Warpaint - Radiate Like This

There’s a specific vocabulary of adjectives that tends to follow Warpaint around: bewitching, hypnotic, enveloping. Though, at times, it can paint Theresa Wayman, Emily Kokal, Jenny-Lee Lindberg and Stella Mozgawa as four musical sirens, luring unsuspecting listeners to their lair on the rocks, the simultaneous underlying thrust is that the LA quartet are, at their heart, an album band: one whose interwoven textures and palettes beg for quality time spent with them, for the listener to submit and submerge. On long-awaited fourth album ‘Radiate Like This’ (their first in six years) this much is true. But while the classic Warpaint tropes - clever, heady interplay; four voices weaving as one - are present and correct, this time the more icy edges are rounded off in favour of softness and a nurturing sense of femininity. Lead single ‘Champion’ arrives as a gentle, undulating ode to self belief, while ‘Melting’ channels an almost ‘80s melodic line into a call to drop your armour. ‘Stevie’ sounds like Unknown Mortal Orchestra with perfect girl group harmonies, ‘Like Sweetness’ bathes in its refrain (“I’ll wait forever/ Know that you’re not alone”), and even the darker rhythmic tension of ‘Hips’ is offset by a powerful sense of womanhood. Growing up and embracing their next stages of life, it’s a lesson in how to evolve gracefully.