介绍： Frozen

00:00​ when jesus says yes, nobody can say no
05:04​ care about us
10:24​ U got this
25:27​ another dust
28:05​ grit
29:44​ reveal itself
30:36​ needed and saved
33:32​ mark
45:00​ understand our tracks
50:06 tribute

Pitchfork 7.6

"Slipping between stark realism and meditative r...

介绍： Frozen

00:00​ when jesus says yes, nobody can say no
05:04​ care about us
10:24​ U got this
25:27​ another dust
28:05​ grit
29:44​ reveal itself
30:36​ needed and saved
33:32​ mark
45:00​ understand our tracks
50:06 tribute

Pitchfork 7.6

"Slipping between stark realism and meditative reflection, this is the South London experimental musician’s most intensely introspective album yet."

lein is a collagist who finds the beauty in pieces that shouldn’t fit together. Though often working with fragments of recognizable melodies—she cites both Beyoncé and Pavarotti as inspirations—the South London experimental artist isn’t interested in simply entertaining. “Anyone can do pop, innit? What sonically I want to hear for myself is stories,” she once said. Her stories don’t shy away from darkness or taboo. In her 2018 musical Care, which she wrote and starred in, she depicted a group of children living in a state-run foster home who stumble upon a Narnia-like fantasy world. She made the case that these hidden parts of our society deserve fairytales, too—albeit distorted ones. On her self-released album Frozen, she is as unflinching as ever, riding that slippage between brutal realism and escapist, meditative reflection.

It is, for the most part, an intensely introspective record. On her first two albums, ONLY and Lifetime, Klein’s music was woven from the fabric of the world around her: church services, R&B songs, covert recordings of conversations between mates, and fractured snippets of drums that give the impression of standing outside a club. Her carefully controlled cacophonies stood on the fringes of dance music, but Frozen immediately feels like a more internal landscape. There are no collaborators in the credits; a number of songs were single takes recorded in her bedroom on her guitar.

The murky, industrial first half is the equivalent of lying face down on your bed and letting out an existential groan. It can feel oppressive, like having the weight of the world on your shoulders. The minimalist “U got this,” 15 minutes long, hinges on a scratchy guitar riff and a rush of what sounds like traffic, and it progresses infinitesimally. Two short, jagged songs that follow break the meditative mood. “My friend I just buried him/Another grave,” Klein’s serene, somber double-tracked vocal intones on “another dust,” before reverb-drenched guitar thrashes out her anger on “grit.” Throughout, she pulls listeners in close, then pushes them away, never allowing them to get comfortable. After a half-hour stretch in which it feels like we are alone with Klein, she abruptly introduces other voices via the cut-up crowd noises of the 50-second interlude “reveal itself.” And at the record’s very end, she crashes out on a moment of dissonance with the abrupt, three-second-long “tribute.”

In her most unexpected maneuver, Klein turns the lens outward on the listener. “mark” is a tribute to Mark Duggan—the man who was killed by London’s Met police in August 2011,spαrking a week of riots in the UK—and 10 of its 11 minutes are silent. It’s a powerful moment, inviting listeners to reflect on Duggan’s death and the scant progress that the UK has made toward racial justice in the years since it occurred. It’s a brave move for an artist to make in a culture ruled by the skip button, and a testament to Klein’s unyielding commitment to looking straight at tragedy.

Surrounding that emptiness is some of Klein’s most beautiful work. The silence is gradually replaced by a mournful guitar melody and slowed-down cries of “No justice, no peace,” which eventually blur into choral tones. With her vocals buried deep in the mix, Klein sounds ghostly. She creates a vast amount of space in the mix, giving the listener the feeling of standing at the lip of a cavern. It’s beauty with an underlying threat, always just on the brink of overwhelming, but with Klein remaining in control.

Resident Advisor

"Haunting sketches from a one-of-a-kind artist."

"That song there—not gonna lie, that's a smash hit... borderline superstar," says a voice emerging from a fog of wildly pitch-bent noise at the end of "care bout us." It's a wry bit of humour from an artist whose music is boldly experimental yet unafraid to joke around, interpolating Foo Fighters and snippets of giggly conversation. The quote is also kind of true. Over the last few years, Klein has emerged as the poster-child of an experimental London scene that explodes R&B into unrecognizable forms, as her early music evolved from alt-pop to something more like musique concrète.

Frozen, released on her Bandcamp in the middle of the night (like she used to do with her early records), is Klein's most tantalizing record, full of aimless guitar strums, extended drones and haunting vocal passages. The songs don't coalesce so much as hang in the air, like a spectral presence in the room.

Klein's remarkable 2019 album Lifetime dealt with her religious upbringing, featuring intimate recordings of family members along with wrenching, chopped-up vocal performances. Frozen feels less private but somehow more intimate, a blank slate after the exorcism of Lifetime. There are few words or voices on the album, and the mood is calm and patient, with a lazy-day contentment.

The LP consists mainly of strummed guitar and Klein's usual piano, which sound like they're being beamed in from a world away, crackly and rough. It's hard to make out what's happening on the stunning 15-minute "summon," whose repetitive haze makes you sit and wait, wondering if anything new will come. These sounds are often lo-fi, but never feel cheap or tossed-off. Like all of Klein's music, there's a purpose to everything, and the fuzzy or indistinct sounds become captivating for what they leave out, or don't say.

"another dust track" is a fried ballad that benefits from this approach: it wouldn't be half as poignant if it were crystal clear. Instead, it sounds like acoustic industrial music, if such a thing was possible. There are plenty of bursts of noise on Frozen, but the most arresting moment is when it goes near-silent for over eight minutes on "mark 19 april track." Eventually, sound resurfaces with distant, garbled vocals, like the album fell asleep and woke up groggy.

These are the parts that feel intimate: the passages that make you turn the volume way up because you need to hear more. It's why the opening track's close-mic'd collage of rumbling sounds feels so dear and personal, because it sounds like you're in the room with her. Klein doesn't need lyrics or conventional songwriting to get her feelings across, because she understands the power of these non-musical sounds and the associations they bring up, the feelings they could trigger. In her hands, every kind of sound can become music in itself.

The way Klein pours those feelings into this structureless, exploratory music is what makes her the unlikely star she is. She's often described as a storyteller, and in interviews, she's spoken about wanting to win a Grammy or an Oscar, as well as her wish to one day work in pop music. These ideas begin to make sense when you get deep into Frozen, which finds soul-baring emotion in the most unexpected of sounds.