Mandy, Indiana: Urgh Review – The dirty, crushing, cathartic attack on injustice is the first great album of the year | music

MAndy, Indiana are not a band that tends to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023’s I’ve Saw a Road, in a Peak District cave known as Devil’s Arse, although budget constraints meant they had to settle for a day in the Wookey Hole caves in Somerset. Manchester/Berlin-based four-piece Urgh’s new album was written in what they call an “intense residency in a strange studio house” near Leeds; At the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex MacDougall were undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield sings about personal and societal horrors in her native French, locking themselves in such a space might seem unnecessarily masochistic.

Mandy, Indiana, seems to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremism. Caulfield has often repeated her (accurate) position that “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”; Her incantatory lyrics to new single Dodecahedron suggest complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the serious state of things, the band’s brief attack may hold as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers into a live socket – but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the necessity of pushing beyond mere observation of injustice to embody its profoundly head-spinning power. Otherwise what’s the point?

This instinct places them alongside Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, Moin, Kim Gordon, and Gilla Band, the latter arguably the progenitors of it all. (The band’s Daniel Fox mixed Mandy, Indiana’s debut, and co-produced Urgh.) Each of these acts deconstructed rock down to its mechanical bones, Frankensteining it with the DNA of techno and trap to make it sound shockingly new. In this filthy, cathartic company, where everyone turns in just enough of a different direction for every act to remain compelling, Mandy, Indiana’s distinction comes from their fluid rhythms. Aided by Macdougall’s incredible versatility and Caulfield’s staccato delivery, many of their songs come alive with an addictive, physical swing, often disrupted by howling winds and crushing noise: the threat lurking around every corner.

Urgh, their debut album for Sacred Bones, has some clear differences from their debut: Cursive repurposes the beat into a primitive electro enticingly reminiscent of Paul Hardcastle’s 19, and American rapper and soul-like Billy Woods adds guest verses to Sicko! But the main development is a firmer, thicker sound, a contrast between intense physicality and excessive detail that sounds like it’s being dragged under a powerful wave and marveling at the debris stuck in its swell.

It’s very difficult to tell where guitarist Scott Fear ends and synth player Simon Catling begins. Magazine’s ferocious climax hits like a pile driver pausing to recharge only to renew its devastating attack, while McDougall’s drumming conjures quivering glass jars one minute, and evokes booming Japanese taiko drums the next. Standout Ist Halt So (the shoulder-shrugging German phrase meaning “that’s the way it is”) seems to pack about four different movements into as many minutes — a sneer, a static, a howl, and a blizzard-like chill — and it has a way worth nine inches of nails of bringing sleazy, earworm-like mechanical movements to disgusting and wonderful ends.

Caulfield said she enjoys that most listeners don’t understand her lyrics. That non-French speakers’ conception of language as beautiful means that she can, as on the early single “Nike of Samothrace,” sneak in lines about stabbing rapists. “I’m trying to convey my intentions to you in the way I perform and the way I use these words, and let’s see if you can get some of it,” she said. Whatever your level of Duolingo, there’s bound to be the impression that someone feels trapped amid the sounds of a shattering mirror and the bouncing beats of Try Saying, a song about wanting a comfortable life. “A Brighter Tomorrow” marries slow sirens with a heavy slide of bass, creating a claustrophobic effect even before you realize that Caulfield, at a disembodied distance, seems to be singing about a faltering, real-time effort to address sexual assault.

On the final song, I’ll Ask Her, Caulfield sings in English for the first time, clearly intent on being heard as widely as possible: “They’re all crazy, man,” she repeats maniacally, between convincing parrots of the way men casually dismiss sexual assault allegations against their mates. With barking dogs, startling staccato sound design, and the unrelenting groan of the angle grinder, it heats up until it sounds like a panic attack.

The #MeToo movement disappears into the back window of culture, and thus songs that explicitly confront rape culture have become less headline-grabbing. You think of Dominic Bellicott and former Conservative adviser Philip Young – who spent years drugging and raping their wives – and of every vile with an Epstein Island stamp in their passports, and of the brothers who watch each other’s backs close to home, and remember that it’s all very well to hear someone angry about this as the state of emergency still exists.

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