Back in March we featured the single ‘Euphoria’ by Prudence, the moniker of Australian artist Tom Crandles, saying that the style was “pitched on the no-man’s land between dream pop and post-punk.” Juxtaposition is the key force in Crandles’s sound—new ideas built from the interplay between chaos and harmony, darkness and light—and we’re pleased to report that the debut EP Major Tom, out today on Forged Artifacts, continues in this spirit.
Prudence makes music that is oddly magnetic, Crandles’s experience as a session bass player influencing a sound he calls “a natural disaster of dissonance and melody.” Major Tom “occupies the space between electric and ethereal,” we wrote previously, getting to the heart of EP’s aesthetic, “songs that blend an ominous technological murk with transcendental brightness […] an off-kilter vision that could be a dream or simulation, the only clear fact that the songs are not quite of our world.”
Opener ‘Smile & Nod’ arrives from amidst a cloud of icy synths, an effortlessly pulsating pop song that sighs and aches with an uneasy allure. The vibe is an illustration of the EP as a whole, which Crandles himself describes as an “amalgamation of all things holy and sinister”—capturing the abrasive bitterness, smoky uncertainty and heart-quickening euphoria that come with addictions and relationships of all colours. “I’ll never be what you want me to be,” Crandles sings, “so for now leave unrest to me.” But for all the brooding darkness, the chorus sparkles with life, early signs that there are chinks in Prudence’s atmospheric fog.
How heavy is this ocean?
come lift me from the deep end
and spread salt beneath my skin
so I’m buoyant again
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‘Euphoria’ follows suit, an intravenous shot of slinky pop that’s offset by a thick sense of tension. “A friction between conflicting moods and tempos […] disrupts even the glossy rhythms of the track’s chorus,” we described in the previous piece, “hiding something unchoreographed, near paroxysmal.” Such a pattern is set for Major Tom, urgent pop songs whose rich shadowy texture belies the fact they were recorded by Crandles alone in Margate, Kent. ‘S on S’ sparkles and sighs its way towards an energetic outro, while ‘Save it For Me’ has big bright flashes of synth illuminating an angsty 80s-inflected electrop pop song. Closer ‘Sound of Your Voice’ smoulders in an easy slow burn, Crandles channeling the Gallagher brothers as he delivers his lines with nonchalant intensity.
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On Major Tom, Prudence explores realms both strange and reassuring, disquieting and beautiful. Human traits are wrapped up in a gloominess as grey and chilly as the Cold War-era of the post-punk and new wave it references, revealed only in the intermittent illuminations made so prominent by the twilit tones—the dancing sparkles, the fog-bound will-o’-the-wisps, the great flashes of light.
Major Tom is out today on Forged Artifacts, and you can get it from the Prudence Bandcamp page.
