The Soft Pink Truth began as a lark and a provocation—an invitation to cut rugs and undercut binaries in one fell swoop. Drew Daniel’s debut album under the alias, 2003’s Do You Party?, operated on multiple levels: A rejoinder to the (straight, white) seriousness of the experimental dance scene, it slipped funk, rap, and disco into a subversive take on glitch-techno aesthetics. The following year, the more expressly conceptual Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? reimagined punk classics from groups like Crass, Minor Threat, and Angry Samoans as insouciant electro-pop bangers, erasing the divide between Daniel’s hardcore youth and his electronic adulthood while queering the punk-rock canon. A decade later, Why Do the Heathen Rage? took similar liberties with black metal, gleefully torching underground music’s ultimate temple to genre purism.
But the project has taken on a distinctly utopian tenor in the 2020s. The music has gotten deeper and sweeter; jokey gambits and herky-jerky sounds have fallen away, replaced by a rapturous fusion of deep house and ambient. You can trace the influence of artists like Moodymann, Matthew Herbert, and DJ Sprinkles, but Soft Pink Truth’s last two albums—2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? and 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?—are also awash in chamber music, spiritual jazz, free improv, and classical minimalism. A spirit of collective reverence prevails. Both albums feel like illuminated manuscripts advancing the simplest argument ever made: A better world is possible.
A doubtful undertone creeps into his new album, Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? The record might be considered the third in a trilogy exploring the importance of community, collectivism, and solidarity, in both joy and defiance. Sinning was expressly framed as a response to Donald Trump’s first term as president, a kind of “We Shall Overcome” rooted in the chosen family that Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, his husband and partner in the duo Matmos, have gathered around them over the past three decades. Deeper was more ecstatic, more sensuous. Like those albums, the new one favors human players over machines, but it goes a step further, largely abandoning overtly electronic tropes in favor of an acoustic palette informed by chamber music and film composition. More than merely a formal experiment, it feels like a political choice: a way of expressly centering people, and the relations between them, at a time when our rights and our autonomy are increasingly endangered by the predatory politics of AI.
It’s a side of Daniel that we’ve rarely heard. “Mere Survival Is Not Enough” launches the album on an unabashedly sentimental note, romantic strings cresting in waves before falling away to reveal a plucky melody that would suit the opening credits of an HBO dramedy. The mood turns more contemplative with “And By and By a Cloud Takes All Away,” closer in spirit to the last two Soft Pink Truth records: Rolling piano chords and wordless vocals sketch out the drifting shapes of the title; pulsing saxophones nod to the American minimalist tradition; pitch-bent chords rise vertiginously, mirroring agile harp glissandi. The dimensions are always shifting, acoustic elements smeared into synthetic arrays and back again.
Daniel flexes his compositional chops on “Phrygian Ganymede,” a 10-minute epic in which limpid pools of harp and piano freeze and shatter, giving way to dissonant pizzicato sequences and dramatic bowing; the latter half is a freeform fantasia full of splotchy woodwinds and unsettling dissonance. It sounds like a tribute to the sounds that Daniel absorbed in the art-house movie theater that his stepfather operated in Louisville, Kentucky.
Nearly two dozen players populate the credits, but it’s not clear who does what on any given track; by design, the Soft Pink Truth’s music subsumes individual voices into a tonal and textural union of broad, swirling shapes. But the emphasis on acoustic timbres also gives this album a more stripped-back feel than its predecessors. Your reaction to that clarity may be a question of taste; confronted with the jagged, almost aggressive string figures of “Time Inside the Violet,” I miss the enveloping nature of Daniel’s last two albums, the feeling of floating through a particularly absorbing dream. But the new album does have plenty of buoyant moments—“Orchard,” featuring pastoral acoustic guitar from Bill Orcutt, is a particular highlight, approximating some of the starry-eyed sensory overload of Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing and Eureka. And in any case, unalloyed pleasure doesn’t seem to be the chief concern of this album. True to form for his day job as an academic, Daniel’s default mode is to question and provoke. Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? feels like an attempt to break out of his comfort zone at a time when there are no easy answers.
