When you start making your first inroads as a band with a description like ‘doom-pop’ bannering your work, it’s probably going to net you some attention. That’s what Manchester five-piece Easy Kill are toting, soul, lilting alt-rock with lyrics so bleak and foreboding that you could scream them through a mic and pass it off for a mid-2000s Machine Head track.
Their actual sound falls somewhere between Future Islands and Foals, which is about as ‘in’ as you can get right now. There’s a huge market for this kind of moody, introspective, electro-laden business but on Phantom Pain (presumably unrelated to the Metal Gear Solid game) Easy Kill still manage to establish themselves as individuals. At lot of this is down to the structure of the song. It changes shape frequently, teasing at a drift into dreamlike repetition but never actually going there, instead letting the vocals meander back and forth in search of the answer to some tragic, fundamental question.
It’s certainly nothing groundbreaking, but it’s an alluring, layered track which requires a few listens to get the full sense of. Easy Kill have released a duo of EPs since first emerging a few years ago, but Phantom Pain is taken from their upcoming debut album –Â Melanscholar – which is set to drop on the 22nd of September. It promises to be just as haunting and entrancing as Phantom Pain from start to finish.
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