- Sacred Bones
- 2026
Where is Mandy, Indiana? The electronic noise-rock quartet by that name has ties to Paris and Berlin and is based in Manchester, UK, the historic intersection of indie rock and dance music. They were originally called Gary, Indiana, nodding to the industrial wasteland just outside Chicago that yielded the Jacksons and Freddie Gibbs. Their new record label, the bleary experimental rock and electronic hub Sacred Bones, is based in Brooklyn. That's all fine and factual, but it only gets you partway to the question of where Mandy, Indiana really exists.
Somewhere outside of time, I'd say. Between dimensions, in a warehouse rave of your imagination. URGH — their second album, out this Friday — bursts forth with familiar pleasures yet is pleasingly difficult to pin down. I hear echoes from across this young century's dark, mechanistic, static-streaked blogger music: the piercing skree and pounding pulse of the DFA's harshest tracks; Crystal Castles bridging the gap between strobe-lit clubs and basements with one lightbulb that host laptop noise shows; Yeezus refracting the Tri Angle Records roster into deconstructed bomb-drop synth beats; the freaked-out howling catharsis of Xiu Xiu at their most unhinged; the drillbit-to-skull intensity of Gilla Band, whose Daniel Fox co-produced the album with Mandy's guitarist Scott Fair.
The list goes on, but Mandy are harnessing all that racket in service of their own spooky vision. Take opening track "Sevastopol," which pivots from abrasive digital bombast to what sounds like an elegant string quartet in a wind tunnel. The aesthetic shifts are not always so jarring but are consistently just as thrilling. "Magazine" gracefully evolves from electro-acoustic percussive clatter to a crisp, skittering groove to an all-out aural assault. On "Life Hex," the backing track morphs from heaving industrial aggression to a spidery programmed beat like it's the most natural transition in the world, all while Valentine Caulfield bounces between barbed French sprechgesang and recitations of the witchy slumber-party incantation "Light as a feather, stiff as a board."
Caulfield's vocals are a marvel here. Every breath is a performance. Sometimes she's whispering, sometimes wailing, sometimes almost rapping, but it's always magnetic. The production further accentuates her charisma, toggling between bare-naked clarity and distorted filters that make her sound as otherworldly as the tunes. She's often speaking French, but when she switches to English, the lyrics pair well with such powerfully frightening music — not least of all on the glitching, pounding finale "I'll Ask Her," a portrait of rape culture that plays like a slowly unfolding natural disaster, blaring alarms included. "And you wouldn't let him date your sister," Caulfield says, exasperated. "But it's different! She's your sister!" As she whips herself into a fervor, the excuses get flimsier, the details more damning: "He brags about getting them drunk, but they're all fucking crazy, man!"
Mandy wrote URGH in "an eerie studio house in the outskirts of Leeds" called the Calm Farm, so it makes sense that the record sounds so haunted. Thanks to holing up together rather than writing remotely, it's also more visceral than the 2023's i've seen a way, leaning on the chemistry the band developed while extensively touring behind their debut. "Cursive," for instance, rides a percolating foundation developed by drummer Alex Macdougall and synth player Simon Catling's bass sequence rather than building out from Caulfield and Fair's sketches as usual. The result is the closest thing to a club jam this band has yet created, a rhythmic extravaganza that blurs the line between paranoia and euphoria.
Even the tracks that rely on studio trickery — like "try saying," with its ghostly spliced vocal samples and high-tech late-'90s spy-movie aesthetic — have a live-band feel thanks to elements like Macdougall's ballistic room-miked drums. Even when they scale back the carnage, as on the creeping, Portishead-esque ballad "A Brighter Tomorrow," the vibe is unsettling and uncanny. When another performer enters the Mandy, Indiana universe for the first time on "Sicko!," it's billy woods, your favorite indie rocker's favorite indie rapper, whose dystopian bars fit in swimmingly here. (A whole Mandy/billy EP: Who says no?)
Fair says the band set out to make "an album of bangers" this time around. They succeeded. This is the kind of level-up you hope for from a buzz band. Mandy, Indiana emerged with a fully realized aesthetic, and sometimes acts like that prove to be one-album wonders, always offering diminishing returns. These songs prove there's much more incredible music to be mined out from Mandy's world of sound. The tracklist hangs together as a front-to-back journey, too, sustaining attention with uniformly solid songcraft and a nonstop array of surprises. URGH is one of those albums that transports you somewhere else; it's a harrowing place, but I look forward to visiting quite often going forward.
URGH is out 2/6 via Sacred Bones. Pre-order it here.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Ratboys' Singin' To An Empty Chair
• J. Cole's The Fall-Off
• Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Anata
• Puscifer's Normal Isn’t
• Hayley Williams and Daniel James' debut EP as Power Snatch, EP1
• Ulrika Spacek's EXPO
• Deedee from MSPAINT's album as Him Horrison, Starting Not To Hurt
• Beverly Glenn-Copeland's Laughter In Summer
• Daphni's Butterfly
• Dirt Buyer's Dirt Buyer III
• Nick Jonas' Sunday Best
• Puma Blue's Croak Dream
• Ella Mai's Do You Still Love Me
• Various Artists' B.B. King’s Blues Summit 100
• Nick Schofield's Blue Hour
• The Grownup Noise's No Straight Line In The Universe
• Music City's Welcome To Music City
• Yilian Cañizares' Vitamina Y
• Hirta's Soft Peaks
• Joji's Piss In The Wind
• Justin Hicks' Man Of Style
• vegas water taxi's long time caller, first time listener
• Mayhem's Liturgy Of Death
• Sarah Nixey's Sea Fever
• YAMILA's Noor
• Silversun Pickups' Tenterhooks
• About You's The Lighthouse, The Storm
• Regulator Watts' The Aesthetics Of No-Drag
• 2070's Big Blue
• Jay Buchanan's Weapons Of Beauty
• Soreab's CU
• UFO95's A Brutalist Dystopian Society Part 2
• Cory Wong's LOST IN THE WONDER
• Dream Nails' You Wish
• Kanonenfieber's Soldatenschicksale
• Mount Palatine's Wormholy World
• KMFDM's Enemy
• Rafael Anton Irisarri's Points of Inaccessibility
• Ellur's At Home In My Mind
• Ricky Dillard & Ron Carter's Sweet, Sweet Spirit
• John Craigie's I Swam Here
• Babyfxce E's Da Realest
• GorpoPap's Reach 4 The Stars
• Lucy Dreams' VVVVV
• Story Littleton's At A Diner
• Duval Timothy & CJ Mirra's My Father’s Shadow — Official Motion Picture Soundtrack
• KAVARI's PLAGUE MUSIC
• Bellbird's The Call
• Michael Marcagi's Under The Streetlights
• Eugene Mirman's Here Comes The Whimsy
• Ian Brennan's The Forgotten Parts
• Belgrado's El Encuentro
• KUN's KUN
• Railcard's Railcard
• Sasha Keable's Act II
• Bat For Lashes' Fur And Gold (20th Anniversary Edition)
• Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans (Super Deluxe Edition)
• Dave Matthews Band's Take Me Back Live From The Gorge
• Eric Church's Evangeline Vs. The Machine: Comes Alive (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
• Charlotte Day Wilson's Patchwork EP
• C.Y.M. & Abby Sage's My Whole World EP
• Tac's SLE…EP EP
• Proc Fiskal's Exchequer EP
• CYCLONE’s Known Unto God EP
• Sydney Ross Mitchell's Cynthia EP
• Paige Kennedy's Style Over Substance EP
