Slow Crush
Thirst
PURE NOISE
The claim that an artist has to go away in order to be missed is, like every oft-repeated yet rarely examined axiom, as much of a fallacy as it can be a truism. That’s especially clear in the current era, in which some musicians reunite because they truly miss creating art together while others do so for cash-grab purposes. Belgium’s Slow Crush haven’t broken up and reunited since coagulating nearly a decade ago, but they’ve perfected the art of gauging when the time is right to step up and present a musical creation of which they’re proud—and, alternately, when to take a seat in the back of the room as listeners savor their work while the band allows their ensuing artistic impulses to organically gestate and follow the path of a natural birth.
To put it in starker terms, Slow Crush materialized around the time of the second coming of shoegaze, and, as a band that comfortably fits within that mold, they opted against capitalizing on the trend that could’ve loaded up their bank accounts. Instead, the quartet founded by bassist/vocalist Isa Holliday and guitarist Jelle Ronsmans let their pulverizing 2018 debut, Aurora, nourish listeners like plump raindrops rejuvenating a parched desert floor before returning three years later with Hush, a record brilliantly written from the perspective of songcraft but more emotionally distant, even abrasive, toward the listener.
Which brings us to Thirst, an album nearly four years in the waiting that Slow Crush’s fanbase would hope—based on its title alone—to see serve as a Gatorade-like quencher for their years-long desire that the Belgians sate them with the majestic music that put them on the map in the first place. The band’s third outing reintroduces them as harbingers of a certain hope that the entire world currently craves more than oil, economic justice, and even sustenance (well, at least before the ramifications of USAID’s gutting are fully exposed). With drummer Frederik Meeuwis and guitarist Nic Placklé in tow, Thirst is effectively a manifesto that the human race still has the opportunity to reinvent itself—or at least to regain some karma by atoning for the widespread horrors that are now so commonly known.
Best of all, Slow Crush, exhibiting or perhaps even flaunting their maturity, deliver their diatribe with the forcefulness of a traumatized individual finally standing up to a bully. Whereas Slow Crush’s first two albums mostly relegated their noisier songs to side A and their more ethereal tracks to side B, only two of the 10 songs presented here (“Hollow” and “Ógilt”) are ephemeral-sounding. The others vie for the best bangers the band has ever brandished; “Covet,” “Cherry,” and “Haven” practically pin Slow Crush’s balls to the wall. If the band manages to exceed this record, they’ll defy imagination—theirs and ours.
