REVIEW: Mrs Frighthouse - Solitude Over Control

MRS FRIGHTHOUSE, Glasgow-based wife-and-wife duo made up of CARYS and LUNA FRIGHTHOUSE, have slowly but surely been carving a name for themselves in the UK underground scene since 2023, with their singular strain of “sapphic metal” - a collision of industrial noise, gothic dread, and cathartic vocals that simultaneously devastates and uplifts. Their long-awaited debut album, Solitude Over Control, is nothing short of a landmark. Across 11 tracks, MRS FRIGHTHOUSE, confront the realities of misogyny, queerphobia, coercive control, and sexual violence with a sound that feels like a mirror held up to the world’s cruellest truths. The result is as harrowing as it is liberating.

The record begins with Intro, a fleeting 24 seconds that establishes the album’s unsettling atmosphere with soaring vocals over frantic, off-kilter piano. It’s a deliberate moment of foreshadowing, a disorienting and suspenseful open door into the nightmare-scape the band is about to unleash. Even in its brevity, it tells you everything: you’re not meant to feel comfortable here. The next track, DIY Exorcism, fully detonates the record into motion. Cinematic in scope, it comes across like the score to a horror film turned feral. The vocals alternate between eerie restraint and unhinged fury, embodying the violence of tearing oneself free from an abuser. MRS FRIGHTHOUSE do not shy from emotional vulnerability here, instead harnessing it into a weapon.

From there, Eyeliner marches with chant-like delivery and a heavily percussive backbone that resembles the clank of chains and machinery. It doesn’t build towards a big release like some might expect, and that denial of catharsis is precisely what makes it so unnerving. The track evokes the constant vigilance many women live with daily, the hovering dread that violence could erupt at any moment. Midway through, the album plunges into some of its most devastating material, with White Plaster Roses piercing through listeners like a cry from the abyss. Beginning with fragile vulnerability, it spirals into a harrowing refrain of “this doesn’t feel right”, before collapsing into screams of “don’t touch me, get your hands off me”. The pain and fury are almost unbearable to hear, which is exactly the point. It’s a song that doesn’t just describe trauma, it embodies it, making the listener inhabit the raw nerve of survival.

Veil continues the descent into unease, with static noise giving way to pounding percussion, while the vocals twist between mocking jeers, and desperate wails and sobs. It’s grotesque and mesmerising in equal measures, and if much of the album feels like a horror soundtrack, Veil is where that metaphor becomes most literal. The album’s thematic throughline reaches another apex on My Body Is A Crime Scene. The lyrics, “my body is a crime scene, you did this to me”, are among the most gut-wrenching statements on the record. Like White Plaster Roses, it speaks to the legacy of trauma left by abuse, but here the words are delivered with an almost funeral solemnity. The grief is palpable, but so too is the reclamation of voice - in naming the crime, MRS FRIGHTHOUSE are seizing back their autonomy.

All of this builds towards the closing title track, Solitude Over Control. Full of shrieking dissonance, we hear a delicate piano and hushed vocals, but also pounding percussion and layers of anguished screams. It’s chaotic and overwhelming, but never directionless. Instead it feels like a summation of everything the album has traversed, from terror and grief to rage and, finally, the stubborn insistence on survival. When the noise finally cuts out, the silence is deafening, leaving you to sit with everything you’ve just endured.

What makes Solitude Over Control remarkable isn’t only its subject matter, but the way it fuses industrial harshness with theatrical flourishes, colliding musical inspirations ranging from NINE INCH NAILS to EDITH PIAF, fragmenting them and creating a final product that is entirely MRS FRIGHTHOUSE’s own. Most importantly, this album is a powerful artistic and political triumph. In a genre still dominated by male voices, MRS FRIGHTHOUSE’s visibility as queer women and their insistence on writing from lived experience, is itself a radical act. Their lyrics rail against the erasure and invisibility of women’s experiences, reclaiming space with a directness that is subversive and incredibly necessary. As they put it themselves, the phrase “solitude over control” is a mantra, a reminder that however painful solitude may be, it will never be as destructive as staying under an abuser’s power.

Despite being a debut, Solitude Over Control feels monumental. It’s the kind of album that demands attention, both for its sonic audacity and for the urgency of its message. It is disturbing and cathartic, terrifying and beautiful, despairing and defiant. MRS FRIGHTHOUSE have achieved something rare: a record that doesn’t just reflect the darkness of the world, but actively pushes heavy music forward in an incredibly unique way. In doing so, they have created not only one of the most important debuts of 2025, but an album that should be remembered for years to come.

Score: 9/10

Solitude Over Control will be released on September 26th 2025 via Lay Bare Recordings.

Words: Zuzanna Pazola

Photos: Mrs Frighthouse