Ten years after “Go Outside,” the New York duo find solipsistic charm in revisiting their past, bolstering their classic sound with the tactile verve of live instruments.
The indie-pop world has completed several rotations around the sun since Cults first released their Day-Glo earworm “Go Outside.” The New York duo’s synthesis of girl-group harmonies and Jonestown imagery was praised, at the time, for Trojan horsing a conceptual record about anxiety into soundbites ready for an iTunes commercial. Along with Sleigh Bells’ menacing cheerleader blasts and Foster the People’s bluesy hooks about Columbine, they unwittingly became part of a small trend that took the tragedies of American nihilism and washed them out in comparatively mellow, 1960s-inspired tones.
But while the axis of small indie labels has tilted towards synth pop and simplicity in the intervening decade, Cults’ very darkness has been mainstreamed: Billie Eilish’s horrorcore music videos and Lorde’s bummer ballads all embody a “doomer” mentality that set in from the very first notes of Cults’ MIDI glockenspiel. The major-label shift to melancholia offers plenty of room for overt displays of depression and high-concept music videos set in psych wards, but it left Cults’ cheeky creepiness out of step. On 2017’s Offering, they attempted to carve out a lighter sound with breezy guitars and wispy falsettos, displaying a carefree attitude that felt immediately dated. On Host, Cults find solipsistic charm in retreading the shadowy pastures of their past, bolstering the dream pop of their earlier work with the tactile verve of live instruments.
The cymbal crashes, horn blasts, and piano strokes of “8th Avenue” feel like hearing Cults in Technicolor after years of black-and-white, digitally rendered instrumentation. Working with classically trained violinist Tess Scott-Suhrstedt, along with a rotating cast of cellists, percussionists, and a trombonist, core duo Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin dig deeper into the roots of their sound. The strings and drum blasts that open “Trials” recall the lush retro flourishes of Phil Spector’s work with groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals; the thin, plucky acoustic guitar on “Shoulders to My Feet” conjures the slanted folk of George Harrison’s self-titled record. Even when Cults reach for synths, as on “Like I Do,” the snap of live drums lends weight and permanence to Follin’s cool croon, which too often faded into Offering’s layers of artifice.
Host also marks the first time Follin brought her own music and lyrics to the recording studio, and her vocals, occasionally cloying and strained on their previous record, feel appropriately at home in the mix. Her two main modes, a sugary falsetto and a sharp deadpan, work best when they provide texture to the surrounding instrumentation, rather than attempting to overpower it. The simple repetitions of “A Low” and “Like I Do” exemplify this: Her voice echoes the former’s sliding strings and highlights the low bass of the latter’s synth line. The simplicity also faithfully renders the album’s concept, which loosely tracks the toxicity of a parasitic romantic relationship on its “host.” With few details about the emotional leech, “Trials” fills in the gaps: “I know you,” Follin intones, her minor triplets suggesting wariness rather than familiarity. But the relative verbosity of “Working It Over” loses its footing as Follin competes for airtime, the reverberating piano lost behind awkward rhyming structures and crowded verses.
Ten years in, Cults find their power in returning to their origins, if somewhat reluctantly. “We can’t escape ourselves!” Oblivion bemoaned in a recent interview. Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble. The mainstream pop industry has come to inhabit the darkness they pioneered, but Cults finally feel above the fray.
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