Low’s thirteenth album HEY WHAT is both crushing and crushingly beautiful at the same time.
Perhaps most amazing about HEY WHAT is how it uses musical elements that are purported to be inaccessible and uses them to convey common sentiments and give them a resonance that would be diluted by a more “traditional approach.”
Low’s 13th album confounds and delights from first and repeated listens.
It is easy to make music that is difficult and it is easy to make music that is beautiful. But it is quite the trick to be both at the same time, and on Hey What, Low mark themselves out as masters of the art.
HEY WHAT reflects on Double Negative’s despair and emerges with a defiant affirmation that our lives are worth living, and worth fighting for.
On the follow-up to 2018’s astonishing Double Negative, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk push deeper into abstraction, finding fresh angles on the themes that have animated them since the beginning.
On HEY WHAT ... Sparhawk and Parker have found a sonic sweet spot between the beauty and the noise.
After almost 30 years documenting the bittersweet mysteries of life, this one’s for the angels.
The songs on Hey What, the duo’s 13th full-length, sound both heartbreaking and uplifting, often at the same time.
Sparse and haunted, experimental and futuristic, HEY WHAT might lack the warm-but-downtrodden majesty of, say, Things We Lost in the Fire, but the cold, cruel world of this record is no less enthralling.
Hey What isn't an optimistic album, but it is one born of the need for hope in the face of long odds.
Despite these intriguing connections between words, music, and the band’s history, Low’s commitment to an ebb-and-flow sound is both HEY WHAT‘s primary signature and chief shortcoming.
It is neither their most immediate nor their warmest album, yet its provocations are effective, and become curious and complex in light of the melody and harmony that sits above them.
Not surprisingly, Hey What makes for the attention-grabber its title implies.
====== 500 FOLLOWERS SPECIAL ======
Happy Super Late Holidays!!! Sorry for the inactivity, I was on a 2-week holiday while also compiling this community list after millenia (3-or-so weeks):
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/hotelrestaurant/list/171948/aotys-cozy-corner/
Explanation for why I've been late can be found at the bottom.
As for my pick, I chose the latest Low album, HEY WHAT. An album which, along with many other key elements, perfectly mixes harshness and distortion with ... read more
Low's Newest Release "Hey What" Will Leave You with a Bare Bones Sensation.
Something lays in the glitchy landscape. It’s a fuzzy, inconceivable blob of polygons, completely untouched by human sight. We know something is there, but we are so apprehensive that we become numb to the fear. Low’s “Hey What” evokes just that: an incomprehensible fear.
And yes, that was just my reaction. “Hey… what?”
Low’s last work, “Double ... read more
Lidt svært at komme forbi den ret generiske vokal, men hvis du gør, er det ret fantastisk
AOTY's recomendations #1:
HEY WHAT - Low
Person who recommended:
Torrance
Kicking off this series of reviews on the albums that were recommended to me by AOTY's new recommendations little box, we have an album that I'm already very familiar with and that I listened to a lot in 2021, but have barely touched again since. Hearing HEY WHAT again after so long has awakened the wonderful feelings I felt so fervently when I first heard it, but before I go into that, it's important to talk about the ... read more
I might be going crazy, but if you shake the album cover really fast an image will appear.
1 | White Horses 5:03 | 90 |
2 | I Can Wait 4:02 | 83 |
3 | All Night 5:14 | 88 |
4 | Disappearing 3:32 | 85 |
5 | Hey 7:41 | 87 |
6 | Days Like These 5:20 | 89 |
7 | There's a Comma After Still 1:51 | 77 |
8 | Don't Walk Away 4:07 | 82 |
9 | More 2:10 | 87 |
10 | The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing off) 7:08 | 86 |
#1 | / | Beats Per Minute |
#1 | / | musicOMH |
#1 | / | Treble |
#2 | / | MAGNET |
#2 | / | Northern Transmissions |
#2 | / | OOR |
#2 | / | Our Culture |
#2 | / | Vulture |
#2 | / | What's Good |
#3 | / | BrooklynVegan |