URGH is a perfect title to greet the bleak dawn of 2026 isn’t it? A sound at the very edge of language, revulsion and disappointment, as much a physical shudder as a word. The album it names is fevered with the city sickness, cold sweats and retinal burn. Information overload headache and the horrors pressing in. Its sound is hectic, claustrophobic, but exhilarating all the same.
A perfect title and a beautiful cover. The subdued palette and angular modernist space on the front of their debut replaced by luminous colour and layers of visceral physicality. It’s not that their sound has changed dramatically but it has intensified, become more vivid and immediate. The album opens on a drawn out tweaking tone and fat bass, everything is glitchy and distorting. This first tune, ‘Sevastopol’, sets into a rhythm, an insistent, twitchy thing before unexpectedly mutating into a swooning carousel of strings. A fairground lifting into the sky.
The two lead tracks are perhaps just a little dancier and shinier than the rest. ‘Cursive’ is seductive industrial pop, fidgety, busy and polyrhythmic. ‘Magazine’ stops and chops, gives a thudding, ominous, lead in to its chorus of screeching metallic noise. It sounds like trains in the underground. You might know that they recorded their debut in a cave and, as much as this record sounds like the noise of the city, it often feels subterranean, the sensory static, the trains and the people pressing in on you. This feeling persists throughout the record and, because Valentine Caulfield sings mostly in French, I vaguely imagine it in the Paris Metro. Although it’s more like some international vague-space between with too much happening and not enough air. It’s blood beating in your temples, the body reacting in unacknowledged ways to the overload.
They maintain impressive control of the chaos. As much as almost everything is distorted there’s clarity, space around the contrasting elements. It never descends into an ugly mulch, they have a refined sonic aesthetic, detailed and inventive. Nimbly dancing between looping guitar alarms, sharp chunks of noise scree, machine spasms and thumping techno beats. Weird interference stutters across the foreground of ‘try saying’ without obscuring its off kilter groove of cut up jazz drums. Virtually all the elements on ‘Dodecahedron’ are percussive but strung out across a wide sound spectrum so as you hardly notice. There’s a careful balance to its overloaded dynamism.
There isn’t much by way of hip-hop beats but production tricks galore so when Billy Woods rocks up to drop a vocal on ‘Sicko!’ it just feels completely natural among the chaos. Caulfield sticks with her native French and so her words arrive mostly as texture and emotion until the final song ‘I’ll Ask Her’ where the shift into her English accent is so stark it almost seems like someone else and the vocal takes centre stage. It does not mess about, a sharp takedown of feeble mansplaining attitudes to other men’s bad behaviour it’s a compelling end to the record. Provocative and stimulating, URGH builds on their debut, I’ve seen a way, creating an intoxicating sound world of its own.
