Deeper is a band from Chicago, Illinois. On their debut album Deeper (2018), this compact-sounding then-quartet took tightness to an extreme, achieving an almost digital feel. Intricate showers of guitar notes and metallic, razor-thin chords created a kind of aural pointillism brimming with melodies.
At the time they reminded me of Bloc Party, in their ability to combine the jerky, spikey and angular side of post-punk with the kind of fluid melodicism of a Stone Roses or even a Tears for Fears.
Perhaps the precursors to this amalgam of mechanical sophistication with wide-eyed pop sensitivity were Talking Heads and Wire. Like the latter, Deeper too showed signs of experimenting with minimalism and ambience. Their eponymous album contained 9 songs and lasted 26 minutes: short and very much to the point.
Now Deeper, stripped down to a trio, return with another brief and beautiful album. Continuing in a similar avant-pop vein, Auto-Pain adds an even more pronounced dimension of 80’s synth-pop to their limpid, precise sound. This electronic sheen, however, is sourced from that decade’s more experimental and elemental side. It’s as if the band took The Cure’s magnificent single “The Walk” and reimagined it as a full-length LP – less dreamy and more jagged and fronted by Robert Smith’s edgier twin brother.
Deeper’s cold disco has always had a political undercurrent. And though they don’t really sound anything like them, their radical spirit and righteous impulse reminds me of Unwound and especially of the Manic Street Preachers, whose album Futurology pioneered a similar keyboard-inspired ride from autobahn to auto-pain.
Deeper’s songs’ single-coil, taut contrariness is punctuated with howling sirens, shafts and barbed wires of sound, but also with empty intervals of un-spray-painted space. And many of the songs end with in a cyclical, hypnotic and shimmering contrapuntal dance, reminding us that Deeper are concerned not only with exposure, but also with carving out a safe space in which to hurt.