8/10

French Inhaler’s debut album 'Practiced Lines' is a release built on tension. The Chicago trio make music that wants to move, but never quite relaxes; as synths pulse, basslines coil, drums keep everything locked in place, while the lyrics pick at the disconnection sitting beneath modern convenience. It's a fitting approach for a record concerned with performance, intimacy and the strange emotional distance created by screens.

Members Ashvin Prakash, Adam O’Leary and Zane Chao clearly understand the lineage they are working within. There are echoes of Joy Division in the skeletal rhythm section, The Cure in the melodic melancholy and Kraftwerk in the colder electronic precision, but 'Practiced Lines' is most effective when those references fade into the background and the trio focus on present-day anxieties.

Lead single ‘TV LOVE’ provides the clearest example of this identity. The track pairs a tightly wound groove with pressurised synth work and a prominent bass presence, creating something immediately danceable while keeping the emotional temperature distinctly uneasy. And that contradiction of movement without release feels central to the album as a whole.

Zane Chao’s live drums give the record physical weight, while O’Leary’s bass often acts as the melodic anchor. Around them, Prakash’s keyboards bring a colder, synthetic dimension, creating enough contrast between human performance and machine-like repetition to mirror the album’s subject matter.

There's nostalgia in its sound, certainly, but the emotional landscape belongs firmly to the present. French Inhaler are less interested in recreating the early 80s than in borrowing its vocabulary to describe a different kind of isolation; one where people are permanently connected yet increasingly unsure how much of themselves is real.

As a debut album, 'Practiced Lines' feels impressively coherent. French Inhaler understand that the most effective post-punk always finds something human trapped inside the machinery. And on this new collection, that tension is precisely the point, and the trio make it extremely difficult to look away from.