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HOW TO DRESS WELL

How To Dress Well

I Am Toward You

    In his 15+ years recording as How To Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell’s musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, its core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity.

    I Am Toward You is the first new How To Dress Well album in six years, with some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic music to date. Krell opens the second decade of his career with an album that delivers on the hallmarks of his best work. When creating the album, Krell was in search of not a fresh start, exactly, but instead a return to the open-hearted, uncynical approach to music making that he adopted as a kid, and carried through the release of his haunting breakthrough debut, 2010’s Love Remains, when he was making music in relative anonymity with little external pressure.

    Krell alongside returning and new collaborators CFCF, Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Trayer Tryon (Hundred Waters), Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read began work on what would become I Am Toward You in 2020. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he’d recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of previous albums to create a collection of songs that oscillate between the present and the past as if it’s happening all at once. A memory from 20 years ago holds just as much weight as something that happened yesterday. Each song, too, is linked to the larger world: these tracks are in constant dialogue with not just each other, but the environments in which they were made. It feels like a diaristic approach to how we can find new perspectives on our own lives, as informed by the way Krell transformed himself in the nearly six years between the release of The Anteroom and the release of I Am Toward You.

    TRACK LISTING

    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

    Co-produced by Joel Ford (Ford & Lopatin, Airbird), this record plays as a single continuous piece of 21st century psychedelic music and features Krell’s most bewitching sound experimentation to date. Moreover, the stories Krell sings on this record – some biographical, many from the most knotted corners of human life – are deeply personal and human(e). The Anteroom - with its blizzardous electronic noise, fragile melodies and poignant poetry - reclaims the experimental core of the HTDW project.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Humans Disguised As Animals | Nonkilling 1
    2. Body Fat
    3. False Skull 7
    4. Nonkilling 3 | The Anteroom | False Skull 1
    5. Vacant Boat
    6. Nonkilling 13 | Ceiling For The Sky
    7. A Memory, The Spinning Of A Body | Nonkilling 2
    8. Nonkilling 6 | Hunger
    9. July 13 No Hope No Pain
    10. Love Means Taking Action
    11. Brutal (feat. Ocean Vuong) | False Skull 5
    12. False Skull 12
    13. Nothing 

    How To Dress Well - AKA Tom Krell - releases his fourth album, ‘Care’, via Weird World / Domino.

    Written by Krell, mixed by Andrew Dawson (Kanye West, fun.) and featuring co-production from Krell alongside Jack Antonoff, Dre Skull, CFCF and Kara- Lis Coverdale, ‘Care’ is a sensual, dazzling alt-pop tour de force.

    ‘Care’ is the next step in the evolution of Krell’s sound, which began with his first critically-lauded album, ‘Love Remains’, in 2010 and continued up through his widely acclaimed previous album, ‘What Is This Heart?’, released in 2014.

    TRACK LISTING

    Can’t You Tell
    Salt Song
    What’s Up
    Lost Youth / Lost You
    The Ruins
    Burning Up
    I Was Terrible
    Anxious
    Time Was Meant To Stay
    Made A Lifetime
    They’ll Take Everything You Have

    How To Dress Well is the stage name of songwriter and producer Tom Krell.

    His debut album ‘Love Remains’ was widely praised for both its conceptual strength and immediate emotional resonance, and saw Krell credited with having given birth to a new, narcotized strain of R&B that has since spawned a host of imitators.

    Now we see him pull back the curtain on a whole new body of work with his new album ‘Total Loss’, released on Weird World and co-produced by Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, King Krule).

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Philippa says: Following his Tri Angle LP outing, How To Dress Well is back with more of his post-R&B, slow-fi, synthwave-tinted melancholic pop.

    TRACK LISTING

    ‘Total Loss’
    When I Was In Trouble
    Cold Nites
    Say My Name Or Say
    Whatever
    Running Back
    & It Was U
    World I Need You, Won’t Be Without You (Proem)
    Struggle
    How Many?
    Talking To You
    Set It Right
    Ocean Floor For Everything


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