Goat Girl are a balancing act, really. The London art rock trio tempered references to cyanide with wry melodies on their eponymous 2018 debut album, and they used cool synths to make having scabies sound more chill on 2021’s On All Fours. Their third album, Below the Waste, once more pilfers the garbage can for inspiration—entrails and mud are some featured lyrics—but they’re not as explicit as they used to be. Now, the band’s mastery of balance lies mostly in their production. Below the Waste welds Goat Girl’s scrap-metal clanging to the more subtle garage-pop groove of On All Fours, creating a more refined version of the band’s music. They’re jumping into filth, and doing it with style.
To commemorate the occasion, the band seems to have dropped their Throbbing Gristle-type monikers. Singer Clottie Cream has turned back into Lottie Pendlebury, bassist Holly Hole has closed and formed Holly Mullineaux, and drummer Rosy Bones welcomes Rosy Jones. Shedding even this thin layer of artifice, with co-production help from black midi engineer John “Spud” Murphy, reflects the band’s fresh interest in analog sounds.
Some of Below the Waste’s most exhilarating moments come from a textural mishmash of orchestral arrangements and the steely glam of synths. A plucked guitar continually cracks the TV static surface of “words fell out” like a faraway bird popping through the clouds, and it softens Pendlebury’s vocal delivery, which has some Tori Amos or red-wine dryness. “perhaps” thickens her voice with a drunken clarinet melody, deepening the phone anxiety she sings about. The flute that comes later is beautiful, but no match for a drooling guitar line’s growing darkness. All of these sounds fight for space in the songs and build an infectious tension throughout the record.
Through these exciting layers, Goat Girl pad Below The Waste with luxurious fullness, occasionally to the album’s detriment. At 16 songs, Below the Waste returns Goat Girl to 2018, when their debut album floundered in its 19-song bloat. Two of Below the Waste’s instrumental interludes, “s.m.o.g.” and “prelude,” sound like lo-fi guitar tuning, and they don’t counter or contribute much to the album’s lithe energy. But, for the rest of its runtime, Below the Waste’s decadent production holds your attention. We hear Pendlebury sigh in infinity circles on “pretty faces,” as if she’s continuously collapsing on the song’s decadent mattress of strings, and it builds our suspense for the coming breakdown: a small windstorm of groaning, chorus pads, and stuttering violin.
While most of Below the Waste’s songs value symmetry in their lush instrumentation and vocal harmonies, it’s thrilling when one overtakes the other. Most of the frantic and fed-up “tcnc” sounds completely swallowed by an earthquake, with synth buzzing through everything like a passing train. On the opposite end, a stabby, brassy keyboard hook guides us down the listless “motorway” like a row of buttons, but Pendlebury’s sleep-deprived vignettes—“Called out shotgun/Motion sickness/Road to nowhere”—make it careful and romantic. This ability to summon intensity without a lyrical shock factor is new for Goat Girl, and they’re better for it.
