"What will we do, what will we do, what will we do when our dreams come true?" asks Faith Holgate in the middle of "Young Girls", from PINS' second album. The garage foursome hails from Manchester, a city whose post-industrial malaise is as famous for feeding its native bands' romanticized melancholy as it is for the textile industry that built it. While railing against your environment is stultifying, Holgate suggests ("Sick for days watching the rain/ Everybody looks the same"), that frustration is useful for the way it stokes rebellion and keeps imaginations hungry. It's punk 101, though not a lesson that Wild Nights heeds: its 11 songs betray little trace of insurrection or fantasy, nor PINS' bold presence in the UK indie scene.
PINS went out to Joshua Tree's Rancho de la Luna to record the follow-up to 2013's Girls Like Us with Eagles of Death Metal's Dave Catching. Despite being over 5000 miles from home, their attempt at making desert rock still sounds ferociously pedestrian. In almost every song, Lois McDonald's guitar lumbers over droning organ, and their collective dead-eyed girl-gang vocals hew rigidly to bassist Anna Donigan and drummer Sophie Galpin's unadventurous rhythm section, stripping away their debut's accented identity and self-produced scrappiness. "Young Girls" and "Dazed By You" have a little more surf-pop pep—the latter spiraling somewhere appealingly chaotic in its final minutes—but the lyrics are devoid of action or joy. "The best comes to those who wait/ I'm waiting, yes I'll wait," Holgate sings on "Dazed", which appears to be about being bored on a plane.
Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them. As it stands, the rhyme schemes sound indebted to Manchester's most famous son ("Glittered eyes like butterflies/ Yesterday so far away/ Sunday morning it's all distorting," goes opener "Baby Bhangs") and the total passivity is maddening. No-good boys are tolerated, girls look best when they're sad/bad, and indecision begets numbness and solitude. There's finally a little action on the rushing "Oh Lord", about a tryst with a stranger, but somehow they manage to completely smother any sense of danger or high-stakes: "He didn't know who I was/ I was a girl looking for love" feels like characterization that wouldn't even pass muster in the fanfic community.
When PINS released the video for lead single "Too Little Too Late", they said that the lyrics "spewed out like hot lava from an angry volcano." The cool result (remember the Duke Spirit?) doesn't match their pitch—it's a tale of infatuation gone sour that climaxes in a painfully weak ultimatum: "Yeah, you said you said you're sorry but I've heard it all before/ Yeah, you said you're sorry, but are you sure?" In a post-"Girls"/Cat Marnell age where messy female expression is such a marketable commodity—confession as currency, struggle as legitimacy—perhaps there's something faintly rebellious about PINS withholding emotional depth (while calling the record Wild Nights!). That's probably a stretch, though: their writing comes off as hesitant rather than any particular aesthetic choice.
However, Wild Nights' standout song makes a virtue of that hesitation, and in doing so, reveals a trace of inner life. Curdled '60s hand-clapper "If Only" is the only number that doesn't feature a "you", only "I", and Holgate conveys her isolation and awkwardness in the simplest terms: "Most of the time I feel wrong/ Like I am no one/ I get so lost/ I want it all to stop." It's the briefest glimpse of promise. PINS has become a halfway-notable British indie band (in domestic terms) because of their industriousness: they run their own label, HAUS OF PINS, and gig relentlessly, whether on their own small tours, or as the opening act for Sleater-Kinney, Babes in Toyland, and Drenge. If they've more like "If Only" in them, they might stand a chance of becoming more than perpetual supporting players.
