A Clark Kent-like transformation is taking place in Manchester’s Night & Day Café. Mandy, Indiana vocalist Valentine Caulfield wipes away her glittery makeup and removes a blonde wig, no longer on active duty as a purveyor of some of the UK’s best experimental, noisy, dancey post-punk. “We just came from taking photos, that’s why I look like a degenerate,” she explains as she settles at a table at the back of the room, next to guitarist Scott Fair and synth player Simon Catling.
As her rockstar alter ego, she looks like an anime hero or a cyberpunk rebel, and it’s the perfect front for the band’s debut album, ‘I’ve Seen A Way’ (due May 19); there’s an epic, cinematic scope to the way synths and drums clash and pulse, a dark blockbuster of discordant noise. There are apocalyptic flood siren sounds, and noises that sound like a wounded creature from a monster movie.
The album’s introduction, ‘Love Theme (4K VHS)’, is supposed to feel like a descent into something otherworldly, heralded by a chorus of pretty, eerie synths. It was partly influenced by the video game Bioshock, as well as the Alton Towers ride Hex. “I was like, ‘I want the album to open up in the way that this big, Biblical-sized event is about to occur,’” says Fair, the band’s main songwriter and producer. “The driving factor behind the writing was, ‘Does it sound unfamiliar, or like something that’s hard to define?’”
The pleasantly gloomy bar we sit in is an institution of the Manchester music scene, the city where Mandy, Indiana formed, completed by drummer Alex MacDougall. As students, they each got a taste for eardrum-blowing noise in Withington and Fallowfield basements, and started to play in bands around the city; Fair was interested in combining experimental chaos with visceral, dark vocals in Caulfield’s native French. The band soon signed to New York label Fire Talk [PACKS, Dehd] and were playing big shows and festivals all over the UK, including opening slots for IDLES, Gilla Band and Squid – and a recent slot at Austin’s SXSW. They don’t feel particularly tied to their hometown; Caulfield, who’s originally from Paris, recently moved to Berlin, citing Manchester’s rising costs and disappearing identity.
It adds to the band’s placeless feeling that in a city defined by musical nostalgia, they’re interested in making stuff that sounds like nothing else. “I think it’s pretty easy for us to say we’re not just a Manchester band, ‘cause it’s not influenced by the [musical] sound of Manchester,” says Caulfield. “A friend of mine said to me, ‘I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll hear a Mandy, Indiana sound.’ Because it’s a weird collection of things, and it’s very influenced by just the world.”
While recording ‘I’ve Seen A Way’, the band took that idea to a logical if surprising endpoint, by leaving the studio and recording parts of the album in different, bizarre locales — a shopping centre, a “Gothic crypt,” and most challenging, a West Country cave. The band had to haul as much gear as they could carry from the van to the cave’s mouth, then return for another load of it; they had to navigate past cheese-ageing rooms that smelt “like death” and through pools of water. In an eight hour day, they only managed to spend two hours actually recording.
“We couldn’t monitor anything, because the reflections were so loud, even with headphones on and your hands over it with the volume turned up you couldn’t hear,” recalls Fair. “So it was only the day after we got out of the caves that we could actually listen back to what we’d tracked. And luckily it sounded amazing. That basically would have fucked the album if it hadn’t worked, because we spent a big chunk of the budget on that.”
The approach resulted in a roughly-hewn sonic patchwork affect — chaotic, intense and proudly ugly. Each element of the album is geared towards a sort of disorientation. “I embrace chaos, and I think sometimes the vocals and the music butt heads with each other,” says Fair. “Certainly in a live setting, people are like can you turn your amps down ‘cause we can’t hear the vocals loud enough? It’s like, no. It’s supposed to be that battle between those elements. It’s supposed to be about that immediacy, and chance as well sometimes — taking it back to raw, elemental feelings.”
That urgency is crucial to the themes in Caulfield’s lyrics, as well. The tracks on this album, delivered in French, look at political exhaustion and rage, resistance to fascism, and revolution. “I no longer want to wake up when we let humans die in the Mediterranean sea,” Caulfield sings (translated to English) on ‘Pinking Shears’; “Always remember that we are more numerous than them,” she repeats on ‘2 Stripe’.
“We’ve had such a massive drop towards fascism here, but also in France where I’m from,” she says. “We’re destroying the planet at a speed that I think is just unbelievable. It’s hard for me at this point to not be in the state of mind where I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on here? How are we letting this happen?’ But then again, if you know me as a person, that’s kind of the only thing I talk about.”
Fair continues: ‘I think a lot of our music is with eyes on the dancefloor — so even if the message sometimes is bleak, I think that it’s galvanising because you hear it in this communal space with other people that wanna go and exorcise their demons. So I don’t think it’s just misery and darkness without hope. I think there’s a lot of positivity to the record as well.”
Caulfield nods. “I suppose there is a level of pessimism because it’s hard to picture anything being different. But also, if you don’t have hope that something better is possible, then there’s no point living, is there?”
The answer to this quandary is hard to find in between the squalling, overwhelming noise of ‘I’ve Seen A Way’. But the album does paint pictures of new worlds, ones in which the laws of nature or the rules of physics are a little different. Mandy, Indiana distort the grim realities of our world into boundless ones.
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