Three albums deep and nearly a decade into their career, Mamalarky embody a tactful self-assurance—a quality that’s universally sought after but hard to achieve, and a classic example of the idiom easier said than done. By flexing technical muscles that are underutilized in indie rock on their self-titled debut and coaxing out the artful charm of prog on 2022’s Pocket Fantasy, the Atlanta-based quartet parsed out a unique sound and learned how to own it. Their latest album, Hex Key, revels in all the benefits that confidence affords: enviable nonchalance when singing, adventurous hooks that shouldn’t worm their way in as easily as they do, and art-rock song structures that dare you to guess what comes next. You can trace a path from the band’s beginning to this point, but that fact doesn’t make this latest step any less impressive; even longtime fans might be tempted to do a double take in admiration, as if to ask, “Wait, this is the same band from back then?”
Throughout Hex Key, Mamalarky move cleanly through complex motions and form rubbery angles with their instruments. It’s a little like watching an avant-garde dance troupe perform to unlikely deep cuts: Noor Khan’s queasy bass slides in “Broken Bones” would make Deerhoof proud, Michael Hunter’s cool-headed keys in “Blush” blossom like the jazzy psych-pop of Crumb, and singer Livvy Bennett’s flirty coos over funk-lite R&B in “Nothing Lasts Forever” recall Ava Luna. Across the album, Mamalarky escalate their trippy art-rock until it sounds like they’re an eight-piece band pushing how weird their jam improvisations can get without their Epitaph rep noticing. Take the album’s strongest single, “#1 Best of All Time,” whose two minutes of BPM-goading delirium come courtesy of drummer Dylan Hill having tracked his part in a frenzy while recovering from a bout of poison ivy. Whether it’s the disparate vocal techniques that interrupt steady stomping in “MF” or the pots-and-pans metallic percussion that dots Bennett’s cheery guitar solo in “Blow Up,” Mamalarky have never sounded more at home with their musical jitters.
“The worst thing you can say about a Mamalarky song is ‘This sounds like another song of yours,’” Khan recently said. While the general sentiment there is true—Mamalarky has managed to expand their sound without chasing a musical makeover—the album’s lowest two points, “The Quiet” and “Hex Key,” fall short of that guiding principle. The former song leaves Bennett alone, in a bog of güiro croaks and flute flutters, to ponder the squandering of her childlike inquisitiveness while a recurring blast of synth drowns her out. With its repetitiveness and the longest runtime on the album, “The Quiet” recalls Mamalarky’s early experiments in directionless interludes. It’s given no favors when followed by “Hex Key,” a blown-out dream sequence of a song whose chorus retreads the sonic scope of its verses. The song’s percussive textures and production flicks are a sign of Mamalarky’s idiosyncratic vision, but where does it head?
