Source: Album Artwork
Oxfordshire quartet Evarose are hailed as pioneers of the UK’s all-female pop-punk movement. Invisible Monsters, due out June 24th, is the band’s long-awaited debut album, released independently with the help of a fan-funded Pledge campaign. The album’s first single ‘Provoke Me’ was released in February this year, and earned the band an impressive amount of critical acclaim. Invisible Monsters depicts the band’s ever-growing confidence, talent, and ability to be heard in this saturated genre.
Evarose kick off their debut with ‘Routes‘, a symphonic track rammed with traditional pop-punk themes. Danniker Webber demonstrates her impressive vocal strength from the start, sailing her way through ‘Glitch‘, ‘Quicksand‘, and ‘Provoke Me.’ It’s when we get to ‘Glitch’, however, that the band’s instrumentation falls flat. It’s true that for their debut record you wouldn’t expect Evarose’s sound to be perfectly polished, but there’s a staggering lack of consistency between parts in ‘Glitch’ that pushes the track out of sync with the rest of the album. It could be an ambitious, stylistic move, but the payoff is massively misplaced.
Much of Invisible Monsters sits so safely in the pop-punk genre that the album does, by ‘The Cause and The Cure’, become incredibly repetitive. ‘Telephonic‘, ‘I’m Sorry‘, ‘Someone Else To Blame’ and sombre interlude track ‘Breathing Space’ are the few exceptions. Slow burner ‘Telephonic’ is the best of the bunch, proving that these simpler, commercially structured tracks are what Evarose do best.
When speaking of the album, Webber expressed how Invisible Monsters contains conflicting lyrical themes: “you get songs about feeling crazy ,nd stupid and acting before thinking and songs written more recently like ‘Telephonic’, which was inspired by a transitional time for me; I met someone and was a little pessimistic about how a human could be so good.” This lyrical evolution is one of Invisible Monsters’ most compelling features; within the album alone we witness the band mature.
‘I Know You Know’ is where Evarose really come into their own. The track is injected with soft, ethereal vocals, melting seamlessly into carefully constructed instrumentals. All in all, Invisible Monsters is a conflicted debut. The album perhaps lacks ambition, but Evarose has an incredible amount of potential. It’s no wonder Invisible Monsters has been so long awaited.
