It was the comeback of 2018 that no one saw coming when Dubstar unveiled their fourth album One. That lush affair—overseen by Martin “Youth!” Glover—made it seem as if no time had passed since the group’s previous album Make It Better (2000) had arrived nearly two decades earlier. As the promotional cycle for One cooled in 2019, many fans wondered what was next for Chris Wilkie and Sarah Blackwood. “Hygiene Strip” answers that query and then some.
The expansive, electro-pop piece is a foretaste of the fresh material the duo are generating for their highly anticipated fifth set Two, due out early next year. The lush soundscape comes out of a writing-production convocation with group’s familiar colleague Stephen Hague, who produced the first two Dubstar LPs, Disgraceful (1995) and Goodbye (1997).
An impressive marker of their first creative reunion with Hague in twenty-three years, “Hygiene Strip” finds Dubstar taking sobering stock of our current moment: a world in the throes of a global pandemic and wracked by social unrest. Blackwood delivers the lyrics in her glacial, yet emotive style as only she can, as the composition evinces that the pair have assuredly made the most of this tense period to render art that makes listeners think and feel.
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