Queen of Jeans' 'hard/SWEET' Is a Gleaming Masterpiece of Philadelphia Dream Pop
The production credit is the tell. Will Yip produced All Again outright in 2024; here he steps back to co-mixing and mastering while Justin Bartlett moves up to produce alongside the band and engineer the sessions. A small shift on paper. On record it sounds like a group given room to decide things themselves.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Miri Devora on vocals and guitar, Mattie Glass on guitar, Andrew Nitz on bass — Nitz the quiet utility player, a multi-instrumentalist Stereogum credits with the banjo threaded through “Still Learning.” Memory Music’s copy promises “dreamy guitars, adventurous instrumentation, crushing lyricism,” and on “Sweet Devotion” delivers “dirty guitars and flirty bass.” Paste hears “steely guitar riffs” in among the dream pop — the right paradox for this group.
The Spatial Dynamics: Stereogum’s Margaret Farrell wrote the most useful sentence about how this band builds a song: “Still Learning” is “a force of slashing guitars, pliant banjo, and cataclysmic drums,” all of it there “to safeguard Devora’s gliding vocals.” That is the arrangement logic across all ten tracks — everything loud in service of something clear. Mindies noted the opener’s guitars grow “more tangled as the song progresses.”
Standout Performance
Miri Devora. Our call rather than a critical consensus, but the evidence is the band’s own instinct: they orchestrate around her. Stereogum, on the second single: her vocals “sound more refined than ever.” The label’s claim that she is “one of the most underrated voices in modern indie rock” is label copy, and happens to be true.
Why It’s Certified
It landed two days ago, so the long reviews haven’t arrived, but the advance notices are unanimous and the pedigree is not in doubt: All Again was Stereogum’s Album Of The Week and took a 7.7 from Paste. Stereogum called lead single “Still Learning” “an epiphany of a track,” and Paste’s verdict — “some of the prettiest songs the Philly band has ever released,” with “Rush” the one to cue first — is the only summary needed. Hard and sweet, in that order, both earned.