by Dash Lewis (@gardenerjams)
Most of one’s existence is spent in the attempt to harness and tame entropy; the struggles that arise from such a futile exercise add depth and shading to a life with only one outcome. The exploration of that struggle has always been a central theme in Low’s work but has taken on a new shape in the past six years with the guiding hand of producer BJ Burton. Beginning with 2015’s Ones and Sixes, Burton helped bend Low's sound into new, more electronic-leaning directions, but not until 2018’s astonishing Double Negative did the partnership fully blossom.
The songs on Double Negative crackle and dissipate like circuitry left in the rain, hinting at the depths of despair and the heights of heartbreaking beauty without naming either. With Burton’s direction, the band blanketed each layer with distortion, creating a towering, undulating wave of sonic oblivion. Not even Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices were spared the destruction, folding themselves into the droning noise and emerging as entirely new instruments. It was a shocking left turn from a band that’s never quite stayed still and all the more surprising from a band 25 years into their career. HEY WHAT, Low’s stunning third album with BJ Burton, refines its predecessor’s approach, sculpting its slabs of noise into something more defined and accessible without losing any of the impact. It’s an album that grapples with the questioning of faith and the acknowledgement that the answers sought may never appear.
Rather than applying it to the entirety of the mix, HEY WHAT employs destruction more sparingly, using stabs of distortion and white noise as emotional punctuation marks. Sparhawk and Parker’s voices are front-and-center throughout, sometimes only accompanied by bit-crushed copies of themselves. Drums are almost nowhere to be found, replaced instead by the rhythmic churn of fuzzy tremolo guitar on “White Horses” or sidechained ducking on “Disappearing.” Where Double Negative felt vaporous and drifting, HEY WHAT rests on solid ground, no longer floating in the void but standing before it with unwavering eye contact. Even its moments of ambience are less drifting than before, having come from the collapse of structure rather than the initial lack of one.
These refinements of practice give HEY WHAT a distinctly devotional bent. The centering of the human voice within Low’s new idiom gives the songs the feeling of hymns, with each building a new cathedral to inhabit before methodically tearing it down. The transcendent shoegaze of the middle section of “Disappears” rises like a choir singing praise during an inferno, shimmering in its beauty and terrifying in its destruction. “Don’t Walk Away” seems to be constructed entirely of the pair’s voices, clipped into pitch-shifted samples, drones, and rhythmic textures all swirling around Sparhawk and Parker’s signature harmonies.
These are songs of devotion to hope in the midst of collapse, to faith in the midst of challenge, and to one another in the midst of alienation. There are repeated acknowledgements that no easy answers exist. “There isn’t much past believing/ Only a fool would have had the faith” Sparhawk muses on “White Horses.” He outs himself as the fool with the follow up lines, emphatically singing, “though it’s impossible to say, I know/ Still, white horses take us home.”
The last minute of “Hey” fully illustrates the point, as Parker repeats the word “hey” through the formless ambient haze. It’s a pestering word, as if from the mouth of a child asking for attention. The repetition of “hey” feels like the direct result of living in our current, seemingly ceaseless chaos, asking whatever deity in which one believes for an answer. The only response, however, comes at the end of the pleading: “What?” With HEY WHAT, Low posits that the point of existence can’t come from above, as the universe is neutral, uncaring. It comes from within. Taken in this context, the centering of the voice amid the brutality of noise makes perfect sense—the questions, the uncertainties, and ultimately, the answers all start and end with us.