Mandy, Indiana

Born in Manchester on the initiative of Scott Fair (guitar/production) and Valentine Caulfield (vocals/lyrics), together with Liam Stewart, the experimental project Mandy, Indiana (borrowed from Gary, Indiana) immediately won over the specialist press as well as the admiration of notable fans such as Daniel Avery, Girl Band and Scalping.

The band's working method has Fair build the sonic settings, drawn from an enormous library of home-recorded demos and ideas, before passing them on to Caulfield, who writes her lyrics in a rush of inspiration and delivers them in her native French.

Recorded across a variety of spaces, from rehearsal rooms and home studios to caves, old industrial mills, halls and other buildings, the resulting sound is highly heterogeneous, yet held together by an explosive, disruptive energy.

Their first recordings emerged around 2019 and fed into the self-titled 2022 EP, which allowed the Manchester band to land their first major collaborations, including a remix by Daniel Avery and some live support slots for Squid and Gilla Band. One of the members of the latter, Daniel Fox, mixed many of the tracks on the first album released under the name Mandy, Indiana, “I've seen a way”, alongside Robin Stewart (Giant Swan). The album was mastered by Heba Kedry (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bjork).

Exhumed sound samples and sprawling percussive experiments are arranged with oblique references to film scores and experimental video game soundtracks. “We want to twist the textures, provoke collisions and create those moments where what you expect to happen never does: by subverting expectations you keep the audience on edge,” the band explained. The resulting album indeed sounds like nothing that's come before it.

The follow-up, “URGH” (2026), moves like a compressed force seeking release, a buildup of tension that grants no respite either to the listener or to whoever generated it. It's a work born within a hostile physical and political context: bodies under stress, illness, personal fractures. “URGH” transforms this pressure into sonic language. Mancunian to the core, yet by now uprooted and transnational, Mandy, Indiana use decomposed industrial, post-punk and club culture not as a style, but as a nervous system.

If “I've Seen A Way” (2023) still had a cinematic, almost observational dimension, “URGH” is a record that puts you right inside the scene. It doesn't build environments: it builds friction. The production, handled by Scott Fair together with Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, pushes every element toward an extreme physicality. The sounds feel solid, abrasive, as if they could wound. The structures are constantly assembled and dismantled, in a process that resembles a permanent remix of itself: no stability, no comfort, only precarious balance.

Valentine Caulfield's voice is the record's center of gravity, but not in the traditional sense. It's a distorted, cut-up instrument, often more percussive than narrative. French, used as an opaque language for many listeners, becomes a surface onto which anger, sarcasm and contempt can slide.

“URGH” is not an album for everyone, nor does it want to be. It's a work that accepts the risk of being misunderstood, even rejected, in order to keep its urgency intact. More than a second album, it's a statement of intent: against apathy, against neutrality, against the idea that music can simply watch the world burn. Mandy, Indiana offer no solutions, but they make the problem impossible to ignore.