Album Review: Mandy, Indiana - URGH
It would be hard to argue that 2023’s i’ve seen a way, the Best New Music-garnering debut album from Mandy, Indiana, didn’t make a splash in the music world, especially for a band whose music sits firmly on the noisier end of the industrial and electronic genres and whose lyrics probably aren’t even understood by a majority of their listeners. But the Manchester/Berlin-based group (with a French lead singer) have much more to say (and scream) that could be covered by just one record, and their follow-up project has arrived with more than enough of a bang to land them on the radar of every noise-loving techno fan on either side of the Atlantic. In case the change in title stylization wasn’t enough of a clue, every aspect of their debut album has been ramped up to eleven on URGH: the music even more abrasive, the atmosphere even more unforgiving, lead singer Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics even more pointed and powerful. This is an album that has something (many things) to say, certainly, but also one that the vehicle is just as important to get right as the message itself, especially when that message is as crucial and universal as what URGH is desperate to get off its chest.
From the first droning seconds of Sevastopol, the album is already eager to set the listener off-balance; the thrumming synth hits are drowned in enough feedback to have you questioning what you just got yourself into even before Caulfield enters with a stream of vocal spitfire in her native French. Poetic as her lyrics always are, on URGH her voice itself also functions foremost as just one more element of the band’s expansive soundscapes; a post-electronic fever dream that yanks your ears in countless directions at once. Even the track’s irregular detours into orchestral string opulence are more unsettling than relaxing, like the eye(s) of a storm whose turbulent gaze follows you even in its sanest moments. Yet just as you start to wonder if the record’s abrasiveness is being used for novelty’s sake only, Magazine comes rattling down the road in a cloud of speaker-destroying bass, ramping itself up alongside Caulfield’s vocals as she lets us know, with grim satisfaction, that there is nowhere to hide from her words and her vengeance (“Je viens pour toi/Alors vas-y cours/Je n’te louperai pas/Je viens pour toi”). Every sonic element slots in with a level of cohesion most electronic acts could only dream of: the screaming riffs at the chorus’ climax fill in for the bloodcurdling screams of her victims, just as the club-thumping bridge personifies the ecstatic aftermath of her hunt (heavy on the ecstasy).
As the album continues, that interminable sense of wrath only becomes more and more prominent in its lyrics, as if Caulfield simply can’t stop her disgust at the cruelty of our world from bleeding into her words. The aberrant ist halt so buzzes like an irate hornet’s nest (aptly so, given the plurality of its “Nous sommes légion” chorus), while also showing appropriate restraint for one of the few times that Caulfield’s lyrics hold nothing back when specifying the injustice they are castigating: “De Paris à Gaza et sous les oliviers/Viendra justice pour tous ou justice pour personne?”. Life Hex thrashes with that same vitriol, its pained vocals and eerie synths acting as an extension of the spirit-channeling incantation at the song’s start (“Light as a feather, stiff as a board”), while the sinister melodies of try saying reach up like a skeletal hand from the Underworld amidst the cacophony of bass, reverb, and some utterly jaw-dropping drumming from Alex MacDougall. Conversely, the techno fever dream of Sicko! pulses with a galvanic energy only enhanced by a show-stopping appearance from billy woods, who somehow sounds completely at home even in a genre so very far from his usual millieu. His rapid-fire rhyme schemes blend seamlessly into the blown-out gabber and ‘endless sirens’ going off chaotically in the foreground, yet his words never sacrifice an inch of their humour (“They say he made 6 mil in the projects, that’s proof of concept/Big pharma, I cop when the stock dip/Buy the farm before you even get sick”) or potency (“Some drink out the cup, others choke on the lies/Waiting in line, hoping to get lobotomized/’Cause the worse it get, the harder to feign surprise”).
It’s always impressive when music is able to evoke without words a feeling so powerful that the listener feels as if the band is speaking to them directly, a talent that Mandy, Indiana and their explosive works of electronic chaos have demonstrably mastered in spades. Still, after a full album’s worth of escalating rage (and a brief segue in the dance-punk banger Cursive), the closer I’ll Ask Her decides it’s best to cut the bullshit and get to the point, with Caulfield even opting to switch to English for once in order to make absolutely sure that nothing is misunderstood. “This is a story about a boy/Well, he’s a man really/But boys will be boys/You know how it is” she begins, voice radiating contempt as a wall of artifical noise wails alongside her. For as sarcastic as the lyrics’ framing is, her attack on the institution of misogyny still hits with a level of unrepentant sincerity that few artists would dare to invoke at all, let alone spit out so candidly: “He brags about getting them drunk, but they’re all fucking crazy, man/Yeah, your friend’s a rapist, but they’re all fucking crazy, man”. For all of Caulfield’s (entirely righteous) fury, though, the reason URGH astounds to the extent that it does is due to that emotion in her lyrics being mirrored one-to-one by the catharsis in the music itself. The sense that you, the listener, absolutely have to hear what Mandy, Indiana are saying has never been more tangible; it’s a good thing, then, that their music has never sounded so damn good.
9.5/10
Favourite Tracks: Sicko!, Cursive, try saying, Magazine