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Country: Australia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Tiktok | Twitter | YouTube
Sisters Doll are new to me, but they've been around since 2010, starting out in Collie, Western Oz and now based in Melbourne. Technically, of course, they've been together since the youngest of the four musicians involved was born, given that they're a quartet of brothers, the Miletos. This is their third album, after Welcome to the Dollhouse in 2012 and All Dolled Up in 2017. Their own website calls them glam rock and there's some of that here but it looks far more overt on earlier releases, where the aesthetic you might expect for that genre is played up to.
Here, it starts out hard and heavy. Purgatory may well be the most elegant intro that I've heard thus far in 2025, acoustic Spanish guitar shifting up to electric rock with a tasty tone and it hints at what the first couple of songs proper deliver, a hard rock vibe with a guitar that clearly wants to get a little heavier than that. This pair, Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner, are highlights right out of the gate, if maybe a little lighter than I expected. There's some Bryan Adams in the vocals of Brennan Mileto and the hooks are just as important as the riffs. The heaviness remains in the guitar, Austin Mileto searing through a strong solo in Climbing Out of Hell, as if he wants to play for Ozzy in the early eighties.
The hints at softness are only fleeting in these two songs, but they're more obvious in Change, a lighter song with a subtle guitar hook and an alternative rock level of fuzz. First Time follows suit but with a country twang to the guitar that leads into even lighter territory. It's as if Sisters Doll want to be categorised as a rock band pure and simple without any further qualifiers to that. It's in scope to drift into softer songs with pop sensibilities but also to escalate into heavier territory, especially when Austin Mileto wants to rock out. First Time is the epitome of this, starting out as more of a pop song but heavying up later on.
What's telling is that, while Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner remain highlights and serve as my favourite songs here, there are other highlights still to come that don't play in their ballpark. I'd call out Don't Give Up on Us, a lighter but more urgent song with a bouncy rhythm and excellent hooks; United, an old school heavy metal anthem downshifted to a rock framework; and You Can't Bring Me Down, a punchy rock number with plenty of sass. This latter is the sort of rock song that Iron Maiden might heavy up on a B side, but I could easily hear a hair metal band covering it too.
None of these songs are particularly long, everything lasting three or four minutes until we get to the closer, which is six because it really wants to build. It's the title track and it opens with the first acoustic guitar intro since Purgatory, with strings to deepen it. It plays out for a while like a power ballad but escalates four minutes in to emphatic vocals and guitar. It's another string to a very impressive repertoire of sounds, with a blues ending here (You Can't Bring Me Down) and a sassy glam strut there (Take You Away), but a commercial yearning over yonder that goes as far as prominent hand claps (Kiss Me).
While I'm very happy with the range that Sisters Doll exhibit here, what I like the most is how the album runs a respectable three quarters of an hour without a single song lowering the quality. It would be fair to say that I like some of these songs a lot more than others, but I don't dislike any of them and I wouldn't call any of them filler. What I wonder is how they're changing over time, a song like Take You Away fitting the image I get from their bio but the others suggesting quite an impressive divergence from that niche. In other words, I rather want to listen to their earlier two albums to see where they came from but firmly expect that they wouldn't be as varied as Scars.
And that bodes well for the future, even if they're clearly not the most prolific band in the world and may well not be the most prolific band on their street in Melbourne. With the gap between albums increasing from five to eight years, I just hope we don't have to wait another eleven for a fourth album. Next week would be nice, of course, but 2027 to return to a five year average would work and give them a couple of years to promote this one on stage.