Symbols

I bought Sergeant’s self-titled 2023 debut without having heard it because of its album art. I was at All Night Flight, a really good record store outside Manchester, and the cover beckoned me: deep green, covered with English text made to look bizarre and unintelligible. Its song titles split the difference between life-changing koan and Jaden Smith tweet: “Seduced by Each and Every Shiny Object I Became an Infant in a Sea of Glance”; “This Song Emanates From the Common Man Claiming His Right to Poetry”; “The Annoying Got Interesting Because the Interesting Got Annoying.”

You absolutely can judge Sergeant by their covers. The Brussels-based group prove that total accessibility and total insularity can form a horseshoe: The songs on Sergeant were deeply absorbing and often led by bright, ingratiating vocal melodies—“hooks” feels like a stretch, although the songs are catchy—but rarely strayed from the kind of ambient-leaning, post-post-post-punk sound design that usually rules out linearity and easy access. On its second album, Symbols, the duo of producer Benjamin Cools and singer Ferre Marnef adds a third member, singer Geraldine Vanspauwen, and brighten up its sound just a smidge, embracing chimes and panpipes in addition to Vanspauwen’s clear, airy vocals.

Sergeant remain one of the headiest bands out, and one of the most searching. Marnef’s lyrics, like the song titles, are syntactically psychedelic but evoke clear meaning. (This is inverted in the band’s production, which sometimes takes a familiar form—jittery IDM song, krautrock groove—before expanding into something wilder and less placeable.) For the most part, Marnef is singing about day-to-day existentialism, the anxiety and ecstasy of life potentially being like this forever, and the futility of trying to change a world when you’re just one guy. On “Shopping for an Avant-Garde Identity in the Bazaar of Life,” he sings about trying to maintain a sense of self as you engage with common life experiences like having kids and moving house (“Since you’ll get bored, rest assured/That I’m in love with you”) while “My Tongue Pronouncing Words Without Consenting to Their Utterance” is seemingly about communication breakdown, not just between individuals but throughout time: “Do you know speeches/From different times/Still didn’t reach us,” he sings, “I’d like to speak them.”

Marnef has an inherently optimistic voice; it sounds like he is singing with his neck craned upward to the gods, as if he needs everyone to hear what he’s saying. (His voice is handsome, but casually atonal; in this way, it reminds me of Yung Lean’s singing voice.) But it’s a tenuous kind of optimism, and all the hemming and hawing about what it means comes to a head on album closer “Working Through Disappointment to Further Disappointment to Defeat,” a dirgey dub track that’s noticeably less sprightly and more freeform than the rest of the record. He sings about feeling disconnected and alone, detached from the modern world, in a plainly defeatist way. Where the dubby, watery loops on the rest of the album feel expansive, they feel claustrophobic here, working in tandem with Marnef’s lyrics to narrow the light in the song to a pinpoint.

Toward the song’s end, Marnef and Vanspauwen sing in unison: “Cling to the brim of your hat/We the people are not dead yet.” But all the while, Marnef is singing “I’ve never felt so alone,” over and over. It is a scary, weird note to end the record on, and almost calls into question the tone of the 40 minutes of music that came before. In light of those lines, I suddenly zero in more on all the darkness on Symbols: The pummelling drums that close “Every Epoch Dreams the Next One, Even if It Becomes the Nightmare of the Other”; the album’s many vortexes of discordant panpipe and freaky animal noises. Even the pleasant circularity of the songs starts to feel more ominous, less like the trio are making choppy, organic dance tracks and more like they’re building you a very pretty kind of purgatory.

Recontextualisation is in the very bones of Sergeant: Their first album was a plunderphonic pop record made from samples of their own long, freeform jams. Given how of a piece Symbols is with Sergeant, I assume this one was made the same way (although there’s not a lot of info about the process behind Symbols available). So it makes sense that the longer you spend with Symbols, the more it shapeshifts and remakes itself. A Sergeant-ism from “A Pile of Dumbstruck Faces Watching the Universe Functioning Without Them,” seemingly about contending with a zillion different feelings at once, taps into that hallucinatory, metamorphosizing sensation: “I am in need of it/I am feeling it/I am digging it/I am sweet to it/I am not done with it.”