The music of Brit alt-rocker Cassy Brooking, AKA Cassyette, comes from the emo school of pop-metal. Her 2021 debut single was, appropriately, called “Dear Goth”, she’s much-hyped by Kerrang, and has been tour support for both Bring Me the Horizon and My Chemical Romance. All these are apt reference points for the music on her debut album which is feisty, occasionally spicy, and – contradictorily – very precisely produced to suggest a gnarly aesthetic.
The songs flip about between crunchy sampledelic wodges of metal riffage, Prodigy-ish electronic hammering, and howled, but polished vocal angst. Comparisons that spring to mind along the way would include early Marilyn Manson, Crystal Castles, Pvris and Babymetal, as well as near-peers such as Vukovi, BEX and Lake Malice. One can imagine Cassyette’s belting voice at the centre of lighters-in-the air stadium ballads but, at this stage in her career, she’s going for something less refined, more basic.
Given the times, it would be great if she were spitting fire at what’s going around us, but This World Fucking Sucks is not so much about the world we live in as the angst of her personal life. Notably, her father died suddenly not too long ago and Cassyette attends to this on the slow-fast rocker “When She Told Me”, about hearing the news.
Understandably, such bereavement flavours the album as a whole, but the best of it still has a petulant, flinging-toys-out-the-pram brio, from the galloping metal-pop of “Sugar Rush” to the pogo’n’sing-along of “Friends in Low Places” to the big room techno 4/4 thumping of “Degenerette Nation”. “Did I break a mirror, because this summer feels like winter,” she sings on chuggung slower number “Four Leaf Clover”, lyrics that sum up the mood of the album.
To this writer’s ears, This World Fucking Sucks comes across as carefully postured rather than loose and raw, but, for all that, most of the songs are well under three minutes, and the best of it combines battering jolt with Download Festival-friendly bubblegum-punk pop.
Below: watch a live performance of "Ipecac" by Cassyette from the album This World Fucking Sucks
