I Am Toward You is the first new How To Dress Wellalbum in six years, with some of his cathartic, most free, and most poetic music to date. Tom Krell opens the second decade of his career with an album that delivers on the hallmarks of his best work.
I Am Toward You is out via Sargent House, and is a beautiful experience. The album is available here.
In his 15+ years recording as How To Dress Well, Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell’s musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, its core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity.
Krell was galvanized following his fifth album, 2018’s dense, noisy and mangled The Anteroom, itself a reaction to 2016’s pop-leaning Care. He finished his PhD in philosophy with a dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics, completing a journey he’d been on since the earliest days of the HTDW project. Krell wanted to retreat deeper into himself, not to go back to basics, exactly, but to instead “find corners of myself that I had never explored” and “get back into the world.” On a mantra-like interlude on the record, Krell sings over and over that “the only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self.” To do this himself, he underwent “clandestine and occult meditation,” including two weeks of complete silence, multiple multi-day meditations, and several dalliances with transformative psychedelic medicine as well.