Review: Thumper by Molly Drag

Label: Forged Artifacts


Words by Ryan Underwood & Luke Janke


Molly Drag's Thumper bursts to life with compellingly driven plucky guitar, piano and bass during opening track Last Words; a soaring melodies are distant enough yet with an earnest closeness, building the song into a cacophony of noise and yearning.

The project's heart and soul, Michael Hansford uses his calculated and melancholic voice to deliver damning words of both pain and empathy. His imagery and lyricism in what it's like to suffer shines particularly in a small line from the track Falling Back:

"You swallow the light/ I am vomiting the dark"

This has a sense of familiarity, evoking overlooked but very human emotions and giving us a comforting reminder that we all live and die, with the same impact of a similar Sufjan lyric in "Fourth of July" from 2015's Carrie & Lowell. It draws acute awareness that our own lives are just as weird as anyone else's.

A lot of the instrumental choices on Thumper share similarities to Coma Cinima's Loss Memory, with the crippling subject matter from releases like Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked At Me: eerily decimated, yet hopeful.

This release isn't without songs to bump; Coyote, in particular, runs wild with autotune and  a "once more, with feeling!" personality. Some movements on this album are even borderline tropical, taking a page from projects like Perfume Genius and St. Lucia.

Thumper is an intentional and heartfelt attempt at grappling with the grief and fear we all experience in valleys and trying to translate the goodness in the peaks.




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