Mandy, Indiana are a Mancunian four-piece with a French singer who's based in Berlin. They make a lot of noise. Their second album is a take-no-prisoners amalgamation of electronic squall, thrashy rap (a distant cousin of Dälek), and tints of deranged hyperpop. In an age when ever-increasing quantities of people seek soothing music, they are outliers.
The album was flavoured by multiple operations undergone by frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall during its making. The former lost most of her vision in one eye. Since the lyrics are in French, only those fluent will pick up more specific references, but the sound throughout is scarred and wounded.
Closer, “I’ll Ask Her”, for instance, the only song in English, is a raging spoken word diatribe about toxic predatory blokes on a night out, splurged around stentorian beats, fuzz and what sounds like an over-amplified siren running out of juice. But there are also tunes and musicality hidden away behind the abrasive frontage, as with the fairground organ interude amid the buzzsaws of “Sevastopol” or the singing on gothy slowie “A Brighter Tomorrow”.
Mostly, though, Mandy, Indiana, revel in discordancy and percussive attack, couched in sounds this writer associates with mid/late-1990s techno vanguardists wracking their kit for ever more terrifying noises, the era when the likes of Aphex Twin, Neil Landstrumm and Speedy J headed for the brutish realms of 2nd Gen and Skinny Puppy.
But let’s not forget URGH’s hip hop touch. One cut even features New York rapper billy woods [sic], and Caulfield is not averse to throwing down bars amidst the arrhythmic battering and dirge-funk.
You know what I’d bloody love? If Taylor Swift decided to work with them. Now that would be truly interesting. Until then, for Mandy, Indiana, it's clobbering time.
Below: Watch the video for "Sicko!" by Mandy, Indiana featuring billy woods
