Mandy, Indiana: Urgh review - grimy, thrashing, purgative attack on injustice is the year's first great album

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Full album stream (click the text)

Label: Sacred Bones Records – SBR373LPC3, Dinked Edition – No. 379
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Numbered, Stereo, Yellow & Magenta Splatter
Country: UK
Released: 6 Feb 2026
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Experimental

(Sacred Bones)

The Manchester/Berlin band’s second album refines their industrial-club sound, as physical and hyper-detailed as being dragged under by a wave and admiring the flotsam

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/feb/05/mandy-indiana-urgh-review-grimy-thrashing-purgative-attack-on-injustice-is-the-years-first-great-album


Embracing extremes … from left: Scott Fair, Valentine Caulfield, Simon Catling and Alex Macdougall AKA Mandy, Indiana. Photograph: Charles Gall

Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023’s I’ve Seen a Way, in a Peak District cave known as the Devil’s Arse, although budget restrictions meant they had to settle for one day in Somerset’s Wookey Hole caverns. The Manchester/Berlin-based four-piece’s new album, Urgh, was written in what they’ve called “an intense residency at an eerie studio house” near Leeds; at the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall were both undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield chants about personal and societal horrors in her native French, impounding themselves in such a place might have seemed unnecessarily masochistic.

Mandy, Indiana seem to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremes. Caulfield has often reiterated her (accurate) stance that “if you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention”; her incantatory lyrics to new song Dodecahedron indict complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the grievous state of things, the band’s short-circuiting assault may hold about as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers in a live socket – but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the imperative to push beyond merely observing injustice to viscerally embody its head-spinning force. Otherwise, what’s the point?

That instinct places them alongside Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, Moin, Kim Gordon and Gilla Band, the latter arguably the forebears of all this. (The band’s Daniel Fox mixed Mandy, Indiana’s debut and co-produced Urgh.) Each of these acts has disassembled rock down to its mechanical bones, Frankenstein-ing it with the DNA of techno and trap to make it seem shockingly new. In this grimy, purgative company, where everyone is mutating in a different enough direction for each act to remain compelling, Mandy, Indiana’s distinctiveness comes from their limber rhythms. Powered by Macdougall’s incredible versatility and Caulfield’s staccato delivery, many of their songs are alive with an addictively free, bodily lope, which is often stalled by squalling winds and thrashing noise: threat lurking around every corner.

Urgh, their first album for Sacred Bones, has a few obvious differences from their debut: Cursive’s percussive churn redirects into rudimentary electro appealingly reminiscent of Paul Hardcastle’s 19, and US rapper and kindred spirit Billy Woods adds guest verses to Sicko!, sounding typically unruffled as the track lurches queasily between gargled fuzz and pointillist artillery fire. But the main evolution is into a harder, thicker sound, a contrast of extreme physicality and hyper-detailing that feels like getting dragged under by a strong wave and marvelling at the flotsam caught up in its swell. It’s impressively hard to tell where guitarist Scott Fair ends and synth player Simon Catling begins. Magazine’s ferocious peak hits like a pile-driver that pauses to recharge only to renew its obliterating attack, while Macdougall’s drumming evokes shuddering glass jars one minute, booming Japanese taiko drums the next. Standout Ist Halt So (the shrugging German phrase meaning “that’s just how it is”) seems to pack about four different movements into as many minutes – taunting, staticky, howling, blizzard-like chill – and has a Nine Inch Nails-worthy way with making the mechanical sleazy and earwormy, to disgusting, brilliant ends.

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