With their 2021 debut EP and 2023 LP, I’ve Seen a Way, Mandy, Indiana fleshed out their industrial, rave-y, and electro-punk leanings. With their new album, the band revisit their eclectic MO; URGH, however, is more relentlessly amped, frothing with urgency and a banshee-like need for expression, catharsis, and transcendence. From the opener to the closing track, a listener beholds an oftentimes savage and rivetingly textured spectacle.
In various PR materials and interviews, singer Valentine Caulfield has discussed URGH being written and recorded while she was recovering from being raped. As one might expect, she moves between primal volatility and alarming despondence. URGH, though, is not overly confessional or diaristic in tone. To the contrary, Caulfield and band have universalized a specific horror or violation, presenting it in archetypal terms. In this way, the album, though personal to a degree, is primarily historical and mythological in scope.
“Sevastopol” serves as an apt intro, overflowing with cacophonic blips, screeches, and grinds. Percussion is messy, arrhythmic, mechanistic. Caulfield sounds driven, almost glossolalic. The piece feels trauma-induced, built around sonics that might reverberate in A Clockwork Orange or 1984-inspired nightmare. On the other hand, Caulfield gropes for a stable perch: human in crisis, human versus the machine, human refusing to become the machine. “try saying” similarly blends electronic barrages and Caulfield’s mock-insouciant vocal; here, however, the instrumentation is noisy with hints of experimental jazz, gestalts that would appeal to Flying Lotus’s Steven Ellison or a caffeine-jacked Makaya McCraven.
“Magazine” is more conventionally rhythmic, dance-y in a meth-y kind of way, while never sacrificing a disintegrative vibe. The track could explode and dissolve at any moment. “Abandon all hope because tonight I’m coming for you” (translated from French), Caulfield declares, snarling through bared teeth. By embracing her anguish, she morphs from victim to sorceress, from mere survivor into a Kali-like character who redefines her own existence, merging creation and destruction.
“Dodecahedron” is a sonic and lyrical war-cry: “Their ivory towers won’t protect them when we destroy their disgusting societies” (translated from French). Caulfield’s delivery is feverish, the instrumentation lurching. The ambient “A Brighter Tomorrow”, meanwhile, ironically evokes dystopian scenes, someone humming show tunes while standing in burning rubble, sirens echoing, tanks crawling through the streets.
If “Dodecahedron” expresses durability in the face of oppressive hierarchies, and “A Brighter Tomorrow” explores existential and cultural fragmentation, “ist halt so” unfurls as an ontological probe, a more removed exposé on the engines of greed and delusion. Percussive rolls and unsettling electronics unfurl, conjuring fusillades, bloody battlefields, and drone attacks. Caulfield’s voice conveys a mix of franticness and determination.
At heart, URGH perhaps reflects Caulfield’s healing process (venting of grief and anger, reclamation of power); however, the set clearly critiques the current spread of fascist impulses in the West: rape, as one person’s brutalization of another, is employed as an implicit metaphor for the entrenchment of hegemony, soul-vampirism, Big State, Big Money. “Sicko!”, featuring guest billy woods, is sonically and lyrically on-point. “Liquid antibiotics, antipsychotics / Got him back on solids”, woods offers, reiterating Caulfield’s take on corpocracy, the nationalistic dumb-down, Big Pharma. Here is a recast vision of the Christ figure being removed from the cross and put on cutting-edge meds, his resurrection a miracle of modern science! We’re all being raped, even if we don’t know it.
“Cursive” launches with tribal drum sounds punctuated by foghorn-sounding electronic blares (which cumulatively recall atmospheric moans: the poisoned earth exhaling in agony). The piece is an EBM exemplar yet also a lament – and a biting satirization of totalitarian rigidity. This is the music that Franz Kafka would make if he were living in 2025 and was sonically inclined. “I am dancing while I wait for the world to disappear” (translated from French), Caulfield sings. The Zion rave scene from The Matrix Reloaded comes to mind, bodies swirling, interweaving as the machines drill down. Destruction may be imminent; still, the visceral, communal, sexual celebration ensues…
With URGH, Mandy, Indiana refuse to shy away from the suffering we exact and endure. As mentioned, Caulfield’s rape, and her recovery, are presumably the project’s fuel; that experience, however, has been reframed, highlighting the more systemic dehumanization that happens each day on micro and macro levels. What about our design leads us to covet, dominate, kill? How do we take responsibility for and rechannel these predatory tendencies? – especially given that they’re flourishing all around us and, if honest, within us, as well.
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