The second album by this London band does something you don’t see much anymore, which is almost jettison everything from the very successful first album entirely. Florence Shaw is the deadpan poet, constantly adduced as the female Mark E. Smith, which is simply wrong (he says, furiously googling to discover whether or not he’s done just that). She simply doesn’t sing or do normal front person stuff, but she’s closer to Billie Eilish than Smith, though she’s not really either. She does not yell, but there’s enough weight and spit in the voice to keep her a few doors away from ASMR. Her worldview is sort of daily facts, minor complaints, big pleas. She has a lot of fun with the word “booze.”

– Sasha Frere-Jones