The premise is simple enough on paper: five twenty-year-olds from the same patch of coastline, harmonies stacked three deep, guitars that sound like they’ve been dragged across gravel, and a rhythm section built on electronic pulse rather than brute force. On record, though, the chemistry is harder to pin down, and that’s precisely the pleasure of it. Flo Crowe’s lead vocal sits at the centre of everything, plaintive one moment and defiant the next, while Cerys Wilcox and Paige Mullin’s close-part voicings wrap around her like scaffolding \u2014 visible, structural, essential rather than decorative.<\/p>
Opener “Oyez” announces itself with the confidence of a band that has already done its apprenticeship in front of festival crowds, and the record rarely lets that confidence slip. “That Was That,” the breakout single that first got tongues wagging, still sounds like a introduction worth making twice: a melody that curls rather than punches, built to lodge itself somewhere behind the sternum. “Shy Girl” follows a different logic entirely, all clipped guitar and quiet insistence, a clap-back dressed up as a lullaby.<\/p>
The record’s centre of gravity, though, is “Anti-Sociable,” and it earns the billing. It takes the very modern ache of feeling out of step with a scrolling, chattering world and turns it into something closer to a manifesto than a complaint. The harmonies tighten like a closing fist, the piano and voices lean into each other with real lift, and just when the whole thing threatens to gleam too brightly, a scrappy, low-fi guitar line scuffs the surface and keeps it honest. It’s a trick this band pulls repeatedly across the album \u2014 polish and grit held in the same hand, neither allowed to win outright.<\/p>
What separates this from a dozen other harmony-led guitar records doing the rounds is the sense of purpose behind the prettiness. Flo Crowe has spoken about the band starting life as a shelter, a place to recharge when the outside world got too loud, and that idea threads through the record’s back half. “New Born Day” and “Something To Hold On” both trade in the language of refuge without ever curdling into sentimentality; “My Soliloquy” strips things back to something closer to confession. By the closing tracks, the folk-tinged intimacy and the electro-pop pulse have stopped feeling like two separate ingredients and start to feel like a single, coherent voice.<\/span><\/p> None of this would matter much without the songwriting to back it up, and that’s where the album quietly does its best work. These are songs about connection, self-determination and the particular loneliness of being young in a divided moment, but they wear their themes lightly, favouring specific, lived-in details over grand statement. The band’s live reputation \u2014 built on returns to Boardmasters and a growing run of festival slots \u2014 makes sense in this light: these are songs built for rooms full of strangers finding a reason to sing together.<\/span><\/p> It’s a debut that knows exactly what it wants to be and mostly gets there. Ambitious without straining, tender without softness curdling into mush, and confident enough to let a little grit show through the harmonies \u2014 Flo Crowe & The Dilemmas have made a record worth standing under.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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