Over various intermittent sessions, they completed the album in late 2019, still grasping the threads that leapt up during that fertile week in Jersey. With an aggressively “no rules” mentality and an inspiration to embrace the concept of constant flux, the duo ended up with the bulk of the album in little over a week. Much like Psychic may have needed to be heard on an appropriately thumping sound system to be fully appreciated, Spiral might not fully connect until you don headphones and spend some time with it, preferably in nature.įor its recording, Jaar and Harrington reconvened in a rental house in rural New Jersey in 2018, arriving with very little existing material and letting the music flow out of them in improvised sessions, many of them beginning in the yard with little more than an acoustic guitar and the Voice Memos app.

Like the unforgettable “Paper Trails” before it, “Liberty Bell” hooks you instantly with Harrington’s swaggering, gothy cowboy riff and an intricately groovy beat. One of the few similarities between the albums is an uncharacteristically catchy single involving a memorable, uncharacteristically rootsy guitar lick. Spiral is a much more methodical affair, more at home with acoustic guitar noodling than the slinky disco beats of Psychic tracks like “Golden Arrow,” “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen,” and “Freak, Go Home.” There are moments that border on glitch (“Narrow Road”), heavy pysch (“I’m The Echo”), late-’60s British folk (the title track), and dub (“Only Young”), and despite an overarching feeling of dark mysticism, the album hones in on a much wider variety of vibes than its predecessor. Again, it finds Jaar and Harrington arriving with considerable toolkits of their own and pushing each other into no-man’s-land genres, but if you’re tuning in with the hopes of restoring the feeling that Psychic gave you, you’d be better off cracking open a can of whatever your preferred beverage was in 2013. Spiral - officially out this Friday, and premiering in a “collective listening event” on YouTube today at 1PM ET - is Darkside’s first release since Psychic, aside from a live album recorded during that aforementioned 2014 tour. Despite how resonant Psychic still sounds, and despite how active Jaar and Harrington have remained in their respective solo careers, Darkside’s seven-year drought makes reminiscing about the band’s brief heyday feel like “ remembering some guys,” in the parlance of the pervasive Twitter joke about men sitting around and naming their favorite old athletes for fun. It wasn’t rock music, it definitely wasn’t EDM, but Psychic sounded just as good in headphones as it did on dancefloors, just as good stoned or drunk or sober, just as good when focusing on its every intricate detail or when forgetting everything you know about music and just feeling it.ĭarkside toured relentlessly over the next 12 months and then, after an electrifying show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in September 2014, went on an indefinite hiatus. Darkside synthesized the eclectic interests of electronic wunderkind Nicolás Jaar and virtuosic jazz guitarist Dave Harrington in ways that felt almost wholly new, despite the obvious influence of adventurous spiritual heirs like Can, electric-period Miles Davis, the Orb, and even Pink Floyd. Remember Psychic, Darkside’s absolute banger of a debut album? Arriving in fall 2013, on the heels of a summer that was kicked off by massively popular, unabashedly nostalgic Daft Punk and Disclosure albums, Psychic offered that same big-tent vibe, but in a more mercurial, genre-bending fashion.

Vinyl me please darkside