Lemonade
Diver
True Panther Sounds
7.4

Lemonade have come a long way from sounding like the kids from Lord of the Flies dropped acid and started a boy band.

Gone are the days of playful tropical island sounds, samples of giggling and palpitating drum lines. Lemonade have taken their years of experimenting with sounds to refine and define what it is they truly want, and Diver is it.

While being a pop record at heart, Diver is a genre bending album that explores everything from Euro-trance to 2-step to jungle rock. It’s passport rock at it’s finest.

They’ve passed the awkward stage and matured into seasoned, self aware grown ups. It’s this sort of new found maturity and confidence that solidifies Lemonade’s sound… as they say, the “transformation is complete”. They’re now a band to be taken seriously.

Neptune is the breakout single off the album. A glossy, polished cut that highlights all that Lemonade set out to achieve with the release of Diver. As the band say on their website, the new album is “more interested speaking to your heart than blowing your mind,” and Neptune is the perfect example of this change in direction. They’ve evolved from the strobe light bedlam of their first album to a more subdued kind of trance. With Neptune there is clarity; sharp drumming, minimal instrumental layering, and vocals at the forefront. “Let me speak to you, so I can show you all I want is to sort this out” is indeed, not a mind blowing chorus, but it is
undeniably emotionally relatable and it’s just what they’re going for.

It’s lyrics like that that make me realize that perhaps you can never take the boy band out of the boy. While Lemonade have tightened up, there is still a childlike innocence to their sound, a vulnerability… and that’s what makes Diver so successful. It’s maturity without apathy.

Ali Haberstroh