Monomania finds the group recalling its scrappy punk aesthetic; a perfect nocturnal garage rock album full of the layered and hazy vintage guitar sounds that define them.
On “Monomania”, Deerhunter have replaced the relatively straight lines of Halcyon Digest with something altogether more thorny. When it gets to the final third of the song, in which Bradford Cox simply intones the title over and over, there’s a venom there, a feeling of genuine malice rising, a sense of arrival in a much darker place than before. This is Deerhunter digging hard into their punk roots, dragging their sound through the mud, then coming out the other side with dirty, smiling faces.
Like much of their best material, “Monomania” has a strong sense of journey to it, pulling you by the hair around all its unexpected curves. It bears some aesthetic resemblance to the Weird Era Cont. material when they launch into the white-out section at the close, but mostly this is the type of reinvention that Deerhunter can always pull off while retaining a strong sense of their own identity. When Cox sings “They’ll never take me away,” it reads like a moment of extreme self-awareness, a nod to how his peculiarities have tied this band together through all their musical and personnel changes.
