It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Halifax’s post-punk quintet, Beauts. They’re following up their 2016 EP Waves/Wash with the release of “The City Loves Me,” a hazy new single that questions the impacts and values of urban life.
“I think that it must be, the city loves me, because it won’t let go,” sings Jeff Lawton in the same sort of half-measure that The National’s Matt Berninger might deliver in another octave. There’s a subdued excitement common to both bands, if you can wrap your head around ratcheting them up a notch and making one of them first cousins to some new wave giants.
It’s capable of catching you off guard, left leaning in with the first jolt of adrenaline and swearing you tripped over a beat drop at the upper end of the register that was never there in the first place.
There’s a dance party happening somewhere in there, as the band sing about the ravages of time, opportunity costs, and the brief moment of doubt that human beings were never intended to live in highly-concentrated fossil-lined stacks of shoebox apartments.
The combination of ethereal vocals, deep-set synths and a clean-fuzz pairing that are reminiscent of The Cure and New Order and my own inescapable dystopian nightmares.
Then again, maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe it’s not just hubris, and the city really does love Beauts. Perhaps, much in the same away that anything Donald Trump does is, by default, “presidential,” we, as humans, are natural and anything we create is, by extension, also natural. As a communal species it only makes sense to concentrate our means of production, housing, and resources for greater efficiency that benefits us in ways that ranges from the industrial to the cultural.
This could be a Stockholm Syndrome with a truly happy ending and not the fiery hellscape one might imagine.
“The City Loves Me” is the first look at the band’s debut LP, set to be released later this year as part of LHM Records’ ever-growing roster.