Mandy, Indiana: Urgh review | Laura Snapes' album of the week

Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023’s I’ve Seen a Way, in a Peak District cave known as the Devil’s Arse, although budget restrictions meant they had to settle for one day in Somerset’s Wookey Hole caverns. The Manchester/Berlin-based four-piece’s new album, Urgh, was written in what they’ve called “an intense residency at an eerie studio house” near Leeds; at the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall were both undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield chants about personal and societal horrors in her native French, impounding themselves in such a place might have seemed unnecessarily masochistic.

The artwork for Urgh

Mandy, Indiana seem to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremes. Caulfield has often reiterated her (accurate) stance that “if you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention”; her incantatory lyrics to new song Dodecahedron indict complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the grievous state of things, the band’s short-circuiting assault may hold about as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers in a live socket – but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the imperative to push beyond merely observing injustice to viscerally embody its head-spinning force. Otherwise, what’s the point?

That instinct places them alongside Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, Moin, Kim Gordon and Gilla Band, the latter arguably the forebears of all this. (The band’s Daniel Fox mixed Mandy, Indiana’s debut and co-produced Urgh.) Each of these acts has disassembled rock down to its mechanical bones, Frankenstein-ing it with the DNA of techno and trap to make it seem shockingly new. In this grimy, purgative company, where everyone is mutating in a different enough direction for each act to remain compelling, Mandy, Indiana’s distinctiveness comes from their limber rhythms. Powered by Macdougall’s incredible versatility and Caulfield’s staccato delivery, many of their songs are alive with an addictively free, bodily lope, which is often stalled by squalling winds and thrashing noise: threat lurking around every corner.

Urgh, their first album for Sacred Bones, has a few obvious differences from their debut: Cursive’s percussive churn redirects into rudimentary electro appealingly reminiscent of Paul Hardcastle’s 19, and US rapper and kindred spirit Billy Woods adds guest verses to Sicko!, sounding typically unruffled as the track lurches queasily between gargled fuzz and pointillist artillery fire. But the main evolution is into a harder, thicker sound, a contrast of extreme physicality and hyper-detailing that feels like getting dragged under by a strong wave and marvelling at the flotsam caught up in its swell.

It’s impressively hard to tell where guitarist Scott Fair ends and synth player Simon Catling begins. Magazine’s ferocious peak hits like a pile-driver that pauses to recharge only to renew its obliterating attack, while Macdougall’s drumming evokes shuddering glass jars one minute, booming Japanese taiko drums the next. Standout Ist Halt So (the shrugging German phrase meaning “that’s just how it is”) seems to pack about four different movements into as many minutes – taunting, staticky, howling, blizzard-like chill – and has a Nine Inch Nails-worthy way with making the mechanical sleazy and earwormy, to disgusting, brilliant ends.

Caulfield has said that she enjoys that most listeners don’t understand her lyrics; that non-Francophones’ conception of the language as beautiful means she can, as on early single Nike of Samothrace, sneak in lines about stabbing rapists. “I’m trying to pass my intentions to you in the way that I perform and in the way that I use those words, and let’s see if you can get some of it,” she has said. Whatever your Duolingo level, there’s no mistaking the impression of someone feeling trapped amid the smashed mirror sounds and ricocheting percussion of Try Saying, a song about wishing for a life of ease. A Brighter Tomorrow weds a slow siren to a heavy slither of bass, creating a suffocating effect even before you realise Caulfield, at a disembodied remove, appears to be singing about a faltering real-time effort to process sexual assault.

For the final song, I’ll Ask Her, Caulfield sings in English for the first time, evidently intent on being heard as widely as possible: “They’re all fucking crazy, man,” she repeats in a frenzy, between convincingly parroting the way men casually dismiss sexual assault allegations against their mates. Laced with dogs barking, incredible splintered sound design and an angle grinder’s unrelenting moan, it overheats until it sounds like a panic attack.

#MeToo is vanishing in culture’s rear window, and in turn songs explicitly confronting rape culture have become less headline-grabbing. You think of Dominique Pelicot and former Conservative councillor Philip Young – who spent years drugging and raping their wives – and of every scumbag with an Epstein island stamp in their passport, of the bros watching each other’s backs closer to home, and remember that it feels extremely good to hear someone raging about this like the emergency it still is.

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