Listening to Hundred Waters can feel like climbing into bed and pulling the duvet over you like a protective shield. The Los Angeles trio’s intimate, intricate music is perfect for when you’re longing for a safe, cozy refuge: It has the power to transport the listener to a hermetic space where there’s magic in the air and normal rules don’t apply. Nicole Miglis sings in a serene murmur, melodies twist and turn, and the lines blur between electronic and acoustic sounds. Voices sound like machines and vice versa; the moon peeks out of the shadows and rings like a bell. Hundred Waters’ music is remarkable in part because of its intense introversion, so the title of their third album, Communicating, is unexpected. Miscommunicating would have been just as fitting: These songs explore the gaps and barriers that keep us from connecting with the people we love.
Much of Communicating rings with melancholy, though there’s no anger or anxious prickle to these songs—more like a dull, lingering ache, the kind you feel when you’ve left something unsaid and lost your chance to say it. Miglis’ voice is still frequently put to textural use: The midsection of the title track is overwhelmed by warped, wordless roaring, and on “Blanket Me,” she chants the titular phrase until the individual syllables melt into meaninglessness. But Communicating also features some of her most direct lyrics and singing to date, and much of the album will undoubtedly resonate with listeners struggling to make connections or find meaning in their lives, despite their best efforts. “Prison Guard” is a futile plea for emotional liberation set to a martial beat; begging a “great defender” for relief, all she can muster is, “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.” She spends the gorgeous “Parade” wandering the streets, full of sorrow and desperate for some kind of purpose.
These songs don’t vary much in tone or tempo, but there’s a quiet flexibility to the band’s piano melodies. While the two notes hammering at the heart of “Prison Guard” throb like something out of Bing & Ruth’s catalog, “Parade” hews closer to stark takes on conventional pop—think of a cross between Fiona Apple and Imogen Heap. The latter approach is particularly satisfying, and it gives Hundred Waters room to embrace sturdier song structures without giving up much in terms of atmosphere. It only starts to falter with closer “Better,” which sounds a hair’s breadth away from anonymous “Grey’s Anatomy” soundtrack fodder.
A few songs express the album’s central themes—isolation, disconnection, existential doubt—in brighter, more propulsive ways, and it’s there that the album really shines. Lead single “Particle” is the only holdover from Currency, a stopgap EP released in May, and it’s also the only song on the album you might imagine hearing on the radio or a popular Spotify playlist. The elements that situate the song within today’s pop landscape—the kind of chipper, wordless hook you associate with the band’s label boss, a featherweight drop a few bars into the chorus—coexist peacefully with Miglis’ yearning for a partner who’s “drifting farther and farther away.” Near the song’s end, when she leaps into her upper register to howl, “I can’t hear you,” you’re hearing her at her most powerful.
“Particle” isn’t the only song on Communicating that benefits from a little extra energy. “At Home & In My Head” percolates until it explodes into a climax fueled by Zach Tetreault’s drumming; “Firelight” strikes a surprisingly optimistic note as it flips between a dreamy waltz and skyscraping digital shoegaze. And on the sparkling, shimmying outlier “Wave to Anchor,” the band opens up the throttle, digs into an honest-to-goodness 4/4 pulse, and puts its virtuosity to work in a song that builds to astronomical scale: splashy hi-hats, squealing feedback, a glowing key change—the whole nine yards. A glittering synth flies through the arrangement like a firefly with a jetpack. And while Miglis is still searching for some greater meaning—you can hear her repeatedly asking, “Who have I lived for?”—“Wave to Anchor” radiates the kind of joy and hope that are absent from much of Communicating. It’s a song that invites you to imagine what could happen if a band that has mastered cocooned whispers decided to throw back the covers and let the light in.
