The Talkies

The album's repetitive & experimental sound is characterized by its unorthodox use of effects-laden guitars, abstract stream of consciousness lyrics & stylistic elements from techno & industrial music.

[7] After the release of their debut album Holding Hands With Jamie in 2015, the band were forced to cancel several of their shows due to lead singer Dara Kiely's worsening mental health (which he had discussed in numerous interviews at the time[8]).

[9] The album was recorded in Ballintubbert House: a mansion on the outskirts of Dublin that Fox had gotten a hold of through connections he'd made via his sound engineering & studio work.

[10] Inspired by Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, the band decided upon using a repetitive motif throughout the album & recording everything in the key of A to lend it a sense of cohesiveness in comparison to their debut.

[9] The sessions also involved a lot of experimentation: the Twin Peaks-inspired track "Aibohphobia" (the title term refers to a fear of palindromes), for example, features "guitar riffs recorded backwards and layered on top of each other as Kiely recites a list of palindromes", while the "unsettling" opening track "Prolix" features his heavy breathing from a "semi-panic attack thing"[8] as caught on record during an early rehearsal.

The band also admitted that much of the album wasn't written by all of the members together, and that instead they "were more into demoing and writing down parts then cutting them up, collaging them together in the computer and reconfiguring them that way.”[10] Kiely, taking inspiration from Leonard Cohen, wrote lyrics from fragments of different songs he'd recorded on "a little organ".

Bassist Daniel Fox deals exclusively in gut-rumbling frequencies, while drummer Adam Faulkner avoids the snare like it might be rigged with electric shocks.

"[8] According to AllMusic, the band incorporates elements of techno music more directly (in comparison to their past work) on tracks such as "Akineton" & "Prefab Castle" (the album's "tumultuous seven-minute climax"[11]), the latter of which features an outro that has been compared to Jon Hopkins.

"Shoulderblades", the first one, was accompanied by a video (directed by Bob Gallagher) featuring dancer Oona Doherty "interpret[ing the song] into erratic body movements as the frames switch from blue to red, and back again.

"Shoulderblades" has a gradual descent into an earth-shattering experimental breakdown, not unlike something you'd hear from Death Grips, but the immensity and impressiveness of its industrial buildup puts that of the following track, "Couch Combover," to comparative shame.

Drawing on a sojourn in a creepy house in County Laois and recorded in the shadow of singer Dara Kiely’s mental health experiences it is spellbindingly baroque - a brutal, mesmerising tour de force".