Throughout Crystal Castles’ first three albums, Alice Glass sang like a woman drowning. On songs like “Love and Caring” and “Doe Deer,” she whipped syllables around like they were weapons, fighting to be heard. It’s strange, now, to hear how deeply her vocals are buried in the mix, how distorted they are and how few words come through, even on her last LP with the group, 2012’s lyrically minded (III). About nine months after announcing her departure from the electroclash band in 2014, Glass released the standalone single “Stillbirth,” whose pummeling electronics buoyed her vocals rather than smothered them. “I want to start again,” she sang then in one of the first instantly discernible lines she’d ever laid to tape. Co-produced by former HEALTH member Jupiter Keyes, Glass’ self-titled debut EP clears even more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work.
Upon releasing “Stillbirth,” Glass also disclosed that she had survived an abusive relationship for years, and much of her debut EP reckons with the dynamic of loving the one person who hurts you most. She addresses that person directly on multiple songs, like the lead single “Without Love,” where she asks, “How are you going to lie about me now?” and, “Was I a stray just waiting to be found?” In the end, she decides to retreat entirely—if love is the equivalent of being caged like an animal, she’d rather do without it. “Got to be without love,” she repeats at the chorus, as though if she can just sing it enough times, it’ll make her isolation bearable.
While the melody of “Without Love” pads around a square pop chord structure, “Natural Selection” shatters into abrasive noise. “Get the fuck off of me,” Glass screams between detuned slabs of bass. Her voice here is as corroded as it was in Crystal Castles, but more present; her words are unmistakable even as they’re being slashed apart. The EP’s strongest track “White Lies” contrasts her breathy, clean singing with a thorny pulse of garbled vocals, often layering both on top of each other at the same time. Glass sounds simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive here, like she’s trying to let you in but can’t help reflexively lashing out.
Almost three years after leaving her old band, Glass responds directly to her years as its frontwoman on her first solo release. “Tell me what to spit/Don’t tell me what to swallow,” she sings in an especially pointed moment on “Without Love”—a direct reference to the hazy closer of Crystal Castles’ self-titled debut album, “Tell Me What to Swallow,” whose lyrics, in retrospect, scan as a transmission from the inside of an abusive relationship: “Through the wall he threw me/I know he’d never hurt me.” Alice Glass can feel more like an exorcism than an evolution, a digestion of past trauma rather than a new chapter. But processing this stuff takes years, and sometimes a six-song “fuck you” is exactly the catharsis you need to start anew.
