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Dream Nails – You Wish – 06/02/26

Dream Nails’ self-titled debut was a politically punchy, wickedly witty riot grrrl LP, updated for the modern age with digispeak lyrics and a sonic palate that blends the pace of punk, the riffs of a wonkier mid-2000s post-punk and, sometimes, even flashes of new rave. Their 2023 follow-up, Doom Loop, found the band with a new vocalist, expanding their sound with swaggering drums and the occasional piano. The wit was still there, but the delivery varied, leading to a richer offering.

With their third album, You Wish, Dream Nails have eschewed the overt for the opaque, menacing their way through eleven tracks, crunching and crackling like a heavy cloud. This is immediately apparent before the needle touches: the cover art shows a horse in endless water, both symbols of freedom and liberty, the image a departure from the gloss-splattered teeth or cartoonish roller-skates of their first two efforts. 

But even in this simple cover art, the sinister lurks. While the two constituent parts are objects of freedom, there is an incongruity in the horse, a land mammal whose boundlessness is expressed through its galloping, being trapped in the water. It is being slowed in the expanse, and we, the listener, are watching from below as though it is prey, and we are predator. You can lead a horse to water, but if it gets greedy and swims past your reach, who knows what danger awaits?

This leads us into one of the album’s main themes: the internet. ‘The Information’, which warbles wet with its lead guitar, is a wish-fulfilment exercise, the narrator wanting to experience “all of my sensations” after feeling lost, only to implode after downloading “all the information”. ‘Organoid’, raging and sarcastic, fumes at tech-induced submission against a backdrop of sci-fi homunculi and horror, and ‘Zeros’ slips into a Midwestern garb and cruises with existentialist dread.

Bassist Mimi Jasson takes on lead singer role, with Dream Nails dropping down to just three members. The band has commented on this making them a tighter-knit creative unit, and with this their style now hinges more on the repetitive, the hypnotic. ‘This Is Water’ comments on this, how “I’m consciously alive, but I’m hypnotized too” portrays the paradoxes at the centre of the LP: homogeneity vs individuality, freedom vs routine, movement vs stagnation. You might be swimming all your life, but if the ocean is endless, aren’t you just treading water?

All songs on this album are sub-four minutes, the majority sat neatly around the three-minute mark, and the momentum of most making them feel even shorter. Beyond all my hypothesising, this album is just cool. Jasson’s half-spoken vocals; drummer Lucy Katz’s oscillation between disco grooves and grungy thumping; guitarist Anya Pearson’s at times unnerving, at others stomping riffs – all combine into a fascinating, immediately enticing and repeatedly rewarding album that proves the depths of Dream Nails’ craft and signals immense positivity for their creative direction.

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