Digging up information on lo-fi pop entity Great Area feels almost counterintuitive, given her sparse online presence and succinct promotional materials accompanying her latest record, Good Coding, courtesy of fellow absurdist Lolina’s Relaxin label. The musical project by London artist Georgie Nettell presents itself in the form of brief, laconic pop songs which tread the line between social commentary and disillusionment, chronicling moments of city life with little apparent enthusiasm, and yet all the more entertaining for their honesty.
The two-minute bop “100% enthusiastic”, from last year’s sample-heavy LP light decline, might be the perfect introduction to the Great Area treatment: a recalcitrant beat and a wistful bassline conjure a sense of mischief, until Nettell’s tight-lipped first verse tones down the energy. “When I shower, when I dress / The power shower’s powerless,” she sings.
It is tempting to find connections between her music and her visual art; a social realist fascination with the apathy of domestic life and a critique of the branding of authenticity under neoliberalism, as seen in her ‘0% enthusiastic’ work I Wasn’t Expecting to Enjoy This and I’m Not, where colourful balloons become emissaries for corporate logos we are polemically invited to free-associate with.
However, while her videos and installations seem to inhabit a decidedly post-digital aesthetic, her music finds its soft spot in the lost futures of synthpop and post-punk. You would be remiss for associating it with nostalgia, a sentiment well past its peak as a cultural brand, but Good Coding, even more so than light decline and the preceding EPs Follow Your Nature (2022) and Hypocrite 21 (2021), leans into its retro undertones, as though rejecting the illusion of originality in favor of refinement.
Skeletal basslines and stuttering drum patterns remain at the core of her compositions, such as the broken waltz “A Dream As Sweet As This” and “Here’s Something For Your Morning Commute”, a two-minute mantra where “the city is empty”, we learn amidst unvarnished stomps, “except for the bad memories”. While nods to the unstable optimism of 1980s synthpop coalesce in a few isolated tracks, such as the shimmery “Science and Poetic”, the latter embellished by the unexpected addition of strings, the nursery rhyme-like quality of Nettell’s vocals continues to recall the understated delivery of post-punk greats like Young Marble Giants and the Raincoats.
Nettell’s version of ‘deadpan’ never matches the level of playfulness of label mates New York, but shares their inclination for ambiguous defiance, perhaps best embodied by the contrast between the glitchy melody of “Human Cannonball” and the seemingly unfazed telling of a sad breakup story (“It used to be loving you was easy, but then you cut me to the bone”).
Although Good Coding, clocking in at a mere 18 minutes, doubles down on the minimalism of the Great Area ethos, an evocative sensibility creeps into her songs compared to her previous efforts, with the occasional disruption adding layers of narrative substance. A faint static accompanies the vocal track on “Rain”, evoking a close-mic’d, intimate exchange (“Believe me when I say that I hate you too”).
Soft mechanical whirring traverses the austere paranoia of “You Must Be So Glad You Met Me”. Meanwhile, what sounds like an underground train approaching looms in the background of the title track, perhaps an indication of its city life-inspired core of alienation (“Small flats in tall building / That’s the way the world ends / The adverts are working / That’s just good coding”). These subtle details permeate the tracks with a sense of drama, compensating for their brevity and tonal uniformity. As disorienting as they aspire to be, Great Area’s songs are both deeply affecting and oddly reassuring, capturing the ‘uncodable’ nature of human fragility.