There are some feelings that demand expression. Anger is one of these: urgent, sharp, painful, threatening to spill out in unintelligible phrases. And then there’s its sibling, disgust: the act of being so horrified by something that the body physically recoils. URGH, the latest album from Mandy Indiana is a record that sits somewhere between both: an echo for a world that is both maddening and repulsive.
When vocalist Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall recorded URGH, the pair had both undergone multiple surgeries. An exhausting and drawn-out process, it’s hard not to sense this experience as an undercurrent to the record. URGH begins with what feels like the start of an operation, with the whirring sound of a surgical instrument opening the first track, ‘Sevastopol’. What follows is a barrage of crashing sounds and distorted voices, a frenetic combination that feels like a journey into inner turmoil.
Like the anatomical cover artwork, URGH sees Mandy Indiana use music as a way to peel back the self beneath the flesh. Specifically, the emotional turmoil left by physical trauma. Standout ‘Magazine’, the second track on the album, is a cathartic rage against sexual violence. It was written, as Caulfield describes, during her time in therapy, attempting to recover from being raped. Talking to Uproxx, she describes the track as her ‘primal, screaming call for retribution.’ Caulfield’s words, in her native French, are as sharp as a scalpel: ‘Tu ne m’échapperas pas… Car ce soir, je viens pour toi / You won’t escape me… because tonight, I’m coming for you.’ Accompanied by strained synths and a thundering bassline, the whole song swells with rage, opening its mouth to scream.
But URGH doesn’t scream with one voice. Rather, the band makes a powerful point about collective anger and collective action, connecting individual suffering to problems with the world at large. Incisive tracks like ‘I’ll ask her’, notably sung in English, are a battle cry against gendered violence, calling out the laissez-faire attitude of those who enable abusers: ‘You stand by your boys / ‘Cause they’re your boys and that’s just how it is’. Meanwhile, ‘ist halt so?’ (the German phrase for ‘that’s just how it is’) condemns a system built to divide and conquer: ‘Ils nous envoient leurs chiens, ils veulent nous faire tomber / They send their dogs after us, they want to bring us down.’ With razor-sharp calls for retribution, one body is united with many others, demanding a brighter future.
Sonicall,y the album speaks in a language of distorted noise-rock, in tongues of fractured synths and glitch-like sound effects, while Caulfield’s voice oscillates between strikingly close and uncomfortably distant. At the same time, an undercurrent of pulsating beats means you could just as easily hear the music emerging from a dark nightclub.
Anger can sometimes threaten to turn itself illegible. Disgust can sometimes render itself reactionary. But URGH is an album that finds a way to articulate the very power of these emotions, transforming them into music that urges you to dance as it urges you to riot.