GIRL RAY

Prestige (Moshi Moshi)

Prestige is Girl Ray’s dreamland club fantasy, negotiating the complexities of love through the medium of 1980s-style disco-pop: power and reclamation alongside awkwardness and vulnerability. In the early imaginations of this album, the London band’s singer Poppy Hankin envisioned Club Prestige – a make-believe space celebrating inclusivity, love, and glamour – and the album’s opener sets the scene. Exit the taxi with your friends and enter Prestige as the DJ cues True Love, a song balancing the tensions of love and its reciprocation – as does previous singles Up, the funk-driven Everybody’s Saying That and the harmony-layered Love Is Enough.

Relationships can be complex, and Begging You Now is a 3-and-a-half-minute confessional about losing sight of right and wrong in the haze of love. The pace of the album is lost with Easy, yet returns with Tell Me, a synthy to-the-point dance number; Wanna Dance feels intimate and slow, contrasting against next track Space Song. Here, a grand heartache is felt via thumping heartbeat drums and Hankin’s echoey vocals, resembling those of Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering.

Closing the album is Give Me Your Love: a single back in 2021, and which raises spirits in club-anthem fashion over nearly eight minutes. Conceptually and anthemically, this album is a step up for Girl Ray.

words TERESA DELFINO