Pillow Queens – Name Your Sorrow Review

Just the one sorrow, is it? An endless supply rests in the disappointing bag we call life. Should Pillow Queens ask for just one it is the futility which rests in the mind when trundling through day-to-day activities. We ask what the point is, and the reply is, as expected: “Who knows”. We take comfort in the finality of certain interactions. Name Your Sorrow is an exceptionally confident album. This much is definite. Opener February 8th has the essential jabs of fuzz and anguish underneath them and it bleeds so well into Suffer. It is what listeners do, after all. Suffer on and find someplace within an album made to exorcise the feelings of contempt, for the self, for the world around them. It all proves wonderfully intoxicating and relevant.  

Tread the fine line between ruining your life and diving headfirst into an experience which could ruin you. Like a Lesson proves itself to be a marriage between the agony of heartbreak and the reward from an experience tearing your self-worth apart. Speeding through numbers like Blew Up the World and Friend of Mine brings listeners to, where else, the bar. The Bar’s Closed and its haunted, slight echo on the vocal work of lead singer Sarah Corcoran is matched by effective instrumental work, domination of sound and an impressive turn for the Irish rockers. They reckon with their identity in the face of devout experiences elsewhere – the line between faith and finding your voice is an essential step for those experiencing doubts. Name Your Sorrow has enough power behind it to steady its alternate rock appeals but also pool the heartfelt commitments of living life against expectation. 

Roaring individuality is the key to Pillow Queens. Their time together is a perfect storm of relative messages posing honest and hard-hitting questions with the shock sprinkling of genuine care from its core. There is a sense of camaraderie for those experiencing the similar headaches of the band. Where the likes of So Gone and Heavy Pour may be a slight nudge off the accelerator there comes a time where Pillow Queens find themselves bombing through the world around them and lashing out at the social atrocities we deal with daily. Harsh, punk-like elements of One Night strike through. Guitar work here and paired with classic-sounding percussion, the cymbal-led triumphs hear the band cut their teeth on harsher realities.  

Gloriously relentless in its passionate approach to the experiences of life and the experiences of doubt and disease, Pillow Queens hold out on the rocky road to proving themselves over a trilogy of albums. They strike while the iron is hot once more and Name Your Sorrow will no doubt define the band as roaring quality. We share the fear. Going home alone, spending the nights in by yourself when you were so close to some mixture of intimacy or experience is the crying defiance found in album closer Notes on Worth. There is worth in life, of course, but it sometimes takes a band miles away from you to cement such a simple experience, a loving embrace from a band basing themselves on experiences unique to them but imitable and explosive when put to song.