On their 2013 debut Weird Sister, Joanna Gruesome rubbed sugar up against sandpaper until both started to melt. Clean leads and light, melodic vocals trickled into oceans of fuzz under song titles like "Wussy Void" and "Anti-Parent Cowboy Killers". Two years later and they haven't evened out. Peanut Butter could have smoothed the Cardiff band's sound, finding the happy middle between their rough edges and sticky-sweet center. Instead, it pushes the group's music further out toward both extremes.
Weird Sister flung a few deliberate curveballs, like the "wrong" chords that rocked "Madison" off its equilibrium. Peanut Butter is a tornado full of curveballs. At a slight 22 minutes, it bursts and buzzes, locking into patterns and then exploding out of them once you think you've figured them out. Joanna Gruesome is still partial to melody—the pop syrup flows freely after a quick hardcore fake-out at the beginning of "Last Year"—but the hooks have lost their primacy inside the band's rough collage. The most interesting parts are now the serrated edges, the way textures brush up against textures, and how unstable the whole freewheeling machine can get.
On "Last Year" and the aggro-peppy "Honestly Do Yr Worst", singer Alanna McArdle snaps out of her light, breathy melodies to find a rhythmic kinship with Perfect Pussy's Meredith Graves. Those choking, biting yelps reveal exhausted phrases here and there, snippets of language like "I am running on empty." A song called "I Don't Wanna Relax" opens with 12 seconds of blast beats and dilapidated guitar chords. When guitarist and lead songwriter Owen Williams slashes "There Is No Function Stacy" sideways with noise-punk breakdowns, it's as if we're getting a glimpse of what exactly McArdle is trying to outrun.
Between the bright riffs and the squalls of feedback, a deep instability rests at Joanna Gruesome's core. There's more than just anger in their screams and the quick slams of the bass drum; there's a nervousness too, a sense that anything you could ever hold on to is always on the verge of slipping away. "I know that life would be alright if I hadn't met you," Williams and McArdle sing on "Separate Bedrooms", as if seeing into a parallel universe and preemptively trying to reconcile the loss. Even the sub-two-minute tracks, like "Jerome (Liar)", seem to argue with themselves, switching modes from "everything is fine" to "nothing will ever be okay again" in the blink of an eye.
Joanna Gruesome combust to keep the world from freezing shut around them. Peanut Butter is a chaotic listen, powerful in parts and fragile in others, and often both at the same time. No matter where it goes, it's always running away from itself.
