by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Montreal’s Feeling Figures write really great songs, the type you can listen to forever, the kind that implant themselves in your mind. With that core firmly in place, the magic of their music resides in how they get there, their swerving path to pop nuggets that’s surging with raw art pop, fuzzy lo-fi punk, hazy basement psych, and a muscular jangle. Every blistering riff and dreamy texture in service to the greater whole, songs that feel worn and lived in, perfected in ways both familiar and unique. Last year’s Migration Magic was a brilliant introduction to their twin lead approach, a kaleidoscope of earnest punk tunes that feel immaculately composed without sounding fussed over, a true DIY gem. Less than a year later and the band are back with their second album, Everything Around You, due out on September 27th via Perennial Death and K Records. As the story goes, the album was recorded prior to Migration Magic, put to tape at home during the height of the “omnicron winter” of the pandemic.
Everything Around You is a more adventurous album, a bit more serrated and riddled with anxiety, but it’s also very much still indebted toward great songwriting. The dynamics are pushed further, stretching out at the edges of the band’s art punk oeuvre, embracing both the heavier and more gentle ends of the spectrum, It’s everything you'd want from a second album (even if it was once theit first album). Following “Swimming,” the album’s swooning lead single, Feeling Figures share “Doors Wide Open,” a triumphantly jangly ripper. Crackling with energetic fuzz and sugar sweet vocal melodies, the quartet tear through a twitchy pop bliss with infectious hooks and brief but impactful solos. It’s really something special, simple in design but oh so vibrant in delivery.
Speaking about the song, Kay Moon shared, “Originally inspired by a stringline from a British reality show morphed into guitar chords, this song was written in the blink of an eye yet speaks to centuries of inequality. A feminist reflection on doors opening and closing based solely on appearances and societal projections.”