DMA’s review | Twelve years in, DMA’s finally put their name on it

Twelve years and four albums in, DMA’s have never put their own name on a record. This one breaks that streak, and it arrives at the same moment as their first proper major label deal, a new global partnership with Wonderlick, Sony and RCA after a decade on the independent label I Oh You. Two firsts landing on the same release reads like a decision, not an accident.

The Sydney trio, Tommy O’Dell, Johnny Took and Matt Mason, recorded across Sydney and Los Angeles with longtime collaborator Lachlan Bostock, a decade on from their 2016 debut Hills End. Eleven tracks, under forty minutes, nothing here overstays its welcome.

Opener ‘El Alamein’ announces the album with a funky, off-kilter twang before O’Dell’s vocal, pushed slightly distant in the mix, cuts through and builds toward a surge that peels off into distortion right at the end. ‘My Baby’s Place’, the band’s first entirely self-produced single, trades that surge for floating, gentle harmonies, the most vulnerable thing here despite being the most streamed. ‘Heatin Park’ answers with something grittier, a harder-edged, stadium-sized turn that feels like the album’s one deliberate risk, and ‘Killing Time’ pivots harder still, all clipped electronic pulse and a chorus built for a festival tent rather than a bar.

Not every track earns that same attention. ‘Concrete’ leans on a jangly, eighties-inflected guitar line and mostly coasts on it, the one song here that blurs into the record’s midsection rather than announcing itself the way the singles around it do.

‘Windows’ pulls the focus back in, O’Dell’s plainest lyric on the record landing hardest precisely because he refuses to dress it up: I wish you were the one that didn’t get away. ‘Distance’ closes things out the way the album opened, stomping and anthemic, built for a room full of people singing it back before the record’s even properly out.

Calling an album after yourself twelve years and five records in is either a genuine statement or a formality nobody thought too hard about. On this evidence, it’s mostly the former: a band confident enough in what they sound like now to put their own name on it, even if not every corner of the record is quite as sure of itself as the singles are.

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