On their new album Oyster Cuts, Melbourne’s Quivers diverge further from the jangle pop pack, incorporating smooth synth textures, syrupy slide guitar, and Stonesian riffs. This time, though, the music never overtakes the words — thoughtful and considered as they are. The music itself occasionally feels vaporous as a consequence of this newfound approach, but the added emphasis on lyrics ultimately lends the album its heft. The result is a series of subtle details transmuted into a cohesive and significant work by a band hitting their songwriting stride.
While not musically derivative, Quivers’ primary language is nostalgia.The lyrics are marked by a yearning for past misadventures and expired relationships — both real and imagined. Images of ghosts, smoke, and faded radio signals pervade the album, suggesting our narrator is trapped in a sort of romantic subterfuge. In these ten songs, the object of affection is always just out of reach: “Will you turn into an apparition?” guitarist Sam Nicholson asks adversarially on Apparition, expecting the worst; elsewhere, drummer Holly Thomas has a “suspicion” her dream partner is someone she “dreamt up” on the title track.
Some genre signifiers remain from earlier work (like the arpeggiated leads of If Only and the tuneful harmonies of Pink Smoke), but Oyster Cuts is unmistakably the work of a group with its own identity. Choruses are frequently chanted in unison by the band, sometimes with only a solitary guitar accompanying them, evoking a hymn rather than a radio anthem. And despite the backward looking subject matter, the group never sounds less than grounded, never fully escaping into reverie. To quote Quivers, “nostalgia will kill you” if you let it; the key is to keep a foot in the present.
Oyster Cuts is out August 9th on Merge Records.