As far as Mandy, Indiana songs go, “Magazine” begins unassumingly: a jittery 6/4 beat heavy on auxiliary percussion, a clubby kick drum, and rumbling synth bass. But roughly a minute in, everything erupts. Alex Macdougall annihilates his crash cymbal, Scott Fair’s guitar caterwauls like a siren, Simon Catling grounds the cacophony with gritty low-end, and Valentine Caulfield excoriates her rapist in a seething warning to flee while he still can: “I’m coming for you / So go run / I won’t miss you,” she bellows in her native French. Even without the translation, the emotional charge runs deep, transcending any language barrier with its frenzied ferocity.
That’s one of the recurring throughlines on URGH, the second album from the Mancunian-Parisian noise rockers. The depth of feeling, conveyed through Caulfield’s tangible presence, is one of this band’s defining traits. Here, they dial up the intensity by heightening and embellishing their core sound rather than delivering a simple reiteration. Through this methodology of escalating their industrial grit until it becomes almost unbearable, URGH utterly shatters expectations.
Part of that upsurge is thanks to Fair, who acts as co-producer and co-mixer alongside Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox. There’s a tactile, physical muscularity to these songs, like miniature abstract sculptures whose curves are easy to trace but with an overarching meaning that’s alluringly arcane and mystifying. The four-piece, alongside Fox, have created small yet realized worlds, abundant with vivid, granular details, that are rewarding to burrow into; it’s a headphones album through and through. “Dodecahedron” lives up to its prismatic name with the erratic synths that subsume the outro in kaleidoscopic chaos. “Life Hex” pays homage to garish ‘90s horror, including a pointed interpolation from The Craft, through its atonal guitar flurry. “Sevastopol” kicks off the album with spurts of distorted synths and Caufield’s glitchy AutoTune, sinking its teeth in from the outset and establishing the harsh timbre to come.
Fair and Macdougall have said in press materials that URGH is often “a remix of itself,” which, given the continuous construction and deconstruction these songs undergo, seems like an astute takeaway. Penultimate track “Cursive” is formed out of its rhythmic bedrock, a propulsion that Caufield uses to wax on nightlife surrealism, as Fair collages everything together like a modern found-object artist. Even with the intricate studio trickery, the end result reflects a banded togetherness, the sounds of everyone reacting to one another’s disparate parts.
The harrowing instrumentals are a fitting outlet for Caufield to spew invectives at whomever she deems fit. She directs her anger toward Zionists in “ist halt so,” declaring “From Paris to Gaza, and under the olive trees / Will come justice for all or justice for none” and ends the track on a note of determined hope to defy an ongoing genocide: “They tried to bury us / They didn’t know we were seeds.” New York rap legend billy woods joins them for a knotty verse on “Sicko!,” channeling the clipping. remix of “Pinking Shears” for one of the most adrenaline-inducing moments on the record. As he is often wont to do, woods cooks up a pot of phonetic soup, busting out of the gate with “Seasick in the soundbath / Ambulance sirens, soundclash, nerve gas at the opera, the paparazzi at the copter crashed.” A great time to be a sicko, indeed.
Some of the album’s most commanding moments arrive toward its end, especially with the closing track, “I’ll Ask Her,” which is the only song that Caufield sings in English all the way through. It’s the story of a man who is beloved by his fellow boys club because they were all friends in high school, but “women cover their drinks around him” and “he brags about getting them drunk.” Caulfield mocks his buddies who claim they wouldn’t let him date their sister but that “it’s different; it’s your sister.” She isn’t content to let sleeping dogs lie, either; amidst all the disquieting rumours already swirling around the song’s subject, she clears any possible remaining air of any ambiguity in the final line: “Yeah your mate’s a fucking rapist / And they’re all fucking crazy, man.”
URGH is seldom an easy listen, but that’s the point. It’s designed to challenge you with its electric urgency, designed to make you feel. Such is the galvanizing world of Mandy, Indiana. It’s well worth a visit, so make yourself comfortable as best you can.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
