Label: Fiction
Released: 5th April 2024
‘Ultrasound’ is a documentation of how love persists in even the darkest of moments, with the album being vocalist Leo Wyndham’s way of coping with his wife’s miscarriage during the initial stages of writing the record. Wyndham’s vocal performance portrays the intensity of the subject matter, with his falsetto feeling as a skyward scream in ‘Rabid Dog’, while his nonchalant delivery in ‘When Everything Was Lost’ gives a feeling of helplessness.
The record has been used as a way to come to terms with grief, questions of mortality and fairness, but ultimately, an ode to strength and a hopeful look to the future. ‘Make You Proud’, arguably the most traditional rock song on the record gives the protagonist the reason to keep on going, with shoegaze track ‘Bleach’ dripping in a rose-tinted nostalgia that shows there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
The album travels through various pockets of what is broadly ‘alternative’ or ‘indie-rock’, using shiny guitars and stretched rhythms to emulate the feeling of time standing still. Palace expertly transition into slow jazz, blues-rock, and even dream-pop at points. There’s a dark experimentalism to the album that feels familiar while still dragging you into the unknown.
If you liked Palace’s two 2023 EPs, ‘Part 1: When Everything Was Lost’ and ‘Part 2: Nightmares & Ice Cream’, then you’ll love this, too. In part, that’s because seven of the songs on the album were on those EPs, but mainly because the band have continued that same warm, almost romantic atmosphere into the new tracks, especially on closer ‘Goodnight Farewell’.
The third part of a traumatic trilogy, ‘Ultrasound’, sees our hero walking off into the sunset after a brutal battle. Palace deserve their moment in the sun, and this album proves it.
