Guilt doesn’t waste any time. It comes in hard, with dry, almost martial drums setting the tone straight away, while Eilis Frawley fires off one phrase after another, as if trying to make some sense of the chaos around her. The track builds from there through repetition and pressure, with a strong krautrock feel and a rough-edged mix of noise rock, industrial, spoken-word punk and lo-fi electronics.
The influence of Kim Gordon’s no wave side is easy to hear in that underlying sense of menace and in Frawley’s phrasing, but here it’s the drums that really call the shots. The rhythm section never lets up, and the sparse, abrasive synths only make things feel more claustrophobic. There’s also something of Sleaford Mods in the stripped-back minimalism, while Frawley’s delivery occasionally brings Mandy, Indiana to mind.
The lyrics jump from one thing to another, almost like scrolling through a feed: violence, genocide, inequality, headlines, memories, privilege, the odd domestic detail in between. Everything is thrown together with no real time to process any of it. That’s what hurts most about Guilt. Frawley is dealing with a very specific kind of guilt: you see what’s happening, you know it’s happening, and still you carry on with your life, caught between anger, helplessness and a sense of normality that suddenly feels much harder to live with.
The video doesn’t need to spell any of this out, and it doesn’t. Metal lifts, concrete, brutalist spaces, and a figure moving from total restraint to completely losing control are enough. There’s no release and no clear answer. Everything stays unresolved. And that’s the best thing about Guilt: it doesn’t give you an easy way out. It just stays there, making you uncomfortable.
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