I feel like I should be in a drum circle outside of a Grateful Dead concert.
If your algorithm hasn’t already shoved Mandy, Indiana into your ears at an unsafe volume, allow us to help accelerate the process.
The Manchester four-piece—“one of the decade’s best new bands,” according to Bandcamp, who rarely lie but also don’t sleep—are back with “Cursive,” the latest nerve-shredding dispatch from their upcoming album URGH, out February 6 via Sacred Bones. Yes, that title is both the sound you’ll make while listening and the sound the world has been making for several years now.
On URGH, Mandy, Indiana sound less like a band and more like an unsettling environmental condition. The record plays like a call to arms, a panic attack, and a brief astral projection all happening at once. This time around, everyone’s fully in the lab: vocalist Valentine Caulfield, guitarist/producer Scott Fair, synth architect Simon Catling, and drummer Alex Macdougall all actively shaping the chaos instead of politely waiting their turn.
Following the “noisy, harrowing” (The Needle Drop) single “Magazine”—which felt like being yelled at by a very stylish machine—“Cursive” leans hard into bristling techno unease. It recoils, explodes, whispers, then detonates again, mining tension from silence before kicking the door back in. The accompanying video, directed by Stephen Agnew, looks exactly like what happens when sound design gains sentience and holds a grudge.
Catling explains that “Cursive” is the band’s most collaborative track yet, built from Macdougall’s rhythmic sketches and Catling’s bass sequence before Caulfield’s vocals and Fair’s production stitched it all into something feral. Translation: everyone threw their ideas into the pit, locked the door, and waited to see what crawled out.
Much of URGH was written during an intense residency at a deeply ominous-sounding studio house outside Leeds (as one does), then recorded across Berlin and Greater Manchester. The process was further complicated by both Caulfield and Macdougall undergoing multiple surgeries while the album was being made—because if you’re going to make a record about pain, disorientation, and survival, you might as well do it on hard mode.
Those experiences bleed directly into Caulfield’s writing, which blurs internal collapse with external catastrophe. Her lyrics—largely delivered in French—wrestle with sexual assault, systemic indifference, and the ever-present hum of suffering that underpins modern life. Even if you don’t speak the language, the intent is unmistakable. Caulfield uses her voice like a weaponized signal: distorted, playful, cruel, cathartic, and unignorable.
Following their acclaimed 2023 debut i’ve seen a way, URGH finds Mandy, Indiana refining their own unsettling dialect into something resembling a survival mantra—self-determination shouted into the void, right before the lights cut out.
Mandy, Indiana will tour across Europe next year, hitting London, Paris, Berlin, and more. Full dates below. Bring ear protection. Or don’t. That’s kind of the point.
