Caroline – Caroline 2 | soundsfromthedarkside

Caroline’s sophomore is here and we can’t stop listening.

Three years after their excellent debut, London’s eight-piece experimentalists Caroline are back. Their new album, conveniently titled Caroline 2, has dropped in stores and promises a fresh push to their already boundary-blurring sound. Over the past 18 months, the band has spent time in a sort of creative hibernation, writing across the United Kingdom, with members Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes, and Mike O’Malley taking the lead in the album’s production. From the opening clangs of Total Euphoria, Caroline invites you into a musical funhouse where nothing is quite as it seems. The song starts with a deconstructed, hypnotic riff that seems to evolve into the pastoral indie pop sound we know from their debut. Instead, it’s merely a sly wink to their beginnings, as the track suddenly veers off into a swirling, bass-heavy climax. It’s this sense of playfulness and unpredictability that is the album’s secret ingredient.

On their sophomore effort, Caroline 2, the band invites you backstage, hands you a tambourine, and lets you see the strings holding up the scenery. Songs are sewn together from snippets of demos, live takes, and studio experiments. You can hear the seams, the tape hiss, the laughter. Indeed, Caroline likes to have fun, take The Coldplay Cover, which isn’t a cover at all, but a cheeky nod to genre expectations. Here, it seems half of the band is in the bathroom playing a folk tune while the other half is in the bedroom playing chamber pop. Midway through, it feels like the mic is moved from the bathroom to the bedroom, and the folky foreground becomes the background and vice versa. It’s like we’re eavesdropping on a house party where every room is playing a different song, yet somehow it all fits together.

This, what I call “kitchen-table conversation” approach, is Caroline’s main calling card. What makes them unique is that they’re not afraid to let the rough edges show, in fact, they celebrate them, just as we also heard on last year’s Still House Plants effort. When I Get Home, for example, feels so close to the heart that you might miss the layering of demos, studio takes, improv, and the strangely mixed-in distant club beats. The song feels like a conversation between people from all walks of life who are exploring possibilities to create something new and tangible.

Not every experiment on 2 is a success. This is mainly due to the use of autotune, which at times distances the listener from the raw emotion at the album’s core. Nevertheless, it also adds an interesting modern layer to Caroline’s modus operandi. On closer Beautiful Ending, for example, it slowly brings forth a fitting surreal sheen. However, on U R ONLY ACHING, they overplay their hand. The song shock-shifts from the familiar, pastoral acoustic style to a glitching, autotuned alt-pop sequence, which feels more like a distraction than an addition. Hate it or not, autotune has found its way from pop music into Caroline’s world. Speaking of pop music: while writing Tell Me I Never Knew That, the band joked that the melody sounded like something alt-pop star Caroline Polachek might sing, so they sent her the half-finished demo, never expecting a reply. Polachek did reply, and went all in, finishing the song with her own improvisations. The result is arguably the most sparkling track Caroline has made to date. Naturally, Tell Me I Never Knew That also became the lead single from 2, I mean, who would pass on a spotlight like this?

Still, I keep wondering if Caroline should be a band that flows along with the mainstream. Their strongest moments are still found in emotional showstoppers like the sprawling six-minute Two Riders Down, which builds toward a wall of sound that eventually crumbles into oblivion, or in the more delicate moments of Song Two (another inside joke?).

To some, Caroline 2 will be a creative mess; to others, a musical playground. Fans of the debut’s more organic, “eight people in an empty space” vibe will need some time to adjust to this new direction. But the effort is rewarded. You won’t get any easy hooks, instead, Caroline creates its own imperfect contradictions that are a bit broken, a bit wild, but ultimately very much alive.