In the four years that it took for Sylvan Esso to write their new album, it’s safe to assume that entertainment seemed, at times, like a silly proposition. Ow ∞ often sounds like a record struggling with what it means to try to take, let alone offer, some kind of pleasure in times of personal grief and world turmoil. Yet it suggests, both through the North Carolina duo’s electropop fizziness and penetrating lyrics, that it bubbles through us regardless: unconsciously in our daily routines, in full awareness, in loving memory. Despite their absence as an outfit, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn have welcomed a host of collaborators to their studio throughout the decade so far, and that sense of community is what steadily animates their most miraculously cohesive record yet. It’s not until we’ve soaked in the album’s contradictions that we get their own definition of the word that, on the opening track, sounds cold and indistinct: “To do the hokey pokey/ With your beautiful friends.” If that’s all there is to it, Ow ∞ suggests, who can complain that the show must go on?
1. Entertainment & Coca Cola
Caught in a tumble of grief, the opener finds Meath easing into a pleasurable nighttime routine, but her pitched-down voice dissociates in a way that sounds more mournful the cheekier her lyrics get. Jake Luppen’s guitar and keys envelop her gently as Sanborn’s production gestures towards the album’s first beat.
2. Flood Season
“The suffering of suffering has got me saying names,” Meath sings before going on to mention a few, both musically and emotionally meta. Gone is the murky haze of ‘Entertainment & Coca Cola’ – the second track ups the urgency with BJ Burton’s signature touch of fragmented electronics, ridiculously defying a world bent on its own destruction: “Universe come pancake me/ Got skin in the game, baby.” The stakes are both evidently universal and incredibly personal, and the song hits no matter which lens you choose.
3. Hot Slob
Rivaling the band’s signature track ‘Radio’, ‘Hot Slob’ is punchier and more anthemic still, turning up the dial on everything that hooks you in about ‘Flood Season’: all of that gleeful ignorance but none of the extra trickery, just dueling waves of guitars and drums, a punk song through and through. “Yeah, I’m living in the glitch,” Meath declares, no further evidence required.
4. Concrete Glen
Addressing current yet ceaseless upheaval makes Ow ∞ reach a boiling point early, but ‘Concrete Glen’ brings things down to a simmer by going back in time, to childhood memories of kissing soundtracked by Sigur Ros’ ‘Svefn-g-englar’. Just like Meath’s tone finds the perfect balance between innocence and desire, so Sanborn’s production hits like the first good beat you remember hearing while blurring around its edges.
5. Back Again
By this point, you’d expect the record to start feeling front-loaded; instead, it proves it has a lot more gas in the tank than just its few singles. While maintaining a minimalist foundation, the duo is quick to inject ‘Back Again’ with a woozy groove, punctuated by some of Sanborn’s most idiosyncratic drum programming. If it feels a little contrived, that’s the point; the song jabs at the self-deception of treating each day like a fresh start. Meath’s lyrics make daily mundanity sound curiously strange: “I keep on trying to deal with the fact that everyone’s living with me/ And every morning they decide to act unfolding their life whim by whim.”
6. Ribbon
Meath is past the point of faking it, so ‘Ribbon’ curls into an unlikely centerpiece that’s part spoken word, part a capella. Even with no production to aid her, her knotty feelings are mirrored in the deceptively easygoing flow of her rhymes. “My friends are dying and I’m twisting again in a spotlight I’ve been chasing for ten years,” she confesses, though guilt does eventually bend into gratitude. When she once again brings up entertainment as a kind of salvation, it suddenly feels more substantive, if only for the company the record has already provided.
7. Sledge
Armed with plenty of distortion and a memorable hook, ‘Sledge’ still keeps itself at a slight remove, not letting itself be quite as explosive as ‘Hot Slob’. Given the anxious specificity of earlier tracks, lines like “Feel the panic/ See it in our eyes” feel a little redundant. But as with ‘Back Again’, it’s in this easily overlooked moment that Sanborn embraces the freedom to wrangle a clear sense of propulsion.
8. Right to Left
The record slips back into a reflective mode, Meath attempting to steady herself over a trip-hop beat, this time with no sample to distract from the present. Even in its utter exhaustion, it’s remarkable how spotless her vocal sounds, still hungry for wordplay you could chew over for days: “I keep unfolding the middle of the middle/ Tesseracting again.”
9. Good at Pain
If ‘Right to Left’ resolves itself with the basic assertion that even if it hurts, you keep going, ‘Good at Pain’ is slyly contradictory. After opening up about being “reborn through my shame again and again” on the previous track, Meath makes a simpler assertion: “I’m good at pain/ I was born through it anyway.” The tune is fizzy and playful, the kind you could absentmindedly hum to yourself in the midst of real trauma. Isn’t that a kind of rebirth, too?
10. Jessica
Turns out the Sigur Ros sample on ‘Concrete Glen’ has a secret, secondary function: the way Meath keeps enunciating the word “alive” on ‘Jessica’, it sounds borrowed from Hopelandic, not meaningless so much as reconstructed from the opposite of death. Which is what ‘Jessica’ does with the disparate memories of their close friend, who died of liver failure in 2023; it doesn’t detail her loss but zero in on the image of her splashing through the water. The album keeps alluding to an abundance of friends, but the repetition of “There’s my friend” makes her sound heart-wrenchingly singular. It bubbles over with delicate details like any other Sylvan Esso track, but it might be their most moving.
11. On & On
The penultimate track not only sums up but embodies the band’s musical approach: “Hold it fast, but delicate/ Stretch it, cover everything” might as well be scrawled across their studio walls. ‘On & On’ is not only the longest track on the album, but the most shapeshifting, conjuring a vision of infinity that aligns with that of the previously sampled band. Yet Sylvan Esso have an unconventional way of adding spiritual weightiness to their music; the spine-tingling marriage of organ, synths, and guitar is as imposing as any combination of strings.
12. Plastic Sword
The duo return to a form of childlike play on the album’s understated closer, where Sanborn’s “electronics” amount to little more than a low hum, save for the shard-like synth that delightfully mimics the titular toy. Sylvan Esso have always had a knack for making peculiar music that seems to exist in its own charming bubble, and though Ow ∞ stretches its wings ever so slightly further, there’s shelter to be found in coming back to it. Grasping for meaning through loss carries it all the way to the end, but taking pleasure in absurdity doesn’t hurt. When it seems we’re born not only through but, at times, to be in pain, that’s refuge enough.
