For a moment, the image was everywhere: the most famous teenager in music, sticking out her tongue and unfurling a shirt reading “No music on a dead planet.” The specter of climate change haunts modern pop: Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey croon about fires in Los Angeles, Grimes embraces global destruction, the 1975 shout “fossil fueling masturbation.” Of course the crisis trickled into festival-core electronica—possibly the genre best equipped to depict the throb and disarray of a decaying world. On his new album, Planet’s Mad, “Harlem Shake” producer Baauer again tries to outrun one-hit-wonder status, this time using battering-ram drums and dancefloor fracas to soundtrack planetary destruction. The clumsy twist is that Baauer means it literally: Through a set of accompanying videos and forced sonic cues, he attempts to convey the tale of a rogue planet crashing into Earth, filling our world with aliens looking to party.
The conceit works when the songs evoke chaos, tangling up tightly controlled instrumentals into an all-out mash. On the title track, sirens wind and screech as the beat builds; a bassline reminiscent of James Bond plunges into thwacking drums. For a producer who gravitates towards trap and tropical house, it’s startlingly guitar-heavy, and the instrumental gnarl creates a lively vision of dystopia—all bang, no whimper. “Aether” erupts in frenetic hi-hats and titanic bass, the notes sounding like muted, glitching screams as they spiral and leap. “Cool One Seven One” opens on a smattering of laughter, climbing with the chatter of a faraway crowd, until the steadily ticking beat and flurry of beeps crescendo in the kind of bassline that blows out speakers. This isn’t necessarily club fodder, but Baauer retains the cavernous bass and drum shuffles that played well at frat parties and proms; most of these tracks have the power to wobble through your body.
The sci-fi narrative disrupts this flow, though, and the interruptions of Baauer’s robot narrator are grating. “Tempo has reached critical level,” says a monotone announcer in “Cool One Seven One.” “This is an emergency.” “Rhythm… sound… rhythm… sound,” a glitchy voice repeats on “Hot 44,” only abating after an avalanche of a beat drop. Countering these are the presumably human voices Baauer employs when his songs soften and slow, a device that only emphasizes how jarring all the beeps and buzzes are. At the end of “Planck,” a mournful sigh floats over a synth; on “Pizzawalla,” one of the few moments the album lurches towards hip-hop, a prayer-like vocal undulates over a wispy chord before getting chopped up over the drums.
Baauer’s last album was stacked with features, including a Future and Pusha T. collab and an M.I.A. banger. On Planet’s Mad, the only guest vocalist is English singer Bipolar Sunshine, who’s best known for crooning on DJ Snake’s diet trop-house hit “The Middle.” “The pain is too strong to hold in,” he cries through AutoTune on “Home.” “I’m on my way, so don’t change your pin.” It’s a sterile, palatable pop song that feels jarringly out of place; it doesn’t make sense in the flimsy alien chronicle, and musically it has nothing to do with the clanging bedlam that animates the rest of the album. Baauer has been pointedly self-aware about his work in the past (he once said he “hated” “Harlem Shake”), but his latest songs are too jittery and goofy to land. Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.
Buy: Rough Trade
(popitrecords.com.)