Nine years after the Rapture’s last album, the group’s singer/guitarist returns with his debut solo album, grappling with fatherhood and legacies of trauma in ambitious, ambient-infused art rock.
The Rapture were so good at being a dance-punk band that it’s easy to forget they spent much of their existence chafing against being pigeonholed as one. Go back and listen to the three albums they released between 2003 and 2011 and what you hear isn’t so much a cool, club-conquering groove machine as a strange, vulnerable, occasionally psychedelic pop group trapped inside one. If signature songs “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks” brought panic to the disco, curveball ballads like “Open Up Your Heart” and hippy-dippy detours like “Live in Sunshine” revealed the Rapture wanted not just to dance until the break of dawn, but to stick around for breakfast, too.
As it turns out, that tension between late-night decadence and morning-after innocence was about more than simply sidestepping indie-dance trends; it was also a reflection of the emotional tug-of-war playing out in singer/guitarist Luke Jenner’s life. As he’s since made clear in interviews, the Rapture’s ascent had a damaging effect on his marriage, while the arrival of his son in 2006—and the death of his mother by suicide that same year—put him in the nigh-impossible position of trying to be both a successful, globe-trotting musician and a present, engaged family man. Eventually, he put his career on pause to focus on being a better dad. “Well, we’re all getting bigger, but it takes time to be a man,” Jenner sang on the last song of the last Rapture album to date, and he wasn’t bullshitting. In his case, it’s taken almost a decade—a period spent reconnecting with his family, getting involved with his local community, and confronting the darkest moments of his past.
Jenner’s musical equipment hasn’t exactly been collecting dust that whole time—before reuniting the Rapture for a couple of dates in 2019, he kept busy playing drums in the DIY no-wave group Seedy Films (which he formed with some amateur musician friends he’d been mentoring) and making bedroom techno under the name Meditation Tunnel. But while 1, the first installment of a planned trilogy, marks his first proper solo album, it’s less a confessional singer/songwriter record than an abstract reimagining of one, where raw lyrical introspection and open-hearted devotionals are filtered through the exploratory ethos of an ambient soundtrack producer. While a handful of tracks provide distant aftershocks of the Rapture’s dancefloor pulse, the guiding principle isn’t so much post-punk as post-Floyd, foregrounding languid acoustic pastorales, stargazing electric-guitar slides, and ominous sound effects (ringing alarms and explosions included) that hark back to the classic-rock icons’ mid-’70s imperial phase.
Jenner has said he named his Meditation Tunnel project after a sleeping-aid toy for kids, but 1 takes that concept to a more literal level—this record isn’t so much a collection of songs as a group-therapy session, its tracks connected by various field recordings of Jenner interviewing members of his community about the meaning of life and love. As in those sorts of meetings, Jenner’s objective is to create a safe, welcoming space before working up the courage to open up and bleed. We don’t even hear his vocals until a full 10 minutes into the record, partway through the epic second track, “All My Love.” With the song’s Funeral-marching beat providing moral support, Jenner reveals his self-doubt, but that anxiety soon turns to exultation as he reaffirms his loyalty to his family en route to a triumphant, Joshua Tree-scaling finale.
On 1, Jenner finally embraces the domestic bliss he once dreamed of on those Rapture records, but the album doesn’t shy away from delving into the struggles he endured to get there. Jenner has said that his desire to be a more committed father to his son stems from his fear of replicating the dysfunctional family environment he was raised in, and 1’s most captivating moments reverberate with the aftershocks of deep-seated trauma. “Asshole” is a frank account of sexual abuse that, in perverse Lynchian fashion, accesses the past through a nostalgic doo-wop serenade. A similar combination of candor and valor pervades the piano ballad “You’re Not Alone,” a devastating portrait of bullying and parental neglect that manages to spin personal pain into communal healing.
As tracks like these confirm, Jenner is no longer the hyperactive shrieker of old. While throbbing, bass-driven instrumentals like “If There Is a God” (whose storm-cloud ambience suggests a disco remix of “Riders on the Storm”) may whet the appetite for a new Rapture album, he mostly favors a tender, graceful delivery that both reflects his current lot in life and respects the sensitivity of the album’s subject matter. In fact, 1 could use more of his voice—Jenner’s lead vocals are heard on only four of these 10 tracks and, after a while, the soundscapes start to blur into one long slow-motion, cosmic campfire hallucination.
Fortunately, Jenner outfits this meticulous album with a pressure-release valve in the closing “About to Explode,” which feels less like a spontaneous combustion than a slow, satisfying exhale. Over a gleaming melody that hovers somewhere between “Heroes” and Disintegration, Jenner leaves us with a thought that echoes his previous sign-off: “It takes time to get to this place/It takes time to finish this race.” On an album that celebrates Jenner’s hard-fought contentment, it’s a sobering reminder that overcoming trauma and becoming a better husband and father aren’t some magical end state, but an ideal to work toward every day.
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