Sweeping Promises ‘You Say I Romanticize’

FIRST LISTEN: SWEEPING PROMISES FIND NEW FORCE IN THE CHAOS OF ‘You Say I Romanticize’

Three albums in, Sweeping Promises have figured out how to get bigger without losing the scrappy immediacy that made them so compelling in the first place.

Released August 14 via Sub Pop, You Say I Romanticize finds Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug pushing their tightly wound art-punk into louder, denser territory. Joined by touring drummer Spenser Gralla, they spent 18 months shaping the album and eventually landed on an unconventional chamber-recording approach to build their own version of a wall of sound.

You can hear it almost immediately.

Opener “Shooting Shadows” comes buzzing out of the gate, with Mondal already pushing her voice toward its limits. Earlier Sweeping Promises records often got their power from how little was there: wiry basslines, skeletal guitars, deliberately lo-fi production. You Say I Romanticize is much more physical. Guitars scrape against each other, voices pile up and the whole thing sounds slightly overcrowded, as if every part is trying to shove its way to the front.

That tension suits them.

“My Friend’s An Entomologist” turns nervous energy into something strangely infectious, while “Last Man” rides a restless post-punk pulse through imagery loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1826 apocalyptic novel of the same name. Sweeping Promises have always sounded as though their songs might unravel at any moment. Here, you start to realize the instability is the architecture.

Mondal is a big reason why. Her voice has never exactly been polite, but across You Say I Romanticize she moves from melody into yelps, shouts and guttural bursts, sometimes within the same song. It makes this record feel much closer to the barely contained energy of the band live. On “Cocoon,” especially, she sounds thrillingly close to losing control.

Then there’s “Accent,” a wonderfully twitchy piece of post-punk driven by an almost insect-like rhythm and a bassline that seems determined to crawl out from underneath the song. It might be the clearest snapshot of Sweeping Promises on this record: weird, abrasive and still catchy enough to lodge itself in your head.

And underneath all that noise, the writing gets darker. Isolation, obsession and people pushed toward the margins keep turning up in Mondal’s lyrics. “My Anchoress” draws from the medieval mystic and writer Julian of Norwich, while album closer “Write Lightly” looks at what happens when the urge to create runs into expectations of professionalism and conformity.

That tension is where You Say I Romanticize gets its title, but it also explains a lot about the record.

There’s something fitting about a band whose music has always sounded slightly out of step making an album filled with outsiders. Sweeping Promises still pull heavily from late-’70s and early-’80s post-punk and new wave, and those reference points aren’t exactly difficult to spot. But the anxiety running through these songs doesn’t feel nostalgic.

At this point, the influences are almost beside the point.

What matters is how completely Sweeping Promises inhabit them. Mondal and Schnug haven’t thrown out the limitations that shaped their earlier records; they’ve pushed harder against them. The production is bigger and the performances hit harder, but the songs themselves remain lean. Nothing hangs around much longer than it needs to.

By the time “Write Lightly” closes the album, You Say I Romanticize doesn’t feel like Sweeping Promises reinventing themselves. It feels like them turning up the pressure on everything that was already unstable, abrasive and exciting about the band, and finding out how much more it could take.

Standout tracks: “Shooting Shadows,” “Last Man,” “Cocoon,” “Accent”.

You Say I Romanticize is available now via Sub Pop Records.