Hey What

Low

★★★★☆

Low seemed a singular band from the outset. They were a married Mormon couple, devoted to playing quietly and slowly, in the teeth of the early 90s grunge era. Their sound had always shifted and changed, but nothing quite prepared listeners for 2018’s Double Negative, which adopted the studio processes commonplace in mainstream pop. The end result was an album that sounded like nothing else.

Album of the year acclaim duly followed, but the shock of Double Negative also seemed to raise concerns for the band who’d made it. Once you’ve pushed everything to the limit, the question of where you go next becomes pressing.

The first thing you hear on opener White Horses is a guitar transformed into a heaving, stuttering moan, followed by a rhythm track made up of crunching digital distortion. The song ends with a minute and a half of its unflinching pulse, which speeds up and becomes the basis of the second track, I Can Wait.

Low are not interested in dialling down Double Negative’s confrontational experimental edge, although Hey What is a far more melodically driven album. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s beautiful harmony vocals are largely unadorned with processing, and are louder, which seems to give the songs a little more space to breathe.

This chimes with the tone of the album, which couldn’t be called optimistic, but at least hits a note of stoicism.