The self-titled debut from untitled (halo) is a gorgeous, airless loop of a record, and it only truly comes alive in the moments when the band lets that loop snap.
The Los Angeles four-piece says the album is about "the act of construction: how memories are edited, identities are formed, and personal mythology is built from the pieces left behind." That is half right. The editing is everywhere, but too often the edit is a repeat button, and the record is at its best when someone finally reaches for the cut instead.
Released November 6 on Dirty Hit, the label home of The 1975, it was written over a year in the band’s Glassell Park studio. Ariana Mamnoon, Jack Dione, Jay Are and Nicholas Noneman produced it with urika’s bedroom, Hayden Ticehurst mixed it and Heba Kadry mastered it. That is 11 tracks in 31 minutes, and eight of them are done inside three.
There are no billed guests, though the credits hide two extra hands: Deer Park co-produces and plays rhythm guitar on "industry talk," and Davis Stewart plays guitar and bass on "default factory settings." The rollout ran from lead single "aimee lou wood freestyle" in August through "easy rider" in September and "sex" in October.
The obvious question for a band forever filed next to Bar Italia and Chanel Beads is whether there is a character here or just a scene. The answer is buried in the structure. These are songs built as loops, refrains that circle and circle, and each one lives or dies on whether the band dares to interrupt it.
"how to make your love (stay)" is the record in miniature, and the best argument for its own case. At the one-minute mark the track sheds roughly half its volume, "You’re taking me apart now / Deepening the scars now" is sung into the hush, and at 1:12 the band slams back in. Twelve seconds of restraint, and suddenly the song has a pulse.
"sex" understands the trick, at least for a while. It opens on ten hushed seconds, steps up at 0:10 and again at 0:30, and the band arrives in layers before the verse that ends "Nobody wants me until I’m dead in an Audi." Around 1:44, right on "Everything is broken I’m trapped in a movie," the floor drops away for a few seconds before the beat crashes back.
That drop is the most cinematic flourish on the album, and the last change of gear "sex" makes. The rest of the song sits on one level while the hook comes round again, and a song that opened like a dare ends like a screensaver.
The middle of the record is where the loop wins. Too many tracks settle into a level early and stay there, hypnotic for a minute and then simply stuck. "you’re going to jail now" at least ends with conviction: after circling "You always change your mind," it cuts dead at full volume at 3:27, no fade, the most decisive edit on the album.
More of that brutality would have rescued "industry talk," which runs under two minutes on one unchanging loop and feels like a demo nobody finished. On a record this short, every stretch that refuses to move costs more, and the middle keeps charging that fee.
That is the irony of an album about editing. It describes the work of cutting, then leaves too much of the raw tape in.
Then comes "kissimmee," the dimmest, most hushed track here and a quiet rebuke to the songs around it. A figure pulses roughly every five seconds at the start, dissolves into murk for the middle stretch, and returns for the final half minute. It is still a loop, but used as architecture rather than crutch, and the effect is genuinely eerie.
"easy rider" is where untitled (halo) stops hiding. Mamnoon has described it as "a classic rock song, strong simple guitar, a jam at the end, a moment where the band sings together echoing lyrics," and the result matches.
It drops to half volume just before the one-minute mark, finds "I adore you" on the way back up, then from roughly two minutes in climbs to the loudest sustained stretch on the record and holds it to the end. The closing seconds are "I adore you," massed and repeated, the only time the album’s repetition sounds like release rather than a holding pattern.
Mamnoon called "easy rider" the closer, but the sequence hands the last word to "On10," and that is the smarter call. It carries far less low end than anything else here and moves in swells and retreats rather than plateaus, before a slow fade.
The band has described their sound as "California Melancholia," and "On10" is the purest version of it. It is also the clearest proof that this group has a character of its own, one that lives in the gaps they leave rather than the haze they lay over everything else.
That character is real, and it is no scene costume. The run from "kissimmee" through "easy rider" into "On10" is the best ten minutes on the record, and none of it sounds borrowed.
The problem is ratio. Too much of this 31-minute record is mood on a loop, gorgeous and stuck, and the breaks that make it sing arrive too rarely to carry the middle.
untitled (halo) has the sound sorted; the second album needs more nerve with the scissors. Until then this is California melancholia on a timer, most beautiful in the moments it lets the timer run out.
