Cooking Up Something Good

This late-period DeMarco track operates at a remove from the warmer, more melodically immediate work of his earlier albums — slower, more opaque, built on a loop-like repetition that has a mantra quality, as though the song is trying to get somewhere by staying still. The guitars are more processed here, slightly more distant, the rhythm section spare and unhurried to the point of feeling almost suspended. Production-wise it reflects the more stripped-back, hypnotic direction of Here Comes the Cowboy — less chord movement, more texture and atmosphere, willing to linger in a single groove longer than is comfortable. DeMarco's vocal sits in a flatter, more affectless register than his earlier work, the delivery almost deadpan, which creates an odd tension with the cheerful implication of the title. The lyrical sense is elliptical, more about mood than narrative — something being assembled or prepared, something not quite ready to be revealed. Emotionally it functions as a kind of suspension, a feeling of being between states, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, just occupied with the process of something. Culturally it signals a shift in his work toward the stranger, more ruminative territory he has been exploring since the mid-2010s — less romantic, more philosophical in an offhand way. This is a song for late nights working alone, when the task at hand has become its own kind of meditation.