Pirouette

The year is 2025. You're at Studio 54. You've tried coming for weeks to no avail, but tonight, you're in. Crossing that red velvet rope is an almost religious experience, and now you're dancing with reckless abandon. The moon with the spoon glitters above the crowd as Willi Ninja teaches Mary Antoinette how to stop and turn. Rambo heads to the bathroom with Cinderella, who has once again lost her glass slipper. (She will find it later, remnants of Moet still caught in the toes.) Frankie Knuckles and Stravinsky chat polyrhythms while Donna Summer and Chaka Khan sit on a towering plinth, observing the teeming decadence unfurling before them.Just before the houselights come up, the band on stage is playing their final song, Sound booms and clicks through the speakers, all disco sleaze and punky thrust, striking a humanistic pose and strutting though the dawn. Everyone sways in ecstasy, blissed out on the deafening euphoria. This is the sound of Model/Actriz's new album, Pirouette — a bombastic, maximalist, and absolutely beautiful exercise in noise and rhythm. It's a harrowing good time, and most certainly one of the bounciest, most grinding and best albums of the year.Like the Birthday Party produced by Giorgio Moroder, Model/Actriz's hybrid of disco-inflected noise and industrial pop is an experiment in sharp rhythms and serrated "riffs." The band — Cole Haden, Aaron Shapiro, Ruben Radlauer and Jack Wetmore — make ecstatic dance music bathed in tar, the sound of which permeated every note and syllable on their 2023 full-length debut, Dogsbody. While that album helped them develop their caustic, mongrelized sound, Pirouette is not only a step forward but a giant, club-ready leap through time and space.From the first ticks of opener "Vespers," the band seduces the listener into a false sense of security, with every beat leading towards a more limber spine. Pirouette immediately does exactly what its title promises: it shimmies and shakes, the motorik precision betraying the openness of its sentiments. The playing is immaculate and precise yet simultaneously loose, gushing, free. This is control abandoned.Songs like "Cinderella" and "Doves" are pure scathing escapism, yet simultaneously filled with images of scratching nails and metaphoric tornadoes. They ask us to embrace the twirling princess inside us all, to unleash Her fury and let Her roar. But the album is an intense exercise in juxtaposition, the vulnerability of Holden's confessions contrasted by the often abrasive, booming sounds of the music. Even at its heaviest and most uncompromising, the band takes post-punk — genre often and historically burdened by masculine posturing — and turns it into something vulnerable and flowing, yet no less urgent.Throughout the album, the band fuses the tension of Wetmore's clanking guitar with the ass-shaking grooves of Shapiro and Radlauer, the obscenely taut band hammering andvibing as Haden's words careen around them; one nation under a rainbow flag, fucking with your cerebellum as you burst and bloom in dancefloor glory. Pirouette was co-produced and mixed by Seth Manchester and mastered by Matt Colton, who gleefully let the light shine off the broken shards of discoball glass. From clanging, alien soundscapes ("Audience") to crunching, in-the-red freakouts ("Poppy"), the sound travels through every fibre and nerve, splashing and crescendoing. Your body will move while listening to this. Resistance is futile.However, it's not all skittering riffs and four-on-the-floor swagger: "Headlights" is a spoken word piece in which Haden tells the story of his coming out. It's a brave moment of absolute exposure, soundtracked by cool, throbbing sounds that bubble and waver. While it could veer into saccharine self-indulgence, it refuses to pity itself, more a revelation than a plea. Its fragility and sincerity are its strengths, and at a minute and thirty-three seconds, it's a brief interlude, one that holds more weight and honesty than many records as a whole.Ephemeral and dreamlike, "Headlights" sits proudly in the middle of the album, necessarily slowing down the proceedings, before the flowing acoustics and coos of "Acid Rain." The respite is short-lived, and the propulsive album highlight "Departures" sees to this. Tight, cryptic and sublime, the song is a menacing celebration of embodying that which makes you the most rapturous version of yourself. "All I want is to be beautiful," Haden sings. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and here, Model/Actriz want us to behold our own.Haden is known for his crowd work, stepping off the stage and interacting in intimate yet respectful proximity with audience members. He holds eye contact, saunters up to you, and sings directly to you without breaking contact. It can be jarring, perhaps even uncomfortable, to be acknowledged in such a way, and asked to be present with the lead singer of a band you're watching — yet it never feels confrontational or hostile. You're not being forced to participate, you're being asked. It's a request with a lack of judgement, and that kind of permissive yet determined attitude results in instant bonding. This is a connection, not an interrogation. For Haden, the stage is a cocoon, a chrysalis; it's a space where he can sashay and sing and be his metamorphosed self. Stepping onto that platform and embracing the pedestal is a healing experience for him, and he wants everyone to share in that catharsis.This is the joy, the thrill that the band brings into their music: even at its darkest, most beleaguered and harrowing ("Diva"; "Acid Rain"; "Ring Road"), Pirouette never sounds exhausted or resigned. It traps the pleasures and pains of longing, devotion and existence, transmogrifying them into something jubilant and transgressive. It's a circular saw covered in dripping honey, all jagged edges and smooth, eloquent beats. More often than not, it's sexual and frenzied, bopping and squealing and slicing through apathy and lethargy in equal measure. Pirouette harkens back to the heyday of Mancuso's Loft, all celebratory and lacking cynicism. There's a bit of irony, sure, but there's an unmistakable lack of misanthropy and nihilism, which are replaced by feelings of pride, redemption and capability. Eventually, the album settles and ends on a surprisingly reserved note: "Baton" is the glorious, romantic comedown, quiet and distant, its dampened drums and pulsing chords echoing against the halls of the empty club. It's time to go home. Goodnight. Be safe and forewarned.Horny, outrageous, delicate, queer and poised to rip flesh at any moment, Pirouette is the sound of a band at the height of its powers. It's a subversive rallying cry, filled with Dadaistic expressions of homoeroticism, beauty, indignity, hedonism, infamy, self-hypocrisy, pain and elation, all done unabashedly and without remorse or restraint. It is Model/Actriz's personal manifesto against shame, expectation and marginalization — one that braces for acceptance, but demands celebration.Early in "Vespers," Haden asks, "Are you hurt? Are you keen to be elegant but genuine?" Yes, yes and yes. Are you here to save us, Model/Actriz? To possess us and perfect us? Yes, yes, yes.