Imagine releasing the most successful, highest
-charting project of your entire career. You
pour your absolute soul into it, you send it
out into the world, and half the people who review
it basically call it a soundtrack to general
misery. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is rough. It really
is, and that is the exact paradox we are stepping
into today. We are not just looking at a standard
album release. I mean, we are looking at an artist
who basically handed the music press a mirror
and just watched the reflection completely shatter.
Yeah, I mean, it's the hallmark of truly dangerous
art, you know? Yeah. When you create something
that refuses to be just background noise, you
force a reaction. Exactly. And sometimes that
reaction is awe, and sometimes it's just absolute
flat -out rejection. Welcome to today's Deep
Dive, everyone. We are immersing ourselves in
the source material today, which is a Wikipedia
article detailing a deeply fascinating moment
in music history. It's the 2014 album What Is
This Heart? by the musical act How to Dress Well.
Yeah. And for those who don't know, this is the
third studio album from the American musician,
Tom Krell, recording under that moniker. Right.
And it was released on June 23, 2014 via Weird
World. Which is an imprint of the Domino recording
label, yeah. Exactly. So we have an established
artist, a major indie label, and this piece of
art that somehow managed to peak at number 145
on the Billboard 200. Which is huge. It's huge.
But while doing that, it simultaneously created
an absolute fault line in music criticism. It
really did. The divergence in the critical reception
is staggering. You have respected publications
calling it this work of eternal transparency.
Right. And then others treat it like it's some
sort of endurance test of emotional torment.
And that kind of split doesn't happen by accident.
OK, let's unpack this, because before we can
even talk about the music itself, or the wild
reactions it provoked, we have to look at how
this artist introduces the project before you
even hit play. Oh, the title. Yes, we have to
talk about the typography of the album's title,
because it is so incredibly deliberate. In the
source material, there's a tweet from Krell himself
explaining exactly how the title is supposed
to be stylized. Right, yeah. He wrote, quote,
my new album is called What Is This Heart? Just
like that, in quotes, like a spoken question.
What's fascinating here is the demand for emotional
labor that's just embedded in that punctuation.
Oh, interesting. How so? Well, by putting the
title in quotation marks, Krell is not giving
you a label. He is documenting an out loud utterance.
Wow, yeah. He's framing the entire you know,
55 -minute album as a real -time crisis. It's
like walking into a crowded networking event,
and instead of wearing a standard name tag that
says, you know, hi, I'm Tom, you wear a name
tag that says, am I a good person? Yes. Exactly.
You aren't giving the other person a neat category
to place you in. You are forcing the person looking
at you to actively engage with your internal
monologue. I mean, this is a startling inquiry.
I would actually take that analogy a step further,
honestly. Because it isn't just startling, right?
It's an invitation to participate in his confusion.
A question like, what is this heart? Inherently
implies that the speaker does not have the answer.
Right. He's asking us. Exactly. It completely
strips away the traditional armor of the pop
star. Like the pop star is supposed to have it
all figured out, you know. They deliver the polished
anthem. Yeah, the catchy hook. But Krell is saying,
I am overwhelmed. I don't know what this feeling
is. And by pressing play on this album, You are
agreeing to help me figure it out. But, you know,
you don't just ask a profound question like that
in a vacuum. Oh, definitely not. You have to
score it. You have to build a sonic environment
that actually matches the weight of that punctuation.
Right. And looking at the genres associated with
this album, the article, the musical landscape
is incredibly chaotic. The text categorizes this
project as. alternative R &B, experimental, ambient,
lo -fi, and experimental pop. It's just a massive
collision of sonic philosophies. You have genres
that fundamentally serve entirely different purposes,
all fighting for space on the exact same track.
And this is where I really have to push back
a little, or at least admit my own confusion
here. OK, go for it. How can a piece of music
simultaneously be pop? Which to me implies mass
appeal, highly engineered, catchy vocal hooks
designed to get stuck in your head. Right, the
earworm. Exactly. How can it be that? and ambient
or lo -fi at the same time, because ambient music
is specifically designed to be atmospheric, right,
to blend into the background. Yeah, Brian Eno
style, exactly. Right. And lo -fi implies a gritty,
unpolished, almost amateurish sound quality.
Aren't those concepts mutually exclusive? I mean,
you cannot be trying to grab my attention with
a pop hook and actively trying to blend into
the background at the exact same time. Well,
mechanically, they are mutually exclusive, which
is exactly why blending them creates such visceral
discomfort for a listener. Oh, so it's intentional
discomfort. Precisely. The producers on this
album, Rodade McDonald, along with the electronic
artist, CFCF. Oh, right. They co -wrote and co
-produced the tracks of Power and What You Wanted.
Yes, exactly. They use acoustic friction as an
actual psychological tool. How do they do that?
They achieve this by taking a pristine, catchy,
pop... vocal -like, the kind of melody your brain
immediately recognizes and wants to latch onto.
Right. And then they bury it under layers of
distorted synthesizer and heavy reverb. So they're
intentionally obscuring the most accessible part
of the song. Precisely. Yeah. Your brain recognizes
the pot structure. It really wants the dopamine
hit of that clean repetitive hook. Yeah. But
the ambient fuzz in the lo -fi grit... obscure
it. It physically forces you, the listener, to
strain your ears to hear the emotion. Wow. It's
an acoustic manipulation that mimics the actual
real -world effort it takes to understand someone
who's emotionally overwhelmed. Yeah. To someone
having trouble articulating their feelings. Oh,
wow. So the sound waves themselves are mimicking
the feeling of an emotional breakdown. Yeah,
exactly. It isn't just a stylistic choice to
like... sound cool or edgy. It is a physical
manifestation of the album's title. Heartbreak
isn't just one sharp, easily identifiable pain
like a clean pop vocal. It's also this dull,
lingering, confusing fog like an ambient drone.
And Krell is essentially forcing you to sit in
that fog. He's using artists like CFCF, who are
really known for building highly immersive, layered
electronic worlds, to construct a landscape where
clarity is just constantly denied. that feeling
of your brain being pulled in two different directions
by the production, it isn't just in the sound
either. He actually maps that out for us structurally
in the track list. Yeah, some track list is fascinating.
The album runs exactly 55 minutes in one second,
and it's spread across 12 tracks. And these track
titles, they read like... deeply conflicted poetry.
They really do. We have track one, two years
on, and then in parentheses, shame dream. We
have track nine, childhood faith and love, parenthetical,
everything must change, everything must stay
the same. Right. And the closer, track 12, house
inside, parenthetical, future is older than the
past. The heavy reliance on parentheticals just
jumps right off the screen. I mean, it is a very
specific, highly unusual way to format a track
list. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Almost every major emotional pivot on this album
utilizes those brackets in the title. To me,
it feels like this is Krell's way of holding
two completely conflicting thoughts at exactly
the same time. Oh, absolutely. The main title
is The Conscious Mind Trying to Establish a Fact,
and the parentheticals is the subconscious mind
whispering this terrifying contradiction right
next to it. Right, right. Take track nine, you
know, childhood faith and love, and then the
brackets, everything must change, everything
must stay the same. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, analyzing a title like Future
is Older than the Past really reveals a profound
internal struggle with how human beings process
time and trauma. Yeah, tell me more about that.
Well, normally we think of the past as old and
the future as new and unwritten, right? Standard
linear time. But when someone is grappling with
deep emotional baggage, the psychology flips.
The events of the past feel incredibly present
and heavy. Oh, wow. While the concept of a future
feels exhausted. tired and somehow already weighed
down by history. That's incredible. Yeah, the
track list is literally charting a roadmap of
a mind that is divided against itself. Which
brings us to a really critical juncture in this
deep dive, because when you build a monument
to your own internal division like this, when
you broadcast this intense vulnerability through
your title, your genre bending sound and your
deeply psychological track list, and then you
put it out on a major indie label for mass consumption,
you surrender. all control over how people interpret
it. Exactly. The moment the art leaves the studio,
it belongs to the audience. And the audience
for this album was severely fractured. That is
an understatement. Right. The album holds an
aggregate Metacritic score of 69 out of 100 based
on 32 critics. Now Metacritic technically defines
that range as indicating generally favorable
reviews. Sure, technically. You know, an audience
of our caliber knows that an aggregate score
of 69 rarely means everyone just thought the
album was fine. No, not at all. Usually a score
hovering right below the 70s signifies a piece
of media that is either deeply flawed or dangerously
innovative. It means you have a wild spread of
polarized opinions. Yeah, a 69 in cultural criticism
is almost always the hallmark of a cult classic.
Oh, definitely. It means the artist took a swing
so massive that it fundamentally alienated a
of the room. Look at the extremes we have in
the source material. NME gave it a middling 5
out of 10. Right. The AV club initially slapped
it with a C plus verge. Right. And the Guardian
published a review that is almost legendary in
its bluntness, literally calling the album a
soundtrack to heartbreak and general misery.
General misery. I mean, that's brutal. But then
you look at the other side of the aisle, spin
rated it a 7 out of 10, stating the artist, quote,
opens a vein. bleeds turbulent R &B. Even the
AV Club, in the text of their review, noted that
how to dress well remains torn between pop escapism
and emotional torment. General misery versus
turbulent R &B. I mean, we are talking about
vastly different sensory experiences of the exact
same 55 minutes of audio. It's wild, and I want
to turn this over to you listening right now.
Have you ever poured your heart out to someone?
Maybe you sat down with a friend or a partner
and you completely laid yourself bare. It's terrifying.
It is. You share your deepest, most confusing
insecurities only to realize that the person
sitting across from you fundamentally misunderstood
what you were trying to say. Yeah. They thought
you were just complaining or they tried to offer
a quick fix when all you really wanted was for
them to just, you know, sit in the fog with you.
The isolation that stems from being vulnerable
and then being misunderstood. is profound. It
really makes you want to retreat and never share
again. And that is exactly what this critical
reception feels like on a macro scale. It seems
like some of these music critics walked into
this album wanting pure pop escapism. They wanted
a distraction from their day. Right. And when
Krell handed them complex emotional torment instead,
they rejected the mirror he was holding up and
simply labeled it misery. Art criticism is inherently
subjective, obviously, but An album this nakedly
emotional acts as a psychological litmus test
for the listener. Oh, a litmus test. I like that.
Yeah, if a critic listens to What Is This Heart?
and immediately dismisses it as miserable, it
often speaks to their own discomfort with unprocessed
sadness. Wow, yeah. They are repelled by the
reflection. The critics who praise the turbulence,
however, are the ones who possess the emotional
bandwidth to embrace the discomfort. Right. They
weren't looking for a catchy distraction, you
know? They were looking for resonance. But the
beauty of putting something that vulnerable out
into the world is that while you will inevitably
alienate some people, you create a beacon for
the people who actually speak your language.
And there is one review in our source material
that stands out because it seems to catch Krell's
reflection perfectly. Oh, Ian Cohen's piece for
Pitchfork. Yes. It is an absolute master class
in understanding the artist's intent. Yeah. Cohen
wrote the review for Pitchfork giving the album
a glowing 8 .8 out of 10. And his analysis just
cuts straight to the bone of why this album matters.
It really does. He writes that modern discourse
like the way we communicate as a society today
seeks metaphorical blood, allowing people to
disclose more than ever without actually revealing
anything. Let's just sit with that for a second.
Disclose more than ever without actually revealing
anything. It's so good. That single sentence.
perfectly diagnoses the modern social condition.
It really does. I mean, think about how we operate
on social media today. Cool for sure. We post
dozens of photos of our vacations, our meals,
the concerts we go to. We update our statuses.
We share our locations. We are constantly disclosing
an incredible, unprecedented amount of data about
the logistics of our lives. Right, the logistics.
We are offering up the metaphorical blood that
the algorithms demand. But we can do all of that.
We can be perceived by thousands of people every
single day without ever actually revealing how
we truly feel. Yeah. We give the illusion of
intimacy without any of the actual stakes. And
this raises an important question about the difference
between performance and reality. Exactly. Cohen
is distinguishing between the performance of
vulnerability and actual risky unvarnished honesty.
Right. Because society loves the performance.
Yeah. We love reality TV arguments. We love carefully
curated crying selfies. Those things are safe
because they are controlled. Right. They're bounded.
But true honesty, the kind that asks a messy
question and refuses to provide a neat answer,
is jarring. It demands something of the viewer.
Cohen concludes his review by stating that Krell
operates with eternal transparency. He writes,
quote, Krell asks, what is this heart and lets
you look right into his own. He frames this entire
55 minute album, not as an exercise in misery,
but as a radical act of defiance against shallow
disclosure and undertaking that defiance. requires
immense courage, honestly. 100%. To walk into
a recording booth knowing that your work might
be graded a C plus by someone who simply doesn't
want to engage with it. Yeah. Or dismissed as
a five out of 10 by someone looking for a dance
track. To know all of that and still choose to
bury your pub hooks in ambient noise and bracket
your track titles with contradictory subconscious
thoughts. Right. You do it because that eternal
transparency is the only authentic way you know
how to communicate. And it frames that Billboard
200 peak at number 145 in an entirely new light.
It really does. It isn't just a chart statistic
anymore. It's a quiet, profound victory. It proves
that there was an audience out there navigating
the complexities of 2014 who recognized the hollowness
of constant disclosure and desperately needed
someone to ask that spoken question alongside
them. It demonstrates that while absolute transparency
might fracture your audience, it fundamentally
bonds you to the people who are willing to look
into the mirror with you. The people who stay
are the ones who matter. We have covered a massive
amount of ground today. We really have. We started
with a cryptic, deliberately punctuated tweet.
We navigated through the mechanical friction
of blending ambience and pop genres. Wait, the
sonic fog. Exactly. We dissected the psychology
of parenthetical track titles and waded right
through the middle of an incredibly polarizing
critical divide. A complete journey from the
typography of a title to the psychology of modern
communication. So what does this all mean? If
we strip away the billboard charts, the indie
labels, and the metacritic scores, the core lesson
we pull from today's sources is that true, honest
expression is always a monumental risk. Absolutely
always. Just as that 69 out of 100 aggregate
score illustrates, putting your truest, most
complicated self out into the world will almost
never result in universal praise. No, it won't.
Some people will look at your vulnerability,
recoil, and label it misery. But others, the
ones paying close attention, will recognize it
as a masterpiece of eternal transparency. You
cannot manage the reception of your truth. You
can only maintain the integrity of the utterance.
Which brings us back to the idea of the neatly
wrapped package we often present to the world.
It is so much easier to hand people a polished,
easily digestible version of yourself. It is.
But I want to leave you with a final thought
to mull over as you go about the rest of your
day or the next time you open an app on your
phone. In a world that constantly demands our
metaphorical blood, where we are heavily pressured
to continuously share, post, and update our lives
without ever really saying anything of substance,
what would it actually look like for you to practice
eternal transparency in your own life today?
Are you simply disclosing data, or are you actually
revealing yourself? Thank you so much for joining
us on this deep dive. Stay curious, keep asking
the difficult questions, and we will catch you
next time.