As the band Cloth, Scottish twins Rachael and Paul Swinton have always dealt in the subtle and the spectral. But on their third album, the pair step boldly into more expansive territory without losing an ounce of their understated magic. This is Cloth at their most cinematic, emotionally charged, and adventurous.
Their 2019 debut captured attention with skeletal textures and tight vocal intimacy, while 2023’s Secret Measure widened the frame with denser arrangements and deeper emotional terrain. Pink Silence feels like a culmination of those ideas. It’s an album that thrives in contradiction: delicate yet muscular, grounded yet celestial, intimate yet widescreen. With production by Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Yard Act), and contributions from Adrian Utley (Portishead), Owen Pallett, and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Pink Silence comes across as richly textured and sonically bold.
The album opens with the title track, a shimmering meditation on love unfolding in the liminal hours between dusk and dawn. Braithwaite’s and Utley’s contributions swirl into the mix like weather systems, adding a stately grandeur to Cloth’s restrained aesthetic. The phrase "pink silence" encapsulates the emotional duality that permeates the record, beauty laced with foreboding, stillness haunted by uncertainty.
“Polaroid,” with its soaring string arrangement from Owen Pallett, pushes the band out of their comfort zone into more upbeat territory. It’s a track built for movement—physically and emotionally—as it mourns the slow fade of a once-bright friendship. The grief here is gentle but devastating, captured in lyrics that feel personal and universal.
Elsewhere, “Golden” stands as one of the album’s most accessible moments. Beneath its hi-hat-driven propulsion and shimmering guitar lines lies a bruised heart, grappling with the aftermath of a love so intense its absence feels surreal. Paul’s lyrical image of the “scar on my wall” where photos once hung is quietly devastating, like an empty frame for what used to be.
Throughout, Rachael’s voice remains the axis around which everything turns. Her delivery is weightless yet deeply affecting, capable of turning even the simplest line into something spectral. Whether she’s navigating the slow-build ache of “Stuck” or the affirming release of “I Don’t Think So,” there’s an emotional clarity that’s deeply resonant. Her performance on “The Cottage” is particularly arresting. A hushed lullaby buoyed by Utley’s ambient synths and Pallett’s heart-swelling strings, it’s a song that feels like it could shatter if you breathed too hard.
Cloth’s sonic palette is broader than ever this time out. “It’s a Lot” bristles with scuzzed-up guitars and electronic crunch, marrying analogue warmth with glitchy unpredictability. “Burn” weaves its layered percussion with eerie ambient washes. It’s a track that wrestles with the pressures of self-betterment and the damage that can come from relentless self-scrutiny.
“Stones” is perhaps the emotional heart of the record. Built around a once-looped guitar figure, it blossoms into one of the album’s most sweeping moments, giving weight to Paul’s lyrical reflection on the slow erosion of connection. It’s melancholic and quiet but never maudlin.
The album closes with “Write It Down,” a gently unraveling meditation on letting go of control and embracing life’s unpredictability. It’s the perfect coda for an album so preoccupied with dualities, loss and love, memory and presence, control and surrender.
There’s a natural evolution to Pink Silence, but nothing feels forced. Every layer, every texture, every ghostly trill has purpose. Nothing feels forced or like lo-fi gimmicks, every sound has its vital place within an emotional mosaic. Cloth doesn’t shout. Their strength lies in their stillness, in the space they leave for the listener to breathe, reflect, and feel. Maybe this is what might hold them back to some listeners, but overall, that’s a minor point. Their music may be gentle, but its impact can be quite profound. This is a record to return to again and again, each listen revealing new depths within its hushed grandeur.
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