Etta Marcus - Devour EP

Etta Marcus writes about appetite like it's physics: force meeting an equal and opposite feeling. 'Devour' is the first set where that idea isn't just in the words but in how the songs move. The arrangements step forward, the edges get sharper, and the voice doesn't hide behind prettiness. Anger is the voltage; love is what crackles after.

'Teenage Messiah' is the banner. The chorus has a hint of the bounce-in-your-bones cadence of Alanis Morissette's 'Hand in My Pocket', the kind of rise-and-fall that makes a hook feel inevitable without softening the blow. Everything else is built to match it: drums and bass carrying the weight, guitars and strings pushed for lift, not haze. It's grand without posturing, the kind of widescreen writing people spend a career trying to pull off once.

The record's other pole is the one that bites. 'Girls Are God's Machines' turns the temperature up until the varnish blisters; the vocal frays where it needs to, the performance choosing catharsis over control. There's a lineage here that runs through PJ Harvey's steel - not sonically identical, but the same refusal to round off feeling. When Marcus heads the other way, she doesn't lose definition. 'Pointing At The Moon, Staring At Your Hand' works chopped drums and a low-lying bassline into her palette, making room for a melody that both stalks and soars.

What hits home is how little fog there is. The mythmaking scale is closer to Wolf Alice than bedroom-pop confessional, but the mixes are clean and front-foot: siren songs pitched high, cinematic and strident rather than soft-focus. It means the EP can swing from shoulder-barge to hush without losing its shape. Marcus has always had the voice and the eye. 'Devour' adds a frame that's big enough to hold both, and brave enough not to look away.