Hey What

Low prove once again they are the sweet antithesis of that: a band who have had decades to hone their work within their own slow and deliberate pace and environment, making their most vital, forward-thinking music at an age where it can be utmost nurtured.

A very clever album that plays with musical codes and conventions brilliantly to create something greater than the sum of its parts. This could be the bravest Low album in recent years. It surpasses ‘Double Negative’ in a way that is surprising, but also feels obvious.

It is easy to make music that is difficult and it is easy to make music that is beautiful. But it is quite the trick to be both at the same time, and on Hey What, Low mark themselves out as masters of the art. [Oct 2021, p.16]

The duo’s recent fascination with 21st-century disconnection continues, but the bombast is louder and the tranquility is quieter, and in focusing on lucid melodies and unobscured fidelity, they’ve created their most visceral work yet.

On HEY WHAT, Sparhawk and Parker, working again with producer BJ Burton, hone the sonic language they explored on Double Negative into a terrible swift sword that cuts like the Minnesota winter wind against the spectres that threaten their home.

If Double Negative was a thrilling and uncertain expedition, bringing an alien landscape into focus for the first time, HEY WHAT demonstrates Low’s newfound mastery of the terrain.

More successfully than on Double Negative, Low has fused the thesis and antithesis of its musical identity, creating a transcendent synthesis of its fragile, beautiful ego and raging experimental id. Lucky 13, indeed.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

In 2021, Low aren’t merely playing rock music gently and slowly: now they’re attempting to rewrite the language of the genre.

One of the more melodic tracks here “Days Like These” chooses not to bog the listener down in platitudes but instead affirm the feelings and exasperation of the audience. Low have toed that line particularly well, while still expanding the breadth of their sound to contribute another truly great album, one that ranks among their very best.

Hey What is a well-rounded experience from the first track, the gorgeously devastating “White Horses,” to the last, “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off)” and all its tentative hope, with moments in between that ebb and flow with the capriciousness of human emotion.

Low's latest finds Sparkhawk and Parker at a thrillingly creative and intrepid peak, building off their experimental blueprint laid out with their 2015 LP Ones and Sixes and fully realized on Double Negative. Although HEY WHAT falls squarely in between the two, it's safe to say that no one is making music that sounds remotely similar to what Low is giving us.

The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.

The music Low are currently making carries a similar, head-turning, where-the-hell-did-this-come-from air to Isn’t Anything and Loveless; as with those albums, the people behind Hey What are redefining how a rock band can sound. It says something – about Low and about rock music – that you have to delve back 30 years to find something with those qualities.

The information exchange attains a near perfect equilibrium between sanctified melody and distress signals. [Oct 2021, p.91]

Just as Double Negative offered a catharsis of the confusion and despair that many felt in 2018, as a whole HEY WHAT promises hurt and healing in equal measure, its abrasive textures the companion to undeniable warmth, tenderness and optimism. [Sep 2021, p.57]

As elegiac, brutally minimalist, silent and hymnal, disturbingly open and ultimately rewarding as before. [Oct 2021, p.77]

It is neither their most immediate nor their warmest album, yet its provocations are effective, and become curious and complex in light of the melody and harmony that sits above them.

Sparhawk and Parker are still trying to make sense of a world that seems increasingly alien, and the paradox of raging against the artificiality while using it as a creative choice is powerfully effective here.