- Par Grindvik and Peder Mannerfelt team up for a pop album you could play at Berghain.
- Peder Mannerfelt has always been one of dance music's slipperiest characters. Recently, the Swedish shapeshifter has made the best dance floor tracks of his 20-plus-year career and dreamy ambient with Klara Lewis, and still finding time to turn out a new Roll The Dice LP. In a recent Bandcamp Interview, Mannerfelt confessed, "I'm constantly thinking, 'Shit, I need to up my game.' I always feel like I have to try harder, and it's competitive in a way, but I think that's good." Clicking play on Arrival, his latest Aasthma release with fellow Swede Pär Grindvik, it's clear that the game has been upped—and then some. Techno kick drums, outsized EDM melodies and pop attitude all come together on Arrival, an album as outlandish as it is enticing.
Arrival is like hyperpop cast far through the looking glass. "Power Ambient Piano Ballad," for example, takes a gentle piano line and vocal refrain and slowly contorts them through a funhouse mirror of feedback. It's a bit like an industrial remix of Charli XCX. Balancing dance floor ferocity and with pop instincts can be a challenge, but the duo have a knack for earworms. "Fall Behind Your Sun" evokes the stadium-sized melancholy of a group like Odesza, while "Lights Out," made with the Shout Out Louds singer Adam Olenius, is like a slightly aggro Chainsmokers track.
HTRK vocalist Jonnine Standish is comparatively gentle on record's best song, "Your Style." Although she's been veering into goth-country territory on the last HTRK album, "Your Style" brings her back to her minimal wave roots, as her melancholy voice bubbles over drums, swung just so to underline and accentuate her breathy voice.
Arrival makes the case that the line between underground techno and Coachella is finer than we might think. The theatrical chords in "We Will Never Change," are primed for a sweaty, dark warehouse but that vibe works just as well for the heartbroken R&B of Canadian vocalist Casey MQ on "3am." Still, the duo do bring their own peculiar touch to these sounds. Between the Reese bassline of "One Million Seconds'' and the claustrophobic dancehall of their Gavsborg collaboration "The Acknowledgment," Arrival is probably still too weird to pull a "B.O.T.A."
Arrival is Mannerfelt's full circle moment. He's kept his feet in both in the world of high budget pop and the outer fringes of techno for a while now, infamously working at the studio responsible for bringing the Swedish touch to the US thanks to hits like Britney Spears' "Toxic." And he has an ongoing collaborative relationship with Fever Ray. On Arrival, Mannerfelt takes from his pop experience, but throws out the rulebook that usually goes with it. You can imagine Mannerfelt and Grindvik in the studio sharing a spliff and laughing at some of their ideas before thinking, "Wow. That actually works." What makes Arrival such a compelling album is how the duo test the elasticity of pop templates, curious to see when the music becomes something else entirely. Let's hope that Dua Lipa catches whiff of this and Grindvik and Mannerfelt end up on her songwriting team.