Liars - They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (LP)

Liars didn’t just pivot with their second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. They torched the map and wandered into the woods. Released in February 2004 on Mute, it arrived after a dramatic lineup change that left the band as a trio of Angus Andrew, Aaron Hemphill, and Julian Gross. They moved to Berlin, ditched the taut dance-punk of their debut, and built a wiry, haunted record around European witch lore and mass hysteria. It felt like a dare. It still does.

You can hear the new intent in the opening moments. The record leans on drums, clatter, ugly-beautiful textures, and voices that sound like they are ricocheting through a forest clearing. Guitars show up as scrap metal and fog, not riff delivery systems. Andrew’s vocals turn from narrator to participant, more chant than croon, as if the band decided that the best way to tell a story about superstition was to act it out in sound. It is an album of ritual, of circle-stomp rhythms and splinters of noise that hint at menace without giving you a tidy villain.

The concept matters because they commit to it. The songs read like dispatches from a village losing its grip, where folk wisdom curdles into accusation. “There’s Always Room on the Broom” swings with a crooked energy, all toms and tangled voices. “We Fenced Other Gardens With the Bones of Our Own” pulls you into a slow, smoky trance, a reminder that Liars understood groove even when they were trying to unnerve you. “They Don’t Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids” is both absurd and chilling, a title that lays out the album’s fascination with rumor as a tool. And tucked into the back half, “Flow My Tears The Spider Said” nods to sci-fi and ancient fear in the same breath, its title echoing Philip K. Dick while the music creeps like a nursery rhyme gone wrong. The melodies are there, but you have to live with the record to feel them.

Back in 2004, a lot of people didn’t want to live with it. Critics split, and some took a hard swing at the band for abandoning the jittery thrills of their debut. Pitchfork’s early pan became a talking point. But time has a way of separating stunt from intent. What once sounded like provocation reads now as a foundational move for a group that would keep reinventing itself across the decade, from the towering drum mantras of Drum’s Not Dead to the synth mutability of later releases. The bones of that restlessness are right here, in the way They Were Wrong, So We Drowned trades scene approval for a strange, focused world-building.

If you love percussion-forward records, this album is a feast. Julian Gross’s drums are recorded to feel tactile and close, a dry thud that leaves space for all the hand percussion and scraped textures that swarm the stereo field. Hemphill’s guitar often hides behind the kit, surfacing as a smear or a scrape, and that restraint keeps the tension. There is very little fat. Even the interludes feel necessary, like stage directions in a folk play.

This is also a record that rewards a physical listen. The They Were Wrong, So We Drowned vinyl gives the low end and the midrange grit a little more air, so those ritualistic toms bloom instead of bunching up. If you have been crate-digging for Liars vinyl, this is the one that separates casual fans from lifers. You can buy Liars records online pretty easily, but it is worth peeking at your local shop’s wall copies first. I have seen Liars albums on vinyl pop up in the new arrivals at small stores from Brooklyn to Fitzroy, and if you are hunting vinyl records Australia, a Melbourne record store is as likely as anywhere to have a clean Mute pressing tucked away.

I come back to this one when I want to remember how thrilling it can be to watch a band burn a path into unfamiliar territory. It is not built to flatter. It is built to hold a mood, to ask you to sit with fear and folk memory and the ways groups can turn on themselves. And on the right night, when the room is dim and the needle drops, it still feels like a bonfire you can stand around, steadying yourself to the rhythm and deciding whether to join the circle or keep your distance.