As it stands, A. G. Cook is somewhat synonymous with the glittering future of experimental pop. From his revolutionary label PC Music to his collaborations with weirdo popheads and avant-garde oddballs (Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek), his strange, glossy production has infiltrated the landscape of modern music. As a producer, he’s been an essential adrenaline shot in modern music: not only re-energising some of the greatest musicians of the 21st century, but also inspiring the latest generation of British bands to burst their genre bubbles to invent something fresh.
On his latest release – a warped 3-disk odyssey examining music’s ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’ – Cook spins us through bits of industrial (‘You Know Me’) before injecting them with rapid EDM beats (‘Prismatic’), sounding something like if Nine Inch Nails were a campy europop group. He never settles in one space. For every track you can imagine blacking out to in a bizarre underground club, there’s a more celestial one just around the corner (‘Crescent Sun’), revealing layers of emotions in complex sonic details. The joy of Cook’s musical output is his skill for scaling up tiny details – often just a single stem – and exploiting and expanding it until it’s unrecognisable. It speaks to his love for the craft. It’s clear he is obsessed with sound because he wants to push it to absolute extremes.
Despite the ‘Britpop’ title, Cook’s songwriting on ‘Present’ veers more towards the sensibilities of midwest emo than boisterous pub rock. His signature dreamscapes still melt through his softer, acoustic melodies on tracks like ‘Serenade’ and the crooning riff of ‘Greatly’. The beauty of his work lies in his ability to create something completely unlike anything else, yet still it pulls from universal experiences. Take a track like ‘Nice To Meet You’ – a song about yearning – or the twinkling ‘The Weave’, and see how he elevates these regular emotions to ethereal heights.
His talent for juxtaposing very real emotional matters with his hypnagogic sounds both pulls the feeling and the sound away from each other while keeping them bound together – grounded in the very real world, only to be twisted into something glossy and more beautiful, focused on the tiny details that make up how it feels to be a person.
The album’s emotional apex is ‘Without’, a delicate ode to the late producer – and friend and collaborator of Cook’s – SOPHIE. Of all 27, it’s the most traditional track; there’s no real need to make grief sound any weirder than it already feels. He honours her legacy by referencing the single ‘BIPP’. His vocals crawl across the edge of the song, barely audible: “I can make you feel, I can make you feel better,”exposing the hollowness that goes hand in hand with devastating loss.
Cook then enlightens us to his ideas on the future of pop: and it looks dazzling. It’s worth trusting his insight, because he’ll probably be the reference point for most of it. ‘Lucifer’ is an understated, yet euphoric dance track that bubbles with joy. ‘Equine’ and ‘Emerald’ too, signal a delightful pop future, though they both spiral towards different destinations. Looks like no matter which road he plans on taking us, it’s gonna be blindingly bright.
