Maddy Costa 

Daughter: If You Leave – review

Daughter's songs are atmospheric, but feel calculatedly so and suffocating, writes Maddy Costa
  
  

Daughter photographed in a wood
Daughter … music for troubled souls and broken hearts Photograph: PR

London trio Daughter make music for troubled souls and broken hearts – but there's no consolation in their debut album, only an echo of misery. The opening song, Winter, has frontwoman Elena Tonra singing of lovers "drifting apart like two sheets of ice", while desolate guitars skitter and slide, as though attempting to skate back to lost tenderness. Youth, first released on an EP two years ago, alternates sounds fragile as a spider's web with blasts of trebly guitar and crashing drums, both hushed by Tonra's caustic line: "If you're in love then you are the lucky one/ Because most of us are bitter over someone." Tomorrow sways and sighs with the desperate thought of loss; in Human, the squealing guitar sounds like an animal's cries. These songs are atmospheric, but feel calculatedly so, especially set against the overwrought poetry of Tonra's lyrics. "I'm a suffocator," she recognises on Smother: there is space in these songs but no oxygen, no air.

 

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