In the spirit of plunderphonic predecessors like the Avalanches and the Books, Sorry takes a cut-up approach to pop culture. “Jetplane” flips a Guided By Voices hook, some dial tone, and a taut breakbeat into a frenzied battle cry: “Arrest me! I’m a hot freak!” On “Waxwing,” backed by a Twilight Zone synth and industrial feedback, Lorenz transforms Toni Basil’s coquettish one-hit wonder “Mickey” into something altogether more salacious. “Love Posture” could be the band’s answer to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” the bass humming as Lorenz sings about the things lovers do on all fours. (And that’s not to overlook the band’s 2022 song actually called “Closer,” an emo slow burn with decidedly fewer references to animalistic abandon.)
COSPLAY revels in distinctly human flaws: The false start on the theatrical piano number “Magic;” Lorenz’s vocal rasp on the rowdy “Today Might Be the Hit;” the way her voice loses and finds the beat on the profane, Elton John-indebted “Candle.” A porous mix of influences and imperfections, the album captures the uneasy sensation of grasping for something concrete in a world that stubbornly defers meaning.
Sorry falters when they try to nail down specifics. A tossed off line about reactionary Japanese philosopher and poet Yukio Mishima on “Into The Dark” and anesthetized single-word repetitions on “Echo” threaten to flatten Sorry into just another group of Zoomer nihilists dreaming of extinction. But this being a Sorry record, a few seconds of a discordant guitar or a percussive clash will shift the mood again.
It might be tempting to compare Sorry, a brash duo equally versed in shitposts and postmodernity, to an American counterpart like 100 gecs. Both groups delight in muddying cultural hierarchies; both make art that is simultaneously an homage and an affront to the 21st century’s “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion,” as Fisher once wrote.
