Snarls’ lead singer Chlo White opened her band’s 2024 album With Love by begging repeatedly, “don’t you ever let me go,” and closed it with an allusion to a famed pair of skeletons embracing in the afterlife. “’Til death do us part” wasn’t a big enough promise to contain the passion on With Love, but on the group’s follow-up EP, In Heaven There’s Rainbows, those heartstrings are pulled so tight they’re about to snap.
Oaths that once sounded sealed with perfume and lipstick kisses now come written in blood or ashes from a fire that demands to be fed. “Tell me I’m the one for life,” White pleads on the opener “Chemical Control (Spill Your Blood),” and it sounds like a threat. The Columbus, Ohio, group’s latest EP takes the sugar-rushed romance of their previous record on a death drive through darker, knottier, more psychedelic territory.
“When you confide / It’s your suicide,” goes White’s breathy confession on “What’s Inside Of Me,” shaded by a sleek, fingerpicked guitar melody. Her vocals benefit from being mixed-front-and-center on the EP’s intimate closer, as well as the track that precedes it, where she and her bandmates reach the arena-rockiest heights of their career (no doubt honed while warming up stadiums for Louis Tomlinson). “Eternal Flame” is, to put it simply, the biggest Snarls have ever sounded. Mick Martinez’s guitar (the anchoring instrument of the EP as a whole) starts in loose, absentminded strumming before blooming into acidic, blown-out thrash; the drums (care of new recruit Mike Taddeo) trip over themselves in a beautifully spacey breakdown. Meanwhile, White is frantic, “craving again,” singing through bared teeth about how badly she needs to be cut off from the love that she can’t live without. It’s one of her best vocal performances, thanks in part to the production on “Eternal Flame,” which maintains the EP’s gritty, gasoline-rainbow distortion without drowning out White’s vocals.
The up-close and saturated production on In Heaven There’s Rainbows toes (and often blurs) a very fine line. It’s immersive in its best moments and muddy in its worst. Bright basslines and watery vocal passages bleed into one another just a little too much at the edges throughout the otherwise haunting “Chemical Control.” The bridge of “No Lock, No Prayer” has all the makings of a compelling scene of White’s hard drinking, bad-tattooed love interest beckoning her to “get out of here,” but the mix washes out her whispers to the point of unintelligibility. Her sighs of “God you’re exhausting,” set up the scene like a friend leaning in to spill some juicy gossip—she’s got a voice that demands to be heard, and the production should honor that demand.
In Heaven There’s Rainbows speedruns a relationship from instant infatuation to crash-and-burn codependency to its death—whether that’s ego death, the “little death” of an orgasm, the end of an affair, or losing yourself in a relationship that should have already ended but hasn’t. The drama of the lows is enough to make the pain worth it, but the highs aren’t too bad either. “One Wish” is the ecstatic peak between songs of certain death, the fireworks-worthy movie moment bright enough to convince you that you just might avoid getting your heart broken. “If you light a match, you gotta let it burn,” White sings at the chorus. Maybe the flame will go out, or maybe it’ll stay lit long enough to burn her whole house down, but for now she’s got something—or someone—to keep her warm. [Take This to Heart]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
