‘A crushing education, Swallowed by the floor, Dying from the shame, A taste of what you need’ (Settle Down)

Hailing from Long Beach, Self Improvement return with their second full-length and follow-up to 2022’s Visible Damage.  And what a delightfully understated, insidiously atmospheric treat it is.  The crisply punchy drums resist any temptation to overplay, while locking in with the tautly resonant, darkly danceable bass lines.  Meanwhile, the guitar weaves its own independent yet equally restrained patterns, tensely angular and melodically serpentine.  Flares of electronics inject a further layer of intriguing texture.  This precisely constructed palette, sparsely coloured yet richly detailed, proves the perfect tableau for the evocatively virtuoso vocals of Jett Witchalls.

The default mode is one of detached, sardonic semi-spoken disdain that morphs with impressive dexterity from the stridently forceful to the hazily ethereal and then the playfully mocking without breaking stride.  This vocal fluidity, with its distinctive English cadence, marries with one of the album’s core themes as Settle Down, Dissolved, and Change My Mind skewer the preordained roles forced on women by social convention, before turning to the cultural polarisation and hollowing out inflicted on us all by technology on Scam and Just Like Me.  This is an album that eschews grand statements in favour of a subtle, enticing finesse, and it is all the more hypnotically persuasive for it.