šmu - morph ⁄ モーフ
Released: August 25 On their debut album, Croatian artist šmu (pronounced as shmu) brings a spanning and wide-ranging body of work wrapped in a theme of transformation and change, which is certainly lived out in the music. It starts out with “white gold,” a track that feels somewhere in the realm of dark vaporwave with ambient influences. It’s a bit haunting, especially with the eerie vocalizations and a rather minimal use of something that sounds similar to a marimba or glockenspiel, but alien. Then, “pastel blue” comes along and gives a fully-fleshed out rhythm, sparse as it may be in a dark atmosphere that plays on more pinging tones that bounce around in the mix as heavy kicks and basses thud. And this is just kind of the start of things. The idea behind the album is a transformation of slowly becoming mad, or quickly if you prefer to listen at 2x speed (please don’t do that and actually enjoy the work). But this theme is quite pronounced as it comes closer to the end. J...
