For an artist with such a distinctive sound, Henry Laufer’s music as Shlohmo is unusually pliable. Since 2009, the Los Angeles-based producer has built instrumental arrangements out of tape hiss and grainy textures, gloomy synths and gristled percussion, crunchy guitar and hard-to-identify samples, constructing a world where hip-hop, slowcore, bass music, ambient, R&B, and pop meet in a murky, disorienting middle. He’d already established himself as a leader in the L.A. beat scene when, in 2012, he flipped Jeremih’s “Fuck U All the Time” and found himself with an unexpected SoundCloud hit. The original version was all bubblegum and rosé, but in Shlohmo’s hands it became dark and unnerving, a shift that morphed the song’s meaning: What if telling someone you wanted to fuck them all the time wasn’t a cheeky sext but a desperate, life-ruining confession? Though he’s gone on to collaborate with plenty of rappers and R&B singers—Drake and Post Malone among them—he seems most comfortable when working alone, in what I imagine to be a pitch-black basement surrounded by candles and voodoo dolls, making ambitious, unruly beats that only he could make.
His fourth studio album, Repulsor, is a bludgeoning listen, one that works hard to earn its fleeting moments of melodic bliss. Though still rooted in lo-fi, abstract hip-hop, Shlohmo tries his hand at death metal and digital shoegaze, splitting songs open with feral, distorted-to-hell drops that erupt with growling synths and guitars. These wall-of-noise centerpieces feel like new terrain for the 35-year-old musician, movements he’d been working up to since 2015’s Dark Red but which he unleashes here like a harrowing scream into a neverending void.
On 2019’s The End, Shlohmo seemed to be caught between two competing ideas: hone the atmospheric cassette-deck sound he’d been perfecting for years, or fuck around and create something new. The result of this tension was a record rich with melancholy and texture. He molded beats out of sandpapery guitar and sinewy bells, deconstructed trap drums and stomach-churning synth bass. Repulsor adopts the weirdest stuff from The End and goes a step further, distorting and saturating sounds until they become almost unrecognizable. “The Thing,” for instance, spotlights a nasally synth before breaking out into screamo mayhem. “Fistful of Dirt” suffocates any sustained melodic gratification with chugging guitars and gory vocals. These choices aim to generate intense, explosive feeling, though after a few listens they become more affecting in the abstract, rather than viscerally so. The music is big and powerful, but the emotional thrust behind it can feel flat, a faint suggestion buried beneath layers of noise. And with almost half the album devoted to these huge industrial salvos, their shape and sound can begin to feel redundant, their potency fading behind unscalable walls of fuzz and distortion.
Repulsor isn’t all brutality, though. Shlohmo slips in several contemplative instrumentals, like the palate-cleansing “Resin” and the ambient chopped-and-screwed number “Light in a Tunnel.” And then there’s “Henry’s Demise,” a reminder of Shlohmo’s brilliance as a beatmaker. Over a haunting piano loop, he turns up the tape hiss and disfigures the drums, the beat prattling about in an anxious gallop, never quite settling into the pocket. It’s rewarding to listen to Shlohmo negotiate the limits of form, toying wildly with rhythm and groove while still making a compulsively listenable song.
It’s not until Repulsor’s closer, “Lola’s Theme,” that the album releases a much-needed exhale. It’s a spasmodic and genuinely moving electro-rap headspinner, with lasers and synth strings and bit-crushed snares bursting into a field of light. To reach this moment, though, you must wade through a sometimes agonizing, sometimes wonderful world of sludge and screams, of ingenuity and frustration. Shlohmo clearly isn’t content with complacency; if he was, he’d likely be producing pop songs and making club-ready remixes. Instead, Repulsor strains with reinvention, searching for the light and life in damp, sometimes decomposing spaces. What more can we ask from a mid-career artist? Shlohmo is, as ever, trying to push himself, and music, toward something new.
