CHILD’S POSE build little worlds. We’re emerging from a long slumber and they’re inviting you in! This is New Wave for Now People, lush, warm vignettes of start-stop punk-pop, played by members of SAUNA YOUTH, WOOLF, SARCASM, and NEKRA. Sop’s fluid — almost taunting! — vocal delivery is at once dark and jubilant, punctuated by instrumentation that reinvents itself over and over, twisting and turning songs that reward repeat listens. Limited to 400 copies on black vinyl, accompanied by a Risograph printed insert and housed in a full color jacket.


Our take: Third release from this London band featuring members of Woolf, Nekra, Sauna Youth, Snob, Sarcasm, and many, many others I’m sure, released on the Thrilling Living label, which has brought a lot of great music across the pond over the last few years. Child’s Pose reminds me of singles from the first few years of Rough Trade Records and like-minded bands like Alternative TV, not because they recreate the surface trappings of that era, but because they seem to come from a similar place in the world. Groups like ATV, the Raincoats, and Young Marble Giants were a little ramshackle, but what they may have lacked in technical precision, they more than made up for with an exciting sense of discovery that pervaded their music. It’s exciting for me as a listener, making it feel like the creators are inventing the song as they’re performing it. Of course they aren’t—at least not in the way of jazz improvisation—but it feels like it. These bands—Child’s Pose included—might even sound naïve if they weren’t so smart, even intellectual. Another way Child’s Pose resembles those earlier bands is that there’s a strong sense of songcraft in their music, which offers no shortage of earworm melodies. If you enjoy the older stuff I mentioned or contemporary bands like Woolf, Frau, or Scrap Brain, you shouldn’t miss Eyes to the Right.