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You cant get Deeper if youre standing still. Thats intentional, says the Chicago quartets Nic Gohl. Does it feel good when youre listening to this song? Does your body want to move with it? These are the questions he asked himself as he and bandmates Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn were writing and recording Careful!, their third record and Sub Pop debut. I wanted these to be interesting songs, but in a way where a two-year-old would vibe out to it, Gohl adds. Its pop music, basically. That basically qualifier is working pretty hard, as fans of 2020s Auto-Pain might suppose. Auto-Pain was an album of thick brutalist architecture, full of straight lines and sharp angles, making hard shapes strong enough to carry a heavy thematic burden. On Careful!, theyre reshaping the facades and splashing color, not reimagining their sound so much as testing its limits. There are synth experiments, there are moments of nauseatingly powerful darkwave and coldbeat. There are massive rocknroll songs that you can imagine 10,000 people singing along to in some beautiful outdoor setting. There is a remarkably moving love song. Is there pop? Theres some pop, yes, a wiry bit of Cars-esque neon called Everynight. Look around the right corners, and you might see some of the old buildings peeking through, too, but in this contexton a song like Sub, say, a song that began life as a slow and dark prog jam but is now an elegantly cresting wave of post-punkthey feel more sophisticated, lit up in the cold, bright glow of Television. Auto-Pain was released in March 2020, which means Deeper wasnt able to play their new album live for nearly a year and a half. It was hard living in the vacuum of depending on Spotify numbers to quantify what your music means to other people, McBride says. Nature abhors a vacuum, though, and the band rushed to fill not only their empty time but the suddenly empty idea of what, exactly, their identity was. Isolated by ourselves, we were like, What is Deeper? Bhatti says. Weve always talked about how we didnt want to stay in one genre as a band, Gohl says, and absent any audience expectations, they gave themselves the freedom to tinker. One vibe I thought about a lot was Bowies most coked-out productions, Gohl says. If you want to, you can hear echoes of Low in the snapping rhythm and gray-sky synths of Tele, but you can also hear a bit of Auto-Pain in the nailed-in, stippling lines being spit out by Bhattis drum programming and McBrides synthesizer. Fame seems to stumble together and nearly fall apart, the dialed-up noise making the beat feel maniacal and a little invincible, the whole thing a series of short, snipped, autonomous gestures that are by now Deepers trademark.
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