19 Thoughts on Sorry's 925
- For the rest of our lives, we’re all going to remember the last few social obligations we bowed out of (that is, if we were smart enough to) right before the pandemic really kicked into high gear. For me, it was Sorry’s first U.S. show(?) at Brooklyn’s oft-derided but still fine Union Pool venue. (Cursed bar, yes—but they had good shows sometimes! They booked Cass McCombs a year or two ago, I think.)
- I decided not to go when it seemed like COVID-19 was going to be a real big thing, even though people I knew at Sorry’s label Domino were imploring me to come and even get some drinks at a nearby bar beforehand. As a friend texted me about how good the show was, the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks announced that he had COVID-19—and at that point, I had no regrets.
- Just so I’m not painting myself as some pandemic Cassandra here: a decent part of why it was so easy for me to walk away from going to the show was because I wasn’t quite into Sorry’s music at the time. I’d spun “Right Round the Clock” and couldn’t quite get what Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen were doing on it, but it sounded intriguing regardless, so I got a list spot. Also, I figured I’d see a few people I knew that I hadn’t seen in a minute, so why not? Ah. Oh well.
- Subscribe now
- Sorry’s debut album, 925, has become one of those albums that I find myself reaching for almost subconsciously. It’s one of the most fascinating and stylish albums of the year so far, and certainly one of the best. I can’t remember the last time an indie band put out a debut so approachably cryptic—the type of record where you find yourself wondering whether, while you’re enjoying this music, the band is just out of frame laughing at you because you’re not in on the joke.
- I feel like more people should be talking about this band! This is the type of band we used to talk about and occasionally argue over, right? The type of clearly buzzy group that, circa 2009-2014-ish, at least 85% of your feed and people who worked in music writing would at least feel required to have an opinion on? Remember when that was more of a regular thing?
- This is something I plan on going into greater detail about in my continuing series of essays on 2013, but right around that 2014-ish time the general nature of music criticism discourse shifted away from arguing the merits of buzz bands like Sorry and more towards weeks-long opinion-fomenting around big tentpole pop albums. There’s only so much oxygen to breathe, and over the last six years the sheer notion of divisive indie acts has been more or less gasping for air.
- If I were to take a real stab in the dark about who the last new-ish indie-sounding act to garner a moderately healthy both-sides argument on the timeline, it’d probably be the 1975 (here he goes again).
- But the conversation around that band only gathered real steam around 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, well after such conversation lost all potential effect. The 1975 were already massively popular at that point, with no real use for discourse to drive their careers in any meaningful direction (although their frontman Matty Healy is certainly and keenly aware of the press he receives). No one really started arguing about the band until they were too big to fail, which is perhaps the story of music writing over the second half of the 2010s in general.
- Hey, remember when the 1975 released a (very good and quite possibly their best to date) album this year? It does feel like new music’s time spent on the carousel of critical discourse is shorter than ever, and it’s not just because of shortening attention spans and the ever-encroaching plague of celebrity worship (both otherwise worthy areas of blame). In the pandemic age (and, let’s be clear, we’re going to be living “like this” for a long time), more new music is getting memory-holed than ever shortly after release.
- This is a boon for some, arguably: both artists big and not-quite-big-but-not-quite-small (I’m looking at you, Childish Gambino and Car Seat Headrest) put out projects this year that, in any other year, would’ve bricked due to their quality not quite matching the anticipation surrounding them. Now? Well, I bet you didn’t even remember either artist put out an album this year until I just mentioned it.
- I’ve spent so much time here talking about buzz and the ways in which interest is marketed and generated—both intentionally and organically—around new music because, musically, Sorry remind me of the type of band that would’ve received splashy in-book up-and-comer profiles in music magazines in 2002. They would’ve been on heavy rotation on MTV2 as well—just like fellow Brits Clinic, whose menacing and obtuse take on garage rock are a distant antecedent to Sorry’s more cleaned-up aesthetic.
- This is all to say that Sorry seem very “cool” to me in a way that feels more natural rather than explicitly focus-tested. (If that makes me sound like a rube, so be it. People still like magicians, too.)
- They’re also schoolmates, just like the xx were. While trying to describe Sorry’s not-always-easy-to-describe sound to a friend, I tried out “The xx, if they knew how to laugh in public,” less a slag against the xx and more underlining that Sorry have a sense of humor tucked away in their slippery lyrics.
- Sorry also have a very threatening air, to me—playfully threatening, like a child singing a nursery rhyme while holding a knife behind their back, but threatening nonetheless. They love a minor key, and Lorenz’s dead-eyed affectation of a singing voice carries some serious undercurrents of dread. But, again, there’s humor in all of this—like on “In Unison,” where she sings, “One day we’re here, one day we—” before getting cut off by what sounds like a life support machine flatlining. Effective!
- The song that really made Sorry click for me was “Starstruck,” which sounds like something that could’ve leapt off rock radio right around the end of the 1990s (Elastica, maybe). Throughout 925, Sorry essentially work in two modes even at their hardest-to-pin-down: shadowy, serpentine dark pop, and here’s-a-guitar-or-two rock music done their way. “Starstruck” is in the latter category, and that they’re able to craft something so immediately appealing while practically needing a decoder ring to understand them elsewhere is indicative of how talented these two really are.
- I hear some classic indie-pop touchstones throughout this album—specifically of the Scottish variety, from Arab Strap’s horny miserabilia to Belle and Sebastian’s gloomier moments. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t hear classic indie-pop stylings as much as I used to, but as ever it has to do with what we look for and what we miss. Slumberland’s still putting out records, after all.
- One thing that I really love about Sorry is that they make songs that might sound boring at first, until they twist one little melody or turn of phrase. You can hear them do this in real time on “Snakes,” which plods and churns ominously until just over two minutes in, when gravity disappears and Lorenz’s bored libidinousness is accompanied by a gentle guitar line: “I never thought about you in your underwear/ 'Cause I didn't really care what was under there.”
- On the whole, mostly great lyrics from these guys, even when they risk getting a little too on-the-nose referential. They clearly have ideas about what their music should say and sound like—and if that sounds like a low bar to clear, well (gestures at “indie music” from the last decade at large).
- I’m always “very excited” to hear what a band or artist does next after they do something I love, and that certainly applies to Sorry. But what are they going to do next? (I’m not asking that in a pandemic way.) 925 sounds like the kind of debut that presents three pathways: make a dense and ambitious follow-up a la King Krule’s The Ooz, change the band’s name and do something completely different, or disappear for, like, six years before re-emerging on a boutique label without much warning mid-2020s. Maybe they’ll do all three—that’s just how unpredictable their music scans as to me, and it keeps me coming back, too.