For nearly 15 years, How to Dress Well has resisted simple pleasures. On Love Remains, Tom Krell’s 2010 breakthrough under the alias, he drowned R&B melodies in dense production, obscuring straightforward sounds with reverb, distortion, and disjointed lyrics about death and desire. Even at his most accessible, Krell’s approach to pop music has been outré. His two best albums, 2012’s Total Loss and 2014’s “What Is This Heart?”, twisted songs that Whitney Houston could’ve sung into skittery, ethereal gems, like imaginary Top 40 hits encountered in a dream. A skilled deconstructionist, he dismantles familiar forms and pop archetypes, repurposes their core parts, and uncovers labyrinths buried beneath.
Krell’s latest album, I Am Toward You, is his first release in six years and undoubtedly his most difficult yet. He constructs an idiosyncratic world of field recordings and ephemera, muffled soul singing and glitchy guitar samples, mournful melodic detours and buzzing electronic drops. It’s frequently blissful and self-consciously beautiful, yet its hooks are elusive—you won’t find a new “& It Was U” or “Repeat Pleasure” here. Lead single “No Light” is dominated by a harshly distorted lead riff that offsets the magic of its dance-pop backbeat, the vocals overdriven to the point of erasure. Even when his choices are less abrasive and more tuneful—like the straight-line strutter “On It and Around It” or the hymnlike a cappella “The Only True Joy on Earth”—the songs have an opaque, hazy quality. They seem to creep their way to transcendence, as if they’ve been floating in memory and are just now announcing their presence.
But like any How to Dress Well project, I Am Toward You asks to be accepted on its own terms, free from preconceptions. A number of breathtaking moments offer inroads to immediacy even during strenuously experimental stretches that otherwise may keep you at arm’s length. Krell uses his raw falsetto less than he used to but still deploys it to powerful effect on “nothingprayer” and “A Secret Within the Voice.” Standout “Song in the Middle” is a slow-building accretion of loops that evokes a surge of strong emotions—anxiety, longing, hard-earned optimism. “A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate Is Shown)” features a string and piano breakdown that’s as moving as anything in the How to Dress Well catalog. Even in its quieter passages, I Am Toward You discards clean, predictable patterns to judder and zag with obsessive intensity.
In an eight-page, 4000-word exegesis Krell wrote to accompany the album, he describes it as a “transcendental poetic effort of great contemplation, confusion, unknowing, and prayerfulness… populated by birds, stones, contingencies, confusion, God, and fate, which takes up the task of becoming oneself, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the meaning and experience of art and music, the mediation of all of this by technology.” Krell's lyrics are as impressive as they are disorienting, crammed with social critiques, psychoanalytic formulations, poetic wordplay, Greek myth, and Bataille references. “I guess I once confused the German word for face with the word for history/Just change one little letter, see your fate in the mirror,” he sings on “Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate),” a meditation on the interplay between historical narrative and personal experience.
Krell earned his Ph.D in philosophy in 2022, writing a 400-page dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics. He has since spurned academia, saying he had “to leave academic philosophy in order to save the true value of philosophical life from the nihilistic jaws of professionalization.” He had a similar falling-out with the “music industrial complex,” as he calls it. After making 2016’s Care, a record his ex-manager insisted be more commercially viable (it was co-produced by Jack Antonoff), Krell grew disenchanted. While touring his most recent album, The Anteroom, in 2018, he realized he needed to “leave the music industry” in order to save “the sacred meaning of music for my life.”
I Am Toward You feels like a decisive step away from institutions and industries where art and philosophy are packaged as commodities, with Krell reemerging refreshed into an artistic life free of compromise or creative constraint. The album may not foreground the sort of open-hearted melody Krell once penned with such astonishing ease, but in its insistence upon breaking open old forms to find new truths, it remains faithful to How to Dress Well’s inquisitive—and provocative—spirit.
