Du Blonde: Sniff More Gritty review – a gleefully self-sufficient affair

The playful garage-pop of recent Solitary Individual (featuring Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace) might primarily be an ode to enjoying your own excellent company, but it also acts as a neat insight into its author, Newcastle’s Beth Jeans Houghton. Continuing along the resolutely DIY path of acclaimed third album Homecoming (2021), Sniff More Gritty is almost entirely performed, produced and engineered by Houghton, save for a few drum parts. As well as being wholly self-sufficient, Du Blonde’s fourth album revels in a proud outsiderness that gave up on trying to toe the party line long ago.

A pair of tracks – the bratty middle finger of TV Star and Next Big Thing (featuring Skunk Anansie’s Skin) – pour disdain on a series of unsavoury characters, the former awash with cocaine and disappointment, the latter a damning report from inside the industry (“He only touched you a few times/ So why does it bother you?”). Yet the resounding spirit throughout these 12 cuts of freewheeling riffs and scuzzily melodic hooks is the essence of someone gleefully cutting loose and celebrating the freedom of answering to no one but themselves.