Manhattan's architecture results from the most rational possible pursuit of the irrational. That's one main argument of Delirious New York, a 1978 book by Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas that Cameron Mesirow has named as an inspiration for her second album as Glasser. It's also a useful frame for understanding the record, not only its specific lyrical concerns but also its general spirit. Interiors is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling.
Glasser's 2010 debut Ring underpinned Mesirow's soaring vocals with free-flowing, rhythm-obsessed eclecticism that made for a notably welcoming collection of atmospheric, electronics-brushed pop. That description still largely applies to Interiors, but the homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of its predecessor have given way to chilly digital perfection—though plenty of organic elements persist, in a way that's crucial—and the album as a whole is more thematically unified. Mesirow's voice, both a singer and a songwriter, still towers over the proceedings, and you can look to this to orient you anytime the sonic and conceptual edifice grows too dizzying.
Mesirow moved from Los Angeles to downtown Manhattan between albums, and the city she finds here is an Ableton Live-era update on sleek 20th-century modernism: Brancusi's "Bird in Space", in CGI space. Her Swedish co-producer Van Rivers, who also helped on Ring, applies his background in dark, shuffling techno and production credits from such albums as the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson's self-titled 2009 solo album as Fever Ray. The nod toward heady electronic music is nothing entirely new from Glasser, who has been remixed by the likes of Jamie xx and Lindstrøm, but she credits her collaborator for helping carry out her blueprints. "I was like the designer, and he was the architect," Mesirow told Billboard.
Glasser's first widely circulated song, 2009's "Apply", meditated on the permeability of walls and windows, and Interiors' rooms, too, are rarely as hermetically sealed as a cursory listen might suggest. "Shape", the opening track and first advance track, introduces the LP's silvery, aerodynamicism with whooshing bass and crisp kick drums, but Mesirow's layered, melismatic vocals are front and center—and she's describing not a city skyline, but an ocean beach. While "Exposure" glitchily theorizes on the "modern trouble" of urban living, Mesirow is far more likely to use her fabricated sonic setting as a framework for exploring personal demons: The bird calls and tropical tinges on "Dissect" signal a lingering stylistic connection to labelmates Tanlines, but next to lyrics about being "shackled to a window/ Anything but open," they also point to her much-reported struggles with spacial anxiety.
The interiors Glasser explores most compellingly are, it won't surprise you at this point to learn, the ones within human beings. She applies the same ruthless precision to these ostensibly messier subjects, so that video selection "Design", an examination of physical desire that wields human breaths as percussion, is crystalline enough for a posh gallery. But the insides of people turn out to be at least as unknowable as those of buildings: "Keam Theme", an uptempo standout, opens with a dream sequence and carries on from its oblique title to ask, "How long before I know you?" It might just be me, but something about the hook brings to mind Arthur Russell expressing a similarly surreal, slightly different sentiment decades ago: "That's us, before we got there."
This is ultimately where Glasser manages to communicate the unknowable—in the way her meticulously arranged soundscapes convey a sense of place even when their literal meaning might be just out of grasp. "I'm in your landscape, and I don't wanna go back to mine," Mesirow intones between rippling synths, sinuous orchestration, and percussive crunches on "Landscape", a song that closes with an out-of-nowhere, live-sounding drum-and-keys groove reminiscent of Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder brain trust. It's a track that contains so many of Interiors' paradoxes: the push and pull between 1's and 0's and flesh and blood, between indoors and outdoors ("There's nothing here but walls, walls, walls"), and between two lovers.
Mesirow has also cited Beyoncé as an inspiration, but although a few of the lither moments bring to mind the future-soul of Little Dragon, her closest parallels on Interiors remain big-idea, big-voice art-poppers such as Bat for Lashes or Björk. Indeed, if the album errs in a particular direction, it's in leaning a bit too heavily on abstraction without anything that lowers its barriers quite as far as, say, "Laura", from Bat for Lashes' 2012 The Haunted Man. A three-part "Windows" suite, presented out of order, brings in fractured sax bleats and ambient textures, but it's more difficult to unlock than its title might hint, and overworked lyrics like "listlessness becomes a habit" occur a little too often throughout the album. Koolhaas, author of Delirious New York, later decided it was time to "kill the skyscraper." Glasser has built a dazzling one, but you figure she just might know the feeling.
