How To Dress Well Has Gone From Dark Existentialism To "Wet, Physical Sex" Songs

When How To Dress Well played a 2013 show at Sydney's Oxford Art Factory, Tom Krell had the house lights turned up so he could see the crowd. It was a definitive moment for the American artist — "I remember thinking: 'Oh, it's unmistakable, now, I'm singing face-to-face with these people'" — that crystallised a desire to communicate more directly. It's since echoed across his career, Krell leaving behind the thick ambience of his early albums, his fourth LP Care pushing into the clearly-defined, sharply produced sounds of contemporary pop.

"I don't need to value you because of some absolute transcendent ideal of eternal love, I value you because of the warmth of your skin."

"My melodic sensibility has always been very pop," says Krell. "With my early records, I was making ambient music but it was melodically super-accessible. Then I made a record about death [2012's Total Loss] that was, melodically, very welcoming. With [Care], once I wrote Salt Song, I suddenly started feeling a new day-lit quality to the things in my life that were once dark and torturous. The sonic brightness and clarity comes from that. When I wrote [2010's] Love Remains, I was six years younger, and was just much more upset. On this record, I don't feel so dismal. On Made A Lifetime, I sing: 'what a wild thing/to only be living'. That's an existential thought, which we tend to [associate with] typical French and German existentialism, which is so depressed in its affect. And that whole thought felt so masculine and passe to me. You can have an existential thought or affect without it being twinned to this fake seriousness. That thought can still be profound even when couched in exuberance, in joy."

Befitting its title, Care is filled with love songs, but it's never beholden to love-song cliches. Salt Song is about the love of the self, inspired by a dream Krell had that he was an old man talking to himself as a toddler, and there's lyrical explorations of parental love, familial love, physical love. The opening track Can't You Tell, is a love song that doubles as a "full-blown sex song", which Krell saw as "pushing at the limits of pop music".

"Pop music doesn't like songs that're about both love and sex. They like songs that're either 'you're the one, I want to be with you forever' or 'it's five in the morning, I'm miserable and we're fucking'. There aren't songs that are about wet, physical sex and listening to the way somebody speaks in the same lyric. It was important to me that [they] not have any of the guilt and negativity that usually comes attached to sex songs, and that it wasn't just about commitment, that it had none of the trappings of banal love. I don't need to value you because of some absolute transcendent ideal of eternal love, I value you because of the warmth of your skin. On this album, I found that I was trying to retrieve more human experiences, less theoretical impressions. I was singing about people's skin, people's mouths; being lyrically more photographic, less painterly."