How To Dress Well returns after six-year hiatus and announces new album, I Am Toward You

The first two singles from the I Am Toward You – "New Confusion" & "No Light" – feature contributions from CFCF and Trayer Tryon, as well as Anarthia DLT.

"It's about how to relate to the past knowing the hard limits on human memory and the challenges of metabolizing intergenerational-anthropogenetic trauma. “At best regret, at worst forgetfulness,” I sing in the chorus – a tortured concept of memory, no doubt. But I also sing that there is a path to freedom from this bind," Tom Krell says about "New Confusion".

Speaking about "No Light", he adds, "is a song about contemporary LA, a place simply teeming with unspeakable suffering. It is, like LA, paradoxically and fundamentally also a bop. It’s a song I wrote after an interaction I had during the pandemic, something like a scene from Mulholland Drive, a young woman crawling across the ground in the alley behind my house in a white dress screaming about a ‘pig mask.’"

Krell was galvanized following his fifth album, 2018’s dense, noisy and mangled The Anteroom, itself a reaction to 2016’s pop-leaning Care. He finished his PhD in philosophy with a dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics, completing a journey he’d been on since the earliest days of the HTDW project. Krell wanted to retreat deeper into himself, not to go back to basics, exactly, but to instead “find corners of myself that I had never explored” and “get back into the world.”

In 2020, Krell, alongside returning and new collaborators CFCF, Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Trayer Tryon, Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read began work on what would become I Am Toward You. For obvious reasons, this was a year where time took on new shapes—Krell suddenly had a lot more of it, and was mostly alone. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he’d recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of The Anteroom.

Tracklist:

1. New Confusion
2. Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)
3. Crypt Sustain
4. No Light (feat. Anarthia DLT)
5. nothingprayer (feat. Aaron Read, Anenon, Noah Allaire)
6. On It and Around It
7. Song in the Middle
8. Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside
9. A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That's How My Fate is Shown)
10. The Only True Joy on Earth
11. A Secret Within the Voice