"Shrines", Purity Ring’s awaited debut album for 4AD, will be out on 24th July, and today we can hear it in its entirety courtesy of NPR. As the first advances suggested, the album submerges us in worlds of rubbery, shiny synthesizers, half-speed rhythms, and melodies that are as angelical as they are bewitching. The sound is ethereal, ecstatic, and Megan James’s vocal frankness gives it an air of synthesized twee-pop, but it hides a spectral flip-side in which this tenderness becomes a disturbingly visceral quality. It’s a complex universe, as tender as it is disturbing, from which emerges eleven majorly pop songs; it’s one of the year’s most inspired debuts.
