“If I had to say which record I thought was the best of this year, it would be mine,” says Tom Krell, AKA How To Dress Well. “I wouldn’t put anything out unless I had 10,000 per cent conviction.”
These are bold words, but there’s no doubting the American songwriter’s sincerity. The record he refers to is What Is This Heart?, which came out in June. Similar to the previous two How To Dress Well outings, What Is This Heart? can loosely be classed as a work of neo-R&B. But contrary to sanitised mainstream fodder, Krell’s compositions tackle topics such as mental illness and the politics of desire with affecting accessibility.
“The construction, the emotion, the details, the performances, the sequencing – everything about it, I worked very, very hard to make it perfect,” he says.
In 2012, Krell released his second LP, Total Loss, which balanced familiar melodic refrains and glaring sensuality with minimalist production. Somewhat unexpectedly, Total Loss introduced How To Dress Well to hoards of new listeners around the globe. However, Krell says the expanded listenership didn’t influence his creative decisions when working on What Is This Heart?.
“The idea is, do that afterwards. If I write five songs that I really like and then I’m like, ‘Shit, these are weird songs,’ then I ask myself if I really, really like them and I say, ‘OK, well I’ve got to figure out how to tell everybody that these are special, because it feels special to me.’ It’s [about] trying to figure out why it’s compelling to me – seeing if that’s something I can make sense of. If it is, then I should be able to make it compelling to other people.”
In comparison to its predecessor, What Is This Heart? covers considerable dynamic range. The record begins with the acoustic torch song ‘2 Years On (Shame Dream)’, and goes on to encompass club-ready R&B (‘Repeat Pleasure’), sweeping ambience (‘Pour Cyril’) and emotional crescendos (‘Childhood Faith In Love’).
“If something is feeling a certain way,” Krell explains, “I will always have an impulse to push it back the other way. If something becomes too pop, I push it back. If something becomes too weird, I push it back. If I’ve written one song that’s really maximal, then I write a song that’s really minimal.”
What Is This Heart? appears to be a culmination of the artistic progression that began with Krell’s debut record, 2010’s Love Remains.It’s as if this latest release harnesses How To Dress Well’s multifarious identities and presents them in high-definition colour. In spite of this perceived climax, Krell isn’t facing an artistic impasse.
“There’s so many different kinds of songs across the three records, and so many different sounds, that I don’t think that there’s a unified aesthetic, other than it being me and what I do.
“Many of the songs are open in a way that there are lots of different kinds of inflections. For instance, based on what I wrote on Total Loss, that cast Love Remains in a different light. And based on what I’ve written for this record, it casts those two records in a different light. On this record there’s minimal folk songs and really weird pop songs and then maximal emo songs. If I did an entire record of folk songs next it’d cast this record in a very different light. Or if I write an entire record of dance music it’d cast this record in a different light.”
What Is This Heart?out now through Domino/EMI. How To Dress Well will also be playing in The Aurora Spiegeltent on Friday January 23 as part of Sydney Festival. Tickets are available through the Sydney Festival website.
