Alice Glass Prey//IV Review: A Forceful Reclamation of Autonomy

For Alice Glass, Prey//IV isn’t just the singer-songwriter’s first solo album but a reclamation of her autonomy. After leaving her former band, Crystal Castles, in 2015, the singer claimed that bandmate Ethan Kath had subjected her to years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, which she subsequently explored in a series of singles. On Prey//IV, Glass continues to pursue healing through cathartic fantasies of violence, extracting the darkest elements of the witch house sound that she helped to popularize with Crystal Castles in order to examine the dynamics of domestic abuse.

Much like her eponymous 2017 EP, Prey//IV is excoriating and fast-paced, with only one of its 13 tracks exceeding three minutes. Some songs, like the pithy revenge fantasy “Pinned Beneath Limbs,” might have benefitted from some lyrical and structural fleshing out, but the album plays as a series of brutal and brisk gut punches that investigate abuse and trauma from a variety of angles. Throughout the album, Glass frequently switches between the roles of assailant and victim, with her delicate, youthful vocals highlighting her vulnerability against the album’s forceful industrial sound and gruesome lyrics.

On the ominous “Fair Game,” Glass takes on the voice of her abuser, repeating lines such as “Where would you be without me?” that affectingly signal Glass’s insight into the minute realities of an abuser’s tactics of control. Other tracks are more fantastical in their depictions of violence: “Suffer and Swallow” uses a trap beat and buzzing synths to underscore the horror of lyrics like “I’ll cut your tongue out your mouth/And wear your fingers.”

In contrast, “Everybody Else,” with its somber music box accompaniment, embraces the vulnerability inherent in intimate relationships, while the explosive “Love Is Violence” revels in the dissolution of a toxic relationship. “You taste like rotten meat/Sips of spoiled milk,” Glass wails, before implicitly turning her attention to us: “It’s my pain as the main attraction.”

The album’s production, which is less ghostly and more abrasive than Glass’s work with Crystal Castles, expands its terrifying soundscapes with jump scare-inducing screams on “Prey” and “Suffer and Swallow,” shocking crashes of distorted noise on “Animosity,” and more literal sound effects such as cawing crows on “Witch Hunt” and breaking glass on “Everybody Else.” Unlike her work with Crystal Castles, on which Glass’s voice and creative contributions were often buried, her presence here is assertive, menacing, and, most often, powerful. Songs like “Suffer in Peace” embody Glass’s desire to reclaim her agency by confronting her trauma directly and writing over her victimization with macabre and stark displays of power.

It’s not until Prey//IV’s penultimate track, “I Trusted You,” that Glass comes down from the high of rage, redirecting her focus from the spectacle of violence to the fundamental betrayal of domestic abuse. While the choice to end Prey//IV with its most downcast song might feel like a relinquishing of the power that Glass has claimed, it grounds the album’s brutality in reality, poignantly reminding us that this is a document of Glass’s lived experiences.