Few bands capture the bouncing fun of a roaming group of troubadours, but Cardinals manage to merge this into the rock atmosphere with finesse. Making you feel like you’re being pulled between a big-top and an amazing indie club, the band does a great job merging these feelings into a heavy but musically fantastical world. There’s an explosive sense of excitement and joy in “St. Agnes” with the band bringing in drums like firecrackers, and accordion lines with a massive power to them, with the whole song feeling like a lesson in adapting marching band energy the right way. There’s a more quirky and slow-rolling flow to “Masquerade,” but it lets all the flaming riffs that follow hit that much harder, as they craft a circus-like flow in their chaotic swing of a song. The sadness baked into the love of “I Like You” is devastating, with the pain in pulling apart similarities to realize things just don’t work out creating a frantic tension in the music itself. Meanwhile there’s a sly angle to “Barbed Wire,” slinking from a downbeat walking rhythm to a Franz Ferdinand-esque grind against all their frustrations.
Taking a break from her more explorative and experimental folk-pop, Lykke Li shows all her songwriting prowess through the deep pop of “Knife in the Heart.” The layers and instrumental choices here create an immersive listening experience, full of amazing tones but also ones that feel atypical. It’s thanks to these amazing choices that the song also mounts a subtle drive towards a blown-out wall of sound finale, as the whole track is reverberating with her vocals by the end, verging on disintegrating in the distortion. While never overtly hook-heavy, there’s a lot of great small choices in the melodies and mounting of the production that make this a euphoric moment, and one that reminds just how sharp Li is as a writer.
True spiritual successors of the indie sleaze scene, Fcukers have found a way to keep something alive without feeling like they’re reviving a dead fad. They know exactly the kind of fun trash sound they’re making, and revel in making it as rich and deep as they possibly can. Not dissimilar to peers like Confidence Man, you could write this off as cheap and simple, but the more you listen, the more you realize how much detail they’ve distilled under the hood and in such bite-sized samples. “L.U.C.K.Y.” starts the album on a big and bubbly intro, with grimy, grinding synths and a crowd chant spell-out for the ages that will no doubt be a ball to hear live. With the lo-fi creating a perfect vocal texture, “If You Wanna Party, Come Over to My House,” builds an intoxicating dance world, with the percussion mounting to a fever pitch within the first minute, and the booming party sound only growing from there. It’s like condensing an LCD Soundsystem collab with the Dare into less than three minutes. Once again aping a bit of Groove Armada, “I Like It Like That” is a great early 2000s throwback sound, that not only perfects that synth sound, but sublimely creates that sultry, smoky vocal tone to make a track that never slows down emotionally. “Lonely” plays a little more on a bedroom indie pop sound before it explodes to the club, mixing some of their tones with a bit of something you might hear from PinkPantheress then cranked to the max.
Taking about one drop of the usual sad singer moment and using it to kickstart Europop ballad for the ages, Annalisa lets it all out on Canzone Estiva! With a touch of Rosalía-style operatic influence on pop, but more in subtle vocal and melodic themes, this song firmly brings back a mid-2010s indie pop sound. There’s a lot of ABBA tones to the hooks, though equally parts of Ricchi e Poveri’s “Sarà perché ti amo” in the fun kaleidoscopic electronica here. The synths are crafted from ’80s heaven, and there’s an utterly guttural drive to dance here, as Annalisa keeps pushing the feeling further and further. It would take hours to peel back all the elements in the mix here, and each of them rings with a triumphant hook of its own to bring it home. With absolute showstoppers like this, she’s certainly trying to prove that her shutdown from Eurovision was respectfully robbery, clear and simple.
It’s not every day that someone like Raye comes along with a great voice and such an overpacked creative spirit that it’s hard to contain it all. However, that same excitement is also to her detriment many times on this record, where songs end up so overstuffed in one department, and stretch out a narrative idea in another. This creates a record with top-tier moments, but a lot of overindulgent choices that leave some songs overly long and potentially too dense lyrically to cut through. “Click Clack Symphony” takes a slightly over-the-top vocal approach, going way too rapid in its lyricism, though not enough to erase the majesty of Hans Zimmer’s work, or diminish the fun when she finally slows down. There’s a more classic orchestral sad pop approach to “I Know You’re Hurting” that is like a galactic rainbow bursting past you when it rips, sending the cosmos flying by in strings and horns, it’s just a shame she milks how long those quieter parts are to get there. All the same, it overrides that low for magnificent highs again and again. Her more maximalist lyrical approach works best on the classic jazz-pop tones of “Nightingale Lane,” as she’s able to up the emotion on a very familiar type of jam with her personality and her frantic style of having four-part conversations with herself through singing. All other indulgences aside, her power is harnessed for peak performance on the divinely crafted “Where Is My Husband!” as every band member is firing like a dynamo, and her multiple voices are all locked into perfect lanes to generate a more kinetic sound.
