Microshift

Despite the album’s title, Microshift represents not a minor step up but a gigantic stride. On an immediate level the songs sound much bigger, cleaner and more confident. Every component is crisper, from the sharpened hi-hat to MJ’s scrubbed-up vocals.

Microshift clearly demonstrates that Hookworms are operating on a new level.

In some ways, Microshift is Hookworms’ equivalent of that album [Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion]. A band with an established sound embracing electronics and pop songwriting like never before, but managing to do so without it feeling remotely forced, and finding their biggest audience yet as a result.

You would have to search far and wide to find a transformation in an already great band that works as well as this. The key to it all is the vulnerability that MJ is now willing to put on display, giving the newfound musical incisiveness the emotional fuel it needs to really fly. If this isn’t one of the albums of the year then we must be in for something special.

It's the beginning of the 2018 and talk of albums of the year right now is obviously churlish, but on Microshift we're hearing a band hitting their sweet spot with such an effortless swagger that we're sure this is a contender.

Over an impossibly difficult three years, the band have learnt to fuse the seismic nature of their sound with an emotional transparency that elevates them as a band hugely.

Microshift finds Hookworms drawing a line under their history and taking their first step on a new adventure. They’ve not put a foot wrong yet.

Their new way of constructing songs and the more open nature of the sound have done nothing to blunt their emotional impact, and Microshift ends up being just as powerful and cathartic as previous works while being richer and more musically satisfying.

While ‘The Hum’ proved a logical step forward for Hookworms, ‘Microshift’ pays little attention to the script, and is all the more thrilling for it.

Reborn through anguish, Hookworms are alive and otherworldly as ever.

Expanding your sound without losing your edge is a tough trick to pull off, but Hookworms manage it with inner space to spare. [Mar 2018, p.111]

An unusual yet utterly coherent balance of tenderness and euphoria, vulnerability and invention. [Mar 2018, p.96]

A wonderful record. [Mar 2018, p.30]

[An] emotionally open and exploratory shapeshift.

Immersive and lyrically heavy, but not without radiancy and light, Hookworms' ability to turn desperation into euphoria is a quality that makes this album a liberating, often healing, experience.

The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.