“Cloudy,” the new single from the South London group Blue Bendy, feels like a panic attack in the park. The art-rock sextet has claimed allegiance to Broadcast, Orange Juice, Iceage—“just anything dark or weird or poppy,” offered their lead vocalist, Arthur Nolan—and their cerebral intensity is palpable in the page-blackening detail of “Cloudy”’s arrangement: Acoustic guitars and pianos are set against one another in opposing pulses, interrupted by startling bursts of distortion. But the song is also filled with air, each element comfortably set off from its surroundings like sheep dotting a field. Nolan, clearly a rising senior in the art-rock School of Wryly Gnomic Asides, is an inscrutable and compelling tour guide: “I’ve got beef with a monkey account/Can I make you proud?”; “Freeze for me, please don’t cry/I made it all the way to the microphone, didn’t I?” The song rolls on for six eventful and fascinating minutes, the breeze blowing back hair from a dark, furrowed brow, a man in a monocle piloting a buggy vehicle over rocky terrain.
