This immediately feels like the album of summer 2025.
Meaning, it’s not some straight-up feel-good dance album, rather its many danceable joys feel hard-won on songs that always feel like they’re having to shake themselves free of the darkness as they head towards the light.
Take title track With A Vengeance, which takes echoing sirens, and the words “Here on my own,” before breaking it down, skittering it forward and rolling into the sound of defiance. Whatever Sherelle has been though of late – and it sounds like a lot – she has discovered an exciting means to escape it, and bring a hell of a lot of people with her.
Sherelle has been a force to be reckoned with on the underground club scene since her Sherelleland club night began taking rave back to its beginnings: cheap entry and dancing all night, so long as you were cool enough to be in the know.
And in fact, this surprise-released debut both embraces the past while searching restlessly for the future, as anyone who listens to her 6Music show will recognise. This music, part of the 160 scene with all the high energy tempo that implies, will grab you like a fast-flowing river; two seconds in and its impossible to resist.
Opener Enter the Void illustrates though, that this pace has depth. Hauntology suffuses these tracks, though not of a nostalgic kind for scenes long dead, rather it feels like emotional states, traumas, are lingering on, ghost-like. And ultimately shaken off.
Freaky (Just My Type) featuring George Riley, is the big pop moment, the lead-off single and ‘bisexual anthem’ which you’ll be hearing at every festival, in every car, bleeding out from every tinny headphone very soon. Just call it Freaky Summer right now. This is the stuff that brings people together and makes life seem, yknow, alright.
Such hands in the air moments are perfectly rendered, and so is the feet to the floor of Speed (Endurance); make sure you are thoroughly hydrated before going anywhere near that one.
It ends with Thru The Nite, and the return of those sirens. Are we descending back into the real world, the painful world of prejudice and pain? No, not so long as Sherelle has anything to do with it.
Ah look, this is one of those records where words seem lame when applied to it: just give it a listen and have a great time.
With A Vengeance by Sherelle is out now
