Total Loss – A Preview

“It’s a very personal song. I was supposed to meet a best friend who I hadn’t seen in a year. I was returning home, and he was supposed to be there waiting for me. But on my way to him and to my home, he passed away. He always anticipated me: when we were younger, I’d discover something – some music or some feeling – and he would have already known it— but he let me discover it for myself. It was like he was always ready for me to arrive. and then, this time, when i arrived, he had gone. “I know u were always ready for me baby, way before we met— I got there just to say ‘hey’ and you were hoping for the days when u could say safely: ‘I have my place, I have my home, I have my future’.  But we never really plan for the worst of things do we? and then something like this happens — for the sake of me? who? me? who? we? we’ve got feeling, got strength, and got the right thing for each other. There’s an ocean floor for everything: for me, the sun, and he, gone.”  

The words of Tom Krell of How To Dress Well speak volumes about just how creatively invested he is in his profession and music. Ocean Floor For Everything was the first of 4 songs HTDW has released in anticipation of his new record Total Loss, and it was an insight into what Krell had to offer in this sophomore record. Continuing the trend of lacerated lo-fi pop, Ocean Floor For Everything repays listeners for their patience. The above quotation, taken from HTDW’s website, tells the story behind this creation, and as an interested listener and a vicarious fan, I find it hard to add to or comment on the song without doing it an injustice. It is so personal that once you know the background, you concentrate on nothing else. And yet, having waited so long for something, anything, from this most ideal troubadour, we are rewarded with the slow-burning loops that we’ve craved. There seems to be something decidedly upfront about this first entrance into the musical realm for so long. In contrast to Love Remains which was at times inaudible (I want that to be a good thing, and it is, in HTDW’s style), Krell’s lyrics, rather Krell’s messages, adopt a welcomed clarity, conveying the growth from Love Remains to this most recent LP, Total Loss.

On Love Remains, the ambience had been intertwined with the lyrical crooning, which left a mysteriousness as to what it was that was being sung, but more so a lasting impression on the ears of listeners made up of love, loss and identity; in any order. This new material continues to invite onlookers and admirers alike to join Krell in an open honesty of oneself, radiating a feeling of softened bluntness, asking, telling you to be honest with yourself and to delve into your emotive archives, not necessarily to “deal with you issues”, but even more so to acknowledge your humanity.

Cold Nites features Krell’s iconically lonely falsetto which, when coupled with the best boom-clap you’d hope for in a HTDW record, tells a story “about the will to preserve love” according to Krell. He continues, [love is] “already a miraculous thing in the most hospitable situations – across long distances, challenging times, life’s changes – this will to love can give us the most beautiful stability and sense of accomplishment, but can also lead us into totally spiritually rending compromises, split between worlds.” You can tell he’s pretty passionate about the thing, and rightly so. Love is an ideal, and what seems like an unachievable target is realised in Cold Nites. Don’t ever mock the passion and drive someone has for what someone else may regard as unworthy, like love, ’cause if it means mind-blowing tracks like this keep being produced, it’s totally fine by me.

While TK has also remixed Janet Jackson’s Again, which is absolutely, definitely, categorically worthy of a listen, this post is reviewing the tracks that made it onto Total Loss, so on we go to & It Was U. It is like a take on 90s soul/r&b but without the atmospheric lacing that we are used to, instead preferring the layering of voices and building up the track with a conventional beat, before bringing it down to the previously introductory click, and then bringing the tempo right back up again. It unravels itself, going back and forth, undecided as to its intentions, and the thing I want to do most is ask Krell what made him change from the ethereal vocal we are used to, to the much clearer descant utilised here. It’s an interesting change, given that the voice on previous tracks has seemed so integral to HTDW’s sound.

A special mention should also be made for World I Need You, Won’t Be Without You (Proem). If you’ve heard Transmissions From A Wistful Place (which you ought to have, and if not, you can stream it here), you’ve heard the incredible 5 minutes of strings that are implemented so well from about the 9 minute mark. Here, Krell uses strings again, which are again so instrumental (no pun intended) in this song. While there are a couple of tracks on the record that would stand on their own, it is best listened to as a complete masterpiece, and can be heard in its entirety below.

Total Loss comes out on 18th September, while HTDW plays Soup Kitchen 3rd November. The anticipation I feel for these dates is peerless. Full Tour Dates are below.