‘Joy and despair, they come as a pair here’

It’s been four years since we last heard from Pianos Become the Teeth. 2018’s Wait for Love showcased a band, whose name had become so synonymous with pain up until that point, moving on. Wait for Love was triumphant, confident, and comfortable. While not necessarily a ‘happy’ record, it definitely had plenty of joyous moments - much of that album centered around being in love and navigating parenthood for the first time. It seemed the agony everyone had come to expect in Pianos’ music was something of the past, and that in itself was something to celebrate.

But four years is a long time. Where Wait for Love was a celebration, Drift feels more a therapy session. The two albums almost seem like halves of a whole, telling the story of falling in love and watching it fade away. While this palpable darkness hangs over Drift, it seems as if that pain was used as a spark to create what stands as the finest collection of songs this band has ever crafted.

Before going into more detail, one thing must be made explicitly clear - this is a record best listened to with headphones. The amount of attention to detail on display here is astonishing, and much of it is easy to overlook unless everything else is tuned out. While this is the shortest Pianos record in quite some time (Drift’s runtime is nearly identical to that of 2012’s now-classic The Lack Long After, despite being two tracks longer), they have never released a record this dense before. While the sheer amount of layering can be dizzying at first, it forces each listen to be unique, and therefore more rewarding than the last. Drift is a grower - it is simply impossible to digest everything here on first listen.

While songs like ‘Out of Sight’, ‘The Days’, and standout ‘Buckley’ are some of the most immediately impressive songs in the bands’ discography, it’s the more detailed moments found in tracks like ‘The Tricks’, ‘Easy’, and ‘Pair’ that really make Drift so special. ‘The Tricks’ is a driving number about lost love, propelled forward by a pummeling rhythm section and haunting call-and-response guitars. This push-pull dynamic between the instruments culminates in a completely unexpected structural breakdown just past the 1:00 mark. Distorted drum samples and fuzzed-out bass frame the refrain of “it’s slipping away from us” in an ominous light, before returning to the initial groove of the song like nothing ever happened. 

‘Easy’ is more subdued than the three tracks before it, and allows the first moment for this monster of a record to breathe. The simplicity of this song allows the lyrics to take center stage - a plea to ‘please keep saving me’ is repeated several times, each instance feeling more urgent than the last.

While the first eight songs on Drift are a feat in their own right, it’s the final two songs on Pianos Become the Teeth’s fifth album that put a stake in the ground that this is their magnum opus. ‘Buckley’ is Pianos by the numbers - full of tension, heavy rhythms, massive dynamic shifts, and haunting lyrics. That said, they have never written a song in this style as well as this one. ‘Buckley’ begins quietly, before being ushered in by a dramatic shift in confidence behind the lyric ‘Luck ran out, was never found / Like Buckley, forever down’. The song builds to a collapse around 1:45, where the band regroups and pulls itself together behind laments of ‘not meeting your needs’ and the faint sounds of an argument. After this intermission, the song takes off and continues to grow until it becomes one of the heaviest tracks this band has written in years.

After ‘Buckley’ is album closer ‘Pair’, which is centered around themes of legacy and the want to leave a positive impact on one’s loved ones, even if they aren’t in the protagonist’s anticipated role for them to be in. All of the pain on display on Drift culminates in a hypnotic beauty here, with added string arrangement making this moment feel triumphant. This feeling quickly fades behind the lyrics ‘Before we burn finally / Smoke and clouds will look the same / I’ll be the dust in your lungs as I drift away’. As quietly as Drift entered, it exits the same.

With Drift, Pianos Become the Teeth have created a body of work that rivals the best in their immaculate discography. It is truly the embodiment of beauty out of agony, an astounding 37-minute epic meticulously crafted by a veteran band with plenty of gas left in the tank. 

10/10