The title, we’re told, arrived before a single lyric did \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p> 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 \u2014 “coerced” is the band’s own cheerfully unrepentant word \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 hesitant, sincere, occasionally laughing at their own participation \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p> Recorded in fragments \u2014 instruments and vocals in one room, the rest arriving as compressed audio from three continents \u2014 “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.<\/span><\/p> This is GLEET doing what GLEET do best \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/godfathersofscrunt.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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