Album Review: Broods - Don't Feed The Pop Monster

Broods know what they’re doing on their third studio album. Don’t Feed The Pop Monster is a solid collection of earwormy pop with the odd dark diversion, all stamped with the personality and creative preoccupations of New Zealand brother and sister duo Georgia and Caleb Nott. 

“I’m such a sucker for everything,” Georgia sings on opener Sucker, and from there the album proceeds through a diverse array of influences: Peach is exuberant and dreamy in the manner of M83; Dust has a melody and chorus that resembles Neil Finn at his most soul-searching; Georgia adopts a Shirley Manson sneer on Old Dog; while Life After could be vintage Sarah Blasko. 

If the album veers at times into acute sentimentality (see Georgia with “oceans pouring from” her eyes in Everytime You Go I Cry) it is elevated by the frontwoman’s versatile voice and by multi-instrumentalist/producer Caleb’s aural inventions (note the restless insect beats skittering through that particular song). 

Elsewhere, Falling Apart is a melancholic chill-out, swimming in staccato plinks, Georgia’s voice digitally chromed; Caleb laments all the times he’s been Too Proud (“to let it out”), which becomes a desperate wail when Georgia joins him at a vertiginous register; and To Belong is a dancefloor rage against alienation, wheeling from defeated to defiant in over five epic minutes. Broods haven’t reinvented the wheel, but they’ve never sounded surer of who they are.