Album Review: Freak Slug - 'Amulet'
Freak Slug turns a past life reading into her most complete album yet.
After being lucky enough to watch them at Leeds Festival 2025, Freak Slug got a past life reading almost by accident, and ended up with an entire album out of it.
"I've got a lot of pain in this life and I wanted to know where that comes from"
The Manchester born multi-instrumentalist, real name Xenya Genovese, explains. The medium told her she'd been a healer in another life, hunted and persecuted for it while her sister was killed in her place. Whether you take that literally or not, it's the emotional backbone of Amulet, a record that digs into old wounds, feminine rage and generations of women written out of the story, and comes out the other side sounding like her most complete work yet.
Where 2024's I Blow Out Big Candles dealt in stripped back, starry eyed bedroom pop indebted to Mazzy Star and Pavement, and first sent her viral with the 2020 single 'radio', Amulet trades that eccentricity for something darker and grittier, sung more distinctly than ever in her own Mancunian accent.
"I've had no previous examples of Northern women from Manchester singing, so I decided that I want to f*cking do it”
Xenya says of leaning fully into her speaking voice on record. ‘Big Boy' sets that tone from the very first crash. A grungey, haunting instrumental building around subdued, sombre vocals as Xenyaadmonishes the history books for erasing the wise women who came before her. It's a heavy way to open, moody and melodramatic in the best sense. 'Wishing Bone’ pulls things back into something more acoustic, sentimental and wistful, her voice at its softest and most delicate, "it's a slow sedation, it's a realisation" landing as the album's most quietly devastating lyric. That softness carries into 'If I Could', a hazy, slow burning meditation on heartbreak that turns unexpectedly cheery, anthemic horns and an upbeat drum pattern giving it a warmth the rest of the record rarely allows itself.
'One Trick Pony' takes a more peculiar vocal approach, smooth and thoroughly indie in its skin, before 'Penny Drop' brings her Mancunian accent right to the front over a genuinely wicked guitar riff, one of the best written hooks on the whole album. 'Serpent' shifts into shoegaze and dream pop territory, entrancing and slippery, exactly as its title suggests, Xenya using it to explore the fraying relationship between humanity and the earth rather than anything more literal between men and women.
'Black Eyes' is rock heavy and swirling, one of the album's most physical moments, its sweetness in the vocal delivery masking real venom in the lyric, a lament for the generational fallout of persecuting women whose only crime was being wise. 'Jade Green' strips things back again, prominent vocals sat over soft guitar, before lead single 'Girl, Intentions' arrives as the record's most braggadocious moment, a sassy, Charli xcx tinged strut that explodes into a full blown indie banger. What started as a song about seeing the champion in someone else became, by the end, a song about believing in herself, villain and saint in equal measure, a nod to the film Girl, Interrupted running underneath it all.
From there, the record turns properly sinister. 'Then Let Me' is gloomy and atmospheric, a distorted ambience adding real allure to a lyric that keeps circling back to being let in. 'Actress' keeps that gloom going into the penultimate slot, a gentle drum pattern underpinning something melancholy and nostalgic, distortion still heavy in the background. Closer 'Muse' brings everything to a grandiose head, heavy amp sounds and a soft vocal take pulling together every thread that's come before it, a genuinely fitting way to close out an album this considered.
Written on the go, in clubs, on aeroplanes, on the way to somewhere else, with long time collaboratorDylan Neustadter across sessions in London and LA, Amulet melds slacker alt rock songwriting with lyricism far sharper and more mysterious than anything on her debut. It sits somewhere between The Breeders and The Brian Jonestown Massacre sonically, but the accent, the anger and the healing underneath it all are entirely hers. Even the demos started life the same way every Freak Slug song does, worked out bare bones on an acoustic guitar before she builds outward from there, a process that hasn't changed even as the sound around it has grown so much bigger.
"It's the best extension of myself that I've managed to capture up until this point. It's Northern, upfront, introspective. Boisterous, as always."
Amulet proves it, an album that turns old pain into something incandescent, and confirms Freak Slugas one of the most distinctive voices working in British guitar music right now.
Words by Alex Peters
