by Louis Pelingen (@Ruke256)
The conversations surrounding the concept of space—whether in the social or artistic context—has orbited Ulrika Spacek for the past 12 years. The London quintet expounds this otherworldliness across their work, observing how social hubs carry community that can linger within existential, abstract anxieties, but how they can also be disrupted when systems take control like gentrification. The band has known, observed, and experienced such a formidable, sometimes traumatic cycle through their entire discography. Despite all odds, Ulrika Spacek have stuck together, growing as a band and honing their musicianship with each record.
Four years since Compact Trauma, the band has only run into even more fascinating ventures. Through the workings of their newest album, EXPO, there is something to be said about them ramping up their ambitions, allowing their voices and compositions to only echo with unflinching resonance. The overall sound alone is enough to immediately pull in the refinements and expansion that they’re taking. Implementing waves of synthetic electronics to seamlessly blend with these brighter organic textures, the band provides tonal variation throughout.
Ulrika Spacek’s melodic chops have also sharpened to a phenomenal degree, with deeper focus on hooks that uplift their compositional swell and Rhy Edward’s raw delivery. “This Time I’m Present” leads the lilting synths and keys from the verses onto the chorus’ guitar flourishes. “Picto” and “Square Root of None” playfully jitter and shamble all over, while still carrying an accessible structure that invites rather than alienates. Then, “Expo” surfs across robust grooves and elastic synth patches, providing melodies over this psychedelic soundscape that can’t be easily glossed over.
The embrace of the electronic and the organic becomes an intent that reflects upon what the band conveys in their overall message. They’re looking to the space between the physical and the digital, a specific environment where calculated online platforms worm around the lived-in reality of individuals. On the surface, this is a bridge that should allow people to connect and bond with one another, but as late capitalism continues to slither in these spaces, said space starts to get stained. Interactions become more rigid, identities are gradually boxed into flimsy categories, and isolation is further enhanced by an emphasis on stifling the lives and, at times, the art that people make. That in-between now becomes a world that exhausts everyone on board, with a volatile system that just wants to exhibit the individuals “successfully” churning through as long as it benefits its morose interests.
Edward’s lyrical flair excels at presenting this picture. He walks the tightrope of mechanical abstraction and personal wit. The in-between of what cannot be understood instantly and what can be observed evocatively, a balancing act that challenges him as a writer, that, by execution, synthesizes both worlds immensely. He plays around with language that seems overtly clinical and mathematical, but never loses the human spirit that is parsing through the gaps.
It’s this very reason why the overall alchemy of both sound and writing gives EXPO its meaningful weight, especially in the band recognizing how much the gap between these two worlds could offer more space for people to breathe in, yet, they all get subsumed by a system that capitalizes on sterile patterns and statistics that only block individuals from eventually growing for the better. The closing track, “Incomplete Symphony,” unfurls through all this deflated exhaustion. It’s a sign of solemn acceptance amidst a world that is getting much worse. It crafts a bleak ending, wherein, despite sharply pointing against fractured systems, the biles gradually strangle them to the point where a hopeful future becomes a futile question. They’re not entirely giving up wholesale, as they’re giving themselves the space to ponder all this draining burden that’s washed upon them for the time being. Becoming absent isn’t always viscerally permanent; sometimes, it’s what people need to recoup from a constantly dire world.
Despite the heavy tone EXPO unravels, the growth that Ulrika Spacek showcased on their latest record is exponential, only blossoming their potential as one of the most intriguing art rock bands that continuously digs into their sound and concept, album after album. It all leads to their most thought-provoking and sonically compelling record to date, shaking parts of their melodic formula while still keeping everything in magnificent shape. The world wedged between the online and the real is a place that should connect rather than divide, like an expo that houses the people and the art they make in an ideally mesmerizing space.