Come Back Down by Total Wife

For fans of My Bloody Valentine, Belle and Sebastian, Squarepusher, internet emo, and that moment when you first wake up and trick yourself into thinking everything will be ok, Come Back Down by Total Wife offers their ethereal shoegaze experiments as a companion for the bleakest form of loneliness. Born in that liminal space between asleep and awake, this guitar-driven record scrapes together scarce instrumental resources to craft an unbelievably dense sound. Wavering, heavily processed guitars and angelic, airy vocals form a melodic core, supplemented by bafflingly delicate and complex additions of noise and countermelody, all sampled and transformed from these aforementioned guitars and vocals. These unrecognizable representations of familiar musical objects reenact the disorientation of a vivid dream, reaching so close to recognizable reality before shying away into something absurd. This album blasts us back to a pandemic past, one filled with off days of near-complete isolation, days so gnawingly lonely that we forget the sound of our own voice, our only relief found in melancholic dreams of friends, family, and a world outside.