United Crushers

by 
AlbumMar 04 / 201612 songs, 43m 7s
Art Pop Indietronica Alt-Pop
Popular

‘United Crushers’ (March 4 Memphis Industries) is POLIÇA’s third full length release and most remarkable album to date. The band, which includes Channy Leaneagh, dual drummers, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu and Chris Beirden on bass with producer Ryan Olson at the helm, collectively wrote the album in Minneapolis in the winter of 2015 during their first true break from two years of touring. They recorded it at the renowned Sonic Ranch Studios in El Paso, TX, nestled just a few short miles from the US/Mexico border. The new album builds on POLIÇA’s signature synthesizer and percussion-heavy sounds with more complex arrangements and a bigger, crisper hi fi punch due to the new approach they took to writing and recording together, all in the same room. There's a tighter groove to these songs and a more vulnerable quality to them, especially in Leaneagh's singing. Her incredible vocal range is on display throughout, beautifully raw and less electronically effected than on previous recordings. The themes found and explored on ‘United Crushers’ are political and personal, touching on social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, the urban decline and gentrification, overcoming music industry machinations, and finding true and honest love in the wake of it all. Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band's most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised. ‘United Crushers’ is the follow up to 2013’s ‘Shulamith’ which EW described as being "propulsive enough for dance floors, and dreamy enough for headphones" and MOJO said "proves that intelligent pop music still has the ability to seduce and enthral." Their debut, 2012's ‘Give You The Ghost,’ also garnered international acclaim, with Rolling Stone hailing it as "the sound of heartbreak and celebration happening simultaneously" and Q praising it as "a bewitching, urgent, magical debut." The band has conquered massive festivals around the world from Coachella to Glastonbury in addition to performing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Later With Jools Holland and more.

6.6 / 10

Poliça's United Crushers is a political record, but it's too exhausted to work as a protest album so much as an album for when all the protest's been sapped out.

B

A mother can’t protect her children forever. Poliça frontwoman Channy Leaneagh knows this well, so she opens the excellent third album by her downcast Minneapolis synth-pop outfit by doing the next best thing: offering a warning.

8 / 10

Poliça's bold new record serves as a clarion call to all of us who are fighting bravely for the cause, be it art, love, or rebellion.

The Minneapolis minimalist synthpop band don't shy away from darkness on their third album

Poliça have finally drawn straws and found something to stick with.

Poliça gave their music shape on Shulamith, but on United Crushers, they give it an edge.

Nervy percussion, spare arrangements, Channy Leaneagh's vocals: Polica are as easily identifiable as ever, despite not being particularly distinguished.

7.0 / 10

POLIÇA has never been one to paint pop music by numbers, and United Crushers is no exception. The follow-up to 2013's critically acclaimed Shulamith, it continues along its predecessor's path into the darkest electronic recesses of Channy Leaneagh's psyc

8 / 10

8 / 10

7 / 10

The Minneapolis band have ditched their brooding edge in favour of a more mature – and more exciting – sound that outstrips the current glut of mannered trip hop

65 %

Album Reviews: Poliça – United Crushers

3.5 / 5

Polica - United Crushers review: More weight.

8 / 10