Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023\u2019s I\u2019ve Seen a Way, in a Peak District cave known as the Devil\u2019s Arse, although budget restrictions meant they had to settle for one day in Somerset\u2019s Wookey Hole caverns. The Manchester\/Berlin-based four-piece\u2019s new album, Urgh, was written in what they\u2019ve called \u201can intense residency at an eerie studio house\u201d near Leeds; at the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall were both undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield chants about personal and societal horrors in her native French, impounding themselves in such a place might have seemed unnecessarily masochistic.<\/p>\n
The artwork for Urgh<\/p>\n
Mandy, Indiana seem to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremes. Caulfield has often reiterated her (accurate) stance that \u201cif you\u2019re not angry, then you\u2019re not paying attention\u201d; her incantatory lyrics to new song Dodecahedron indict complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the grievous state of things, the band\u2019s short-circuiting assault may hold about as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers in a live socket \u2013 but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the imperative to push beyond merely observing injustice to viscerally embody its head-spinning force. Otherwise, what\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n
That instinct places them alongside Model\/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, Moin, Kim Gordon and Gilla Band, the latter arguably the forebears of all this. (The band\u2019s Daniel Fox mixed Mandy, Indiana\u2019s debut and co-produced Urgh.) Each of these acts has disassembled rock down to its mechanical bones, Frankenstein-ing it with the DNA of techno and trap to make it seem shockingly new. In this grimy, purgative company, where everyone is mutating in a different enough direction for each act to remain compelling, Mandy, Indiana\u2019s distinctiveness comes from their limber rhythms. Powered by Macdougall\u2019s incredible versatility and Caulfield\u2019s staccato delivery, many of their songs are alive with an addictively free, bodily lope, which is often stalled by squalling winds and thrashing noise: threat lurking around every corner.<\/p>\n
Mandy, Indiana: Sicko! ft Billy Woods \u2013 video<\/p>\n
Urgh, their first album for Sacred Bones, has a few obvious differences from their debut: Cursive\u2019s percussive churn redirects into rudimentary electro appealingly reminiscent of Paul Hardcastle\u2019s 19, and US rapper and kindred spirit Billy Woods adds guest verses to Sicko!, sounding typically unruffled as the track lurches queasily between gargled fuzz and pointillist artillery fire. But the main evolution is into a harder, thicker sound, a contrast of extreme physicality and hyper-detailing that feels like getting dragged under by a strong wave and marvelling at the flotsam caught up in its swell.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s impressively hard to tell where guitarist Scott Fair ends and synth player Simon Catling begins. Magazine\u2019s ferocious peak hits like a pile-driver that pauses to recharge only to renew its obliterating attack, while Macdougall\u2019s drumming evokes shuddering glass jars one minute, booming Japanese taiko drums the next. Standout Ist Halt So (the shrugging German phrase meaning \u201cthat\u2019s just how it is\u201d) seems to pack about four different movements into as many minutes \u2013 taunting, staticky, howling, blizzard-like chill \u2013 and has a Nine Inch Nails-worthy way with making the mechanical sleazy and earwormy, to disgusting, brilliant ends.<\/p>\n
Caulfield has said that she enjoys that most listeners don\u2019t understand her lyrics; that non-Francophones\u2019 conception of the language as beautiful means she can, as on early single Nike of Samothrace, sneak in lines about stabbing rapists. \u201cI\u2019m trying to pass my intentions to you in the way that I perform and in the way that I use those words, and let\u2019s see if you can get some of it,\u201d she has said. Whatever your Duolingo level, there\u2019s no mistaking the impression of someone feeling trapped amid the smashed mirror sounds and ricocheting percussion of Try Saying, a song about wishing for a life of ease. A Brighter Tomorrow weds a slow siren to a heavy slither of bass, creating a suffocating effect even before you realise Caulfield, at a disembodied remove, appears to be singing about a faltering real-time effort to process sexual assault.<\/p>\n
For the final song, I\u2019ll Ask Her, Caulfield sings in English for the first time, evidently intent on being heard as widely as possible: \u201cThey\u2019re all fucking crazy, man,\u201d she repeats in a frenzy, between convincingly parroting the way men casually dismiss sexual assault allegations against their mates. Laced with dogs barking, incredible splintered sound design and an angle grinder\u2019s unrelenting moan, it overheats until it sounds like a panic attack.<\/p>\n
#MeToo is vanishing in culture\u2019s rear window, and in turn songs explicitly confronting rape culture have become less headline-grabbing. You think of Dominique Pelicot<\/a> and former Conservative councillor Philip Young<\/a> \u2013 who spent years drugging and raping their wives \u2013 and of every scumbag with an Epstein island stamp in their passport, of the bros watching each other\u2019s backs closer to home, and remember that it feels extremely good to hear someone raging about this like the emergency it still is.<\/p>\n This week Laura listened to<\/p>\n Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever \u2013 Sunburned in London
Love, disconnection and the shadow of colonialism weave around each other in the Melbourne band\u2019s return, the beauty of it being how lightly they weigh those subjects amid a perfect slice of Aussie indie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-269127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}