Albums
I look at her and light goes all through me
2025
Genre: Alternative
Release Date: 2025
By Samuel Hyland
Reviewed May 29, 2025
On the Los Angeles producer-guitarist’s strongest album to date, he recasts his indie-rock roots into a delightfully dizzying collage of nu-gaze and SoundCloud rap.
Grills, guitars, Auto-Tune, CS:GO gameplay footage, Wisp, flashing lights, shooting guns, skeletons, scuzzy CCTV shots. In the overstimulating music video for “I Heard You,” nu-gaze and SoundCloud rap congeal into an onslaught of digital debris, like an A24 take on corecore. The mastermind is Max Epstein, a Los Angeles workaholic whose rap sheet—live guitar for Jane Remover and quannnic, production for post-emo prodigies like daine and Blair—often outshines his own feverish output. But within the vast sprawl of his collaborations, his spunky solo catalog feels like a buried treasure. His latest and lengthiest LP, the 18-track , is equal parts guitar album and producer tape: feature-flecked, genre-agnostic, scattered, and sincere. Across 30-odd searing minutes, Epstein synthesizes his impulses, allowing his frenzied vision free rein. The result is a delightfully dizzying collage, not unlike the “I Heard You” music video: shards of inchoate ideas, cascading until the clamor becomes cathartic.