7/10

Travel is often romanticised as a simple route towards reinvention. Pack a bag, leave the familiar behind and return transformed. But on their debut album 'International Breakthroughs', Montreal project Hey Gorgeous takes a more complicated view, treating movement as a state of uncertainty in which freedom, isolation and self-discovery remain closely connected.

Led by multidisciplinary artist Peet Massé, the eleven-track LP arrives after three years of individual releases and experimentation. Written while Massé was completing a master’s degree in the arts, it brings together indie-rock, electronic production and introspective songwriting within a record concerned with what happens when familiar boundaries begin to shift.

These songs draw from travel and changing landscapes, but the album is less interested in destinations than in the effect of leaving one place for another. The artist writes about the discomfort of stepping beyond established identities, whether those identities are connected to geography, relationships, artistic practice or genre.

And the production reflects that refusal to remain fixed. Raw guitars sit beside programmed rhythms and synthetic textures, while moments of direct rock energy frequently give way to more atmospheric passages. But instead of presenting analogue and digital approaches as opposing forces, Hey Gorgeous treats them as parts of the same creative vocabulary.

At times, the album’s broad interests make it deliberately difficult to categorise. Its ideas move between inward reflection and outward celebration, while its sound can shift from guitar-led immediacy to electronic abstraction. Yet that instability is appropriate for a record built around crossing borders, as a cleaner division between styles would undermine the point here.

In all, 'International Breakthroughs' is an ambitious debut that finds coherence through contrast. Hey Gorgeous aren't choosing between rock and electronic music, travel and belonging, or introspection and release. Instead, they create meaning in the unstable ground between them.