Mint Julep In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep

Following on from 2019’s Stray Fantasies LP, Mint Julep (husband and wife team Hollie and Keith Kenniff) return with a new album that takes a deliberate step away from verse/chorus song structures to a more free-flowing, layered approach that ditches premeditation. “We went with first ideas and let them guide the composition rather than planning a definitive road map – which hopefully lends itself to creating a specific and unique emotional connection,” says Keith.

Across these eleven tracks, Mint Julep has created a diverse musical ebb and flow, with stratified song structures that swell and undulate across the full sonic spectrum. It’s a richly rewarding journey. Never mind ‘shoegaze’, this is ‘mindgaze’. Get your head up. Opening track ‘A Rising Sun’ with its synth washes, dreamy vocals and thrumming guitar pitched against analogue static scratches is a precursor of things to come.

New single ‘Black Maps’ is probably the exception here – in a good way. The pulsating bass synth beat and sparkly guitar structure synchronises beautifully with a melodic chord overlay. Uplifting. Each track evokes a varying sense of musical sensibility, from the industrial beat and squeezebox-like pulse of ‘Lure’ and the aircraft drone and string-plucked melody of ‘Longshore Drift” to the stunningly beautiful synth coda on ‘Lost’.

It’s very much to Hollie and Keith’s credit that this excellent album’s sonic stream of musical consciousness approach works so well. If this is an example of the hazier direction of Mint Julep’s technicolour pop venture, then here’s hoping for more of the same soon.