#threespheres

Blog rock era cult favs the Forms will be releasing their as-yet-titled return album and first in over a decade this June. The NY experimental art rock band has previewed it with a few great singles in “Southern Ocean”, “Head Underwater”, and “All Soul’s Day”, and now they’ve released another -- albeit surprising -- potential preview, with their own take on Disclosure and Sam Smith’s 2013 hit collaboration “Latch”, which they refer to as “one of the weirdest and most complex songs ever to break through to the mainstream.” Maybe it’s the weirdo factor that drew Alex Tween and Matt Walsh to it, and it very much works in their own ubiquitous way in replacing its synthetic electro-house banger elements with a more post-hardcore physical matter in the, er, form, of Rhodes, hammond organ, piano, drums, and Steve Albini, who recorded it with them at Electrical Audio in Chicago.

There’s also a fascinating feature on the band over at the Line of Best Fit that gets us back up to date as to what the band has been up to over the past decade and where they see themselves fitting in (or not!) in the current music landscape. Read that here and “Latch” on below...

Soon, the Forms will return after a decade’s absence with their as yet-to-be-titled Steve Albini-produced third full-length. The world at large may have forgotten how singular in, er, form their first two albums were when they cracked the 2000s NYC blog rock scene, and in turn, takes uncanny artists like them for granted. Perhaps that’s because -- to their credit -- there’s still really is no space in the scene where their sound lays tangent to anything else being made today. Once pensive and gleaming in post-hardcore elements, vocalist and keyist Alex Tween and drummer Matt Walsh have transformed their music into an ocean of digital euphoria and abstract pop that continues making its own waves in this life on the album’s latest preview “Head Underwater”.

The listen is bright and brimming with optimism with an energy that challenges hyperpop's raw energy, but achieves more so in existential substance, as Tween recognizes the treading that must be done to achieve these climaxes (presented in a music video directed by Bo Mirhosseni where we witness the lengths some go to find their own resurrection, while others simply drown above ground.) "Head underwater / Hanging my head / Overlooking at the reflection before us / Standing at the endless borders / Of the invented world before us." In that which the Forms have always existed, creating your own possibility is always there if you want it to be.

Criminally overlooked early in their career and certainly an overlooked blip on Brooklyn’s blog rock scene of the early 2000s, the Forms were outliers then and remain outliers now a decade removed since their last release in 2011′s Derealization. Their last effort heard the band collaborating alongside members of the National, Shudder to Think, and Dirty Projectors to rework music from their first two albums -- a perfect pop clangor of post-hardcore with the twilight beauty of the city glimmering through produced by Steve Albini on 2003′s Icarus and 2007′s self-titled. -- into idiosyncratic electronic pop that contoured the outlines of the original hard edges, and refracted them into a prism of color and sound that promised a new phase to come.

We’ve had to wait 10 years for it, but on “Southern Ocean”, the first single from the band’s forthcoming return effort recorded once again alongside Albini, we hear the duo of vocalist and keyboardist Alex Tween and drummer-sequencer Matt Walsh not only continuing their pursuit to defy all logic in indie rock convention and pop trend with shape-shifting energy transmissions, but with advocate intent, as their current surrounding Rockaway Beach ocean community connects them with a nature beyond their own world. It’s global warming-awareness disguised as euphoric digital dance-pop, juxtaposing the ice-melted creation of the newly-anointed fifth ocean with microcosmic indifference. “It’s just another phase I’m going through / It’s another path I’m on / Doesn’t make a difference what I do,” Tween sings. While it’s easy to push uncomfortable emotions down, the Forms showing signs of life again is cause for listen.