Album opener, ‘Untethered,’ is a moment of celebration born from achieving that very same kind of release. There is a frantic energy to the song that makes remaining static an impossibility while its themes of transition, joy, and reframing negative situations continue throughout “BLUSH”. Harris had “loads of therapy” during lockdown and came to terms with a lot of major life situations. “I just feel happier with myself and that was really important for the songs, too,” she says.

This is something Baxter shares, too. “Vicariously, through Harris, I get to express my queerness, too.” He leads the vocals on both ‘Bunker’ and the saw-toothed industrial banger ‘The Individual,’ songs dealing with identity and the characters that we see within ourselves. ”This album is definitely exploring who we are as people,” Baxter says. “We’ve all had this personal growth and the album is about us allowing us to be ourselves more and being comfortable with that.”

“BLUSH’s” artwork also reflects the themes explored across the album, the concepts of release and liminal spaces, various characters and their relationship with gender and sexuality, and a breaking down of oneself to allow love in. Heavily inspired by sci-fi and high fashion, Harris says the album’s aesthetic is “one of simplicity, bold colour (pinks / blues) and relationship with the body and the forms the body creates (stretching / dancing / bending / collapsing). The model is caught between lightness and dark – wanting both and conflicted, pulled by external forces in both directions.”

“BLUSH” was written during various lockdowns, a testing time for a band used to finding the limits of their sound live on stage. Adversity, clearly, doesn’t get the better of PVA, though. If anything, they feel some enforced distance strengthened their songwriting. Harris wrote poems and learned to produce music, Baxter worked with other artists as a producer, and Satchell continued his music course at City University, studying ancient African polyrhythms among other techniques. “We’d got apart from one another with what we were making and had to come back together,” Harris explains. “We could have just bashed the album out but I’m really happy we took our time with it. It feels a lot more like us.”

The album was produced by the band alongside friends Ben Romans-Hopcraft and Jamie Neville over a two week period at Neville’s home studio in south London. They then mixed the record at FOLD, the club hidden away on a trading estate in Canning Town. One place intimate, another industrial; this is PVA’s world.

Creating a world in which these songs could exist, not as disparate entities but cohesively and connected, was key to PVA. Over time the songs have changed and grown, resulting in a record that is at once gargantuan and yet deeply personal; purpose built to ricochet off the walls of any major venue yet stitched with enough personality and individuality to make the epic feel easily grasped. “The album has taken on a life of its own,” Harris states. “It’s really become something we didn’t expect.” Having set out to surprise people they ended up shocking themselves. The result, however unpredicted, is nothing short of revelatory.