From the trip-hop haze of its title track to the club-kick thump of “Giving Up Air,” the Temper Trap’s first studio album in a decade, Sungazer, feels darker than the band’s past work, full of lyrics about suffocation and unanswered prayers. For a group famous for their big, feel-good choruses, the challenge is balancing the hooks with the album’s melancholic subject matter. And for about half of the time, they manage to succeed.
After 2008’s “Sweet Disposition,” which soundtracked countless movie trailers and has exceeded a billion streams on Spotify, frontman Dougy Mandagi moved to Berlin, traded guitars for nightclubs, and cut a solo EP under the moniker Bloodmoon before settling in Bali to start a family. The influence of Mandagi’s Berlin years surface throughout Sungazer: “Lucky Dimes” pairs sampled breakbeats with some of the band’s heaviest guitars to date, while “Giving Up Air” rides interlocking synths toward a climax that’s closer to Underworld than Coldplay.
Elsewhere, “These Arms” evolved from a quiet, Radiohead-style demo into a stomping singalong. The result is fuller and more physical than anything on Conditions, the Temper Trap’s 2009 debut studio album. You can feel the band trying to decide what this album should be: guitar catharsis one minute, electronic pop the next.
“Giving Up Air” delivers euphoric dance-rock, yet its lyrical imagery, of a person fighting for breath, is wrenching. Mandagi wrote the song from the perspective of his aunt, who buried her own child, capturing the suffocation of a grieving mother. The band keeps the beat bright and pulsing, and that tonal mismatch—of a woman gasping for air while the track invites you to dance—is emotionally complex and sonically bold.
Religious doubt of the vaguest order is woven throughout Sungazer. On “Lifeline,” Mandagi walks into a church, leaves “a track of dirt,” and begs “for a way to rewind.” He greets each dawn as “a warning of mortality.” The band’s attempts at heaven-sized choruses start to feel less like empty uplift and more like a representation of a man who desperately wants to believe and keeps asking whether anyone is listening.
The spare “Kuru” was the first song the band wrote when they reunited—and the one that convinced them that a comeback was worth it—and it ends the album on a unresolved note, with just Mandagi and an acoustic guitar calling into the dark: “Is anyone there?/Can anyone hear me?” The trouble is that, Sungazer too often seems to try to answer the existential questions it poses with a generic, uplifting chorus, and the specific sorrows—a dead child, a father’s fear, a faith coming loose—melt into one big, generalized feeling.
The Temper Trap’s instinct to take a small, specific ache and swell it into something an arena can share too often sands down the edges into something too pleasant and familiar. Mandagi’s voice, though, remains an extraordinary instrument, and the songs on Sungazer are rawer, sharper, and more honest than anything the band has released since “Sweet Disposition.”
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