Sophia Kennedy: Monsters review – showtunes and sub-bass from sonic shapeshifter

For the modern musician, genre-fickleness is no longer the exception but the rule. Switching styles and blending sounds doesn’t simply cater to listeners with depleted attention spans – it can also be a way of evoking and critiquing the chaotic internet culture that left them that way. Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist Sophia Kennedy’s music does both those things, but it also channels a restlessness and nostalgia that has little in common with her peers.

For a start, her sonic references include Tin Pan Alley and vintage showtunes, she complements curious melodic callbacks with ominous electronica, expansive hip-hop, sub-bass, trap beats, twanging guitars and the sound of monkeys screeching. What’s also unusual is that she doesn’t temper this fluctuation with a consistent voice: frequently, it’s a low, stately, Bette Davis-style drawl; sometimes it’s a brittle falsetto; sometimes a taut, mean sprechgesang.

The cumulative effect is disarmingly disorientating and oddly relaxing: unable to categorise Kennedy, you are forcibly submerged into her emotional world. It is one characterised by ambivalence, sinister confusion (Orange Tic Tac speaks of a “schizophrenic timeline”) and a dreamlike reckoning with selfhood that doubles as a form of solace.

“I’ll always be mine,” she sings on I Can See You, while Francis reassures its subject that the “inside of your hands will always be the same”. On the fluttering, sparkling I’m Looking Up, Kennedy soothes herself after the death of a loved one: “You are everywhere / I’m not really here.” Monsters is a place where boundaries – generic, personal and otherwise – dissolve, leaving only pleasing sonic experiments and Kennedy’s strangely consoling words.