Fragile Animals – Tourist (2025)
Since their inception, Fragile Animals have made a point of never standing still. From the glistening melancholy of Light That Fades to the hazy vulnerability of Only Shallow // Only More, and the widescreen emotional terrain of 2023’s Slow Motion Burial, the band have constantly sought evolution, not repetition. Now, with their latest EP Tourist, Fragile Animals have created something that feels at once intimate and expansive, a record of quiet devastation and luminous hope.
Across six deeply immersive tracks, Tourist sees the Australian four-piece sharpen the blade of their shoegaze-drenched dream-pop. There’s a newfound weight here; every gliding guitar line, every aching lyric, every reverberating drum hit is placed with purpose. It’s a body of work that breathes, swells, and aches, anchored by Victoria Jenkins’ spectral yet resolute vocals, which act as both narrator and lifeline.
Opening with the ethereal vignette ‘People I’ll Never Know’, the band wastes no time in establishing the mood. Oscillating delay, watery guitar textures, and a deep sense of emotional displacement set the tone perfectly. It’s lonely, haunting, and beautiful, a fragile sketch of connection lost before it’s ever found.
The title track ‘Tourist’ is classic Fragile Animals, but has evolved. A driving bassline cuts through shimmering tremolo guitars while Jenkins sings about the paradox of deep emotional resonance with strangers. Her delivery, delicate yet unwavering, holds a mirror to our craving for understanding. The band leans into pop sensibility here without compromising the genre’s hallmarks, echo-soaked guitars, space, and restraint. It’s dreamy, yes, but grounded in sharp emotional clarity.
On ‘Sending Flares’, fragility turns visceral. Recorded in the dead of night in a radio station’s soundproof room, it captures the rawness of memory and sorrow. The use of baritone guitar lends the track a weightier feel, while Victoria’s vocal, delivered from the floor, eyes shut, pierces through like a flare in the dark. It’s a highlight, drawing power from its quietest moments.
‘Into It’ trades the soaring for the smouldering. There’s an emotional unease here, a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves. Reverb-heavy guitars drift like smoke through the chorus, while a late-night stillness hangs over every line. It’s the sonic embodiment of insomnia, moody, beautiful, and full of creeping dread.
‘Worldview’, the lead single, might just be the band’s most immediate track to date. Beneath its glossy surface lies a sharp duality, despair and joy in a constant tug of war. The tension between the beauty of life and the horror of reality is played out musically in lush textures pitted against fuzzed-out bursts. “We need the awful truth,” Jenkins says, “but it’s the beautiful stuff that gives us a reason to want to live”.
The closer ‘Allergic’ ends the EP on a cathartic high. Urgent and immediate, it surges forward with pounding drums, melodic bass, and guitars that swirl with both euphoria and grief. It’s about caring too much, about feeling the world’s pain and still choosing to stay soft. That’s the essence of Tourist: empathetic, unflinching, and deeply human.
Find out more about Fragile Animals on their Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Spotify.
