Does anyone remember Bloom, that iOS software Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers created in, like, 2008? I certainly do. I have a distinct memory of sitting next to my dad in his bed as a kid, watching him tap his phone and giggling as pastels rippled across the screen, accompanied by ambient hums, beeps and drones—although, to be fair, I had literally forgotten about all of this entirely until earlier this week, both the app’s and the memory’s existence having faded from my mind for the majority of the past decade-and-change. But listening to the titular, minute-long track on lots of hands’ Fire Talk debut, into a pretty room, the sense memory of adoringly watching my father play with Bloom struck me senseless—so much so that I immediately paused the song and dialed up my dad to try and figure out the app’s name. This whole yarn might just seem like a roundabout way for me to illuminate the Eno-esque ambience present in lots of hands’ latest LP (although some moments from the record really do sound like they could have been created using Bloom), but it’s more than that—this is me trying to speak to the album’s most ineffable quality, by way of anecdotal evidence: its transportive reminiscence.
Billy Woodhouse and Elliot Dryden, the UK-based pair of 21-year-olds behind lots of hands, are no strangers to creating and releasing music (their first single, “I Hate Myself,” was released in 2018), but it’s on into a pretty room that the duo step into their own, their maturation obvious. Much of the record examines Woodhouse’s grief after recently losing his father, and even though the songs tend to obscure the lyrics themselves in waves of sound and fuzzy pitch shifts, there’s some indefinable, intangible quality in his music that allows that same sentiment to seep into one’s bones regardless.
Take “barnyard,” the final single released prior to the album’s arrival: I absolutely got the lyrics embarrassingly incorrect when trying to make them out myself (I could have sworn the earworm refrain of “I don’t wanna go / You don’t wanna leave / So I’ll grieve” was actually “I don’t wanna be in a little league story,” but I digress), and even then, I came out of the song lilting and unmoored, overcome with a sense of yearning I didn’t entirely understand. into a pretty room does an incredible job at portraying fleetingness: in memory, in life, in people. From the muffled, pitched-up vocals just slightly beyond your ability to parse, to the spritely flittering around of the instrumentation, there’s always something in every beat of the record that feels like it’s fluttering away, a butterfly your net keeps missing by mere inches.
The pair have long approached music the way a visual artist might approach a collage, stitching together slacker rock and ambient drone, lo-fi indie and abstract electronica—but the difficulty inherent in collage-making, regardless of medium, is not only ensuring that the sum of the finished project is somehow greater than its seemingly disparate parts, but additionally that the parts themselves do not get swallowed up in the whole and maintain their eclectic individuality. It’s a difficult needle to thread, this tapestry that must simultaneously flow smoothly from one patchwork quilt to the next while still allowing the jagged seams to show through, but as into a pretty room demonstrates, Woodhouse and Dryden are growing better and better at threading it.
Experimentation is all trial and error, though, so on an album as experimental as this, there’s bound to be a bit of both. So, of course, there are moments where the aforementioned parts never seem to satisfyingly coalesce into a meaningful whole (or, on the other hand, where the parts collapse into one unified whole so entirely the sense of “collage” is swallowed up in the drone of it all), but those are easily outweighed by the times everything just clicks.
Presumably due to their collage-like approach to music, lots of hands have often been described by way of amalgamations of their influences: they’re the slow-core union of Hovvdy and Alex G, they’re a version of Teen Suicide that got trapped inside Eno’s Bloom app. It’s hard not to draw these comparisons; the resemblances (especially to Alex G) do sometimes feel a little too uncanny. But into a pretty room finds the 21-year-old pair beginning to carve out their own niche, feeling around for the shape of it, exploring its boundaries and its nooks and crannies so they might begin transcending their mélange of influences into something definitively, idiosyncratically them. It makes sense, considering this is the first time Dryden and Woodhouse (who used to live 90 miles away from each other) were able to fully collaborate on an album, writing the songs together rather than building them piece by piece like an IKEA lamp passed back and forth. This long-awaited proper collaborative effort allowed the pair to “approach the album more intentionally” than with their earlier works, according to Woodhouse, and even as a listener, the resultant shift is evident.
At its strongest, into a pretty room melds form and content into a singular, experimental entity, transforming a song into a wholesale sensory experience. The re-recorded single “the rain,” for instance, confidently mars a beautiful strummed chord progression with light, staccato interruptions, atonal plucks of piano keys and pitched beeps, that not only evoke the feeling of raindrops falling at the beginning of a storm but the glitching of a memory only partially remembered. They grow more and more frequent, more and more warped; those “droplets” build into a background deluge as Woodhouse’s soft vocals at the forefront continue on anyways, murmuring “Because death is only cold / You hold your head against the wall / And listen to the sounds / The sound of pouring rain.” While “the rain” would undoubtedly be gorgeous stripped down to just acoustic and vocals, it’s the electronic, ambient additions that turn it into something both unique and uniquely meaningful, creating the literal sensation of holding your head against the wall in grief and listening to the sound of pouring rain—that also, due to the electronica influence, feels as if it’s perpetually unraveling into sparse glitches, a memory put on vinyl and skipping on the record player.
The hauntingly beautiful “in b tween,” which features a stellar guest appearance from Mage Tears (a former roommate of theirs, incredibly), is all hushed voices and soft acoustics, vulnerable and aching within it. It’s one of the less electronic, ambient tracks on the record, save for a faint, wobbling pitch in the background that’s sustained throughout the song and appears so quietly it feels almost like the final segment of a hearing test, the note set so far back it feels almost as if it’s coming from behind, or even deep within, you. But its inclusion doesn’t feel incidental, a subtle attempt at weaving drone qualities into one of the more understated songs; the way the muted pitch keeps on trembling, like an auditory lip quiver right at the edge of your awareness, somehow amplifies the visceral emotionality of the rest of the track, making you utterly susceptible to it.
From the slow groove of “run your mouth” to the twang of “backseat 30,” the electronic riffs in the background of “masquerade,” to the whale-call-esque pitched drone underneath “game of zeroes,” to the hyper-pitch-corrected, Auto-Tuned vocals of “alive,” Dryden and Woodhouse’s eagerness to experiment with instrumentation in the pursuit of capturing a feeling is evidently one of the band’s greatest strengths. And judging by the vast range of styles and genres encompassed within these 14 tracks (folky strings, acoustic riffs, plaintive piano melodies, glitch-pop electronica, fuzz-heavy guitar, droning reverb), the pair themselves know that more than anyone. But soundscapes aren’t the only tool at lots of hands’ disposal, although it is certainly the most deployed; their lyricism is blunt yet evocative, short and sweet and unexpectedly expansive—and, at times, incredibly easy to miss.
“rosie” chronicles the mundane with odd profundity, with verses like “Rosie keeps walking the path / When she turns to me she starts to laugh / And points at the ground / I’m pausing the earth and its sound / And the worms start to rise / I’m seeing it with my own eyes.” The soft beauty of “knave” lives at odds with the unexpected violence of its lyrics, such as “They saw me on my feet / And pushed their pitchfork deep / And down my ear his malice talks / Seeps.” They’re visceral, beautiful lines, but I’d have had no idea they even existed if I didn’t have a typed version of the lyrics handy. The heavy haze of “rosie” is lovely, maintained as it is by the particularly muffled whisper of the vocals; the bright gauzy reverb on the duet at the heart of “knave” is charming to listen to. But when the vocals themselves are so muffled, so pitched-up and so smooth that they become less a vehicle for language than another element (albeit a foregrounded one) of the gradient soundscape, the lyrics themselves are lost on the listener—which in this case is genuinely a bit of a shame, because I quite enjoyed them!
It makes sense as a choice, considering the band’s lo-fi, somewhat-shoegaze-y lineage, but not every instance of these obscured vocals on pretty room work as well as my bloody valentine—or even others elsewhere on the record. “barnyard,” for instance, certainly has difficult-to-parse portions, but it’s catchy enough to take up residence in your head for hours even when you can’t quite make out the exact words, the vocals prominent and memorable enough to stand out and make an impression anyways. But on more drone-laden tracks like “rosie,” in which the lyrics feel almost as if they were murmured into a mic close enough for lips to repeatedly brush the surface, the lack of audible words feel less like a crucial element of the song’s emotional landscape than they do a barrier preventing full immersion within it.
It’s not as if these soundscapes are reliant on vaguely inaudible lyrics to succeed, nor is it that lots of hands fail to realize this; after all, much of pretty room showcases their ability to straddle the emotional landscape of a song with its lyrical content. Dryden’s voice comes through warm and clear amidst the swirling soft country and background electronic drones of “game of zeroes” as he sings “I play a game of zeroes / Everyone but me will always win.” The languid slide of “perfume” is only augmented by lines like “Why should I keep on moving / When my world is so bland” gliding slowly (but comprehensibly!) through the song.
In those moments when everything comes together, when that collage finds purpose in its parts at the same time as it moves beyond them into something greater, the result is nothing short of transcendent—and those moments aren’t few or far between, either. From “the rain,” to “in b tween,” to “perfume” and to “barnyard,” lots of hands manage to repeatedly surround listeners in ineffable emotion, bittersweet but always warm and always thoughtful—the feeling still lingering after the song ends like the phantom press of a weighted blanket. Grief and memory are molded into tangible sonic experiences, with every pitched-up vocal, glitched beat and droning undertone contributing to the overarching emotional landscape. Though lots of hands have been putting out music for years now, the pair behind it are, again, only 21—so it’s only natural that they would still be in the process of discovering their sound. But frankly, the confidence, depth and maturity of into a pretty room makes me think they’re already finding it.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
