Scary movies usually end. Whatever has appeared at the window or risen from the grave is gone by the credits. The viewer always has the option to leave. Life offers no such sympathetic division. In her memoir Blue Light of the Screen, Claire Cronin wrote about the frightening images that follow us out of the cinema, finding their way into ordinary life. On The Bruise, the gap between the screen and real life is closing in. Sparse electric guitar, low strings and voices gathered around Cronin’s lead make these songs feel less like stories told after the fact than thoughts still spiraling and coalescing in the dark.
It is another tentative step forward from 2021’s Bloodless, whose private fears acquired an awful public backdrop when wildfires…

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