Label: True Panther / Dirty Hit
Released: 2nd May 2025
Model/Actriz’s ‘Pirouette’ spins like a ballet dancer wielding a chainsaw – precise yet dangerous, graceful but ready to tear everything apart. On their second album, the Brooklyn quartet has crafted a masterwork that flits between industrial aggression and pop vulnerability, never losing its balance even as it threatens to spiral out of control.
The record opens with ‘Vespers’, a dark dancefloor meditation that sets the tone for what’s to come. It’s immediately clear this isn’t the same band that delivered last year’s jagged debut ‘Dogsbody’. Where that record was all sharp edges, ‘Pirouette’ finds beauty in the spaces between the chaos.
‘Cinderella’ struts through the 1980s with murderous intent, transforming a fairy tale into something simultaneously seductive and sinister. The industrial stomp of ‘Poppy’ showcases the band’s masterful layering, while ‘Diva’ could share playlist space with Korn without breaking a sweat.
Even the album’s lighter moments carry weight. The spoken-word of ‘Headlights’ evolves into a deceptively deep exploration of adolescent longing, while ‘Audience’ transforms club music textures into something more intimate and essential. ‘Ring Road’ is pure adrenaline, its fuzzy percussion threatening to run off the rails before pulling back from the brink.
Throughout, vocalist Cole Haden performs a balancing act worthy of the album’s title, one moment vulnerable and confessional, the next transformed into a theatrical force of nature. The production work of Seth Manchester captures every facet of this duality, giving equal weight to both whispers and screams.
But what makes ‘Pirouette’ truly exceptional is how it weaves personal narrative into its industrial-pop tapestry. This is a story of growth told through distortion pedals and dance beats, each track adding another layer to its exploration of identity and transformation. By the time the contemplative ‘Baton’ brings things to a close, the album has completed its revolution from darkness to light and back again.
This is what it sounds like when art school meets fight club. Model/Actriz have created something that works both as pure physical release and intellectual exercise. It’s a record about growing up that never grows old, about losing control while maintaining perfect form. Like the dance move it’s named for, ‘Pirouette’ is all about momentum and precision, about spinning fast enough to blur the lines between genres while remaining perfectly, impossibly balanced.
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