Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Irreversible

Chicago’s Brigitte Calls Me Baby feel like a band on the rise. Undeterred by the minimal impact of their 2024 debut The Future Is Our Way Out, their follow-up Irreversible is, superficially at least, bigger, glossier, bolder—the work of a band dramatically recalibrating its ambitions from the realistic to the grandiose. And it seems to be working. There is a growing sense of buzz around the band, no doubt helped by their striking moniker—a reference to singer Wes Leavins’ high school correspondence with the late, controversial French actress, Brigitte Bardot.

But beneath the sheen, behind the new wave stylings and the third-hand Morrissey affectations that leave Leavins sounding more like a cross between Hamish Hawk and Brandon Flowers, Irreversible is the work of a competent band that simply can’t resist the lowest-hanging fruit. There are no unexpected turns here; the next chord is always the most obvious one. The hooks are big, yet frustratingly predictable. 

Brigitte Calls Me Baby might look like a New Romantic supergroup, but even bands like Spandau Ballet, A-ha and Duran Duran took a more adventurous approach to their songwriting. Strip away the veneer, and you’re left with the kind of band major labels signed in the wake of the Killers’ success—acts that would come to be pejoratively tagged as landfill indie. They do not immediately sound like the Wombats or the Courteeners, but there is clearly some shared DNA, most evident in the chugging guitars on tracks like “Slumber Party” and “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction”. The verse of “I Danced With Another Love in My Dream” goes a step beyond mere influence, bearing such an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In the Dark” that I feel positively grubby just listening to it.

The banality of Irreversible’s lyrics also deserves scrutiny. “I bought Blue Velvet on a DVD/I brought it to the slumber party” (from “Slumber Party”) drips with sophomoric pretension, while “She said, Truth is so much stranger than fiction/Oh, fiction/And I said, I don't have five years lеft, that's my prediction/Oh, my prediction” (“Truth is Stranger Than Fiction”) is a spectacular clunker.

Given how the band have centred their identity around Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted of incitement to racial hatred multiple times in her latter years, and chosen to tour with Morrissey, their empty, politically incurious writing starts to feel less bland than strikingly unreflective.

Commercially, in the UK at least, Brigitte’s haphazard cosplay is a smarter path to follow than you might initially think. The landfill survivors perform well on a summer festival circuit that reeks of nostalgia, and Brigitte will slot in nicely as an unthreatening newcomer for audiences to adopt—and I’m sure they’ll look great on the big screen. But artistically? Irreversible sounds like a dead end: a lethargic monument to hollow style over substance, entirely on brand for a band that saddled their debut with one of the more ridiculous, faux-philosophical titles of recent years. It is a meaningless shell of a record with few, if any, redeeming features.

Irreversible is out now via ATO.