Model/Actriz – Pirouette
Model/Actriz rarely opt for a scalpel when a sledgehammer will do. The band, formed in Boston and now based in New York, form magnificent and powerfully physical monuments of artfully sculpted noise and hypnotic rhythm. Theirs is music meant for dancing as an act of acrobatic contortion—sensual yet stormy, less a noise rock band in the Amphetamine Reptile sense of the word than in the lineage from Liars to Fuck Buttons to Gilla Band. Yet even at their most unabashedly libidinous, as on “Mosquito,” the standout from their 2023 debut Dogsbody, they package pleasure and desire into jackhammer intensity.
Pirouette, the group’s sophomore album, sheds little of their prickly exoskeleton or armory of abrasion, even as the group cites inspiration from the likes of Grace Jones and Lady Gaga (who was also name-checked on one song on the band’s debut). But amid the sturm und drang and thrum and clang are unguarded moments like the one that arises toward the end of first single “Cinderella.” Though it arrives in brash fashion, vocalist Cole Haden offering a litany of hyperbolic declarations against its looping sequence of guitars that don’t sound like guitars (“Astonishing, utterly divine, exhilarating, preciously sublime”), it’s in the song’s bridge, after a three-minute arc of uncertainty and self-discovery, where he allows a little grace to shine through, offering the reassurance, “Just know I’ve cleared the way/Just know I won’t leave as I came.”
Moments of vulnerability aren’t absent from Model/Actriz’s previous album, but on Pirouette, they’re allowed to shine under their own spotlight rather than be subsumed beneath the din. Make no mistake, that din is as glorious as ever, but it works in concert with Haden’s confessions and character sketches rather than consistently as counterpoint, such as when his voice reaches gorgeously soaring heights in opener “Vespers,” proclaiming, “in the light it’s you” and asking, “Are you free enough to be a bitch, but graciously?” over a runway of prickly dancepunk throb. “Departures” comprises all sleek surfaces, a futuristic goth techno banger of sorts providing a darkly textured backdrop for Haden’s invocations to the gods: “Embody me, Osiris/Embody me, Persephone.”
Model/Actriz sharpen their sonic arsenal to perfection on Pirouette, arriving at the point where their penetrating and pummeling sounds carry a greater degree of elegance. Standout “Doves” translates razor-sharp textures and edges into one of the band’s most successful expressions of pop hooks, pristine but imposing and intimidating—and gorgeously intense. The aptly titled “Diva” draws as much of its palette from hip-hop as it does rock, its push and pull between distorted beat thumps and barbed-wire guitar squall maintaining a tense surface over which Haden provides a tour through series of sexual encounters (“I met a guy in Copenhagen/He was gay but had a girlfriend”). Meanwhile, all two minutes of “Ring Road” is an exercise in abrasive excess—a pinging, clanking beast, distorted to the point of being swallowed by its own sub-bass.
There is, however, a rare moment of musical tenderness on Pirouette in the form of “Acid Rain.” It’s the most surprising song of the bunch, identifiably a song of Model/Actriz’s own, but built of atypical elements such as clean-tone and acoustic guitars. “I’ve recognized the beauty in fragility, it’s true/But I feel like a stranger to it now,” Haden sings against a gentle, beautiful folk-funk strut. There’s less cognitive dissonance to his exposure here, or at least that would be the case for any other band, yet its own beauty is undeniable. In allowing themselves these acts of restraint and tenderness, Model/Actriz seem to make their moments of bombast reverberate even louder.
Label: True Panther
Year: 2025
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Model/Actriz : Pirouette
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