Cut Copy have been at it for almost 20 years, which seems impossible. They seem to exist outside of time, perhaps because they’ve been looking back from the start—immediately appealing and with a toothsome competence, but more about articulating taste than defining a singular point of view.
Maybe bandleader Dan Whitford felt stale after 2017’s slick bummer, Haiku from Zero. Maybe the anxiety of influence had settled into ennui. For whatever reason, Whitford left his native Australia and decamped to Copenhagen, endured Scandinavia’s dark winters of the soul, and obsessed about climate change before returning to Melbourne to get the band together again. The result is an album as chilled as an upscale boutique in a heatwave and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed, which is to say very and not quite as much as it thinks.
Lead single “Love Is All We Share” is sumptuous, with an icy choir hovering at eye level and little squiggles signifying the alienation that arrived with the dial-up modem, leaving us more connected and more isolated than ever. “Dead to the world,” he sings, as beautiful chunks of harmony float by like floes in a rising sea, “can you feel it in your fingers?/Love is all we share.” There’s more numbness than sentiment. If this “we” is us in Australia, or Denmark, or the United States—or, sadly, so much of the rest of the world—love is not all we share; rage and terror are at least two more things. Anyway, in “A Perfect Day,” Whitford is “running out of love” but does have very well recorded percussion echoing like bad thoughts, and glistening synths that can fill up an otherwise empty room. “What a perfect day,” he sings, “to be alone.”
Words barely make it into “Stop Horizon,” a twinkler of plucked guitars and pitter-pat keyboards, as if the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” blew in some light showers. Later, a track called “Rain” arrives, and whether it signifies tears, a biblical cleanse, the flooding doom on our horizons, or a pitiless drought which will allow the West to burn unabated, it puddles beautifully. It’s basically an onomatopoeia, but the meaning washes away. Lyricless “In Transit” moves the album to a close, with little stuttering ticks of time running out for us all and a rather lovely sing-song melody that murmurs, Oh well.
“Running in the Grass” has a bit more bite, with a sharp swiping blade of a noise that could give your eardrum a papercut. It severs the chorus (“You cut me down to the bone”) from the verses. If crowds ever gather again, it will please them. As will “Like Breaking Glass” which is mixed, like the rest of the album, by the Knife and Fever Ray collaborator Christoffer Berg. It softens those Swedes’ silent shouts into slightly hushed sighs. And opener “Cold Water” is wistful and effective, a soggier take on Portishead’s “The Rip,” soaring upward in hopes of a festival to survey. Would that it find might one.
Festival culture, with its massive expenditures of energy and waste creation, is (was?) hell on the climate. Touring, too, not to mention the transubstantiation of fossil fuel into beautiful vinyl. If it’s hypocritical for Cut Copy to swap the joys of neon and dancing and kissing for a political agenda diametrically opposed to their own work, well, hypocrisy is the price of existence. The trick is to acknowledge reality without aestheticizing peril. The cover of Freeze, Melt nods to the conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose death at the start of 2020 might have warned us of the waves of bullshit to come. Its own concept is unimpeachable: Climate change does suck. Ice is a memory. Mostly, though, Freeze, Melt just feels like a nice warm bath.
