This is this Toronto quartet’s first album, but they’ve been playing shows and releasing singles since 2023. In fact, a chance encounter with one of those singles in a record store is what landed Mad Iris this record deal and it is easy see why, as the sexy, hiss-ravaged dual-vocal sorcery of Kaiya MacIsaac and Ela Hinatsu can be pretty fucking attention grabbing. There are also some great noisy guitars and plenty of punchy, hook-filled songs, which stylistically lands this band in an imagined timeline in which Hole, The Swirlies, Elastica, and Cranes’ Alison Shaw improbably teamed up to record a raucous, bratty, and sexed-up pop album. While that wild and unstable collision of divergent influences and a deep love of ’90s MTV admittedly sometimes errs on the side of too-big ‘90s alt-rock hooks for my taste, that element is easily eclipsed by all of the cool shit that Mad Iris got exactly right.
For me, the single “Poor Baby” is the piece that most perfectly captures Mad Iris at the peak of their “‘90s throwback” powers, as it has a big bratty hook for a chorus, but the seething and sexy vocal purrs of the verses are absolutely mesmerizing. I especially love how the sibilant layers of vocals leave behind vapor trails and seem to fade in and out of focus like I am in the middle of a very strange retro dream. In keeping with that theme, this whole album feels like an imagined Beverly Hills 90210 episode in which a cool “bad girl” moves to town, but causes a huge scandal when her band crashes the prom in streaked mascara and leather pants and incites the previously well-behaved students of West Beverly High to trash the gym in an orgy of alcohol-fueled teenage hedonism. Naturally, said bad girl would be immediately expelled, but the damage would be done and the school would never be the same again, as Brandon, Brenda, Dylan, and the gang fleetingly got a glimpse of what it meant to feel truly alive (also, everyone would totally be dressing like that girl the next day).
While the kittenish sensuality and playful brattiness of the vocals undeniably provide much of the album’s sizzle, they are usually icing an already great cake. The best evidence of that the jangly and bittersweet closer “The One I Wrote For You,” as lines like “last night I wore my dress, I wanna look my best” manage to capture the yearning of heartache at the same time they feel like a darkly funny societal critique. At the other end of the spectrum lies “Employee of The Month,” which is a propulsive banger of pure snarl, attitude, and distortion. There is eventually a cool melodic passage that opens up near the end, but my favorite bit is how the chorus culminates in a chaos of noise and howling vocals that suggests that the whole band were on a roller coaster the whole time and just hit an especially scary plunge.
Elsewhere, the opener “Silver Nails” captures Mad Iris at their most art-damaged and noisy, as splash of dissonantly jangling chords kicks off a disjointed off-kilter groove of walking bass lines and guitar squall, but even that nod to more distinctly post-punk and art-damaged terrain still breaks into an unexpectedly great and poignant hook about a preferred nail color. Notably, the press release for this album name-checks Sonic Youth as a big inspiration and I absolutely could not hear that at first, as Mad Iris’s noisier guitar impulses are never explosive or indulgent enough to ever tear through the confines of these short, punchy, and tightly constructed fuzz-pop gems. After hearing the album a few times, however, I think finally get it: Mad Iris is the spiritual descendant of Kim Gordon-sung songs like “Kool Thing” where the band’s arty avant-garde sensibilities collide with a punky and snotty dose of anarchic fun. That endearing balance of underground cool, snark, and playful camp seems to be so seamlessly woven into Mad Iris’s DNA that the whole album feels like unselfconsciously hook-filled indie pop fun, so it is doubly cool that there are also plenty of great noisy and hissing textural delights to enjoy beyond the more immediate pleasures of the great hooks and vocal performances. This is an absolutely killer debut.
