The title, we're told, arrived before a single lyric did — born from that tired old habit of calling women "strident" the moment they say something with conviction, while men saying far worse get a shrug and a podcast deal. GLEET don't so much argue the point as detonate it. Where a lesser band would have written an op-ed with a backbeat, GLEET understand that the correct response to being patronised is not persuasion but volume — and so the record builds, patiently, needling, until it arrives at its thesis statement delivered with all the restraint of a slammed door: *I'll show you fucking strident.* It's the kind of line that would sound merely rude in someone else's mouth. Here it sounds earned.

Structurally, this is leaner fare than we've come to expect from a band whose reputation was built on walls of sound thick enough to plaster a room. "Strident" breathes. There's space here, gaps where the noise usually lives, and into those gaps GLEET have poured something stranger and more compelling than another wash of guitars: voice notes. Actual voice messages, sent in from friends scattered across London, Bangkok and the States, coaxed — "coerced" is the band's own cheerfully unrepentant word — into contributing after having the concept explained down a crackling line. The effect sits somewhere between the collaged found-audio unease of Negativland, the tape-loop hauntology of Eno and Byrne's *My Life in the Bush of Ghosts*, and the sample-heavy provocations of Nocturnal Emissions — though GLEET are honest enough to admit the influence is more atmospheric than architectural. What results doesn't sound like homage. It sounds like a band letting other people's actual voices — hesitant, sincere, occasionally laughing at their own participation — do the work that a sampled newsreader or a stolen soundbite usually does. It's a small formal gamble and it pays off handsomely, lending the track a warmth and a specificity that pure studio invention rarely manages.

Recorded in fragments — instruments and vocals in one room, the rest arriving as compressed audio from three continents — "Strident" could easily have sounded stitched together, patchwork and provisional. Instead it sounds inevitable, as though this was always the only sensible way to make it: a band spread thin across a map, refusing to let geography dilute the message.

This is GLEET doing what GLEET do best — turning a grievance into a groove without losing an ounce of its teeth. It's political pop music in the old, unfashionable sense: songs with something to say, said loudly, said well, and said, crucially, with a tune you'll still be humming after the anger has cooled. Strident? Damn right. More of this, please.