On their new single "You’re a Genius", Liverpool band Sisters transform a subdued emotional reckoning into an incandescent anthem. Fronted by singer and primary songwriter Jane Kero, the half-American, half-British band, which bills itself as “dreamy, poetic, weepy rock,” continues to make music in that sweet spot between the intimate and the striking, where openness is not a confession but a weapon.
“You’re a Genius” is an awakening, the one where you start to realize that perhaps the person you used to worship is actually the very person tugging you away from the ground on which you first sprouted. It’s a subject that Sisters parse with both delicacy and bite. Kero’s delivery shines with that soft, quavering clarity common to truth far too long coming, and the band unfurls around her voice in textures that ebb and swell like a rising shoreline.
Their influences, Wolf Alice’s supersonic scuzz, PJ Harvey’s emotional blade, and the pulsating melodic lines of The Cardigans, are evident in the DNA blueprint of the track, but never consume it or the identity Sisters are beginning to create. Instead, those echoes function like constellations, knowable, guiding, but always in service of the band’s own gravitational pull.
The song ambles with slow-burn confidence, marrying dreamlike haze and rock-leaning tension. Its poetic sensibility gives every lyric the feel of something scribbled in handwriting on the spot, while its arrangement subtly mirrors the emotional unspooling at its heart. When it glides into the home stretch, “You’re a Genius” practically radiates an afterglow, the warm luminescence that burns, and feels at once beautifully tender and defiantly bright.
On this release, the Sisters are not only presenting a song, they’re staging a reclamation. “You’re a Genius” is a reminder that clarity can also be excruciating and release like lightning, returning to one’s own illumination, its own capacity for genius.