Visions of damaged energy sockets and cosmic supercomputers flash in my thoughts as I take heed to the angelic but tormented music of kuru. Their erratically vivid 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 “Powering down like I’m Sony,” they cry, sunsetting like out of date {hardware}.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 in some way sounds idyllic.
re:wired teleports between glacial ambient and percussive carnage. kuru’s frail but feverish voice fills the combo like a permafrost vapor. The 19-year-old artist has the anxious depth of a paranoiac: Throughout the album, even inside a single tune, they skitter between abjection and self-assurance, lethargic gloom and absurd asides about consuming soup. It’s arduous to inform the place kuru’s actual and inventive selves start and finish, whether or not they truly 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 may discuss with the psycho-horror anime Serial Experiments Lain, which encompasses a international communications system referred to as the Wired.)
To the untrained ear, re:wired may 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 strain of resistance. Whereas kuru’s circulate is a persistently 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 beautiful music actually works, as if the best sound may 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 essentially the most relentless monitor however nonetheless feels plush; kuru bludgeons the combo like a satin mallet, their voice swathed in layers of ad-libs and dizzy glossolalia like a Saya monitor. “I might fairly kill myself than fuck with you,” they roar, an ideal distillation of the album’s emo-aggro duality. “give me a second” may be the straight-up sweetest tune, an ambient rap meadow of bare confessions. “I’d be mendacity if I stated I hate all the pieces/What I hate essentially the most is feeling vacant,” they moan.
