Spectreview: New Fries – Is The Idea of Us

Released: August 7, 2020

Experimental
“No-Wave”
Dance-Punk

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

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A profile on two members of Toronto experimental band New Fries back in 2014 found the band self-describing themselves as “one musician and two non-musicians.” Six years and a roster change later, only they would have an idea of how much they’ve progressed, but that doesn’t matter much when you’ve got great ideas and the verve to execute them.

Is The Idea of Us is technically the second full-length from the band since 2016’s More, but that depends on your definition of full-length; just over half the songs here could be considered segues. Leaving those tracks aside for a second, that leaves us with six songs and technically an EP’s length worth of material. There’s that word again, “technically”: a word that’s utterly useless to describe music without seemingly an ounce of practicality. “No wave,” the decades-old label for music that sees to challenge any industry-fabricated idea of music, fits this record like a glove, and going into it with that expectation reveals an intoxicating balancing act between tonality and atonality, between dance rhythm and no rhythm at all.

No-wave music, or at least no-wave-adjacent music, requires elements other than the attractive nature of melody to function effectively. New Fries’ intuition in structuring their tunes stands out for this reason. The band builds each song from simple pieces – an string of ominous bass notes, or an elliptical guitar pattern leashed by delay – and merges those parts together through some creative production touches to create an immersive, pleasantly-unnerving headspace. The faint hiss and sent reverb on “Mt. Tambora,” the increasing chaos on the six-minute “Lily,” the low-key dance-punk of “Ploce”; each of these songs are sewn together in similar fashions but still stand out in differentiated shades of gray. Meanwhile, the handful of tongue-in-cheek “Genre” tracks posited throughout work wonderfully as palate-cleansers between the album’s main events. The end result: a record with the cerebral integrity and mysterious aura of no-wave but with a compelling listenability akin to dance-punk. Give this one a play.

Recommended for panic attacks in the pool.