When Samantha Cameron was “outed” as a fan of Minneapolis synth-pop band POLIÇA in 2015, British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail naturally sensationalized the association. A close-up photograph of lead vocalist Channy Leaneagh screaming into the microphone accompanied mentions of the band’s “violent imagery”, their decision to name their second album after radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (“who described pregnancy as ‘barbaric’”) and Leaneagh’s androgynous looks. It was true, however, that Leaneagh’s experience of being a single mother after separating from her first husband Alexei Casselle had inspired a rather unforgiving perspective on heterosexual relationships.
In 2015, she married Poliça producer and co-founder Ryan Olson and gave birth to a son in October. The band’s third album United Crushers took on an overtly political slant, but it also contained more personal - and less nihilistic - ruminations on heartbreak and intimacy. (As befitting a band with a debut LP that was released on Valentine’s Day). On February 16th, POLIÇA’s fourth album Music For The Long Emergency appears poised to dwell on that familiar continuity between the personal and the political.
There is a nevertheless a major stylistic change, given that the album is the product of an 18-month collaboration with Berlin-based orchestral collective s t a r g a z e. After premiering the explicitly political, dissonant and sprawling “How Is This Happening” shortly after Trump was elected, POLIÇA released the more accessible “Agree” last week. With the band’s signature electronic boldness replaced by elegant chamber arrangements, Leaneagh presents an intriguingly nuanced perspective on the persistent need for intimacy:
"In this long emergency of being human without a clue, we fall prey to the loudest, most powerful voices, and romantic love seems old-fashioned and usually oppressive. However, we still fall in love again and again. When I got married a second time, I understood I have more philosophy than true conversion; I'm a religious anarchist but I haven't been born again, so to speak.”
“But when I see it amongst my smartest, most radical friends and heroes, it's more confusing; they too get married or enter monogamous relationships. It makes no sense when you discuss the historical evidence or just our own experiences with love, but then we don't often act in evidence and learn from the past. That's the place 'Agree' was made from. We don't believe in it but we want it all the same.”
Channy Leaneagh, Billboard
The song expresses an inexplicable longing for intimacy (‘Want to please you babe/ Tongue in teeth’) while gravely mourning its costs (‘Being good to you, but losing me’). Leaneagh raises the unanswerable question (‘But what is love anyway/ You don’t believe in that/ You agree with me’ ) and notes that what has been set in motion cannot be easily halted or reversed:‘How do we stop what we started?’ By the song’s end, her plaintive introspection arrives at a striking conclusion: ‘I want to be with you/ And blow it all to hell’.
