Week of 11/17: dltzk, Camp Cope, Big Thief, Titus Andronicus
Eli examines the intersection of emo and digicore, Miranda ups a perfect song for pre-work dread, Michael can't wait to say Big Thief's new album title out loud, and Eric remembers they love Titus.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
dltzk — “search party”
Eli Enis:
We’ve finally reached the point of intersection between what emo kids consider emo and what emo-rap kids consider emo-rap. I’m being purposefully cautious with my definitions here because the genres — or rather, scenes — I’m writing about do not have the same framework for musical categorization that I and most other music writers do, and the thesis of this blog post is that both of these musical worlds that developed from completely different aisles of the internet are now basically doing the Spiderman pointing meme, so I don’t really think sonic verbiage serves much purpose here outside of background context. That said, background context is fun, and if you’re an Endless Scroll subscriber reading this, then chances are you’re more ingrained in the Rock side of emo than the Rap, so let me explain.
Now that I’ve used emo-rap to put a mental picture in your head that probably looks something like Lil Peep, Juice WRLD or even 24KGoldn if we’re talking the Panic! at the Disco version of emo-rap, I’m going to stop using it right now because the genre that actually matters in this instance is Digicore. Although many of its most notable figures (glaive, ericdoa, quinn, d0llywood1) were awkwardly folded into hyperpop last year despite sounding about as similar to 100 gecs as any one of their zillion influences that they’re constantly smushing together, and despite me not understanding what digicore was at the top of 2021, as I didn’t yet see what have now become glaringly obvious distinctions between the music of, say, midwxst and Dorian Electra, I now see it as an idiom with a fairly recognizable and explainable sound.
In as brief a definition as I can muster: digicore drags emo-rap’s cadences and pathos into the same project file with hyperpop’s playful auto-tune and its open-source embrace of myriad EDM beats, as well as other SoundCloud micro-scenes like Plugg and rage rap. If you stripped away the vocal manipulation and flattened out the beats into simple guitar loops, it’d basically sound like Peep-era emo-rap. But with all of its other flair, it’s something else entirely, and there’s a generous amount of wiggle room for experimentation. As music being made predominantly by teenagers who are still developing their own tastes in real time, you might hear an artist rapping over a dnb breakbeat in one song and then over a spindly acoustic guitar sample on the next.
The latter is where this music begins to sound a lot like what’s going on in what’s half-shruggingly become referred to as fifth-wave emo, which has the same borderless approach to genre culling as the most interesting digicore artists. While both columns of emo in the early-mid-2010s (emo-rap and fourth-wave, i.e. revival-era emo) were both in conversation with Nineties emo, whether through samples or obvious songwriting callbacks, the genres couldn’t have sounded more different. Adam McIlwee leaving Tigers Jaw to kickstart Wicca Phase was baffling and incongruent with the type of emo that his former band and others (TWIABP, You Blew It, Balance & Composure, etc.) were making. Now, if a member of fifth-wave emo kingpins Glass Beach — who are as much of a synthy, progressive internet music band as they are a classical Rock act — decided they wanted to start doing Yung Lean homage over blown-out 808s, no one would bat an eye.
Which finally brings me to this new dltzk album, which I’ve seen capture the attention of old-school emo lovers and 16-year-old Carti stans alike. Similar to quinn’s (i.e. osquinn, i.e. p4rkr on Spotify) formless, stark and only briefly overstimulating debut album from back in the fall, the record has a surprisingly wide dynamic range that stretches from lo-fi acoustic bedroom pop-punk to explosive emo-pop ragers that sound like Bladee covering the most bombastic Say Anything songs. Speaking of Bladee, his early 2020 album, Exeter — a collection of muffled, bristly emo-folk with nasally, breathy vocals that sound like the unsettling beauty of Midsommar percolating through auto-tune — is already showing its influence on this world. In ten years, it might be one of his most influential releases.
What really struck me about the dltzk record is that a song like “search party” — which is five minutes long by the way, and therefore one of the longest digicore songs I’ve ever heard that isn’t a cypher — really doesn’t sound that different from the new Snow Ellet single, or if it were a little more lo-fi, a song from that Hey, ILY EP from earlier this year. I don’t know if dltzk is familiar with Crying’s Beyond the Fleeting Gales, but if he heard it then I’m sure it would become as much of a reference point as it is for many of the young emo acts who are cropping up in the wake of Glass Beach and Weatherday. I don’t know how much crossover we’ll actually see between these two distinctly internet-bred worlds (there’s no regional scene for digicore or fifth-wave emo), but these similarities are a nice reminder that for as insurmountably vast and lonely as the internet often feels, it can still be such a small world.
Camp Cope - “Blue”
Miranda Reinert:
It’s been four years since Camp Cope has put out any music and in that span I’ve only grown to love all of it more. It seems like every few months I’ll stumble upon a song of theirs that I can’t shake. Their self-titled has always been a favorite, but in the years since How To Socialise and Make Friends I’ve found myself developing new affection for songs that didn’t hit me immediately after it came out.
Despite not too much musical output or live performance (obviously) in the last few years, Camp Cope hasn’t been too far from my mind especially this year. That’s mostly because I follow their bassist, Kelly Hellmrich, on TikTok and it’s just about the whole reason I log on. I like her account on there usually because it just feels calming and I think she’s funny, but I also found out they were releasing their new song “Blue” through the clock app. I also saw some criticisms of the song through her posting a video. It was people complaining that it sounds dull, which got me thinking about what it is I like about Camp Cope and the criticisms of the band’s sound I’ve seen in the past. Usually to the effect of not having enough going on instrumentally, but I think the three piece nature contributes to what makes the band special. Every song is arranged in a way that feels exactly right. The pared back nature of being a three piece allows each part of the band to shine in a way I’m not sure any other band right now can compare to.
As always, the arrangements on “Blue” frame Georgia Maq’s voice perfectly. And as always, the lyrics bounce between funny and sentimental and a touch resentful. They’ve upped the harmonies, but what can I say! It’s a killer Camp Cope song in all the ways I want a Camp Cope song to be. It’s catchy, it’s succinct, it’s a perfect song to listen to in the morning while sitting in your car outside your job dreading going inside. Or at least that’s how I’ve been listening to it.
Big Thief - “Time Escaping”
Michael Brooks:
Next year, Big Thief are returning from God knows where with a double album called Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, a phrase I can’t wait to say out loud for the first time. I think it’s awesome that Big Thief are at a point in their career where they can title an album something ridiculous like Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You and we just have to accept it. Alongside their announcement of the best album title of 2022 they also shared a new single called “Time Escaping,” a really great tune that shakes up the standard Big Thief songwriting formula just enough to make things interesting.
The band has been slowly releasing new music since August, making “Time Escaping” the fifth?! single from their upcoming record. If you hate long album rollouts (and I know some of you do) then you should try to avoid any Big Thief news until the album drops in February, which thankfully isn’t all that far away. If I’m being completely honest with you, I don’t think this album rollout has seemed very long at all—I don’t know if that’s because they dropped four of the singles before they actually announced the album or if it’s because I’ve lost track of time entirely. I was off work for a week and I honestly couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened to me. The only thing I remember is this weird new single from Big Thief, which is why I’m writing about it right now. Man, I hope we get more weird Big Thief songs on this new album. If you ran into Adrianne Lenker or Buck Meek at the grocery store and asked them where the soup was, I wonder if they would give you a normal answer or if maybe they would give you a riddle to solve.
Titus Andronicus — “Dimed Out”
Eric Bennett:
Last night, I saw Titus Andronicus on their 10th Anniversary tour of The Monitor. I like Titus, but it wasn’t until the band started playing that I remembered just how much I like them, and how many of their songs I know the words to. They were a band I absorbed partially by osmosis, as older friends in college shared Local Business and The Monitor with me in an attempt to shape my taste. I took to most of it, but it never became something I gravitated towards. Another stray thought I had as Patrick Stickles and company took the stage was “wow, [redacted name of Titus fan friend] looked exactly like Patrick in college, I wonder if that was intentional”
Before playing through the album in full, the band played some highlights from their other records, including “Dimed Out” from 2015’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy. Dimed Out is maybe the only song from that record I took to, but I love it all the same. It’s a track that feels like an experiment, though not one that feels experimental. It’s an uproarious bar rock song, but one that asks “What if there were a song that was like, 80% the hook?” The amount of time it’s asking you to shout back is nearly constant, and it only makes it more fun. Plus, because there are so few lyrics, it's an easy one to learn the words to, with minimal time mimicking singing when you don't know the next line. There weren’t any songs the band played last night that didn’t shine brighter in a live setting, but “Dimed Out” is the one standing out to me in the post-show afterglow.