[highlight]With Love Death Immortality, The Glitch Mob has created a masterwork that will go down in dance music history as a seminal album. Our scene may never be the same again, as electro bass and ethereal glitch offerings bring us a cohesive crown jewel that puts the LA trio in a class of their own.[/highlight]
Typically, when you take in a new album there’s a process that goes along with it. First you listen to each track in succession to get a feel for the collective work. Then you weed out the tracks you don’t like. Finally, you double back to your favorites for repeat listens. It’s a tried and true method, and it applies to almost every album. With The Glitch Mob’s Love Death And Immortality though, you get something entirely different.
You hit play on the very first track entitled Mind Of A Beast, and the journey begins. Instruments plug in. Feedback blares and a hard guitar chord blows through the speakers, while piano gently guides you in for a landing. The backbeat explodes, raucous synths blare, and right away you realize that this is no ordinary album. Fast forward to the end and a startling realization pops into your head: There isn’t a single track you don’t want to hear all over again.
“No wonder you have demons, anything you ever did is coming back around” –‘Our Demons’ (feat. Aja Volkman)
With earth-shattering bass, rock-infused guitar, and an every-genre type of influence, we’re not exaggerating in the slightest when we say The Glitch Mob has created a masterpiece of modern dance music. Tracks like Our Demons featuring Aja Volkman turn us down a dark, vocal corner that slams alternative rock and electro together like never before. Followed immediately by the even harder Skullclub that victoriously announces “we are the wild ones,” it proves firsthand that the full-play album has officially planted its flag in bass music.
Many times, an artist has to choose between making a collective work that either works as a “sit around in a circle and quietly listen” experience or a “jump around and go crazy” offering. What The Glitch Mob has accomplished here marries these two ideas. When you want to dance, a track like Can’t Kill Us echoes through your headphones, as it wildly charges through the darkest, hardest genres while managing to never land firmly in one. When you want to sit back and think about the universe, on comes Becoming Harmonius (featuring Metal Mother) to slow things down with a swaying, vocal bass ballad.
Every want, desire, and emotion is touched on without spreading you too thin, resulting in a cohesive, contemplative monument to versatility and musical acumen. Walking that fine line between pleasing melodies and experimentation, Love Death Immortality finds a way to please both camps while compromising for neither. All the while, The Glitch Mob has done what few artists within dance music have accomplished successfully: They’ve evolved.
Their first album Drink The Sea was largely a psychedelic, instrumental space voyage. It glided gently from track to track, providing us with a singularly intriguing opening effort back in 2010. Since then, it’s clear the trio has been moved far past these roots. Songs like Fly By Night harken back to their beginnings, but quickly remind us that this is a brand new Glitch Mob, as booming basslines and melodic synths bring a unique danceability into the equation. Explaining the difference best is founding member Justin Boreta:
If our last album was introverted, then the new one is definitely extroverted.
That all being so, Love Death Immortality doesn’t spend long reminiscing about the past before it rockets back into the future with Carry The Sun. Glitched-out vocals and thunderous electro highlight the second-to-last track, eliciting the sensation of barreling through the night sky at light speed. But then comes the final offering, Beauty Of The Unhidden Heart, punctuating the album with a quiet ellipsis rather than an exclamation point. Ethereal harps and Sister Crayon’s vocals slow the world to a deliberate crawl , as they pull the parachute on your descent back down to Earth.
Where this stands in the pantheon of modern dance music is unclear, namely because there’s nothing out there quite like it. It could become an album you hear in nonstop radioplay, as other artists begin to play out each song in their sets. There could come a day where you don’t hear a mainstage set without something off of Love Death Immortality. Regardless, what it almost certainly provides is a sound that will inform the future of dance music on a global scale. Remixes will pour out, tracks will top charts, and soon the influence will be unmistakable. The world is about to see just what The Glitch Mob is capable of, and once that happens our scene may never be the same.
Stream ‘Love Death Immortality’ below and listen for yourself!
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