If there’s one thing Liars have taught listeners since their
2001 debut, it’s that they’re not to be trusted. So how should one take
it when Angus Andrew frantically howls the line “I want to run away”
over and over at the beginning of the band’s new self-titled album? Is
it a straight-faced admission to Liars’ refusal to stay in a single
place for very long—or just another half-truth?
Yes, the band that traded Brooklyn for Berlin has made a career of
re-imagining itself with every release. But while their albums have
explored different sounds, they’ve all shared the same manic
sensibility. Namely, they buzz with a crazed and haphazard energy. Like
mischievous children, Liars delight in their creations as much as in
demolishing them. But according to guitarist and founding member Aaron
Hemphill, what sounds like so many calculated reversals
is—honestly—”not that intentional.”
“I guess it seems so drastic because, as a listener, you only get
the album,” he explains. “You don’t talk to us in between. But a lot of
time passes between albums and there’s a lot of natural growth.”
Still, that evolution has included some conspicuous leaps. On their
debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on
Top, gnarled bass grooves and ESG-copped beats elbowed to the front
of an utterly frenzied, cut-and-paste stab at post-punk. When bassist
Pat Nature and drummer Ron Albertson left to form No Things, Liars
released a concept album about the Salem witch trials, in which songs
alternated between the perspectives of the terrified villagers and the
persecuted witches. It preserved the debut’s noisy experimentation, but
the absence of its on-a-dime rhythm section alienated many listeners.
Last year’s Drum’s Not Dead largely ditched guitars for a suite
of compositions that were moody, textural, and, unsurprisingly, driven
by percussion. But Liars’ self-titled fourth album follows the least
expected path yet, imposing the band’s anarchist sensibility on more
conventional pop structures.
“It seemed like a challenge we hadn’t really faced yet,” says
Hemphill. “To take all the experiments we apply to different
instruments and apply it to vocal choruses. I think for us it was a lot
more experimental to make than, for example, a bass guitar-based
album.”
For the new album, the band condensed all of the writing and
recording into the span of a few months, and Liars bristles with
that sense of frenetic urgency and ungrounded electricity. All
pummeling drums and nimble, treble-heavy guitar leads, opener “Plaster
Casts of Every-
thing” is sonic whiplash, while the melodically
direct “Freak Out” worships at the altar of the Jesus and Mary Chain.
With its nursery rhyme lyrics and neck-snapping dynamics, “Clear
Island” is party music for zombies (in the best possible way). In part,
this revitalized interest in the concision and immediacy of pop
structures came from listening to bands Liars loved as teenagers, from
the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees to Led Zeppelin.
“We noticed that there are some albums that you never get tired of,
that have affected us since we were young,” Hemphill explains. “[That
inspiration is] less about those bands’ approaches and what they did
structurally than about how they affected us emotionally. We thought
that would be a nice thing to meditate on and, hopefully, something
that would come out in our record.” n