In his 15+ years recording as How To Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell’s musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, its core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity.
I Am Toward You is the first new How To Dress Well album in six years, with some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic music to date. Krell opens the second decade of his career with an album that delivers on the hallmarks of his best work. When creating the album, Krell was in search of not a fresh start, exactly, but instead a return to the open-hearted, uncynical approach to music making that he adopted as a kid, and carried through the release of his haunting breakthrough debut, 2010’s Love Remains, when he was making music in relative anonymity with little external pressure.
Krell alongside returning and new collaborators CFCF, Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Trayer Tryon (Hundred Waters), Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read began work on what would become I Am Toward You in 2020. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he’d recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of previous albums to create a collection of songs that oscillate between the present and the past as if it’s happening all at once.
A memory from 20 years ago holds just as much weight as something that happened yesterday. Each song, too, is linked to the larger world: these tracks are in constant dialogue with not just each other, but the environments in which they were made. It feels like a diaristic approach to how we can find new perspectives on our own lives, as informed by the way Krell transformed himself in the nearly six years between the release of The Anteroom and the release of I Am Toward You.
