Album Review

Modern Woman, ‘Johnny’s Dreamworld’ Review: The Beauty in the Unsettling

Words by The Pit Standard

Modern Woman understand that a song can be beautiful and still make you uncomfortable. On Johnny’s Dreamworld, a violin line can lend tenderness to a passage that is about to erupt into noise, while Sophie Harris can move from an almost delicate murmur to a voice that sounds ready to tear through the arrangement. The London band’s debut thrives on these contradictions. Its nine tracks move between art-rock, post-punk, folk and chamber music, but the real distinction lies in how rarely those elements behave as expected.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Harris writes in scenes rather than straightforward explanations. Film references, unsettling domestic details and shifting characters give the songs the quality of overheard conversations or fragments of stories whose beginnings and endings remain out of reach. The title is apt: this is a record that follows the peculiar logic of dreams, where a small detail can become disturbing without warning and familiar surroundings can suddenly feel strange. Yet the writing is not obscure for its own sake. The songs are grounded in recognisable feelings, particularly fixation, desire, shame and the uneasy relationship between how women are expected to behave and what they actually feel.

The title track opens with spoken passages, a growling bassline and marching drums, with a squealing guitar cutting across the arrangement. References to film and actors, including Harry Dean Stanton, contribute to its collage-like construction. Harris shifts between speech and melody without settling into either for long. Rather than introducing the band through a conventional chorus, the track establishes a place where narrative and music can interrupt one another. It is an unusual opening, but it makes clear that Modern Woman are more interested in atmosphere and perspective than in making their intentions immediately comfortable.

“Neptune Girl” follows with a more defined melodic shape. Its skipping rhythm and wiry instrumentation give the track a playful quality, while the vocal delivery retains a certain unpredictability. The contrast makes it one of the album’s more accessible songs without sacrificing its oddness. Modern Woman can write a hook, but they rarely present it in a way that feels entirely settled. Even when a melody seems ready to resolve, the arrangement leaves a little uncertainty hanging around it.

“Offerings” is one of the clearest demonstrations of the band’s command of dynamics. Whispered vocals and clipped bass create a restrained opening, with the percussion carefully marking out the space around Harris’s voice. The song then breaks into crunchy guitars and freer, more forceful drumming. The transition feels integral to the song rather than a dramatic effect added for its own sake. The quiet passage makes the heavier section more affecting, and the shift gives the track an emotional force that a constant wall of sound could not achieve.

“Killing a Dog” uses a similarly unsettling contrast, setting delicate refrains against riffs that arrive with considerably more aggression. The effect is deliberately uncomfortable. Its imagery refuses the listener an easy emotional position, while the arrangement keeps pulling between restraint and confrontation. Harris does not explain away the tension, and the band does not smooth it over. It is one of the album’s more challenging pieces, but also one of its most persuasive, showing how musical softness can make a darker subject more disturbing rather than less.

“Daniel” changes the scale again. David Denyer’s violin brings a mournful quality to the track, while the more measured arrangement gives Harris room to develop its character-driven narrative. The song feels less concerned with impact than with what remains after it, allowing the unease to accumulate through small details. Denyer’s playing is especially effective here because it contributes to the song’s emotional character without simply decorating it. Modern Woman’s arrangements are most successful when every instrument seems to have a role in the story.

“Fork/Heart” is more abrasive, opening with a folk-leaning passage before giving way to jagged guitars and sharper rhythmic shifts. The violin becomes part of the track’s friction rather than a source of conventional prettiness. Harris’s vocal moves through the arrangement with a similarly restless quality, refusing to remain in one register or mood. The song could easily become an exercise in excess, but its changes in intensity have enough purpose to make the journey worthwhile. It captures the album’s defining tension between careful construction and the desire to pull everything apart.

“Blessed Day” is arguably the record’s most immediate display of force. Prominent saxophone, heavy instrumentation and a strong melodic centre give it a muscular quality, while the vocal performance maintains the band’s characteristic unpredictability. The song has enough momentum to stand on its own, but it also illustrates why the album works as a whole: the experimental elements do not prevent Modern Woman from writing something memorable. They give the melody a different kind of weight.

“Dashboard Mary” is the album’s centrepiece. Its restrained opening, wispy synths and organ gradually give way to a more frenetic instrumental passage, creating a song that feels as though it is constantly changing its mind. The narrative follows a woman whose choices leave her caught between desire, responsibility and social judgement. Harris avoids reducing the character to a simple moral lesson. The song’s power comes from the discomfort of sitting with a person whose actions may be difficult to defend but whose motives are not easily dismissed. By the time the arrangement reaches its more expansive passages, the music has become part of that emotional conflict rather than merely a backdrop.

“The Garden” closes the record on a quieter note, with soft piano, shimmering synths and Harris’s more fluid vocal delivery. It is a different kind of ending after the sharper turns that precede it, returning to the album’s interest in memory and the presence of people who are no longer there. The arrangement is understated, and the song does not have the same immediate impact as “Dashboard Mary” or “Blessed Day”. Its restraint, however, provides a useful counterweight to the record’s more volatile moments. The album ends not with a final eruption but with a voice lingering in the space around the music.

The breadth of Johnny’s Dreamworld is one of its strengths, although it occasionally threatens to pull the record in too many directions. The quieter songs do not always have the same grip as the tracks built around sharper contrasts, and the shift from folk intimacy to abrasive art-rock can feel more compelling in some songs than others. Yet the variety rarely feels like a band trying on genres at random. Harris’s narrative approach gives the material a shared sensibility, while Denyer’s strings, the bass and saxophone work of Juan Brint-Gutiérrez, and Adam Blackhurst’s drumming create a distinctive musical language around it.

What makes this debut stand out is not simply its willingness to be strange. Plenty of bands can make music that is dissonant, theatrical or difficult to categorise. Modern Woman are more interesting when they use those qualities to expose something in the writing: the tenderness that sits beside cruelty, the desire that becomes fixation, or the gap between a person’s actions and the story they tell themselves about them. Harris’s voice is central to that achievement, not because it is consistently forceful, but because it can change the emotional temperature of a song without warning.

Johnny’s Dreamworld feels like the work of a band that has already developed a strong instinct for how its members can challenge one another. It is not flawless, and the softer passages occasionally lack the precision or emotional force of the album’s strongest material. But its best songs are vivid, unsettling and difficult to reduce to a single mood. Modern Woman have made a debut that rewards close attention, with enough musical invention and lyrical curiosity to make their next move genuinely exciting.

Artist: Modern Woman