No Rules Sandy

An album that never fails to take you off guard with each new song. The end result of that frenetic time in California shows how a change of pace can create magic; this is Sylvan Esso’s best album yet.

Longer songs are punctuated by studio chatter, voicemails, birdsong and other ambient sounds, lending the whole project an artfully informal intimacy. [Sep 2022, p.32]

Sylvan Esso’s fourth offering doesn’t dwell in solitude, despair, or desire for escape. Instead, it resides in what is left after the darkness clears: tighter connections to the surrounding world and the people who populate it. To borrow Meath and Sanborn’s own words, the album is a bold and defiant example of what could happen when you walk back into the world, “wilder and stranger” than before.

For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.

Throughout No Rules Sandy, Meath’s lyricism remains observed and witty, with double entendres and eccentric phrasing abound.

Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward.

It's a free-wheeling surge of glitchy beats and fizzing, ravey energy, with the wobbly UK garage underpinnings of Echo Party a notable standout. [Oct 2022, p.86]