Over the course of the four albums he’s made as the Soft Moon, Luis Vasquez has slowly risen from a mire of his own making. His 2010 self-titled debut barely let his voice creep into the mix, focusing instead on pummeling post-punk rhythms, austere guitar riffs, and a bleak haze of distortion. The vocals were hardly the point; Vasquez rarely sang above a whisper, opting to drown the most obviously human element of his music in a miasma of deliriously goth instrumentals. Eight years later, he seems to be waking up from the nightmare. Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.
Written in a small basement studio in Vasquez’s current home city of Berlin, Criminal thrashes with an anger that the Soft Moon has never fully indulged before. “I’ve been spending the last eight years trying to heal myself, and it hasn’t been working, so [this record is] kind of an act of desperation,” Vasquez said in a recent interview. Like 2015’s Deeper before it, this LP grapples with the residue of childhood trauma, examining the shape a psyche can take when its formative years are toxic. Vasquez doesn’t use lyrics as a storytelling tool—his words come out in shards, not narratives—so there’s plenty of room to interpret the seething sentiments peppered throughout the album. “This guilt is a problem/You’re the ghost of my problem,” he chants in a steely monotone on “Like a Father,” a song he says is “about the father [he] never had.” While a few other lines direct their anger toward an ambiguous “you,” most of Criminal addresses a deep-seated self-loathing. “I wish I could be somebody else/Cause it burns,” Vasquez howls on charging opener “Burn,” his voice vaulting a tune that’s about as close to a traditional hook as the Soft Moon gets.
Vasquez’s melodies sweeten on Criminal, but their catchiness stands in contrast to the severity of the album’s texture and subject matter. It’s a trick wielded expertly by industrial-pop acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson: Load up an earworm with arsenic and let your listeners have their pleasure and pain at the same time. Yet instead of sounding like a deep cut from The Fragile, as Soft Moon tracks often did in the past, Criminal edges closer to the aggressive and delightful mix struck on Pretty Hate Machine. Vasquez begs masochistically for someone to “Take your time/Crush me right” on the stuttering, bass-heavy “Choke,” whose primary riff carries so much momentum it ought to be lapped up as soon as possible by a goth-adjacent rap act like Danny Brown or Vince Staples. And “The Pain” orbits a descending bass line that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Interpol’s radio-friendly compositions, the instrumental melodies counterbalancing the abject tone of Vasquez’s voice as he asks, “How can you love someone like me?”
Much of the music Vasquez has made to date has felt like a cocoon blocking out the world, hiding something impossibly dark at its center. Some of Criminal falls in that vein; there’s a superfluous instrumental called “ILL” lodged in its lagging Side B, and “Born Into This” masks his vocals to the point of near-illegibility. But the best of this album shows Vasquez piercing through his self-protective veil, exposing raw nerves and real pain. Inside all that darkness lurks a shuddering will to live.
