I Am Toward You

In his 13 years recording as How To Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. In Krell’s musical world, the weight of a sample comes from his history with it, the meaning of a lyric fragment is stretched and distorted, its core skirting universal interpretation in favor of specificity. On new album "I Am Toward You", his first new music in nearly six years, Krell was in search of a return to the open-hearted, uncynical approach to music making that he adopted as a kid, and carried through the release of his haunting breakthrough debut, 2010’s Love Remains, when he was making music in relative anonymity with little external pressure. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he’d recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of previous albums to create some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic music to date,