Nikolaj Vonsild is best known as the frontman of electropop group When Saints Go Machine, whose second album Konkylie made a splash in their native Denmark on its release back in 2011. His new trio Khalil retains some of his main group’s hallmarks. This is bright, synthetic music drawn in digital textures, with Vonsild’s yearning falsetto pushed right to the fore. Yet Khalil feels harder to categorize than his parent band. Released on the underground Danish imprint Posh Isolation, their debut album The Water We Drink takes a fluid approach to arrangement and song structure, its electronic washes and hyper-processed vocals right at the verge of dissolving into abstraction.
In places, The Water We Drink recalls the so-called “bubblegum industrial” music of label co-founder Loke Rahbek’s Croatian Amor, for instance. Khalil, though, balance their experimental tendencies by engaging with the broader realm of pop music. Production comes courtesy Vonsild, Villads Klint, and Simon Formann the latter of whom played in the Copenhagen post-punk group Lower, and whose current solo project Yen Towers prefigures Khalil’s tensile club rhythms and skittery sound design. But all that stands secondary to Vonsild’s voice. His vocal is placed front and center, drenched in Auto-Tune, lending it an alien vibrato or freezing it into unnatural leaps and pirouettes. The first time you hear it you think of Drake or the Kanye of 808s & Heartbreak, and what at first feels like an impulsive comparison slowly gains weight as the album unfolds. “Rest My Head Against a Wall of Water” and “Sculpture No Solid” are possessed of that distinctly Drakeian confection of preening vanity, romantic angst, and sad-boy rapture.
This sense of permeable boundaries is a hallmark of the project. On the cover, a plastic water bottle drains its contents into a pair of cupped hands—a juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made that feels heavy with meaning. The branding of bottled water implies cleanliness and purity, but the reality is heaving landfills and oceans choked with plastic, environmental apocalypse smuggled in under the benign corporate language of hygiene, health, and well-being.
This conflicted spirit finds its way into the very fabric of The Water We Drink; even as its artificial textures convey an effervescent euphoria, something darker and more damaged drifts just beneath the surface. “Submit So Deep” and “Estate Straight Line” recall the mutant bass experiments of Rabit, or the more eerie recesses of vaporwave; on the latter, shuddering sub bass and glitching vocal samples coalesce into a disorientating sonic fog. Elsewhere, Khalil reach for moments of febrile intensity. On the closing “The White Hoodie I Wear Because I Love You,” the electronics recede into the background and Vonsild’s voice is left to spin and whirl madly, as if being eaten up by the intensity of its own emotion. Here, in particular, I’m reminded of the glossy trauma of ANOHNI’s HOPELESSNESS, another album on which beauty and horror are closely entwined.
A few years back, Posh Isolation’s stock in trade was dour post-punk and arty power electronics. The idea of the label releasing a record drawing on contemporary hip-hop modes would have been, to put it mildly, unlikely. But The Water We Drink is a porous record for an increasingly porous age, one in which lines of influence or provenance mean little, so long as you’ve got engaging sounds and smart concepts to tie everything together. Khalil certainly bring both to the table on a record that feels like soul music for our times.
