After locating the beat, Intro to Dance classes always start with moving your feet—in any direction, at any pace, patterns be damned. If you’re feeling apprehensive and can’t yet see where your shoes are guiding you, may I recommend one of the most kinetic songs of 2024: “Anxiety” by the Chicago trio Plum? Every move works when set to their new wave-styled post-punk, from fluid poses to herky-jerky flailing. With a title like Bodies in Motion, Plum’s second full-length is a slice of advice about the highs of dancing, but no words are needed when the music alone makes the instructions this clear: Move and the fun will follow.
At their most hectic, Plum write songs where fragments of their instruments rain down with an acidic tint: Heather Perry’s bass leaps like Q*bert skipping blocks to escape snakes, Eric Ridder rattles his cymbals as if they’re actively spiraling off the stands, and Jeff Kelley splinters his guitar riffs into squiggly lines or electrocuted exclamation points. It’s why “Can Jam” sounds like a zany cereal commercial come to life with percussive toys, or how the cool-toned diverging melodies in “Memory” maintain a buoyant atmosphere. Underneath Plum’s retro take on post-punk is a firm rooting in funk. Every song on Bodies in Motion comes back to Perry and Ridder, who egg each other on with the type of irrefutable groove that has Anderson .Paak grabbing his wig for a bob off.
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In the title track, Plum explain how the end of the world will go down not in a flurry of missiles or wartime scares, but when electrical outlets emit a frequency that makes everyone stand up and burst into movement. The Spielbergian conceit plays out like pure Araki camp. “Couldn’t stop our hips, perpetual motion/Nothing left to do but sweat until we drop,” sings Kelley over ricocheting guitar-and-bass interplay. There’s no call to the dancefloor quite like our planet’s ticking clock, and they milk it for all of its rapture-laced thrill.
No matter a song’s scenario, Plum decorate it with the streamers and snacks of an uncontrollable, irresistible party. In “Obscurity,” Kelley yelps like David Byrne midway through Stop Making Sense as his Talking Heads bandmates escalate the energy, and the trio channels the B-52’s eminent Saturday Night Live set with “Club Scum” as Perry nails her falsettos amid the ample space created for angular dance moves. Even boredom is conquerable for Plum. When Kelley confesses in “Asymmetric” that it “feels like nothing ever happens,” he can’t shake the imagery around him that’s challenging time: the endless blue horizon, two mirrors facing each other, a dried flower pressed in the pages of a book. His bandmates come to the rescue with jabbing bass and tom hits until the embellishments drive home the obvious: You’re the creator of your own fun. By the single’s end, Plum sound collectively liberated and loose.
