MONEY’s 2013 debut, The Shadow Of Heaven, never really caught on as much as I expected to. I’m not sure why — the English band’s first album was wonderful — but I think it probably had a lot to do with it being so impossibly sad. It sure made it hard for me to return to it with any frequency unless I was really fucking depressed — tracks like “Bluebell Fields” and “Goodnight London” are breathtaking, but also a bit hard to revisit all that often. They don’t really have hooks or structures so much as they are just giant smears of emotion and emotive lyrics. But when you’re trapped in the moment with them, they’re really moving: I remember crying a lot during one of their sets in the United States a few years ago at CMJ and not really being able to control it.

Anyway, with all that being said, it seems like they’re doubling down on the emotion this time around. Their sophomore album is called Suicide Songs, a title that frontman Jamie Lee expresses some reservations about in the press material for the record: “It seemed to make sense for the period, since I was dabbling with an unworldly attitude toward life, though that’s changed now. But we don’t want it to come across just in a negative way. We don’t want to glorify mental illness either.”

But even though MONEY are often unbearably bleak, it never feels to me like they’re insincere about it: They’re just demonstrating the depressing reality of feeling these feelings and going through these things. “You Look Like A Sad Painting On Both Sides Of The Sky,” the lead single from the new record, lacks some of the grand sweep of the best tracks on their debut, but lyrics are just as strong and it still sounds like it’s bearing the entire weight of the world on its shoulders. Listen below.

have you seen the disgrace?
the world wears the dawn like a day
like a painting of a face
whose features fade away
puts it’s mirrors in the dark
points at your back and starts to laugh

in the meeting of this mire
i awake as if on fire
no my dawn was not put out
by some mistake was not put out
unlike the dawn was not put out
and now it will never be put out
there will be music all around
when they put me in the ground
and the drunk whilst laughing, spoke
these words that i have wrote

‘you look like a sad painting’ he sighed
‘on both sides of the sky’
as the room it roamed a throng
and the piano played a song

outside the world is crucified
you must find something to be sacrificed to
to your love
or to your lie

Tracklist:
01 “I Am The Lord”
02 “I’m Not Here”
03 “You Look Like A Sad Painting On Both Sides Of The Sky”
04 “Night Came”
05 “Suicide Song”
06 “Hopeless World”
07 “I’ll Be The Night”
08 “All My Life”
09 “A Cocaine Christmas And An Alcoholic’s New Year”

Suicide Songs is out 1/29 via Bella Union. Pre-order here.