Smoky, stylish, horror-dark, simmering, swaggering, searing goth-rock and indie-pop by the Brighton band in a fourth album vocalist Izzy B. Phillips describes as "picking at the layers of messy, romantic, confusing, woozy, beautiful and fucked up things". In part it reflects on her now being sober after a decade of addiction, ironically reflected in the album’s most upbeat track - Drag, a pacy, thrumming indie-pop number. The band’s main inspiration, as shown in the cover art, also comes from Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, as well as creepier side of Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton. The unsettling, cinematic, disturbing, macabre and shadowy recur in their songs, from the whispery Insulin, the jeering Dead (“You can’t kill me now cause I’m already dead for you”), or the negative black hole of social media on Shallow (“Conversations empty vessel / Still naive or existential”). The talky wry humour and playful pop of Psycho makes it one of the highlights (“Have you ever kissed a psycho? Floating on a lilo”) while Carroll Avenue as a theatricality with a alluringly beautiful melody. And as the stop-start closer number Medication veers between quiet acoustic (“I’m still unsure of what that was”) and a swirl of noise of disturbing strings and overdubbed vocals, it feels like a hybrid of an album, mixing upbeat pop and darker, gothic rock, perhaps reflecting on a possible new direction, with a lead singer blinking in the sunlight having emerged from addiction and darkness. Out on Foxfive Records.
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