Design

Gustaf's New York art-punk arrives with the particular energy of people who have read too much theory and decided to make it physical. "Design" — from their debut — distills the band's sensibility: angular guitar lines that feel like they were drawn with a ruler and then slightly bent, rhythms that are simultaneously precise and agitated, the whole thing running at a temperature just slightly above comfortable. Lydia Gammill's vocal delivery is the defining element: deadpan without being affectless, cool without being distant, delivering words with the cadence of someone reading a particularly damning exhibit into the record. The song takes aim at aesthetic systems — the way design, in the broad cultural sense, organizes desire and value, who gets to decide what looks right and what looks wrong, what's aspirational and what's embarrassing. There's dark comedy baked into the performance, a kind of arch awareness that the band is itself an aesthetic product critiquing aesthetic products. The production is deliberately unglossy, the guitars brittle, the bass anchoring things without warmth. This is downtown Manhattan music in the truest sense — confrontational, a little alienating, deeply funny if you're on the right frequency, and utterly uninterested in making you comfortable. Best heard in a cramped venue where everyone is pretending not to be impressed.