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Almost all of Hatchie’s music could slot frictionlessly into a coming-of-age film. Her songs, mostly, are misty-eyed ruminations on puppy love and its ensuing devastation; they yearn for a redamancy that feels both fated and vexingly out of reach. You can imagine Harriette Pilbeam’s millefeuille harmonies soundtracking a high school prom dappled with a disco ball’s refractive glimmer, or picture her fleecy guitars over a montage of light teenage debauchery. These are tracks prefabbed for telegraphing big feelings; everyone knows the outsize melodrama of a first, second or 20th crush.
Liquorice, the title of Pilbeam’s potent third album, winks at her 2018 breakout EP Sugar and Spice. That formative work was a candy blast of dreampop, emphasis on pop – indebted as much to Carly Rae Jepsen as Cocteau Twins, whose co-founder Robin Guthrie ended up providing a remix of Pilbeam’s single Sure. Liquorice, meanwhile, is more mature and less immediately palatable, eschewing the fairyfloss hooks of Pilbeam’s earlier work.
At its best, the record attempts to dismantle the grand romance on which Pilbeam cut her teeth. On Liquorice’s dizzying first single Lose It Again, the rush of new love cedes to motion sickness as she pillories a distant suitor’s “convoluted poetry” – as close to a snarl as her honeyed vocals will allow. The propulsive poison pen letter Wonder strikes an even crueller note to a similarly unavailable beau. “I want you to wonder til the sky is red / I want you to hang on every word I said,” Pilbeam sings, relishing not reciprocated affection but mutual misery. These are welcome flashes of depravity which lance otherwise earnest declarations of desire and devotion.
The romance of the music industry, too, has soured. On her 2022 sophomore record Giving the World Away, written during lockdown, Pilbeam interrogated her vocation with startling anxiety: the portrait of a fêted ingenue whose relationship with art and ambition has become brittle with time. Named after the feeling of nostalgia for something never experienced, Liquorice opener Anemoia plays like a lament to Pilbeam’s thwarted dreams. “Maybe the world you want has to slip away,” she elegises over throbbing synths.
The track ends on an unexpected wink: “Secretly you were happier all along.” But happiness comes at the expense of experimentation. Giving the World Away was a big swing that saw Pilbeam expand her sound – inflected by disco, electroclash and new wave – and work with bona fide hitmakers including Dan Nigro, the pop guru behind much of Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan’s output. Liquorice, in contrast, feels more restrained by design: a retreat into the references which have long coloured Pilbeam’s music. You can hear Dolores O’Riordan’s wounded yodel on Only One Laughing, or the deafening deluge of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive across Liquorice’s production, so cavernous it can threaten to subsume Pilbeam’s voice entirely.
For an artist so influenced by shoegaze, Pilbeam’s attention has always been fixed towards the heavens. Throughout her career, she has kissed the stars, stared into the sun, watched the clouds and wrung meaning from the moon. Again and again, she has turned to the firmament for divine guidance, retribution and absolution from love and its consequences.
Despite her best efforts, though, Liquorice finds Pilbeam unable to totally resist the lures of infatuation. Lyrically, the album often edges towards giddy abandon. “Lost control of myself / Again and again,” she sings on Carousel, giving in to the centrifugal force of a reckless romance. On the title track, “I surrender myself to you”; elsewhere, on Part That Bleeds, there’s a “surrender to curiosity”. At times, her capitulation to love’s stupefying force can sound frustratingly opaque. “You’re falling in love with me / falling in love,” she deadpans like an amorous hypnotist on Sage, skirting the line between awestruck and anaesthetised. The droning entry Anchor is particularly inert, never quite progressing beyond its metaphor tethering a doomed dalliance to oceanic depths.
When Pilbeam eventually ascends skywards again, the result is thrilling. Stuck – the album’s closer and its best track – rockets headlong into a crush so intense it’s downright degrading. “I’m still stuck with these pathetic dreams,” she laments, her vocals diaphanous above catapulting guitars that thud like a heartbeat. It’s classic Hatchie: she’s embarrassed and enchanted, impossibly captivating in the face of it all. Cue the credits.
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Liquorice by Hatchie is out now (Secretly Canadian)
