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**Liars - WIXIW**
★★★★☆

After spending the better part of a decade terrorizing audiences with their apocalyptic noise-punk theatrics and conceptual mind games, Liars pulled off perhaps their most shocking move yet in 2012: they made an album you could actually dance to. Well, sort of. WIXIW (pronounced "wish you") finds Angus Andrew and his shape-shifting collective trading in their sledgehammers for synthesizers, their primal screams for whispered confessions, and their trademark chaos for something approaching—dare we say it—accessibility.

The journey to WIXIW began in the aftermath of 2010's Sisterworld, an album so relentlessly bleak it made Joy Division sound like The Beach Boys. After relocating from Los Angeles back to New York, the band found themselves creatively spent, questioning everything they'd built over their tumultuous career. Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross had departed, leaving Andrew as the primary architect of Liars' next evolution. Rather than recruit new members to recreate their established sound, Andrew embraced the isolation, diving headfirst into electronic production and drum machines.

The result is Liars' most intimate and paradoxically their most alien work. WIXIW strips away the band's punk aggression to reveal something far more vulnerable underneath—a collection of songs that feel like transmissions from a lonely satellite orbiting a dying planet. The album opens with "The Exact Colour of Doubt," a pulsing, hypnotic meditation that immediately signals this isn't your older brother's Liars. Andrew's vocals float over a bed of synthetic textures and programmed beats, creating an atmosphere that's simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive.

Musically, WIXIW occupies a fascinating middle ground between industrial electronica and avant-pop, with Andrew drawing from influences as diverse as Throbbing Gristle, New Order, and early Depeche Mode. The production, handled by Andrew himself alongside longtime collaborator Tom Biller, favors space over density, allowing each synthesized tone and drum hit to breathe in ways that would have been impossible within their previous wall-of-sound approach.

The album's standout tracks showcase this newfound restraint beautifully. "No. 1 Against the Rush" builds tension through repetition and subtle shifts in dynamics, while "Brats" serves up the closest thing to a conventional pop song in the Liars catalog, complete with an actual chorus you might catch yourself humming. "His and Mine Sensations" demonstrates Andrew's growing confidence as a vocalist, his delivery ranging from robotic detachment to genuine emotion within the span of a single verse. Meanwhile, "Flood to Flood" closes the album with eight minutes of slowly evolving ambience that feels like watching a city burn in slow motion.

Perhaps most surprisingly, WIXIW works as a cohesive listening experience in ways that some of Liars' more adventurous efforts didn't. Where albums like Drum's Not Dead could feel like endurance tests, WIXIW invites repeated listening, revealing new details and emotional subtleties with each encounter. Andrew's lyrics, often abstract but occasionally heartbreakingly direct, explore themes of isolation, technology's dehumanizing effects, and the search for genuine connection in an increasingly artificial world.

The album wasn't without its detractors upon release. Some longtime fans felt betrayed by the band's electronic turn, missing the visceral punch of classics like "Plaster Casts of Everything" or the conceptual audacity of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Critics debated whether this represented artistic growth or creative capitulation. But time has been kind to WIXIW, and it now stands as a crucial pivot point in Liars' discography—proof that a band known for constant reinvention could surprise even their most devoted followers.

In the decade since its release, WIXIW has influenced a generation of artists working at the intersection of punk attitude and electronic experimentation. Its DNA can be heard in everyone from Death Grips to Preoccupations, and its blend of vulnerability and alienation feels increasingly relevant in our current digital age.

WIXIW may not possess the raw power of Liars' early work or the conceptual ambition of their mid-period masterpieces, but it succeeds on its own terms as a deeply personal statement from a band unafraid to burn down everything they'd built in service of something genuinely new.