Warpaint, Los Angeles-based mistresses of the art-rock slow jam, have made a sideways swerve on their third album. Feeling hemmed in by their heavily overdubbed sound, their intention here was to capture their live show’s propulsiveness, which they have done, to an extent: the single New Song and the title track are by some way the most immediate things they have yet recorded. Get past the wind chimes-and-piano chorale that opens the latter, in fact, and you’re in powerpop territory; elsewhere, the churning electronic rhythms that power Whiteout and So Good could, at a pinch, be described as baggy. In the main, though, beats are secondary to impressionistic delicacy: lyrics drift past teasingly, like semi-formed thoughts (“Don’t wanna defend myself,” singer Theresa Wayman seems to murmur on Don’t Wanna; defend herself from what, we never learn), while the overdubbed guitars on Don’t Let Go feel like layers of gauze. Many shades of grey and fragments of sound have gone into Heads Up, which is much greater than the sum of its parts.
