Smiling Off

Where "Glazin" drifts, "Smiling Off" lists and lurches — Black Dice here work with a more destabilized sense of groove, as if a rhythm track has been left out in the sun too long and warped into something almost unrecognizable. Synth tones clot and separate, bright candy-colored patches of sound bumping against low murmuring undertow. The production has the texture of melted plastic: rigid structures softened into slow droop. What's uncanny about Black Dice at this moment in their catalog is the way derangement reads as cheerful — there's nothing menacing in "Smiling Off," only a profound cognitive dislocation that somehow feels playful. The title earns its keep: the emotional affect is somewhere between a grin and a flatline, a smile that's come unmoored from whatever caused it. Bass frequencies bubble up intermittently, providing momentary anchor before dissolving again. This is experimental music that doesn't perform difficulty — it simply exists in a register beyond conventional pleasure without being hostile to the listener. The cultural lineage runs through Suicide's motorik weirdness and the No-Neck Blues Band's collective smear, arriving somewhere uniquely American and uniquely strange. You'd put this on in a room where conversation has exhausted itself, where people have stopped trying to communicate and are simply coexisting in space together, each person's attention wandering to different corners of the same sonic environment.