Girls Names – “Reticence”
Tough Love is building up a reputation as the UK’s noisiest label, and one that consistently puts out aggressive, cathartic, and exultant music. Girls Names were one of the decade-old label’s many incredible finds, a Belfast band who have churned out menacing post-punk and gloomy, jangling indie rock since as far back as 2011. Tough Love has been there nearly every step of the way for the group’s prolific past, and will be releasing the quartet’s third and most ambitious album Arms Around A Vision. It follows up their recent 12″ one-off, an eleven-minute zeitgeist busting trip called “Zero Triptych.” The lead single off their new release is called “Reticence” even if it’s anything but. In a lengthy press release about the new album, the term “skygaze” comes up, as an antithesis to the meandering gauze of “shoegaze,” a smeared sensibility that has spread into even the most isolated corners of indie rock. There is nothing smeared about “Reticence” — it’s all crisp, cold edges and angular careening riffs that threaten to tip the song off course and flip it skyward. It towers with the surfy gloom of a wave about to break, a tide of defiance with no intention of crashing. Listen.
Here’s the full Arms Around A Vision tracklist:
01 “Reticence”
02 “An Artificial Spring”
03 “Desire Oscillations”
04 “(Obsession)”
05 “Chrome Rose”
06 “A Hunger Artist”
07 “Málaga”
08 “Dysmorphia”
09 “(Convalescence)”
10 “Exploit Me”
11 “Take Out the Hand”
12 “I Was You”
Arms Around A Vision is out 10/2 via Tough Love. Pre-order it here.