Album Review: Superdestroyer – ‘In Your Loneliness, Your Holiness’
Posted: by The Editor
Superdestroyer’s last record Such Joy—a self-described underwater acid trip—was full of spacey tunes and ethereal melodies that fit the aquatic and psychedelic description. His follow-up In Your Loneliness, Your Holiness feels like a continuation of that acid trip after emerging from the water with the world rushing at you in a chaotic and swirling way as you regain your footing in the new setting. Things are trippy and hectic at first with programming and electronic instruments taking the lead in “MK-Johntra,” a track whose lyrics consist entirely of “I wish you’d tear open my skull / pull out my brain, please keep it warm / so you could see what’s wrong with me / it feels like everything.”
As the tracks blend and bleed into each other, the guitars make their presence known a bit more, with “What Font is Your Voice?” being a slacker-punk ripper topped with a fat synth melody as Superdestroyer sings “I like it when we sit at home / I think that maybe I’ve become / some boring loser homebody / I hope you still think I’m cool.” It’s over in less than a minute and then followed by “Slow Horror,” a catchy and loping electronic tune that pulls back the intensity a bit.
After “Slow Horror,” the guitars take hold a little more with “SU ‘85,” a tune that is no less spacey for that fact. At just under two minutes, it’s one of the longer songs on the record, and the extended coda repeating “we have a plan but we’re both too tired to leave these covers” serves as a nice midpoint on the album.
The final three tracks also push past the minute-and-a-half point, and the closing is probably the stronger half of the record as Superdestroyer pulls back and allows the melodies and riffs a little more room to breathe. Lead single “I Hate What You’ve Done With The Place” is built around a fuzzy and hypnotic riff overtop of lyrics like “I’m sinking through the floorboards, I’m / stuck here for the weekend, I’m / starting to get the feeling that / you don’t want me to be here.” It’s followed by “Eternal Mountain,” which shifts from a fuzzed-out guitar that melts into a trippy and bouncy electronic track at the vocal feature from Pink Navel.
Album closer “We Used To Live Here” shifts slowly from the synths back to guitar over lyrics about the malaise that comes from continuing to party into your thirties just because it’s the only way you seem to know how to spend your time, highlighted in the line “we’ll hang out with our friends to distract ourselves / from the fact that we can’t be left alone / you’re getting drunk and I’m hiding in another room / where did the fun go? I think I wanna go home.” The song ends with the repetition of “do you wanna go? Cuz I wanna go.”
With his short releases and quick turnaround—Such Joy is only a few months old at this point—Superdestroyer’s output matches the chaos of the songs themselves, and In Your Loneliness, Your Holiness might be his most direct hit yet, with infectious melodies forcing their way through the psychedelic fuzz and synths.
Disappointing / Average/ Good / Great / Phenomenal
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Aaron Eisenreich | @slobboyreject
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