Tom Krell has detailed a new album as How to Dress Well. The L.A.-based musician will share I Am Toward You, his first full-length under the moniker in six years, on May 10 via Sargent House.
Following 2018's The Anteroom — and the accompanying solo tour that saw him play over 150 solo shows in two years — Krell felt exhausted and frustrated by how his music practice felt less like art and more like a business.
In a release, the artist now reflects how, in search of a less cynical approach to creation, "I had to reorient myself towards music in a purer and less restrictive way in order to retrieve what has made music one of the most heart-opening, instructive phenomena in my life."
In order for Krell to "find corners of myself that I had never explored," he underwent "clandestine and occult meditation,” including multiple multi-day sessions, two weeks of complete silence and "several dalliances with transformative psychedelic medicine."
Album cuts "New Confusion" and "No Light," with contributions from CFCF, Trayer Tryon of Hundred Waters and Anarthia DLT, can both be heard in the players below. The former finds Krell's lyrical optimism backed by glimmering guitar harmonics, while the latter takes a more pop-oriented direction, led by carefree melody, pumped-up drums and Krell's modulated vocals.
Of "New Confusion," Krell shares, "It's about how to relate to the past knowing the hard limits on human memory and the challenges of metabolizing intergenerational-anthropogenetic trauma. 'At best regret, at worst forgetfulness,' I sing in the chorus — a tortured concept of memory, no doubt. But I also sing that there is a path to freedom from this bind.
I Am Toward You:
1. New Confusion
2. Contingency / Necessity (Modality of Fate)
3. Crypt Sustain
4. No Light (feat. Anarthia DLT)
5. nothingprayer
6. On It and Around It
7. Song in the Middle
8. Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside
9. A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate Is Shown)
10. The Only True Joy on Earth
11. A Secret Within the Voice
