We are very honoured to be able to bring you an exclusive first listen to the new album self-titled from Welsh indie giants Sock, released through Bubblewrap Collective.
Hailing from Cardiff, Sock are adept at infusing their music with a psychedelic hue, filtering tracks with melody and anthems that have a bright and sparkling shimmer. These are perfect pop songs with a melancholy thread running through them and harmonies that paint the skies with heavenly colours.
The album is a collection of jangling pop gems that has an airiness and lightness.
Opening track ‘With You’ is a case in point – layered vocals float in the ether above shimmering guitars with a bright and bubbling undercurrent. Single ‘Accidently High’ has gorgeous guitars – crystalline and sharp – with soft velvet vocals creating an mesmerising fugue, gentle and calming.
Pounding drums and harmonics herald the upbeat thrum of ‘Change Your Mind’ with celestial melodies that create a cinematic vista of endless horizons, a pulse quickening pace. This track signifies a heavier sound with a touch of a barbed wire spine in the guitars.
Sock have mastered a distinctive reverb-soaked sound to their guitars – a sound that drapes around your ears like ear muffs. ‘Gone Are The Days’ seduces you with this almost Hawaiian steel guitar sound that suddenly counter punches with a threshing wall of heavy guitars in an anthemic blast.
The crisp guitars in ‘Quick and Slow’ provide a distant bed for the layered harmonies that coast through the sky with a dreamy fugue. ‘Interlude Final’, as the title suggests, provides a quiet ambient sonic instrumental break of natural sounds and synths – like a warm sonic bath before bedtime. ‘Pick And Choose’ continues with dreamy vocals and layered harmonies – a hypnotic steady pace over splashing, dappling guitars.
‘Tango’ casts aside the sleepy fugue with a pop-laden high stepping trot and a driving rhythm and a psychedelic haze. ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ drifts the listener back into a dreamy atmospheric world with a heavier anthemic chorus as a contrast. Final track ‘Waiting’ sends us off to a quite and reflective place filled with cotton wool clouds, gently drifting across the skies before launching onto a psychedelic whirlwind – a sonic eddy in the slipstream.
Written during the pandemic, this is an album that captures a delicious sense of languorous haziness, enveloping us in the security of soft and gentle harmonies – sometimes shredded and rent apart by musical interludes that toss and turn us but gently and inevitably return us to the warm embrace of sparkling vocals and guitars.
‘Sock’ is out this week and available to download and stream through all the usual sites. You can get a vinyl copy here.
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