Mandy, Indiana – Urgh!
Manchester/Berlin quartet Mandy, Indiana return with their second album “Urgh”, their first for Sacred Bones, co-produced by guitarist Scott Fair and Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox: louder, harder and more physically aggressive than their 2023 debut, and just as uncompromising about why.
Nothing about making “Urgh” was easy. Vocalist Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall both underwent multiple surgeries during the writing sessions, which the band held in what they called “an intense residence in a spooky home studio” near Leeds. The pressure shows in the music, but not as a limitation: it’s baked into how the record moves and breathes. “Urgh” doesn’t build toward anything. It starts under high voltage and stays there, cycling through noise, rhythm and voice in a way that refuses comfort from the first track to the last.
Opener “Sevastopol” sets the template: industrial bass, Caulfield’s voice filtered through a vocoder until it’s barely recognizable as human, followed by a sudden digital orchestral passage in the closing 40 seconds that doesn’t resolve anything so much as briefly suspend it. “Magazine”, the lead single, runs a driving percussive impulse through layers of distortion and siren-pitched guitars until the original instruments are unidentifiable. Half-programmed, half-live drumming, always threatening to tip into a panic attack. “Try Saying” loops vocal fragments and sampled acoustic guitar into something comparatively digestible, then inches steadily toward helicopter-blade density. “Dodecahedron” ends in a shower of short-circuit percussion and 8-bit flutes. It’s the first half where the album’s logic is clearest: each song is a closed system, locked in on itself, resistant to easy classification.
Macdougall’s drumming is a key reason this works. Coming off the more synthetic kick-heavy approach of the debut, he’s freer here, more histrionic: one moment shivering glass, the next a rudimentary jungle pulse as on “Cursive”. “A Brighter Tomorrow” pairs a slow siren with dense bass for the album’s one genuine resting point, Caulfield’s voice floating in something like a melodic line over a lyric about struggling in real time to process sexual assault. “Life Hex” implodes on feedback and vocal fragments. “Ist Halt So” (German: “that’s just how it is”) stacks four distinct movements in as many minutes: provocative, static, howling, blizzard, arriving at an ending that manages to be both bleak and brilliant.
“Sicko!” brings in Billy Woods, who stays typically composed as the track lurches between gargled distortion and pointillist percussion. The pairing works because Woods doesn’t try to meet the noise halfway; he just moves through it. “Cursive” redirects the album’s rhythmic violence toward something closer to Paul Hardcastle’s “19”, a percussive swirl that almost invites movement before undermining it from within.
What sets “Urgh” apart from comparable noise-adjacent records is how little it relies on escalation. There’s no arc toward a climax: the pressure is already at maximum at the start and maintained through structural variation rather than dynamic buildup. Fair and Fox’s production keeps everything dense and abrasive, with synthesizers and live drums bleeding into each other until it’s nearly impossible to locate where one ends and the other begins.
What I keep coming back to is that last 40 seconds of “Sevastopol”: the shredder stops, a ghostly orchestral fragment appears from nowhere, and for a moment, you think the album might offer a way out. It doesn’t. That pocket of strange beauty is precisely what makes what follows feel more violent.
Caulfield sings almost entirely in French, and has said she likes that most listeners don’t understand the lyrics, that the perception of French as a beautiful language lets her smuggle in jokes about rapists being stabbed. The final track, “I’ll Ask Her”, is the only one in English, and it makes the shift count. Backed by barking dogs and the sustained moan of an angle grinder, Caulfield repeats how men dismiss assault allegations against their partners until the track overheats past the point of comfort. No metaphor, no distance, just the mechanism of complicity laid bare.
