When Howling at a Concrete Moon introduced us to Pynch, we met a band wrestling with the disillusionments of youth, already sounding world-weary, defiant and bruised. But for their follow-up, Beautiful Noise, it seems like they’ve turned the telescope inward. There’s less of a feeling of manifesto and more focus on their inner monologue. it’s a map of the heart, in short, the sound of a band growing up and embracing the weird and wonderful experiences that brings.
From the opening crackle of its production, Beautiful Noise wears its DIY skin proudly. Spencer Enock’s bedroom-based command centre spills over into every corner of the album: glitchy synths, distorted guitars, and lo-fi drum programming. The result is a record that feels intimate, like stumbling upon someone’s diary and reading it late at night, an amber street light glow illuminating the pages.
The opening single “Post-Punk / New-Wave” is emblematic of the record’s dual nature. At first glance, it sounds like a self-aware slacker-rock riff: “I don’t know what I’m doing but maybe that’s where the truth is.” But within that playful irony is a sincerity that cuts deep. The song collapses the distance between meta-commentary and emotional urgency. It mocks and merges genres while embodying its own internal logic.
That blend of irreverence and earnestness threads through the album’s most affecting moments. “Forever” wraps summer melancholy in bits of shimmer and static, while “Hanging on a Bassline” drifts toward a plea for cheap beer, belonging, for something simple to latch on to. When Pynch invoke the trivial things they aren’t kitsch adornments they anchor bigger dreams and ideas together.
It’s in “Microwave Rhapsody”, though, where Beautiful Noise aims deepest. Contemplations on purpose (“Does it even matter at all?”) arrive not as rhetorical posturing but as vibrations in the mind. The title track, too, becomes a melancholic hymn. Daily hustle and cosmic void are wrapped in the same breath, its a way of evoking and acknowledging the spiritual without oversimplifying.
At its most vulnerable the band sees their indie-pop leanings stripped of pretense. “How to Love Someone” and “Revolve Around You” turn inward on romantic breakdowns, each line carrying a weight that only grows in the spaces between notes. “The Supermarket” wrestles with alienation not through grand statements, but through the banality of modern life. “It’s Wonderful” bursts like a euphoria-struck data glitch, extolling art itself as salvation, even as it warns against being seduced by it. And then we end with “Come Outside” a closing duet weaving weather, longing and breath, the kind of fragile closure that lingers just beyond the last note.
Myles Gammon’s addition on synths is subtle but vital, his textures loosen the boundaries between guitar and machine, helping the band expand their palette while staying grounded. Julianna Hopkins, on drums, vocals and synth, adds crucial counterpoints: when Enock’s nostalgia tilts inward, she helps lift it outward.
What’s impressive is how Beautiful Noise steps forward confidently without abandoning the restless uncertainty that made Pynch compelling in the first place. The production is sharper, the arrangements more adventurous, and the emotional stakes higher, yet there’s never a sense of artifice. Enock says they “recorded it mostly in my bedroom … it was a joy to make and you can hear that in the music.” That joy never softens the edges; it gives those edges purpose. Pynch electing to pursue something sincere, ragged and even flawed, in an era that often demands polish and perfect branding shows independence, maturity and trust in their own vision that perhaps transcends their initial ambitions, above all, it’s a record by a band becoming themselves and that’s beautiful.
7/10
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