Model/Actriz Twist and Twirl on Pirouette
Paste Pick: The Brooklyn band’s second album expels some of its predecessor’s obliqueness—both musically and lyrically—in favor of perverted pop hooks, haunted club sensibilities, and more straightforward, confessional storytelling.
A Model/Actriz track often sounds like a music hardened to bone, stripped of the fleshy scaffolding that might otherwise hold up its form. Lushness exits the vocabulary; in its place go breakneck, atonal anti-hooks, three-syllable diatribes, and hammering guitar riffs that direct each pluck into tight, percussive detonations. On their sawtoothed and dissonant 2023 debut Dogsbody, the Brooklyn four-piece had little patience for the lazy strum or indolent wail. Vocalist Cole Haden rarely so much as sang, but gurgled and snarled with swagger, poise, and metaphors so rich even one bite felt dangerous. Everything was a drum, and so everything was hammered.
Haden described the process of making Dogsbody as something of an exorcism, banishing the wraiths of his self-flagellation and allowing for something tender to emerge between the walls of distortion and cuspid clangor. Its successor, Pirouette, doesn’t forsake the band’s intensity, but it has expelled some of the obliqueness—both musically and lyrically—in favor of perverted pop hooks, haunted club sensibilities, and more straightforward, confessional storytelling. It remains blisteringly intense, insofar as intensity is a game of restraint—of knowing exactly when to pull back into a whisper, exactly when to let the floor drop out from under you.
Though Pirouette’s opening track “Vespers” barrels in with that typical Model/Actriz skeleton of a riff (albeit, brighter than you’d remember Dogsbody, though not all that dissimilar from the staccato pulse that opened the last record on “Donkey Show,”) there’s immediately something twinklier here. From the way Haden yanks his voice up into a falsetto for the song’s hook—a repeated “In all the lights, it’s you, you, you”—to just how abjectly groovy it gets when Aaron Shapiro drones his bass across the track’s syncopated drum and guitar spine, there are still moments of dissonance: By the end, Ruben Radlauer’s drums are so compressed that they glitch out violently. Rather than linger in the more abrasive moments though, the band pulls it back for the last 30 seconds, making way for Haden to lay down a gentle vocal melody, over chimes as elegant as they are spectral.
Model/Actriz isn’t a dance punk outfit—certainly not in the LCD Soundsystem or Radio-4 sense—but they are a band composed of four hardcore kids-turned-prima donnas with a rococo infatuation for techno trouncing and tight pop hooks, citing Burial and Floating Points as inspirations for Pirouette as much as Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga. It’s in their approach to tension—and its release—that they draw most ardently from the conventions of either genre. On standout single, “Doves,” they build the pre-chorus over a careening drone with Jack Wetmore’s skeletal riffs and Radlauer’s analog clanging hi-hats, as if some twisted drum machine had programmed them with only one command: intensify. It’s a siren song, and every queer kid on the dance floor is lured in, ready for the break to come, waiting to thrash their sweat-soaked and wanting bodies against each other. But the track diverts instead, at exactly the one-minute mark, allowing the percussion, drone, and distortion to leave abruptly and totally. Instead of a collapse, there’s a melodic guitar splashing with Haden’s cheeky falsetto. He vocalizes over and again, “Waiting, waiting.”