In Brighton, the air smells of salt and damp, and Talking Machine, the fifth album by The Wytches, seems to breathe it all in. Recorded live to analog tape, as in their debut Annabel Dream Reader (2014), the record sounds like a reunion with their own demons: no polish, no click tracks, just crackling amps and sizzling strings. It’s a return to a garage-bred psychedelia — heavy and damned, noir like the goth undertone that has always followed the band, now a quartet with the addition of drummer Bhavin “Bhav” Thaker.
If Annabel Dream Reader moved from surf punk to stoner under the cursed gaze of Edgar Allan Poe, and the three records that followed tried to recalibrate that formula — growing darker on All Your Happy Life or turning quieter and more reflective on Our Guest Can’t Be Named — Talking Machine marks a return to their roots with newfound awareness. The themes are contemporary — authenticity, artificial intelligence, the tension between human and mechanical — and the title, fittingly, recalls Thomas Edison’s nickname for his early gramophones.
The record swings between the hard-rock viscosity of the title track (somewhere between Ty Segall and Jack White) and the delicate piano-and-voice ballad Romance 2, moving through the abrasive psychedelia of Black Lips (Black Ice) and the twisted grunge undertones of Perform. The darker Factory and Is the World Too Old slow the pace, open up to melody, and even hint at unexpected Latin accents.
There’s a stronger sense of purpose here — in the lyrics, the references, the arrangements — and the authenticity the band proclaims finally finds tangible expression. The Wytches have never been the sharpest edge of their scene — not quite Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Black Lips, or King Gizzard — but with Talking Machine they reaffirm both their solidity and their strange, smouldering inspiration.