Album review: male // gaze – TOO LATE NOW

Welcome to male // gaze’s weird, wild ‘extreme pop’ world, where sounds interlock into bright new shapes and absolutely no rules apply. Synths and shoegaze textures are thrown at the canvas with cathartic abandon, sometimes harshly, sometimes more delicately. It’s dense and strange, but in a way that gives the impression that, amongst its dwelling on themes of trauma and memory, its Pacific Northwest-based creators feel lighter for creating it.

In a time when no combination of styles has been left unturned, there’s no denying that whether you can wrap your head around male // gaze or not, they’ve crafted something distinct. Opener FALLING transforms the staple of a piano ballad into something elegiac and church-like, every drawn-out note making it thick like tar. It means that GET WELL is almost a tonic afterwards, a more immediate number with dreamy guitar lines and lively, pounding rhythms. Later on, SPEAK (FOR ME) fuses the primary ideas running through both those aforementioned songs, channeling a melancholic, slow-burning shoegaze feel and unravelling at a heel-dragging pace towards an uncertain destination.

There’s myriad other ideas at play, too. SOFT & QUIET is dominated by a scratchy, brooding synth line that spirals out into a mountainous finale, while RETURNING is a synth-laden take on their previous shoegaze forays that winds to a soaring conclusion. Perhaps their finest moment, however, is the amusingly-titled SLAYMAXXING, which screeches into fast-paced, raging mayhem intercut with a bubbly chorus, not unlike The Callous Daoboys’ eclectic flavour of sonic madness.

It's a snapshot of their evolution beyond 2022’s debut album but short enough to avoid the denser moments becoming too hard to digest. Sometimes it’s zany, sometimes it’s sad, but it’s consistently creative, and has the rare accolade of sounding probably like nothing you’ve ever heard before.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Model/Actriz, Brutus, Scaler

TOO LATE NOW is out now