How To Dress Well has shared two new songs, ‘Crypt Sustain’ and ‘nothingprayer’.
The songwriter continually adapts and evolves his art, building a catalogue that stretches across multiple genres, and 15 years. Advancing his expansive take on pop at its most engaging, and experimental, the American artist – real name Tom Krell – returns this May with something new.
New album ‘I Am Toward You’ is out on May 10th, blending his recent academic work – he finished a PhD in philosophy – with what he terms “clandestine and occult meditation…”
Heady stuff for sure, with the full album draws on some key collaborators – some close, others new, such as CFCF, Trayer Tryon (Hundred Waters), Joel Ford, ANENON and more.
‘Crypt Sustain’ and ‘nothingprayer’ are online now, blending the experi-pop of How To Dress Well’s earlier work with some ineffable, liminal, and hard to pin down. There’s a burgeoning spiritual quality to his songwriting, matched to technical prowess, and a melodic inquisitiveness.
Here’s a note from the songwriter…
‘Crypt Sustain’ is about the cryptic origin of all artmaking, about my art and my brother’s art work (which is all over the ‘I Am Toward You’ work, including a font of his beautiful handwriting). It’s about Maria Torok’s work on crypts and ghosts in the intergenerational psyche and intergenerational transmission of trauma (again Tom? lol). It’s about the hegemony of realism and the desire to disavow the graphomaniac origins of art-making. It’s about non-verbal para-speech, Headbanger’s Ball, and the origin of graffitti 40,000 years ago and in the Lascaux Caves 20,000 years ago. It references Abraham and Torok, Bataille’s The Cradle of Humanity, Puar’s The Right to Maim, and Metallica, and criticizes the historical use of the category of disability and the violent creation of the ‘upright’ subject across human history.
It positions neurodivergence in the history of profound human spiritual expression, rather than giving away the game to categories of policing and control. Ultimately, the chorus draws our attention to the simple elusiveness of the secret dream at the core of all human representation. If we could sustain ourselves in the retraction of meaning we’d have less atomic bombs, less restrictive categories, better art, more dreams.
‘nothingprayer’ is a prayer in the Via Negativa, an attempt to orient myself towards God or that level of reality that lies beyond any attempted contact. Ἀπόφασις in Greek, I try to reveal that even attempting to name God through stripping away, through holding onto nothing, still leaves God infinitely far from me. I believe this teaches a great lesson about reality and about love: we must offer our prayer against possession as a model of connection. ‘I Am Toward You’ is what the nothingprayer says, fully recognising the impossibly of naming God or possessing the beloved.
Check out both songs below.
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Photo Credit: Sean Stout