How much of the world’s suffering can one person take in? Tommy Lefroy keep coming back to that question on The Precariat. “Anomie” puts Grenfell Tower and the Golan Heights in the same song, and keeps returning to the fact that nobody knows the death toll. The song stays with what it means to watch from a distance, and so does much of the album.
Tommy Lefroy is the duo of Tessa Mouzourakis and Wynter Bethel. The album’s title combines “precarious” and “proletariat,” a term the pair came across while talking about the anxiety they and the people around them were feeling. They spent six years writing the record across Nashville, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Michigan and London. Some songs, including “Thief” and “Threat,” date back to 2019; the title and broader themes came later. Stephen Sesso co-produced with the band, with Mike Crossey as executive producer.
The political songs come at the album’s theme from different angles. Bethel has tied “Anomie” to Guy Standing’s writing on the precariat and the weakening of people’s ties to their communities. “Turbulence Over Canada” gives instability a physical presence: a low rumble evokes the jolt of a rough flight, so the title is about more than geography. “Slush Puppy” comes at consumer culture through satire. It’s the lightest moment on the record, and the joke lands. Mouzourakis and Bethel draw on books, art and history, but their songs still have to work as songs, with melodies that stay with you after the references have registered.
Two songs look at the expectations placed on women. “Angel in the House” brings Virginia Woolf’s 1931 speech Professions for Women into contact with contemporary trad-wife culture. A low, distorted guitar gives the song a rough edge, and near the end, fragments of Woolf’s speech meet modern language about traditional gender roles. “In paradise, war is prevented by mothers” takes a gentler approach. Its heavenly atmosphere sits beside a more complicated idea of surrender, which can mean letting go of control or yielding to a force that should be resisted. The duo tie the song to the women who came before them and let both meanings stand. The calm of the music makes the choices at its centre harder to settle.
The most intimate material comes when the band looks at itself. “All Things Forgiven” opens the album on vulnerability and the possibility of reconnecting with yourself, a personal starting point before the frame widens. “Vacuum” returns to the duo’s early days in London, when they were cut off from a wider music community with no guarantee the project would work. The image of building an empire in a vacuum carries a touch of self-mockery over real tenderness. “Thief” takes its time, with a jazz-leaning drum pattern loosening the verses. The bridge keeps fragments of the original demo and a filtered, distorted acoustic guitar, leaving the song’s earlier form audible rather than polishing it away. “Threat,” which Bethel has described as difficult to write and sing, ends with a guitar figure that lets in a little hope without pretending to resolve what came before.
The title track pulls these threads together. The duo have linked it to Bruce Springsteen’s complicated relationship with patriotism and to questions about American identity and decline. An ARP Omni synthesizer gives the verses a circling, helicopter-like quality. Toward the end, processed drums and strings combine with samples from elsewhere on the album and melodies from the duo’s 2021 EP Flight Risk. Side-chain processing sets the outro rocking like a pendulum, refusing a clean resolution.
There is a lot to carry in The Precariat. Its references ask for attention, and the songs move between private feeling and public events without pretending one can replace the other. It’s an outstanding debut for the group, and I look forward to hearing these songs in a room when they play Montreal. For now, the uncertainty remains throughout this record. So does the friendship at the centre of it.
The Precariat is out 23 October 2026 via Thirty Tigers.
Photo – Brendan Burton
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