Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke – and this is the time for us to pick up something for the weekend as we take an in-depth preview of one of the weekend’s most noticeably notable new album releases, because it’s always been my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of new music every day! There’s stiff competition from Dirty Projectors and Coco’s Maia Friedman, as well as rock band The Districts, this weekend – but The Mysterines have the vote of ‘Album Of The Week’ from One Track At A Time for this fine Friday of March 11th. A fair share of music publications frequently seem to assume the emerging Alternative Punk 4-piece of The Mysterines are from Liverpool, but they were actually originally formed in Merseyside. Led by vocalist/guitarist Lia Metcalfe, The Mysterines have been gaining fans all over the music and radio industry across the last couple of years and various tracks by them have each received daytime rotational airplay from BBC Radio 6 Music. They have performed at festivals as beloved as 2021’s Sound City Festival, and I’m sure there are some die-hard UK Hard Rock fans who have been desperately awaiting what’s in store for them as ‘Reeling’ – their first full-length album – finally lands on store shelves today. ‘Reeling’ was recorded in sessions that took place throughout 2021, where The Mysterines worked with Catherine Marks (Foals, The Killers, Eliza Shaddad) as their producer. The record will be supported by a string of tour dates in locations like Cambridge, Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, Leeds and more throughout the spring. Teasing the style and direction of ‘Reeling’ when it was initially announced, Metcalfe said, “It’s a pretty ambiguous title for most people, but for me, ‘Reeling’ sums up every emotion of the album in just one word”, in the band’s press statement. On that strong note, let’s check out the final pre-release single – ‘Dangerous’ – below.
The final advance single to drum up hype for the album, Lia Metcalfe also said in a seperate statement about the visceral Alt-Rock tune, “Dangerous is about those wild cycles that life sometimes traps you in, the ones that seem desirable at first but quickly become very dangerous”, as The Mysterines’ dynamic frontwoman explains, concluding, “Whether it be with people, places, relationships – the hardest part is always letting go”, in her thoughtful and provoking press notes. ‘Dangerous’ gets off to a heated start as a slightly Folk-led opening guitar riff slowly turns sour in tone and becomes more thunderous at a brisker pace, and Metcalfe soon croons refrains like “I was willing and able/But I was caught in your jaws” and you caught me standing on the table/I saw you watching me fall” that invite you into the Post-Punk style of the single with dramatic lyricism that touches on toxicity and cyclical break-up as key themes. For the chorus, the hooks become more melodic and infectiously catchy as the simple refrain of “It’s such a danger/It’s such a dangerous thing” is given an infuriated amount of emotional weight that grinds under the relentlessly electronic-enhanced electric guitar riffs. Metcalfe’s vocal delivery has a noticeably potent and, most crucially, masculine quality to it, with the rest of the band backing up her gently husky voice by driving the beats forwards with a more standard ‘Indie’ formula of punchy guitar riffs and compact drum riffs. It is probably not the heaviest track that The Mysterines will likely present on the new record, but they have a bunch of ears that show a great knack for catchy melodies that interplay between the Pop and Punk elements of the track. ‘Dangerous’ also feels more eclectic than you may assume, given the title of the track on paper, because there’s some Grunge influences that pull from the more bombastic flair of more modern rock bands too. They were clearly influenced by Nirvana and The Strokes, and there’s a nice mixture of slightly different Rock influences being pulled together pretty neatly in ‘Dangerous’. It, perhaps, does feel like a fairly obvious choice for a radio-friendly single to promote the album as I could definitely envision ‘Dangerous’ being played on a daytime BBC Radio 1 programme as equally as on the next FIFA video game soundtrack, and so they do adhere to a more conventional structure and sound on the track more so than other examples of their music, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as it ensures The Mysterines are keeping their ambitions broad and attaining more reach with their music to entice others to check out the full record, where the more experimental tracks can find a larger audience. There’s also a Brit-Pop styling, especially in the raw vocals and the lightly distorted guitar riffs, that can appeal to older listeners while balancing out their more off-beat tracks naturally too. Overall, The Mysterines seem primed for sturdy success on ‘Dangerous’, a solid single that feels as though it is fairly diversified while giving the more casual fans of their genre some crowd-pleasing riffs.
That leaves me with little else to say other than to thank you kindly for lending a moment of your day to find out what I had to say about The Mysterines today, and I hope that you are looking forwards to their new album as much as most of their devoted fans are. I’ll be back tomorrow on the eve of ‘Scuzz Sundays’ to shine a spotlight on one of the UK’s most lively Grime artists who has just released his new LP ‘Reason To Smile’ via the major label Island Records. He has collaborated with the likes of Mahalia and Swindle, and he has received three nominations at the MOBO Awards. His ’23Winters’ EP reached #3 on the UK Rap & Hip Hop Albums Chart in 2016.
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