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**Warpaint - "Warpaint"**
★★★★☆

There's something deliciously unsettling about Warpaint's self-titled sophomore effort, like stumbling into a fever dream where Siouxsie Sioux and My Bloody Valentine are locked in an intimate slow dance. The Los Angeles quartet—Emily Kokal, Theresa Wayman, Jenny Lee Lindberg, and Stella Mozgawa—have crafted an album that feels both weightless and heavy, ethereal yet grounded in a hypnotic groove that pulls you deeper into their shadowy sonic universe.

Following their critically acclaimed 2010 debut "The Fool," the band faced the inevitable sophomore slump pressure, compounded by internal tensions and the challenge of living up to their own atmospheric masterpiece. The years between albums saw them scattered across continents, with members pursuing side projects and grappling with the complexities of creative collaboration. Wayman's solo work as TT and the band's collective soul-searching sessions threatened to fracture their delicate chemistry, but instead seem to have refined it into something more potent and purposeful.

"Warpaint" finds the band diving headfirst into a more electronic-influenced sound, trading some of their guitar-heavy psychedelia for drum machines, synthesizers, and production techniques that would make Kevin Shields nod in approval. The result is their most cohesive statement yet—a dreamy, narcotic journey through post-punk landscapes painted in shades of midnight blue and silver.

The album opens with "Intro," a brief instrumental that feels like being pulled underwater in the most pleasant way possible, before launching into "Keep It Healthy," where Kokal's gossamer vocals float over a rhythm section that's both minimal and monumentally groovy. It's here that bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg announces herself as one of the most underrated players in indie rock, her lines providing the gravitational pull that keeps these songs from floating away entirely.

"Love Is to Die" stands as the album's emotional centerpiece, a gorgeous meditation on romantic dissolution that showcases the band's ability to find beauty in melancholy. Kokal and Wayman's harmonies intertwine like smoke, while Stella Mozgawa's drumming provides a heartbeat that's both steady and subtly complex. It's the kind of song that reveals new layers with each listen, a quality that defines the album's best moments.

The hypnotic "Biggy" demonstrates their knack for building tension without traditional verse-chorus structures, letting ideas evolve organically over its six-minute runtime. Meanwhile, "Go In" serves up their most direct statement, a relatively straightforward rocker that still manages to feel like it's being transmitted from another dimension. The closing track "Son" brings everything full circle, a sprawling nine-minute opus that feels like watching the sunrise after a long, strange night.

What makes this album particularly compelling is how it captures a band fully comfortable in their own skin. Where "The Fool" sometimes felt like four talented musicians still figuring out how to blend their distinct voices, "Warpaint" presents a unified vision. The interplay between Kokal and Wayman's guitars creates textures rather than riffs, while Lindberg's bass work provides the melodic backbone that keeps these atmospheric pieces anchored to earth.

The production, handled by Flood and the band themselves, deserves special mention for creating space within density. Every element breathes, from the reverb-drenched vocals to the carefully placed electronic flourishes that never feel intrusive. It's the sound of a band that understands the power of restraint, knowing when to pull back and let silence do the heavy lifting.

Ten years later, "Warpaint" has aged remarkably well, influencing a generation of bands who've tried to capture their particular blend of dream-pop sensuality and post-punk edge. While they've never quite recaptured this album's particular magic on subsequent releases, its influence can be heard everywhere from Drab Majesty to Preoccupations.

This is music for 3 AM drives through empty cities, for moments when you need something beautiful but not necessarily comforting. Warpaint understood that the most powerful emotions often exist in the spaces between words, in the pause before the chorus kicks in, in the way a bassline can say more about longing than any lyric ever could. "Warpaint" remains their masterpiece—a gorgeous, haunting document of four artists at the peak of their collaborative powers.