In hindsight, coming of age in the ’90s was a blessed thing. There was a well-spring of creativity and art bursting out of every city across the country. From the cobbled streets of Boston to the misty grey skies of Seattle, the spawn of punk rock dealt a final blow to the bloated self-importance of over-produced pop music and hair metal.
At the time, I played in bands and delivered food for a Chinese food restaurant. On any given evening there would be a half dozen musicians bagging wonton chips in the back of the kitchen, waiting for our next run. All of us were in our early twenties, and none of us had any aspirations beyond practicing when we got off work, and playing a show on a Friday night for a few bucks and localized glory. Everyone wanted to be famous, but by our own design.
Times have changed and that Chinese food restaurant has long been closed. I find it hard to believe that any kid in their twenties would be able to pay their rent by driving for Papa John’s now like we did back in the day. A college education—which most of us lugging our Marshall amps around knew—would be our fall back, a way to catch up with the masses if our dreams went array (which they always did). In 2025, even that’s not a guarantee. Door Dash, Uber, the gig economy, low-paying entry level jobs with no hope of moving up: all of this has defined Gen Z, and has left many looking down at their feet instead of up to the skies.
Nashville experimental act total wife exist in this purgatory of non-success. Their music represents a generation who get the fame we could only dream of back in the Clinton era, but do so at an enormous cost. In a world where a high school influencer can gather up three million followers just by dancing for a few seconds, fame is something that isn’t earned so much as it’s just given. And those that don’t achieve this seem to wallow in a cesspool of uncertainty, shame and self-consciousness.
On their 2023 debut in/out, the band seemed to conjure up the digital consciousness of a world that’s lived in the palm of our hands. The music sprung from the polluted cobalt mines of the Congo to the sweat-shop assembly lines of Zhengzhou city in China to finally end up in a posh, sterilized Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. The music on their debut album represented the process—an amalgamation of sweat, poverty, greenhouse gases and the uncontrolled opulence of capitalism. And yet, in/out still acknowledged our quest for human communication.
On their new album come back down, Luna Kupper and Ash Richter crawl into the mechanisms of that same handheld device, traveling through the motherboard of Gen Z existence. The album lacks the organic moments of in/out and instead offers an abrasive, disturbing treatise on being literal slaves to our digital masters.
It starts off innocently enough. The Slint-like guitars of “in my head” creep through the undergrowth of a wetland forest, serpentine and reptilian. Guitars grow into a shimmering glory, easing into a crescendo of ominous portents before dropping back down. The vocals are wisps of ideas, barely audible over the gently-picked guitars. By contrast, the follow-up song “peaches” offers the first hint of My Bloody Valentine–style guitars. The song lingers underwater, slithers of light glimmering through the whitecaps of waves. Slightly off-kilter and dissonant, the snap of the snare drum punctuates the noise with an insistent clatter, a bubble rising to the surface.
The interstitial dial-up energy of “internetsupermagazine” ushers in the glitchy, electronic breakbeat of “naoisa,” a song that exists in the realm of zeroes and ones, a computer code struggling to find its own grasp on organic reality. This song—and others that total wife compose—exist in a digital universe, as if the phones that Gen Z have been inextricably tied to are trying to communicate to them out of a sense of desperation: ‘LOOK UP’, they seem to implore, ‘AND EMBRACE THE LIVING BREATHING WORLD AROUND YOU!’
“second spring” is the first song on the album that comes as close to a ‘single’ as you can get. Like ‘peaches’ the song has guitars that twist and swell around a simple three-note melody played on the keyboard. Vocals drift like smoke from a swamp-fire, casting the song in a hallucinatory haze of hope. The outro is a noisy, distorted explosion before transitioning to “still asleep”, which acts as a counterpart to “second spring”. Clean guitars echo over dry, organic-sounding drums, while heavily affected distortion lends the song a surprising earnestness. It’s a joyous, playful tune, with a compelling Pavement-like outro. Kupper and Richter, the motherboard of total wife, are at their best when they get adventurous, as their exploration of electronic sounds are unique and terrifying in their own right.
“chloe” is a blur of chaotic guitars and Beck-like percussion. total wife’s shoegaze is less about social-paralysis fueled by anxiety and more about boots splattered in the blood of your enemy. Regardless, both are fueled by copious amounts of SSRIs and oxycontin. In the liner notes, Luna Kupper references “Twin Peaks”, and the music of total wife definitely exists in a Lynch-ian world filtered through psychedelics and insomnia. “chloe” is a great example of this homage at work.
“ofersi13” is a summation of all the songs that came before it. According to the band:
‘Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band’s own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars.” In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction.’
“ofersi13” is an industrial explosion of abrasive, angry fractal noises—the sound of a super-computer blasted to bits by high-frequency radiation. Callous, uncaring, and horrifying, it’s an apt penultimate track for an album that seems to collapse under its own weight.
The last song was the single that turned me on to the band. “make it last” is a blast of shoegaze power, looking down to make sure they can pick up all the shotgun shells they’ve fired off. Aggressive and confident, “make it last” takes the best noise of My Bloody Valentine and packages it for a new, smaller generation. It’s a song that’s made to fit the six-inch screen of a phone, existing as another reel scrolled through in the incessant quest for a fulfillment that will never come.
come back down is asking a generation to move from the digital to the analog, to find room in the organic fractals of their lives for connection and fulfillment. Every generation has sought a life that feels complete and connected, yet today’s world is as fractured as it has ever been. total wife is the sound of the phone screen shattering, a battery on two percent, and a Tik Tok channel getting banned. And yet, they’ve also found room to understand that as long as we wander through this world as flesh and blood, interacting with the aura of life that permeates this great ball of rock and gas, there’s always a chance that we’ll find what we want and what we need.
