Tantrum

The title is legible in the sound: there's an agitation here that the other tracks hold at arm's length. The opening is abrupt, the guitar work angular and percussive, with rhythmic patterns that feel deliberately difficult to settle into — not chaotic, but resistant, pushing back against any attempt to simply absorb the music passively. The tempo is faster, the picking tighter and more insistent, and when the full arrangement arrives it carries genuine weight. This is Clever Girl at their most assertive, with the instrumental voices working in tight coordination to generate something that functions less like a landscape and more like a physical event. The dynamic range is used aggressively: quieter passages don't feel like relief but like the intake of breath before something arrives, and what arrives justifies the preparation. Metrically the track is knotty in ways that reveal themselves only on repeated listening — what first sounds like rhythmic disorder gradually clarifies into a precise, interlocking architecture that was there from the beginning. The emotional register is confrontational without hostility, channeling the kind of frustration that comes from trying to articulate something that language keeps failing. It's music for when sitting still feels impossible, for movement through a city that isn't going where you want it to, for energy that needs somewhere to go.