You can see why Model/Actriz’s 2023 debut album Dogsbody attracted a lot of approving critical attention. In an era when rock music largely leans towards familiarity – where originality has essentially come to mean rearranging recognisable sounds from the past in a relatively fresh way – here was a band who genuinely didn’t seem to sound much like anyone else.
The Brooklyn quartet had released a handful of noisy singles pre-Covid, which attracted vague comparisons to the notoriously challenging clangour of the late 70sno wave movementor the frenetic dance-punk of Liars, an outlier band on the far left field of the early 00s New York scene that gave the world the Strokes and theYeah Yeah Yeahs. But on Dogsbody they honed their sound into something entirely their own.
Largely cultivated during lockdown, it was a style in which, as bass player Aaron Shapiro put it, “everything is a drum”: each instrument was mined for for its percussive capacity, including the guitar, which emitted blasts of sculptured noise, impressively controlled shrieks of feedback and eerie harmonic tones, but never anything resembling a melody.
Their sound was hugely exciting and less confrontational than you might expect something so lacking in obvious melody to be, perhaps because it was incredibly tight – there were moments when you could easily have been listening to a loop rather than a band – and writhingly propulsive. If you were desperate for a comparison, you might have detected in its rhythms the faint ghosts of disco or the more dancefloor-focused end of industrial music, or even the ascetic techno of Surgeon and Regis. But Dogsbody didn’t really sound like any of them, even before you got to the vocals of Cole Haden, a succession of theatrical snarls, howls and whines that delivered visceral lyrics about sex and queer desire. Splendidly, he claimed that his biggest influence was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats.
Perhaps there’s something similarly knowing about Haden’s claim that Dogsbody’s follow-up was inspired by Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson. But if their precise impact on Pirouette is hard to detect, evidence of an unexpectedly poppier approach is not. The music often remains as taut, propulsive and atonal as before. The rhythm of Audience initially feels punishing and sweat-spattered, but it’s positively laid-back next to the distorted jackhammer of next track, Ring Road. The collection of noises Jack Wetmore wrests from his guitar during Cinderella is hugely impressive, as is the way each one seems to ratchet the song’s sense of tension a little further.
Even the noisiest moments are, however, leavened by melody, usually courtesy of Haden. He suddenly seems to have a surfeit of nagging tunes at his disposal. On the opener, Vespers, he uses his voice in a manner similar to that of a singer on a dance track, colouring a relentless groove with a top line.
The album largely thrives on thrilling contrasts: between the band’s tendency to cacophony and the taut control with which they play; between the sweetness of the tunes and the pummelling din behind them. Haden’s vocals somehow feel intimate and understated, even when he slips into a falsetto, yet there’s a cocktail of emotional intensity and campy floridity in the lyrics: “I’m such a fucking bitch, girl, you don’t even know,” he purrs on Diva. “Just imagine me absolutely soaked, dripping head to toe in Prada Sport.”
Occasionally, the album takes a completely different approach: Acid Rain and the closing Baton are straightforwardly beautiful. The former deploys a fingerpicked guitar figure that’s as pretty as the vocal, briefly collapsing into abstraction but gathering itself before the conclusion. The latter sets Haden’s lyrics about a long-term relationship to musical textures that are still distorted, but feel less aggressive than hazy and melancholy: they build in intensity, then die away.
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Whichever approach they take, whether they’re dealing in the tension of opposites or something more holistic, Pirouette is reliably exciting. You would struggle to describe its take on pop music as commercial when faced with something as overwhelming as Ring Road, but it’s certainly more approachable than Dogsbody, an album you almost had to brace yourself to listen to. At any rate, if their debut was the kind of thing from which rabid cult followings are made, its successor is the kind of thing from which bigger cult followings are made. Far more importantly, it offers an object lesson in embracing a broader musical palette without sacrificing any of your uniqueness: Model/Actriz still don’t really sound like anything else.
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