As they shed their masks and streamline their sound, the UK psych-pop duo sound like they’ve found their voice but not yet something significant to say.
We’ve met Jadu Heart before, but in a sense, their second album is a chance to meet them anew. On their 2016 EP Wanderflower and 2019 debut Melt Away, the duo of Diva Jeffrey and Alex Headford wore 3D-printed masks, adopted elaborate mythologised characters named Dina and Faro, and couched their electronic pop experiments in a fantastical backstory. Like their identities, their sound was polymorphous, shifting between ukelele folk and choppy electronics in the vein of Maggie Rogers or Mura Masa (with whom they share a manager). One year on, follow-up Hyper Romance feels like a re-introduction to the band, who have ditched the masks and settled into a steadier groove. The newfound simplicity suits them.
Jeffrey and Headford made Hyper Romance after moving away from the bustle of London to the port city of Bristol. Holed up in a basement studio, they used distortion pedals and cheap amps to create the layer of atmospheric grunge that hangs over the record (which was later co-produced by Guy Sigsworth, noted for his work with Björk and Madonna). “Suddenly I Know Who You Are” is built around a swaggering Britpop riff, while the ghost of Tame Impala appears in the faintly psychedelic rush of “Metal Violets,” and the blurred edges of “Dead, Again” feel an homage to The Bends-era Radiohead. On each of these songs, Jeffrey and Headford’s vocals intertwine seamlessly, the contours of their voices fitting into one another so well that it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
It’s these more spectral and sensitive moments, the ones hiding behind the crunching guitars, that are the record’s most powerful. The dusky ballad “Caroline” is tailor-made for the montage that comes three-quarters of the way through an indie rom-com, when the protagonist’s life has fallen apart. Nothing on the album quite tops “Burning Hour,” a smoky blend of live drums, tentative falsetto vocals, guitar shimmers, and—piercing through the haze, before things get too comfortable—samples of screams. It’s a refinement of the laid-back yet eerie electronic sound that flickered through the more disjointed Melt Away, with a pining chorus that sticks.
On Hyper Romance, Jadu Heart sound like they’ve found their voice—if not yet something significant to say. The points of reference for their songwriting shine so brightly that at times it threatens to overwhelm them, as with the Thom Yorke moment at the end of “Day by Day,” and their lyrics exhibit the same problems as on their first LP, which often relied heavily on rhyme and cliché. Despite the occasional striking line or memorable hook—like the disarming honesty of “I heard your friend call me a pig” on the prickly romantic duet “Walk the Line”—many images in these songs are ones you’ve seen before. Take this uninspiring couplet from “Caroline”: “A rolling stone, whose moss has grown and grown/A broken home, no love lives here no more.”
Towards the end of the record, on the title track, the band sample Streetwise, the 1984 documentary about homeless youth living in Seattle. While the emotive snippets work well within the whorl of warm synth notes and metallic found sound, the overall effect is one of nostalgia for its own sake. The film is a familiar sample, used by bands including the Avalanches and How to Dress Well in the past, and the question of how its tragic mutterings pertain to this record from a Bristol-based psych-pop duo goes unanswered. Though they’ve removed their literal masks, there’s still a sense that Jadu Heart are trying on different costumes, trying to figure out which one captures who they really are.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.