Whereas engaged on their second album, two members of Mandy, Indiana—the Mancunian quartet fronted by a French valkyrie named Valentine Caulfield—had been confronted with their very own corporeality. Drummer Alex Macdougall underwent surgical procedure for a hernia and, after docs discovered a lump, had half of his thyroid eliminated. Caulfield misplaced most of her imaginative and prescient in a single eye. The ten-hour days that comprised the recording periods might have damaged them. As an alternative, the band’s distinctive sound—an alloy of business, post-punk, and ’80s neo-noir soundtracks—emerged titanium-plated and electrified. URGH is each headier and extra visceral than something Mandy, Indiana have made earlier than. This isn’t physique music or mind music; it’s backbone music, homed in on the bony junction the place thoughts meets matter.
Listening to Mandy, Indiana’s 2023 debut, i’ve seen a method, felt like wandering the darkrooms at Berghain—if Berghain blasted classic French pirate radio broadcasts. You had been within the cool children’ membership however couldn’t shake the sense of being held at a take away, as if there have been one other velvet rope you weren’t allowed to cross. URGH places you proper within the intercourse sling, and there’s Caulfield towering overhead, cracking a driving crop. As she recites Revelation 6 (the one in regards to the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse) on opener “Sevastopol,” her voice glitches and frays like Jigsaw coming by way of the TV display. The abiding temper is powerlessness: At any second, a trapdoor would possibly open beneath your ft, sending you down a tube slide right into a hornet’s nest of violins or a ball pit filled with scrap steel.
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Caulfield’s lyrics—most of which she delivers in her native language—have at all times been involved with energy, particularly how interpersonal violation mimics the patterns of structural violence. In press supplies, she described URGH’s lead single “Journal” as “the one method I’ll ever get to say to my rapist: You damage me, so I’m going to harm you.” After a blistering salvo that may finest be likened to Trinidadian soca produced by Edward Scissorhands, “Journal” plunges right into a techno netherworld akin to the one Coil charted on “The Snow.” “This time, regardless of what you imagine, you received’t escape me,” Caulfield purrs, as a one-syllable pattern of her voice will get chopped and splattered throughout the stereo area. To borrow a framing from the unconventional feminist scholar Andrea Dworkin, when the autonomous zone of 1’s physique has been forcibly colonized, fantasies of retribution—to by no means let him do this to anybody else, ever once more—are sometimes the only recourse. Caulfield sharpens them into knives.
In Mandy, Indiana’s arms, repeated sounds and phrases develop into improvised weapons. “Souris souris souris souris/C’est plus joli une fille qui sourit” (“Smile, smile, smile, smile/A woman who smiles is prettier”) went the skin-crawling nursery rhyme hook of i’ve seen a method’s “Drag [Crashed].” On URGH, Caulfield flips the French playground chant “Am stram gram” right into a name to the dancefloor (“Cursive”), and recreates a pattern of the “Gentle as a feather/Stiff as a board” scene from the 1996 teen-witch cult traditional The Craft (“Life Hex”). As her voice will get wolfed up by the gnashing enamel of Macdougall’s package, the listener is, in flip, subjected to the ravages of rising up as a woman underneath patriarchy. However these sorts of schoolyard video games are additionally early constructing blocks of feminine solidarity, the groundwork upon which networks of collective care—from “Are we relationship the identical man?” Fb teams to French girls’s activism behind Gisèle Pelicot—are constructed.
