Label: Rock Action
Released: 30th June 2023
With their second album, ‘I Don’t Know’, bdrmm have mastered the art of keeping you in their clutches. Shuddering, relentless beats grip onto you from the get-go, snaking around your arms like tendrils of smoke. It’s an expanse of space to step into, an embrace you can’t help but relax against. After the unbelievable success of their debut, bdrmm have returned stronger, more ambitious and ready to tighten their grip. There’s no getting away from this one.
Sinking into the album with the pounding ‘Alps’, there’s an immediate sense of a band having levelled up. The pounding, atmospheric beats of the opening track is the first of many layers of skill and influence that will soon lie atop each other. When the drums kick in, shimmering alongside that electronica, it’s an immediate euphoria, pummelling to your core. It’s a statement – there will be no messing around for bdrmm. It’s a reinvention.
It proves to be a mercurial beast, as far as albums go. The reassuringly steady drum groove of ‘Be Careful’ is met with mantric reminders, whilst ‘We Fall Apart’ is spatial and buoyed by a simple piano progression that soon gives way to layers and layers of texture and beats that unravel before you. It’s the sunlight fading, sky flitting from blue to lilac to deep indigo, the musical equivalent of that early summer evening breeze that washes over you. ‘Hidden Cinema’ is a real highlight – vocals wrapping serpentine-like around those ever-glorious drums; it’s an atmospheric endeavour, unlike anything bdrmm have really done before.
They conclude with an eight-minute odyssey that feels like a testimony to the fully-grown confidence of bdrmm to experiment and free-wheel through sonic worlds. They may claim ‘I Don’t Know’, but if these eight tracks are anything to go by, they know a few things: how to twist through genre, how to stay true to their vision whilst pushing the boundaries further than ever before. Most importantly, they certainly know how to make a formidable second album.
