The Manchester band Handle speak a different language than you or I: Their second album, COLLIDE, much like their fantastic 2020 debut, In Threes, builds its sentences from splats, crashes, clucks, clinks, whooshes, and thuds. Lead singer—or perhaps“chief yelper” or “head orator” would be more accurate—and synth player Leo Hermitt writes lyrics that split the difference between commands and incantations; bassist Giulio Erasmus fills the gap usually occupied by vocal melody with sparky fretless lines that pirouette and somersault through drummer Nirvana Heire’s fantastical rhythms. Handle owe a little to dance punk and a lot to no wave, but mostly when I listen to their music I imagine the dishwasher at some amazingly strange restaurant whacking on all the prep containers with ladles and fish spatulas after everyone else has gone home.
Any straightforward bio of Handle might sound like the setup to a joke: a poet (Hermitt), an electrician-slash-photographer (Heire), and the son of Factory Records co-founder Alan Erasmus walk into a recording studio. But it would be disingenuous to try and draw any particular meaning from those backstories. There’s an electric, sometimes terrifying spontaneity to what Handle does that defies conventional narrativization: The first time I saw them perform—at Spanners, a tiny, hazy portal of a club under an arch in south London—it felt like I was standing in a giant tin-can telephone, hearing what another band was playing a few streets over.
On COLLIDE, Handle essentially have three modes. There are the songs that rumble ominously and saunter forward, like "Invisible Number” and “Blue & White,” where Hermitt unleashes commanding, stream-of-consciousness poetry as Heire and Erasmus lock into thick, hypnotic grooves. There are no-wavey barnstormers like “Difference” and “Slightly Does It,” where, if you squint a little, you can imagine Handle fitting in alongside anarchic, slightly mathy post-punk bands like Cola and Palm. And then there are barnstormer freakouts like “Next” and “Do You?,” the latter of which descends into a palpitation-inducing cacophony of crooked synth and squeaking woodwinds.
Hermitt’s voice is a unifying factor, as is the tone of their synth: A detuned, metallic-sounding chime, frequently used to flesh out songs with spacey glissandos, that can sound like a sample from some old Thai rock song (as on “Do You?”). Despite Handle’s penchant for chaos, their instinct for sound design is impeccable: Unlike so many of their contemporaries in the UK’s (arguably overlarge) post-punk scene, Handle seem to genuinely care about how they come across on record. Certain instruments sound as if they’ve been recorded through walls or curtains, and disarming stabs of digital distortion are layered into the mix, as if they’re just another live element. The irony, of course, is that Handle are so locked into their own sense of logic that listening to the 27-minute album can be disorienting and frequently quite intense. That’s one of its great strengths, too: The best way to learn a new language is to throw yourself in, right?
