Powerful, dark, brooding indie-pop shoegaze by the Irish quartet from Galway, with candid, emotionally charged, musically rich textured numbers on themes that include bullying, mental-health issues, self-harm and heartbreak. The music is has influences from Pixies to The Breeders, The Cure to Garbage, with strong riffs and basslines, and singer Julia Dawson breathy openness. Change My Mind has some instantly beautiful, intricate guitar work, and New Ribbons some gentle acoustic arpeggios and shimmering synths, but this is overall an album of heavy, brutally bleak lyrical material: “You’re sweet, I’m sick / I hurt myself for kicks” we hear on opener Angel, or In My Head’s vivid declaration: “I’m buried under blankets, descending into madness”. Even with the song Nightmares, however, there’s a broken sort of beauty, and catharsis to it with a rousing chorus. The title and closing track is a dream world of shoegazey magical miasma, Sickly Sweet has a catchy thumping Garbage pop romance quality, Dream of Me a jangly, singalong potency. It’s bleak and gloomy, but there’s hope and defiance expressed in the music. Out on Fair Youth/Atlantic.
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