Low
Hey What

It is incredibly painful to talk about this album with the awareness that we are facing the last work in the thirty-year career of this formidable group; it is incredibly painful to do so at such a short distance from the death of Mimi Parker, the heart and soul of the group along with her partner Alan Sparhawk. Because Hey What is a dark album in its own right, speaking of pain and loneliness, yet in many ways it is also luminous, shining with a light and hope that at times is even violent, aggressive. After all, Low, behind a thick veil of melancholy, have always cultivated light, but they had never been able (or wanted) to manifest it in such blinding flashes.

The album revolves around an idea of obsessive and suffocating rhythm, which resonates also in the choice of predominantly electronic sounds that are almost always distorted or disrupted, inherited from the previous Double Negative. As much as the two albums are similar both in sound and in overall character, Double Negative is an album that gives the impression of being a building under construction, driven by a fascinating creative chaos and a constant quest that led to an imbalance between frankly forgettable songs and masterpieces like that gem Fly; Hey What, on the other hand, is a monolithic, solid album, a single block within which many tracks follow one another without beginning or end, in a forced march continuum that offers no respite.

There are no tracks that stand out above the others; if we were to choose just one, we might mention Days Like These, a lucid portrait of humanity shattered and shaken by the pandemic but aware of facing a world very different from what it was before, with new flaws but also new strengths; nevertheless, the solidity and balance of the album never leave room for fillers or dead times: every moment, every instrumental coda, every white noise appears necessary in the economy of the album, an impression only the greats can convey.

Themes such as suffering, illness, and abandonment are expressed in this album in an almost stoic guise, paired with extremely harsh and jagged sounds that bring them to another level of maturity and intensity: thus, the dissatisfaction of More becomes a hard and firm awareness, and the end of a relationship in I Can Wait becomes a liberating cry that sharpens the pain but also gives it a deep sense.

There are many excellent reasons to listen to this album: to remember Mimi, certainly, but above all to remind ourselves once again what Low have been, and to enjoy a great work that has among its greatest merits the fact that it is profoundly contemporary, and perhaps even slightly beyond.