In Love Again, the new album by London-based power pop outfit Ex-Vöid, is simultaneously more expansive and fragile-sounding than its predecessor, 2022’s Bigger Than Before. The rhythms are more ragged, the melodies more frayed, and the guitars more mangled, suggesting a group that’s been brought to the brink and hasn’t quite fully recovered from the journey. The vocals, perpetually sung in unison by former Joanna Gruesomes Lan McArdle and Owen Williams, are less audible this time, almost-but-not-quite suffocated by a fuzzy mix that can barely contain the morass of guitars presented here.
The blown out recording quality makes the quiet moments on the record, like devastating closer Outline, stand out even more. Ex-Vöid’s range is more apparent, too. Aside from the upending of Lucinda Williams’ Lonely Girls and the aforementioned acoustic-heavy Outline, there’s the Americana-isms of Nightmare and the ebullient, C86 indebted July, featuring a swell of jangling guitars cresting and curling around one of the album’s most arresting melodies.
If you hadn’t gleaned from the title, McArdle and Williams write about love—mostly lost, sometimes found. For them, heartbreak is neverending, immutable, and occasionally prosaic: “It’s always the same old story/it’s like you do it just to bore me” they sing on album lead-off Swansea. Try as we might to move on, we can only expect “all those feelings” to crop up again and again, and submit ourselves to love’s vicissitudes once more. So, when they tell us we’ll “fall in love again” on the title track, we should take that as both consolation and a warning.
In Love Again is out now on Tapete Records.