Pop music feels increasingly like a hall of mirrors. Sampling, referencing, and straight-up replication have become the genre’s default mode. Halloween is now a celebrity costume contest of uncanny impersonation, while the Billboard Hot 100’s longest-running chart-topper is a near-literal rehash of a late-’90s hit. Social feeds and streaming algorithms bombard us with the uncanny suggestion that nothing new exists under the sun. As Mark Fisher framed it, borrowing Franco Berardi’s phrasing, this is “the slow cancellation of the future”—a cultural dead zone where innovation seems perpetually postponed.
Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen have made their artistic home in this uncanny valley. For nearly a decade, the primary architects of London’s Sorry have mined the tension between past and present, exposing their influences instead of burying them. Across two albums and multiple EPs, the band—rounded out by Lincoln Barrett on drums, Campbell Baum on bass, and Marco Pini on electronics and production—has leaned on borrowed song titles and lyrical fragments, from Oasis to Tears For Fears, to craft music that is at once neurotic, referential, and strangely alive. On their third album, COSPLAY, Sorry try on personas without the ironic buffer they once used: folk troubadour, dark ambient chanteuse, and UGK MC all make appearances. The result is an unpredictable, sensuous, and slightly haunted record, a soundtrack to a future that feels retroactive.
The album thrives in its cut-up approach. “Jetplane” mashes a Guided By Voices hook with dial tone and taut breakbeats into a frenzied battle cry: “Arrest me! I’m a hot freak!” On “Waxwing,” Lorenz repurposes Toni Basil’s “Mickey” under Twilight Zone synths and industrial feedback, transforming saccharine nostalgia into something sharp and salacious. “Love Posture” could be Sorry’s nod to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” a bassline hum underpinning Lorenz’s lyrics about desire’s physicality, while the band’s earlier track “Closer” remains a tender emo slow burn.
COSPLAY lives in imperfection. A false start on “Magic,” Lorenz’s rasp on “Today Might Be the Hit,” and her elastic timing on the Elton John–inflected “Candle” all underscore the album’s human vulnerabilities. It’s porous, slightly messy, but always precise enough to capture the tension of searching for meaning in a cultural landscape that refuses to settle.
The record stumbles when it leans too heavily on erudition or gimmick. References to Yukio Mishima on “Into the Dark” and repetitive, single-word hooks on “Echo” verge on flattening Sorry into a cohort of Zoomer nihilists. Yet, a dissonant guitar strum or percussive hit can always pivot the mood back into the uncanny, reaffirming the band’s skill at controlling chaos.
Comparisons to American hyperpop provocateurs like 100 gecs are tempting: both delight in scrambling cultural hierarchies, both oscillate between homage and critique of contemporary life. But COSPLAY’s closer, “Jive,” demonstrates a key divergence. Starting from a single downbeat, the track unfolds across a sumptuous R&B groove, bratty electroclash outbursts, and what sounds like a marching band of misfits. Lorenz anchors it all, repeating the refrain like a mantra: “I wanna jive tonight.” Unlike hyperpop’s ironic pullback, Sorry leans in, unafraid, letting the future stretch just a little further.
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