When you’re an adolescent, your world doesn’t extend far beyond your school or your neighborhood. On her 2015 debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream, the Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson—aka SOAK—provided an unflinching portrait of what it felt like to be trapped inside such a confining space. Written while she was still in her teens, the album bristled with equal parts restlessness and resignation, communicating both the desire to break free of one’s humdrum surroundings and the soul-crushing difficulty of actually attempting do it. “Come on, come on, be just like me,” she sang, a lost soul desperately trying to attract kindred spirits into her own special club. Then she laid out the membership requirements: “Come on, come on, be a nobody.”
If Before We Forgot How to Dream was the direct product of SOAK’s experience growing up gay in the Catholic stronghold of Derry, its indie-folk outcast anthems proved highly relatable to a lot of other nobodies out there: The album made her one of the youngest-ever nominees for the UK’s Mercury Prize. The SOAK we hear on her second album is different; now in her 20s and based in Manchester, she’s at a physical and psychic remove from the dark days that inspired her debut album, and there’s a greater sense of levity and adventurousness to her songcraft. But even if she’s managed to escape her own prison, she’s continuing the rescue mission for those still trapped in theirs.
As Monds-Watson revealed in a recent interview, Grim Town is a cheeky phrase she and her friends use to describe something that’s “a bit shit.” Bringing an inside joke to the outside world, SOAK imagines Grim Town as an actual place where hopes and dreams go to die, complete with its own railway service delivering daily trainloads of society’s rejects. The album opens with a cinematic vignette where a conductor delivers a stern platform announcement: “Please note this train is for the following categories of passenger only—recipients of universal credit or minimum wage, the lonely, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the lost, the grieving. Those who are unmedicated and who have salaries or pension plans should vacate the carriage immediately.” It’s the sort of declaration that, when set to a funereal organ drone, conjures public transportation's history as a vehicle of segregation and much worse—that is, until you hear the cabin full of ne’er-do-wells in the background, affably chatting away and cracking cold ones open in anticipation of the ride ahead. It’s SOAK’s way of saying: These are my people—let’s roll.
Following that scene-setting intro, Grim Town swiftly drops any explicit pretense of being a concept album. But its overall structure is not unlike a railway trip, with 14 discrete tracks that each chronicle different scenarios yet feel emotionally of a piece, like individual stations on the same line. SOAK has graduated from lonesome singer-songwriter to wide-eyed art-pop auteur, and her growing confidence is palpable from the get-go: The elegantly aching, cocktail-shaken shuffle of “Get Set Go Kid” suddenly shifts gears into an urgent percussive coda topped with a squealing sax solo, while “Everybody Loves You” begins as grayscale post-Portishead trip-pop before swerving into arm-swaying “Hey Jude” territory. But rather than smoothe over the blunt quality of SOAK’s writing, Grim Town’s widescreen sound amplifies it. “Maybe it’s all in my brain/People don’t look at me the same,” she sings on “Knock Me Off My Feet,” elevating the song’s wistful, “In Between Days”-styled shimmer from retro window dressing into pure dancefloor escapism.
SOAK’s confidence can also be measured by her willingness to rip off the bandage and poke at her deepest wounds. In Grim Town’s more delicate turns, she homes in with microscopic clarity on details like the panic attacks that followed her parents’ divorce (“Fall Asleep, Backseat”) or the crippling, post-breakup bawling fits spent curled up on the bed, “pushing your face out to the fabric” (“Crying Your Eyes Out,” which, along with “Valentine Schmalentine,” is one of two songs here that depict the purchase of cheap supermarket flowers as the death knell for a floundering relationship). SOAK’s voice is at once an immediate and elusive instrument, variously recalling the outsized ardor of Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell, the peculiar interior dialogues of Lorde, and old-school Dylanesque grit. She takes particular delight in heightening the tension between medium and message: “Deja Vu” emerges from a synth-pop fog with an ominous opening line (“I haven’t seen you for months/I’ve been waiting up on a call/For a stranger’s voice to ask if I’m sitting down”) and only gets bleaker from there, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, thanks to its ebullient, sun-kissed chorus.
In light of its opening train-ride motif, Grim Town winds up being almost too faithful to the travel experience, in that the excitement you feel at the start of a trip inevitably gives way to a certain fatigue. The album’s back half settles into a predictable pattern of alternating between upbeat, 1980s-slicked indie pop and desolate, dark-night-of-the-soul piano ballads, without the surprise change-ups that animate Grim Town’s standout tracks. But with the waltzing closer “Nothing Looks the Same,” SOAK arrives at her desired destination, delivering not so much a grand finale as a sigh of relief. “I don’t wish I was somewhere else all the time,” she reveals, which is as close to a declaration of peace and happiness as she can likely muster. SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.
