Tasteless

The shift Shame made between albums announces itself immediately here — slower, stranger, the guitars smeared and droning rather than jabbing, the rhythm section locked into something hypnotic and slightly ominous. Krautrock had clearly been playing in their van. Steen's voice has changed too: less the young man performing bravado, more someone genuinely unsettled, processing something that won't resolve neatly. "Drunk Tank Pink" emerged from a period of genuine psychological difficulty and this song wears that openly — the tastelessness of the title is probably self-directed, an examination of numbness and excess and the particular emptiness that follows a period of running too hard at everything. The production is more interior than their debut, more concerned with texture than attack — synths and effects bleed into the guitar lines, softening edges that used to be deliberately sharp. It's disorienting in exactly the right way: you can feel the ground shifting under the confidence. This is music for the morning after, for the particular clarity that comes with a hangover that extends beyond alcohol, for realizing that the scene you've been living inside has its own costs that eventually present themselves.