During our talk, Tom Krell made it clear to me that he isn’t the kind of artist who likes to repeat himself. Since 2009, Krell has been making music under the How To Dress Well moniker; in that time, his acclaimed work has been an always-shifting negotiation between songcraft and experimentation. Within those contours, Krell has explored a range of genres and tonal colors—sometimes in conversation with mainstream music, other times seemingly reacting against it. No matter what the proportions, there is one thing that has always held together Krell’s music: his silvery falsetto, which the artist has presented both naked and decimated. 

I Am Toward You, Krell's first solo release in six years, is one of his more distorted records to date. It’s catchy and damaged in equal measure. Like most of Krell’s output, the music on the album is guided by the artist’s own history and conceptual language—Krell holds a PhD in philosophy from DePaul University—more than any specific genre or tonal moodboard. As he enters the middle of his second decade as How To Dress Well, Krell sees his own narrative not as a burden but rather a wellspring of inspiration. I recently caught up on Zoom with the LA-based, Colorado-bred musician, who spoke to me in front of a large shelf of books. Our edited conversation is below.

I really like the new record. It might be my favorite from you. I wanted to talk about that double kick drum moment on “Crypt Sustain” to start—what did that come out of?

Tom Krell: It’s interesting because so much has changed in my life since I started making that song. I started making that song for my brother Dan and he since passed away quite shockingly and brutally. So it went from a way of speaking to my brother to a way of honoring him. I start the song by singing, “Dan makes nature paintings / They don't show the landscape / Shaking from within / A crypt we carry with us.” And I'm literally talking about my brother's art practice. He’s a janitor who worked menial labor his entire life, a neurodivergent guy who, you know, because of the way our society is structured, he didn't get enough honor, recognition, etc. 

But he made these amazing works that he called nature paintings, but they were just kind of like line drawings—very, very impressionistic, very primitive. And because of the tremor that he had, the very bad physical tremor, they had a really specific line character. His handwriting is the handwriting you see all over the album in the campaign. It’s not an aesthetic, like so many of these design-led campaigns. It’s very close to me. 

Yeah.

And his whole life gravitated towards, was attracted by, and heard empathy in the signals of death and black metal. That was his passion. So I started working on the song and I was kind of transported at one point to these early childhood memories of watching Headbangers Ball with him. It was such a big deal for him when he was 12 years old to see Headbangers Ball on TV. So there's some Headbangers Ball references in there, and then I got to the second chorus and I was like, this just has to have a blast beat. If it's going to be a song for Dan, it can't just be in words. It has to be a sonic signature that cues to this. In 1984, all these new words came into the Webster's dictionary. You know how that happens every year. 

Sure. 

One of the new words in 1984, the year I was born, was death metal. So, no one had heard of death metal outside of the actual niche communities until 1984 when it reached a ubiquitous level, pop cultural threshold or whatever. And so I grew up in this context of death metal being a reality and my brother's passion always being something that I was watching. So even when I was a really little boy, I knew there was enormous value in getting the CD, or the cassette or the zine from a niche death metal band from Denmark or whatever. This is pre-internet, you know, he would write letters to the labels and be like, “Do you guys have anything new that I should listen to?” And they would send a catalog, or they would just send records over and we'd listen to them. He just taught me a ton about art, life, the value of art separated from market value. 

Yeah.

He never made a single work with the aspiration of selling it. So, the double drum there, I wish I had a shorter answer. But I mean, it does a lot of work.

I wasn't expecting that personal of an answer. 

It should give you an indication also of how I think and work as an artist, too. I just don't do shit for no reason. I'm not a stylist or an aesthete, I'm not trying to make something beautiful for its own sake. Everything is enormous communication, even if it goes unrecognized—just creating testaments and altars in the work.

So there's a lot of sonic intentionality on this record. I was going to ask you about your vocal treatments—it's not like you haven't treated your vocals throughout your career, but it seems a bit more severe on this new one. Is that safe to say? 

In some instances, it's extremely severe. It was obviously extremely severe on the first record. 

Yeah. 

Everything was drenched and fucked. [Laughs] Just shredded. And then over the course of the kind of three pop records I made—I mean, this is just like, music lives in a time and in a context—it started to feel more daring in those moments to just be open. Just be a voice. And then we passed out of that moment to the point where on my last record, it felt really important again to be fucking it up. Really refusing that pop naked logic. 

One of the key things on this record is that I really wanted to push the density of language on the one hand and the intensity of sonics on the other hand. I think that most people think intensity of language, that means it's got to be just confessional poetry. And I had a hypothesis that by pushing the vocal treatments, it could be mutually amplifying where the poetry and the intensity of the treatment are building each other. 

Do you think there's a legibility that's lost in the language when the vocals are getting treated that way? 

No, no, I think that legibility understood purely as transparent understandability misunderstands how language works. There's obviously the propositional character of language, understanding the meanings of symbols in a symbolic matrix. But then there's the entire affective aspect of language. The sonic material reality of language isn't something separate from it. I think a lot of people make this mistake. They think language is primarily text, its kind of got a neutrality to it, but text is actually downstream from speech. They grew together over the course of whatever human history, but the first thing is a guttural yell, and that has a sonic material, muscular dimension, as well as a signifying dimension. 

I have a little 11-month-old daughter, and as she's learning speech, it's a pure kind of, almost like before the big bang density of symbol and muscle. And we tend to live in a reality, a social reality, where language is separated from its muscle. And I think that through the treatment of the vocals on the record, you can bring that affective muscular reality back to it. 

There's always a tension in your music between language and muscle, but also abstraction and songcraft. Considering you're looking at all of this fairly conceptually, is there sort of a baseline tenant that grounds how you approach songwriting? 

I don't think there's an invariable thing across my life, across my work. For this record, there was a hardcore commitment to, I've called it a mixture of paranoia and pronoia. I’ll try to relate a snippet of a lyric with the paranoid affect of being like, this actually means something else and I have to follow it out to the truth, the secret truth. Then a pronoic kind of, this connects me with the meaning of all reality. One is fearful and the other is loving. This is more of the poetics rather than like the songcraft, but I guess it relates to the songcraft. 

On the songcraft side, this record is more a bunch of micro arrangements kind of synthesized and stitched together. I didn't sit down and jam out a six chord little riff and then sing over it. I'd jam out a six chord riff and then I’d hear this little transition between the third and fourth chord, and I'd be like, OK, that's what I like in this. Take that. That becomes a snippet in a sample collage or a sample patchwork. And then I start to see which samples fit together. Not the most coherent answer I’ve given you. [Laughs]

Process based, and then the form is kind of coming afterwards? 

Yeah, but it's multiple iterations of that. So it's process based, arrive at form, turn that form into an element. You have a song like “Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)” where the main guitar sample is a sample of a guitar recording I made in Berlin in 2012, 2013. I really liked the way the rain in the background sounded, so I did a spectral resampling of it, tried to isolate the rain, so you have this heaving rain layer and this guitar thing. Just pulling the guitar thing in felt too nostalgic to me because it was so time-saturated. I could literally hear my friend placing the dishes in the sink. I could just see the space. That didn't feel contemporary enough. 

So I was like, OK, got to chop it. So the guitar now gets chopped. And then I started playing over it more, started singing over it more. And so it's a multi-iterated process, product, reprocessing the product. This is the luxury of being an artist now making my first record of the second decade of my career. I have a lot more like sedimentary layers to reprocess now than I did when I was first making records. And then additionally, because I'm not making music on the touring cycle, I don't have just a two-year window where I can do this process, reprocessing. It has its own lifespan.

I think a lot of artists, once they hit their second decade, it can be a burden to deal with the body of work that they’ve accumulated. But it seems like for you, it’s more of a benefit that you have this history to play with. 

I'm obsessed with history, not world history—I'm obsessed with the history of ideas and how they grow and transmute and evolve and produce surprising outcomes. And that's what my interest in philosophy is, too. I hadn't thought of it, but maybe one of the things that differentiates me from other artists that would maybe feel encumbered by their mid-career history is that for me, now all of a sudden I have like this entire past. I can look at the past records in my mind's eye right now, I'm looking back through all my records stacked. And I can see all of these different threads and there's some really obvious common threads and there's some really obvious breaks. 

But what's interesting are the finer grained things where I'm like, I can't believe I've been saying that same phrase in nine different ways across these six records. Or I didn't even know what I was doing on a song from my first record, like “You Won’t Need Me Where I’m Going.” And now when I listen to it in view of the sixth record, I'm like, dude, I can't believe I was so close and I had no idea. So I just find it really interesting. I mean, it's tough because I think what most people react to is the stuff that they experienced or things that didn't work. It's embarrassing. 

My father-in-law was like, “You talk so much shit about some of your records in the press, you shouldn't. It's actually a really good record.” I was like, “Yeah, I'm talking from inside the work.” And right now I'm like, Oh man, I really wish I had sung that. Or, Oh man, that shit's too corny. But, maybe in five years, that'll be my favorite song that I ever made because I will have reached a new level of self-understanding where the earnestness or maybe what I perceive now as the naivete comes across to me later in the future as unencumbered. So, I love it. To me, I just have some paradigm artists that I really trust. Whether it's Phil Elverum or Lou Reed or someone like that, I'm just like, Oh, they got it. They understood how to metabolize and reprocess their work. That's what I want to do, too. 

When you're working, do you feel almost more in conversation with your personal history than you are with what's happening outside in the wider world of contemporary music, or are you still tuned into that? Is that something you're still interested in taking inspiration from? 

I'm always and only ever making music against my very, very current music listening habits. When I think of, like, what does the contemporary music world mean, I'm definitely not making music against Boygenius or Charli XCX or something. 

But you're still listening to new music, though, is what you're saying? 

Every single day, hours and hours. New music, music that's new to me. I just did an NTS show last night—a lot of records from the last two years, some records from the 80s, new shit that I know I have that I know no one else listens to. [Laughs] One of the challenges in my career in the streaming era has been that every single record I make is so different, and it fucks me on streaming. So all the tags that are relevant to The Anteroom where I got playlisted, I make this new music and it underperforms in those places because it's just not the same music. So the way the algorithm works, it's like, Oh, Tom made this song called “Nonkilling 6 | Hunger” which has got this pretty rockin' kind of house rhythm guiding it. New single, let's give it the house tag. And then one person hears it on a house playlist and is like, Oh, downvote this motherfucker. He's in the wrong place. 

And so then I would need someone on Spotify's side who really cares to go in and recurate my work every time. And they just don't give a shit. And it actually makes their jobs harder if you make music which surprises and confounds. So the artists that do really well on streaming, they make one kind of music and they make it really consistently year over year. So I've been absolutely fucked by streaming because I can't make the same kind of music twice.

I think some people segment their projects. They have three or four separate projects that each dials into a genre. But I can understand how it’s not conceptually interesting to do it that way. 

Exactly. I don't listen like that. That's the thing—I create against my listening habits. 90 percent of Americans end up listening for the rest of their lives to the music they listen to their sophomore and junior year of college. I'm constantly awestruck rediscovering music, being like, I can't believe I haven't only been listening to this for the last 40 years or whatever. And I have that same feeling literally every six weeks, my friends make fun of me for it. I'm always awestruck rediscovering new corners of music, stuff that I haven't listened to in years. The most glorious thing about aging is returning to records that you thought you understood 20 years ago and being like, Dude, I never even heard this. 

A big part of my creative process is aggregating music that helps me echolocate the music that I'm making. An artist will come to mind where I'm like, Oh, this sounds like that. Let me listen. And I'm like, Fuck, this is so fresh, let me throw it in the in the the pile. I look in the music and I try to see a mirror for the creativity that I’m pursuing. 

I think when you love a lot of music and you're not super narrowcasted in your taste, trying to put that all together into a song, it's this constant negotiation.

I just go through such phases listening to music. And like I said, the coolest thing about being a little bit older is like, Oh, I'm in my eighth [cycle where] the only thing I can listen to for a year is techno. And that's cool. Because I remember when that first happened, when I was 14, and I was taking enormous amounts of ecstasy and just feeling like this is God's music. 

This is the music that we've been meaning to make all our entire the life of our species. [Laughs] Building this life of obsessive phases with different music, especially because at any given moment when you get into a phase, there are new artists doing it. 

I'm not listening to a ton of techno right now, I'm sure I'll dive back into that at some point in the future. It’s just so contextual, dude. I had this infant, so my most played record from last year was the Dane Law & Chants record. If I was in party mode, that wouldn't have been my most listened to record, but I was at home, so let me put on something that feels propulsive and isn't just ambient, has texture and energy, and I just fell in love with that record. The context is constantly changing, life is constantly changing. So music is always there. It's just the best thing, literally the best thing in the world. 

(Photo by Chris Black)