Fuelled by snacks, Pepsi Max, and 100 gecs on repeat, Oxford glitch-pop duo Dream Phone – aka Hannah Watts and Jenny Bell (last seen ‘caught in the act of looking weird’ as half of Junk Whale) – get ridiculous for their DIY debut extended play with ten minutes of synth-driven hyper-pop melodies and pitch-shifted lyrical pandemonium!
Opening with the infectious one, two, three, four, ‘strut’, Dream Phone sparkle with an off-kilter electronic groove (“If you can’t find me in the dark / I’ll be here by the searchlight”) before exposing us to the extreme temperature of their own personal ‘hell’; a hot mess of obnoxiously upbeat noise and auto-tuned self-destructive attitude: “I can do what I want now / It’s none of your concern / Gonna cut my hair short / Because I’m not really listening to / What you say what you say what you say!”
Piercing your heart with a wooden stake, the ‘bad girls’ sink their fangs into riot grrrl for this next track, taking inspiration from Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre and Julie Ruin, and transforming their already unique pop sound into something otherworldly. Dream Phone’s ode to Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a celebration of friendship and “finding your partner in crime”; a euphoric glitch-pop beatdown for the BBC 6Music generation. “Going to the club / Dance up on some hunks and / Maybe kill some monsters / Or crash a cop car!”
Deliberately artificial in its production and sound, ‘no’ is an “anti-people-pleasing” pop anthem for those of us who struggle to say fuck “no” (“You ask, I sigh but I agree / You can always count on me / I will lie on the ground for you / You can wipe your feet on me”); opening with an electronic blast beat before glitching out into synth cyberspace! Closing their self-titled EP with ‘i don’t want to talk to you (at the show)’, the dreamy duo set boundaries and get anti-social: “Clinging to my beer / Everything’s too loud in here / I can’t concentrate / On what you’re shouting in my ear.”
Dream Phone ooze hyperactive energy, enthuse an ethos of DIY disorder, and, throughout their wonderfully eclectic debut EP, occupy the brain with vivid musical imagery.
The debut EP from Dream Phone is out now via independent record label Divine Schism. Buy on bandcamp now.
Ken Wynne
@ken_wynne