Album review: Jehnny Beth – You Heartbreaker, You

Primal. If you were to boil the energy of Jehnny Beth’s second solo album down to a singular word, that would be it. It’s primal in multiple dimensions – confrontational, sexual, alight with a revolutionary spark – all made possible by an approach that feels proudly organic, unvarnished, even. Whatever guise the ex-Savages vocalist chooses to assume, she is fearless about it.

To start with, we re-encounter Jehnny when her spirit is bruised. Nonetheless, you can sense her grit her teeth and stagger forwards on opener Broken Rib, a tense, discordant beast of a track where her pain is as acute as a shard of glass pressed into the wrist. Later, No Good For People, in which she laments the way ‘I wear you down and you get unhappy’, does harsh maximalism with class, while Obsession pushes that sound further into something more twisted and strange, lending a creeping undertone to her plea of, ‘I don’t know why I’m so girly / I’m desperate to know when we will be together.’ Out Of My Reach is simultaneously dense and straightforward, shifting its feet between wavering, weird verses into a simple yet effective, and no less massive, chorus.

In its second half, things get noisier. Reality sees her move from a purr to a bark and back again in an ode to queerness, sex and polyamory – ‘Did not mean to hurt you when I said / I’d like you and your man in my bed.’ Meanwhile, High Resolution Sadness rattles and rolls in a battle cry for unplugging and living large, and Jehnny’s whisper of ‘Put down the screens’ certainly is a compelling command. Closer I See Your Pain slows down and assumes a moodier, more dramatic tone as she contemplates the blurry line between calling out performative action and demanding moral purity. ‘We want our heroes to be pure / Your heroes to be insecure / Everyone’s so strange,’ she sings.

In a time where it seems everyone wants to make noisier music as an act of defiance against an increasingly cruel world, Jehnny Beth has found a way to stand out. She’s real, she’s raw, and everything here has such a strength of spirit to it that it feels truly alive.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: IDLES, St Vincent, Sprints

You Heartbreaker, You is out now via Fiction