ALBUM REVIEW: The Mysterines – ‘Afraid Of Tomorrows’

This is the voice of The Mysterines; we know you can hear them, Earthmen.

Or you will, at any rate. If the conceited push that’s only become heftier as of late is an indication, then The Mysterines are pretty serious about getting out there. And for a band who so easily could’ve been a patch sewn into the sprawling indie tapestry and left to subsequently collect dust, it’s encouraging that they’ve found their hook. For some of the darker, slinkier impulses hinted on 2022’s Reeling, the package ended up a bit too plain to fully support that vision.

Afraid Of Tomorrows, then, isn’t precisely a ground-up reworking, but it might as well be. Following Reeling’s indifference towards some of the trendier aspects of its environment (which might’ve been the most consistently agreeable thing about it), the starkness has been upped again on the follow-up. Gone is the majority of ‘standard’ indie DNA, now replaced by dusty, ramshackle notes of PJ Harvey and Queens Of The Stone Age, and the notion that The Mysterines are leveraging the built-in evaluation of cool for all it’s worth. When that’s the gimme they’ve always sought out, having it come to fruition feels like a real corner has been turned.

Of course, there’s a difference between brandishing that as a skin and feeling the ramifications of it more deeply, and Afraid Of Tomorrows might split some people on whether it not it achieves the latter. And you can empathise with that, likely even from deep in the camp that’s all for this. It’s one of those albums in which its darkness is deliberately set up to be creaking and skeletal, and particularly embracing of certain post-punk standpoints of not needing a hook. Singles Stray and Sink Ya Teeth might say otherwise, but they’re a clear minority, practically in every way. They’re immediate in ways the rest of the album is demonstrably not, with a stickiness that just isn’t possible on the matte coating elsewhere. It goes without saying, then, that Afraid Of Tomorrows is a textbook slow-burn.

Naturally it takes a while to gel, maybe even more so than average. There’s no mistaking this for The Mysterines’ big, broad mainstream play, not when, by any normal parameters of what that entails, this would be completely incompatible. Though don’t get it wrong—that’s not a criticism. It’s great to see The Mysterines developing into something like this, where they can skulk through some of the shadowier roots of this sound. They’ve got interesting ways of going about it, too, like the baleful acoustic melancholy of Hawkmoon or the blown-out edges of production on Junkyard Angel. What’s more, this isn’t the sexy kind of darkness bands like this tend to fall back into; it’s ragged and unclean in obvious ways. Even when Lia Metcalfe’s vocals are teased out, they’re still designed to be throaty and hardened rather than explicitly inviting.

On an album about falling to fear and paranoia, the unfriendliness of Afraid Of Tomorrows is certainly apt. Production-wise, John Congleton pulls from the sparser, bleaker entries on his CV—you’ll find work with Phoebe Bridgers and Chelsea Wolfe highlighted specifically—in the sense that The Mysterines are evidently looking for that more spellbinding approach. Skirting past codified representations of ‘darkness’ is a clear choice; where they could slap an eerie synth on and call it a day, the commitment to something fractured, or even wholly broken down, shows a creativity that shouldn’t be brushed aside. Although The Mysterines never totally fit the ‘indie darlings’ tag, they were probably close enough to where you wouldn’t this so soon.

It’s almost like that path of their tour-mates from earlier this year Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, albeit in an expedited, truncated form. There are sonic and thematic parallels to Dark Rainbow that The Mysterines are already pleasantly equipped to handle, even if that album does have the benefit of a more extensive throughline to shore up its decisions. Afraid Of Tomorrows suffers from that a little, but never where it counts. It’s not a less bewitching album for it, and rightfully so when the newfound sources of insidiousness sown are such an obvious jump forward from where The Mysterines were. More to the point, it’s the kind of album that makes paying undivided attention much more likely, and much more worthwhile.

For fans of: PJ Harvey, Queens Of The Stone Age, Garbage

‘Afraid Of Tomorrows’ by The Mysterines is released on 21st June on Fiction Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall