Double Negative is a journey into the chilling unknown. A 48-minute sleigh ride into a fractured and distorted musical tundra.

Low hails from Duluth, Minnesota. A city perched over the northern tip of Lake Superior; a city known for its bitter cold and stunning scenery. As a band, Low operates a conduit for their icy home, mirroring their surroundings like the frozen waters of Lake Superior. Their music is hypotonic and slow -nay- glacial, channeling the spirit of the snow that coats their home. Their twelfth studio album, Double Negative, is no stranger to this motif.

Double Negative is the embodiment of fresh snow on a cold night, each and every sound muffled and muted, yet delightfully complex.

The album opens with the track Quorum, a deconstructed tune which sounds as if white noise became sentient and decided to repeatedly gore itself (but - like, in a good way). This track bleeds sound, every hole or gash a faucet for a noise, a blip, or a haunting vocal line. As the track progresses, it slowly builds in intensity, trembling and panning across the speakers rapidly, as if violently shaking the listener by the ears. At its crescendo, it collapses into itself. Then, taking the listener by the hand, gently drags them into the next track, Dancing and Blood. A track defined by an almost paradoxical feeling of disassociation and claustrophobia. At its epicenter, the track features an all-encompassing rhythm that can only be described as “Tell Tale Heart”-esque. A muffled heart beat drum that feels as if its seeping from below the floorboards of the song, trying to escape.

A few of the songs on this album are solely noise tracks, but do not let that discourage you from listening. Tracks like The Son, The Sun are not ambient solely for the sake of being ambient, but instead operate as extensions of the varied sound palette that Low deploys for this album. They operate as a form of audible hypnosis, caressing the listener into a sense of wonder, a demonstration of the depth inherent in auditory minimalism. Double Negative as an album does this beautifully, each song is like a sample of an extraordinary impressionistic painting. Intense flashes of sounds and distortion that seem unintelligible up close, but display stupefying depth and beauty, when explored in total.

Tracks like Tempest, which is enveloped in prickly blanket of noise and distortion, demonstrates Low’s ability to bend the conventional concept of a song without diminishing the experience as a listener, there is no chorus to be found here. At the same time, Low does not reject conventional song phrasing throughout the entirety of the album. The final song, Disarray, is arguably one of the best tracks on the album and does not stray from the conventions of verses, choruses, and bridges. In fact, it glides seamlessly through each section, propelled by pumping bass and drum lines, drenched by a mourning vocal chorale whose lyrics coat the finale, dripping with a sadness as tangible as a transparent pool. Low proves that in order to push the envelope, you’ve got to have a understanding of the basics, and by god do they understand how to make a good song.