A truly ephemeral return with 13 minutes of short, dreamy, melancholic ballads.
One of the most mysterious and dreamy bands to come out of the 2020s is The Crying Nudes.
No one really knows who they are or where they even came from.
They’ve never even played a live show.
One day, they just appeared with mystifying, melancholic ballads that take one back to the sounds of bands like Mazzy Star.
A closer look at their record label, World Music, gives rise to further speculation about who the members are and what the project actually is.
World Music is mostly believed to have been co-founded by Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, two influential artists whose reach has extended far beyond the underground British music scene they dominated.
One member of the record label is Fine, a Copenhagen musician who has long been speculated to be the singer of The Crying Nudes due to rare past performances of their songs.
Equally as mysterious as the band itself, their album dropped dropped completely out of the blue.
With the simple title DJ, ominous artwork stating “I’m done.” and a runtime even shorter than their 15-minute debut, the listener is left with a piece of music that flies by just as fast as the lead vocalist’s melancholic memories.
Compared to their previous album, the band sits in a dreamy and weightless space, with softer vocals and a stripped-back arrangement of deep bass, light drums and dusty guitars.
In typical World Music fashion, most of the tracks are named with only a number.
The exception is track three, ‘when I dance I raise the dead’, undoubtedly the album’s most energetic track of the bunch.
The track features the lead singer demanding that a lover repeatedly “come a little closer to me”, with foreboding instrumentation and crashing drums that cloud the true nature of the character’s intentions.
Another standout track is ‘two’, a bass-led track with windy, eerie strings and a mix that gives the vocals total control over everything.
This track and the rest make the listener feel like a cowboy journeying through an unforgiving wasteland, or like Harry Dean Stanton walking across America for four years in Paris, Texas.
With a mysterious drop like this, predictions about the band’s future movements are obsolete.
