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Easily one of the UK’s most intoxicating new rock bands, Saint Agnes have a knack for revivifying the gothic mythology. Their 2019 debut Welcome To Silvertown reimagined their London Docklands home town as a den of devils, gods and witches, and the band themselves as a death-or-glory vigilante gang. 2023’s visceral follow-up Bloodsuckers gave singer Kitty A Austen’s personal woes very vampiric demeanours, in an era obsessed with all modern forms of metaphorical Nosferatu.
This third album makes beasts, ghosts and war gods out of the deeply personal and the furiously political. On the tubthumping side, Good Boy - a more gruesome Garbage - decries both social and emotional submission: ‘Compliance is desired, get down on your knees, satisfy the tyrant if you want to succeed’, Austen insists, embodying the voice of our capitalist rulers. Gods Of War attacks warlord world leaders with abattoir guitars and stiletto lines: ‘Supervillains don’t wear masks any more’.
Internally, meanwhile, Austen is a torn and tormented soul, one minute surrendered to the metaphorical fangs of her inner anguish, on the hauntingly elegant The Beast, the next roaring out her self-worth on savage, revved-up bitebacks like Everything You Denied and Get Them Out.
Stylistically, the record is just as ravenous. While Bloodsuckers leaned heavily into the more savage end of Saint Agnes’s sound – and they certainly venture there again on throat-tearing thrashes like Get Them Out (the thoughts in your head, that is) and the high-octane The Blood Beat (Angel In The Marble) - here they also evolve to brilliantly modernise Nine Inch Nails’ industrial brutalism with touches of evil-Eilish goth-pop.
There’s a contemporary gleam to tracks like The Father, The Son And The Holy Beast, and a rave-rock sizzle enveloping The Ghost, Austen’s dark pop paean to feeling unseen. They also find space for more delicate, intimate strokes: atonal orchestrations, spectral piano, Song For Mia’s spidery synth lines and, on pensive closer Where Do I Begin?, a moment of introspective fragility that seems to be playing out partly on a possessed musical box.
The album is a finely tuned beast: hardcore yet never inaccessible, melodic but never lightweight, ultra-modern yet steeped in arcane rock textures. By rights, Saint Agnes’s chart-bothering days are about to begin too.
