Another Sky
Beach Day
FICTION
I Slept on the Floor, the title of Another Sky’s 2020 debut album, refers to anxiety so acute that you wind up in the bathroom in the middle of the night, hunched over the basin and the abyss. Favoring minor keys and gently cresting musical passages, the songs distorted these disorientating emotions into arena-sized art rock charged by the telescopic timbres of vocalist Catrin Vincent—a one-of-a-kind voice among an increasingly homogenized class of hip, talky, London-set indie acts. Her vocal range is laughably impressive, running from supernatural syllable contortion through ambiguous ASMR whispers to glass-shattering clarity.
Though not as straightforward as running barefoot on the sand or playing frisbee with your dad, Another Sky’s second album, Beach Day, finds unfettered joy where there wasn’t any before. For instance, the raucous post-Britpop cut “Uh Oh!”—which threatens, via hooligan-esque chants, to “push you in the Thames on your way home”—exemplifies Another Sky at their most puppyish and unmasked. “Uh oh, uh oh, watch where you go-oh!” Vincent yells through thronging city streets, daring to channel her rage into fun, and daring you to question it.
Those on the receiving end of that rage vary across the record. Among the title track’s synth swirls is some douchebag at a party who says, “It’s cute [you] write riffs, but [you’re] not Elliott Smith” and gets an “I’ll shut up when I’m dead” in response. There’s Kim K et al who landed on that “We all have the same 24 hours” bullshit a few years back, part of the inspiration behind “A Feeling,” which is introduced by a pitch-warped voice proclaiming, “I woke up at 7 a.m. and did yoga, some cleaning, and even had time to schedule in my mental breakdown.” Other tiles on Vincent’s anti-capitalist mosaic include powerful psychopaths, climate change deniers, and trust fund babies. Moments like these are comparable to the band’s 2018 standalone single “Chillers,” which was exacerbated by boomers, bureaucracy, and bankers, blending its adversaries into a gleeful, pogoing sing-along that was, crucially, as funny as it was acerbic.
But even though Beach Day parks the somber city lights and twilit ruminations of I Slept on the Floor, it doesn’t move backward. For one thing, the production is exceptionally tight and resplendent, and the lyrics fold in the band’s interim experiences—the complicated, contradictory feelings that daybreak brings: relief, frustration, fatigue, euphoria. “The Pain” comprises them all. Opening like a sped-up take on the sleek motorik of Japanese Breakfast’s “Diving Woman,” the track struts and surges through progressively emphatic sections as Vincent threads in the album’s central rallying cry: “The pain makes me feel like I’m alive.” If “Uh Oh!” was a facetious rage cleanse, “The Pain” is an exercise in absorption, in feeling everything. And it does make you feel everything, its shooting-star falsetto harmonies and Naomi Le Dune’s hiccuping bass are like a belated wake-up call from—sorry, cringe—life itself.
In her “Letters From Catrin” series of musings on the album, Vincent wrote: “Repairing things now. Synapses, sinews, songs. Finally feel like there is a future.” Her hope is tangible throughout Beach Day—in Jack Gilbert’s effusive, Gish-esque major-key guitar eruptions as much as in the closing track’s gauzy trip-hop groove and the self-help epiphanies of “I Never Had Control” and “City Drones.” On the latter, Vincent repeatedly beams the mantra “I don’t have to be anyone” over a mid-tempo pop-rock instrumental that splits the distance between Bloc Party and Radiohead. “I can go anywhere / Today can be the first day,” she adds during the bridge. In the past, life could only get in through the cracks, but on Beach Day, Another Sky position themselves outside—a hurt, healing, hungry, happy band that are poised to take on the world.
