IDER - Emotional Education (2019)

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IDER - Emotional Education (2019)

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Damn, do IDER make themselves easy to love. The London flatmates make for unlikely pop darlings, but in a crowded era of rampant poptimism with its Carly Rae's and K-pop, they've managed to carve out a respectable space for themselves.

Emotional Education is sure to increase their stature by leaps and bounds. A supremely assured, instantly addicting debut, it walks the precarious balance beam between earworm and confessional. Lily Somerville and Megan Marwick deliver stark honesty with such ease and regularity that it's certain to trick dozens of acolytes into thinking it's easy.

Needless to say, it isn't. Reduced to its barest, pop tends to gravitate between two poles: the universal made to feel personal, and the personal made universal. Thinktanks painstakingly polish hits that pass hands before landing in a lucky lap, while songwriters end up with something equally appealing simply by remaining true to their experience. There's a reason suburban parents think they relate just as much to 'Lose Yourself' as aspiring rappers, after all.

IDER excel at making the listener inhabit their inner world. When they sing, "I'm still so desperate all the time" on opening track 'Mirror', we feel every syllable. Anyone growing up in 21st Century knows precisely what they feel when they sing "I won’t stop looking at others, thinking that’s where I should be," on the sardonic 'You've Got Your Whole Life Ahead Of You Baby'. On the other hand, when they're feeling themselves, they produce sexually overt tracks like 'Brown Sugar', where they confess "I knew I'd be something that you'd wanna taste."

By mining so bluntly and truthfully into their own weakness and insecurities, IDER expose us all. After all, the best pop is ultimately a wilful exploration of the human condition, something IDER understand better than any pop duo in recent memory.

Indeed, if there's an overall concept Emotional Education mines, it's the fumbling, deeply bruised earnestness of our generation. 'Saddest Generation' takes on this hopeless feeling the most directly, but a general undercurrent of dejected melancholy pervades affairs overall. IDER are lost in a gleaming, suffocating mall along with the rest of us. At least they're making the best of it, and they have each other. Emotional Education makes another year in this maw seem worth it, even if we are the saddest generation.