They don't ease into it, either. Opener "My Bones" throws the listener straight into the album's central nerve — a song, by Sara Engström's own account, about compulsive self-destruction, the quiet private ruin that rarely gets put into words, let alone sung about. The guitars hold back just enough to let the lyric breathe, and starting the record here rather than burying it at the end is a bold, telling choice: the band aren't interested in easing you in gently.
From there the album only tightens its grip. "Debbie Lost Her Mind" — the song that's already found its way to John Kennedy's ears over on Radio X, and rightly so — is a dizzying, careening thing, built on guitar lines that seem to double back on themselves mid-thought, with Engström's vocal sitting right at the point where melody threatens to tip into panic. Emilie Rösler's drumming deserves a mention here too — she doesn't so much keep time as wrestle it into submission, propelling the song forward even as the lyrics describe someone coming apart. "The Top" pushes further still, all kinetic guitar interplay between Mark Petterson and Karl Nordahl, who trade riffs like they're passing a live wire back and forth; Engström sounds rawer here than anywhere else on the record, her voice cracking at precisely the moments a lesser singer would have smoothed things over.
The middle stretch refuses to let the tension slacken. "Another Day" and "On The Floor" sit close together and play like two sides of the same exhausted argument, all coiled rhythm and half-buried melody, before "Come On" arrives like a sudden intake of breath — propulsive and hook-driven, guitars scraping against each other like two people arguing in a stairwell, Engström's bass holding the whole thing together with the patience of someone who's done this before. It's the record's most immediate three minutes, and placed mid-album rather than up front, it lands as a jolt rather than an introduction.
"Anonymous Hates Me" and "Crossing Fingers" keep the unease simmering without ever repeating themselves, the former biting and paranoid, the latter warier, more hesitant, the guitars circling rather than striking. "Eyes About To Pop" ratchets the tension back up before the record finally exhales on closer "River" — the one moment on the album that sounds like release rather than compulsion, guitars opening out instead of coiling in, as if the record has finally run out of things to fight.
Across the whole album, Washing Machina thread a needle that's tripped up plenty of louder, more celebrated names — the trick of sounding both wounded and in complete control. You can hear the DNA of Sonic Youth's guitar sprawl and Pavement's crooked melodicism, the visceral snap of Sleater-Kinney, but none of it plays as homage. It plays as a band who've simply absorbed those lessons and gone looking for their own kind of trouble.
*Before My Mind Wakes Up* is not an easy listen, nor does it want to be. It's a record about the loops we can't break and the thoughts we can't outrun, delivered by a band who've grown sharper, stranger, and considerably more dangerous since *The Spontaneous Splendid*. Washing Machina have made the leap from promising to essential — and they've done it by refusing to look away.