Dystopia is here. We’ve surpassed the point of no return from it already. What we do with the dystopian anxiety from here on out is another question, however. For Mandy, Indiana, the answer is simultaneously uninhibited and revolutionary. The Manchester four-piece began setting the stage for their own cinematic voyage into the ether with their 2020 debut EP, …, a cataclysmic altered zone of clashing rhythms immolating from industrial parties. This nocturnal dance into the noise of the void becomes all the more widescreen on the band’s debut full-length, i’ve seen a way. Consider this the fallout of the warning signs that came before it from Mandy, Indiana, with vocalist Valentine Caulfield, guitarist Scott Fair, synthesist Simon Catling, and drummer Alex Macdougall becoming all the more masterful in crafting moments in sound straddling tension and rebuke, as if to celebrate the abyss if it so eagerly insists on knocking at our door. Caulfield’s tongue is her shield, a French lash whipping back fascism, inequality, and our dark daily existentialism, oft forcing into motion a wide display of sci-fi motoriks and experimental aggregations from the soundboard. Every encroaching claustrophobia created by human aggression is met by the band clawing their way out from it. Every attempt to shift balance into the wrong hands is met by the band tweaking the gravity controls to destabilize the axis altogether. When all meets its end, Mandy, Indiana’s strange anthem is defiant the entire way down. It’s said that the band recorded elements of the listen within caverns and abandoned malls – a symbolic polarity of inspo from world artifacts in nature and human-made capitalism, as if to further punctuate the fact we’re already living in post-dystopian. Heed this not as a warning to our future selves, but rather a reason to look at the present with a wild eye and reason to fuck back with it if it’s going to happen anyway. It’s among the few things left within your control.

Highlights: “Drag [Crashed]”, “Peach Fuzz”, “Sensitive Training”

Mandy, Indiana’s i’ve seen a way is available now on Fire Talk.

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