With their latest offering, WHOLES don’t so much write a song as they do exhale a weird collective crisis. ‘Modern Day Drama’ is three and a half minutes of beautiful disorientation- a track that creeps in like fog and leaves like a riot.
It starts in a liminal daze. The guitars strum and meander, soaked in delay and veering between twang and tremble. Percussion flickers in and out like the pulse of a dying satellite. The vocals are barely tethered. Detached, conversational, and eerily calm- like someone reading from a diary written in the middle of a blackout. The tone is flat, but the subtext is volcanic.
And then comes the rupture.
The final stretch descends into something superbly primal and unhinged. The instruments shed all restraint- guitars tear through the mix, the rhythm section combusts, and any sense of structure dissolves in a hail of distortion. The track is content to unearth, to leave the wound exposed.
If their earlier track ‘Till We Don’t Meet Again’ whispers into the abyss, ‘Modern Day Drama’ shouts at it, and dares it to blink. It’s louder, gnarlier, and somehow even more visceral in its chaos. WHOLES- formed from members of Elefant, Pink Room, Hypochristmutreefuzz, and kolektiv- are assembling a language of grief, inertia, and noise. A place where the numbness of the everyday rubs up against something volatile and electric.
This is a commentary on our times and is a sonic embodiment of the strange stillness and slow-burning anxiety of simply existing in them. WHOLES offer the sound of unravelling. And it’s glorious.