PRE-ORDER - EXPECTED END OF OCTOBER
Melbourne duo Hysterical Love Project return with their second album for Motion Ward, and take a deeper dive into the introspective dreampop/triphop (dreamhop?) dynamics explored on their previous recordings. February’s Album is perhaps the most confident they’ve sounded - the production richer, the songwriting more robust and fully-formed - though the overall feeling communicated by the songs is somewhat different, struck with a lovelorn romanticism and confessional intimacy that’s riddled with the emotions of doubt and longing. Kinds blissful and kinda intense. It’s an approach they share with countrymates HTRK, that feeling of afterhours, blue-light seduction swaddled in gauzy beats and echoing, reverb drenched guitars that makes sense of both the band name and album title - we all know what happens on a certain day in February. Highly coquettish stuff for the most part, though also appealingly tender and vulnerable, that long-standing contrast that underpins a good deal of pop music, alternative or otherwise. Hysterical Love Project just above sums up their take on liaisons tendres…
FFO: HTRK, Bowery Electric, Jabu, Dregs, a.s.o
