8/10

There's something fitting about an album obsessed with contradiction taking a decade to finish. And 'This Monologue Conversation', the third album from Farnborough's I Plead Irony, arrives carrying the marks of interruption, distance and changing perspective, but it never feels like a record assembled from leftovers.

Across eleven tracks, Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald and Lawrence Arnold pull alternative rock through punk and blues edges, keeping the music direct even when the ideas become more complicated. Fear, conformity, ego, anxiety and self-imposed limitations all surface, but the band are just as willing to turn the scrutiny inward as well.

It gives songs like ‘Inside the Lines’ added weight. Originally written from a personal perspective, its ideas around boundaries and constraint took on a broader resonance when revisited after the pandemic. ‘History’ carries a similar unease, circling around progress and reversal with the uncomfortable suggestion that civilisation may be far less stable than we like to imagine.

But the band’s long friendship gives the record a looseness that cuts through the darker themes. You can hear the shorthand of musicians who know one another instinctively, as riffs are given room to breathe, sections shift without feeling overworked, and the songs retain the feel of ideas tested in a room rather than engineered into submission.

Recorded partly at Swan Sound Studio in France with Guillaume Doussaud and completed over years at home, the final result feels surprisingly cohesive.

'This Monologue Conversation' may have taken the scenic route, but the delay has given it a valuable perspective. Dark, thoughtful and often sharply self-aware, it sounds like three friends finally finishing the record because, after everything, the songs still mattered.