Georgia Barnes, also known as Georgia, follows up last year’s Come In EP and this year’s four-track album-teaser Welcome To Georgia with an inventive, eclectic, and completely manic debut filled to the brim with raw, elemental ingenuity. The 21-year-old multi-instrumentalist and producer hasn’t as much worn her influences on her sleeve as she has completely torn them apart, scattered the pieces, and then restructured them as a beast of her own design with dazzling aplomb. Grime, R&B, pop, house, garage, playful hints of Hudson Mohawke, Kate Tempest, a Dean Blunt-ish approach to modern experimentalism, and the socio-sonic concerns of M.I.A. – all converge on Georgia, offering a diverse and initially overwhelming listening experience that bursts with imagination, if not all the tiny struggles that come with it.
‘Intro’ lures us in with perhaps the most restrained moment on the album, chirpy synths and chipmunk cries immediately giving way to the tannoy-blasted frustration and choppy percussiveness of ‘Kombine’, merged with a tempered Qawwali drone. ‘Be Ache’ scrabbles for heartstrings with an ambience of faltering, half-formed confessions, meditative until they erupt into unrelenting electronic surges and devastating claps. Georgia remarks “I could be your heartache / You could be whatever”, belying a human tenderness at the core of the LP that is often deliberately waylaid by the swirling grandiosity of her production, rendering it all the more affecting when it slips through the cracks.
She often deals in paired opposites: ‘Nothing Solutions’ talks of indecision and doubt amidst a lurking, ever-mutating soundscape, the strained non-melody of her voice on “This could be something / Nothing” enhancing the nature of her inner turmoil, whilst ‘Tell Me About It”s repetition of “I love you too much / I hate you too much” reinforces this permanent conflict, as fickle as the supposedly ill-matched musical styles and elements that she so joyfully fires at one another. She traces her weaknesses, her self-reassurances (‘GMTL’), her youthful power (‘Digits’), and this typical back and forth of the human condition culminates in ‘Heart Wrecking Animals’, a tough, hard-bitten track whose discordant, slightly off-tempo strings – used much in the same way as Dean Blunt employs his – expose Georgia at her most honest, removed as she is from the ballast of her jolting, rapid musical constructions. As such, Georgia is a fledgling soul with a wicked grin on its face; a exploration of what it is to be young and human under the auspices of an expanding global urbanity,
Standout track is lead single ‘Move Systems’, if only for the sheer monstrous bombast it launches on the senses. Beats cascade like white powder in an avalanche, powering through Georgia’s garrulous, M.I.A.-ish drawl, at once nonchalant and fiercely politicised as she proclaims “These systems always lie about who we are / But it won’t be long”. Dancehall, globalist rap, the earthy lyricism of Jamie T and a chorus hook that rivals the very best of sophist-pop weirdoes The Knife – ‘Move Systems’ takes a rusty pipe to genre, and announces Georgia (in case you hadn’t got it already) as a presence that cannot be ignored.
Sometimes Georgia lurches into murky territory – her boundless inventiveness can overwhelm at first, making it difficult to connect with her sound, as impressive as it is – but is best to see her music as a living organism, borne of the scrap and the smog and the empty street corners of the city. It snakes freely, making use of its fickle sound to transcribe a human emotive experience – one of indecision, doubt, regret even – with a policy of no prisoners and a twinkle in its eye. These systems may lie about who we are, but Georgia certainly doesn’t. Alright, I’m out.
Words by Tom Grantham
@_katelush