Dubstar - Two

Vinyl LP pressing. 2022 release. Two is the second album from Dubstar since Sarah Blackwood and Chris Wilkie reunited in the mid-2010s, and the first since their seminal 90s albums Disgraceful and Goodbye to be produced by New Order and Pet Shop Boys collaborator Stephen Hague. This reunion with Hague ushers in a record of full-spectrum megapop, swooning synthesized orchestras, acutely observed kitchen sink dramas, and outright bangers. A mere 26 years since Stars and Not So Manic Now announced them as something disturbing and different in the pop firmament, Dubstar are themselves again - only more so. Two is a record of bewitching, cinematic scale that connects Dubstar's original thematic universe - the madness under the surface of the suburban, the way that women are forced to fit themselves to the shape of the world and not vice versa - to a new, older and wiser, post-COVID reality.