What happens when you realise your entire personality has been built on a false premise? An unspoken agreement with the world to act in a certain way in order to lubricate your way through the jagged walls of life, so you get through as unscathed as you can.
And what’s the price of making everybody else feel ok at the expense of yourself? North London quartet Sorry sit on their hands and ponder this question on their spindly, brittle third album. And in the process they’ve created one of the most psychologically disturbing indie rock records of the year.
Written by a band on the edge of breaking up (founders Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen fell out during its conception) and mixing scuzzy nursery rhyme melodies with lyrics that lean into self abandonment, Cosplay conjures up songs which gnaw at the listeners deepest fears. The title (Cosplay) and the visual (the band posing in grotty looking masks, hiding their identity) leans into the fourth trauma response fawning (after fight, flight, freeze) where people blend in, Zelig-like, in order to survive. On the lurching, building-to-breaking-point ‘Candle‘, the protagonist is broken (“I’m just a candle fitting in/ I don’t get fat, I don’t eat anything“), while the moody ‘Life In This Body’ (“I have loved every version of you“) speaks to the splintering of the self.
The winding, nursery rhyme rhythm of the melody of opener ‘Echoes‘ curls around the chorus (“echo, echo, echo I love you“), which builds a creeping sense of dread. As Lorenz sings “I ain’t got no words/ I think you’ve shut me up…you can draw your line, well I can draw my dot,” it’s a portrait of a person so minimised, so masochistically conditioned to expect so little in a one sided, parasitic relationship that they’ve been completely atomised and abandoned themselves. Here is a simulacrum of love. An imitation of something real. Or worse, on the bass-heavy, industrial ‘Love Posture‘, a horror show of co-dependency: “We’re in a love posture/ Four hands, four feet, a monster.” These are songs sung by a ghost of a person, someone who’s checked out entirely.
Throughout the album, the band repurpose phrases from fizzy, quasi-novelty pop songs and it feels like a juddering wi-fi signal or a radio going in and out of reception. The call and response of Toni Basil‘s ‘Mickey‘ (‘”Hey! Mickey! You’re So Fine! You Blow My Mind! Hey Mickey!“) becomes a lurching, lonely come-on on ‘Waxwing‘; Shaggy‘s ‘Boombastic‘ reads as another line of self abasement for the desperate characters in ‘Jetplane‘. It plays as meta-commentary around the idea of costume and mask wearing, underlining the emptiness of ‘performance without context’. They are also sonic band aids, where words have failed and real connection is oblique and fragmented.
Cosplay leaves you feeling unsettled but it’s a brilliant, unforgettable gasp from the forgotten.
Cosplay is released on November 7th through Domino.
