The Mistys have never sat still long enough to be pinned down. The Manchester‑based duo of singer Beth Roberts and electronics artist Andrew Hargreaves treat genre as a dressing‑up box rather than a rulebook, pulling on and discarding styles with gleeful abandon. Across previous releases they have built a self‑contained sonic world: subversive pop in thrift‑store glamour, songs that flirt with synthpop, art‑rock, electro and torch balladry while quietly sabotaging each from within. “Subversives in pop’s clothing” is not just a slogan but their operating principle - hooks come laced with side‑eye, and every sugar‑rush carries a faint aftertaste of unease.

With Situations | Useless Mouths, that restless project pivots decisively toward the hedonistic dancefloor. Where the previous album turned inward, mapping private anxieties and late‑night spirals, this one faces outward, toward bodies in motion and the charged space between them. The Mistys aim their sights at the club not as escapist fantasy but as a place where joy itself becomes a form of activism: a fragile, necessary promise of possibility in a world that seems determined to grind people down. Here, pop is not garnish; it is a tool. In their hands, a chorus can turn confinement into release, a four‑on‑the‑floor kick can convert confrontation into consolation, and a synth‑riff can prise open the tight fist of loneliness long enough for togetherness to slip in under the lights. The record doesn’t pretend to fix reality - “it can make the world feel better... at least until the record ends” - but it insists that those temporary betterments matter.

Musically, the album feels like a set of interconnected short stories. Each track is a vignette: a situation, a useless mouth, a fleeting contact. Lyrics read like phone notes, overheard confessions, internal monologues caught halfway between despair and delirium. Roberts’ voice moves from conspiratorial whisper to full‑throated plea, always slightly fogged, as if beamed in through steam on club mirrors. Hargreaves builds environments around her that pulse and shimmer: drum programming that nods to house and electro, synths that oscillate between glassy brightness and smeared, shoegazey haze, basslines that carry both weight and bounce. The production revels in edges slightly out of focus, like memories of nights out replayed the morning after - specific in their emotional hit, hazy in their detail.