ADULT. - Detroit House Guests

Pitchfork 79

ADULT.’s Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller have always had a hermetic aesthetic. Their synthesizers sound like museum pieces; their post-punk production reeks like a leaky dungeon. And their dry sense of humor keeps the listener perpetually off balance, the same way that their creepy cover art steadfastly refuses to meet the viewer’s gaze. You never see a pair of eyes on the duo’s record sleeves—just covered faces, gloved hands, and ambiguously slumped poses, markers of contemporary alienation raised to the level of high art. If you were to describe their music in architectural terms, it would be part hall of mirrors, part Winchester Mystery House.

For Detroit House Guests, their first album in four years, the married duo—both are visual artists and filmmakers as well as musicians—went the opposite route: Assisted by a $40,000 Knight Foundation grant, they threw open the doors of their 4,000-square-foot compound in Detroit’s New Center neighborhood, inviting a handpicked succession of artists to live and work with them. Some, like Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy, they had known for years. The Austrian Thereminist Dorit Chrysler, on the other hand, had only a passing acquaintance with the duo before her residency. It was an “intense” process, Kuperus has said: “Because you’re living together, you’re having breakfast together, and when you’re done with the studio you’re watching Netflix together.” That kind of intimacy is palpable across the album. While there’s no mistaking ADULT.’s wiry signature, their collaborators’ input is largely indistinguishable from their own, leading to a record that is richer and stranger than anything the duo has done before.

All of their usual hallmarks are here: spring-loaded drum programming, clammy reverb, brittle synths that clink like wind chimes in an ice storm. Classic electro remains a driving force, and on “Stop (and Start Again),” featuring Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess bellowing over a flanged, high-necked bassline, they return to the hair-raising goth of 2005’s Gimme Trouble. But a majority of the album’s tracks find them foraging far beyond their usual stomping grounds. The opening “P rts M ss ng,” with Lichens’ Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, is slow and methodical, its modular synthesizers twitching like metal shavings under a magnet. “Breathe On,” with Swans’ Michael Gira, extends the meditative mood; Gira’s basso purr verges on ASMR territory, and the same could be said of the woozy third track, “Into the Drum,” with its disorienting soup of whispers and vocal fry.

In fact, they don’t unleash their usual body-moving assault until the fourth song, “We Are a Mirror,” a chilly slab of death disco enlivened by Kuperus and McCarthy’s call-and-response vocals. Just like his hosts, McCarthy sounds like he’s ventured far from his comfort zone. Neither of his songs bear obvious traces of Nitzer Ebb’s abrasive legacy; instead, he seems determined to twist his formidable baritone into the most unexpected shapes. Ironically, it falls to Funchess to deliver the album’s best Nitzer Ebb impersonation: Her “We Chase the Sound” is a dead ringer for the EBM pioneers’ scorched-earth funk.

Throughout, ADULT.’s synthetic sound world is unusually electrifying. On “Inexhaustible,” abetted by Chrysler’s Theremin, they conjure a mercurial fusion of Morton Subotnick and early Depeche Mode. And on “Uncomfortable Positions,” the conceptual textile artist Lun*na Menoh performs on a modified sewing machine whose darting needle wobbles like a quarter spinning down. Strangest of all is “This Situation,” which sounds like an eight-minute tribute to the Beatles’ notorious musique concrète experiment “Revolution 9.” Over rumbling abstractions, two snippets of Kuperus’ voice loop in parallel. “Forgive me if I change the usual order of the menu,” runs one; “This situation can’t go on indefinitely,” goes the other, more or less indefinitely.

The album’s most fascinating aspect is the way it affords a glimpse behind the duo's masks. The closing “As You Dream,” in which Michael Gira does his best Tibetan monk impersonation, is a damn-near liturgical take on drone techno—not so much hermetic as immersive, a rising tide spilling out their front door and subsuming everything in its path. ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.