PVA – ‘No More Like This’ album review: A redefinition of the limits
London-based electronic trio PVA have returned after three years with their second full-length, No More Like This, an abstract loop that traverses boundaries and eradicates limits to become a bold, wildly unique offering.
The Skinny: No More Like This isn’t any one genre. Rather, the three-piece experiment with post-R&B, post-Electroclash, Berghain-beat, Twin Peaks-inflected, queer-core experimental dance-trad shimmer. And that’s just on the first side. By the end of the project, genre is dead, and labels are obsolete.
We are left with the lived reality of the noise as it plays out across the body, heightened by the hands of Tirzah’s producer Kwake, whose experience in south London’s beats, jazz, and soul scene thrives across the ambitious project.
As such, PVA’s talent and craftsmanship remind us that music is just a human craft shaped around the absence of human interaction, touch careening around an otherwise charged, throbbing silence. One such evidence of this is the expansive trip-hop influence on tracks like ‘Boyface’ and ‘Enough’, the latter of which garners speed with a repeated phrase lifted from night-club confessions and the kitsch catechisms of a high-school lunch hall. Nothing is off limits for PVA.
Across the project, Harris’ lyricism takes no prisoners, tackling gender identity, body image, and club culture with a gaze that, in her own words, “tries to keep the stars in the sky” while questioning the origin of their glow. This restless ambition is led by the body, no better exemplified than through the album cover, which holds the album title as an impression in the skin. In this way, No More Like This is obsessive, full-frontal, lived within, like a naked hand exposed to the cold. It is meant to be felt, as well as heard.
Few bands have successfully amalgamated the disparate electronic and traditional band approach to music-making, both begetting differing tropes that demand different reactions from the creator and the listener. Yet, PVA sets up this dichotomy only to break it: The third track, ‘Mate’, typically boasts more electronic inflections, as samples shimmer and fragment atop a chiming industrial groove, and ‘Flood’ soundtracks the post-Covid psyche with intimate intention, as hypnotic and entranching as a live PVA show.
Eventually, the seven-minute epic ‘Okay’ navigates the traditional structure with a mercurial depth that flitters between flirtatious and threatening. PVA might have been away for three decades, not three years, to achieve this kind of maturity.
The verdict: Harris’s first utterance on the album is “Good morning, following the moon.” It is fitting, then, that the ending track, titled ‘Moon’, is a cathartic tale of coming to consciousness. As such, PVA has opened and closed their own self-contained loop. In it, they’ve evaded the logic of boundaries, sonically, physically, and experimentally, to reach out and touch us all.
Defining Track: ‘Enough’
Release date: January 23rd, 2025 | Producer: Kwake | Label: It’s All For Fun / Secretly Distribution
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