MOTHER MOTHER – NOSTALGIA – ALBUM REVIEW
5th June 2025Twenty years of MOTHER MOTHER, bless ’em. Instead of shuffling off to some expressive-persons’ commune to make clay statues of their chakras, they’ve released Nostalgia—a concept album about memory, emotion, and the ghastly business of remembering how you used to feel before the feelings curdled. Like a scrapbook made in a sensory deprivation tank by someone slowly becoming wallpaper.
They’ve called it Nostalgia, which is fair enough. I too once had nostalgia—caught it off a Canadian backpacker in 1978. Came with a rash and an unshakable fondness for Spandau Ballet. But this Nostalgia isn’t contagious (though I did feel itchy). It’s an album from that strange and shimmery cult known as MOTHER MOTHER, who hail from the frozen provinces of Canada, where emotions are worn like scarves and synthesizers weep gently in the background. It brought back the time I sobbed into a sink while “Total Eclipse of the Heart” echoed across the meat aisle of Kwik Save. But with more circuitry. Less luncheon meat.
I didn’t trust it at first. Ten albums in, most bands sound like divorced dads doing TikTok yoga. But It’s alive. Like a velvet slug crawling up your spine and whispering secrets about your first kiss. It’s theatrical, twitchy, oddly beautiful—like me, if I had a better haircut and access to a producer with intimacy issues.
The opener, Love to Death, ambushes you like an ex at the garden centre—sweet on the surface, but there’s something ominous in the dahlias. Then it starts to spiral. Make Believe sounds like Roald Dahl wrote a synth opera while concussed. Playful, yes, but slightly rabid. There’s a frequency in there that made my teeth hum.
And FINGER. That track gave my telly a migraine. It’s all glam panic and sneering surrealism, like Ziggy Stardust throwing a tantrum at a gender reveal party. The video is all domestic madness, pink sauce, screaming objects. Basically it’s Tunbridge Wells through the lens of a surrealist drag collective on heat.
But the real emotional centre—and I say this while clutching a custard cream like a rosary—is ON AND ON (Song for Jasmin). A love song with no groin in it. A friendship anthem, forged over decades of late-night motorway breakdowns and shared anti-acid tablets. It’s tender, but not cloying. Like when someone you used to sleep with gives you half their sandwich and remembers your therapist’s name.
Every song pokes something buried: identity, death, unicorns, and whatever lives between the notes of a warped vocal take. It’s not polished. It’s lacquered in anxiety and eyeliner. Imagine Florence Welch locked in a shipping container with The B-52s and a crystal healer who used to be a dominatrix.
The title track, Nostalgia, nearly did me in. It’s not wistful—it’s wrong-footed and echoing and possibly about a past that never actually existed. I stared into my toaster for a full minute afterwards and saw three versions of myself, all disappointed.
There’s no filler. Just a dozen forms of melodious psychic interference. You don’t know whether to dance or ring your estranged uncle.The album is reminiscent of a disco in a deconsecrated church, with glitter in the confession box and someone crying in the vestry. Oddly comforting.
I’s easy to sneer at this record. Too arty, too Canadian, too many unicorns—but Nostalgia is bold. It’s a band doing exactly what it pleases after two decades, and somehow still sounding like they’ve just discovered synthesizers are edible. There’s joy here. A weird, lopsided joy. The kind I only get during silent discos or when someone under 30 compliments my shoes.
Score 7/10
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