Inspired by the grimness of the present moment and grief over a loved one’s death, the Detroit electro duo is at the height of its dark powers.
“We think, we write, we paint under pressure,” wrote the seminal queer theorist Leo Bersani: “a pressure that is in part the ‘knowledge’ the body has of its own death… It is a powerful formalizing element of the energy passing through the extended arm.” Or, as the electro-goth poet Martin L. Gore once wrote, “Death is everywhere.”
The pressure passed through Bersani, who reportedly passed away recently. And it passed through Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, better known as Detroit electro lifers ADULT. As the pair began work on what would become their ninth album, and the pandemic swelled to take its toll, Kuperus’ father took ill. They served as hospice caretakers until he expired. Bereft, they reached out toward new equipment, including a vocal loop pedal and Roland percussion pads, and used the pressure to fashion Becoming Undone, a brief and blistering collection that finds their dark arts at full power.
Mostly, they turn to the kind of vicious pop that has kept rapt fans devoted for nearly a quarter century. Their minimalism is malleable but endlessly evolving. “Undoing/Undone” is their most bulbous jam in years, a bit of knob-twiddling while the world burns. “My body lies,” Kuperus snarls, as if the desire to lose yourself on the dancefloor isn’t just another death drive. “I Am Nothing” dissolves the ego in an acid bath as a way to free the ass so the mind will follow. But “Our Bodies Weren’t Wrong” resists such release, clenching tighter and tighter in a kind of rictus grin while ropes of acid and techno weave a black patent-leather noose. The nasty bit of bounce “Fools (We Are…)” pisses all over such self-seriousness—literally, in the video, a piss-take of the incoming indie-sleaze revival that reads like some abject Cobrasnake x Paul McCarthy collab. If death is everywhere, clowns are also all around us.
Becoming Undone works the dance nerve well. But it also includes their first song without the life force of drum machines: “Teeth Out Pt.II,” a thick miasma of scuzz that Kuperus wanders through, clutching strings of words like lifelines. “Suddenly I will be solitary,” she lashes out. Synths oscillate, seances conjuring the ghosts of cruddy futures. The expert placement of the echoes, a sturdy architecture of ruins, bring to mind the vocal tics and tricks of Robert Ashley, as fertile a reference for ADULT.’s content as the crunch and rush of peak Robert Armani.
The hysterical “She’s Nice Looking” loops Kuperus into a choir with the acrobatic vocal fury of Judy Tenuta, Kathleen Hannah, and Maria Bamford reacting to construction-worker catcalls; digital handclaps land like slaps to the face. “Normative Sludge” is an exhuming sluice of brown noise, an electronic body music for a world in which a pandemic can take out a million bodies and the bodies of power argue over masks. “The particular artfulness with which each of us moves through space,” Bersani wrote, is “the expression, or pressing outward, of death’s inscription within our bodies.” It’s autographed upon the new ADULT. album. Its pressure forced out a gem.
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