Daughter – Stereo Mind Game

After a seven-year break, we’re invited back into Daughter’s beautifully sombre world with Stereo Mind Game, a dazzling record that finds the trio slightly more optimistic, slightly more resolute, but defiantly themselves. The record’s sound is immediately familiar, sitting on an intersection of pretty, sad and hostile. They’ve opted for much of the same instrumentation: reverberating guitars, ticking percussion and dream-like synths, which, along with Elena Tonra’s tenderly melancholic vocals, create their distinctive, atmospheric sound. 

But there’s more richness, more vitality, with the addition of choral backing vocals and string and brass ensembles. Elsewhere, glitchy voice notes from friendly voices overlay the music. The effect is that Daughter’s music sounds warmer, and a little less lonely. 

That’s not to say it doesn’t bleed; at times we are enveloped by that signature despair as the music grapples with heartbreak, addiction and personal crises. As Tonra murmurs on Junkmail: ‘The pain never stops’. But Daughter’s rare power is in their ability to translate that pain into music and words that have the power to understand and console. More so than its predecessors, Stereo Mind Game faces that anguish head-on, and by doing so, finds resolution.

Listen to: Dandelion, Future Lover, To Rage