MANDY, INDIANA - URGH

“URGH” isn't an album that asks for attention: it demands it. From the very first impact, the Mandy, Indiana record moves like a compressed force seeking release, a build-up of tension that grants no respite either to the listener or to the people who made it. It's a work born inside a hostile physical and political context: bodies under stress, illness, personal fractures. “URGH” turns that pressure into sonic language. Mancunian to the bone, 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 quality, “URGH” is a record that drags you inside the scene. It doesn't build environments: it builds friction. The production, handled by Scott Fair alongside Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, pushes every element toward extreme physicality. The sounds feel solid, abrasive, as if they could actually cut you. 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 centre of gravity, though not in the traditional sense. It's a distorted, cut-up instrument, often more percussive than narrative. French, an opaque language for many listeners, becomes a surface on which to slide anger, sarcasm, contempt. On tracks like “Magazine” or “Try Saying” the voice doesn't lead: it attacks, digs in, insists. It's a presence that swings between cruel play and explicit violence, able to turn language into a weapon without ever tipping into the literal.

Rhythmically, “URGH” is one of the most physically aggressive records to come out of the European noise-club scene of late. Alex Macdougall's drumming is mobile, unpredictable, often brutal: it doesn't accompany, it destabilises. Where “Cursive” works a pulse that seems to invite movement only to sabotage it from within, “Life Hex” implodes on itself amid feedback and vocal fragments, while “Ist Halt So” piles up sections and meanings until it turns into a genuine act of sonic resistance, where the reference to Gaza is structural rather than decorative.

The album still makes room for moments of apparent accessibility. “Sicko!” (featuring Billy Woods) is perhaps the closest thing here to a recognisable song form, but even here the groove is sick, unstable, closer to controlled delirium than a traditional banger. It's precisely this ambiguity — between dance and refusal, attraction and repulsion — that makes “URGH” a record hard to digest and yet impossible to ignore.

The final blow lands with “I'll Ask Her”, the only track entirely in English. Here Caulfield drops every filter and every linguistic ambiguity to strike directly at the heart of rape culture and the complicit silence that protects it. There's no metaphor, no distance: just frontal exposure, almost unbearable. It's a closing statement that seeks not catharsis but accountability.

“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.

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14/02/2026