The music of Yves Tumor moves like something molting. At first, it cleaves to genre, taking recognizable shape—a loping bass line, a steady backbeat. And then the shape dulls. It starts to appear as a copy of itself, not a rock song but an imitation rendered from paling memory. And then the form splits, and from the split comes something glistening and new, in the same arrangement as the old, dulled thing but rawer and more perceptibly alive.
Across Tumor’s previous two albums, 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love and 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the artist plays in this sequence of writhing, shedding, and revealing. Songs skirt close to familiar forms and then bloom into grotesqueries. Often, Tumor deploys negative space to this effect. Take “Gospel for a New Century,” the lead single and opener from Tortured Mind, where a horn riff sampled from a 1978 Korean funk track rings out and abruptly cuts to silence, as if the sound waves produced by the instrument were suddenly and impossibly sucked back up into its bell, the air returned to the lungs of its player. The effect confounds the song’s sense of space, rendering it unstable, pocked with void.
On the new Asymptotical World EP, Tumor injects a similar mutation into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. Squalling guitars tower and topple, straining toward great vertical heights and then spilling out toward the horizon. Songs like “Jackie,” a tight rumination on tortured love that ranks among Tumor’s most direct and immediately gripping songs, channel the fever dreams of late-’80s experimental rock bands from the UK, bearing traces of A.R. Kane and early My Bloody Valentine. As ever, dry humor and a subtle playfulness shine through the deadpan mood, showing in flourishes like “Jackie”’s bass drum hiccup and the phaser wobble in Tumor’s voice just before the climax of “Crushed Velvet.” “We can go wherever/I don’t have a favorite spot/I just wanna look you in the eye,” Tumor speak-sings against a post-punk bass throb on “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important to the Both of Them,” a blase romantic gesture that promptly swings around to sly dismissal: “How can I miss you/If you won’t go away?”
Throughout the record, Tumor eases ever more deeply into the role of prismatic bandleader, shifting readily from tone to tone while sustaining a core sense of authority. The lovelorn wail of “Jackie” calcifies into “Secrecy”’s bitterly cool asides, which then evaporate as unsure sighs on “...And Loyalty Is a Nuisance Child.” Across Asymptotical World’s six songs, Tumor plays a roster of characters gripped in various turmoils, acting them out in different postures, from sweltering and vulnerable to icy and impenetrable.
At the EP’s molten center is a guest appearance from the industrial noise duo NAKED, whose vocalist Agnes Gryczkowska streaks “Tuck” with glimpses of body horror. “I didn’t die for you,” she insists, “I feel myself/Growing big and hard inside you.” Her voice lifts in a conspiratorial whisper amid scattered, buried beats; it’s the only track on the EP that doesn’t foreground the rhythm section in the mix, and as such it feels boneless, amoebic, like it could at any point open its body and swallow its listener.
That is the steady promise of Tumor’s work, and its constant threat: that its strange, inverted intimacy might spill into the listener and turn the self alien. When you recognize the shape of a song but can’t fix its innards, can’t place its emotional register among your catalog of acceptable feelings, what does it do to you? What might meet you there? The Asymptotical World’s motions are recognizable; they come in familiar skin. Under the skin, something ill-fitting thrashes, trying to escape itself, inviting anyone in sight to do the same.
Buy: Rough Trade
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