Plum - Bodies in Motion (20260 [Hi-Res]

Bodies in Motion is the second full-length album from Chicago post-punk trio Plum. To make it, the band set out to unlearn themselves, dismantling the usual writing process instead of returning to the methods that shaped their 2024 debut Can't Hold On To It (praised by Audio Fuzz as "a vibrant mix of sounds, blending New Wave, No Wave, Krautrock, and Indie Sleaze”).

Writing began with a retreat to a cabin in Wisconsin, where they spent days on intuitive and constraint-based approaches: songs emerged from Tarot card pulls, graphic scores, free vocal improvisations in the woods, and challenges thrown at one another, like writing a section with asymmetric phrasing or moving toward the ideas they'd normally avoid.

Where Can't Hold On To It centered on groove and propulsion, Bodies in Motion expands the band's vocabulary through layered counterpoint, interlocking rhythms, and parts that answer and circle one another. New drummer Eric Ridder (Em Spel, Vaya) is central to that shift, reinforcing the band's motorik pulse while opening space for more intricate interactions between vocals, guitar, bass, and drums. Primary songwriters Jeff Kelley (guitar, lead vocals) and Heather Perry (bass, vocals) write into that space, keeping every part in conversation and always moving.

That motion is the album's subject as much as its method. "Too Much Sunlight" lives in the burnout of an always-on culture, its narrator "consumed by an impulse / to be performance machines," unable to sit still as "too much sunlight / gets in my head and I can't see out." "Asymmetric" drifts through a world of sterile simulacra, all echoes and mirrors facing mirrors; unable to imagine any alternative, the narrator gives in to apathy: "perfect thoughts, perfect hair / I don't mind, I don't care." The title track imagines the end of the world arriving not as a missile but as "a frequency played from every electric convenience" that hypnotizes everyone into dancing until they drop. A body in motion stays in motion.

The through-line is the body breaking back in, the physical overwhelming the curated mind. It's the same instinct that drove the record's making: a band reintroducing asymmetry, chance, and imperfection into their process. Bodies in Motion is the sound of Plum working more from the body than the head, and finding something more alive on the other side — restless, jagged, and refusing to hold still.