Sleeper

The sounds and scenarios on Carmen Villain’s debut album, Sleeper, are enough to jar you awake and make your head swim. Villain seems far more interested in peeling back the layers of her troubled psyche than reveling in beautiful surfaces. On Sleeper, she walks through dense sonic atmospheres that bring to mind The Sun City Girls’ bracing clatter and This Heat’s ominous constructions. Her lyrics convey a sense of fear, desire, and dislocation that’s both seductive and disturbing. “Lifeissin” sets the album's tone as Villain caresses her venom-etched words against severe synths and tingling percussion. “Dreamo” and “Easy” are even scarier, bathing their eerie transgressions in metallic echoes and quivers. At the furthest extreme is “Made a Shell,” a lysergic interior journey embellished with swirling vocals and squalling guitars. Villain shifts to upbeat (though still abrasive) pop for “Kingwoman” and ends on a morbidly erotic note with “Demon Lover.” With production input from Emil Nikolaisan (Serena Maneesh) and Prins Thomas, Sleeper is a sustained aural hallucination by a true mistress of dangerous dreams.