“Not your carbon copy, baby.”
“Happy music with sad lyrics” is a powerful concept. Across cultures and contexts, we mostly agree on what constitutes a happy chord – concordant, approachable, bright, hopeful. Until the lyrics hit, you can be on cloud nine without a care in the world. But when they do, the atmosphere turns bittersweet and the real magic unfolds. Modern musicians must be their own endless fonts of happiness to endure the realities of being in a touring band, which only makes the choice to sing about the bad times more urgent. Based in the sunny south-west of the UK, rock band Soot Sprite conjure all the rain clouds on their debut album Wield Your Hope Like a Weapon. They are no strangers to sullen music, and a seven-year career has culminated in one of the finest albums the UK underground has generated this decade.
So what are these deliciously sad lyrics? Across the record and especially in its front half, singer and guitarist Elise Cook spells out her struggles and insecurities. Lead single “All My Friends Are Depressed” is a laundry list of reasons to be just that, juxtaposed against Soot Sprite’s smooth blend of rock, indie, and emo. Its chorus is almost exasperated: “change what you can, what you control / let the rest wash over you, and try not to fold”. It’s the adage of a therapist you were on a waiting list to speak to, who simply tells you to stop living within your troubles, and merely live beside them.
“Spectator” is about dragging a depression with you through life, and the sense of hopelessness that this entails. This wraps into Cook’s own sense of direction (“All I can do is sing / I’m just spectating / I’m not helping anything“). “Doomed” extends the misery all the way to catastrophizing on behalf of others (“Can’t you see the sky is falling down? / Nothing I can do can drown that sound”). As it ends on a too-rock-and-roll fill and chord, you can feel the band laughing at their collective situations, as if to say “hahaha, this sucks man”. Importantly, the lyrics across Wield Your Hope Like a Weapon avoid tired cynicism and woe-is-me emoisms. Cook’s words don’t sensationalise, and instead the misery feels shared and familiar, allowing every listener to feel sore.
The record’s production is fundamental to its dark-light duality. The band sits on the border of shoegaze, occupying in a space a little bigger than the studio. The guitars thread the needle between gripping delivery and velvety atmosphere. The placement of the drums really lets the fresh air in, and both guitar and rhythm clear the way for Cook’s fantastic vocals to ace every line. The rich bass also provides a pillow for the band to fall on, and the fairly recent addition of Abi Crisp on lead guitar completes the soundscape with plenty of little hooks and delayed solos.
And speaking of solos, these songs rock. The songwriting is straightforward, providing grounding for the lyrical content, yet sublime moves are made across the record. “Vicious Cycles” is delightfully dynamic, going from near silence to full fireworks mid-chorus. It’s where Crisp’s shred-gaze leads really shine. The spirited “Surprise Guilty Party” is Cook’s greatest moment as her vocals hit transcendent heights on the chorus. A few of the shorter songs hark back to the band’s earliest work, full of the rudimentary charm of bedroom pop. “Sunday” is a mini track that brings the walls of the room close and lets the guitars get all fuzzy and warm. The piano comes out on “Grip” whose dark lyrics play off against the otherwise upbeat track (“Breaking lightly / Only enough to cry when I’m alone”). More than leftover ideas, these songs deepen Soot Sprite’s character.
As lovely as it is to indulge, the pessimism is not endless on Wield Your Hope Like a Weapon. In fact, in its very first moments, the slow dancer “Days After Days” calls us to reject indifference – to the swirl of the news cycle, ongoing class war and climate collapse. Cook praises the sources of optimism we can find, particularly through protest movements (“They lay in the roads, lighten the load of heavy days after days”), and wills us “to be soft is a form of defence”. The subsequent lyrical gut punches that follow are so cutting due to this invitation. The track closes by crumpling itself into a ball, leaving the guitar and vocals to navigate alone. “Great Expectations” is a thorough dressing down of naysayers, and those who will find something negative to say no matter what you do (“Spinning with vitriol, making me feel small, fervently critical, yet hypocritical”). It’s a pivotal turning point for the album, as if to say that, if spite is what it takes to start you on the path to inner peace, so be it.
The title track is the real take-home lesson: “As long as there’s air to breathe, I’ll do anything just to show my teeth”. Embracing that hope that seemed so distant on the record’s first half, this time, it feels as though the sliver linings might be enough to live on. It’s hard to argue this is not the record’s strongest track, so powerful that the closer that follows, “Cautious Optimist”, is an acoustic number by necessity. It’s Cook’s solo moment to ponder what lies beyond this record’s cycle. What does life look like as she tries to put her own words into practice, To Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon? Are the trials of the modern world and music scene worth fighting through, and will the catharsis within her music be enough to sustain her?
Wield Your Hope Like a Weapon is an ultimate “happy music with sad lyrics” record, balancing hope and doubt. It screams maturity from all of its facets: flawless production and performances, resonant takes on the strife that is modern life, and a core message of hope that it knows is not easy to embrace.
9/10
Wield Your Hope Like a Weapon releases through Specialist Subject records on May 16th and can be pre-ordered here.