If you like Placebo, you’ll love Pirouette by Model/Actriz.
Piroutte is a dramatic and brooding queer club record refracted through the lens of a noise-rock band. The opening throb of Vespers slams like the first track of a late-2000s FabricLive mix from Simian Mobile Disco or Filthy Dukes, pulling you into a shadowy world that’s part Berlin dance floor, part confessional booth, and holds you there with your pulse racing. The beats are relentless industrial kicks, clanging industrial textures, and high-speed Italo-disco rhythms with Cole Haden at the centre of the storm, a magnetic presence who delivers every lyric like it’s life-or-death theatre.
These aren’t just bangers for the floor. Instead they’re stories of insecurity and queer revelation. Haden revisits the memory of wanting a girly birthday party as a child on Cinderella. On Diva he snarls and flirts over what sounds like someone banging steel pipes together. Even when the tempos ease up for more subdued interludes the anxiety lingers, with a nervous heartbeat thrumming through nearly every track. The reference points are an eclectic collision of underground techno, industrial textures, and confessional songwriting, with the dark theatricality of Scissor Sisters and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and the result is exhilarating. The pounding rush of Poppy, the clattering metallic groove of Diva, and the high-drama swells of Cinderella all feel urgent and alive. The pounding, metallic beats you’d expect to hear at Berghain sit with Cole Haden’s voice dead-centre in the chaos, his delivery transforming the punishing backdrops into a narrative space for reckoning and self-revelation. There’s something of Brandon Flowers in the sheer drama, and where The Killers built stadium-sized emotion on new wave romanticism, Model/Actriz take the same high-stakes theatricality and drop it into the queer-club underworld, taking industrial techno’s cold impersonal surfaces and injecting them with theatrical intimacy and emotional pop storytelling.