Saturn Return is the hotly anticipated debut album from Te Whanganui-a-Tara three piece Soft Plastics. Curating a wide range of influences, their music defies easy categorisation. Ranging from sun-bleached surf pop to swelling shoegaze, the songs are arranged with an investigative eye and a throughline of dry wit.

Saturn Return captures the many moods of the twenty-something spiral, wallowing in the lows just long enough to have some fun before saying fuck it and starting the long walk back up. Singer and bassist Sophie Scott-Maunder seems to relish switching between mourning and eye-rolling. Her expressive delivery and wryly evocative lyrics play back various quarter-life crises with searing clarity. Jonathan Shirleys guitars eddy in, layered and reverbed, bringing billowing dimension and texture. Deft, driving drums from Lau