Diet Cig - Do You Wonder About Me?
Their debut took New York’s boundless energy and contained it within the walls of a house party. Unapologetic and unified, Diet Cig return with lessons on outgrowing bad habits and holding on to the good ones.
Do You Wonder About Me? is a sprawl of refreshing, confessional moments, often 2 minutes apiece to the backdrop of two people having a lot of fun playing them.
A lot of these elements ensured the band’s first album, Swear I’m Good At This, arrived in 2017 awash with critical praise. Attention from their joyous, frenetic live shows had melded together with a set of witty, often painful lyrical confessions. The end product of this album is a cleaner set of songs that are still direct-but-scrappy in all the right places.
Harnessing that directness in the release’s starting point, Thriving. Within seconds of the album opening Alex Luciano has asked you the question posed in the album’s title partnered with something not unlike a marching beat. Fuzzy guitars interplay, driving upwards to set up an assured response - ‘I’m thriving, thanks for asking’.
This is the first of many admissions from Luciano: she only wants to take care of her friends and her plants. Her moon sign is in Cancer. She can’t visit you like she used to. Simple moments drawn from a composite of NYC millennial anxiety and hope.
The band’s longstay collaborator Christopher Daly has produced a wider breadth of brighter sounding songs while retaining a winning formula. Luciano’s takes better command over vocals that used to veer on sickly sweet. Drummer Noah Bowman has more to do and does it well - each song feels more ‘together’ as a result of this.
Much of the album feels like an ongoing confrontation, a call out to lovers and friends past and present with no promised answer. Energy spent on sharp intakes of confessional, jagged guitar pop are followed by quieter moments of introspection.
The two come together midway through the album with Broken Body, surefire live favourite when the band are granted the opportunity to bring their postponed tour to the UK later in the year. It is non-stop, chant along moment where more questions are asked, but like Thriving, there’s a chance Luciano already has an answer for you.
Do You Wonder About Me? ends as strong as it starts - sombre reprise of Night Terrors concludes the album beautifully, a dreamy rework that slots synthesisers into the album’s lead single. It pivots the song's original meaning on its head in a way that feels like exhaling at the end of a long counselling session.
Coming off the back of a critically acclaimed debut can be testing - Diet Cig show that growing as a band does not equate to over complicating a winning method, they can just be more self-assured tackling it this time around.
7/10
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