A Model/Actriz track often sounds like a music hardened to bone, stripped of the fleshy scaffolding that might otherwise hold up its form. Lushness exits the vocabulary; in its place go breakneck, atonal anti-hooks, three-syllable diatribes, and hammering guitar riffs that direct each pluck into tight, percussive detonations. On their sawtoothed and dissonant 2023 debut Dogsbody, the Brooklyn four-piece had little patience for the lazy strum or indolent wail. Vocalist Cole Haden rarely so much as sang, but gurgled and snarled with swagger, poise, and metaphors so rich even one bite felt dangerous. Everything was a drum, and so everything was hammered.
Haden described the process of making Dogsbody as something of an exorcism, banishing the wraiths of his self-flagellation and allowing for something tender to emerge between the walls of distortion and cuspid clangor. Its successor, Pirouette, doesn’t forsake the band’s intensity, but it has expelled some of the obliqueness—both musically and lyrically—in favor of perverted pop hooks, haunted club sensibilities, and more straightforward, confessional storytelling. It remains blisteringly intense, insofar as intensity is a game of restraint—of knowing exactly when to pull back into a whisper, exactly when to let the floor drop out from under you.
Though Pirouette’s opening track “Vespers” barrels in with that typical Model/Actriz skeleton of a riff (albeit, brighter than you’d remember Dogsbody, though not all that dissimilar from the staccato pulse that opened the last record on “Donkey Show,”) there’s immediately something twinklier here. From the way Haden yanks his voice up into a falsetto for the song’s hook—a repeated “In all the lights, it’s you, you, you”—to just how abjectly groovy it gets when Aaron Shapiro drones his bass across the track’s syncopated drum and guitar spine, there are still moments of dissonance: By the end, Ruben Radlauer’s drums are so compressed that they glitch out violently. Rather than linger in the more abrasive moments though, the band pulls it back for the last 30 seconds, making way for Haden to lay down a gentle vocal melody, over chimes as elegant as they are spectral.
Model/Actriz isn’t a dance punk outfit—certainly not in the LCD Soundsystem or Radio-4 sense—but they are a band composed of four hardcore kids-turned-prima donnas with a rococo infatuation for techno trouncing and tight pop hooks, citing Burial and Floating Points as inspirations for Pirouette as much as Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga. It’s in their approach to tension—and its release—that they draw most ardently from the conventions of either genre. On standout single, “Doves,” they build the pre-chorus over a careening drone with Jack Wetmore’s skeletal riffs and Radlauer’s analog clanging hi-hats, as if some twisted drum machine had programmed them with only one command: intensify. It’s a siren song, and every queer kid on the dance floor is lured in, ready for the break to come, waiting to thrash their sweat-soaked and wanting bodies against each other. But the track diverts instead, at exactly the one-minute mark, allowing the percussion, drone, and distortion to leave abruptly and totally. Instead of a collapse, there’s a melodic guitar splashing with Haden’s cheeky falsetto. He vocalizes over and again, “Waiting, waiting.”
The comedown is, for all intents and purposes, the beat-drop here, and Model/Actriz is hellbent on affording us neither, all the while still making it impossible to escape their grooves. In other words: they’re edging us, building the tension and pulling it back before climax. They’ve got one foot in the door of the no-wave scene, one hand still teasing the lever on the industrial sound machine, and their playing is meticulous and oh-so-tight. The payoff of their restraint is, well, waiting, waiting—and as we wait, we continue to want. This is the push-and-pull formula for desire that Pirouette prescribes. Take the minimal, industrial, and endlessly danceable “Departures”: Haden calls upon us first with a directive: “Be embodied.” 40 seconds later, he’s posing it as a question: “Can I be the one to be embodied?” He deadpans, “I slide into my skirt,” and the until-then blunt, oppressively pulsing percussion and bassline devolve into a crash, only to literally slide across the surface of the song. The strings diminish to a quiet creaking, pushing Haden’s voice into a croon: “Let me be your girl.”
It’s clear that Model/Actriz delight in contrasts, more evident than ever on tracks like the blown-out, electroclash-splattered “Poppy” (complete with a piercing, pop-diva high note from Haden) and the aptly-named “Diva,” where Haden croaks out “I’m such a fucking biiiiitch, girl, you don’t even know” over a The Fragile-pitched industrial wail. We hear the group having more fun than ever, twirling through both the heaviest (“Ring Road”’s two-minute, full-on onslaught of distortion) and gentlest moments (“Acid Rain”’s folksy tribute to hummingbirds and Haden’s grandmother) in their brief but muscular catalog.
It is this full-frontal display of versatility that allows Pirouette to obliterate the walls that gave a record like Dogsbody its impenetrable inaccessibility. As they diva-out in new and protean post-punk roles, Model/Actriz get closer, more hedonistic, homoerotic, and disgustingly tense. Haden stages unfettered confessions: On lead single “Cinderella,” he recalls abandoning his dream of hosting a Disney princess-themed fifth birthday party over whirring, ossified plucking from Wetmore; on the spoken-word interlude “Headlights,” he strips away the melodrama with a story about his first crush, a friend of a friend he’d yearn for at holiday parties and self-loathe in the absence of: “I hated most how I’d pray each night, asking God to make him see me in all the ways I couldn’t.”
As Pirouette comes to a close with perhaps its most straightforward track—the melodic, post-rock flavored “Baton”—not only have the roiling distortion and pounding grooves tamed into a lusher string arrangement, but Haden’s voice too has softened, thanks to producer Seth Manchester’s masterful placement of the melody at the foreground of the mix. As Haden runs, gracefully, across the middle of his register, the beat picks up slightly and starts to grind. It’s clear we aren’t just hearing a band come to some abstract consciousness on their sophomore effort. Rather, here is a group with so much command over their sound that they can unravel and retwist it at every angle on every track, or surrender with a campy, sludgy, and ever-twirling grace. It’s a perfect source.
Read: “Model/Actriz: Spectacles, Scars, and Survival”
Madelyn Dawson writes about music, books, and desire (among other things) from New York and New Haven. She can be found everywhere @madelyndwsn.
