‘(re)constructed’, the debut full length from Dublin-based post-rockers Bicurious, reveals yet another duality from the band – it’s music you can easily both mosh and dance to.

In the works since 2019, the album follows a slew of acclaimed singles, their ‘I’m So Confused’ EP, some 5 million streams on Spotify and considerable delays due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. It also follows significant incidents in the lives of its creators that heavily influenced its composition, one being a psychotic episode suffered by half of the band, Gavin Purcell, the other being his collaborator Taran Plouzané’s foray into fatherhood.

The album opens with gorgeous, ascending chords on Intro (Voices), swiftly joined by stomping drums and the incessant babble of samples of people talking. This gives way to the trance-inducing Like We Used To, arranged in a bait-and-switch, catch-and-release style that wouldn’t sound out of place on a nightclub dancefloor, with each breakdown giving way to another and no section in a song sounding like the last.

Palapalapa is an onomatopoeic track, which sees the duo at their most weird and wonderful so far. It takes the notion of an indie landfill riff you’d sing with your friends as you stagger home from a night out and flips it on its head, injecting their chosen genre with a sense of fun that is often sorely missing while simultaneously injecting a very simple pop hook with a whole new kind of wonkiness and raw power.

The experimentation doesn’t stop there. On Deconstructed, there are Celtic and folk overtones in the mix while Mercurial draws on shoegaze, with superhuman drumming from Purcell. The album takes an unsettling turn by the time we reach I Can Hear Them Too, which again draws from sampled voices, wails and makes heavy use of discord to convey the mental torture Purcell once suffered, disorienting and overwhelming the listener.

That just two people are responsible for so much sound, fun and fury is incredible. While post-rock is hardly a new phenomenon, Bicurious do add enough to the crescendocore template to keep things fresh and interesting. While their knack for complex musicianship and composition is on par with any of their peers’, their ear for a bop and tendency towards a touch of silliness make them stand out, and makes (re)constructed a thoroughly enjoyable listen.