As a musical genre, is “escapist goth” an oxymoron? It shouldn’t be because that is the most accurate way to describe what British alternative revivalists the Mysterines have created on their second album, Afraid of Tomorrows. The record is the aural equivalent of a spooky, creaky old house— at an amusement park. It gets the look and feel right on the surface, but there is no question about its artifice. The band might as well have called it The Haunted Mansion.
The Mysterines’ early singles and debut album Reeling (2022) earned them accolades as the (latest) torch-bearing great hope of British indie guitar music. While basically a facsimile of peak, primarily American 1990s grunge and alternative, the music was sharp and catchy and stood out in an atmosphere where guitar-driven anything was pop culture anathema.
Afraid of Tomorrows does away with all that. It is moodier, darker, and slower. Like its predecessor, it is derivative. Unlike its predecessor, it is dull as a wall painted with black lipstick. It does take a while for this realization to sink in. Smartly, the Mysterines chose to work with American alternative uber-producer John Congleton (Regina Spektor, Wallows, everyone). Congleton is a pro and knows how to achieve a clean, immaculately mixed sound that is nothing short of listenable. He gets the details right, from the bone-dry snare drums to the well-placed shards of jagged guitar noise to Lia Metcalfe’s affected American accent.
The production is so perfect, so careful, even nuanced, that it initially belies how thin the songs are. Throughout, the Mysterines sound like their one rule for the album was to avoid the traditional grunge soft-loud-soft dynamic at all costs. To his credit, Congleton helps them succeed, mostly. “Another Another Another”, for example, wallows in subtle moodiness but, despite some guitar surges, never really transitions to the loud part. But too many songs go by this way, in a kind of midtempo, minor key morass, with the same lackadaisical guitar chugging, synthesizer accents, and drum machine pulses. It is, in a way, remarkable how these songs are dull and yet melodramatic at the same time. A lot of that is down to Metcalfe’s singing. Her voice is husky and supple, yet is stuck in the same tortured/alluring mode throughout—the only aspect that changes is the amount of distortion on any given track.
The overall impression Afraid of Tomorrows leaves is the Mysterines and Congleton have taken great pains to construct the framework for something striking and monumental but haven’t built anything around it. “The Last Dance” is agreeably doomy but fails to conjure up anything more substantial than its clichéd title suggests; the chorus simply repeats the same phrase four times without any discernable emotion. Single “Stray” falls into the same rut. The verses are nice and snarly, but the chorus just repeats the title a few times, and then the sequence resets.
The results aren’t much better on the scant occasions when the record tries a different approach. “Sink Ya Teeth” ups the tempo and employs a dirty groove but ultimately sounds like an outtake from ZZ Top’s Eliminator. The synthpop bleeps on “Goodbye Sunshine” sound grafted on. Only the closing track, the Mellotron-heavy lament “So Long”, more or less ditches the posturing and evinces heartfelt emotion.
The Mysterines are signed to Fiction Records, which begs the question of how ironic it is that the best Afraid of Tomorrows can do is muster a lighter-weight version of what another famous Fiction band, the Cure, crafted 40-plus years ago. The press release proudly announces that with Afraid of Tomorrows the Mysterines have “burn[ed] their past to the ground”. But they’re awfully young for that; Metcalfe is in her early 20s. Perhaps they should have preserved at least a few pieces.