More about: Georgia

Seeking Thrills is Georgia’s second full-length album after 2015’s self-titled outing. Trying to summarise her sound is an exercise in itself, suffice to say that to date the artist has delighted fans with an interlocked tapestry of sensitive lyrics and catchy, well-crafted rhythms.

Fans of her already released singles will find themselves on familiar territory as she kicks off with the pulsating ‘Started Out’ and ‘About Work The Dancefloor’, before the effervescent recent single, ‘Never Let You Go’. This opening salvo combines her circumspect lyricism with runaway melodies, ensuring these tracks will be firm favourites when performed live. Having featured as a session drummer alongside Kate Tempest & Micachu amongst others, Georgia’s percussive ability stretches across the album as a whole, adding a rhythmic urgency to many of the tracks at both high and low tempo and given over to a larger soundsystem, the thumping percussion lines of ‘About Work The Dancefloor’, ‘Never Let You Go’ and ‘24 Hours’ should coerce even the stiffest of dancers into twitching some limbs.

There follows a switch in mood through a growling bass coupled with hedonistic exuberance in ‘Mellow (feat. Shygirl)’ and then the gentler ‘Til I Own It’, which augurs the album’s less frantic and more reflective side with ‘Ultimate Sailor’ and ‘Honey Dripping Sky’ later completing a trio of more contemplative works. Georgia allows the instrumentals to take on some of emotional work in the joyous upturn, ‘I Can’t Wait’, and likewise in ‘Feel It’, the track which feels closest to the emotive core of the album’s more tender moments where lines are laden with anxieties such as “I'll keep telling myself/That I'll grow with my valuable friends” alongside the possibility of “Fall[ing] into different worlds”, lyrics which lend the song a potency it holds underneath the surface until eventually giving way to an unavoidable excess in the powerful, distorted chorus. If there was an outlier in the album, it would be ‘Ray Guns’, which whilst feeling like the sound of an artist enjoying the multitude of sounds at her disposal, could leave a less attentive listener a touch adrift.

The overwhelming result however is an emotive work that, as the title suggests, leaves you permanently seeking thrills long after the initial listen. Georgia herself likened her process of discovering influences in the Chicago House, Belgian Post-Punk and Detroit Techno scenes of the eighties to diving down a “rabbit hole”, and in many ways listening to Seeking Thrills produces much of the same effect. The sound often consumes the themes of youthful joy with an eye on the future to such an extent that with all else forgotten, Georgia’s raw and totalising sound creates a space that is all her own. As she shifts from jubilance to reflection and back again, a vast range of sounds appear in the most unexpected of places, letting the euphoric and wistful blend into a unique mode, reminding revellers of the inevitable daylight that succeeds every famous night. Though the three opening singles are oftentimes a world apart from the latter stages of Georgia’s second LP, this shouldn’t deter fans: the rest of Seeking Thrills is nonetheless a joy to discover. 

Seeking Thrills is released on 10 January 2020 via Domino. 

More about: Georgia