On their debut album, Voyage Out, Floatie locate untapped delicacy, tranquility, and serendipity inside math rock. The Chicago four-piece have spent the past few years honing their skills as a tight live band in the city’s DIY scene. Although their minimalist approach and jazz-indebted playing style is more akin to Real Estate than Tera Melos, Floatie are also well-versed in the tricks of math rock—uncommon time signatures, gratuitously technical guitar, maze-like song structures. The proof is in Voyage Out, an album like an M. C. Escher painting, revealing its gravity-bending tricks the longer you look at it.
Voyage Out oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety. That kind of intuition and control can only be built over time, with a deep sense of connection between players. Although Floatie formed in 2018, all four members—singer-guitarist Sam Bern, singer-bassist Joe Olson, guitarist-synth player Will Wisniewski, and drummer Luc Schutz—have been friends for nearly a decade. That bond lends Floatie an effortless precision, which allows tiny explosions of garage fuzz to jump out of the otherwise buttoned-up “Lookfar,” or the time-signature twists in “Water Recipe” to give the deceptively smooth song a delightful, hiccuping rhythm.
Like their labelmates Krill, who dissected individualism and teleology through nature metaphors and BDSM scenarios, Floatie boil down the complexities of similarly academic issues into conversational lyrics. On “Catch a Good Worm,” Bern sings about a “pretty worm” that’s confused by the sight of its own reflection. The song gradually becomes a metaphor for the false binary of gender identity: “You hear the words, but tell yourself/That you deserve what you’re dealt,” sings Bern. “But something’s in the way of feeling great.” Elsewhere on Voyage Out, Bern wades through self-determination, gender expression, and social acceptance. For a band that quietly wants to educate listeners about decolonization and libertarian socialism, Floatie hit their stride when using personal struggles to illuminate universalities in their songs.
Floatie fuse all of this together into an endless helix, looping back to verses in inconspicuous yet seemingly unending ways. Meanwhile, Bern sings so gently that their lyrics occasionally seem to dissolve into the arrangement. Floatie immediately submerge listeners in this experience with album opener “Shiny.” After a few beguiling riffs criss cross in the introduction, the song shifts gears into a world of impossibly soft hi-hat taps, dreamy guitar chord slides, and whammy bar sighs. It’s here that Bern matches their falsetto refrain (“Other ways to get to the other side”) to the song’s rise-and-fall melody, as if the very phrase is climbing over a fence to the aforementioned location. It’s the type of trick that lures you back to figure out how it’s done, and in moments like this, Voyage Out is as hypnotic to pick apart and puzzle over as it is to close your eyes and get lost in.
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