The first song The Temper Trap wrote when they got back in a room together was ‘Kuru’. It’s the last song on Sungazer, not the first, and that gap between when something was made and where it ends up sitting says most of what you need to know about this record.
Dougy Mandagi built his career on the opposite instinct. ‘Sweet Disposition’ exploded the moment it existed and never really let up: soundtracking films, streaming past a billion plays, following the band into festival slots for years after they’d stopped wanting to play it. By 2018 that success had burned the four of them out completely. Mandagi moved to Berlin and started making club music alone as Bloodmoon. Toby Dundas built a studio and scored films. The rest scattered further still. Nobody was in a hurry to make another Temper Trap record, and that turns out to be exactly the record they made.
‘Sungazer’ itself is the clearest evidence. Mandagi wrote it as a promise to his son, Ziggy, before he was born, and it’s built slow: I was bending in the wind, half awake in a lucid dream, when you came without a warning and pulled me in, his falsetto sitting almost alone over a bed of synth before the rest of the band arrives underneath him rather than around him. Nothing here is trying to detonate the way ‘Sweet Disposition’ did. It’s trying to hold still long enough to mean something.
‘Giving Up Air’ makes the same case from the opposite direction. It started as ‘Disarm’, a track from Mandagi’s solo project, before the full band rebuilt it around Joseph Greer’s off-beat chords and Dundas’s drums until it turned into the album’s most physical, danceable moment. He’s reportedly written the lyric from his aunt’s perspective, after she lost her own child: Giving up air, laying it bare, hoping my dreams will reappear, when everything I know is hanging on a prayer. The band keeps the groove celebratory underneath that, and the tension between the two is the best trick on the record: grief with a body that still wants to move.
‘Lucky Dimes’ opens things with sampled breakbeats and the heaviest guitars they’ve used, a signal that eight years apart changed what this band thinks it’s allowed to sound like. ‘Bird on a Wire’ sits closer to their old register, all crescendo and falsetto, and it’s the strongest proof that formula still works when there’s an actual song holding it up.
Not every slow build earns its patience. ‘Halfway’ and ‘Dystopia Radio’ move at pace but pass by before they register, and they’re the two moments on the record where the band reach for urgency instead of trusting the songs to take their time. They’re also, not coincidentally, the two moments that sound the least like this particular Temper Trap.
Eight years is a long time to spend not making the thing you’re best known for. Sungazer sounds like a band that used the time well: writing the ending first, then taking the rest of the record to earn the right to actually get there.
