Sergeant: Symbols

Sergeant’s 2023 debut draws listeners in through striking cover art and cryptic, koan-like song titles. The music pairs bright, ingratiating vocal melodies with an ambient-leaning, post-post-post-punk sound design that avoids straightforward linearity. The second album, Symbols, expands the group by adding Geraldine Vanspauwen, whose clear, airy vocals and added chimes and panpipes brighten the sound slightly. The lyrics remain syntactically psychedelic while still evoking clear meaning, often centered on day-to-day existentialism, anxiety and ecstasy, and the futility of trying to change the world as one person. Production sometimes starts from familiar forms before turning wilder and harder to place.

"You absolutely can judge Sergeant by their covers. The Brussels-based group prove that total accessibility and total insularity can form a horseshoe: The songs on Sergeant were deeply absorbing and often led by bright, ingratiating vocal melodies-"hooks" feels like a stretch, although the songs are catchy-but rarely strayed from the kind of ambient-leaning, post-post-post-punk sound design that usually rules out linearity and easy access."

"On its second album, Symbols, the duo of producer Benjamin Cools and singer Ferre Marnef adds a third member, singer Geraldine Vanspauwen, and brighten up its sound just a smidge, embracing chimes and panpipes in addition to Vanspauwen's clear, airy vocals."

"Marnef's lyrics, like the song titles, are syntactically psychedelic but evoke clear meaning. (This is inverted in the band's production, which sometimes takes a familiar form-jittery IDM song, krautrock groove-before expanding into something wilder and less placeable.) For the most part, Marnef is singing about day-to-day existentialism, the anxiety and ecstasy of life potentially being like this forever, and the futility of trying to change a world when you're just one guy."

"I bought Sergeant's self-titled 2023 debut without having heard it because of its album art. I was at All Night Flight, a really good record store outside Manchester, and the cover beckoned me: deep green, covered with English text made to look bizarre and unintelligible. Its song titles split the difference between life-changing koan and Jaden Smith tweet."

Read at Pitchfork