Authentic Heart

29 October 2014 | 12:32 pm | Simone Ubaldi

“I think pop as a form is basically incapable of carrying authentic content, so I’m looking for that weird mutant.”

Tom Krell has released three albums under the moniker How To Dress Well, drawing enraptured Pitchfork-led praise for his Justin Timberlake-meets-Burial art pop aesthetic. It sounds like JT but it’s cool; it’s cool because it sounds like JT. In an era where all divisions between chart and alternative music have collapsed, Krell is writing the rules to suit himself.

“I think pop as a form is basically incapable of carrying authentic content, so I’m looking for that weird mutant,” he begins. “This is why a lot of my music has pop aspirations but, I don’t know… unless you’re like an extremely naïve hipster, there’s no way you listen to my music and think that it’s the same thing as Taylor Swift’s music… I don’t make capitalist pop music, I don’t make shitty hetero-normative pop music, so this is the challenge. I love the pop form because of the way it makes us dream and the kind of naïve feelings it produces in me, but then I want it to do something more than maybe it’s equipped to do.”

When asked why bother wrestling with an inherently inauthentic, hetero-normative genre, Krell shrugs. He was raised on mid-‘90s R’n’B and Warped tour punk; this is his language. Pop informs and influences everything he does. “If you listen to, like, the newest Rihanna album, every track is a genre. It’s like they just had a demographics meeting and they were like, ‘Oh we need to get a country song on here, we gotta get a techno song, we gotta get a song for urban radio.’ All the boxes have to be checked… it allows someone like me to come along (who), because of my listening habits, wants to make a song that one moment sounds like Brian Eno and the next moment sounds like Velvet Underground, then next moment sounds like Outkast, the next moment sounds like Burial.”

"I don’t make capitalist pop music, I don’t make shitty hetero-normative pop music."

 

Honesty is key; Krell’s music attempts to scrape away at the easy romantic symbols of love in popular music and instead communicate something profound about the “reality of life” in which “people are so complicated, people are unsatisfied; it’s very difficult to be honest.” 

For all its lofty intellectual pretentions – informed by Krell’s doctorate in philosophy and a lifetime of literary scholarship – his music is a form of open-heart surgery. “I write a lot, so I think that I have a naturally poetic character. For instance on a song like Repeat Pleasure [on What Is This Heart?], the second verse came out as a complete freestyle. The lyrics are ‘You shouted I told you and I saw the sun reflected in your eyes, the whole world in a dark hue repeated without grace, a broken light.’ That was just a freestyle! I think that it’s incredibly beautiful; it was just arresting to me. When I said it I couldn’t believe that I said it, it’s like bordering on high poetry. I don’t like when things become overwrought and over-thought. I like things to be pretty raw.”