Pickle Darling: Battlebots (digital outlets)

Elsewhere is usually candid about certain artists – usually young women in contemporary pop whose target market is teenagers and their own peers.

We simply say, they don't make music for us . . . although many times we have conceded that but said the album is excellent and worth hearing.

We think we can recognise talent if even it doesn't make music for us.

Pickle Darling, Christchurch's Lukas Mayo (they/them), captured our attention a couple of years ago for their gentle, sometimes fragile sounding songs and their EP of Beatle covers.

We became as engaged with them as we had been with Princess Chelsea when she started out.

We hedged our bets a little with the 2023 album Laundromat but advance singles from this new one were very tantalising, and they were clearly stretching themselves.

So who is Pickle Darling?

Adopting a name combining the astringent and affectionate, they have quietly built a carefully curated catalogue of delicate albums where songs rarely breached three minutes.

Just seemingly slight, fey and charming miniatures brought to life through glockenspiel, soft guitar, keyboards and samples. But earning the slightly disparaging description “cardigan pop”.

Their small, self-contained songs were mostly sensitive and delivered with what could seem like reticence.

But this fourth album finds three of the eight songs at five minutes-plus, only two fewer than two minutes.

This allows for Violence Voyager (“it’s time to reconnect, but sadly this summer I can’t as I’ve got to work”) to develop subtle pop shapes; Human Bean Instructional Manual has internal quirkiness and a delightfully airy jangle, and the sparse, typically lo-fi Massive Everything – considering that uncertain cusp of adulthood when everything ahead seems overwhelming – gets almost funky.

The eggshell-walk of the opener Obsolete starts with a spoken word sample and an atmospheric pillow of synths before their late-arriving first words: “For your consideration. I’m trying my damn hardest to not disappoint again. But I still do.”

Not true: this is a beguiling album of considerable, but deflecting, ambition.

They make music for us.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here. It seems there is a vinyl version with a lyric sheet also.