The Brag

How To Dress Well
A Pop Aspirant’s Experiments
By Rach Seneviratne

I saw Tom Krell, aka How To Dress Well, play at Roskilde Festival in Denmark this year, after torrential rain shepherded several hundred people into the dark, sweaty, marijuana-filled tent in which he was set to perform. The walls of the dome were shrouded in beguiling visuals, half the room was high, and Krell was in his element. Since then, he’s released the Just Once EP, a slightly orchestral follow-up to last year’s lo-fi, ethereal RnB masterpiece Love Remains – and with his impending Australian tour and a new release due early next year, Krell is audibly excited about what the future holds.

“This next record is a really nice middle ground between Love Remains and Just Once,” Krell says from Chicago, via a wonky Skype connection. “The songs are just much bigger… I feel way more confident coming out of the ambient haze of Love Remains.” Through his releases, Krell has built a reputation as an experimental artist – a label he considers as both a blessing and a curse. “I started writing another noisy, ambient record, and it didn’t feel like experimentation anymore. I realised if I was actually going to engage in what, for me, would be a musical experiment, it’s way more intimidating and brave and experimental for me to just go the opposite way,” he muses. “One song on my new record is this totally naked a capella piece, but formally, it doesn’t really share the characteristics of what we call ‘experimental music’. It’s not noisy, harsh or intimidating; it’s quite accessible, and incredibly vulnerable.”

Krell’s distinct RnB influences, paired with his falsetto croon and ambient production, have earned him comparisons to that league of extraordinary gentlemen à la James Blake, The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye, Frank Ocean – but he’s quick to distance himself from that movement. “My new record will make it more clear what the commonalities and differences are between The Weeknd and I. There’s one song that’s a real wintry RnB jam where you can hear our similarities, but then there’s other songs on the record with really dark, sweeping vocal arrangements and strange production. The biggest beats on this record coming out are big, poppy, almost Alice Deejay-style Europop… a lot of the newest Weeknd mixtape sounds to me like fuckin’ Evanescence.”

Krell displays a certain disdain for popularised music, yet at the same time relishes the idea of making it. He says of James Blake, “He doesn’t write songs per se; in some ways his music is ‘post-song’. He sings a vocal loop and repeats it a tonne of times, but he doesn’t aspire to write verse-chorus pop songs… In a certain way he’s going hard against it. Whereas I wanna write pop songs you can play at the Olympics and your wedding and shit.”

But given his musical roots, the Olympics-and-your-wedding-and-shit goal is still out of arms reach for Krell. The heartbreaking Love Remains made How To Dress Well an overnight Pitchfork sweetheart, but its pop music credentials – in the form of smooth, Aaliyah and Cassie-inspired ‘90s RnB – were obfuscated by a thick blanket of ambience and experimental noise. “I don’t think that I’ve proven myself as a pop artist yet,” Krell admits. “I think that I have a foot in the door – and I’m really happy that Love Remains is my debut, because it sets the stakes differently. I don’t have 50 000 followers on Twitter because of a song that got on a Starbucks compilation… I’m coming out of a background in much more experimental waters. So to combine that with my desire to be a pop singer – this is the pedigree I want to have.”

But it’s not an aspiration for pop stardom that drives Krell so much as his desire for people to see How To Dress Well as the sum of all its parts. “I hope one day that I can put out a record and people will listen to it and situate it within my more general body of work… I don’t know if I’m established enough yet as an artist to expect that from listeners.” Krell makes a big distinction between pop music and more left-field music; not just the song itself, but in the way he listens to it, and the attention he devotes to it. “When I listen to new Xiu Xiu records, I’m listening to hear what Jamie Stewart’s going to do. I don’t judge the new Xiu Xiu record in the same way that I judge the new Drake record. With Drake I’m like, ‘Okay, is there a hook that catches me?’ If not, next song. When I listen to the new Xiu Xiu, I sit down with a patience and an attention that is very different to when I’m listening to pop radio.”

If I’ve gleaned anything from my conversation with Krell, it’s that he’s a deep thinking, vulnerable person whose music and personality are both fragile and forthright all at once. His love-hate relationship with pop music and experimentation seems to mirror his desire to evolve his output, and change. “How many times do I [hear] myself speaking and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, I’m still just a four year old boy, looking at my dad and just fucking imitating his behaviour.’ I think it’s one of the hardest things in the world, to change yourself – not just musically, but spiritually and personally.”

With: Wintercoats, Albatross, Preacha, Wedding Ring Fingers
Where: GoodGod Small Club
When: Wednesday December 7