UK Act Sorry’s Album Debut 925 Builds Worlds, Snake Pits
Image courtesy of Google Images
As an American lamenting the dead ring of my own country’s milky rock offerings, I’ve found myself mapping from afar the trajectories of upstart bands wriggling from the seams of London’s various quadrants; Shame from the south, Deep Tan from Hackney in the east, and King Nun from Richmond in the southwest, to name a few. While boasting the kind of organic, grassroots support and scene-building that marks each band as capable of stirring the viscera of audiences large and small, many of these acts have found themselves pocketed by popular labels with significant buying power.
Shame is attached to indie giant Dead Oceans, while King Nun has signed with Dirty Hit, purveyor of fire-eaters The 1975, Wolf Alice and Beabadoobie. Of the two acts, the only one I’ve seen live is Shame, twice, but I’ve heard it said, and believe, that the debut albums of both Shame and King Nun, Songs of Praise and Mass, respectively, can’t compare with the ballistic energy of their live performance.
Then there’s Sorry, a foursome of 22-year-olds from south London, fronted by Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz, recently signed to Domino (Arctic Monkeys, Anna Calvi, Dev Hynes). The first I heard of Sorry was a clip of their single “Showgirl” borne forth on some thermal of the Instagram vortex. I was deeply, immediately creeped out by the song. The flatness of the guitar tone, the compression, the particular gravel-studded whine of distortion in the chorus made me feel like a spectator in some two-dimensional Sims basement-saloon hell. Even the single artwork acted upon me: an anatomical splicing of “sexy” legs and a front-facing Foucauldian audience, combining ‘collage found in a teen girl’s room’ with morgue vibes a la Prime Suspect Tennison. I was left nauseous & obsessed.
For two years, I’ve watched and listened as Sorry has released a ramp of singles, each more transfixing than the last. The branding is equally tantalizing. Lorenz has been photographed wearing a Russian-style fur hat and select pieces of cheap menswear over a t-shirt that says “sex”. As a bottom-bosom Placebo fan, my ears prick up at this kind of messaging, likening it to Brian Molko’s affinity for t-shirts that read “pissboy” or “stunt girl,” these plain, provocative Annunciations of identity that hide more than they reveal.
As a whole, Sorry’s visual motifs propose a relaxed noir formulated from the marginalia of the unremarkable. A prime example is the music video for their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” in which the band sport clumsy, oversize suits, bowler hats and kit gloves, equal parts Rat Pack, Blues Brothers and Droogs of Clockwork Orange. They glide around the neighborhood, a band of unlikely mobsters rarely seen in daylight, toking cigars and snapping lazily. They are the cheap magicians who, rather than hide the mirage of their two-cent magic, are pointing at the trick.
Unlike the debut records of Shame and King Nun, the production of 925 seems to me to be less concerned with sounding “good” than it is with sounding “right”. It is a record rife with the memorabilia of its own creation; clips from voice memos, small easter eggs replicated from demos, a host of guitar and sax sounds that depart and reappear like a cast of characters. It is self-referential insomuch as it refers to a world pre-established by singles like “Showgirl” and “2 Down 2 Dance” where club and party scenes are suggested as backgrounds for a nail-biting interiority that looks upon “fun” and “pleasure” with bored disgust and a just a little longing.
A stand-out on the album is “Snakes”, a love song. “I was nervous as hell / a bottomless pit / snakes didn’t even scare me” Lorenz intones as if issuing a dare, speaking to a desire that is crippled, but powerful. The same focus on the ridiculous nature of (and necessity for) exteriors so prevalent in Sorry’s imagery is expressed in the refrain: “I never thought about you in your underwear / cause I never really cared what was under there”. Unlike the party scenes evoked in “More” and “Right Round the Clock”, where Sorry aims to undress the motives behind people’s public personas, from their entourages to the flash of their “fuck me eyes”, “Snakes” suggests an unwillingness to slip a scalpel under the disguise of the beloved, preferring to be beguiled by their projections.
People are magic, they seem to argue, and our worst behaviors, habits and habitats are what make up our magic. Just examine the bridge of “More”, a track that investigates the rote desire for romantic love to satisfy but not overwhelm, where Lorenz sings, “all the blood runs to my stomach / I might stumble, I might vomit”. This eagerness to confront the visceral, vommity truth is what gives Sorry its currency. Angular and awkward and smart. Here for a while, I predict.