Anyone who has spoken at a funeral can appreciate the delicate balance of honesty and sentimentality in effect on Hold Onto Me Infinity, a pop album about grief. Vocalist and multimedia artist Hayden Dunham performs today as Hyd, but first made their name in 2014 as QT of “Hey QT.” They’re a veteran of the PC Music house style, and a test case for how its signatures can be tweaked to new ends. In some respects, Hold Onto Me Infinity is a straightforward record of contemporary electropop, with few outright surprises. But Hyd unsettles this arrangement with their deadpan affect, playing the part of a mourning truth-seeker trying to live in the moment.
At the center of the record is Dunham’s voice, which makes basic songwriting come off as performance art. Their phrasing is deliberate and puckish, as they savor rounded vowels and pause over bated breaths. On the HudMo-produced “Freak,” Hyd writes about a nighttime tryst like an idealistic teenager (“Your hand in my shirt/A secret in the dark”), while their performance projects listlessness; like a lot of flirting, the song toes the line between a sheepish joke and a vulnerable confession. Kitty Pryde, Doja Cat, and Smerz have all explored the dissociative depths behind cheeky talk-singing, but Hyd often employs it to contain the journey of grief. “Angel,” an elegiac pep rally for a lost love in the “Together Again” school, undercuts its soaring spirit (“You keep me safe, hold onto me/Infinity and beyond!”) because of how matter-of-fact Dunham stays throughout. Hyd tries to bring the listener close without being ostentatious. Ignore the lo-bit drums that pixelate piano ballad “Never Is Over,” and you could book Dunham at Lilith Fair—they have a candid adult-contemporary attitude that honors life’s inherent spirituality.
Dunham’s persona as Hyd is more upfront than the enigmatic soda mascot they played as QT, but their aesthetic palette still prompts you to expect a rigor that they often subvert. Hearing them relate conversational details, like the song where they ask someone for “help with physical stuff” or call a lover a “baddie through and through,” is disarming, as if the disembodied voice in a vocal trance track became a singer-songwriter. Hold Onto Me Infinity’s release accompanied a Manhattan audiovisual exhibition featuring handmade geodes, purportedly therapeutic 526 hertz frequencies, and recorded voices from some of Dunham’s departed inspirations, including Octavia Butler, Sally Ride, and former partner SOPHIE. Hyd’s cosmic outlook can muddle songs that aim to be loose or catchy; if you’ve ever meditated too long and had trouble re-adjusting, it’s a similar effect. Hearing their voice melt into the background as they work through more formless passages, though, makes for some of the album’s rawest depictions of transformation after loss.
With their mawkish yearning and soft-focus ’80s thump, parts of Hold Onto Me Infinity could pass for music from a bigger queer pop act like MUNA. The bulk of the album finds power in gutsy sound design, a blend of PVC and quartz. Ambient ballad “Looking Up I See a Cloud,” which features some of Hyd’s starkest musings on loss, is mixed so thick that their voice has to push through it, palpably dazed by someone’s absence. The two SOPHIE-produced tracks, “Make Me Believe” and “Makeover,” have floated around for years as demos. The album’s official versions smooth out some of the buzzy sibilance of the bootlegs, but Hold Onto Me Infinity accommodates lots of tasteful clangs and wubs. The overall feel is sleek, tactile, and somewhat restrained, letting heavily swung beats germinate to resolve tension.
The album’s most routine moments still carry an apprehensive weight, that trick of pop abstraction that can frame a checking-the-mirror anthem like “Makeover” around both glamour and dysphoria. Pressed up against their fastidious production, Hyd sometimes sounds like they’re trying, and failing, to cry. Dunham seems to argue that when you harbor heartbreak for long enough, the whole world can become glassy and synthetic—and that loss sculpts us nevertheless, connecting us to a universal cycle. Instead of playing up the artifice of their art, they’ve written a direct, personal set of tracks, and come up with something appreciably strange.
