There’s a wonderfully unstable quality to ‘Becoming A Baddie’. Here, The Real Jobs spend much of their new release sounding as though they are deliberately testing how far a song can be bent before it collapses, filling the EP with nervous guitars, mangled electronics, sudden melodic turns and rhythms that remain oddly inviting beneath all the disruption.
The Norwegian quartet’s self-appointed description as an “evil boyband” gives some indication of the humour involved. But for all the abrasion, this isn’t an exercise in joyless post-punk severity. The Real Jobs clearly understand hooks, movement and pop structure; they simply seem more interested in twisting those elements into unfamiliar shapes.
There are echoes of IDLES, Squid and Fat Dog in the combination of anxious energy and dancefloor momentum, but ‘Becoming A Baddie’ increasingly develops its own peculiar atmosphere. Synths buckle and buzz around reverb-heavy guitars, while moments of straightforward indie brightness can suddenly dissolve into shoegaze haze or something altogether more confrontational.
It’s an unpredictability that gives the project the feel of a continuous performance. Instead of presenting a collection of neatly separated songs, The Real Jobs allow moods to mutate as the release progresses, moving between infectious grooves, psychedelic textures and sections that feel close to overload.
Self-production also helps preserve the EP’s deliberately skewed personality. Eirik Marinius Sandvik, Jonas Vedaa Særsten, Bryn Bowen and William Jensen Mangerøy sound less interested in sanding down their stranger instincts than amplifying them.
Messy in a purposeful way, melodic when it wants to be and constantly threatening another left turn, ‘Becoming A Baddie’ finds The Real Jobs turning post-punk anxiety into something colourful, physical and impressively difficult to predict.
