When was once the final time prog steel was once actually modern? Complicated? Naturally. Difficult? Positive. However with regards to authentic, boundary-pushing sonic journey, it’s been consuming its personal tail for some time. That’s what makes Beijing’s OU – pronounced ‘O’ – so thrilling.
Their first album slipped in below the radar halfway via 2022, however those that have been listening clocked it was once one thing distinctive and no longer just a little particular. Musically, it piled at the knotty riffs and time adjustments, however it had one thing else in singer Lynn Wu. Like Björk making a song in Mandarin Chinese language, she spiralled and swooped across the prime registers, developing one thing unworldly and in contrast to anything available in the market at this time.
Devin Townsend surely idea so; fashionable track’s maverick-in-chief signed as much as co-produce this follow-up. II: Frailty takes the entirety that was once so nice about its predecessor and amplifies it. Opening tune Frailty units refined piano chords in opposition to a transferring rhythmic backdrop operating from tricksy to intense, the latter courtesy of drummer, and ex-pat American, Anthony Vanacore. But it surely’s Lynn, floating gracefully excessive, who takes it someplace stranger and extra unsettling.
OU continuously sound like they’ve beamed in from the twenty fifth century, the place this sort of factor is extra standard. Purge – that includes backing roars from Devin – is artwork steel made for golf equipment with blinding white partitions and the place vividly colored beverages go with the flow in on steel trays. Redemption is a gradual first light of a tune. Maximum brilliantly outlandish of all is Recall, its layered, birdlike vocals colliding with a percussive backing that manages to be hypnotic and disorientating on the identical time.
It appears like AI track created via flesh and blood people. How these items will paintings are living is still noticed – OU haven’t begun to play a gig. However with II: Frailty, they’ve tunnelled via prog steel’s complacency and spread out a atypical new global of their very own.
II: Frailty is out April 26 by way of InsideOut Tune
