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Jul 15, 2015 Web Exclusive By Kate Bennett

Girls Names aren’t exactly a band that shy away from reinvention. They wrote off their debut album of rackety surf pop as a disaster before it had even been released, calling it Dead to Me and moving swiftly on to the hypnotic, Sisters of Mercy-indebted post punk that appeared on their follow up, the aptly-named The New Life. Girls Names’ recent single, “Zero Triptych,” isn’t featured on their upcoming third album, Arms Around a Vision, but was released as a 12-inch. It sees the Belfast band shifting along the sonic spectrum once more: it’s a fuller, Krautrock-inflected wall of sound that’s distinctly comparable to the likes of TOY, The Horrors, and Telegram, their London-based comrades across the Irish Sea. It’s more energetic than we heard the band on The New Life, two minutes of pulsing, swelling synths diving into a driving rhythm section overlaid with wiry, incisive guitars—and it keeps on building right to the end, before dissolving into a swamp of feedback and synth drones. At 11 minutes, “Zero Triptych” is considerably longer than anything Girls Names have released before, and yet it never drags or feels indulgent, zipping along with such momentum and vigor that the listener can’t help but be sucked into its slipstream. (www.toughloverecords.com/girlsnames)

Author rating: 8/10