Visions of broken power sockets and cosmic supercomputers flash in my mind as I listen to the angelic yet tormented music of kuru. Their erratically bright and breaks-heavy album re:wired has the sheen of a hologram and the glimmer of chrome. “Powering down like I’m Sony,” they cry, sunsetting like obsolete hardware. After years of working in the shadows, the Maryland musician’s debut propels us deep into their psyche. It’s a panic room crammed with miseries, victories, betrayals, realizations, and music so dreamy it somehow sounds idyllic.
re:wired teleports between glacial ambient and percussive carnage. kuru’s frail yet feverish voice fills the mix like a permafrost vapor. The 19-year-old artist has the anxious intensity of a paranoiac: Across the album, even within a single song, they skitter between abjection and self-assurance, torpid gloom and absurd asides about eating soup. It’s hard to tell where kuru’s real and artistic selves begin and end, whether they actually want to CTRL+ALT+DELETE their life (“If I died I wouldn’t be opposed to it,” goes a line on “misery ost”) or if they’re roleplaying a character in a sci-fi sad-scape. There’s a clear anime and video game imprint on these tracks, from the titles—“misery ost,” “save;File-9”—to the fried doinks, airbrushed alarms, and beeping printers in every beat. (The “wired” in the title could refer to the psycho-horror anime Serial Experiments Lain, which features a global communications system called the Wired.)
To the untrained ear, re:wired might hit like an amorphous blast of Auto-Tune and “celestial melody” type beats. The stacking of sounds in a similar range makes some tracks cycle like hyperloops, verses gliding into hooks without the tension of resistance. While kuru’s flow is a consistently slick slipstream, their voice isn’t that emotionally versatile—sometimes you can barely tell when they crash from elation to devastation.
But often the dissonance between the blue lyrics and the lovely music really works, as if the right sound could spare kuru from distress. “vo://id” cries out with physical and psychic pain—images of ripped skin, a body stretched thin, aching bones—while the beat radiates euphoria and uplift, a real-life RPG potion. Squint your ears and the tonal shifts and rhythmic variations are subtle but hypnotic. “yume” is the most relentless track but still feels plush; kuru bludgeons the mix like a satin mallet, their voice swathed in layers of ad-libs and dizzy glossolalia like a Saya track. “I would rather kill myself than fuck with you,” they roar, a perfect distillation of the album’s emo-aggro duality. “give me a second” might be the straight-up sweetest song, an ambient rap meadow of naked confessions. “I’d be lying if I said I hate everything/What I hate the most is feeling vacant,” they moan.
A few years ago, kuru was a leader of hyperpop’s sibling scene, digicore, with one of the best ears for wacked-out beats and pristine flows. Their dopamine geyser of a meltdown anthem, “clueless,” became a digicore classic. Like their scenemates’ solo albums, re:wired pushes that hyper-rap sound to its limits and beyond. The title track begins with pluggy emo before blazing into infernal shoegaze redolent of quannnic and Jane Remover. Underground heads will appreciate a line from Jane’s “Video” that warps across the dewy bounce of “iheartu2,” as well as the arsenal of connected collaborators, like Syzy and Lucy Bedroque.
That’s not to say the uninitiated can’t appreciate the album’s airy glide, as on the irresistible “wired in.” The twikipedia-produced highlight “if u cant change i wont either” brings everything together: a matrix of choppy breakbeats, fairytale piano rolls, and tortured lyrics. It’s not a love or hate ballad as much as a hysterical unraveling, its narrator begging an unnamed “you” to just kill them because “it feels like you did anyway.” The music swells with melodramatic feeling and the climax hits with a flood of jumpstyle kicks. “I feel stupid,” kuru wails repeatedly. But buried in the chaos, it sounds like they’re saying “I feel something”—like they’re finally wired in properly.
