- Multi-instrumentalist Will Cumings aka LANKS returns with debut full-length, twentyseven. Deeply personal, the record documents his love story with his now-wife, addresses the stigma surrounding the modern day mental health crisis and his own battles with a crippling fear of failure.Sprawling opening track Man prefaces the record with mathy percussion reminiscent of Antidotes-era Foals. LANKS fastidiously builds with purring synth and delicate keys as the cut swells to a blistering climax. Nestled in the layers is LANKS’ quintessential smokey vocal, smoothing the jarring edges of ringing guitars and marching snares.
There’s more instruments on twentyseven than you can poke a stick at, track Phoenix Friends employs flute, brass and acoustic guitar while wonky synth and airy keys on Horoscope see LANKS flex as a producer capable of generating filthy club bangers, while still staying true to his pop sensibilities.
Single Comfortable showcases LANKS’ vocal dexterity, decorated by glittery eastern leaning synth and driving percussion. Delicate and airy, the instrumentation lends a necessary lightness to the dark subject matter as Cumings addresses suicide and mental health.
There’s a sense of familiarity that lives in the tracks on twentyseven. LANKS has drip fed five singles from the record, even lifting two tracks from 2016’s Viet Rose EP. The fourteen here are a case study in texture and contrast, each track multifaceted and intricately layered, twentyseven chronicles the earnest confessions of a man weighed down by his own expectations and sees him reevaluate his own interpretation of success. It’s in the culmination of those successes and importantly, those failures, we are delivered a very worthy, rounded debut. As the old adage goes, diamonds are made under pressure, and evidently LANKS was sitting on a mine.
- Fiona Priddey.