This is SOUND ADVICE, a weekly destination for playlists curated by Interview’s friends, enemies, and lovers. Over the past few weeks, we’ve gathered playlists from Thugpop, Dasha, and George Clanton. This week’s guest is the multimedia artist, singer-songwriter, and producer Tom Krell, aka How to Dress Well, who’s just released an album last week after a six-year hiatus. Entitled I Am Toward You, its name captures its contents: a deeply embodied sonic journey that bares its heart in search of a truth more profound than the appearances of our mortal world. “Music, like fragrance, is best when it produces language,” Krell told us. “Pure sensation or affect is pretty boring, the real stuff happens when affect produces a charge that unearths unknown corridors in language.” The self-avowed “friend of the undertow,” Doctor of Philosophy, and recent father of a daughter (whose heartbeat closes out the last track) curated a playlist for us encompassing his varied taste, featuring Mariah Carey, 1010benja, Lorraine James, and more. For our Sound Advice questionnaire, Krell tells us his favorite philosophers, album cover art, and the secret to dressing well. - CLICK HERE FOR THE PLAYLIST AND FOR THE INTERVIEW 

"An album that harnesses the full expanse of that experience and revamps the sound of How To Dress Well in satisfying ways. It might be my favorite album he’s ever released."  
- Stereogum, Album of the Week

“a deeply experimental album made by a person that also clearly has a deep love for pure pop music.”
- Brooklyn Vegan

“feels strikingly intimate, like a peek at a diary that scans as if its writer knew that it will one day be made public.”
- Flood

“there’s a sense of real glory about the record that’s fascinatingly beautiful. It’s at once so huge, yet so microscopic, looking at small details and the tightest introspection, yet handling it on this vast, godly level.”
- Far Out Magazine

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. I Am Toward You is out today May 10th via Sargent House, and is a beautiful experience. 

We're delighted to share this record with the world. It's a monumental work of art - now available everywhere.

ORDER / HEAR ‘I AM TOWARD YOU’

It’s been nearly six years since we last heard from How To Dress Well, the beguiling musical project from American multimedia artist, singer-songwriter, and producer Tom Krell. Over the course of the last decade and a half, he’s crafted a wholly unique body of work, encapsulating everything from dream pop, R&B and soul, to brash, confrontational noise.

For his part, Krell would probably be the first to admit that How To Dress Well projects have always required an open mind, but it’s his unique, unflinching pursuit of truth within the weirdness that continues to make the project so compelling. To be here in 2024 discussing the sixth How To Dress Well LP is something of a gift, not least because if Krell had had his way several years ago, we wouldn’t have been here talking about it.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW ON CLASH

How To Dress Well's upcoming album I Am Toward You has been named Album of the Week by Stereogum. Check out the glowing review below. I Am Toward You is available everywhere May 10.

PRE-ORDER 'I AM TOWARD YOU'

"All music is the product of thoughts and feelings, but Tom Krell’s derives from so many thoughts, from emotions felt so deeply. Most albums released into the music industry slipstream are presented with some degree of “director’s commentary”-style guideposts explaining how to think about the work — interviews, press releases, an official biography — even before getting into the common language of cover art, music videos, stage visuals, merch, and social media posts. Music is an ancient form of human expression; popular music, especially in the internet era, tends to be a multimedia art project. Krell understands both points, and with How To Dress Well, the great creative endeavor of his life, he goes beyond the norm to give the world a little extra. Or maybe a lot. Extra is who he is. He pours his whole heart and mind into his records, and then he gives you detailed footnotes.

I Am Toward You, out this Friday, is the first How To Dress Well album in six years. It arrives a decade and a half since Krell sent shockwaves through music-blog world with his earliest releases under the name, songs that reframed the sound of ‘80s and ‘90s R&B as faded memories, bathed in celestial light and laced with conceptual underpinnings of someone who loves philosophy as much as he loves music. His first three albums gradually brought that aesthetic into focus. They were released at a time when seemingly every indie rock band was dabbling in R&B — a trend Krell helped to initiate — and they made him something like a star. As he explains in an extensive document accompanying the new album, getting indie-famous didn’t pay the bills, so he tried to make something more digestible and expressly commercial with 2016’s Jack Antonoff-assisted Care. When Care failed to elevate Krell to new heights, he reacted against the careerist impulse with 2018’s fractured and noisy The Anteroom, an album that emerged from an intense period of ego death involving two-week silent meditations and hallucinatory experiences with sacred plant medicine."

FULL REVIEW

Heading into next week's album release, How To Dress Well has shared the new single "Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)". Its a richly layered, emotionally vulnerable song based around the sound of heavy falling rain in Berlin in 2013, wrapped like a blanket around Krell’s experience of life-history unfolding. It features guest CFCF who plays additional guitars and synths, and was also mixed by Trayer Tryon. 

"“Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)” is a song about how random decisions and random historical contingencies come together to shape a life into something undeniable and necessary," Krell says.

The full album I Am Toward You is available everywhere May 10.

WATCH / STREAM “CONTINGENCY/NECESSITY”

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