Loraine James didn’t have much fun making Detached From the Rest of You. She was feeling stuck, lost, painfully self-conscious. When she finished the record, she decided to name it after her alienated state: a person detached from others, a mind detached from its body. James is forthright about her struggle on the album itself: “Some days I think about quitting this whole thing/Seems like I sulk in my own shit/Oh Loraine, but where’s the passion?” she murmurs on the vignette “Seems Like I.” In interviews, too, James presents her new work as an obstacle rather than a detour, something she had to overcome in order to return to her thrillingly off-kilter club music. She’s already looking forward to the next album, she says, with the relief of someone who has just clocked out after a long series of double shifts.
So it’s surprising that James also calls Detached From the Rest of You her “IDM popstar album.” She’s being a bit tongue-in-cheek—James is unlikely to make anything truly “pop” in the usual sense of the word—but it’s true that her voice is higher up in the mix, her melodies more prominent, and her song structures more conventional than ever before. James’ challenge was to combine these newfound pop sensibilities with the IDM half of her equation, an especially difficult task given her predilection for the sterile strain of clicks ’n’ cuts pioneered in the late ’90s by Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto. The producer Aoki Takamasa pulled off the combo two decades ago with 28, his collaborative album with singer and experimental musician Tujiko Noriko, which James cites as her inspiration to try the same trick. It’s not easy to breathe warmth into such notoriously cold music, but Detached From the Rest of You manages to be intimate, human, and emotive.
Glitch music, in its early-2000s heyday, was primarily about our relationship to technology. We were increasingly reliant on computers, which were prone to fail; making tracks from the beeps and buzzes of those failures reinstated a sense of mastery over the machine. Detached From the Rest of You is instead about our relationships to each other and how they are prone to fail—a trickier and more anxious subject. Opener “A Long Distance Call” starts with the classic jittering clicks of malfunction and data loss that would fit comfortably on any of the Clicks + Cuts compilations, but it soon becomes clear that the failure is specific to the present moment. The titular call is not via telephone but Zoom. “Wanting to touch, ’cause the screen ain’t enough,” James sings in a pitched-up, compressed voice, as if the connection is barely holding. Then the call drops at the critical moment: “Take off your—/Sorry, can’t hear ya—”
The isolation and ennui persist through the whole album. Since 2021’s Reflection, James has wrestled with being a shy person in the public eye, navigating her penchant for solitude and her role as performer by making bedroom music for the club and vice versa. On Detached From the Rest of You, she can’t get out to the club; she can’t even get out of her own head. “The Book of Self Doubt” lays bare her insecurities. “Reading this book/It’s called self doubt/What’s it about?/Putting myself down,” she sings, half-mumbling. The track is all skeletal beats and delicate synths that stop and start as if they can’t quite convince themselves that it’s worth it, either—this is music made not only for the bedroom, but for headphones, by yourself, with the lights out.
For such a vulnerable, emotional record, Detached From the Rest of You is surprisingly communal, with half of its tracks featuring guest vocalists. It’s just that James’ friends are all lonely, too. Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori isn’t sure if her lover is real or AI on “Flatline,” which appropriately blurs the line between sultry R&B and busy IDM. “Is this love? Or just lines you were programmed to say?” she asks in Japanese, before admitting, “When you say my name, I feel like home.” On “Habits and Patterns,” Tirzah’s partner is at least an actual person, but they “seem far away”; single piano notes lingering over domestic field recordings create the tension of being in a room with someone you can’t talk to.
This may sound like pretty gloomy stuff—and it is, largely—but there is also something uplifting about being so down. James shares her insecurities with such naked honesty that she turns paradoxically confident. She admits that she has had to grow accustomed to her own voice, and here she centers it more than ever. On album highlight “Forever Still (Steel),” she even raps. Over a beat that develops out of the sounds of an old printer, she delivers a set of confessional bars until she turns angry, looking to start a fight. Then, in her best emo voice, she repeats one of the only positive lines on the record: “I will be forever steel.” On an album full of uncertainty and doubt, it’s an important moment of defiance. James may not be having much fun, but that’s all right: Great music can also come from sulking in your bedroom.
