Shygirl – ‘Swallow!’ review: a dreamy, guitar-heavy return from the pop experimentalist
Following the slippery, futuristic club sounds of her 2022 debut album ‘Nymph’, Shygirl’s second album ‘Swallow!’ has been touted as a step back in time to guitar-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium indie rock and pop. It’s essentially the pitch Dua Lipa failed to deliver on with ‘Radical Optimism’ and Charli XCX nailed on ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ – but from Shygirl it feels especially intriguing. In the decade since her grittily seductive debut single ‘Want More’, the London artist has made a name for herself in experimental music while flirting with commercial pop, but hasn’t given much of a previous indication she is also really into The Cardigans. ‘Swallow!’ succeeds in bringing moody live guitars into her shapeshifting sound without it feeling bolted on.
A maximalist record co-produced with Karma Kid, ‘Swallow!’ densely combines sounds which can be linked to the 33-year-old’s formative years in the late-1990s and early-2000s. ‘Alyse’ samples Colleen’s 2006 track ‘Cello Song’ in a big beat banger which recalls, down to the vocal “whoops”, The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. There’s a hint of that big beat sound in the deep, groaning intro to ‘Luvli’ before it breaks into a pop song with more than a hint of ‘Overload’ by Sugababes. ‘Altar’ bursts from its opening distorted strings into a lush, woozy trip-hop track. It is a rich brew of millennial pop references, and the genre-hopping brings a fun, freewheeling irreverence to it.
Within this, the special sauce of those live guitars – introduced in the baggy, sun-drenched ‘Lucky (hymn)’ – gradually becomes more prominent. ‘Déjà Vu’ is a surging breakbeat track which entirely changes in tone as a finger-plucked guitar is added and taken away, mirrored in the pitch-shifting on Shygirl’s deadpan vocals. ‘Sublime’ is punctuated by some brash, foot-on-the-monitor lead guitar riffs. The brilliance of the album is in showing how the introduction of those indie rock elements can, amid all the twists through different kinds of electronic music, throw a different lens on everything.
However, that musical complexity is disappointingly absent in the album’s thematic or emotional dimensions. Ahead of creating ‘Swallow!’, Shygirl has spoken about having entered a very happy romantic relationship with actor George Smale, and this is an album of nothing but love songs. “I travel on with you into these brighter days”, she claims on ‘Sublime’, and on ‘Eternal she hopes that “in these whispers love will go on forever”. There is a rather one-dimensional, woozy contentment to all her reflections on love, which misses her usual sensuality and wit.
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On ‘Swallow!’, Shygirl again shows she is able to combine genre-hopping experimentation with big pop songwriting, and convincingly expands her sound world in an album even more exciting and dynamic than her debut. But to make it a real classic, she’ll need to bring that scope and ambition back to her lyrical reflections.
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