Joseph Thornalley values his privacy. On the rare occasion that the London-born artist gives an interview, he keeps his cards close, only offering enough details to foster more curiosity. Thornalley, who records under the name Vegyn, doesn’t often perform live and mostly steers clear of social media, but has worked with megastars like Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, Kali Uchis, and Dean Blunt. His music doesn’t provide many intimate details either, but it does reflect his eclectic influences, ranging from dubby ambient to lush techno to toystore electro, as well as his deep love of hip-hop. Even if it isn’t explicitly personal, his music is always meticulously constructed and frequently gorgeous, the product of a songwriter’s approach to textural electronic production. Thornalley’s new album, The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, is another ornate but shadowy collection in his discography. It sounds incredible, but ultimately doesn’t reveal much beyond his wide-ranging taste.
Born of Thornalley’s itinerant lifestyle as a label head and in-demand producer, The Road to Hell took shape in various studios, hotel rooms, and apartments around the world. He was hoping to break out of his usual production methods, challenging himself to write songs on piano and guitar, instruments he hasn’t yet mastered. Many of the Vegyn trademarks are present—cannily programmed drums, sparkling synths that sit in the mix like low-lying clouds—but Thornalley tames the genre-hopping just a touch, keeping his sounds contemporary but homing in on the yearning emotional core of ’00s R&B crooners like Ne-Yo and Toni Braxton. “Last Night I Dreamt I Was Alone” and “Halo Flip” apply a loose jungle framework to the emotional balladry of the aughts, while “Stress Test” sounds like Craig David circa Born to Do It studying at Lofi Girl’s desk. These tracks are impeccably assembled, and, in most cases, quite catchy if listened to on their own outside of the album. But as a whole, The Road to Hell doesn’t quite gel, feeling more akin to a well-curated, vibey playlist than a unified statement.
It’s when Thornalley really lets loose that the record excels. The Road to Hell’s trip-hop flirtations are among its strongest cuts; “Turn Me Inside,” a rainy-day combination of glowing Rhodes, stuttering percussion, and Léa Sen’s smoky vocals, is a particular highlight. “The Path Less Travelled” is a blissful blast of big beat, sunburst synthesizers echoing into the distance like cathartic shouts from a mountaintop. Thornalley takes an especially strange left turn at the album’s midpoint and drops “Makeshift Tourniquet,” a festival-ready house heater. It’s the most propulsive song on the album, building tension through shuffling drums and pads that wobble in and out of tune like heat lines off a stretch of desert highway. When the song explodes into a flurry of spacey sequences in the final minute, it marks one of The Road to Hell’s most thrilling moments, but it doesn’t signify a distinct change in direction. Like most everything on the record, it jams and then we move on.
The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions is Thornalley’s most crowd-pleasing project to date, even if it isn’t his most cohesive. These songs are bigger and more immediate than much of his previous work, and an excellent display of the range in which he operates. But imagine if he were to explore the adventurous potential of a song like “In the Front,” which starts as a glitchy Boards of Canada tribute before morphing into an aching, string-laden swirl with trap drums straight out of James Blake’s playbook. Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen.
