grabyourface
Sadgirl Mixtape
self-released
grabyourface, the project of French producer/singer Marie Lando, has been many things: a noisy outlet of emotional catharsis, a poised and swaggering portrait of pure industrial cool and charisma, and an instantly recognizable and distinct personality on collabs with the likes of Covenant and Caustic. But nothing in the past six or seven years in which we’ve been tracking grabyourface prepared us for the arrival of Sadgirl Mixtape, a bracing listen whose musical variance is only matched by its brutal, raw wrestling with depression and despair.
“You Will Never Be Happy” was a warning shot we all should have heeded – when a song featuring the refrain “Nothing has made sense for years now/ Only death will set me free” is chosen as a single, it might be because there simply isn’t any cheerier fare to be found on a record which walks the walk its title points to. There’s nothing here but bad road, from breakups (“If you wanna hold my hand you’re gonna drown, too” Lando warns on “My Last Act Of Love”) to existential despair (on “Rain On The Car Roof”, she reasons her way towards the impossibility of day to day life: “You live with the dread, but act like you don’t, and above all be thankful, people have it so much worse than you”). Lando’s vocals, ranging from pure exhaustion on “Car Roof” to an abused numbness on “I Dream Of A Future Without You”, never fall into repetition or cliche; throughout the gruelling hour-long affair there’s never any doubt that they’re a pure rendering of something real, something intimately felt.
That sense of immediacy and conviction is carried over to the musical side of the record by virtue of its origins and construction. The “mixtape” in the title isn’t just a clever nod to the idea of distilling every emotion music can produce within you into a dense package – it’s an acknowledgement of the piecemeal construction of the release, having been written and recorded at separate intervals over the past seven years. That gestation period hasn’t just provided Lando with the emotional reserves needed to write and record these pieces, it’s also allowed each individual track to build up its own aesthetic edifice and interiority. The pitting of confessional singer-songwriting strumming against cinematic bombast on “The Black Of My Hoodie” has precious little in common with the dissociated darkwave of “Bubbles Of Me”, in which Lando’s narcotized voice drifts through liquid, waltzing synths. In recording, structure, and influence, Sadgirl Mixtape is genre-fluid (like any good mixtape should be), touring through electro, metal, hyperpop, downtempo and, yes, emo.
If you were drawn into darker music as a teenager (and are old enough to have experienced full albums as your primary musical medium), you probably have memories of records by your favourite artists – be they Joy Division, The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, or My Chemical Romance – which concluded with depressing epics which were intimidating in both their grandeur and their intimacy. To listen to those records all the way through to those closing tracks meant voluntarily signing up for an emotional gut punch you both dreaded and needed to feel in order to know that someone, somewhere, had felt the way you did. Lando might be being arch by describing Sadgirl Mixtape as her “emo offering”, but she’s also well aware that she’s delivering an experience made entirely of those resonant, harrowing epics from start to finish with absolutely no respite. Sadgirl Mixtape is pure, uncut pain, but the strength of each individual, self-contained jewel of miserablism makes it the first truly great record of the year. Highly recommended.
