Sorry have always been a slippery proposition. Just when their ability to unleash hook after hook has them pegged as an indie band, they’ll start to disrupt their own melodies, notes firing off in unexpected directions until the whole thing deconstructs. They’ll settle effortlessly into a slick groove, then soar out of it with a blast of unabashed pop. This defiance of easy definition is what makes them enticing, although it can also create distance – a sense that the core of the band is unknowable. It’s intriguing, then, that on album three ‘Cosplay’ they refuse to pull back the layers, instead leaning even further into the ephemeral.
The sweet and dreamy arpeggios that introduce opener ‘Echoes’, for instance, are deceptive, the song gradually darkening until it erupts into a blast of epic distortion. Closer ‘Jive’ starts so sombre that it feels like a demo, before it’s suddenly cut through by big industrial blasts. Between these bookends, the record constantly twists and shapeshifts: the hulking gothic groove of ‘Love Posture’ giving way to the uneasily tender ballad ‘Antelope’, the sweetly fractured jazz of ‘Magic’ to ‘Into The Dark’’s overwhelming crescendo of noise.
Left-field inspirations are masked beneath the record’s most accessible moments. The springy indie rock of ‘Today Might Be The Hit’, for instance, was inspired by 19th century theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose definition of entropy – the scientific concept of chaos – is still used today. It’s the kind of record where genre distinctions feel totally arbitrary, which is exactly the point.
With a near-endless amount of culture available online, the band say the album’s name refers to the way we are the product of a dizzying collage of influences, doomed to imitate rather than innovate. Or, in Sorry’s words: “We just wear things from the past as they are the only thing to hold onto. We are all cosplaying something that doesn’t exist.” After all, we live in a world in which most of Hollywood’s highest-grossing films are remakes and adaptations, and where the Oasis reunion was Britain’s biggest cultural event of 2025.
Instead of revealing more of their true selves on ‘Cosplay’, Sorry offer a mish-mash of references, while also trying to recontextualise them in an effort to find a route out of this cultural stagnation. A sample from cult lo-fi rockers Guided By Voices’ ‘Hot Freaks’ is wrapped up into a manic up-tempo blast on ‘Jetplane’, and on ‘Waxwing’, the cheerleader chant from Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’ is mutated by darkwave synths into a sinister psychodrama – made even more apparent by the appropriation of Mickey Mouse’s iconic white gloves and circular ears in a shadowy video directed by frontwoman Asha Lorenz and her long-term creative partner Flo Webb.
It all adds up to a strange and unsettling record, not just a single act of cosplay but a whole wardrobe of different masks that the band keep swapping between. Sorry’s mystique has never been greater, and they’ve never been more intriguing.
Details
- Record label: Domino
- Release date: November 7, 2025