Sorry: In Character
“Cosplay means being an artist or just being a person; you change a lot and you should be allowed to try on different things.”
— Asha Lorenz
It seems like this has been a long-running tension - supposedly part of a scene that they themselves have never really felt attached to. Asha nods. “From the beginning, we’ve always just written songs, so it was funny to be compared to things we never really felt part of in the first place. I think you can get confused with your identity, with comparison, but as you get older you just say, ‘oh, no, that’s not what I like’. I don’t like how [artists] can’t change right now. I think it’s really weird, and I think it makes stale music, and people have to regurgitate themselves.”So what does this act of dressing up actually sound like? Opener ‘Echoes’ is a spidery pop song, all whispered vocals and twinkling guitars, while ‘Love Posture’ is a warped tale of romance that could have come straight from The Cure, with a propulsive bassline underneath a skittering drumbeat, Asha singing “you and me, we’re in love posture … four arms, four feet, a monster”. ‘Life In This Body’ employs a strategy that Sorry have used before - their love of sampling.“I think samples allow the world to suddenly change, and it just brings it into the next moment,” nods Asha. “It’s something I wanted to do to inform people of the next thing, or to feel like a TV switching between channels. On ‘Life In This Body’, Marco had a poem that he sped up, and it just seemed to fit really well.”Creating such a disparate musical landscape, let alone stitching it together into a coherent whole for an audience, is quite the feat. Sorry’s magic trick is making their often scattershot sonic world feel as straightforward and solid as a Top 40 pop album. What exactly does Asha think ties it all together? She smokes her cigarette, and thinks about it.“I think it’s quite dark, I feel like there’s quite a lot of, yeah, sadness and darkness in it,” she ponders. “But it’s like letting go too, in some ways, on this one. It is what it is. Being able to recognise an emotion, or express it, is sort of all you can do anyway.” It’s a slippery goal to pin down, but on ‘COSPLAY’, Sorry manage to do exactly that.‘COSPLAY’ is out now via Domino.
