Kate Boy: One

When it came out three years ago, Kate Boy's "Northern Lights" joined a new, growing class of Knife-wielding groups. Purity Ring, Chvrches, and Niki and the Dove all made debuts that year that recast the Swedish duo's roiling, synth-heavy formula into new electropop oddities. But the strutting "Northern Lights" stood out for a number of reasons: Those teeming, plasticized synth melodies; that widescreen, euphoric chorus; the promise that "everything we touch turns to gold" that on repeat listens sounded more and more like a threat. In spite of singer Kate Akhurst's voice bearing a borderline-scary similarity to Karin Dreijer Andersson, Kate Boy's music remained irresistible, dressing up Silent Shout's pressurized gloom in vivid, maximalist clothes.

Kate Boy's long-gestating debut, One, continues to hit those same targets, for better and for worse. It includes "Northern Lights" and three other tracks culled from an EP quietly released earlier this year, and none of the album's new offerings stray from those songs' well-established blueprint. Kate Boy loves pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is as exhausting as often as it is potent. On "Lion for Real", Akhurst's cries of "It's adrenaline that you're traveling" are matched in force by the synthetic drums that rally behind her like a militia, an explosion of sound that practically demands you to move. "Burn" is similarly gratifying, in a slower, more consuming way, Akhurst stretching her vowels out in a pained howl that sounds like an alternate universe in which Fever Ray was making Billboard-charting singles. Nothing on One really feels as immediate as "Northern Lights", but Akhurst's ability to grab you by the throat with each chorus and the trio's playful use of texture—the descending wash of glassy synths at the end of "Human Engine", the '80s-indebted guitar line that slinks through "Higher"—make One an easy, undemanding, and ultimately unsurprising listen.

This speaks to Kate Boy's credentials: Australian-born Akhurst has been working as a songwriter since the age of 16 and spent time in L.A. penning songs for Disney star Ashley Tisdale and "Glee" actor Charice in the early 2010s before migrating to Sweden, where she met Markus Dextegen and Oskar Sikow Engström and formed Kate Boy (Engström has since been replaced by Hampus Nordgren). But where the group excels at assembling all the bones of a good pop song, One's lyrical content is broad even by those same standards. Platitudes like "It doesn't have to be this way/ We're different, still the same/ Move your mind to a higher state" are vague and don't manage to express much nuance beyond "we're all human, get it together." "Self Control" reaches a bit further, girding its narrator's insecurities as self-defense and providing an interesting counterpoint to the bright, jagged sounds Kate Boy likes to plays around with. On "Human Engine", they even shoot for a bit of self-awareness: "We like the word 'dynamic'/ We like to use it a lot." Still, those moments are fleeting; sometimes the group even resort to baffling, tech-referencing word salad, as on "In Your Eyes": "Activate emotion waves, oppression down/ Activate the open changes flowing out."

But maybe Kate Boy's sleekly designed songs aren't meant to be ingested with so much scrutiny. They're aiming for the same big, emotional targets as those aforementioned electropop peers here, with enough brooding style to make it distinct. Besides, the group has admitted that they're painting with broad strokes, saying in an interview last month that their main goal is to create "something that we can all feel empowered singing together." There are enough dance-ready, skyward hooks on One to render that mission accomplished. Perhaps next time they'll have something worthwhile to say.