The whistle. That is what gets people first, and you can hear why. It opens A Kiss From A Mother like the cold open of a film nobody asked for, half spaghetti western, half saloon brawl, before the song collapses into something feral and danceable. Marmozets have been gone for seven years. They come back not by recreating their twenties but by kicking the door clean off its hinges.
CO.WAR.DICE. is the sound of a band that has lived since the last record. Becca Bottomley and Jack Bottomley became parents. Will Bottomley left. The four-piece that remains sounds tighter, more concentrated, pointed at something specific. The math-rock contortions that defined The Weird and Wonderful Marmozets have mostly gone. Groove arrived in their place. Hooks. A weird, unstable confidence that flickers between snarl and surrender, sometimes mid-bar.
Becca’s voice carries it. She still screams like she means it, still pushes into that blood-curdling upper register, but there is something controlled underneath now, less interested in the spectacle of its own range. On Swear I’m Alive she sounds genuinely haunted, the verses pulled tight and shadowy before the chorus opens into something wider, almost cinematic. The lockdown bones of the song show through. Meditation, yoga, religion, sunlight on a wall, a memory of a beach. She sings it like someone trying to talk herself back into being alive, and mostly succeeding, and the gap between those two states is where the song lives.
Cut Back is the one that will detonate live. Arcade synths, glitchy guitar, four-to-the-floor drums from Josh MacIntyre that refuse to let the song breathe. Jack’s guitar has been run through something that strips out its edges, blurs it against the synth patches until the distinction stops being interesting. The song doesn’t build toward anything. It just keeps arriving.
Then Dandy arrives and the whole record tilts. Acoustic guitar, voice, nothing else really. Jack’s playing here is the quiet centre of an album that mostly refuses quiet. The song was written almost a decade ago, apparently in the middle of a stressful household moment, and you can feel its age in the best way. It sounds like a younger version of the band reaching forward.
Flowers goes maximalist and theatrical, Josh’s drums crashing through Becca’s vocals while she moves from fragile to venomous inside a single chorus. It belongs in the lineage of Captivate You and Run With The Rhythm, denser than either, less linear, more willing to fall apart and rebuild itself in real time.
The title splits in half on the page. CO.WAR.DICE. War sitting inside cowardice. Becca apparently got fixated on historical war dice, generals rolling for outcomes, handing real lives over to chance. That image runs through the record without ever being said out loud. You Want The Truth mocks conspiracy culture in under three minutes, bratty and fast. New York leans into garage-rock swagger and pulls it off most of the time, though the chorus flirts with something more disposable than the rest of the album allows. The Ting Tings comparison has been made. It is not entirely unfair.
Sam MacIntyre’s bass keeps the frantic stuff from spinning out. He grounds Like Last Night, gives Running With The Sun In Your Eyes its dance-punk push, that Death From Above 1979 thing people keep pointing at. Sunlight imagery shows up everywhere on this record. Beaches, warmth, the sun in your eyes. For a band that came up sounding like nervous breakdowns set to time signatures, it is striking how often this album reaches toward light, not as resolution, more like a direction they keep stumbling in.
Keep Going Darling closes things out at over seven minutes. Some people will say it overstays. The Nashville-tuned guitars in the final stretch, the whoops, the jangly half-mystical drift, it is the kind of ending that earns itself if you let it. Whether you do probably depends on what you were hoping to get back. The song doesn’t care either way. It just keeps going.
CO.WAR.DICE. is out now via Nettwerk Music Group.
Photo – Yoshitaka Kono
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