If you’ve been to a Water From Your Eyes or This Is Lorelei gig lately, you’ve likely been greeted by the guitar and percussion efforts of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz, a couple of musicians not as immediately well-known as their bandmates Rachel Brown and Nate Amos but who have a very good duo of their own: fantasy of a broken heart. I was not aware of fantasy until five months ago or so, when rumblings of their debut album began to bubble over. The sonic differences between Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei are vast; it would make sense then that fantasy of a broken heart exists beyond them, too. But still, you can connect all three projects with a little bit of string, luck and genius.
fantasy of a broken heart’s debut album, Feats of Engineering, is a collage of pop goodness. I haven’t been able to put it down lately. They played some of these songs during a handful of unofficial SXSW sets, but I missed them all. Nardo and Wollowitz have been on tour, through one measure or another, for so long that the migratory, non-linear sonics of Feats of Engineering makes sense with context. The story goes that Nardo canned their dreams of being a journalist after falling in love with New York’s music scene, while Wollowitz’s family has a performative background (their mom is a dance teacher) and became a multi-instrumentalist at a young age. Together, they took a turn in a punk band called Animal Show before becoming players in Sloppy Jane. When you get to interact with all of those things in a city that’s burgeoning with the suffocating expectation that you have to be something, a project like fantasy of a broken heart can be just what it arrives as to listeners: a breath of fresh air; an outlet for two best friends to bounce their creative inklings off one another.
Feats of Engineering never settles, nor would I, or should you, want it to. “Mega” is pure bedroom pop, while “Basilica” is distant and atmospheric. Wollowitz delivers spoken-word on the former while synthesizers crescendo so brightly that, for a moment, I mistake them for Nardo’s high-pitched harmonies. “Catharsis” is exactly that, as Wollowitz asks “When will I reach you?” through a skyscraping, twinkling piano melody that erupts into a glitchy, droning finale; “Feats of Engineering” is a tour-inspired catalog of California strip malls and calm mornings full of fog and palm trees, as Wollowitz declares that they “made love in an empty Waffle House while the fry cook smoked off the roach of a menthol cigarino.” It’s all grandiloquent; a couple of Zillennials executing hints of rock opera-style vicissitude through ProTools noodling.
“Tapdance 2” begins thunderously before nose-diving into a lo-fi, distant rock groove powered by the same guitar tremolo. Wollowitz gets cheeky, professing that they “read too many Pitchfork reviews” and love the band Life Without Buildings, declaring they “could’ve been born in a smaller town with a disco scene and spent more time deep in my element.” Though, it might be difficult to make out those words while you’re listening, as Wollowitz sounds like they’re singing 100 feet away from the microphone. It all works, though, as if fantasy of a broken heart want to sound like a sample beneath their own foregrounded arrangement. It’s a nice touch, and a cresting left turn from the preceding “Tapdance 1,” which finds Nardo lamenting “nobody knows what you’re talking about” through repetition that swells into heavy, languid downstrokes. Wollowitz joins their bandmate on some of those lines, until letting out a “woo” and dissolving just out of focus.
Caught somewhere in-between musical theater, glam rock and dance-pop, fantasy of a broken heart skedaddle across Feats of Engineering, notably on a song like “Loss”—an irresistible jaunt that is so Vaudevillian that the melodrama quickly cycles into something terrifically contemporary and uncategorical. This is the kind of unpredictable music I crave, as it oscillates through various levels of distortion, choral harmonies and swirling, multi-patterned chord progressions and tempo-shifts. “I raze my wrists in Camelot, hoping that the sting will ease the ringing,” Wollowitz sings, before Nardo’s light touch of “loss won’t cure you” comes sweeping in. It’s all very baroque, surreal and heart-warming, in the kind of way that feels as much like a road-trip through a century of music as it does a modern-day discovery of something plentiful, handsome, ornate and shockingly new.
“Ur Heart Stops” sounds like something Elliott Smith might have cooked up if he’d haunted the Glove or Heck in NYC during his Heatmiser days, or if he got really big during the bedroom dream-pop boom of the early 2010s. Combining freak-folk, synth-pop and psych-rock, fantasy of a broken heart revels in buttoning up a truly indescribable yet positively chaotic and beautiful M.O. While listening, you may be reminded of bands like Dirt Buyer or Crooks & Nannies, if only for the multi-dimensional signals of cross-genre fascination and finesses—as well as the subdued undercurrent of pop wonder that often populates the backbone of This is Lorelei. It would be too easy to say that Nardo and Wollowitz are inspired by their other bandmates; of course they are. But, then again, are they really? If so, they hide it well, because Feats of Engineering is full of hooks, jamming keys that flutter with glitter and, most emphatically, a core duo of voices that fasten into one another. They ricochet off each other while seizing every sound they can, and it’s positively enthralling at every turn and triumph. With that in mind, calling fantasy “referential” becomes inspiringly irrelevant.
Normally, an approach like Wollowitz’s wouldn’t excite me enough. There are instances where I can see them teetering a bit too far into parody, but on the Feats of Engineering title track, they balance the many voices in their repertoire like a wardrobe with shirt sleeves and pant legs spilling out of the drawers. The way they oscillate between cartoon villainy and emo pedantic mirrors the musical whiplash of the track’s music itself. “If we could work this thing out,” Wollowitz sings through a piano breakdown, “that would be fresh. I love you forever, but I’m feeling detached. Maybe this time I could be alone.”
There are even moments on Feats of Engineering when Wollowitz sounds like Iggy Pop, and the way they sing “all I really wanted a little sensation” during “AFV” sounds like one of Iggy’s incantations on his 2023 album Every Loser, particularly on a song like “Morning Show.” That’s a hard parallel to dislike. Nardo’s singing, too, is always angelic and always complimentary, their vocal coloring every song without losing a shred of its delicacy. When they run the gamut on a lead part like they do on “Doughland,” the pinnacle track, the goof gets less goofy and fantasy of a broken heart negotiate a deal with sweet, sweet psychedelic jubilee. “I still see your face in the unexplored,” Wollowtiz sings, before Nardo finishes the sentence: “Following me, trying to break apart in another form.”
Form is the word of the hour, as fantasy of a broken heart are allergic to it—and good on them for that, as there is so much to discover during the 36-minute runtime of Feats of Engineering. You might not find all of it on your first or even your second and third listen, but that’s the point. Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo seesaw through so many key-changes and tempo-shifts that the word “bombast” still wouldn’t paint the full picture of this record. It’s a beautiful, lawless formula constructed by two mad scientists who also happen to be best friends. They let comfort turn into contrast, as bravado bursts into abandon.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
