There’s always been something bewilderingly claustrophobic about Sweeping Promises sound. The economy and density of the duo working so tightly together can feel gleefully intense. From the lockdown-era discovery of Hunger for a Way Out through 2023’s Good Living Is Coming for You, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug have turned limitations into an aesthetic advantage, making punk that feels less performed than trapped in a room with you. You Say I Romanticize, their third album, pushes that instinct further: recorded over 18 months in the Kansas home studio the pair have made both a creative hub and recording space, it sounds like a band deliberately testing how much pressure its songs can withstand.

The answer to that question, judging from this new album, is quite a lot. “Shooting Shadows” launches things off from 0-60mph in record time. Its wiry post-punk propulsion allows Mondal to move from controlled menace to outright howl without sacrificing the song’s melodic bite. “Cocoon” is less immediately combustible but arguably more unsettling, gradually turning its simple musical premise into something heavier and more engulfing. “Accent” takes another route, its restless, insect-like rhythms give the track a relentless mechanical momentum while the vocals add a distinctly human panic.

What makes You Say I Romanticize intriguing, however, is the tension between its deliberately rough physicality and its surprisingly literary concerns. The album’s ten songs populate a world of outsiders, obsessives and isolated personalities, with “Last Man” drawing loosely from Mary Shelley and “My Anchoress” turning towards Julian of Norwich. These aren’t intellectual decorations pasted onto punk songs; they seem to provide Mondal with characters through which she can examine alienation, fixation and the complicated relationship between creativity and isolation.

The production is equally central. Rather than sanding away the evidence of its long, interrupted gestation, Schnug and Mondal have embraced a dense, chamber-like wall of sound, subsequently bringing drummer Spenser Gralla into the process to reproduce the songs’ live urgency. That approach gives the record an appealing contradiction: intimate in its construction, but huge in execution.

You Say I Romanticize occasionally threatens to overwhelm with its own intensity, but again that’s arguably the point. Sweeping Promises aren’t romanticising outsiderdom so much as interrogating what happens when isolation becomes an identity. They are at their most compelling making complicated ideas hit home with the immediacy of a great punk song. Sounds like a simple trick but the pair work hard at making it feel that way and the hard work pays off time and time again here.

7/10

You Say I Romanticize track list:

1. Shooting Shadows
2. My Friend’s An Entomologist
3. Last Man
4. Rapture, Or…
5. Abduction On Camera
6. My Anchoress
7. Cocoon
8. Accent
9. Does He Want To Be The Weatherman?
10. Write Lightly

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