ULRIKA SPACEK - EXPO

Listening to "EXPO", one becomes convinced that change here is not an aesthetic affectation but a structural necessity. The London band Ulrika Spacek, who set out ten years ago from fairly orthodox neo-psychedelic coordinates, don't simply bolt electronics onto their guitar-driven setup here: they reorganize the whole creative process around an idea of radical collage, building a bank of self-produced samples from which to carve out actual rhythmic frameworks and sonic skeletons.

Even though this isn't the first rock band to flirt with samplers and drum machines, the point isn't hybridization for its own sake. It's the way "EXPO" stages the friction between analog and digital as both theme and method. Real drums layered over programmed patterns, modulated guitars that seem to fray into almost synthetic textures, orchestral inserts that smooth over a deliberately sought-out coldness only to then deliberately contradict it. If the previous record chased a tape-warmed heat, here the temperature drops: the atmosphere is colder, more reflective, but never sterile.

The opener "Intro" works as a perceptual reset: urban noise, vocal fragments, hints of percussion that don't aim to impress but to prepare the ground. It's a threshold, not a song. With "Picto" the material takes shape: jittery grooves, lines that intertwine without fully resolving, a controlled tension that becomes a manifesto (strength in numbers isn't just a phrase, it's a collective statement of intent in a hyper-individualistic age).

The comparison to Radiohead of the "Kid A" or "In Rainbows" era surfaces almost inevitably in certain more rhythmic, oblique passages, just as the shadow of an updated trip-hop might bring to mind a "Dummy" filtered through a more guitar-centric sensibility.

Still, reducing "EXPO" to a game of reference-spotting would be misleading. If there's a risk, it's more that of veering too close to a certain Yorke-esque falsetto on "Build A Box Then Break It", an episode that nonetheless remains one of the most immediate on the record: it starts from an obsessive, almost industrial beat and expands into a warped rock form, cinematic but never mannered.

The songwriting favors structure over explosion. The dynamics rarely detonate, instead bending, shifting density and reorganizing themselves. "Weights & Measures" toys with lopsided time signatures and jazzy touches without ever lapsing into a mere stylistic exercise, while "Square Root Of None" and "Showroom Party" best synthesize the record's two souls: guitar-driven art-rock and electronic pulse. Tellingly, "Square Root Of None", the track closest to the band's past, turns out to be among the most beloved (a sign that the transition is real, and not painless, even for the listener).

Thematically, "EXPO" is more outward-looking than the band's previous work. Touring, impending fatherhood, observing a world increasingly filtered through screens. In this respect, Rhys Edwards's lyrics move between isolation and overexposure, between a longing for community and digital claustrophobia. The age of permanent individuality is portrayed as a hall of concave mirrors: everyone on display, everyone distorted. There's no direct denunciation, just a constant sense of fracture, of contemporary reality perceived through phantom barriers.

"Incomplete Symphony", closing the record, belies its own title: the album is anything but unfinished. It may well be the band's most cohesive work yet, precisely because it manages to hold together experimental ambition and editorial discipline. No detour feels gratuitous, no language seems only half-explored. Even when the sound turns elusive or deliberately esoteric, its form stays legible.

“EXPO” is certainly not an album that gives itself up on first listen. It demands attention, and it rewards that attention with detail. It's a record true to its own title-as-manifesto: an exposition of materials, but also an exposition of fragility in a world that's hyper-connected yet profoundly alone.

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24/02/2026