$6.00
Lower
Someone’s Got It In For Me / But There Has To Be More
When the Copenhagen four-piece Lower surfaced with its debut Walk on Heads EP earlier this year, its dark-hued pallet seemed intentional and impressively realized: a honed but unhinged mix of no wave and hardcore foregrounding singer Adrian Toubro’s dense poetry. But as drummer Anton Rothstein told me this summer, “We had no intentions of playing a defined genre,” naming touchstones like Scott Walker’s slow, bleak surrealism and the militaristic noise of rock avant-gardists Venom P. Stinger. From the eery shine of its opening gong taps, the desperate, raw-sung paranoia of “But There Has to Be More” finds Lower continuing to stretch; with wider-screen emotional delusion, Toubro sings tensely to the sky as if after a nightmare, one brutal to the heart, not the head. —Pitchfork