Lime Garden
Maybe Not Tonight
SO YOUNG
One sleepless night, Lime Garden’s Chloe Howard wrote down a list of everything that made her feel afraid. “Fears,” from the Brighton quartet’s 2024 debut album One More Thing, begins by logging features of her immediate environment—darkness, silence—before the gnawing of failure and death take hold. But the reality that the vocalist-guitarist ultimately fixates on, one scarier in its unfamiliarity than the feeling of disappointment, is “the thought of some success.” On an album that not only affirms all four members’ dedication to the project but unapologetically dreams big, the idea that a modicum of fame might be catastrophic was enough to disarm the listener. Nothing that would stop the band, though, from continuing to chase their ambitions.
Some success did befall Lime Garden the way that a warmly received debut tends to keep an indie band’s dream alive these days: They still had to juggle gigs and day jobs while toiling away at their sophomore LP, Maybe Not Tonight. But the underlying anxieties of being in your mid-twenties, when you’re no longer entering adulthood so much as watching it hurtle toward you, persist whether you’re singing in front of thousands of strangers or dancing with friends on a night out. And that’s where we find our narrator on the opening track “23”—once again awake past midnight, crushingly self-aware, but this time not alone: “So I try to breathe at night / Holding close the ones that get me high,” Howard sings. One look at that line and you might assume “23” is in the meditative vein of One More Thing’s final tracks, when the single is in fact the group’s most infectious anthem to date.
So much was evident when it accompanied the announcement of Maybe Not Tonight; what becomes clear in the context of the album is that the cocktail of frustration, insecurity, and lust that courses through it is no downer. For a record reconciling with a period the band describes as a “mass breakup,” it’s consistently spunky, buzzing, and adventurous. It’s sequenced to mirror the trajectory of a single night out, but the combustible energy never lets up. Even when the time comes for it to wind down, it doesn’t pull the brake like its predecessor. The intimacy of closer “Do You Know What I’m Thinking” only pushes Leila Deeley’s guitars into overdrive, and it’s on the shadowy predecessor “Always Talking About You” that Howard blurts out her messiest thoughts, including that old desire for fame: “I want everybody to say, ‘That’s that bitch,’” she admits.
Annabel Whittle’s drumming on the relatively quiet tracks which close out the album is dynamic, but it’s her involvement in the production that takes this project to the next level. Most of the songs originated as demos she produced at home, taking notes from Danny L Harle, A. G. Cook, and Jim-E Stack, a fascination that can be traced back to the hyperpop inflections of One More Thing’s “Pop Star.” Ultimately produced by Charlie Andrew, known for his work with Wolf Alice and alt-J, the album’s fashionable club-music flourishes serve both a functional and narrative role; it’s more than just about a night out. The glitchy title track, driven by a nimble bass line, feels in-conversation with the latest Fcukers record while gelling alongside “Body,” which could pass for an Editors tune if Howard were a baritone.
And just as the fizzy guitar licks of the band’s debut turn into full-blown soloing, so, too, does Howard’s voice here become flashier, embracing the theatrics of pop with sharp inhales, “urghs,” and “yeahs.” The sober mind can tell that a moment in the spotlight is no shortcut to feeling alive. But that kind of expression can charge every bone in your body.
