Ugly Duckling Union

The Roast

“Lowertown spent years being the band you discovered on a friend's Bandcamp at two in the morning, two Atlanta teenagers whispering into a cracked condenser mic, and that fragility was the whole point. Olivia and Avsha sounded like they were confessing things they had not told anyone yet, and the room tone around the acoustic guitars did half the emotional labor. Ugly Duckling Union is the sound of that bedroom getting torn down and replaced with a real studio, and I will say upfront that they have absolutely earned the right to make it. The guitars bite now. The drums hit a wall instead of a pillow. There is a confidence in the arrangement choices that the early EPs could not have faked. This is a band leaning into post-punk abrasion with the full Dirty Hit pipeline behind them, and on the best tracks here that pipeline gets out of the way and lets the songwriting do what it has always done well, which is sit inside a feeling until the feeling gets uncomfortable. The title is a tell, of course. Ugly Duckling Union telegraphs the whole thesis: we were the weird quiet kids, now we are a band, now we are loud, and we are inviting other weird quiet kids to be loud with us. It is a sweet idea wrapped in a slightly nervous one, because the duckling becoming a swan only works as a metaphor if you actually wanted to be a swan in the first place. There are moments on this record where I am not convinced they did. The softest passages, the ones that still let Olivia's voice crack mid-phrase without a guitar covering for her, are still the strongest material here by a noticeable margin. The fully blown out post-punk choruses are competent, occasionally great, but they sound like a band trying on a coat that fits two of their friends better. The production is glossy in a way that flatters the noise and slightly betrays the intimacy. Compression is doing a lot of emotional work that the performances used to do for free. None of this makes Ugly Duckling Union a bad record. It makes it a transitional one, which is the most honest thing a seven point oh can mean. They are figuring out which parts of the bedroom were the cage and which parts were the magic, and they are doing it in public, on a label that has a very specific commercial appetite. I will absolutely be there for whatever comes after this, because the songwriting bones are still real and the chemistry between Olivia and Avsha is still the kind of thing you cannot manufacture in an A and R meeting. I just hope the next one trusts the quiet again, at least for a song or two, the way the early stuff did before everyone noticed.”

The Bright Side

When the arrangement steps back and lets Olivia's voice carry a half-broken melody over one clean guitar, this band still does something almost no one else in their lane can do. The chemistry between Olivia and Avsha is real, lived-in, and totally unfakeable, and the songwriting bones underneath the noise are stronger than the production is letting them show. There is a great record buried in here, and a few songs already deliver it.

Hardest Sneer

“Ugly Duckling Union is the sound of a bedroom band realising the bedroom got knocked down, and trying to convince itself that the new open-plan studio with the post-punk pedalboard is what it wanted all along. Sometimes I believe them. Sometimes I miss the mattress on the floor.”

Issues (3)