Dream Wife are a very modern rock band: they sing about queer love, miscarriage and misogyny; they work with an all-female recording team; and they have a podcast. And yet the London-based trio’s music recalls lost nights at midweek indie clubs and Karen O’s fingerless gloves. The follow-up to their self-titled 2018 debut continues to blend 2000s guitar bands with yelping riot grrrl while sounding surprisingly new, stripping back their earlier post-punk atmospherics to bring Icelandic singer Rakel Mjöll’s storytelling to the fore.
They career through a wide range of moods – coquettish, horny, craving approval, irony – with a zeal you rarely hear in other bands. Occasionally those stories can come across as a little juvenile, but where they lack finesse (and, indeed, it’s great to hear a punk band that still sounds like one, the edges unsmoothed), they make up for in ambition. Old Flame is a smouldering, Robyn-inspired lament for lost love; the title track is a tantrum about wanting to make out; and the album ends with After the Rain, a moving pro-choice piano ballad. “Serve it, smash it, win it, own it”, they pout on electroclash-esque single Sports! An exuberant racket.
