The music of the exiled four-piece has become heavier, with distorted guitars and desolate vocals

When we last heard at length from Lucidvox, with the 2020 album We Are, the band’s four members were living in Moscow, the breakout stars of a thriving post-punk scene that also boasted Glintshake, Shortparis, Inturist, and Gnoomes. The Russian invasion of Ukraine put an abrupt end to that as many of these bands scattered into exile; the four women who make up Lucidvox now live in different parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Their new album That’s What Remained has a wider sound than We Are — and it is understandably darker. Three years ago the band’s hard-driving psych-rock was recognisably in the same world as one of their key influences, the LA quartet Warpaint. Now the music has become heavier, Galla Gintovt’s guitars awash with fuzz and distortion, Alina Evseeva’s singing less glassy than desolate.

Their hermetic soundworld is opened up to other musicians and instruments. Dmitry Chesnov doubles Gintovt on guitars, Dasha Avramova sweetens some of the songs with violin and Timur Mizinov’s multi-tracked trumpets sound sometimes like a Balkan wedding, sometimes like a military band. Keyboards are now in the mix, thin and New Romantic at the start of “Naidiya”, or fat and arpeggiated on the title track, a feint into disco before the guitars take over.

The album’s most distinctive track is “Don’t Look Away”, an urgent bassline launching into guitars so loud and distorted Evseeva can barely be heard above them. “Even when the air is thick with fear,” she sings, “never betray, care for others/Even hands are sometimes no use . . . ” — and then the music stutters for a moment and the melody takes a Russian Orthodox cast. “We were told to be happy. We were told it’s good to obey . . . ” As the trumpets bray like hunting horns, the song falls into the sing-song cadences of a demented nursery rhyme before Nadya Samodurova’s drums and Anna Moskvitina’s bass lock into a groove over which the music roils. Via FT

‘That’s What Remained’ is released by Glitterbeat