Album review: Indiana – No Romeo.

Originally published in LeftLion magazine.

“These may appear to be love songs but look closer, chip away their exterior beauty and reveal an inner darkness. I am No Romeo.” With these words, Indiana defines the central theme of her début album, which folds twisted takes on love, loss, betrayal, revenge and regret into sinister, icy, leftfield electronic pop.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Romeo, who finds true love but is ultimately destroyed by it, Indiana finds only tainted love, and yet she survives. Even at her most vengeful – “all your sons and daughters will be broken, from now on and ever more”, she pledges on Never Born, the opening track – you sense an underlying vulnerability, and even in her most vulnerable moments, her power never fully fades.

On the cavernous, gothic Play Dead, she could be Juliet, feigning death as a coping strategy. On Bound, she traces a journey from submission to dominance in a way that hints at sado-masochism (“this isn’t love, this is dangerous”), while on the title track, she spurns the whole idea of romantic love: “I don’t need no Romeo… it’s not enough, but it’s alright, I’m sleeping on my own tonight”.

Only The Lonely buries an uplifting dance anthem under six feet of soil; Heart On Fire subverts the headrush of falling in love, casting it as a perilous act, like jumping off a tall building. Finally, Mess Around ends the journey with a ghoulish resurrection and a deadly re-embrace: “Your suffering completes me, I’ll take no more, I want no less.”