Against Men

Popular Music — the Melbourne-based synth-pop duo of former Parenthetical Girls leader Zac Pennington and composer Prudence Rees-Lee — are pleased to release their album Against Men in an ultra-limited Vinyl Edition through It Records. The album’s title is a playful yet pointed provocation — sardonic shorthand for the everyday betrayals, minor tragedies, and persistent disappointments of the unfair sex. Self-produced and recorded at MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio), the group drew on the studio’s collection of electronic instruments, evoking the tones and textures of hauntological pioneers like Joe Meek, Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, alongside the post-punk experimentations of Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The result is a leaner, intimate approach, following their acclaimed 2023 album, Minor Works. Throughout Against Men, Popular Music blends classic pop structures with avant-garde ambition, crafting narrative-driven short stories that feel timeless and immediate. There’s the glam-rock shuffle of “Passover,” whose T.Rex swagger belies a subtle indictment: “For there are no good men/And I’m no exception.” Elsewhere, songs function as portraits — “Crying,” a synth-ballad where nostalgia becomes performance (“Those waterworks still flow / But now it’s just for show”), while “Emily Says” echoes Lou Reed empathetic character studies with a tale of a woman exhausted by the cruelties of self described feminist men (“When surely everybody knows / Those wolves are wearing women’s clothes”). In “Desert Motel #1,” romantic disintegration unfolds with Cohen-esque grace and devastation, while the obsessions of “Black Shroud” cast a hypnotically shadow over the album. Against Men moves toward its apex with “Providence St.,” a melancholic meditation elevated by composer Jherek Bischoff’s string arrangements, and the closer “The Last Night of Our Lives,” an eight-minute elegy steeped in romantic fatalism and ironic resilience: “Well-read and welfare-bred and more dead than alive / well, nevermind.”