This is a glacially beautiful album that you’ll do well to spend a lot of time with.
Featuring eight songs of disco/pop haze laced with longing and Dan Bejar-approved horns (Shabason moonlights as Destroyer's saxophonist), the band's debut album Perpetual Surrender is packed full of earworm elements that, in another era, we all had to use the phrase "guilty pleasures" to describe.
This sense that DIANA are still figuring out how to best fit together the pieces they've got to work with serves as a reminder that Perpetual Surrender is a debut record-- a very compelling one, but a debut nonetheless.
Perpetual Surrender's highlights might have had more impact if they were collected on an EP, but DIANA have a unique enough perspective -- and enough potential -- to make the album worth a listen for anyone who loves synth pop in any of its incarnations.
Diana, a supergroup of sorts including members of The Hidden Cameras and Destroyer, acquit themselves well thanks to a gift for electro that tends towards the chill of early rave, and icy female vocals from Carmen Elle.
DIANA have proven themselves worthy of the hype on Perpetual Surrender. There's lots of nods to contemporaries, but plenty of individual achievements too
They might be the musical embodiment of a knitted handkerchief, but something about the no-shit beats and just-kiss-me vocals bats off the twee with suave effortlessness.
Neither engaging enough to be exhilarating, nor boisterous enough to be obnoxious, Perpetual Surrender simply gazes at its shoes without making much of an impression at all.
Neither entirely derivative nor completely unoriginal, DIANA’s Perpetual Surrender is simply of the norm — an enjoyable yet essentially average release that plays it very safe
In many ways 'Perpetual Surrender' is the average British weather forecast; patchy, dull and cloudy with occasional sunny spells. Room for improvement.
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