Slipping between stark realism and meditative reflection, this is the South London experimental musician’s most intensely introspective album yet.
Klein is a collagist who finds the beauty in pieces that shouldn’t fit together. Though often working with fragments of recognizable melodies—she cites both Beyoncé and Pavarotti as inspirations—the South London experimental artist isn’t interested in simply entertaining. “Anyone can do pop, innit? What sonically I want to hear for myself is stories,” she once said. Her stories don’t shy away from darkness or taboo. In her 2018 musical Care, which she wrote and starred in, she depicted a group of children living in a state-run foster home who stumble upon a Narnia-like fantasy world. She made the case that these hidden parts of our society deserve fairytales, too—albeit distorted ones. On her self-released album Frozen, she is as unflinching as ever, riding that slippage between brutal realism and escapist, meditative reflection.
The murky, industrial first half is the equivalent of lying face down on your bed and letting out an existential groan. It can feel oppressive, like having the weight of the world on your shoulders. The minimalist “U got this,” 15 minutes long, hinges on a scratchy guitar riff and a rush of what sounds like traffic, and it progresses infinitesimally. Two short, jagged songs that follow break the meditative mood. “My friend I just buried him/Another grave,” Klein’s serene, somber double-tracked vocal intones on “another dust,” before reverb-drenched guitar thrashes out her anger on “grit.” Throughout, she pulls listeners in close, then pushes them away, never allowing them to get comfortable. After a half-hour stretch in which it feels like we are alone with Klein, she abruptly introduces other voices via the cut-up crowd noises of the 50-second interlude “reveal itself.” And at the record’s very end, she crashes out on a moment of dissonance with the abrupt, three-second-long “tribute.”
In her most unexpected maneuver, Klein turns the lens outward on the listener. “mark” is a tribute to Mark Duggan—the man who was killed by London’s Met police in August 2011, sparking a week of riots in the UK—and 10 of its 11 minutes are silent. It’s a powerful moment, inviting listeners to reflect on Duggan’s death and the scant progress that the UK has made toward racial justice in the years since it occurred. It’s a brave move for an artist to make in a culture ruled by the skip button, and a testament to Klein’s unyielding commitment to looking directly at tragedy.
Surrounding that emptiness is some of Klein’s most beautiful work. The silence is gradually replaced by a mournful guitar melody and slowed-down cries of “No justice, no peace,” which eventually blur into choral tones. With her vocals buried deep in the mix, Klein sounds ghostly. She creates a vast amount of space in the mix, giving the listener the feeling of standing at the lip of a cavern. It’s beauty with an underlying threat, always just on the brink of overwhelming, but with Klein remaining in control.
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