Fuck me, Du Blonde really has known some terrible cunts. And for 'cunts', obviously, you can swap in the word 'men'. Excuse the language, but listening to Sniff More Gritty, peppered as it is with references to manipulative men and their toxic behavioural patterns across its 12-track, 38-minute runtime, it's hard not to be enraged by just how often those [formerly] close to Du Blonde have sought to diminish the Newcastle-born singer/songwriter. Equally, however, it's impossible not to feel quietly thrilled by how brilliantly Du Blonde eviscerates these demons from her past here. If there's a core theme on the record, it is - to borrow a mock-Latin phrase featured in The Handmaid's Tale - Nolite te bastardes carborundorum: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. And that defiance makes Sniff More Gritty utterly irresistible.
Du Blonde's last record, the joyously uninhibited Homecoming, was one of the very best records of 2021, in fact one of the very best records of the decade, the sort of album that one could obsess over during the pandemic. I know this to be true because, at a point, I was listening to Homecoming up to five or six times a day, every day. At the time she was making that record, Du Blonde was convinced that it would be her final offering, a farewell 'fuck you' to the music industry, so disillusioned was she by years of being exploited, patronised, sexually harassed and gaslit. Self-produced, recorded solo on a laptop in her childhood bedroom, and released on her own label, Homecoming was the sound of liberation, and, ironically, it became the best-selling album of her career. Sniff More Gritty is much more than Homecoming Pt. II, but it shares with its predecessor a sense of no fucks given euphoria, born of the certain knowledge that no-one is ever going to be allowed to dictate terms to Du Blonde again.
