Visions of damaged energy sockets and cosmic supercomputers flash in my thoughts as I hearken to the angelic but tormented music of kuru. Their erratically brilliant and breaks-heavy album re:wired has the sheen of a hologram and the glimmer of chrome. “Powering down like I’m Sony,” they cry, sunsetting like out of date {hardware}. After years of working within the shadows, the Maryland musician’s debut propels us deep into their psyche. It’s a panic room filled with miseries, victories, betrayals, realizations, and music so dreamy it one way or the other sounds idyllic.
re:wired teleports between glacial ambient and percussive carnage. kuru’s frail but feverish voice fills the combination like a permafrost vapor. The 19-year-old artist has the anxious depth of a paranoiac: Throughout the album, even inside a single track, they skitter between abjection and self-assurance, lethargic gloom and absurd asides about consuming soup. It’s onerous to inform the place kuru’s actual and creative selves start and finish, whether or not they really wish to CTRL+ALT+DELETE their life (“If I died I wouldn’t be against it,” goes a line on “distress ost”) or in the event that they’re roleplaying a personality in a sci-fi sad-scape. There’s a transparent anime and online game imprint on these tracks, from the titles—“distress ost,” “save;File-9”—to the fried doinks, airbrushed alarms, and beeping printers in each beat. (The “wired” within the title might seek advice from the psycho-horror anime Serial Experiments Lain, which includes a world communications system referred to as the Wired.)
To the untrained ear, re:wired would possibly hit like an amorphous blast of Auto-Tune and “celestial melody” sort beats. The stacking of sounds in an identical vary makes some tracks cycle like hyperloops, verses gliding into hooks with out the stress of resistance. Whereas kuru’s stream is a constantly slick slipstream, their voice isn’t that emotionally versatile—typically you’ll be able to barely inform once they crash from elation to devastation.
However usually the dissonance between the blue lyrics and the stunning music actually works, as if the fitting sound might spare kuru from misery. “vo://id” cries out with bodily and psychic ache—pictures of ripped pores and skin, a physique stretched skinny, aching bones—whereas the beat radiates euphoria and uplift, a real-life RPG potion. Squint your ears and the tonal shifts and rhythmic variations are refined however hypnotic. “yume” is probably the most relentless monitor however nonetheless feels plush; kuru bludgeons the combination like a satin mallet, their voice swathed in layers of ad-libs and dizzy glossolalia like a Saya monitor. “I might relatively kill myself than fuck with you,” they roar, an ideal distillation of the album’s emo-aggro duality. “give me a second” could be the straight-up sweetest track, an ambient rap meadow of bare confessions. “I’d be mendacity if I stated I hate the whole lot/What I hate probably the most is feeling vacant,” they moan.
