KÁRYYN – Physics Universal Love Language
An aspect of maturity I was inadequately prepared for was what happens when the heart does not let go. We are trained via Western culture to believe not just in monogamy, which is one of many acceptable shapes, but of a particularly monofocal version, where your heart divests itself of all previous attachments at the onset of any new one. This, it turns out, is not so. There are joyful agonies that persist, names and faces etched in the pink marble of the brain, not only that you do not forget but that you do not wish to forget. So much of life is the struggle within the hauntological stacks of the holography of the heart, these many contradictory layers that should not coexist and yet mercilessly do.
KÁRYYN captures this state of a riven heart beautifully on Physics Universal Love Language, or PULL. It is a concept album not by explicit character-based narrative but by exploring the many facets of a single sentiment: what is the shape of a heart that has been exited from a romance but cannot relinquish its love. There are paeans here not to reuniting as lovers but to being remembered as warm fires within a cold world, to not let the ache that drives wise separation erase the joy and comfort that people give to each other. In a world so constantly harried with induced post-traumatic stress where every good thing that falls apart is followed by all the reasons this was always going to happen and you should have known all along, this is a necessary balm.
The emotional melodrama here is comparable to Rosália’s remarkable LUX, albeit without the arch cerebralism that made that record such a wonderfully shocking powerhouse of a progressive pop record. But KÁRYYN matches the fevered pitch, with her vocals sounding often just on the verge of tears, the kind that bristle automatically when we confess more to ourselves than to another that we still love. Great pop is driven by a macroscale universalizing and a broad imagistic sweep; if, say, we stop to critique the lyrics of a modern Taylor Swift record, this means the melodic and emotional directive of the record has failed enough that we are confronted with the often sub-literary world of pop lyrics. KÁRYYN meanwhile has a sure grasp of the functional purpose of pop lyricism, having enough lines and phrases that cut above the waves of sound and texture that you can grab hold onto while still surrendering ultimately to the overall sound-world of the music.
That the album opens with “Collapse Phase” and ends with “Fwd” is a perfect arrow; the album, like an archer, grabs hold of a lover post-separation, draws back, and fires. There is enough subtlety here however that it does not come across as poorly staged theatrics. Like any great conceptual framework for a record, it’s a sublimate structure, one that arrays and justifies the emotional directionality of the songs and their specific order rather than one that calls attention to itself. If the only critique of THE QUANTA SERIES, her debut, would be that it was sometimes emotionally opaque to those not attuned to avant-garde, experimental or progressive pop, then PULL is the rejoinder. If we use Björk, a musical saint, as the pillar of abstruse experimentalism of a certain quality of execution, then KÁRYYN had already started near her, needing for her own growth to push toward more immediacy rather than more avant-garde movement, the inverse to someone like Rosália.
In a recent interview with Musictech regarding her new record, KÁRYYN described herself not as much music but as making 3D sonic collage and architecture. I couldn’t agree more. She borrows the sonic language of sound installations, a hybrid of music and sculpture where composition is more built on managing a real 3D space that can be moved through freely. Obviously, given its stability as a record, PULL does not allow free movement, but it does demonstrate well the thought behind the avant-garde timbres and textures deployed here, the moments of stacked contemporary classic vocals that diminish in a heartbeat into pop chanteuse or explode into a post-Florence arena filling sound.
The emotional soundscaping here is reminiscent as well of the work of Half Waif, able in comparable ways to cut through the often tricky middle space between inspiring experience and the emotional moment of performance. You can read umpteen interviews with songwriters about what spurred this or that song, shaped or deleted a line, and it can sometimes feel like mere trivia factoids disconnected from the experience we have as listeners and indulgers in art. Worse, we have figures like Drake who strive so hard in the necessary melodrama of art that it can be both utterly legible and utterly repulsive, far too garish in the artless connection of the two. That she cited in a video with Rough Trade her love of Smashing Pumpkins’ Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness underscores both her work and PULL specifically superbly; neither work is afraid of drama nor melodrama even, but mind their edges well enough that the excess is not just the point but the means toward this magnificent other emotional space that wouldn’t be available following more typical or tasteful routes. The reason why so many songwriters are advised to keep it simple and dial back the emotional directness is because it’s so easy to fall on your face. Sometimes however, like on PULL, you soar.
Label: Mute
Year: 2026
Similar Albums:
KÁRYYN : Physics Universal Love Language
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.
