Chastity Belt - Live Laugh Love

All surface indications are that Chastity Belt have retained their penchant for quietly sardonic humour on this fifth album, their first since 2019; both the title and the artwork, on which an inflatable dancing tube man looms large, suggest that a group who called their first album ‘No Regrets’ and maintain that they began playing together as a bit of a joke are still very much into having a laugh. However, spend a little longer with this four-piece, now based in Seattle, and you realise that they are experts in skipping lightly over deep waters, with vocalist Julia Shapiro’s insightful lyricism and droll delivery sharply capturing a feeling of millennial malaise.

The subtle unfurling of their musical parameters on their last album, ‘Chastity Belt’, is expanded significantly on ‘Live Laugh Love’, perhaps owing to it being recorded across three sessions in three consecutive calendar years, as well as the sharing of vocal duties across all four members. There’s some continuation of the woozy, sun-drenched territory first visited on ‘Chastity Belt’, especially on opener ‘Hollow’, but elsewhere, there is quiet rolling drama (‘I-90 Bridge’), subtle deployment of scuzzy, college rock guitars (‘Clumsy’ and ‘It’s Cool’) and exercises in experimentation, such as the shapeshifting, freeform ‘Blue’, a track with a quintessentially Chastity Belt message - “I’ve got to get off the internet / out of the blue.” By opening up their songwriting process, the band have managed to carve out an even more singular sound. The possibilities from here seem endless.