Crumb are creating a supernatural experience through a singular sound you can easily surrender yourself unto. Across two EPs, their breakthrough 2018 debut full-length, Jinx, and their 2021 sophomore outing, Ice Melt, the New York quartet have found an escape from this Earth through a chic sonic style that opens pathways into the spirit world through dreamy, psychedelic pop spellbinding. And yet, they never permanently affix themselves to any one corner of those realms, always evolving along new planes. On their third studio effort, AMAMA, Crumb again venture through a new portal, now with their sound embellishing inner emotional energy radiating out more than ever. Synth keys refracting prisms, blood vessel-thumping basslines, and a cool, breezy meditative weave of percussive rhythm and brass transfix the body and soul through a crystalline production of subconscious-capturing color and pattern. In it, they’re daring to wonder a way through this world where they discover connections more organic, outrun isolation in their minds, and crack the existential through its soundwaves, even if portrayed as vapor trails and cloud forms in bloom. Through Lila Ramani’s cast of emotions in its haze, you can still see outlines of people and places in them through needle-eye detail. The strange dream-weaving which made Jinx and Ice Melt warm collages of contact highs remains present here on AMAMA, but there’s audibly a more present and tangible energy flowing through Crumb, reminiscent to the transformation of ruminative murk into lucid bliss by Broadcast and Stereolab across their uncanny catalogs before them. Even as the space Crumb’s which sound expands on AMAMA as an in-between passage for humans on cosmic journeys, the atmosphere it creates from the inner self feels wholly lived in once it sinks into you.

Highlights: “Side by Side”, “AMAMA”, “(Alone) In Brussels”

Crumb’s AMAMA is available now on Crumb Records.

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