The Cheerleader at the End of the World

Sleigh Bells’ debut Treats felt like having your skull used as a drum. Reign of Terror, their 2012 follow-up, kept the volume and added something darker underneath—the kind of record that sounds like it was made by people processing something they couldn’t say any other way. Demons sits near the heart of it: Alexis Krauss’s voice against Derek Miller’s guitar work, which by this point had absorbed enough metal that noise-pop barely covered it anymore. The pairing of those aggressive textures with the group’s cheerleader aesthetic was either perfectly ironic or perfectly literal, and I’ve never fully decided which.