Motherhood - Thunder Perfect Mind
Forward Music Group
Released on January 24th, 2025
The genre-bending Frederictonian band Motherhood’s new album is a manic art-rock romp. Billed as their most accessible offering to date, Thunder Perfect Mind is nonetheless—beneath the spirited riffs—a work of speculative fiction. Traversing the full breadth of the surf-rock galaxy with stops in the pop, prog, noir, and punk constellations, the band makes creative use of genre as a storytelling vehicle, and names artists as diverse as Bad Brains and Ennio Morricone as influences this time around.
The story begins with “Flood II,” in which our protagonist, crossing a local bridge, is seized by an ominous black cloud and swept into a nightmare.
The psych-western “Bok Globule” is a particular highlight on the journey, with an accompanying music video in which the desperately grinning band outrun several outlandish monsters over a barren space-scape. They sing as they flee, “But it’s something / Even if it’s ugly / It reaches out towards me but it clearly doesn’t love me.” The campy aesthetic amplifies the track’s retro-futurist charm.
“Wandering” is the poppiest song on the album, with bouncy guitar and synth lines and a 2000s indie feel that recalls the eclectic energy of Wolf Parade or the playfulness of the Unicorns. A hazy plotline emerges from the distressed laments of the lost hero: “Pushed out against the wind / I walked around for hundreds of years / Just for a glimpse of them / Who said they would / But did not appear.”
There are recurring themes of entrapment, of walls and fences, of horror-movie versions of eternity. “Sunk” evokes an unnerving sense of frustration (“Well it’s been so many / That if time had threading / I’d twist it like a rag in my clenched fists wringing”) while the lyrics of “Moat,” sung in unison with spy-theme surf guitars, depict a dire purgatory: “I’m in the moat / The circle goes forever if it’s watched / My eyelids twitch and strain but never close.”
At times the poetry risks being lost behind the frantic theatricality of the music, but if one listens closely, the frenetic delivery helps to highlight the story’s surrealness and the anguish of a narrator unsure what is reality and what is hallucination.
“Propeller” is the climax of the album’s arc and contains its catchiest melody, delivered in apocalyptic gospel harmonies that somehow convey a rare sense of hope: “I set a long course and fell asleep / There is a strong force propelling me.”
The instrumental “Kyle Hangs at Noon” closes the saga in grand spaghetti western style, but provides little clarity on the fate befalling the narrator: Does he remain in the unending smog? Is he deposited back on the bridge at the same moment he disappeared, home but forever changed? Has he been in a coma this entire time?
Whether the protagonist prevails against the dark cloud is unclear, but either way, it’s worth appreciating a band brave enough to defy the Spotify algorithm in 2025. More than ever, the world needs works that are thought-provoking, that demand a repeat listen, that are crafted from the imaginations of real people rather than emerging from the cloud, fully formed but empty of substance.
The band admits, “It’s a tall order: presenting a 10-track concept album in the era of algorithmic, single-driven listening,” and aims to provide “catchy one-hitters that give no air of codependency; like a Magic Eye, the bigger picture appears only if you care to search.”
The bigger picture is worth searching for in an album notable for both its comic-book momentum and its value as a work of fantastical sci-fi poetry.
- Ava Glendinning