Modern Woman are the next great voice of art-rock on Johnny’s Dreamworld

There are, in some schools, two ways to build a world on the page: start from the big picture—the “point,” if you will—and pour the details in accordingly. Sophie Harris, it seems, takes the opposite tack. She paints a picture from the ground up, allowing the details themselves to make up a scene and determine its outcome. Her eye unerringly zeroes in on the minutia that makes up a life: the “white bits stuck to the rim” of a box urn, the silent judgment of a Virgin Mary statue sat atop the dashboard. We’re introduced to a lover by hearing that “his father said he was born foot first,” to a dead childhood friend by their afterschool hobby of pushing girls down Dovedale street. But on Harris’s tongue, these routine particulars take on spiritual force.

If you hear her voice, you’ll immediately understand why. When Harris sings, you can feel it in your ribs. I’d say it’s near impossible to come out the other side of Modern Woman’s debut LP, Johnny’s Dreamworld, without feeling certain you’ve stumbled upon the next great voice of art-rock. Her vocals are the axis the rest of the London outfit orbits around, flipping on a dime between wispy falsetto and guttural screams, operatic vibrato and cheeky yelps, often multiple times in a single line. She’s Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Björk, Kate Bush, and Florence Welch all at once, her voice capable of sustaining an entire album on its own. But the rest of the band—violin and keys from David Denyer, bass and sax from Juan Brint-Gutiérrez, and drums from Adam Blackhurst—refuses to simply sit back and let Harris carry the music alone. Instead, they pull on her voice like taffy, stretching it across theatrical post-punk and avant-garde experimentation until it nearly breaks under the strain.

Album standout “Dashboard Mary” remains one of my favorite songs out this year, a distinction it claimed the moment it arrived in January. It is, simply put, a perfectly structured track: a ballad that builds, slowly but surely, into pained walls of noise, taking the song’s already evocative lyrics and making them tangible, somatic. Harris’s voice moves like a sprung trap: coiled and waiting, capable of sudden force, brutal when it snaps. She chronicles an affair between, seemingly, a grad student and her professor by focusing on the awkward drive to a diner the morning after, rendering it all with a novelist’s eye for detail and restraint: “She thought that he was regretting, cos his hands on the wheel were blue / If her boy at home had woken and if the Dashboard Mary knew.” The instrumentation glides between hush and abrasion as violin, saxophone, and a rhythm section pull against one another—at least until the stark, heartbreaking passage before the song’s final stretch of riotous distortion. 

Like “Dashboard Mary,” much of the record revolves around the disquiet of unequal footing—a feeling that all modern women, so to speak, are all too familiar with. It’s a hierarchy built on dichotomies (strong/weak, head/heart, mind/body), with “man” always assigned the favorable half. Johnny’s Dreamworld reckons with this throughout. Naturally, the title track occupies the liminal space between dreams and reality, its speaker trapped there until the male object of her affection allows her into his fantasies as little more than a manic pixie dream girl. Driven by a taut bassline and winking cymbals, “Offerings” leans into the lurid fantasies of female desire, even as they’re hobbled by the dynamic at hand: “My gift is only a gaze / So he gifts me in sections / Gives me his fingers, torso, knees.” The slow, piano-led closer “The Garden” makes the distinction between the pull of lust and a spiritual calling that’s impossible to parse: is this Joan of Arc hearing angels in her backyard, or is it Juliet mistaking Romeo’s voice for something holy? “Fork/Heart” begins eerie and sparse, Harris detailing the way objects take on lives and charges of their own but become unsafe by their proximity to power and masculinity. And “Killing a Dog” opens with acoustic finger-picking before erupting into distortion as Harris sings of blood, viscera, and a murder she never thought, “as a girl,” she’d commit.

Memory, its fallibility, and its relationship to mortality and grief take centerstage elsewhere on Johnny’s Dreamworld. Three of its most lyrically affecting tracks—“Blessed Day,” “Neptune Girl,” and “Daniel”—turn to the past to make sense of an unhappy present. The biting “Blessed Day” adopts the perspective of a father socially exiled for their son’s unnamed crime—à la We Need to Talk About Kevin—and wonders when the boy they remember “lakeside / on a faded Kodak” became someone cruel and unrecognizable. “Neptune Girl” remembers a late childhood friend by sewing past and present together: the shame of childhood punishment and the survivor’s guilt of outliving somebody who evaded it. And “Daniel,” a keening track colored by mournful violin and Buffy Sainte-Marie adjacent vocals, narrates an ash-scattering at a river interrupted by the incorrigible spirit of false hope: “But I saw Daniel swimming from the rocks,” Harris sings. “And I thought then / That I could raise the dead.”

It’s easy to forget that Johnny’s Dreamworld is a debut, given how self-assured and fully formed it feels. Usually you can hear a first album searching: for a sound, for an identity, for the courage of its own convictions. There’s none of that audible groping here, at least not inward toward self-definition. The searching on Johnny’s Dreamworld points outward instead—rifling through the world’s mundane debris for a way to make the whole thing cohere. That the scraps never quite assemble into an answer is precisely the point. Harris and company aren’t interested in tidy meaning so much as the act of sifting itself, holding each fragment up to the light to see what it confesses. [One Little Independent]

Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

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