Robbie & Mona have constructed an undiluted display of experimental force

The project initially issued out of plans for Gray’s second full-length record, with Carkeet on-board to produce; the ensuing results of which cut a glitch-tripping vision alongside the pair’s membership of indie ensemble Pet Shimmers. Recorded amongst the cellar space of long-standing Bristol venue The Louisiana, EW shares a similar subterranean dimension in its character, an undercurrent lurking at the album’s bedrock - poking at its deceptively escapist surface fabric. Mona’s vocals spectrally tracing over electronic swathes, delicate shoegaze neighbouring blasts of cryptic static.

Framed by a string of alternative cinematic influences, the pair sheer at the veneer of conventional expectation, emerging much as a Lynchian fever dream creeps beneath the fragile facade of the everyday. The couple’s stream of consciousness style songwriting figures vividly as such, proving the sonic equivalent of wandering Twin Peaks’ strobe-struck red room, ethereal melodies splintered with passages into freeform dissonance. Robbie & Mona find strength in these anarchic flashes: “Cherry Fish” and “Queen Celine” standing as examples of them averting a desire to be easily defined or labelled. The latter track explicitly nods to a shroud of surrealism engulfing the album: “I want to express myself through / Automatism / Pierre Mabille and his mirrors / We perceive ourselves through reflection / Marcel Marion and his non-scientific fourth dimension”. A purely artistic intention rings throughout that defies any sense of pretense, in this respect.

Inevitable comparison with acts such as Beach House finds merit in the form of “Fidelity”, with its range of syncopated harmonies, while fractal synth patterns tesselate the soft glow visage of “Wallpaper”, bearing some degree of resemblance to the synth work of DIANA at their most unpredictable. Volatile in scope, fluctuating between benign enchantment and darker detours, EW is, at its heart, an undiluted display of experimental force; Robbie & Mona unafraid to abandon safe and innocuous territory in lieu of an urge to upend and disrupt, an impulse that yields a phantasmagorical pull.