In Amber cover
Released

Imagine a disco Swans album, and you’re close. This is the sobriety hymnal for everyone who woke up, alive, after the emotionally purple years of Depeche Mode and Bronski Beat, who needed the gray cream of self-pity that soothes the hot ice of New Order and Pet Shop Boys. If the dancefloor has a salve for all genders and stripes of personhood, it is the unifying force of being really fucking dramatic, an urge that has no church and no limit. We’ve got Kate Bush drums,  Morrissey inclinations, guitars from The Cult, Moroder arpeggi, all of it in support of the singing from Anohni and Butler. We have the deracinated church here, the commercial gospel of the drum machine and the fainting couch.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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