Los Angeles-based musician Tom Krell has announced his first How to Dress Well album in six years. Following up The Anteroom, the new LP, I Am Toward You, is slated to arrive on May 10 via Sargent House. To accompany the announcement, he’s unveiled the new songs ‘New Confusion’ and ‘No Light’, which feature contributions from CFCF, Trayer Tryon, and Anarthia DLT. Take a listen below, and keep scrolling for the album cover and tracklist.
Opening up about ‘New Confusion’, Krell said: “It’s about how to relate to the past knowing the hard limits on human memory and the challenges of metabolizing intergenerational-anthropogenetic trauma. ‘At best regret, at worst forgetfulness,’ I sing in the chorus – a tortured concept of memory, no doubt. But I also sing that there is a path to freedom from this bind.”
Of ‘No Light’, he added: “‘No Light’ is a song about contemporary LA, a place simply teeming with unspeakable suffering. It is, like LA, paradoxically and fundamentally also a bop. It’s a song I wrote after an interaction I had during the pandemic, something like a scene from Mulholland Drive, a young woman crawling across the ground in the alley behind my house in a white dress screaming about a ‘pig mask.’”
Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read also collaborated with Krell on the new LP. The title I Am Toward You came about as a result of Krell’s wife mishearing a lyric from Miley Cyrus’ ‘I Adore You’. “[She said,] ‘wow, that’s a powerful lyric,’ I asked which lyric, and she responded that she heard the chorus as having said: ‘I Am Toward You,'” he explained. “Because I had expressed to her that I thought the song was powerful, she generously attuned her mind to hear something powerful, something profound.”
I Am Toward You Cover Artwork:
I Am Toward You Tracklist:
1. New Confusion
2. Contingency/Necessity
3. Crypt Sustain
4. No Light [feat. Anarthia DLT]
5. nothingprayer [feat. Aaron Read, Anenon, Noah Allaire]
6. On It and Around It
7. Song in the Middle
8. Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside
9. A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate is Shown)
10. The Only True Joy on Earth
11. A Secret Within the Voice
