Photo by Sean Booz

Artist: Total Wife, the duo of composer and producer Lana Kupper and lyricist and vocalist Ash Richter

Location: Nashville, TN

Buzz:  “I’m a psychological mixer — I’m trying to think of how someone’s experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,” Total Wife’s cultivator of sound, Lana Kupper, describes of her creative process. As you’ll soon discover on the band’s new album, come back down, we should probably consider it a curse word to consider the Nashville-by-way-of-Boston duo as mere shoegaze — especially in a year where the typical take on what’s become increasingly an aesthetic rather than something deeper — has begun to wear thin the more it saturates the scene. Instead, Total Wife immerse you within their own underground world, as Kupper and Ash Richter are part of this ambiguous, hard-to-pin experimental extension of it akin to Nuclear Daisies and forever ☆ — but also completely not and of their entirely own thing.

Their singular intent and exploratory ethos are what makes them a fittingly novel roster addition to Doug Dulgarian of We Are Gutting A Body of Water’s DIY tastemaking hotbed, Julia’s War, as their sound traverses between lucidity and a waking reality through a strewn, recycled energy source. Guitars are repurposed as synth samples as well as those of the unassumingly not-so-obvious which keep its cosmic body evolving (the entire album is apparently scattered with vocal samples taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”.) Blurring the lines between slowcore fades, digital pop glitter, blown out techno, and yes, swelling pools of shoegaze, into one sonic topography where Richter’s lyrics — a hushed dissolve of thought borne of pure isolation — truly make the whole of the body become the most resolutely authentic connection between human emotion and what your senses translate into sound.

Sound: The walls, floorboards, and celestial heavens collapsing wondrously at a synapse of brain thinking about the world ending.

Recommended: “peaches”, “naoisa”, and “make it last” from their recently-released album, come back down

Total Wife’s come back down is available now on Julia’s War.