Adventurous art-rock outfit Mandy, Indiana to make its SF debut Friday

Originally posted in the SF Examiner on December 7, 2022

One of the great joys of listening to Mandy, Indiana’s debut full-length album, “I’ve Seen a Way,” is not knowing what comes next.

At one moment, the band is a sleek synth-pop group, writing tunes made for the dance floor. Later, it's a grimy industrial outfit, making music you’d hear in the dimly-lit underground clubs of Berlin or Paris. Then suddenly, it's a brainy and cerebral art-rock unit, creating thought-provoking tracks that challenge the notion of traditional song structures.

That dizzying combination is by choice. While every number shares one unifying commonality — an urgent, latent sense of angry defiance — the eclectic array of musical approaches was meant to push the boundaries of what kind of songs can and should correspond with another, according to the band’s founder, Scott Fair.

“A lot of album writing is kind of contrived — like, there are instances where people are telling themselves, ‘oh, we need a ballad here,’ or ‘now we need a fast song here,’ and there’s not much thought beyond that” Fair said. “We looked at this album as an opportunity to put the most jarring elements together to see if they could work.”

Despite the rebellious nature of the album, it has been a hit with fans and critics. Pitchfork recently named “I’ve Seen a Way” No. 20 on its list of the best releases of 2023, and the band just played a raucous sold-out show in Brooklyn. On Friday, it will make its San Francisco debut with a performance at the Brick and Mortar Music Hall.

The roots of Mandy, Indiana can be traced back to 2016, when Fair and vocalist Valentine Caulfield met in Manchester, England, while playing a show together with some of their former bands.

The two both expressed an affinity for each other’s musical styles, and when their respective groups came to an end, they decided to link up for a new creative endeavor. Despite, the transcontinental nature of Mandy, Indiana — Fair, synth player Simon Catling and drummer Alex Macdougall are based in Manchester, while the French-born Caulfield is located in Berlin — the band was able to collaborate on songs that blended their diffuse and discordant musical tastes.

After years of experimenting together, the band (whose name is inspired by the ’90s cult teen show, “Eerie, Indiana,” about another fictional town in the Midwest) released a five-song EP in 2021 that generated significant notice in hippish music circles. The group took the template set out by that EP — random bursts of violent noise combined with irrepressible synth beats — and expanded it to create “I’ve Seen A Way,” which came out in May.

The band is uncompromising in its artistic vision, as the songs of “I’ve Seen a Way” lack anything resembling a chorus or traditional song arrangements — and Caulfield made the conscious decision to sing all the vocals in French.

“I come from a classical music background, and I was always inspired by the opera,” Caulfield said. “And a lot of times those songs are being sung in German and Italian, so one really understands what they’re saying, but people very much appreciate that sense of performance. And I wanted to replicate that feeling, because this band is really a way for me to perform.”

Despite the growing buzz surrounding their debut full-length album, the various members of Mandy, Indiana all kept their day jobs, a sense of economic security that they said contributed to the adventurous artistic nature of their work.

“This has never been a full-time thing for us — it’s a creative outlet that lives alongside our regular lives,” said Fair. “I think that’s actually quite liberating because it means we’ve never sort of focused on how to make it more commercially appealing or viable. We use this as an escape to be as kind of out there as we want to be, which is where our tendencies really lie. That gives us a lot of creative fulfillment.”

The sequencing of “I’ve Seen A Way” keeps the listener perpetually alarmed. A cavernous, clanging post-rock number (“Mosaick”) is followed immediately with an auto-tuned dance anthem (“The Driving Rain (18)”); a jaunting and stomping punk track (“Pinking Shears”) is paired with a nocturnal, darkwave offering (“Injury Detail”).

Anyone expecting convention and uniformity in their music will be sorely disappointed in this album — and that’s fine with the members of Mandy, Indiana.

“When we were making this album, I thought there would be like, at most, 50 people who would listen, but they would absolutely love it,” said Caulfield. “So, it’s been quite weird seeing how well it’s been received. It gives me hope that there is a space out there for weirdos like us.”