If Porter Robinson didn’t make an album like Worlds in 2014, someone else would have. Never mind that, if one were to squint real hard, the North Carolina producer’s shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album could be seen as an antidote to the aggressive, toxically masculine culture that’s pervaded mainstream American dance culture over the last few years—a culture whose fuck-it sense of hedonism has recently resulted in fatal consequences, even as its corporate benefactors continue to cynically bleed its participants dry. Much more than a corrective gesture, the specific mix of sounds on Worlds—part synthy indie-pop, part twinkling bedroom-beatmaker fare, part festival-ready electro—comes at an excellent time. Finding a middle ground between the synthetic surge of big-tent dance music and the tart melodic tendencies of Passion Pit, Robinson’s debut album drives home the reality that mainstream electronic music carries a certain sensitivity found in chart-topping smashes, zeitgeist-capturing Ultra Fest main-stagers, and sneakily successful soft-beat auteurs alike.
Viewed through this lens, the mess of contradictions that Robinson seemingly embodies—a one-time bassface junkie who loaded his recent BBC Essential Mix with cloying indie fare, a dance superstar who’s expressed disgust regarding his own Las Vegas residency while pooh-poohing “DIY Brooklyn” and “future bass” in the same breath—untangles itself. And anyway, the expansive, wistful grandeur of Worlds is a sound that Robinson’s slowly built towards over the last few years. A practical Skrillex protegé raised, like many internet denizens, on a diet of video games and the nerdier areas of Japanese culture, Robinson’s transformation into a sky-gazing sentimentalist began not with his Beatport-crashing 2011 debut EP Spitfire, but the following year’s “Language”, a swooning single that packed shoegaze’s heady throb, American dubstep’s techy crunch, and the wistfulness of trance into six minutes-plus of bliss that slightly resembled if Tiësto had remixed the Honeydrips’ “Fall From a Height” instead of the Field.
If “Language” toyed with the idea of pushing American dance music trends into a more blissed-out direction, Worlds goes whole-hog, to the point that when buzzsaw synths, chintzy strings, and nasty basslines rear their heads near the album’s end on “Fellow Feeling”, their presence is garish and unwelcome. If we’re being real, it’s hard to justify calling most of Worlds “dance music,” as this is electro-pop plain and simple, with its guest vocalists—Stars’ Amy Millan, Owl City affiliate Breanne Duren, Canadian indie-pop duo Imaginary Cities, Sean Caskey of Australian festival-poppers Last Dinosaurs—embodying that genre’s sensibilities. Most surprisingly, Robinson himself occasionally and quite effectively takes lead vocal duties, especially on “Sad Machine”, which finds his high-range voice dueting with a Vocaloid, a digital audio tool that replicates the human voice, over a mid-tempo beat and starry-eyed melodic structure.
”Sad Machine” is one of a few tracks on Worlds that evoke, unintentionally or not, Passion Pit’s high-wire synth-pop fantasias. But above all else, the equally enduring influence of M83’s emotive electro looms over this album’s highlights. “Sea of Voices” stretches out elided vocals and fizzling ambience to an impossibly gorgeous zenith, before massive drums crash through the foreground in a manner not unlike “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”, from M83’s still-unbeatable 2011 opus Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; on “Hear the Bells”, a similar trick is played to equally ecstatic effect, the processing on Imaginary Cities’ vocals serving as a minor and unnecessary distraction from the rippling electronics and anthemic synth that gives the song a healthy, balanced dose of rocket fuel. Together, “Hear the Bells” and “Sea of Voices” make for two of the most transportive electro-pop singles of this year, a pair of unabashedly huge songs that, when caught in the right light, carry the potential to strike a personal chord for anyone who’s ever felt alive while looking at a city skyline at night.
The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat—after all, Passion Pit’s suffered a legion of imitators in their wake, and “Midnight City” has proved one of the most influential songs of the decade when it comes to guiding the tastes of major-label-signed, small-font-Coachella-poster acts. So no one’s going to refer to Worlds as “innovative”, and the sonic shift Robinson’s made here is as industry-canny as it is surprising. Regardless, the career transition he’s attempting is admirable and extremely promising, even of his peers don’t follow suit—and if they do, they certainly could use the change of pace.
