Review: Yves Tumor’s ‘Safe in the Hands of Love’

Breakout! Although Yves Tumor’s Serpent Music has been a modern classic in my eyes for some time, Safe in the Hands of Love has further extended the genius I see in them and their music only days after release. Its album art is a stark evolution from the self-portrait of Serpent Music: while that album portrayed them laying back in a bold midnight setting surrounded by ghostly plastic-y refracting light, here Yves Tumor is a similarly ghostly but stronger, glam-like being rising up, depicted in feverish-green tinting.
Although it carries on from the pop structures of Serpent Music, Safe in the Hands of Love leans into art rock and neo-psychedelia for breakout hits like ‘Noid’, ‘Licking an Orchid’ (feat. James K) and ‘Lifetime’ while still carrying their familiar disemboweled industrial collage traits throughout, especially on final single ‘Economy of Freedom’ (feat. Posh Isolation mainstay Croatian Amor). Their recurring phrase/tagline, ‘How I Learned To Love The Indiestry’, feels like a subtitle to the album as a whole. Yves Tumor’s own vocals fit perfectly on an album that’s as personal lyrically as Serpent Music was musically, but the varying styles they’ve explored as an artist are not lost once in the album’s slow-rendered style. In fact, album intro ‘Faith in Nothing Except in Salvation’ is a bigger, bombastic extension of that album’s ‘Devout’.
‘Honesty’ and ‘All the Love We Have Now’ particularly lean into glossy and funky electropop that simultaneously drives itself into the abyss, and ‘Hope in Suffering (Escaping Oblivion & Overcoming Powerlessness)’ (feat. Oxhy & Puce Mary) is a power electronics sermon blaring out from the near bottom of that abyss. ‘Recognizing the Enemy’ plays on the sound of gothic rock, a genre I see as being in the same abyss, alongside its psych-folk sample and eventual post-rock tearjerker breakdown.
‘Let the Lioness in You Flow Freely’ closes the album driving itself up out of the abyss and further out of the atmosphere in a noise rock form that matches 90s experimental rock band Disco Inferno, before the album seals its story, Dean Blunt style, with an 80s pop sample that cuts off before it can be identified. As much as it’s a surprise release with surprising elements and featured artists that match the album’s immensely blown out headspace, Safe in the Hands of Love is the successor to Serpent Music that we needed.
10/10
