REVIEW: Pygmy Lush - TOTEM

Pygmy Lush returns after 14 years with a peace offering, an archived album that absolutely deserves to be heard.

38:03 // July 11, 2025 // Persistent Vision Records

When the family cat that went missing over a decade ago suddenly shows up at your feet with a mangled bird in its mouth, do you recoil in disgust? Or might you be filled with joy? Enough to assume a certain significance of the cat's offering? You might want to inspect the bird for magical properties, perform an exorcism, make it your God. Perhaps the bird gave its life to guide your mangy little friend back home. Maybe it was just the random cruel chance of nature. Maybe it doesn't matter—just take it as a sign of better terms moving forward. In the words of Pygmy Lush, "This isn't our record anymore, it is yours".

TOTEM arrives like a curveball—flung out of purgatory nine years after it was originally recorded and mixed by Kurt Ballou at God City Studios, and fourteen years since the band's last full-length, Real Friends, graced our ears. The arrival of TOTEM marks neither a complete return to the split-personality form of the group's debut (Bitter River, one bank clinging to the bloodied feathers of its pageninetynine lineage) nor a logical evolution of the moody folk rock sound they settled into on Mount Hope and Real Friends. No, TOTEM occupies its own realm in the Pygmy Lush pantheon—perhaps at times a more conscious melding of their influences, and at times something else entirely. It's a bit of a Frankenstein record, to be honest, written during a tumultuous period in the band's history when lineup changes and creative wonderings turned into dissolution and unofficial hiatus. I'm not sure if TOTEM is the mangy cat or the sacrificial bird in this story, but it's punk either way, and it rules.

"House of Blood (Butch's Monster)" kicks the door wide open with perhaps the heaviest version of Pygmy Lush we've ever seen, dropping in with the rotten punk blues of Mike Taylor and Mike Widman's guitar playing, alongside Chris Taylor's iconic half-man, half-beast snarl. At just over the halfway mark, the guitars begin to lurch between palm-muted chugs and squeals of orchestrated feedback, and it makes you wonder how anyone could have kept this recording under wraps for so long.

Rounding out the lineup on TOTEM is Erin McCarley on bass, whose tone provides a majority of the distortion on the album, and whose backing vocals also add a welcome contrast on songs like "Algorithmic Mercy" (which takes a page directly from the Unwound playbook of long, dirgy repetitions) and again on "The Puppeteer", which may not have been much of a standout otherwise. On drums we have Andy Gale—snappy and reliable. His playing shines early just by virtue of how well he carries the band's momentum throughout the noise rock swagger of "A Little Boy and His Bulldozer". The energy across TOTEM is volatile, though. Album highlight "February Song" sounds very close to something that could have been found on their previous two records, with more subdued vocal melodies from Chris Taylor and a healthy dose of depressive blues—but then "Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound" snaps right back with a short, freakish blast of hardcore. Oh, and because it wouldn't be a Pygmy Lush album without some ambiance, "Nonsensical Whimper" closes things out with a short saunter before slipping straight into a 10 minute post-rock coma with a nice crescendo at the end. It doesn’t give me nightmares like the behemoth "September Song" that consumed the back half of Bitter River with noisy drones, but that might not be a bad thing.

Frankenstein, mangy cats, dead birds, momentum that gets up and falls, gets up and falls—it's not actually that hard to see why this album was put on the backburner, or why it fell into the cobwebbed crevice of adulthood. TOTEM is absolutely at its best when the riffs are dizzying and the yelps are maniacal, but it's a sharp change in direction from what the group had made their name doing. It doesn't always land smoothly, and Mount Hope and Real Friends were more popular than the half-hardcore Bitter River anyway (despite my incessant advocacy). So why now?

Pygmy Lush has always been a transient collective of shapeshifters; it's why they released an album like Bitter River in the first place—to allow themselves the freedom to move between worlds that are so often segregated by decibel level but connected by culture, so to hear a record like TOTEM isn’t all that surprising. To hear an album that sounds nothing like this next will be just the same. The group has been spotted playing fleshed-out acoustic sets behind NPR’s Tiny Desk, so clearly that sound is still very much in the wheelhouse of Pygmy Lush's future. TOTEM is simply a celebration of new life in old things, of hiatus melting away like the end of an ice age—a fossil, brought back to life by some act of necromancy as a reminder of the road traveled. It’s an archival snapshot of the band in a transitional period, and now it's a weight that the group no longer has to carry. For that reason, any hairs that I could split are overridden by the pure joy of having one of Virginia's best bands back in action.

7.5/10