Hi, everyone. Urghthony Urghtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Mandy, Indiana project, URGH.

Here we have the newest album from English, French, noise rock outfit, Mandy, Indiana, who are back with their sophomore effort, URGH, following their 2023 debut, i've seen a way.

Now, I first caught on to these guys through some teasers to that album, and I was wowed by the combination of danceable grooves, strange vocals, and unnervingly dark industrial atmospheres. But I did find some of the deeper cuts on that album to not do as great a job of dishing out the goods. Still, there was enough potential there to wonder what the band would do on the next go around. I'm happy to say the band has come through with a much more explosive and focused effort on URGH.

Members of the band have also said they were partially inspired by movies they were watching at the time while creating this record and trying to create music that sounded the same way they felt while watching particular scenes. It's also worth noting two members of the band also underwent surgeries and recovered over the course of creating this record.

In a lot of ways, URGH is just this ball of intense energy the group was collectively feeling while touring, healing, and working long distance, too. The album title itself is said to come literally from an often used text response from Valentine Caulfield, who would often type this out while the band was going through the recording process. In that sense, URGH is the perfect example of taking all of the worst feelings and channeling them into a fantastic outlet.

Now, I would say the sound the band creates on this record is an even bolder combination of not just industrial music and noise rock, but we have some big rave-flavored beats and bass on some of these tracks, too. Some hip hop influences as well. The opener, for example, features all these fat, distorted hits of 808s, crispy snares, stuttering bits of distortion, and some autotune vocal runs en français. It's a great tone setter, and there's some chilling but whimsical melty layers of what sounds like strings on the back end of the track, too.

Meanwhile, the second track on the record features all this drum circle percussion, pumping bass, spoken word vocals, and tense verses that suddenly blast off into these twisted, depraved refrains that feature these persistent driving grooves that make me feel like I am just in the midst of a chase scene in a slasher flick.

There's also something about the band's music here that reminds me of the freakish collective indie bands that were put on the map by groups like Liars back in the early 2000s. There's definitely something similarly dark and tortured and strange about what Mandy, Indiana is doing here. The song "try saying" has a similar mix of influences, but is even catchier. We have more aggressive talk/sung, vocals, acoustic guitar passages too, marching snares, and these stuttering vocal samples of, "Is that you? Is that you? Is that you?" This film and even soundtrack influenced approach, I would say, does lead to a lot of tracks with winding and unlikely structures.

But there are a few cuts here and there that maybe fizzle out toward the end or don't offer too much of a structure or payoff at the finish line, be it either "A Brighter Tomorrow" or "Dodecahedron". "Life Hex" has a much more gratifying run time, though, and some oddly witchy vibes, too, with this "light as a feather, stiff as a board" chant. The combination of pounding beats and screeching feedback, wailing tones and blood curdling screams, it all sounds like a torture chamber. I mean that in the best way possible.

I love the way the band is able to build on this sound in a beautiful and cinematic way with these murky, really epic arpeggios that pop up in the second half of the track. It is just so locked in. Then with "ist halt so", we get what I can only categorize as a silly one. We have this massive bass and pummeling beats that remind me somehow of early Swans' records such as Filth. But then that's topped with a little bit of cowbell and these funny little farty samples. I feel like I'm listening to some French EDM or something, with some spaghetti Western samples, I don't know.

Then the song "Sicko!" very much plays into the health themes of this album. It has a Billy Woods feature on it, too, to boot. Between his verses and the booming industrial beats, there was something very Death Grips-coated about this track, strangely enough. The song "Cursive" was a teaser track to this record that really had me anticipating its release. It's like the album's dance epic. The beat switch around the midpoint of the track is insane.

Then the closing track is a very sharp bit of biting commentary over pulsating beats, about the rationales that people put onto themselves or force onto others through online discourse when it comes to discussing the behaviors of abusers in the music scene, specifically, it seems. Just the shitty discourse you see people throwing out there in order to avoid accountability. It makes for one of the strongest statements on the entire album for sure.

Now, I will say the flow of this record, I think, is just okay. The overall run time is a little scant. It's obviously not the most thematic or conceptual album out there for sure. The collection of songs here in this tracklist really does feel like a collection of songs. But outside of that, maybe a few tracks feeling a little one-dimensional in terms of how they progress and build, I don't really have a whole lot of issues with this album. It's got a lot of great highlights on it: killer production, great performances, intense, intense instrumentation.

What Mandy, Indiana has pulled off here is incredibly dark, super visceral and exciting, and honestly, an improvement on all fronts when compared to their first record, which is why I am feeling about a light eight on this album. Really good stuff.

Anthony Fantano, Mandy, Indiana, Forever.