Sorry – Cosplay (Domino) (13th Floor Album Review)
Sorry’s third album Cosplay feels like the moment they stop trying to explain themselves.
Where their debut 925 examined modern life through irony and collage, and Anywhere But Here wrestled with intimacy and self-doubt, this record is more physical, more instinctive, and more unsettling. It sounds like a band exploring how much truth can slip through performance.
The music shifts between clarity and distortion, with guitars, synths, and drums blending into something organic yet unnervingly synthetic, recalling the tension between trip-hop atmosphere and post-punk precision that has always defined them. The five-piece band is still centred on Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen who share the writing and the vocal space. Their voices both merge and alternate and there are moments where you can’t tell who is speaking or to whom. This blurring becomes part of the current that drives the album.
It opens with Echoes, where a ringing guitar line expands outward until it meets the low thud of bass and the gentle insistence of drums. Lorenz’s voice feels distant and conversational, appearing and disappearing in the mix, as if drifting in and out of earshot at a raucous party in someone’s flat, where conversation and sound bleed into one another. The song winds down, only to rise again in a burst of angular energy, a pattern that mirrors its theme of connection and return. The production balances beauty and unease, creating something cinematic while keeping the edges unpredictable.
Jetplane moves in the opposite direction, driven by a solid, propulsive beat and a distorted vocal that hovers on the edge of sense. The rhythm surges, pauses, and rises again, the bass line moving up and down while the band strain for lift off but know they can’t escape gravity for long.
The middle of the album moves through a darker and slower space. Love Posture builds from an industrial pulse into something tense and uneasy, Lorenz’s voice fluttering above like a ghost of melody. Antelope begins quietly, almost pastoral, before guitars and synths swarm around it, creating a dense, metallic haze. Candle brings warmth back into the mix, with a steady snare and entwined vocals giving the song a gentle sway, like the calm settling after long exhaustion. By the midpoint, the album seems to tighten its grip, testing how much pressure its darker tones can carry before giving way to release.
Today Might Be the Hit provides a brief flash of brightness. Its brisk tempo, glam-inflected guitar, and playful title suggest self-parody, yet the energy is genuine. It’s a short, sharp track that captures the absurd hope of creative life: every day might be the one that changes everything, though it rarely does. The push and pull between effort and irony is at the heart of Cosplay, and this song holds it perfectly.
Life in This Body is the album’s quietest revelation, opening with a disoriented vocal before settling into a slow duet that meditates on change and the limits of self. The refrain “everybody changes” shifts from statement to acceptance. Waxwing, one of the highlights, transforms a pop cliché into something strange and intimate. The Toni Basil hook “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine” reappears in fragments, twisted and reframed, surrounded by flashes of humour, lust, and irritation. It’s the band’s knack for reinvention at its most complete, pulling the familiar into the uncanny.
Magic feels like an interlude of doubt, with its halting rhythm and repeated refrain that tries to summon something that never arrives. The final track Jive begins with footsteps and a whisper, building into a roar of sound before subsiding into exhaustion. The lyric “I wanna move like that but I only seem to move like this” becomes the album’s self-portrait: the struggle to express, to change, to dance their way out of a loop.
Across Cosplay, Sorry find coherence through fragmentation. Each track feels alive, full of small decisions and contradictions that reflect the album’s title. It’s a work about performance and self-recognition, tracing the blurred line between who they are and who they pretend to be. The result is not a costume but a kind of truth, one that flickers in and out of view, as haunting as it is human.
Cosplay is Sorry’s most fully realised work to date, a study of identity and imitation that turns self-awareness into sound. It fuses post-punk’s jagged edges with the poise of art-pop and the shadowed pulse of trip-hop, revealing a band confident enough to hide and reveal themselves at once.
John Bradbury
Cosplay is out on Domino November 7th. Pre-order COSPLAY
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