With sincere, resolute songwriting and a more accessible sound, the latest album from the New York quartet feels more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club.
Even at its brawniest, Parquet Courts’ music has always explored questions of knowledge and the self, freedom and desire, responsibility and autonomy. Where some bands might sink in such existential quagmires, the New York quartet have only been propelled by their inquiries. With every album since their 2012 breakthrough Light Up Gold , their aperture has widened, allowing them to take in blues, western noir, and even some dub. Though the lyric sheet is still loaded with questions about the often unreasonable nature of life in the 21st century, on their latest album, Sympathy for Life, Parquet Courts abandon the fiction of certainty, take the elevator back to street level, and get the people moving.
They’ve flirted with drum machines and dance rhythms before—see, for example, their unsettlingly weird 2018 performance on Ellen—but the big beats on Sympathy for Life feel more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club. Much of the album was written during lengthy jam sessions that the band later stitched into coherent tracks, giving it a starry sense of possibility they’ve previously reached for but have never quite been able to grasp. Co-frontman Austin Brown leads the way, continuing to push his bandmates beyond the kraft-paper textures of their early records. The group luxuriates in the open space of the title track, allowing drummer Max Savage’s acid-house beat to pump until its three minutes feel as dilated as a 12" dance mix. A coda of switchbacks and mild sound-collaging turns co-frontman A. Savage’s “Trullo” into the kind of song the Beastie Boys tagged onto their mid-period records, bongos and all. Producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish give the band a much broader sound field—this is the first Parquet Courts record you’ll want to hear on good headphones—and they take full advantage of the space, Brown’s vocals wandering its edges in “Plant Life” while a melodica and piston-pumping beat keep the song grounded.
Like any good groove, the songs on Sympathy for Life are powered by tension. The album balances critique and celebration, allowing each to spill into the other. In “Application/Apparatus,” Savage frames a rideshare driver as an “operating mechanism” at the mercy of both the instructions given by their phone and the larger systems of war, migration, and capital that forced them into the car in the first place. The song glides by on a beat so precisely engineered and so brightly spangled with noise, it takes several listens to internalize the linguistic and ethical complexity of the story. Even then, it’s hard to deny the pure rush of joy that comes when the drum machine pushes the beat into overdrive. Both songwriters are interested in how it feels to have your sense of self manipulated by technology, how a pristine feed of recommended shows, music, and products can be both flattering—if you like interesting stuff, you must be interesting—and dehumanizing at the same time. “Algorithm waltz sets the pace/Indicates an authentic taste/Tell me what I love,” Savage sings in “Just Shadows.” He frog-marches his words through a melody so jaunty and upbeat it feels like he’s leading a sarcastic parade, the song’s forced cheeriness mirroring the way it can feel to scroll the Instagram Explore tab, searching for a jolt of adrenaline.
As he often does, Savage writes about wandering through New York City, hoping to shake loose some bit of understanding. Twice he decides to take in a movie. Wherever he goes, he’s hounded by his chosen isolation—“How many days of life will I spend underground?” he asks—even when it offers him solace, as when he wanders into La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, removes his shoes, and centers himself among the glowing pink and purple lights and the buzzing microtones. At home, he runs out of things to watch and is both debased and liberated by the experience, his empty queue making him feel “like an inmate that’s finished his term.” Throughout Sympathy for Life, he’s chased by the specific dread that comes when you try to get a clear view of yourself in the reflection of a dark screen.
Though Savage’s attempts to come to grips with himself provide some of the album’s greatest moments of insight, they have a strange way of feeling almost beside the point, vestiges of a way of life both he and the band are in the process of shedding in an attempt to become more open-hearted. When Savage connects the impulse behind the consumerist present to the brutality of the colonialist past in “Homo Sapien”—both have been “hardwired to your desire”—Sean Yeaton’s bass drops with the realization; it’s a level of emotional awareness that goes beyond the righteous anger they cultivated on Wide Awake!. These songs aren’t merely interested in how bad things can be, they’re searching for liberation in syncopation.
Compared to the rest of their catalogue, Sympathy for Life feels broadly accessible—“Plant Life” suggests Lorde isn’t the only artist who’s been spinning Screamadelica—but that accessibility seems driven by a sense of responsibility. “No city, it’s all community,” Brown sings between calls to action in “Marathon of Anger,” a stark contrast with Human Performance’s “One Man, No City,” which carried essentially the same message but padded it in self-conscious snark. Sympathy for Life treats it more like a mission statement: The places we live aren’t just the sites of our consumption, they’re also the spaces we share, and that means we have to understand and help one another. “We’ve got the power,” they sing together, and they mean all of us.
It can be strange to hear a band who made their name by refusing to be pinned down sound so sincere and resolute. But like Talking Heads before them, the move from punk to dance has meant not only an expansion of what Parquet Courts sound like, but also of what they mean, who they are, and, crucially, who they want to be for. Though the band may still have their hangups, this album shows they know when to stop thinking and when to start moving.
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