Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
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French noise rock band Mandy, Indiana make their powerful return with URGH, their second full-length LP and first for new label Sacred Bones. As on their 2023 debut, I’ve Seen a Way, lead singer Valentine Caulfield sings passionately and angrily; with the exception of one song, the whole album is in her native French. URGH was recorded in England and Germany in a tense spurt of three ten-hour days. The band was beset with adversity during the album’s creation, with Caulfield losing most of her vision in one eye, and half of the band needing multiple surgeries. But the result is a shock of color and brilliance, a thundering triumph of a record.
Mandy, Indiana is a noise band, so it’s no surprise that URGH is full of sounds and samples and strangeness. At different points in the album I was reminded of the sound of slamming car breaks (“Magazine”), computer glitch noises (“Sevastopol”), and music from the early iPhone game Temple Run (“Cursive”). Two songs are expressly and pointedly political. “ist halt so,” German for “that’s just the way it is,” throbs with anger, a brawling, chaotic exultation written in praise of pro-Palestine protesters during the Gaza genocide. This sentiment, the exact phrase “that’s just the way it is,” is repeated in “I’ll Ask Her,” the one song where Caulfield sings in English. It is an acerbic attack on misogyny in the music industry, with Caulfield almost hissing the line, “your friends are all fucking rapists.” The disdain and fury are channeled into catharsis with a hammering bass and the wailing tones of an electric guitar.
Highlights of the album include “Cursive,” a thumping electro shock, maximalist and brutal, the kind of music that makes you want to be at the club bedecked in black leather. “Sicko!,” featuring American rapper billy woods, contains a sample-reference to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and a funny little bleached-feeling percussion interlude. Lead single “Magazine” is an absolute banger, with a jangly percussion line and juicy, dark bass. About a minute in, the song is stripped of everything except a bare percussion line, and then comes thundering back to earth like a meteor flaming in the atmosphere.
These songs are reminiscent of the best of Death Grips: explosive, noisy, angular, powerful. But there is also so much newness in every song; each one contains something that is totally unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The first few seconds of “Sevastopol,” the album’s opener, are consumed by a whirl of static, before breaking out into heavy, almost hip-hop-y beats. The song ends with something that sounds like a string quartet being played through a blender.
Sometimes the chaos of the instrumentation is discombobulating, even jarring; there are so many noises in “try saying” it is like being shot with thirty different lasers at once. This accentuates the heavier and angrier parts of the album. But the record leaves room for the sublime, as well; in “Life Hex,” the roaring and buzzing dissolves into an ethereal, synthy release about two and a half minutes in, becoming a different song. (The breakbeats and metamorphosis reminded me of many songs off of Pure Music, Strange Ranger’s foray into art-pop.) The moment passes, however, and the song ascends or descends back to the crashing and throbbing soundscape from whence it came.
It feels wrong to call URGH a “fun” album, but there is so much contained on this record that is pleasurable and exciting and new. URGH is forceful and unflinching, with oceanic tumult and power. It is alien and apotheotic, transcendent and thrilling. Mandy, Indiana makes music that saves your soul, even if it shakes it in the process.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
URGH is out now.
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Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan | @onefellswoop