It’s easy for most artists to describe their songs or albums as “cathartic.” The Oxford Dictionary describes “cathartic” as “providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions.”
That, my friends, is why we consume music. Why artists make music. Yet, some cases of catharsis can be said to be deeper, more genuine, more necessary.
On the release day of New York-based synth-pop trio Nation of Language’s newest and fourth album, Dance Called Memory, lead singer and guitarist Ian Richard Devaney shared on social media:
Much of this one was born from a deeply low point where I was experiencing a string of losses/stumbles — but we took that moment and tried to channel it into something cathartic. The process itself proved to be a big part of the healing journey for me. So here I am, excited to share something that was born out of darkness, hoping that it helps us see more of ourselves in each other. We’ve also just begun about ten weeks of touring, so hopefully we’ll find ourselves in the same crowded room as many of you soon, celebrating the ride we’re all on.
If a string of losses and stumbles are the thread that binds these new songs together, the end of that line is clearly reaching out for the comfort of humanity. So it makes total sense that also through these new songs, the OMD-inspired sounds of Nation of Language — on the spectrum of synth, vacillating between the humanness of Brian Eno and the chilled precision of Kraftwerk — would lean more heavily toward Eno’s philosophy here.
I talked to Devaney before the band’s visit to Milwaukee’s Turner Hall this Saturday about turning detached and chilly into warm and vibrant — not just sonically, but in every dimension. We also chatted about calling on themselves and their fans to come to the dancefloor, and lose their troubles (and themselves) through plain old catharsis.
Nation of Language interview highlights
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On making synths sound more human and embracing imperfection:
Kraftwerk, for us, is such a foundational sonic influence. But they were very intentionally making things sound very cold and robotic because they were doing so in a response to their times, which was like just after the hippies, and they wanted to be an alternative I guess. Now we have actual robots making music, and I think it’s good to just try to inject as much unpredictability and allow mistakes, provided they don't distract from the emotional message of the song.
You don't want something in there that’s gonna take you out of the listening experience, but we rarely did more than a handful of takes on any instrument. And even just in the songwriting, a lot more of the songs are kind of rooted in the guitar, of which every take is not gonna be exactly the same, especially if I'm the one that's playing it [laughs]. Just making it feel like the album kind of breathes in a way and everything isn’t perfectly gridded, mapped and auto-tuned.
We would talk in the studio about New Order — an example of a band where, when you listen to early New Order especially, it's like they…suck at playing those instruments. [Pauses] Well, no, that's too far. But a lot of the songs are super sloppy and mixed very weirdly and not the way that a pop song is traditionally done. In certain ways, they each rip on their own instruments, but it feels very shambolic when it's together.
Guitar was not my first instrument; I took like one lesson from my older brother's friend and from then on just figured stuff out. I'm really not good at guitar. I can pretty much only play our songs. And with Aidan, she first started learning synth to join this band.
While we were recording, while one person was playing the keyboard, I'd be grabbing the knobs of the synth and messing with them. And our producer, Nick Millhiser, he might go and flip on the tape-delay box and start turning the knobs, and the sound would start getting all weird and wobbly.
I think Nick’s philosophy in general is that he's really not about things like autotune. He's really not about absolutely perfectly digitally synced delays. He really likes when things sort of float around the beat. And so while we're not recording to tape, we are using a computer to take it all in. Yet it’s a very analog approach to recording synthesizers, favoring things in the physical world that you can touch and manipulate over the digital.
On working with producer Nick Millhiser (who’s worked with LCD Soundsystem):
Things will seem hands-off until he reaches a hand in and creates some chaos to sort of throw you off your game and make you adapt a little bit. And I think there's very much just a spirit of like, “We're in this studio and we have all these knobs we can twist and switches we can flip. Why wouldn't we see what happens if we just mess with stuff?”
The studio is a lot less fun when you see it as a checklist. You can still be sort of constructive and experimental at the same time. Really, it should feel like play as much as possible, I think.
The second song on the album, “In Another Life,” when I brought that to the studio, I envisioned it as much more sad and lilting in nature. There's this song “Idioteque” by Radiohead, and Nick brought in that sort of relentless, almost ’90s electronic percussion aspect to it.
He's doing crazy stuff and re-routing the drums through synthesizers so the sound gets all crunched and messed up, and it definitely puts you in a position where you're thinking to yourself, “I thought I knew what this song is, and now I'm kind of just like, we'll figure it out in the end, in the most exciting way.”
On the album’s thematic focus on struggle, loss and endings:
The themes are of loss and change and how quickly those things can pile onto each other faster than you're ready for. I'm in my mid-30s now, and it’s been the first time that I’ve had to start taking antidepressants and going to therapy. …
It was this very sort of bizarre, overwhelmed feeling where, to a degree when you're in your mid-30s, you feel like you've seen a fair amount. And you think, “Well, I haven't needed antidepressants so far, so I probably won't.” And then, all of the sudden, you do. Just the way that life can catch you off-guard and try to crush you at times definitely played into a lot of the lyrics.
“Now That You're Gone” is one of the songs that is just straight up about death. It's about my godfather who died from ALS. My parents took care of him in their house for the last several months of his life. They were able to take on this home care in addition to everything else they were doing. …
It played into a number of the other themes of the record in terms of friendships that had fallen apart in my own life where you're dealing with this expectation of — versus the reality of — “Oh, I thought that these people would be with me forever and we could be taking care of each other.” Then, when that doesn't pan out and you sort of see it illustrated so beautifully with your own parents, it makes it extra difficult in your own head.
On the album title, Dance Called Memory:
Aidan found that title in a poetry book by the writer Anne Carson called The Beauty of the Husband. For a while, I wanted the album title to come from the lyrics of the record. That tends to be sort of the thing that I default to, and I kept scouring through everything, and there was nothing that felt like it wasn't just too specific to the one song that it came from.
The Beauty of the Husband was a book she had read a little while ago, and she's a very active reader in earmarking pages and underlining things and such, and she handed me this copy of the book with “Dance Called Memory” underlined. The line that Anne Carson says is like, “What is the nature of the dance called memory?” I see it as your memories are things that you're either trying to pull yourself closer to or push them away.
I envision it as a very physical relationship to your own past and how you want to remember it or how it wants to be remembered. There's a kind of ducking and weaving and physicality to contending with yourself and how things were.
And so, when she handed me the book with that underlined, at that point I was still so set on it coming from the lyrics, and I set it down and kept working. But then my eye just kept going back to that page with it open and underlined until I was like, “I obviously can't ignore this. My brain just keeps saying this phrase over and over again in my head.”
I feel like in the artistic process when you get something really stuck in your mind that you feel is the muse trying to send you a message like, “This is the thing. Pay attention to this,” and indulging in the magic of that is always important, I think.
On leaning into vulnerability through music (and dancing):
Bringing it back around to the AI music conversation, I feel like that’s one of the things we as artists can all lean into is that sort of communal vulnerability. It's one of the things that I just love about playing live and didn't realize how much I missed until COVID, when we couldn't play live.
Just people feeling like they can let their guard down in front of you and in front of each other, and that you can let your guard down, is a really special thing — something that seems to become more and more rare as we're more and more just in the “box” of the computer or the phone.
