Sometimes when I’m looking for music, there are incredibly abstract things I go looking for that if I were to try and explain, would likely make me look like an insnae person. Music producers are the worst for this, asking for things like mixes to sound more chocolate (a real thing I observed once), and I’m nothing if not part of the problem. But, if you’re as insane as the rest of us and want abstract qualifiers for your music, I’m here to offer you something crunchy, and somehow both digital and analog-sounding simultaneously.
Insane tangent out of the way, #CRUSHED is the latest project from the mind of kruu, and despite its merely 8 and a half minute runtime, it’s packed with a full length album’s worth of character. It’s a project that blends y2k RnB pop vibes, crunchy/distorted synth design, and an unmistakably internet era post-club feel. From its intensely melancholic title track CRUSHED to the dark, thumping club beat of CLOUD9, there is an incredibly well distilled feel to the entire project giving it all gritty personality of it’s own while paying homage to all that came before it.
To focus in a bit, it feels most fitting to focus in on the title track. As mentioned above, CRUSHED is a song that gives it’s unique spin on RnB tracks of the early 2000s. It’s opening moments are something to behold, accelerating 0-100 from a basic drum beat to suddenly enveloping the listener in a thick wall of sound built from fuzzy synth chords with a hint of sadness below the surface. That hint of sadness is further compounded by a plucky topline, a detail that feels like a singular teardrop in the rain (if you’ll allow me to get abstract again). From a mixing perspective, this song (and the entire EP for that matter) walks a careful line between distortion and clipping while still leaving room for vocal clarity, which is no easy feat. What this accomplishes in practice is the gorgeous yet pensive vocal performance from kruu to shine through the chaos of the instrumental. I love when a track can walk that balance, because it feels almost like a peek into a moment in someone else’s lived experience. The vocals are the narration to the scene set by everything backing them up, and once again kruu has managed to conjure something beautifully wistful.
I’m often the first to complain about how everything is getting shorter. I kind of hate that songs are getting shorter, content is getting shorter, and just about everything in between is feeling the effects of it. Often the quality of art suffers because of these constraints, but I simply cannot say that about this project. 8 minutes across 4 songs is really not that much canvas, and yet somehow #CRUSHED has chosen quality over quantity and created a work of art within that limited framework. I would be lying if I said I had awareness of kruu prior to release radar blessing me with this. In fact, for reasons I can’t explain it fed me an old song from her catalog on this projects release day which, quite frankly, shouldn’t be possible (but that’s a complaint for another day), but after getting to experiece what she can throw into such a short amount of time, I’m incredibly excited to see what else her catalog holds for me to find.
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