SWALLOW!’s late-’90s signposting lands nearly two years on from FKA twigs’ Eusexua, undebatable harbinger of this current moment, as Troye Sivan sources Will Orbit dupes and After churn out algorithm-gaming trip-slop. With the same meals traveling up and down the food chain, songs like “Sublime” and “Eternal” have to fight over scraps. Shygirl and her collaborators get ahead of the pack when they push into the greener pastures of big beat and IDM. “Luvli” flashes its warning colors in Prodigy red and yellow; “Submit” is dance-punk chewed up in Richard D. James’ pearly incisors; “Déjà Vu” proposes Shy as a sort of grown PinkPantheress. “We were made for each other,” she purrs, a sweet nothing instantly turned into a threat by the pitched-down goblin on her tail.
In press materials accompanying SWALLOW!, Shygirl stated her initial goal “to make indie music,” a nebulous designation clarified somewhat by her secondary directive: “I think we need to do some full band stuff.” The bonkers electronics, i.e. the best bits on the album, came later—a surprise to learn, considering the guitars are mostly processed beyond recognition anyway and the chamber arrangements, while lovely, end up serving as filigree. Karma Kid and Casey MQ put in noble work capturing the live instruments in hyperreal fidelity—“Lucky[Hymn]” offers a glimpse of a Lilith Fair on Mars—but those touches feel like they belong to a predetermined version of SWALLOW!, as opposed to the spontaneous (and better) album it became.
“When I made ‘Lucky,’ I sat in the room with the mic,” Shygirl recently told The Guardian. “I didn’t write anything down, I just said how I felt.” Consider that song a test of a listener’s open-heartedness. Some will hear trite, albeit period-accurate, wellness speak; others—those who’ve studied the mystic art of manifestation, perhaps—will hear a mantra: “I’m so lucky/Don’t you know it’s true/So lucky in the things I do.” There may be something to it; in the last two years, on top of finding love, Shygirl opened for Charli xcx’s first arena tour and was selected by Madonna to appear in her Confessions II short film. (Spot her in the bathroom stall with Arca and Richard E. Grant.) Later on the album, she demands, “Can you decide, to live the life you like?”, her voice reverberating with determination through the toothy Madchester bass riff.
