Louise Distras - Beauty After Bruises (2023)

It’s been ten long years since her debut album, was it worth the wait? ​It’s been a bloody long wait, but Louise Distras is finally releasing her follow up album to 2013’s debut, Dreams From The Factory Floor. Ten years is a long time for anybody, and when you were described as a snarling, angry, polemical singer/songwriter, the question will be, have the years mellowed Yorkshire’s finest? The answer is yes and no.

Whilst she may have burst on the punk scene with all the velocity of vindaloo vomit and speeding spit, for those who were prepared to listen there was always more to Distras than just vehemence. She herself admits though that, “…the major differences between the first album and this one, emotionally, is that I felt at that time in my life like I was looking outwards, and saying, ‘here’s what’s wrong with me, here’s what’s wrong with the world. And it’s the world’s fault. It’s the world that’s doing it to me’. But with Beauty After Bruises, I’m looking inwards. I’m saying, ‘Well, the way I see the world is actually because of the way that I see myself. I pulled the wool over my eyes for a long time, because I was still carrying bricks from my past. And if I carried them any longer, I would have been building the same house.”

Her first album was a punk-spitting attack on all that she saw wrong with the world, now, years later, she is looking inward – an introspective album that has a message for us all. You can’t solve the world’s problems without first solving your own.

The first single released off the album, Black Skies, which we reviewed here, featured Steve Ignorant and was a blistering song full of punk vitriol and unrestrained energy, but it was the next single, Girl In The Mirror, reviewed here, with its pop beat and thoughtful lyrics that really set the tone for the new album.

Beauty After Bruises, lushly recorded by Ross Peterson in San Francisco and Stephen Street in London and featuring Mick Talbot on keys and Gunnar Olsen on drums, is more indie pop than punk. Distras has always had a great ear for melody, often lost in the heavy sounding songs of her past, and this really comes to the fore on this album. But what she hasn’t changed is her incisive and thoughtful lyrics, delivered on this album with more range and emotions than before.

Distras has clearly been through the mill in the ten years since her first album release and Beauty After Bruises is a reckoning with herself, a re-appraisal and a moving forward. On the bouncy opening tune, Truth In Your Lies, the great pop melody sets your head nodding and foot tapping, but the lyrics cut to the heart of those predator gurus who are looking for the damaged and cracked souls to exploit. Hollywood Drug has a dreamy 60s psyche sound, with ominous drums, with the vocals slightly cracked and you can sense the LA streets littered with broken and forgotten dreams like discarded syringes. It’s a theme on the album that you have to discover yourself, not let others tell you what you are or be distracted by false dreams. But Factory Girl (a nod to her first album title) which has soulful keys, shows that dreams can lift you above the routine drudgery of life, whilst Time Heals Nothing, with its haunting melancholic reflection on painful memories, explodes the lie that some damage will heal in time: some scars are too deep and you have to learn to live with them.

This is balanced out by the songs extolling the virtues of love. Forever Is You is a great pop song which shows what a songsmith Distras can be and displays the range of her voice. Love And Money opens with an Americana acoustic sound and could slip into AOR territory but it’s held together by her affecting vocals that can turn a hackneyed idea of love being more important than money into something fresh.

Album closer, Keep On Trying, ends with an upbeat note in a Springsteen bombastic style, that acknowledges that every day we must get up and face the world anew: Keep on trying/Even though your heart is breaking.

Punk in attitude but with an indie pop sound with real soul, Beauty After Bruises is an album that was worth the wait. It’s not an album that Distras would have made had she recorded her second album a year or two after her first, and it’s a shame that she has had to go through suffering to produce this album. It is our experiences that shape us, and the way we deal with them shows the strength of our soul and character. Distras has turned her experiences into songs, distilling her inward-looking reflections into lyrics that can become universal for the listener.

Punk is about attitude and Louise has enough for the whole of Yorkshire. Her voice was always emotional but now it’s more introspective, more mature and distinctive. With less shouting, she has become a voice to be heard.