XIU XIU - IGNORE GRIEF

Released: 17/03/23 (delayed from 03/03/23)

Xiu Xiu have been going for over two decades now, and they continue to confound expectations with every remarkable album, destroying quaint notions of typology at every turn. To call Xiu Xiu ‘experimental’ doesn’t really help in describing the wild heterogeneity at the band’s core, and so I’ll just say that they’re the kind of band that Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth would namecheck in an interview, as if to say, “I may write pop music now, but do you remember when I did that ‘glitch-opera’ concept album abut Don Henley?’ 

Anyway, Xiu Xiu’s new LP Ignore Grief is a remarkable work of ecstatic, and often brutal, collage-noise, with half of the album being an abstract exploration of the early rock and roll ‘Teen Tragedy’ genre. People keep banging on about the merits of AI pop, but until the machines become sentient they’ll never come close to writing anything as beautifully unhinged as a Xiu Xiu record.