Love Remains is the debut full-length from How To Dress Well. These 14 songs are the various stories of the human voice: on “can’t see my own face” a voice proclaims a surrender to love to combat the limits of narcissistic self-enclosure, on “escape before the rain,” tortured voices wander through empty streets abandoned by love, giving voice to the fact that “in the night the heart becomes the truth.” Each of these stories is the direct precipitation of irrepressible affect or the resurfacing of memories (from the past, from dreams). In “Ready For The World,” we hear what might sound like the mournful pleas of an arguing couple, desperately fighting to save a love that may or may not be repaired. Yet, we are never sure what the song is about: How To Dress Well does not say what his songs mean, but rather exposes the listener to a range of senses and sensations and invites them to discover or redefine their own emotional constellation in each song. To say what a given song on Love Remains means, to latch onto a hint of a determinate thought, of a memory, or even a cinematic scene in any given song, is simply to develop a personal sense of the song in the face of a complex pattern of textures, melodies, and harmonies that exceeds any determinate account of what it means: Love Remains is a book written with smeared ink, with multiple stories written over the same page, with emotion that exceeds our typical means of capturing the meaning or effect of song. Through the multiplicity of gorgeously haunting voices, we may hear words such as “love” or “girl,” but these are just the fragments of stories listeners have to bring together themselves. Yet, as we piece it all together, we discover a range of images and affects, whether it be the grinding terror of “Walking This Dumb (Live),” the brutal, sobering mourning of “Suicide dream 2,” or the melancholic hope of “Endless Rain” or “Suicide dream 1.” Further, for each of the gorgeous and crystalline voices that populate How To Dress Well’s songs, there is a moment the noise and distortion of yearning desire. These songs surge into the red, crackling through our headphones as if How To Dress Well were dousing a campfire with gasoline to illuminate his scenes, forcing the fire to roar so as to signify the emotional urgency at the core of every song on this record. Paradoxically, every time our speakers peak and clarity is obscured, the emotion of the music becomes more undeniable and clear and the stories we develop in our minds become more captivating, just as the grotesque lines of a Schiele painting or the violent distortion of the image in a Brakhage film deliver to the viewer something more real than a clear and distinct presentation could. As anyone full well knows, the truth of affect is that we do not experience it in the mode of clarity: rather, we are overwhelmed by sadness, held captive by desire, buried under loss. How To Dress Well delivers, in this respect, the truth of affect, using the medium of sound and the very act of listening to show the experience of emotional life rather than simply saying something emotional over a beat. However, these songs are not merely depictions of broken love. Deep happiness shines through the fog like crepuscular rays and this sweet love too is experienced as a rush of feeling; consider the dramatic and prideful, but nevertheless shivering love of “Decisions (feat. Yuksel Arslan)” or even the infectious melody of the celebratory chorus of “Mr. By & By.” It’s within that play of fog and light and that rush of affect that How To Dress Well exists. It’s within this realm where Love Remains.

Garnering inspiration from a broad range of artistic, cinematic, philosophical, and musical sources How To Dress Well, aka Tom Krell, creates music that is provocative and compelling. Though the arrangements are remarkable, it is Krell’s singing voice that truly carries this record. At the heart of each song there is a chorus of disarmingly beautiful vocal lines that are as angelic as they are harrowing. His voice seems to swell up out of nowhere, the multiple tracks colliding with each other to form stirring, otherworldly harmonies, overtones, and distortions. His mysterious lyrics are delivered through striking vocal melodies as Krell experiments with his exceptionally wide vocal range. His work presents us with a complex and difficult sound that is somehow still immediately approachable: Krell’s compositions are abstract and yet unmistakably pop and r&b, are alien yet in no way alienating. Ultimately, How To Dress Well’s Love Remains is an exploration of voice and sound that transgresses typical expectations about song structure and the place of vocalization in the compositional whole in order to inspire thought and evoke enthralling images of what is left of love after it is broken and how to find in ourselves and in our truest bonds those places and moments where love remains.