Take an early nineties shoe-gazing album that’s drowning in layered guitar, delay-pedal effects and ethereal wandering vocals – something like Ride or The Cocteau Twins. Now imagine, synaesthete that you are, that you’re carving away at that music with a sonic chisel until most of the superfluous layers and effects fall away, and you find that underneath there’s music with corners: melodies with angles, rhythm tracks with edges, clean angular guitar, indie-funk bass, chanting backing vocals, and a lead vocal which is wayward, but which isn’t ethereal any more, instead sounding crystalline and lovely and pure. That’s Warpaint.
Key Track: ‘Undertow'