How To Dress Well announces new album The Anteroom
10th September 2018
A new album from How To Dress Well, titled The Anteroom, will be out October 19th on Domino. Co-produced by Joel Ford (Ford & Lopatin, Airbird), this record plays as a single continuous piece of 21st century psychedelic music and features Krell’s most bewitching sound experimentation to date. Moreover, the stories Krell sings on this record – some biographical, many from the most knotted corners of human life – are deeply personal and human(e). The Anteroom - with its blizzardous electronic noise, fragile melodies and poignant poetry - reclaims the experimental core of the HTDW project.
As TK puts it: “I wrote the record after moving to Los Angeles, which is a crazy and maybe dreadful place, right after the 2016 election, with hell and death gaining ground all around us on every corner of the globe. The Anteroom is testament to a two year period in which I felt myself slipping out of the world and into a cosmic loneliness in which I would eventually be dissolved. In order to give myself a way back, I began to try to understand my station as some kind of anteroom – a space between – a chamber that separates the known and the unknown, stable life from total disintegration.” Teetering on treacherous precipices, living in an uncanny new place, Krell found his way back around to the sound and inspiration of his early work, and to his grandest statement yet – the culmination of a 10-year journey, and the dawn of a daring new one.
Today, How To Dress Well shares the first single from the album – “Nonkilling 6 | Hunger”. The song opens with a stanza from Li Young-Lee, one of the many poets sampled and featured on The Anteroom. The video is a collaborative effort, written and directed by Krell and visual artist Justin Daashuur Hopkins, with help from Hopkins’ NOH/WAVE collective. Much of the video features interactively generated digital visual work by Cloaking, and all the effects in the video were generated by combining digital fx with analog in-camera techniques, yielding a physically intense lo-fi/hi-fi hybrid a union that is echoed in the music of The Anteroom.
The Anteroom will be available on CD, double LP, digital retail and streaming platforms on October 19, 2018. A Domino Mart exclusive 2xLP that features heavyweight silver vinyl, fold out poster/booklet, and an etched clear 10” vinyl that features 2 exclusive songs is available to pre-order now. The CD and LP feature different album covers, each designed by Joshua James Clancy.
The Anteroom Tracklisting
01. Humans Disguised as Animals | Nonkilling 1
02. Body Fat
03. False Skull 7
04. Nonkilling 3 | The Anteroom | False Skull 1
05. Vacant Boat
06. Nonkilling 13 | Ceiling for the Sky
07. A Memory, The Spinning of a Body | Nonkilling 2
08. Nonkilling 6 | Hunger
09. July 13 No Hope No Pain
10. Love Means Taking Action
11. Brutal (feat. Ocean Vuong) | False Skull 5
12. False Skull 12
13. Nothing
How To Dress Well will be touring the world in support of the new album, starting with the UK, Europe, and North America. The ambitious new live A/V show is a solo performance, in three separate acts of uninterrupted song sequence, and featuring the hallmarks of the HTDW experience - emotional singing, ambient lushness, and pummeling electronic sound. Krell will take the stage against video art he has created with NOH/WAVE, which will react to the sound in the environment and transform spontaneously. Krell is touring with an all-hardware setup, including an experimental live vocal rig that allows him to trigger and disintegrate sounds with his voice. This new stage show will be performed at all dates, on sale now, via the HTDW website: http://howtodresswell.com
Oct 15th | London, UK | Corsica Studios
Oct 18th | Amsterdam, Netherlands | s105
Oct 19th | Paris, France | Pop Up Du Label
Oct 20th | Zurich, Switzerland | Stall 6
Oct 22nd | Prague, Czech Republic | Cafe V Lese
Oct 23rd | Berlin, Germany | Silent Green
Oct 24th | Copenhagen, Denmark | Ideal Bar
Oct 25th | Stockholm, Sweden | Under Bron
Oct 26th | Oslo, Norway | Jaeger
Oct 28th | Bergen, Norway | Landmark
Oct 30th | Vilnius, Lithuania | Kablys
Nov 12th | Washington, DC | Union Stage
Nov 13th | Philadelphia, PA | Jonny Brenda’s
Nov 14th | Brooklyn, NY | Good Room
Nov 15th | Boston, MA | Museum of Science
Nov 17th | Montreal, QC | Le Ministère
Nov 18th | Toronto, ON | Velvet Underground
Nov 19th | Detroit, MI | The Schvitz
Nov 20th | Chicago, IL | Sleeping Village
Nov 27th | San Diego, CA | Casbah
Nov 28th | Los Angeles, CA | Lodge Room
Nov 30th | San Francisco, CA | Rickshaw Stop
Dec 1st | Portland, OR | Doug Fir Lounge
Dec 3rd | Vancouver, BC | The Wise Hall & Lounge
Dec 4th | Seattle, WA | Kremwerk
“Nonkilling 6 | Hunger” lyrics
Winter raging
The color gone,
hands were blue and cold
A recitation –
I slowly read you Tomb for Anatole:
He was eight years old.
A dead child is no
occasion for a song –
Where did I go wrong?
When they say face facts,
disobey that:
there’s singing still left to be done.
They still can’t name that
fragrant
wind rolling off a corpse.
Until the day that you play back
the tape that you made –
record your mother saying every word,
pronounce the gray that
the rains had brought over the sun,
like a veil to suffocate the earth.
(But hunger is first.)
And I could feel in my body time rushing in,
the way nothing must have felt when something started to begin.
The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong:
Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum.
***
I remember snow ...
Saw it fall ...
Watched a child learn
The word
‘nightfall’
And sleep
because it’s sad,
or not sleep at all–
I learned the word
‘forever’
from Demerol–
I let my body go: I feed the thaw.
Like jumping off a cliff, but never falling.
A dust finer than smoke,
a memory in my throat,
A flame that pulses cold,
A faraway echo ...
And I could feel in my body time rushing in,
the way nothing must have felt when something started to begin.
The way all of your sympathy taught me something was wrong:
Secret disfortune, this cold, slow momentum.
I remember snow ...
Saw it fall ...
Watched a child learn
The word
‘nightfall’
And sleep
because it’s sad,
or not sleep at all–
I learned the word
‘forever’
from Demerol–
I let my body go: I feed the thaw.
