Pop music is trapped in a funhouse mirror. Borrowing has never been more in vogue. Halloween is now one expensive, unsettling lookalike contest in which celebrities pose as other, usually deceased, celebrities. The song that currently holds this decade’s record for most weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart is an almost word-for-word interpolation of a hit from the first Bush administration. The recent past haunts our Instagram feeds and Spotify algorithms with the disturbing possibility that there really is nothing new under the sun. Repurposing a phrase from the Marxist scholar Franco Berardi, the late critic Mark Fisher referred to this phenomenon as “the slow cancellation of the future.” This is the dark side of nostalgia, the notion that the march of progress—whether in social movements or music—has slowed to a halt.
Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen have made a home in this uncanny valley. Over their nearly decade-long career, the two primary songwriters for London’s Sorry have embraced the tension between past and present, shining a floodlight on their references rather than burying them in the mix. Across two albums and a collection of EPs, the group—which also includes Lincoln Barrett on drums, Campbell Baum on bass guitar, and Marco Pini on electronics and production—has nabbed song titles from Oasis and refashioned lyrics from Tears For Fears and Death Cab for Cutie in their wry, neurotic image.
On their third album, fittingly titled COSPLAY, Sorry try on new personas—UGK MC, folk troubadour, dark ambient chanteuse—without the veil of irony they once used to keep listeners at a remove. Unpredictable, sensuous, and slightly spooky, COSPLAY captures the disquieting sounds of a foregone future.
