With their second full length album the Liverpool trio – who initially draw from Norway (frontwoman Guro Gilking), Brazil (guitarist Luis Santos) and Ireland (drummer Richard O’Flynn) – are trying to grow up. By flipping their sometimes stereotypical indie pastiche into something more contentious and sinister All We Are try to make something more reflective of the darker political times we’re engaging with. Released on the day of the UK election, you can’t help but feel slightly wary about the uncanny coincidence.

The album cover depicts an American woman’s home dwarfed beneath the looming shadows of neighbouring high-rise buildings – this woman fought off investors, including a certain Donald Trump, to keep her home. This gives you a glimpse into the trio’s attitude and vision behind the music, this is music that shatters their previous indie-pop croon by attempting to pinpoint something more cathartic and vibrant, whether it works properly is up for debate though.

Their spell of anger erupts from the off with opener ‘Burn It All Out’ – a song that catapults around the musical cannon sounding either exceptionally diverse or bafflingly confused. Jarring synths collide into a wall of sound, with guitars mucking together a musical soup that strolls between the fantastic and the downright head scratching. Half falling into chaotic 80s synths whilst trying to string together riffs as big as those by the likes of Royal Blood and Wolfmother does nothing for cohesion and even less for your ability to process.

This musical confusion though operates not just in song structure but also in the overall dialogue of the album. Next track ‘Human’ feels slightly more concise as a track, more focused and confident in how it should sound but, unfortunately, it feels slightly drifting from the former track, bearing little connection to it. The lyrics often flounder too, asking too many questions in this instance doesn’t emphasise the message but instead becomes horrendously irritating, especially when they are loosely tied together through primary school rhyming patterns:

“What's truth, what lies?
What lies beneath what cries?
Are you human?
Are you human because your day is more dry?”

It feels somewhat apparent that All We Are’s attempt to make a boisterous political statement with Sunny Hills has lead to an album packed with lots of half-baked ideas which are then stitched together to form a fabric of little political or sociological comment.

Where it succeeds is with the funk-dance rhythms of the likes of ‘Dance’ and ‘Waiting’ that rely less on Guro’s howling vocals and Luis’ shattering guitar sounds but instead within the playing of rhythm sections. Keeping things to a more streamlined sound finds their music moving in time to the likes of Pumarosa and Wild Beasts. The likes of ‘Youth’, with its cacophonies of ringing guitar and melancholia and ‘Dreamer’ with its stripped back, barren sound carry a much more fervent message. The land of dystopia that All We Are seem to be aiming for exists within the empty pockets of verses – it is not something that is created through layers of battering guitar and synth.

The album’s standout track however lurks right at the end with its climax, ‘Punch’ – a song that embraces the best of sparsity and leaves Guro’s voice often in isolation. Off-kilter guitar morphs throughout the track, drawing shapes with jagged sounds whilst jousting with light keyboard textures. This song ultimately tells a better tale of dystopia than the confusion that plagues the rest of the album. Unfortunately the song doesn’t feel at all well-placed on the album, instead resembling a sound completely away from the rest of Sunny Hills.

This story of ‘Punch’ ultimately tells the tale of a slightly misguided second album though. Many of the ideas on the album are not necessarily bad, they just don’t feel fully formed, but then the album itself doesn’t quite feel fully formed either. It certainly feels like a maturer sound that the band are aiming for with a succinct concept behind it but, unfortunately, when making such grand statements at this time of political intensity, your ideas need to be fully formed and here they are not.
Tom Churchill

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