Pod can be so intensely physical as to test the line between exhilaration and obliteration. “Hour by hour!” Deal howls over and over as cymbals clang and guitars scratch on “Iris”—a track whose snarl contains the DNA of Hole’s blistering 1991 debut, Pretty on the Inside—and you’re imprisoned with her, watching the hands of the clock crawl. “Limehouse” is tactile in the extreme; so vivid it’s almost sticky, Deal’s description of how “warm black tar forms balls” cements the title’s reference to East London’s 19th-century opium district.

- Pitchfork.com