A tin can teeming with worms. The album artwork for Abi Reimold’s Wriggling is unsettling, dirty, and a little bit nasty, but it’s the perfect image to represent the music under the cover. Reimold is such a new face in indie rock that there’s very little to read about her online, but if there is one personal thing to be learned about her, it’s that this is a woman who knows betrayal. I too remember my first significant betrayal. In the waters of the oil spill that was my first relationship, I was consumed by a relentless anger. I was a steam kettle of resentment that I could not contain. Since it was impractical to drive to where he lived and set myself on fire in his house, I wrote everything down instead. I filled pages, notebooks, volumes with my vitriol. It was my release valve. Wriggling expressly captures the sentiment of those weeks. Wriggling sounds like Reimold marched directly out of a fight and into the recording studio without a detour.

Taking cues from mid-90s indie rock such as Archers of Loaf, Sebadoh, and Pavement, Reimold has written a complex and cathartic monument to sinister relationships. Emotions (mainly anger) are laid bare in noisy, chaotic tracks about people who make each other sick. Reimold spits acid, her voice desperate, raw, and abrasive as if she’s been screaming at fuckers who’ve crossed her for years. On Arranged, Reimold sounds like an animal caught in a trap, wounded and enraged. Feed sees Reimold immolate herself in song, the climax of which sounds like a hundred souls escaping from hell. Stain, Trap, and Won’t Clot represent some of the album’s more introspective moments, the heartbreak apparent beneath all of the rage. Seething, snarling guitars carry the album through furious tracks like Bad Seed and Mask to a resolute and painful end. Her lyrics contain grotesque imagery and raw emotionality. The melodies are unpredictable and a little bit sick. Reimold’s music captures the dissonance of an unfit relationship, the oscillation between fury and misery that comes with betrayal. Wriggling sounds like a fight that someone started and Reimold finished; an open can of worms in every way.