Darkside’s timing is impeccable. “We’re living in hell,” sings Nicolás Jaar on the plainly named “Hell Suite (Part 1).” His calm baritone wafts atop the song’s narcotic waltz, emerging from a flurry of organ and frantic drumming. This moment of eerie calm two-thirds of the way through Nothing, Darkside’s rich and arresting third album, evokes the split second between turning off the alarm on your phone and clocking the gruesome news alerts that popped up overnight.
The band seems preternaturally tapped into the collective mood, appearing every few years to confirm what we feel in our bones. Their music is dark and sensuous, vivid as a rainbow in an oil slick. In 2013, when the duo of Jaar and multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington first emerged with Psychic, their pulsing cosmic sprawl was exhilarating, giving the zeitgeist’s detached, simmering synthesizer music a more vital, menacing edge. Looking back, the album feels prescient, its queasy bliss-outs perfectly attuned to the souring of the post-Occupy era. Darkside’s second album, 2021’s Spiral, came as the isolation of COVID lockdowns began to ease. It was a woolier—though no less sinister—version of their slow-burn sound, mirroring the cautious optimism of an apprehensive public yearning for normalcy. It traded the previous album’s neon-lit swirl for a more bucolic approach but otherwise didn’t stray far from the parameters they’d set for themselves, the gravitational pull of a black-hole kick drum shredding every element in its orbit. The songs were brighter and jammier, but the echoing acoustic guitars and gentle pianos felt nauseous, one strobe flash away from a bad-trip panic attack.
Now, four years later, after expanding to a trio with drummer Tlacael Esparza, Darkside return with another timely and inspired reconfiguration. The world is scarier, reality feels tenuous, and incessant noise fills every waking moment. Instead of 11-minute codeine-disco epics or jangly electronic psych-folk, Nothing leans in a more pop direction, but it’s still warped and corroded. The record wears disgust with the current times on its sleeve, and its unsparing nature feels like a knowing clap on the shoulder. “Look at the window,” sings Jaar on “Hell Suite (Part 2),” his unsettling, warbly falsetto drifting through the pastoral Americana arrangement. “It’s hell out there.”
The three musicians started working on new material in 2022 at a rented Los Angeles storefront, relying on an improvisational method they dubbed the Nothing Jam. “It’s a thought experiment for playing music,” Harrington said in a recent interview. “You’re not trying to make anything happen.” The concept of “nothing” was the trio’s guiding light, a mindful idea that freed them from convention, genre, and, most of all, the designs of Darkside past. You can still pinpoint the group’s main signifiers, like Harrington’s guitar pyrotechnics and Jaar’s love of techno, but their palette has expanded. Opener “SLAU” has the slow metabolism of Darkside’s previous work, but it draws more from King Tubby than Can. There’s a deeper embrace of cosmic American music—“Are You Tired? (Keep On Singing)” suddenly bursts into an ecstatic, Grateful Dead-esque jam two minutes in—and the rollicking, “Superstition”-referencing clavinet on “S.N.C.” brings a little funk to their nocturnal thump. There’s also a more pronounced emphasis on texture, some of which can be chalked up to Jaar’s production prowess. But the glitchy, cascading samples at the end of “SLAU” and “Graucha Marx” sound like the work of Sensory Percussion, a system that Esparza developed for his company Sunhouse that turns drumheads into powerful samplers.
Every element of Darkside’s arsenal gets run through some sort of processing, but none more than Jaar’s voice. It’s pitch-shifted and distorted, spliced into fragments and rearranged. Though it’s never entirely lost in the wash of sounds, the constant mutations make it hard to catch the fury and frustration of the lyrics on the first few listens. At times, Jaar’s repeated phrases sound like he’s screaming into the void: The searing shout of “A planned descent!” on “Graucha Marx” could be a voicemail left for an uncaring senator, while the calm repetition of “Si no funciona, no me diga que funciona,” on “American References” (“If it’s not working, don’t tell me that it’s working”), feels like the internal reaction to an endless, glassy-eyed doom scroll.
Though its title hints at a Zen state, this isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos. In the contemporary context, “nothing” serves as an acidic response to maddening, evergreen questions: What’s being done by those in power to keep people safe? What will be left when all the dust settles? If Darkside were simply cynical, the music wouldn’t sound this alive, this spirited, this anxious for an answer. It feels very of the now while speaking to the timeless fear of collapse that every generation wrestles with. Until destruction finally darkens our doorstep, Darkside use the expansive and exploratory Nothing to posit that there’s still reason to hope: We will be transformed, and those changes may help us dismantle the hell we’ve made.
