Dehd: Poetry review – a sparkling dialogue with rock’n’roll history

Chicago rock band Dehd’s music is two things: mercilessly catchy and meticulously camp. The trio’s biggest hit to date – 2022’s Bad Love – was a smoke machine-fogged rush of instant-singalong glam. Now, their fifth album arrives in a swirl of bratty pop-punk: opener Dog Days’ stop-start guitars accompany pouty playground-chant lyrics dripping with teenage melodrama. Later, they turn to sweeping, big-chorused Americana (Hard to Love), combine slacker indie and vintage soul for the irresistible Mood Ring – a sleazy, cheesy tale of unexpectedly reciprocated lust – and, on Necklace, cleverly meld country and grunge, the exaggerated scuzz offsetting sugary-sweet melodic hooks.

Contemporary guitar music is in constant, unavoidable conversation with the past, and Dehd inject a lot of fun into this dialogue. There’s a knowingness in the band’s dressing-up-box approach to genres past, and a distance, too; Poetry often feels as if it has a sepia filter (it comes as little surprise to find Whitney’s Ziyad Asrar on production duties; a band who helped pioneer this kind of faux-retro feel).

Yet there’s real feeling here, too (“Everyone I know is a broken heart,” is the devastating observation sneaked into Dog Days’ ode to adolescent freedom). While the band can’t quite maintain the heady momentum of the album’s first half – it does eventually peter out into samey, mid-tempo indie – Poetry still provides ample proof that its makers are experts at wringing entertainment and emotion from archly resurrected rock history.