Nation of Language

Hot on the heels of 2020’s debut ‘Introduction, Presence’, synth-trio Nation of Language return with another heart-stamped love-letter to formative influences, sermons to sound-pioneers and eulogies to the emancipatory power of pop music. If that album criminally got lost in the global post-clampdown kerfuffle, then ‘A Way Forward’ signals a clearer path to critical mass seduction.

Sick of scrimped together stand-alone singles and dreaming of an album as artefact, members Ian Devaney and Aidan Noéll tied the matrimonial knot, but, decided to forego the usual toaster, weighing scales or matching bath robes as gifts and instead ploughed any donations into the debut recording (ably assisted by Abe Seiferth. ‘A Way Forward’ splits the desk-duties 50/50 with Nick Milhiser)). For richer, not poorer.

On this second release, (Michael Sue-Poi completes the triumvirate) again, obvious audible touchstones are Depeche Mode (’A Fractured Mind’ captures the simplistic wonderment of the Vince Clarke era) and OMD (‘Miranda’ has the elegiac undercurrent of 1980’s ‘Joan of Arc’), with traces of the tech-Teutonic motorik maestros Cluster and Kraftwerk (‘The Grey Commute’ expertly embodies the hy-perpetual metronomic (e)motion of both groups).

However, there are also to these ears (un)conscious echoes of late 1980s electro-industrialists England’s Manufacture and Belgium’s situation-art-ists à;GRUMH...

However, such revocations are not the only praise-worthy feelings and thoughts about this album. Veering between pure bliss-pop to cerebral claustrophobia and running the gamut of identity crises to gut-wrenching teeth-clenching exhortations, all sensory fibres are stimulated, every nerve-ending activated.

Lyrically lovelorn, forlorn and well-worn, these are lived-in vignettes of stolen glances, fleeting chances and upfront romances. Heartfelt dances that achingly swoon. Nation of Language are showing you the way ahead, close your eyes, open your ears, gulp and quietly … follow.