Deadletter have you where they want you before you even start listening to their debut album ‘Hysterical Strength’. The title alone sets the mood: the post-punk band are in thrall to life’s contradictions, busking at the crossroads where beauty meets brutality, fearsomely strong while also embracing the hysteria.
The Yorkshire-bred group are now based – where else – in South London, and they’ve pitched themselves with this record somewhere between the clarity of genre forefathers Magazine and Gang of Four and the maximal overflow of contemporaries Black Midi and Squid. Broody, crunching guitars might be their staple diet, but Deadletter understand the value of letting the light in too.
We hear it on ‘Relieved’, which tingles with the jaunty dartiness of early Franz Ferdinand, Alfie Husband’s skipping drumbeats powering the group. Frontman Zac Lawrence has a wry Northern wit, singing about the British social paralysis of bearing the company of someone you’re too polite to walk away from: “I’m far too vertebrate to face you with my spine,” he sings.
‘More Heat!’ is another barnburner, a track about accepting the need for change that wails under its own taut, claustrophobic tension. Lawrence dizzily cries out for “more heat”, surely knowing that any more and the whole thing will combust into a glorious bonfire.
It has been a big few years for this kind of studious art-punk, but in a scene that can be too po-faced, Lawrence’s colourful writing brings some welcome sparks of humour – even if the subject matter remains dark. Take ‘Deus Ex Machina’, which the band wrote amid the wreckage of the Liz Truss catastrophe. “Hilarious as stand-up, more like a sit-down or a law-low,” he sings. “This isn’t comedy, it’s presents, futures.”
Amongst it all is Deadletter’s deadliest weapon: the saxophone of Poppy Richler. At times she seems to be locked in a duel with Sam Jones and Will King’s guitars; in others, the three combine in some terrifying axis of power. Richler’s parts ignite and catalyse ‘It Flies’ and ‘Hysterical Strength’, which owe a sonic debt to The Comet Is Coming, while on ‘Mother’, the sax adds a sense of mystery, verging on menace – not far from the paranoid mood of Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’.
And there it is again, the tangle of juxtapositions that makes Deadletter such an intriguing new addition to the Brixton Windmill era of post-punk. ‘Hysterical Strength’ is dark and foreboding and it’s irresistible and fun. It confronts the daily struggle of our shared society and forces us to smile about it. Deadletter might only be getting started, but with a record as accomplished as ‘Hysterical Strength’, it already feels like they’ve been here for quite a while.
