The Anteroom

About

Colorado singer-songwriter Tom Krell has spent much of the past decade inching from lo-fi R&B to glossy, boldfaced pop—a transition that culminated with 2016’s <i>Care</i>. Bleak, fragile, and unsettlingly beautiful, <i>The Anteroom</i> is a kind of about-face, shelving that glossy optimism for music that sounds rough, even a little industrial—what Krell calls <i>Care</i>’s “evil twin.” “This is the first record I made where I lived,” Krell tells Apple Music. “I poured a hundred times the hours into it than all the other records combined.” The immersive, round-the-clock experience helped open his ear. “It takes an enormous amount of time to access a level of hearing, where you really start to hear texture as texture and timbre as timbre.” Though the collection was composed in more or less the same way as Krell’s previous efforts (often starting with voice improvisations into a phone or computer), he dove deeper into the sound design, creating—with coproducer Joel Ford—a dense, almost obsessively layered world filled with static, broken signal, and surfaces eroded by digital noise. Despite the tonal shift, the album retains Krell’s unusual talent for transposing pop forms into adventurou, avant-garde space, touching on gospel (“Nonkilling 13”), UK garage (“Nonkilling 6”), sound collage (“False Skull 7”), and the kind of free-floating balladry that has always made his music stand out (“Body Fat”), all of it anchored by his restrained falsetto—a worried voice searching for comfort in the dark. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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