SOAK
Grim Town
Release Date: Apr 26, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock
Record label: Rough Trade
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Album Review: Grim Town by SOAK
Great, Based on 6 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Irish songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson was still in her teens when she released 2015's Before We Forgot How to Dream, her affecting debut album as SOAK. Arriving four years later, her follow-up, Grim Town, reacts to the realities of young adulthood in the late 2010s. A 14-track album framed by a scripted train departure and the optimistic "Nothing Looks the Same" (which also features an on-board announcement), it opens dramatically with "All Aboard.
Based on rating 8/10
At some point, youth cracks. That sense of perpetual invincibility, the world firmly clenched in your fist, the euphoria that rushes through your blood as you contemplate your ever-expanding horizon— everything starts to crumble. But the world that emerges from the debris doesn't have to recede into darkness. In Bridie Monds-Watson's sophomore album as SOAK, our guide steers us through the limbo between growing and grown up, which she calls Grim Town.
Based on rating 8/10
Continuing to draw upon formative experiences of growing up in Northern Ireland for inspiration, Bridie Monds-Watson, alias SOAK , proves undeniably consistent in undercutting inoffensive sheen with introspective lyrical bite. In this respect, Grim Town flaunts a maturity of intention and execution, gravitating beyond an endearing, if cynical, Mercury Prize-nominated debut to forge a peppy twee sound wrought with tight-paced momentum and spontaneous inflections; rarely lapsing into glacial complacency. Despite the disaffected mundanity that the album title suggests, Monds-Watson renders a cathartic psychological space with a tacit optimistic veneer.
Based on rating 7.3/10
When you're an adolescent, your world doesn't extend far beyond your school or your neighborhood. On her 2015 debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream, the Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson--aka SOAK--provided an unflinching portrait of what it felt like to be trapped inside such a confining space. Written while she was still in her teens, the album bristled with equal parts restlessness and resignation, communicating both the desire to break free of one's humdrum surroundings and the soul-crushing difficulty of actually attempting do it.
Based on rating 3.5/5
The transition into early adulthood is usually full of a few hard truths: life is hard, people can be shit and success and stability is often more difficult to achieve that you'd once hoped. So forms the premise of SOAK's second album 'Grim Town'. If a then 18-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson's 2015 debut 'Before We Forgot How To Dream' was often full of a sense of teenage optimism, hope and the sense of an endless, wide-open future, her second album 'Grim Town' is something of a rude awakening.
Based on rating 7/10
From the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, musician SOAK (Bridie Monds-Watson) has cultivated a soundscape of indie pop with her album Grim Town. Straying from the folk arrangements that characterized her Mercury Music Prize-nominated album, Before We Forgot How to Dream, SOAK has returned with a more vibrant and pop-oriented record. Throughout the album is the underlying notion of escaping, a yearning for growth and maturity and to leave the present in favour of a more optimistic future. "I've always done the best I could / To get ….
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