Fronted by The Big Moon’s Soph Nathan, the London trio’s second album is nuanced, melodic and comfortable in its own skin It might not seem like it, with its warm guitars and delicate harmonies, but Our Girl ’s ‘The Good Kind’ is oddly daring. This is one of those old-fashioned, front-to-back albums best understood through bouts of close listening, its many rich hooks and lyrical feints coming into focus over time. In this age of streaming-optimised grab-and-go record-making, it’s a bit of a unicorn.
If it’s less direct than the trio’s 2018 debut, ‘Stranger Today’, it makes up for it with a quietly adventurous textural approach. This album wears its nuances confidently while executing incremental shifts in tone and pacing with precision and care. It’s telling that its biggest earworm moment – the chorus of the perfectly snarky single ‘Something About Me Being A Woman’ – is brought about chiefly by vocalist Soph Nathan’s willingness to let the cadence of the hook slowly sink in rather than make it anything pyrotechnic.
In many ways, Nathan continues to flip the script on her work as guitarist in the Big Moon , trading out that band’s fizzing indie-pop in favour of something ruminative but equally melodic. During the record’s noisier moments, for example, there is the feeling of Britpop ’s outsized swagger being remade as something subtle and introspective. The wordless refrain of ‘Something Exciting’ could have, in different circumstan.
