PVA - No More Like This

After the electro-dance chaos of their debut “Blush” (2022), the London trio opt for subtraction. Less club explosion, more inner pressure. Less toxic rave, more silent after-hours, when the beat still throbs in your temples but the room is almost empty. “No More Like This” is a record that favours texture over saturation, skin over spotlight.

This transformation isn't simply a change of sound, but a change of posture. Where the previous chapter moved with centrifugal energy, here PVA work by compression. The beats are still there (“Send” could set fire to any industrial dancefloor), but they're often held back, bent, funnelled into structures that prefer to accumulate tension rather than release it. This is music built through layering, like an obsessive thought that keeps returning with tiny variations until it leaves a mark.

“Enough” is one of the album's high points: sensual, restrained, built on a groove that never fully explodes. It's suspended desire, a confession whispered in a dark corner. “Boyface” plays openly with gender categories, not as provocation but as a fluid, ambiguous exploration of body and identity. The beat recalls a certain Nineties trip-hop, but the approach isn't revivalist: it's a personal, updated, almost clinical appropriation.

“Anger Song”, on the other hand, is emblematic of how PVA handle emotion: the anger isn't shouted, since it's internalised, made fragile. Ella Harris alternates spoken word and singing with a restraint that can seem distant, but is in fact a conscious control of tension. When her voice cracks or opens up slightly (as in “Mate” or in the airier moments of “Flood”), you can feel just how much emotional potential is being deliberately held back.

“Okay”, with its expansive, almost shoegaze-like layered synths, is one of the album's most ambitious moments. Here the trio proves it can combine club culture with more traditional songwriting without losing coherence. The closer, “Moon”, completes the circle opened by “Rain”: if that was an awakening, this is a cyclical reckoning. There's no definitive catharsis, only a return. Emancipation is an ongoing process.

The whole album is threaded through with the idea of the mark that people and experiences can leave on the skin. You feel it in the hypnotic repetition of certain phrases, in the synths that return like distorted echoes, in the rhythms that persist until they become almost physical. This isn't just music to listen to: it's music that presses against you, that shapes your emotional space.

The body is therefore central (and not only in the lyrics). The cover, with the title imprinted on skin, perfectly sums up the meaning of the record: physicality, vulnerability, the mark left behind. The songs deal with desire, consent, shame, exposure. There's an explicit but never gratuitous sensuality, interwoven with harder, sometimes unsettling imagery. The tension between attraction and control becomes musical structure: slow build-ups, sudden rarefactions, basslines emerging like internal pulses.

The growth since the debut is clear, as PVA are no longer just after immediate impact but also depth. They've turned their stage energy into a more intimate, controlled language, without losing the physicality that has made them one of the most interesting acts on the London scene.

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05/03/2026