FOLLOWING THE announcement of their sophomore album, it quickly became apparent that Brighton, England dream-pop trio Fear of Men was heading in an exciting new direction.
Last month the band released Fall Forever, the follow-up to their glorious 2014 debut, Loom. The new album’s first single, “Island,” is an icy entanglement of incandescent guitars, pulsing rhythms, and the plainspoken defiance of guitarist and vocalist Jessica Weiss, who sings, “I don’t need to feel your arms around me/I’m like an island without a shore/Used to be scared, to be misunderstood/Now I don’t care if I’m not what you want.”
Weiss is no longer scared. On Fall Forever, she has largely left behind the allegories and allusions of Loom in favor of… well, in the spirit of the album, she should explain:
“I just wanted to kind of open up a bit more and write more in my own words,” Weiss says. “Some of the things that I wrote on Loom are quite referential and playing around with other people’s texts and hiding behind layers of metaphors. So this was a move toward just trying to set my own tone and a way to express things that I was going through.”