In E.M. Forster’s gay coming-of-age novel Maurice, the title character walks around his college campus after dark, peering into the lit windows of his fellow students’ dorm rooms as they go about their evenings. Holy shit, he thinks (I’m paraphrasing), other people are real. They think and feel. They have insides. “But, O Lord,” he narrates to himself, “not such an inside as mine.” On “Baton,” the closing track to Model/Actriz’s second album, Pirouette, Cole Haden has a similar revelation in reverse. While talking to his sister, he realizes that she has memories of him that he does not share. There’s a version of him in her head that doesn’t overlap perfectly with how he perceives himself. Suddenly there are two Coles. Then, by extension, because Haden is the singer of a band whose first album did quite well for itself, suddenly there are n Coles: one for everyone who’s ever perceived him. All these selves multiply and spin away from him, uncontrollable.
As far as follow-ups to raw, brilliant debuts go, Pirouette is strikingly honest about its own self-consciousness. The Brooklyn quartet’s 2023 album, Dogsbody, stormed hot out of the gate, sending lyrics about gay abjection flailing over squalls of cathartic noise. Now firmly established, Model/Actriz follows with an album deeply concerned with being seen and calibrating one’s image in service of pursuing desire. Rather than raucous and eruptive, the music is now icy, clipped, and clean, a step away from Einstürzende Neubauten and toward Crystal Castles and Circus-era Britney. It still has teeth, but they are oh-so-white.
But Pirouette is more than the sound of a band strutting while the cameras flash. Haden’s lyrics root into early memories of self-censure, when he intuited as a very young child that his queerness was too dangerous to be celebrated or even shared. On “Cinderella,” over harmonics that blare like an emergency siren, he sings about the time when, at age five, he almost asked for a Cinderella-themed birthday party. “And when the moment came and I changed my mind/I was quiet, alone, and devastated.” Even now, in adulthood, that internalized rejection stings his drive for intimacy. Being out, generally speaking, is one thing; opening yourself up to another person in your fullness is another.
Throughout the record, Haden chases himself through a mirror maze, startling at his own reflection as he tries to slither his way out into reality. On “Departures,” he prays to a scattered personal pantheon to realize his own embodiment, to become flesh instead of reflected light. “Diva” finds him meeting men out in European clubs and bemoaning that he has no way to take them home—a logistical problem standing in for a spiritual vacancy. It’s here that he sneers his way through one of his most perplexing couplets: “You could call me a small business owner/Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva.” He’s nodding, maybe, to the eternal tension between art and commerce, the harrowing compromise of selling one’s deepest shames for penny streams, but the wording is so explosive that the point disappears in the muzzle flash.
“All I want is to be beautiful,” Haden sings throughout “Departures,” as if beauty were some objective quality which, once attained, could definitively preclude any rejection or misunderstanding. And wouldn’t that be nice, if anyone could perfect their own image and wield it like a sword? But we live in the world of other people, where images never stop mutating regardless of our attempts to control them. Pirouette’s most delightful moments come when Model/Actriz savor their own powerlessness: when Haden, in flights of falsetto, hears his mother’s voice and begs to be carried on “Poppy,” or when the noise drops out in “Doves” and he sings, in a half-whisper, “I make a rapture out of waiting.” Candles flicker, birds swarm, the trappings of religiosity suggest some urgent ritual, some desperate doing. Then what Haden does is nothing. He waits. The image denatures, and he’s left alone with that minuscule spark you might call a self. He breathes on it. It glows.
