Suburban
Speed

Rating: 8/10

by: Jonathan Greer

Daughter's debut If You Leave wasn't a bad record, but it was really their live shows that marked them out as something special. They had taken up the space left vacant by the xx and filled it with plaintive songs and a wash of guitar effects.

Two years later and the follow up album Not To Disappear has taken leaps and bounds on from that debut. Still in their mid-twenties, the mastery of dynamic range and the emotive subject matter of the lyrics - dysfunctional relationships, dementia, heartbreak - belies their relatively young age.

It is a darker record not just in subject matter, but also in terms of their sound. Their debut had built layers of sound over their pretty indie-folk influenced melodies, but this follow up is bleaker and initially harder to get into, but the old cliche is true, and the more you put into this record, the more you will get out of it.

The songs are relatively simple in terms of structure, the melodies are delicate and haunting, but it is their words and the way Elena Torna delivers them which hit home and make the most impact. Relationships are difficult and unpleasant - on the manic, uptempo 'No Care' she sings "How I wanted you to promise we would only make love/ but my mouth felt like it was choking, broken glass," and the bleak situation described in 'Alone/ With You' is accentuated by the way that she deadpans "I should get a dog or something."

The darkest parts deal with loss, and specifically dementia. It's harder to imagine a more intense verse than "I have lost my children/ I have lost my love/ I just sit in silence," on 'Doing the Right Thing', though 'Mothers' continues the theme with "The strangest chemical reaction inside her brain, no she's not the same."

Not to Disappear is a more intense listen than you may have expected, yet it is often a very beautiful record.