Angel Deradoorian spent much of her career as a supporting player with Dirty Projectors, but her solo work has revealed an artist with a thrillingly singular voice. Find the Sun is her latest full-length record as Deradoorian, and it marks an imposing shift in her sound — no longer floating and bright, the music on Find the Sun takes its title as a panicked demand, a journey through the long, lightless tunnels of the mind.
The record is subterranean and dank — pressurized to the point of suffocation, it takes the percussive drive of her debut (2015's The Exploding Flower Planet) and combines it with the hypnosis of 2017's hushed Eternal Recurrence, crafting a restless and twilit world. Find the Sun's elusive moments of brightness — the unsettling acoustic glow of "Waterlily," the ancient flutter of "Monk's Robes" — feel like emerging from beneath the earth and into vast windswept desert.
At its core, Find the Sun is motorik psych-rock, shot through with winding, primeval folk melodies. It's her most grounded record to date — more interested in exploring a weighty and heaving low-end than the towering, light-as-air harmonies she's grown famous for. The record's best songs — the driving, light-dappled "Corsican Shores" and the anxious forward tilt of "Saturnine Night" included — sound like they're hurtling away from some unknown danger.
The songs lock into grooves and tend to stay there — if you're partial to a given track's first few bars, it's likely you'll find yourself pleasantly lost in its magnetic repetitions. However, Deradoorian is a master of the hypnotic potential of a repeating sound, and Find the Sun rarely feels redundant. The small details that appear and pull away, the slowly building sense of momentum — these songs are made to be lost in and explored subconsciously.
That subconscious place remains an essential playing ground for Deradoorian — her lyrics focus on meditation and worlds both natural and beyond vision, of gloomy corners and the pursuit of light and self-fulfillment. Find the Sun is an uncompromising record from an artist intent on mining further depths, one that finds the beauty in unease — and a sense of purpose in the darkness.
(ANTI- Records)The record is subterranean and dank — pressurized to the point of suffocation, it takes the percussive drive of her debut (2015's The Exploding Flower Planet) and combines it with the hypnosis of 2017's hushed Eternal Recurrence, crafting a restless and twilit world. Find the Sun's elusive moments of brightness — the unsettling acoustic glow of "Waterlily," the ancient flutter of "Monk's Robes" — feel like emerging from beneath the earth and into vast windswept desert.
At its core, Find the Sun is motorik psych-rock, shot through with winding, primeval folk melodies. It's her most grounded record to date — more interested in exploring a weighty and heaving low-end than the towering, light-as-air harmonies she's grown famous for. The record's best songs — the driving, light-dappled "Corsican Shores" and the anxious forward tilt of "Saturnine Night" included — sound like they're hurtling away from some unknown danger.
The songs lock into grooves and tend to stay there — if you're partial to a given track's first few bars, it's likely you'll find yourself pleasantly lost in its magnetic repetitions. However, Deradoorian is a master of the hypnotic potential of a repeating sound, and Find the Sun rarely feels redundant. The small details that appear and pull away, the slowly building sense of momentum — these songs are made to be lost in and explored subconsciously.
That subconscious place remains an essential playing ground for Deradoorian — her lyrics focus on meditation and worlds both natural and beyond vision, of gloomy corners and the pursuit of light and self-fulfillment. Find the Sun is an uncompromising record from an artist intent on mining further depths, one that finds the beauty in unease — and a sense of purpose in the darkness.