SINGLE REVIEW: cartoonhead – Slick

Birmingham four-piece cartoonhead are back once more. The indie rock outfit released their debut EP, ‘this house is not a morgue’, back in 2022, and followed it up with a single last year. With this latest number, ‘Slick’, however, the band have put out arguably their best track to date.

This is a gorgeously dreamy cut, with some of cartoonhead’s finest performances all round to date. The lounge and blues influences infused into their indie rock sound transforms the track from a whimsical catchy number, to a glittering, wistful affair, soaked through with a truly palpable sense of melancholy.

Elements such as the reversed guitar notes harmonising with the main track, or the impressive yet wonderfully understated vocal performance, help to make the song feel expansive and sprawling, something that demands your attention and requires respectful patience.

Stripped back percussive rhythms contrast wonderfully with bass lines that meander gently with a jazzy sensibility. A particularly stunning guitar solo plays out in the back half, driving the song into a climax that gradually builds to a moment of brief sonic claustrophobia, the percussion and guitars crackling with noise.

Meanwhile, cartoonhead manage to deliver some of their most fantastically poetic lyricism that grapples with sobriety, existential dread, and modern romance, with stunning bars such as ’You said we’re not cut out for this world/But honey we are the earth/Darling we are the dirt’.

It’s a wildly impressive track from the band that instantly forces you to take notice of them. cartoonhead have been bubbling away in the indie underground for quite some time, but ‘Slick’ is a song indicative of a band that could so easily fill club venues should the fates decide it. An unexpected hidden gem of 2024 that deserves to be anything but hidden.

For Fans Of: Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight, The Smiths, Catfish and The Bottlemen

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