Pop music is trapped in a funhouse mirror. Borrowing has never been more in vogue. Halloween is now one expensive, unsettling lookalike contest in which celebrities pose as other, usually deceased, celebrities. The song that currently holds this decade’s record for most weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart is an almost word-for-word interpolation of a hit from the first Bush administration. The recent past haunts our Instagram feeds and Spotify algorithms with the disturbing possibility that there really is nothing new under the sun. Repurposing a phrase from the Marxist scholar Franco Berardi, the late critic Mark Fisher referred to this phenomenon as “the slow cancellation of the future.” This is the dark side of nostalgia, the notion that the march of progress—whether in social movements or music—has slowed to a halt.
Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen have made a home in this uncanny valley. Over their nearly decade-long career, the two primary songwriters for London’s Sorry have embraced the tension between past and present, shining a floodlight on their references rather than burying them in the mix. Across two albums and a collection of EPs, the group—which also includes Lincoln Barrett on drums, Campbell Baum on bass guitar, and Marco Pini on electronics and production—has nabbed song titles from Oasis and refashioned lyrics from Tears For Fears and Death Cab for Cutie in their wry, neurotic image.
On their third album, fittingly titled COSPLAY, Sorry try on new personas—UGK MC, folk troubadour, dark ambient chanteuse—without the veil of irony they once used to keep listeners at a remove. Unpredictable, sensuous, and slightly spooky, COSPLAY captures the disquieting sounds of a foregone future.
In the spirit of plunderphonic predecessors like the Avalanches and the Books, Sorry takes a cut-up approach to pop culture. “Jetplane” flips a Guided By Voices hook, some dial tone, and a taut breakbeat into a frenzied battle cry: “Arrest me! I’m a hot freak!” On “Waxwing,” backed by a Twilight Zone synth and industrial feedback, Lorenz transforms Toni Basil’s coquettish one-hit wonder “Mickey” into something altogether more salacious. “Love Posture” could be the band’s answer to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” the bass humming as Lorenz sings about the things lovers do on all fours. (And that’s not to overlook the band’s 2022 song actually called “Closer,” an emo slow burn with decidedly fewer references to animalistic abandon.)
COSPLAY revels in distinctly human flaws: The false start on the theatrical piano number “Magic;” Lorenz’s vocal rasp on the rowdy “Today Might Be the Hit;” the way her voice loses and finds the beat on the profane, Elton John-indebted “Candle.” A porous mix of influences and imperfections, the album captures the uneasy sensation of grasping for something concrete in a world that stubbornly defers meaning.
Sorry falters when they try to nail down specifics. A tossed off line about reactionary Japanese philosopher and poet Yukio Mishima on “Into The Dark” and anesthetized single-word repetitions on “Echo” threaten to flatten Sorry into just another group of Zoomer nihilists dreaming of extinction. But this being a Sorry record, a few seconds of a discordant guitar or a percussive clash will shift the mood again.
It might be tempting to compare Sorry, a brash duo equally versed in shitposts and postmodernity, to an American counterpart like 100 gecs. Both groups delight in muddying cultural hierarchies; both make art that is simultaneously an homage and an affront to the 21st century’s “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion,” as Fisher once wrote.
But the final song on COSPLAY, “Jive,” sets Sorry apart from hyperpop’s anarchic whimsy. Building slowly from a single downbeat, “Jive” goes through multiple episodes: a sumptuous R&B groove, a bratty outburst of electroclash, and what sounds like a marching band of misfits. Lorenz is steady throughout these shifts, repeating the song’s refrain like a mantra. Where gecs might pull back before the song’s emotional pitch, Sorry leans in, free from pastiche or ironic detachment. “I wanna jive tonight,” Lorenz sings, and for a moment, the future seems to stretch out forever.
