- Rough Trade
- 2025
Have you ever realized several browser tabs are playing music at the same time? The first song on the new caroline album is like that, but in a good way. Imagine all those disparate outputs blaring until they blur into something thrillingly beautiful, like a group sing-along from a movie musical breaking out in the middle of an arthouse drama.
First it's just one guitar, strummed in fervent stabs like sputtering machinery trying to turn on. Soon, there are loud-as-hell drums and another guitar, none of them quite snapped to the same grid. More sounds come flooding into the frame, Jasper Llewellyn's plaintive voice among them, posing questions and hypotheticals in the spirit of the abstract soundtrack. It's chaotic, yet in time it coheres into a landscape with its own internal logic, with brass instruments regally filling in the gaps and Magdalena McLean answering Llewellyn — an off-kilter symphony full of jagged edges that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Just when you're getting your balance, a depth-charge blast ripples through the mix, as if somebody detonated a bomb from the center of the song. But soon the music comes surging back, now buoyed by an elegant string section. By then it's a small army of vocalists crying out as the lyrics shift from elliptical to assured: "You're taking it in your stride/ I know that you don't mind!"
It's called "Total euphoria," and it delivers on its titular promise. No song this year has made me tingle so much or so often. As the lead single and opening track, it serves as a staggering (and likely polarizing) introduction to caroline 2, an album of fussy art music that brims with unabashed emotion. Out this Friday, it improves upon the stirring abstractions of caroline's 2022 debut, affirming the London experimental rock octet as one of the most exciting bands in the world.
So many traditions collide in caroline's music — elements of post-rock, hyperpop, emo, ambient, indie-pop, avant-garde classical, and more — yet even as ideas and reference points pile up, the prevailing mode is minimalism. And pile up they do: Talk Talk's stark deconstructions are a stated influence, as are uncanny indie artists like Alex G and More Eaze. "Song two" (not a Blur cover) is like one of Animal Collective's shapeless feral headtrips domesticated and conservatory-trained. "Coldplay cover" (not a Coldplay cover) resembles a live-band rendering of the Books' tender, mystical sound collage.
The list of fleeting resemblances could go on: Adult Jazz! Sigur Rós! Frank Ocean! Arthur Russell! But what stands out more — especially coming from an eight-piece band — is what's not there. You hear the blank canvas here more than on most albums, and when caroline conjure magic in that empty space, it seems to materialize out of thin air. Sometimes the music is like architecture full of exposed brick and beams; sometimes there seems to be no architecture at all, just a convergence of spirits. It can feel alien, yet it dredges up deep sensations, like some sort of experimental therapy.
Not every song is a study in less-is-more. "Two riders down" is six and a half minutes of suspended chaos — an emo anthem breaking out in a severe storm, where pained howls give way to pitched-down dialogue and what sounds like an orchestra tuning up becomes a gorgeous droning bombardment. At the other extreme, the sparse and whispery "When I get home" lets its melancholy chords breathe in and out of earshot over top of what amounts to a heartbeat, then shifts to a free-jazz hi-hat float and ramps up the drama with a few subtle shifts. When the rhythmic backing disappears entirely, processed vocals take the spotlight, and a refrain that seems to be about working up the nerve to have a big conversation instead becomes a disconnected dialogue — one more missed opportunity to bridge the gap between two hearts that have grown distant.
At least, I think that's what's happening there. To analyze the words on this album too rigorously feels like folly. According to the band, they often pluck phrases from the ether during the writing process. They leave those dispatches from the subconscious vague enough to be slippery, then repeat them with so much unrestrained passion that you can't help but imprint your own meaning on them. Mirroring their approach to instrumentation, caroline's lyrics are potent fragments that let your imagination fill in the blanks. The elusiveness of meaning does nothing to dampen the intensity of feeling; if anything, it turns the band's heartfelt outpourings into Rorschach blots, potent bursts of raw humanity that meet you wherever you're at. As they put it in the album's final moments, "Not everything needs to even out."
The biggest exception to that rule of inscrutability may be "Tell me I never knew that," the spotlight single that brings name twin Caroline Polachek into the caroline sonic universe. The song is a stunner, an ideal alignment of this band's approach with Polachek's artisanal avant-pop. The lyrics assigned to her are some of the most direct on the album: "I don't even know if I'm alive," she sings, her self-harmonizing voice dancing atop an acoustic guitar like sympathetic neon. "But I don't wanna be somebody else/ Maybe I don't wanna be anyone." Once the band has allowed more beauty to bloom, the bottom falls out and we're left with one more set of koans about the eternal and inevitable: "It always has been," "It always will be," "This always happens."
There are only eight songs on caroline 2, and on balance they're shorter than the sprawling caroline tracks that leaned on Reich-ian repetition to create a meditative state. Not that caroline have given up on hammering a lyric to alter its resonance or letting songs stretch out a bit, but the core compositional trio of Llewellyn, Mike O'Malley, and Casper Hughes keeps getting better at locating the heart of their heady music. These tracks rapidly guide listeners into a potent state of vulnerability, and when they go long it's often because caroline have shifted gears a few times, stacking up related sections into little multi-segmented epics. They come across like a band learning how to speak a unique musical language, honing skills but also gaining control of latent superpowers. Two albums in, I still don't fully understand what they're up to or how they pull it off, but I do know I'm amazed.
caroline 2 is out 5/30 via Rough Trade.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Miley Cyrus' Something Beautiful
• Alan Sparkhawk's With Trampled By Turtles
• Yeule's Evangelic Girl Is A Gun
• Ty Segall's Possession
• Matt Berninger's Get Sunk
• Ben Kweller's Cover The Mirrors
• Shura's I Got Too Sad For My Friends
• CIVIC's Chrome Dipped
• Gordi's Like Plasticine
• Swans' Birthing
• Garbage's Let All That We Imagine Be The Light
• Wormrot's TNT
• Bruiser Wolf's Potluck
• Aesop Rock's Black Hole Superette
• Obongjayar's Paradise Now
• Foxwarren's 2
• Planning For Burial's It’s Closeness, It’s Easy
• Faun Fables' Counterclockwise
• Will Epstein & Dave Harrington's Wine Picture
• Sally Shapiro's Ready To Live A Lie
• The Minus 5's Oar On, Penelope!
• Luh Tyler's Florida Boy mixtape
• Rome Streetz & Conductor Williams' Trainspotting
• Amy Millan's I Went To Find You
• David Lowery's Fathers, Sons And Brothers
• CLOVER's Atlas EP
• Anderson East's Worthy
• Rivers Of Nihil's Rivers Of Nihil
• guccihighwaters' DEATH BY DESIRE
• Mt. Joy's Hope We Have Fun
• The Dead Daisies' Lookin’ For Trouble
• Demise Of Love's Demise Of Love EP
• Watchhouse's Rituals
• MRCY's VOLUME 2
• Miynt's Rain Money Dogs
• Preston Woolsey's Bubba
• Moonrisers' Harsh & Exciting
• Gridiron's Poetry From Pain
• KEEP's Almost Static
• Vildhjarta's + där skogen sjunger under evighetens granar +
• Kathryn Joseph's WE WERE MADE PREY.
• Léa Sen's LEVELS
• Matthew Young's Undercurrents
• Budos Band's VII
• Chad Price Peace Coalition's A Perfect Pearl
• Chicarica's Invierno en la playa
• Goddess' Goddess
• Obsidian Tongue's Eclipsing Worlds Of Scorn
• Athletics' What Makes You Think This Is How It All Ends?
• Grace Potter's Medicine
• CLAMM's Serious Acts
• Qasim Naqvi's Endling
• Various Artists' Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us
• SAVAK's SQUAWK!
• Samir Boehringer's Olympia
• Sage Martens' Chamber Music For Lawn Mowers
• Photographic Memory's I look at her and light goes all through me due
• Julia Wolf's Pressure
• Hudson Freeman's Is A Folk Artist
• Lung's The Swankeeper
• Josiah Flores' Doin' Fine
• Jameszoo & Asko|Schönberg's Music For 17 Musicians
• Jesse Futerman's Upstairs In My Basement
• Pry's Wrapped In Plastic
• SEVENTEEN's Happy Burstday
• Pry's Wrapped In Plastic
• Beach Weather's Melt'd
• Zig Zags' Deadbeat At Dawn
• (Hed) P.E.'s New And Improved
• Allstar JR's Ball Up Top
• Ovrkast.'s WHILE THE IRON IS HOT
• jess joy's Garden
• Leon Thomas' Heel
• Lavinia Blackwall's The Making
• Idiot Mambo's Shoot The Star
• The Ghouls' Handle With Care
• Anyma Announces' The End Of Genesys
• The Grateful Dead's Enjoying The Ride box set
• Big Moochie Grape's EAT OR GET ATE 2 (Deluxe)
• Sufjan Stevens' Carrie & Lowell (10th Anniversary Edition)
• Mariah Carey's The Emancipation Of Mimi (20th Anniversary Edition)
• Grouplove's Rock N’ Roll You Won’t Save Me [Live]
• Soccer Mommy's Evergreen (Stripped) EP
• W. Cullen Hart & Andrew Rieger's Leap Through Poisoned Air EP
• Illuminati Hotties’ Nickel On The Floor EP
• Oddisee's En Route EP
• Kissing On Camera's Baby Names EP
• Nympho's Honk If You're Horny EP
• 54 Ultra's First Works EP
• Benji Blue Bills & BNYX's Out The Blue EP
• Sophia Warren's Adesso EP
• Goat + MC Yallah's Nimerudi Remixes EP
• Honey Bxby's Raw Honey EP
• Verraco's Basic Maneuvers EP
• Cut Cult's First Three EP
• Michael Younker's Date Nite Denim EP
• Tash Sultana's Return To The Roots EP
