I have a playlist on Spotify called Hard Liars - it's all the shit that drew me to Liars in the first place, those cut T-1000 riffs and menacing deadpan deliveries: post-punk perfected. And that playlist has like 5 songs from their first album. And 3 or so from each of their next few. And then a token song from each of their latest. And I don't think anything off this new album's going to make the cut. And yet.
Liars always did what they wanted, dividing critics and fans proper alike with their second album's sludgy weirdness, doubling down again and again into meandering production holes thereafter. Arguably all that rejection of listenability's even _more_ post-punk, but in practice it was so bo.o.o.o.r.i.ng.
But it works here. It's an Angus solo album now, lack of name change notwithstanding. That perfect cover photo, so strange, so visceral, so sad. And as solo records go, it's personal, but its also seemingly a breakup album about the band itself. And the meandering, icy, strangeness feels so heartfelt, so direct, it just _works_. There is the sense of the singer being as lost as you are in these spaces, an entrancing sense of mystery, peppered with some of the prettiest moments to ever come out of the Liars name, some hint of desperation giving this all __stakes.
"ok, that's it. those are all the songs I really like. so I hope that you [???] now. and I hope that you have a really great break. and I'm thinking of you. __all the time. . . was that kinda close?" [giant bass wobble]
so goes a distorted confessional closing out the fourth track, laying it all out there. fuck. I'm calling everything a classic lately, but man I've got good albums from War on Drugs, Liars, Thee Oh Sees, and I got an LCD and a BSS in the clip. A good week for music right when we could use it 4/5
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