Mandy, Indiana
URGH
SACRED BONES
Mandy, Indiana is a slippery band to pin down, and that’s precisely why their French-language techno-EBM debut album I’ve Seen a Way was one of our favorites of 2023. The Manchester quartet’s buzzsaw electronics and rust-belt guitars expand in scale with their second album, URGH. A Mandy, Indiana project is violence on the scale of HEALTH, NIN, or John Wick, and I wouldn’t be surprised if members of the band transition to film score work down the line. This shit is a techno-industrial kaleidoscope of sounds arousing the cyber-punk apocalypse.
For URGH’s 10 tracks, all four band members contributed to the songwriting process, taking their own internal crises and screaming them into the void. The rainbow skull cover art for URGH by the artist Carnovsky—featuring an illustration of the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius—underscores the record’s visceral confrontation with the body and its limits. The album starts with the industrial banger “Sevastopol,” which growls and bumps along before morphing into a demented carnival outro after all its chopped-up blasts of French attitude. The thumping noise-rock single “Magazine” ensues with its threatening lyrics (“Abandon all hope / Because tonight I’m coming for you”) and sets a ferocious tone for an emotionally unrestrained record dealing with unresolved emotions after vocalist Valentine Caulfield’s experience of sexual assault. “A Brighter Tomorrow” repeats the theme in the middle of the album (“Almost like a caress / Your hands on my flesh / I am losing my breath”). It’s the group at their most feral and vulnerable.
URGH’s roiling ocean of moods continues with the playfully cut-up vocals and rattling drum kit on the third track, “Try Saying.” Noise blasts are sprayed across the mix with a machine-gun Doppler effect as Caulfield sings in French. The drums are pounding and the translation is desolate: “I just wanted a sense of belonging / I felt powerless.” The genocide in Gaza is addressed on “Ist Halt So” and “Dodecahedron” through a protest-song lens: Caulfield sings “Stand up and march” before the band distances into a prismatic club beat straight out of hell. The industrial noise rock returns on “Life Hex,” where the band references the levitation mantra “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” The power of Mandy, Indiana comes from their ability to assault the senses and then drop into a witchy electronic bridge before closing their fist around the whole thing for the final act.
Rapper billy woods features on “Sicko!,” which sounds like a Cyberpunk 2077 chase sequence. It’s Mandy, Indiana’s most approachable song so far in their career, until they hit you with another wave of buzzing noise in its outro (“Oh, you are sick” is the key lyric here). Final track “I’ll Ask Her” wraps up the album by baptizing toxic male culture in flame, and you realize Caulfield left an oil slick behind her for the nine previous tracks. Her final line lights a match at the feet of the boys-club cult: “Yeah, your friend’s a fucking rapist.” Mandy, Indiana is devoid of genre anchors, but their communication is clear: Get the hell out of our way.
