It might not seem like it, with its warm guitars and delicate harmonies, but Our Girl’s ‘The Good Kind’ is oddly daring. This is one of those old-fashioned, front-to-back albums best understood through bouts of close listening, its many rich hooks and lyrical feints coming into focus over time. In this age of streaming-optimised grab-and-go record-making, it’s a bit of a unicorn.
If it’s less direct than the trio’s 2018 debut, ‘Stranger Today’, it makes up for it with a quietly adventurous textural approach. This album wears its nuances confidently while executing incremental shifts in tone and pacing with precision and care. It’s telling that its biggest earworm moment – the chorus of the perfectly snarky single ‘Something About Me Being A Woman’ – is brought about chiefly by vocalist Soph Nathan’s willingness to let the cadence of the hook slowly sink in rather than make it anything pyrotechnic.
In many ways, Nathan continues to flip the script on her work as guitarist in the Big Moon, trading out that band’s fizzing indie-pop in favour of something ruminative but equally melodic. During the record’s noisier moments, for example, there is the feeling of Britpop’s outsized swagger being remade as something subtle and introspective.
The wordless refrain of ‘Something Exciting’ could have, in different circumstances, been deployed as a roof-raising communal singalong. Instead, it has a plaintive, pleading air to it. So, too, the descending chords of ‘I Don’t Mind’, which amble instead of strut. Then there’s the brilliantly riffy ‘What You Told Me’, which is low-key anthemic while doubling as a poetic discussion of serious illness. “You’ll struggle all the while / Then dawning in your smile a flicker / A flash of white,” Nathan sings before the second chorus drops.
Work on ‘The Good Kind’ was split between sessions at Rockfield with John Parish – he of multiple records with PJ Harvey, plus recent outings with Aldous Harding and Dry Cleaning – and the home studio of Fern Ford, Nathan’s bandmate in the Big Moon. Between the two, the band – completed by bassist Joshua Tyler and drummer Lauren Wilson – struggled to reconcile what they had with what they wanted.
That dissonance almost caused them to walk away from the project, but there are few, if any, remnants of creative uncertainty on the finished LP. More so, there’s the sense that this existential wrangling served to double their resolve. This isn’t music that’s unsure of itself; instead, ‘The Good Kind’ is happy to exist on its own terms.
Details
- Release date: November 8, 2024
- Record label: Bella Union