The Big Moon are at their best when they don’t overthink it. On “Don’t Think,” the British quartet’s most irrepressibly joyful song to date, lead singer Juliette Jackson breathes: “If you have a gut feeling, maybe you should go with it this time.” With verses describing the kind of nothing-y Friday nights out in which you spill your pint all over yourself and hold conversations that are forgotten by morning, the bass-driven song is an ode to mindless impulses, written to encourage an anxiety-riddled generation to let go. “Just don’t think about a thing,” Jackson trills on the boisterous hook.
The band, which Jackson formed with guitarist Soph Nathan, bassist Celia Archer, and drummer Fern Ford in 2014, have made a minor name for themselves in the UK with hook-driven, Libertines-adjacent indie rock that would sound right at home on a Camden pub crawl. Their 2017 debut, Love in the 4th Dimension, was a clutch of angsty guitar songs nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. But when she came to write its follow-up, Walking Like We Do—alone, as she does much of the band’s material—Jackson said she “wanted to make some music that felt really soothing and cleansing, like a tonic.”
Walking Like We Do arrives in the soft glow of synth pads and layered harmonies. Inspired by the spacious pop production of Frank Ocean and James Blake, the band worked with producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley) in Atlanta to capture a wide-open, stripped-back sound. Nothing here is radically new—the album’s high points hark back to ’60s girl groups and ’90s pop-R&B—but it’s a departure for the guitar-heavy group, and they commit to it boldly from the first piano chords of “It’s Easy Then,” the lead single and opening track. Over a bed of bubbling synth notes, Jackson heralds their optimistic new sound—but the song’s title, and its buoyant melody, belie the darkness that prickles through its lyrics. In the full context of the chorus, “It’s easy, then/You make it hard.”
Walking Like We Do may have been born from an impulse to create “soothing” songs, but it’s inextricable from the anxious mindset that requires soothing. “Maybe it’s an end ’cause this don’t feel like a start/But every generation probably thought they were the last,” Jackson quips on “Your Light.” Her lyrics touch on what it’s like to come of age amid political and ecological catastrophe, with varying degrees of sincerity. While it’s mostly played for laughs, the bare-bones piano ballad “Dog Eat Dog” offers an earnest reflection on social injustice in the UK, specifically London’s class divide. Its bleak central image is of a pigeon eating discarded chicken on the pavement.
But the album’s surface-level observations don’t always register as heartfelt political commentary, and its most downbeat songs are its most forgettable. The understated approach means that clunkier ideas have nowhere to hide; on the airy ballad “Waves,” Jackson chews on the same musical idea a little too long. She strides more confidently across the playfully camp landscapes of “Take a Piece” and “Your Light,” where the sunny chorus describes a day so good that you momentarily forget you’re depressed.
“Your Light” is one of many flippant, tongue-in-cheek allusions to doom on Walking Like We Do, where the possibility of total annihilation is never far from mind, but also never taken entirely seriously. “Oh our data trail’s long/We’ll never die, we’ll linger on,” Jackson deadpans on “Holy Roller.” Her self-deprecating humor channels what The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino has called the “half-ironic millennial death wish,” the extremely online habit of expressing passion in the form of jokes about one’s own demise. Walking Like We Do has moments of thoughtless escapism—and a couple of earnest bum notes—but it comes into its own when it blends humor with darkness, suffusing everything with gentle, sarcastic nihilism.
Buy: Rough Trade
