Last year was a hard one for Henry Laufer. The Los Angeles native, who records and performs as Shlohmo, saw a collaborative EP with Jeremih delayed for months by mismanagement at Def Jam. In July, the two artists gave up and released the record for free, only to receive lukewarm reviews. Laufer also suffered through some personal losses, ones that he’s done his best to keep private. He’s spoken of hospital visits and funerals, of partying too hard and feeling like shit whenever he took the time to make music.
His second full-length, Dark Red, channels that heavy energy. The album is jarringly different from Laufer’s past work and a difficult, oft-deafening listen. The emotional anguish contained in many of these tracks was hinted at on his 2013 solo EP, Laid Out, but some internal dial has spun from "ennui" to "cold rage." The album’s third track, "Buried", is most representative, a near seven-minute piece of what could be called abyss-core. Its engine is a yearning sample, distorted into fragments and underscored with menacing guitar progressions. Shlohmo has always been a fan of distortion, but on Dark Red he’s beating his synths to hell, from the opening chords of "Meet Ur Maker", which contains a recognizable Shlohmo melody ripped to shreds, to the steel-drum-like plinks of "Remains".
Shlohmo has testified many times recently that he is looking to avoid the trappings of his more pop-leaning projects. Once, he made an avant-garde R&B that resembled the production of mainstream foils like Drake and the Weeknd. Now he’s dabbling in ambient noise and prog with dashes of drum’n’bass and allusions to footwork. Vocals are gone, samples chopped and buried. Collaborations have largely been nixed: "I just want to do my own fucking thing," Laufer said in a recent profile.
Fans of the producer’s older work may blanche at the aggression of the first three tracks here, which function as an aural "Beware of Dog" sign, warning the faint of heart away. Yet after repeated listens, the front trio reveals some of the best moments on the album, demanding attention but also meriting it. Those who want the old Shlohmo will have to wait for the final two tracks, "Fading" and "Beams", which concede to fans, and constitute a kind of middle ground between the producer’s past work and the new album.
If Dark Red were another EP, all that fury boiled down to a manageable five or six tracks might make an impressive statement. At an hour run-time, Shlohmo’s change in tenor loses its shock value and becomes a slog. The four tracks that make up the album’s mid-section are unmemorable, a fact that their names—"Apathy", "Relentless", "Ditch", "Remains"—seem to acknowledge explicitly. When the album’s rhythm finally picks up again on the drum and bass influenced "Fading", it comes as a major relief.
Los Angeles’s Low End Theory club was an early site of the alchemical process that has melded hip-hop kids and beatheads together into a formidable coalition. Laufer was a frequent attendee and in response he formed the Wedidit collective, a group of producers including RL Grime, Groundislava, Salva, and Ryan Hemsworth. All of these artists were early in working with modern electronic dance genres that share the musical vocabulary and dynamism of hip-hop.
But the rest of the world has caught up with this style of music-making, so on Dark Red, Laufer is scrawling furiously outside the lines. Early in his career, before he dropped out of art school, he talked about music as a diversion, something that was less serious and less restrictive than learning how to paint the right way. His experiences with the mainstream and the colonization of his own genre seem to have had a similar effect. With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.
