Desire can be volatile, excruciating, wonderful, and cruel—but above all, it keeps us going. We want and want and want until we die, these small hopes urging us across the vast expanse of our lives. Caroline Polachek—pop auteur, emotional philosopher, hopeless romantic—makes a muse of this tangled, pervasive force on her virtuosic new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She knows too well that falling in love suffuses you with possibility, makes a boring world briefly beautiful. And so, as a nod to desire’s transformational power, her album’s cover displays her on all fours on the grimy subway, lunging forward with a ravenous look in her eyes. On one end of the car is the rat race; on the other end, sand—a mirage of paradise.
Polachek spent much of her career as one half of the indie-pop band Chairlift in the maddening, formative city of New York, and more recently has split her time between Los Angeles and London. In 2020, she decamped to the idylls of the Mediterranean—blaring ’70s and ’80s Italo-pop out of a beat-up station wagon with her boyfriend in Rome and staying at the base of Mount Etna in Sicily, marveling at the “faceless, tectonic, chaotic energy coming up from below.” Inspired by these excursions, the album takes us to breathtaking places, all palm trees and crystalline water, deep red sunsets and smoke-covered volcanoes. On the ecstatic “Welcome to My Island,” Polachek is Calypso greeting a shipwrecked Odysseus, waving us to her oasis. She channels a yearning as deep blue as the ocean and howls like a wolf to the moon.
While Polachek was constantly in transit on her 2019 album Pang—descending with a parachute, passing through a door to another door—Desire is grounded in a more real sense of place. Even on songs with few locational details, you can feel the climate: An elusive woman lives out an escapist fantasy on “Bunny Is a Rider,” not checking her email because she’s “AWOL on a Thursday.” Satellites can’t find her because she’s somewhere in the jungle: Hear the muggy, tropical bassline, the faint bird chirps, the static that resembles the rustle of fronds. “Crude Drawing of an Angel” is staged below the Earth’s surface amid dripping stalactites, with jagged breaths creeping up from behind. Polachek’s voice slices through the dank atmosphere like a blade: “Forsake me/Here on the ground/All or nothing,” she pleads, begging for mercy from a lover whom she knows will disappear.
Perhaps the “crude angel” is painter Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the “angel of history” who, in one famous account, looks with horror upon the cumulative wreckage of civilization, the damage wrought in the name of glory and beauty. Polachek is not just a swooning lover, but an aesthete and philosopher attuned to contemporary extremes, conceptualizing Desire during a period of grand instability. During the pandemic her father died of COVID-related complications, and she saw cruelty all around her as she contended with the cyclical nature of disease, the fragility of the supply chain, and the rancor of social media morality. “I started thinking about how to re-harmonize myself, and my music, with the reality that there is a destructive side to everything,” she said. On the flamenco-inspired “Sunset,” Polachek dramatizes the pressure of new love against the backdrop of a destitute society, a collapsed infrastructure of care: “So many stories we were told about a safety net/But when I look for it, it’s just a hand that’s holding mine.”
The love explored on Desire is not the result of a patient and sustainable partnership, but a violent, all-or-nothing immersion. Implicit in the wish in the album’s title, I Want to Turn Into You, is the prospect of losing one’s own selfhood. Across the album, Polachek indulges in the pleasure of obliteration and surrender: “You are melting everything about me,” she sings with her arms outstretched on “Smoke.” On “Blood and Butter,” her descriptions turn grotesque: She coos breathlessly about diving through her lover’s face and underneath his tattoos, longing to be sustained by nothing “but the sun that’s in our eyes.”
Sometimes Polachek seems so breathless with desire that she can only come up to its surface to gasp up a few intelligible lines at a time. Bristling at our culture’s obsession with literalism in art, she proffers, “I’m a deep believer in what lies behind.” So songs like “Pretty in Possible” dabble in Cocteau Twins-style abstraction, blotted narratives featuring mayflies and bloody noses. Sonically, the song is Frou Frou meets “Tom’s Diner” with its keychain-jangle beat, wordless a capella stretches, and corkscrewed melodies. Polachek and producer Danny L Harle started it as an exercise in pure flow, no explicit choruses or verses. Still, one sweet line wrestles itself from the stream: “I was born to get you home.”
The theme of mania is replicated in the songs’ twisted, irregular structures. “Blood and Butter” casts off its jacket and just to put it on again, staging a fickle transition between day and night and ending on an epic bagpipe climax lifted out of “The Sensual World.” “I Believe” is breakbeat pop fit for a Lizzie McGuire trip to Rome, punctured by glitchy, adrenal breaths that sound like a cyborg subjected to shock therapy. The album’s production veers from trip-hop to new wave, trance to flamenco, demonstrating an innate understanding of the pop archive in pursuit of a new personal style. Each creation seems marvelously its own: Who else would pay tribute to their mercurial father with petulant white-girl rapping and cheesy stadium-rock guitar, or use a 1970s young adult novel about an immortal family as fodder for a shimmering Enya ballad?
The cumulative effect is like staring up at a giant fresco, the detail so exquisite you can’t decide where to rest your eyes first. Flourishes appear in one place, then echo in a new location—wings flapping, whistles beckoning, blades slicing, bells chiming. She opens Desire with her father’s warning to “watch your head, girl” and concludes with the image of a decapitated angel. But what really binds the album is the dynamism of Polachek’s vocals, the culmination of years of bel canto operatic training and the hunger to get it right. There is so much conviction in her delivery that ceding space to anyone else, even guest spots from Grimes and Dido, feels like a disservice: Within the span of one song, Polachek’s voice will smear like paint, swoop like a crane, and bubble like lava.
All of the best attributes of Desire are reflected on its closer “Billions,” a humid tabla-pop song with medieval sound effects and an over-the-top drone squiggle. Polachek brings us into the throes of a shaky love affair, doling out details in succulent little morsels. “Salty flavor/Lies like a sailor/But he loves like a painter,” she sings, evoking the tangy taste of skin, the coarse vernacular of the seaman, the uncalloused touch of the artist. There’s something brilliant in how she drops down an octave between verses, going from the heady bliss of the evening to the sobriety of the morning after, and how she lends ordinary words their own strange mouthfeel—“zay-zay-zay-something to me” and “bill-lee-yaaans!” After running through scenes of seduction and anguish, the song appears to end on happy note: “I never felt so close to you,” Polachek confesses, echoed by the cherubic voices of the Trinity children’s choir. But being close to is still not the same as being subsumed by, having turned into. So we nudge and nudge and nudge, never quite reaching fulfillment, longing until the end.
