by David Wilikofsky
“Ikea Youth Pt 2”, the opening track on Qlowski’s debut album Quale Futuro? , feels like a statement of purpose. “Ikea Youth”, its predecessor, was a dark, jangly single the band released in 2020. Its pleasures were simple: a driving melody, an anthemic chorus, huge hooks. Its sequel feels like an entirely different beast. In its opening moments, notes seem to meander aimlessly around Michele Tellarini’s spoken word soliloquy. The band suddenly snaps to attention, locking into a groove only to slowly drift back into chaos by the track’s end. It’s something far stranger, and a harbinger of things to come.
The sounds that waft through Quale Futuro? are familiar (romantic washes of synths, jangle pop melodies, squalls of guitar feedback, a dark brooding atmosphere), yet the band manages to sculpt them into something that sounds distinctive. I’ve used the word sculpt deliberately here; each track and note feels placed as part of a larger whole. Take, for instance, the way in which the chaos of “All Good” is followed by the eerie atmospherics of “Interlude (02/11/1975)”, a tenuous calm after the storm. Or how closer “In A Cab To Work” slowly builds from a gentle melody into din. This is music that is carefully considered and constructed at both a micro and macro level, creating a listening experience that perfectly balances dissonance and harmony.
Vocal duties are split between Tellarini and Cecilia Corapi; Tellarini in particular demonstrates his range, sometimes even sounding like two different people on the same track (see “Larry’s Hair Everywhere”, where he goes from a steady, sweet calm to a howling frenzy and back again in the span of a minute). But my favorite moments are when the two sing together, as on “The Wanderer”, where the lightness of Corapi’s vocals play off of the heaviness in Tellarini’s. They voices encircle one another, sometimes coming together in harmony but always splitting apart once again. Though many of the actual words feel muddled beneath the propulsive energy of the music, those that cut through do so like a knife: “sleepless nights”, “nothing matters”, “I try, try and I try”, “I don’t know”. They’re words that get at the central question of the album’s title: what future? Though the future Qlowski conjure up here may be bleak, it sounds nothing short of extraordinary.