Take My Hand

tricot's "Take My Hand" compresses their math-rock instincts into something unusually direct without sanding off the strangeness. The guitars interlock in clipped, angular figures that keep sliding out from under the beat, time signatures shifting with the casualness of someone changing lanes, but the arrangement never feels like a puzzle demanding solution — the groove stays physical, propelled by a bass tone that's round and rubbery underneath all that fretwork. Ikkyu Nakajima sings across the top with a delivery that's part pop hook, part shrug, sweet-toned but never precious, occasionally leaping into a wail that reveals how much power she's holding in reserve. The lyric is a reaching-out, an offer of contact phrased with more ambivalence than the title suggests, the kind of connection that requires the other person to move first. tricot's cultural position matters here: an all-women (originally) Kyoto band who took a genre associated with male technical showboating and made it swing, warm and funny and human, and who found audiences far outside Japan on that basis. This is music for a crowded standing venue, or for headphones on a walk where you want your steps to keep getting knocked off their expected count and then landing anyway.