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You can’t get Deeper if you’re standing still. That’s intentional, says the Chicago quartet’s Nic Gohl. “Does it feel good when you’re listening to this song? Does your body want to move with it?” These are the questions he asked himself as he and bandmates Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn were writing and recording Careful!, their third record and Sub Pop debut. “I wanted these to be interesting songs, but in a way where a two-year-old would vibe out to it,” Gohl adds. “It’s pop music, basically.”

That “basically” qualifier is working pretty hard, as fans of 2020’s Auto-Pain might suppose. Auto-Pain was an album of thick brutalist architecture, full of straight lines and sharp angles, making hard shapes strong enough to carry a heavy thematic burden. On Careful!, they’re reshaping the facades and splashing color, not reimagining their sound so much as testing its limits. There are synth experiments, there are moments of nauseatingly powerful darkwave and coldbeat. There are massive rock’n’roll songs that you can imagine 10,000 people singing along to in some beautiful outdoor setting. There is a remarkably moving love song. Is there pop? There’s some pop, yes, a wiry bit of Cars-esque neon called “Everynight.” Look around the right corners, and you might see some of the old buildings peeking through, too, but in this context—on a song like “Sub,” say, a song that began life as a slow and dark prog jam but is now an elegantly cresting wave of post-punk—they feel more sophisticated, lit up in the cold, bright glow of Television.

Auto-Pain was released in March 2020, which means Deeper wasn’t able to play their new album live for nearly a year and a half. “It was hard living in the vacuum of depending on Spotify numbers to quantify what your music means to other .......
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