Caroline Polachek goes to paradise, Pink loses the attitude – the week’s best albums

Sound of the future: Caroline Polachek
Sound of the future: Caroline Polachek
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Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You ★★★★★

Caroline Polachek’s metamorphosis from fey frontwoman with quirky US indie duo Chairlift to bravura pop visionary has been intriguing. Adopting different personas across a number of projects, with each step she seems to shed layers of worthiness to hone in on something both glamorously artificial yet creatively true.

Collaborations with Christine and the Queens and Charli XCX have helped frame Polachek as a star of avant-pop, a genre just left of the mainstream, toying with commercial sounds and grooves. At 37, and having already spent 15 years in the music business, Polachek is no newcomer, but suddenly she seems like the woman of the moment.

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is Polachek’s seventh album, but only her second under her own name. The striking cover depicts Polachek crawling through a busy commuter train carriage towards light and sand, headphones on, facial expression transfixed, as if being transported into a realm of escapist fantasy.

Opening track Welcome to My Island serves a similar function for listeners, demanding attention with a stentorian vocal ululation that – for all the melismatic fluidity of Polachek’s opera trained soprano – suggests something primal. Despite references to palm trees and blue oceans amidst a shiny soundscape of Eighties-inflected synth-rock, there is a faint threat in Polachek’s invitation to her pop paradise: “Hope you like me – you ain’t leaving.”

This is Polachek as Calypso, with mythological references threaded through songs of sensual pleasure, implying a captive lover (Crude Drawing of an Angel), a bed of forgetting (Blood And Butter), all winking towards “the Oracle and Odyssey” (Pretty In Possible). Still, you don’t need a classic degree to follow her flirty thrust. Desire is a playful album, where the classical bumps rudely against the super-modern and Polachek revels in “sexting sonnets” to her seafaring prisoner (“He’s a pearl, I’m the oyster”) on the breathily seductive Billions.

Polachek’s father died of Covid-19 during the pandemic, and that loss haunts these songs of escape. Grief gets its fullest expression on the wonderful Butterfly Net, a spacey prog-rock power ballad that touches on David Bowie at his most yearning. The sheer range of Polachek’s songcraft makes you realise you are in the presence of a commanding talent. She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren. Neil McCormick

Pink, Trustfall ★★★☆☆

Should you fall backwards into the arms of Pink’s discography, you’re sure to be caught by a capable hit or two. The American star, real name Alecia Moore, has been releasing solid pop songs for over two decades: a consistent artist, if not always an innovative one.

On her ninth album, Trustfall, Pink puts her trust in her collaborators. She has writing credits on fewer than half of the tracks, and a team of songwriters and producers provide the rest of the hooks, melodies, and melodramatic lyrics – including dance producer du jour Fred Again, who helps turn the title track into a robustly bland hit.

In fact, familiarity defines much of the album, which ticks off many of the generic pop styles that prosper well on streaming playlists: elastic disco on wincingly-titled Never Gonna Not Dance Again, by-the-books pop rock on Hate Me, Runaway’s chugging 1980s synths. There’s nothing wrong with these songs, exactly – innocuous fare that’s catchier than you want it to be – but they’re a far cry from Pink’s attitude-laden early hits: misfit anthems about depression and divorce that elbowed her a place in the mainstream.

Opening piano ballad When I Get There offers a moving tribute to the recent loss of her father, and a similar restraint succeeds on Turbulence, a track propelled by a rocky strum that never nosedives into the bombast it threatens. First Aid Kit work their usual magic on warm, tumbling number Kids in Love – a welcome antidote to the anodyne Lumineers feature on the preceding track.

But Trustfall dwindles into formulaic ballad territory, so that when Pink sings “now it’s just another song on the dancefloor” on the penultimate track, she’s uncomfortably close to the truth. No leap of faith required for this bunch of competent, dull songs. Kate French-Morris

Inhaler's new album is full of bangers - Lewis Evans
Inhaler's new album is full of bangers - Lewis Evans

Inhaler, Cuts & Bruises ★★★★☆

By now, Inhaler’s singer/guitarist Elijah Hewson has probably realised that everyone knowing about his famous dad, Paul, aka Bono, is more of a hindrance than a help to his band’s progress. He and his compadres have talked patiently about the colossal shadow that U2 cast over any Irish combo trying to make waves abroad.

With 2021’s debut LP, It Won’t Always Be Like This, however, the fledgling quartet, then barely into their twenties, made a remarkable job of standing on their own two feet, topping the UK charts, and scoring the fastest-selling vinyl debut this century.

Suddenly with much more to lose, the young Dubliners apparently laboured long and hard over this follow-up, their illustrious frontman in particular requiring a frequent boot up the posterior from producer (and sometime Pulp guitarist) Antony Genn to step up to the plate with lyrics and vocal melodies.

Whatever your feelings about the Hewson connection, it has to be conceded that the hard graft has paid off, as a fair proportion of Cuts & Bruises is well up to snuff, with Inhaler’s own seamless blend of “proper rock” and boy-band pop perfectly poised to woo mainstream consumers.

As such, Just to Keep You Satisfied challenges the unrivalled masters of that art, The 1975, with its combination of blissful Stone Roses-y arpeggios and an euphoric la-la chorus, while These are the Days cleverly marries The Strokes’ scratchy downstroke strumming with dreamy Coldplay effects.

Best of all, If You’re Gonna Break My Heart introduces a spacious country flavour, influenced by hearing country and western radio stations while on tour in America, and anchored by a hooky bassline similar to Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out with Him?

The quality wanes a little in the album’s second half, but there are four or five bangers, all told – ample firepower to win fresh converts while supporting both Harry Styles and Arctic Monkeys on the stadium circuit this summer. Andrew Perry

Skrillex, Quest for Fire ★★★★☆

Alongside the likes of Swedish House Mafia, Calvin Harris and Avicii, Skrillex helped dance music take over the world in the early 2010s. The former post-hardcore vocalist dragged dubstep into the mainstream with hits like Bangarang while a series of dance-heavy collaborations with popstars such as Justin Bieber created a model that’s still going strong – see Rihanna’s baile funk remix of Rude Boy at the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show.

Back then, he was the polarising rockstar of dance music (“Is Skrillex the most hated man in dubstep?” asked one 2011 newspaper article) but following the release of his 2014 debut album Recess and the collaborative Jack Ü project with Diplo the following year, Skrillex drifted away from the genre as EDM was dethroned by trap and hyper-pop.

But after a string of tentative singles, Skrillex has returned properly with second album Quest for Fire, with a third record apparently on the way. Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like 2010 all over again. Sure, Quest for Fire still blends urgent, bass-heavy peaks and drops with a near-constant sense of euphoria but there’s more to this record than a “brostep” revival.

Butterflies, a collaboration with dance auteur Four Tet and rapper Starrah, straddles the lines of club banger and experimental art project while Rumble sees Skrillex team up with exciting new producer Fred Again… and Grime MC Flowdan for a track that sounds like the future of dance.

Things only get more adventurous from there. A Street I Know is a glitching, frantic collab with famed percussionist Eli Keszler while XENA puts Palestinian singer Nai Barghouti front and center before Too Bizarre (juked) makes nods to metal, punk and pop while never letting the rave energy dip.

Even the nostalgic final third of the album manages to feel fresh, as Skrillex celebrates his legacy but refuses to be defined by it. Quest for Fire is still visceral EDM designed to get the pulse racing, but the whole thing has been given an ambitious refresh. The second coming of Skrillex starts here. Ali Shutler