“Arrest me, I’m a hot freak!” Asha Lorenz sings, her words spilling out frantically. “I’m bombastique! I’m making modern music in Spain, I’m on the jet plane…” Behind her, the beat skitters and grinds ominously. By the time the song ends with a gonzo sample of Robert Pollard bellowing “HOT FREAKS!” from the 1994 song of that name, you might be asking yourself what kind of band you’re listening to. That’s how it goes on Cosplay, the spectacularly strange new album from Sorry.
The experimental North London group is led by Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, both 28, who first bonded over their love of underground U.S. hip-hop when they met in school at age 12. They formed Sorry a few years later, releasing their debut in 2020 and quickly gaining a reputation for their flagrant disregard of any and all genre rules. With Cosplay, out Nov. 7 on Domino, they cement their place as one of the most brilliantly eccentric bands in indie rock — though they’d probably roll their eyes if you tried to box them into that category.
They spent about two years recording the album at studio spaces across London, including a tiny room of their own near Kentish Town, in the city’s northwest sprawl. Lorenz and O’Bryen generally get the songs started as a duo before bringing in bass player Campbell Baum, keyboardist Marco Pini, and drummer Lincoln Barrett to help flesh out their inside jokes and stylistic gambles. “Me and Louis have a kind of unspoken [understanding],” Lorenz says. “We know what each other are talking about, so the song just takes off or it doesn’t.”
The material on Cosplay is hard to pin down, even by Sorry’s standards. Take “Waxwing,” one of the first songs they finished for the album. Over a doomy industrial synth crawl, Lorenz whispers to an ambiguously defined object of devotion: “Maybe you’re desire/Maybe you’re the bomb/You make all of my money, ’cause you make all my songs.” There are lyrical references to Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey” and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, all used to explore a twisted obsession with a character who might or might not be the world’s most famous cartoon. “We were making this beat, and it sounded like Mickey Mouse,” Lorenz explains. (It does not sound like Mickey Mouse.) “Waxwing” is an unsettling siren song that draws you in closer even as you try to puzzle out what exactly it means.
Elsewhere on the album, there are feverish club chants (“JIVE”), tender folk songs (“Antelope”), jumpy rock tunes (“Today Might Be the Hit”), and much more. After a few months of work, Lorenz and O’Bryen were unsure how it all fit together. “It was hard to understand the thread of what was going on, because everything’s quite different,” Lorenz says. “I went insane, because I didn’t understand what the string was… We were working on the songs all the time, and I felt like they were eating me.”
In late 2024, they toured the U.K. and Ireland as the opening act for Fontaines D.C., whose lead singer, Grian Chatten, has hailed Lorenz as “a genius.” Playing to 10,000-capacity arenas full of Fontaines fans was a bracing experience. “It was quite tricky, because we were a support band and we weren’t really used to playing those stages,” O’Bryen says. “It was nice, but it was scary.”
When they got back home to London at the top of this year, they ended up re-recording all of Lorenz’s vocals, yielding the intense, all-in performances heard on the album. “It was January and I had to travel for an hour to get to the studio, and it was so cold, and I was super depressed, and I was living on my own,” she recalls. “I feel like I haven’t really sung like that before.”
In the end, they decided to embrace the wildly divergent nature of their new songs. “The string is that each one is different,” Lorenz says, comparing the varied sounds on Cosplay to “trying on different outfits.”
Sometimes it was also about playing up the absurdity in their music. That’s what happened on the “hot freak” song, which is called “Jetplane.” “I think we just wanted to write something a bit more humorous and tongue-in-cheek,” O’Bryen says, smiling.
Another band might have tried to erase or obscure the song that inspired “Jetplane” instead of directly sampling it, but that would have defeated the purpose for this project. Whether you’ve got Mickey Mouse or Guided by Voices on the brain, why not play with it and see what happens?
“Some big cultural references feel so far away from what they used to mean that they’re almost like inanimate objects that are part of the furniture,” Lorenz says. “That’s the point of the album concept. Instead of hiding the fact you’re stealing something, you can just use it.”
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