Poliça

United Crushers

Channy Leaneagh’s vocals are no longer distorted as default, and heard alone, they sound slightly as if delivered while fighting back tears. It all adds up to a record that bristles with mournfulness and melodious joy. Older, wiser, but far from jaded.

There's beauty to be found here, and as ever a longing that love can help ease all, if not at least make you forget your woes for a while. It's a screwed up world, but Poliça are taking it head-on and with a spring in their step.

United Crushers is driven by the seemingly contradictory desires to bring things together and break them apart, but Poliça bring them into harmony with a gloves-off fearlessness, resulting in their most impassioned and immediate music yet.

If this really is Poliça’s “final paper” (as Leaneagh’s called it), then they’ve excelled themselves with the most intimate and empowering album of their career.

‘United Crushers’ is here to debunk the notion that Poliça are doomed by their own experience with the simplest of tools – better songs.

Poliça's bold new record serves as a clarion call to all of us who are fighting bravely for the cause, be it art, love, or rebellion.

It is ... an album of two halves; while filled with experimental tendencies, it comes plagued with dreaded topics, issues of politics, and sees the four-piece create something impressible to ignore.

Despite its heavy subject matter, this record sparkles and whirrs in a way that is very easy to fall in love with.

In combination with the lyrics and a relentless feeling of despair, United Crushers can come across as a draining listen, perhaps even an uncomfortable one to those accustomed to their earlier work. It takes a few listens to discern the resolve in Leaneagh’s lyrics, but it’s there: kernels of hope in a sea of shit.

For an album so drenched in sadness, there is a disco for the downhearted lurking beneath its surface.

It may not be as immediate as some of their earlier material, but it was a necessary endeavour for a band trying to make sense of the maelstrom of the modern world.

Poliça’s third album is perhaps more spiritually linked to the essence of Leaneagh’s fluid and sometimes delicate voice, radiating outward from her talents rather than closing in on them.