Body Type gave themselves a tough act to follow with their ultra-confident 2022 debut album, ‘Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising’. Delayed from its original 2020 release, that record proved equal parts intricate and exciting. That means ‘Expired Candy’ is the Sydney quartet’s actual lockdown record, penned remotely and often piecemeal during two years of border restrictions and related upheaval.
So one might perhaps expect a more scattershot second record from Body Type. But the band’s four members – guitarists Sophie McComish and Annabel Blackman, bassist Georgia Wilkinson-Derums and drummer Cecil Coleman – only sound more closely attuned this time around, sometimes even finishing each other’s songs like close friends completing each other’s sentences. Though mostly written by McComish, the resilience-themed opener ‘Holding On’ taps Wilkinson-Derums for the hook and for the lyrics of the first verse, while on ‘Tread Overhead’ Blackmans source a verse of lyrics from McComish.
Such intimate connections comprise a key theme on this album, especially since the four members were kept apart for so much of the writing process. While McComish wrote ‘Tread Overhead’ about having to live at her parents’ house again – and being able to hear every footstep upstairs – Wilkinson-Derums devotes ‘Sha La La’ to missing her bandmates from her childhood home during lockdown. Revisited locations frame several songs, with Blackman mourning the homogenised tourism in her seaside hometown on ‘Summer Forever’ and a particularly bleak strip mall nearby on ‘Albion Park’.
Musically, these songs are awash in hooks and harmonies, with more than one ending in a shouted group refrain. Whereas the first album edged closer to punk and post-punk, this one is cleaner, poppier and more aligned with classic indie rock. Pavement-esque guitars come up more often, and yet overall the band’s influences are more distilled this time around. Body Type sound like themselves here, speaking their own shared language of sidewinding melodies, spontaneous vocal pile-ups and thorny propulsion.
Again recorded with Party Dozen’s Jonathan Boulet, ‘Expired Candy’ benefits from a rapid-fire pace that only makes the pointed lyrical sentiments more talky and articulate. That’s suitable for the contradictory emotions fuelling certain songs: even the ones that directly tackle romance (‘Weekend’, ‘Anti-Romancer’, ‘Shake Yer Memory’) tend to offset their sincerity with knowing washes of cynicism and chagrin. McComish especially sharpens her pen on ‘Creation of Man’ – about the tiresome male domination of the arts – and ‘Miss the World’, a pandemic-inspired anthem that graduates from self-aware wordplay (“She’s a violent pre-teen anarchist/Your oxymoronic protagonist”) to mulling the unignorable evils of capitalism and misogyny.
The most satisfying moment might be ‘Dream Girls’, Blackman’s solidarity-minded origin story of the quartet. She describes sitting alone in her room starting to write songs, only for the other members of Body Type to gradually enter the picture so they could finish them together. It’s about the limits of what one can accomplish alone and the exponential possibilities of joining forces in creativity. Think of it as a thesis statement on Body Type, a band that brings out the best in each member.
