The Brisbane trio immerses itself in cavernous, eerie post-punk to soundtrack the uncanny horror of young adulthood.
The horrors of life as a twenty-something: You’re having less sex, working constant overtime, and handing over most of your paycheck to a landlord who won’t bat an eyelid if the black mold in the ceiling gives you lung disease. Self-worth is a fleeting commodity, sanity even more so. The Goon Sax have always had the market cornered on tales of young-adult embarrassment—their songs cover scenarios like cutting your own hair and being left on read in the group chat. On Mirror II, the Brisbane trio’s third album and first for Matador, they dig deeper, cataloging embarrassment and every emotion in spitting distance: shame, disgust, malaise, anxiety, discomfort, disconnection, fear, and, above all, cringe. Far from a downer, the album is breathlessly chic, less chaos-for-chaos’-sake than their previous work but kookier where it counts. It’s shittier than ever to be young; Mirror II, like the best documents of youthful discontent, makes it sound gothic, glamorous, and fucking cool.
Shedding the bells and whistles of 2018’s We’re Not Talking, the Goon Sax reveal a penchant for glassy, unsettled post-punk. With production from John Parish, the band forgoes the horns, strings, and castanets in favor of glam guitars and crackling no-wave synths. It’s a metaphorical shift as much as a musical one, with the painfully romantic, Jens Lekman-y outlook of We’re Not Talking giving way to emotional abjection and outright cynicism. Most notably, the speak-singing that defined their past work is all but gone, or at least tempered with deft, ingratiating melody. Band members Riley Jones, Louis Forster, and James Harrison share vocal duties about equally, and their push towards singing rather than speak-singing allows each band member to carve out their own style, from Jones’ narcotized drawl to Forster’s petulant yelp to Harrison’s dazed, Felt-lite sighs.
The absence of sprechgesang serves more than just aesthetics. The Goon Sax view pop songs as gospel, and their devotion is evident in Mirror II’s tightly-wound song structures and tragic lyrics: “I tried to listen to a pop song to get through the day/But the only word I heard was you,” Jones sings on “Desire.” “Just let the music take your heart away.” Pop songs are meant to be heard, but they’re also meant to be sung along to, and on Mirror II, this interactive aspect is a form of immersive, emotional mimesis. If you were to sing along to opener “In the Stone,” for example, you’d have to pout and scowl to affect Forster’s vocal tics to mirror his disgust. The effect recurs on “Psychic,” where he spits the words with barely-concealed fury to a condescending partner, and again on “Bathwater,” where he repeats the word “blood” in a theatrical groan. This is show-don’t-tell singing, using pop as a demonstrative form.
In her book Sleeveless, critic Natasha Stagg writes about the increasing prevalence of the “internet as horror” metaphor—the way terms like “ghosting” and “trolling” translate our lives online into the language of the uncanny. The Goon Sax take a similar approach. “You called my number three times today/But I was busy on the other plane, so you called the pilot,” Jones sings on the shoegazey “Tag,” rendering the act of getting in touch as a never-ending goosechase sabotaged by a “demon of fate.” “Psychic” visualizes the ability to spot a partner’s lie as a dangerous psychic connection. And on “In the Stone,” Forster describes a relationship as haunted: “Are you the vampire? We take on so many forms,” he sings, stalked by spectres both real and imagined. The production choices add to the gloom: At the bridge, Forster sings through a distortion pedal, his words contorted and crushed beyond meaning. These gothic allusions fit well on an album that feels cavernous and eerie, tinny drum claps and overdriven guitars echoing as if from cathedral ceilings.
The relative darkness of these songs doesn’t prevent them from being among the most beautiful the Goon Sax have recorded. The propulsive rhythm and heartbroken lyrics of “In the Stone” hit the same pleasure centres as a pop-punk song; the static haze of “Desire” is almost ASMR-like in its directness. Jones’ lyrics about trying to assuage a crush by listening to pop music begin to feel almost like a running commentary on the record itself. Mirror II offers a sighing, spectral alternative to the mess of our world, if only for four minutes at a time.
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