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Future Islands: People Who Aren’t There Anymore review – back to melancholy banger mode

Some perfectly constructed pop offsets dark musings on a record elevated by Samuel T Herring’s ever richer vocals

Here are grownup, weighty ruminations on devotion, sacrifice, separation and Covid, but The Tower and King of Sweden are also perfectly constructed pop. Iris smartly repurposes a 70s Nigerien funk beat, while Deep in the Night and Give Me the Ghost Back (“Two hundred million feel they’re underneath a knife”) offer beauty suffused with dark drama. A ballad such as Corner of My Eye makes great use of his vibes, his intensity; it doesn’t seem much of anything until Herring gets out on the stump and sells it with his chewy, syllable-relishing diction.

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