Sylvan Esso: Free Love | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- In a piece for the Guardian this March, Brodie Lancaster spoke to Cut Copy's Dan Whitford about the challenges of performing electronic music post-lockdown. She noted that "the energy required for dance music can’t be replicated in a two-dimensional experience" like the livestreams that have become popular with singer-songwriters, "[beaming] out of one living room into another."

"Attempting to create a sensory experience out of one that flattens the senses feels hopeless," she said.

Today, Canadian husband-and-wife duo Sylvan Esso release their third studio album, Free Love, which follows their 2017 Grammy-nominated record What Now. That record inspired a mammoth tour, live album and film, where Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn expanded their ensemble to ten-strong, playing the kind of music Meath says she hopes will inspire punters to take off their shirts and dance. With festival appearances at the likes of Bonaroo's Superjam already booked, it's understandable how the suspension of public dancing could deflate the impact of this release.

And yet, the hybridity of this compact, ten-track album - borrowing elements from pop, electronic and folk - gives it an intimacy and an intricacy worth consideration beyond the dance floor.

As always, the contours of Sanborn's electronic arrangements feel human and multi-dimensional, a pulse that ebbs and flows under Meath's delivery. Opening track What If gurgles to life like an arcade game, a vocoder filters her voice as she asks “What if end was begin? / Would men be like mothers / And the falling of others would be like / The first leaves of flowers." We follow where her curiosity leads, poetic explorations of relationships, conflict, memories, dreams - the sketches are both broad and exacting, rewarding even after a few listens.

Bright like a firework, Ferris Wheel is the standout highlight of the album, with its raucous call-and-response, hand-claps, panflutes. It's an immediate companion to the band's bigger dance hits, Radio or Coffee. Amelia sings the phrase "asphalt's hot" staccato, like feet hopping along stinging concrete. After so much time collaborating with Nick, the line between instrumentation and vocals is blurry, and her delivery sublimely merges into the soundscape.

On Train, she lends a woozy inertia to the hook which gives way to the urgency of a four on the floor chorus. On Rooftop Dancing, the murmur of a city is conjured by a buzzing synth, she launches her voice into it like a cooee.

Halfway through the record is the key to it all - a song called Free. Amelia sings the line "I'm being honest it feels like / Each moment is loving at first sight" with the tenderness of Big Thief's Adrienne Lenker. The softness of it is new for the duo, but not too far removed from their folk background. While it was probably recorded sometime last year, it feels oddly prescient - in the face of upheaval and turmoil, connecting to and recognising yourself in others is grounding. And melting into the rhythm and melody of dance music is freeing.

- Aleisha McLaren.
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