Daughter from Hell Review

The title promises something feral and the songs half deliver. Hit the Wall, Death Wish and Men Like You are angrier and more direct than anything on The Secret of Us, written by someone who has stopped being careful about who the songs name, and the arena tour that followed was built around that shift.

The problem is the finish. Aaron Dessner and Dan Nigro both know how to make a confession sound pretty, and between them they smooth most of the roughness back out, so the record ends up quivering where it ought to be spitting. The Guardian put it well in describing a gap between the emotional turbulence of the writing and the insistent prettiness it arrives in.

That split is why the reviews scattered so widely. Rolling Stone went to four and a half stars, NME to three, and the aggregate landed in the low sixties. None of it slowed the record down: 124,000 units in the first week, a number one debut, and sixteen tracks that hold their shape rather better than fifty six minutes of this kind of writing has any right to.