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Heads Up

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  • Rough Trade

Warpaint’s new album is said to be informed by recent hip-hop and R&B but it ultimately hews closely to the moody downtempo rock they’re known for.

There’s a difference between sleepy-eyed music and music that just puts you to sleep. If Warpaint have made a career out of walking the fine line between the two, your enjoyment of the band naturally depends on which side of that line you see them. Does the L.A. quartet’s anesthetizing approach to downtempo rock create tension out of restraint or does it simply lack enough friction to generate heat? Heads Up, the band’s third full-length, probably won’t change whatever opinion you already have.

When we last heard from Warpaint on their 2014 self-titled album, they were tucking the cerebral distance of post-rock into tight pop songs. But if that album staked out a middle ground between, say Tortoise and Broken Bells, Heads Up leans more heavily in a pop direction, veering ever closer to the tuneful but overly polite hum of acts like Coldplay. Warpaint have recently name-dropped Q-TipErykah Badu, OutKast, and Kendrick Lamar as influences on this new material. But the album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body. When Heads Up does increase its heart rate slightly, as on “New Song,” the band actually loses power with a vanilla hook, couched in a typical modern production sheen that has “sync opportunity” stamped all over it. Mood-wise, Warpaint have essentially remained in the same gear since day one.

But Warpaint can slyly rope you in when guitarist/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman drop lyrical hints about romantic malaise. Kokal and Wayman express vague indignation without quite lowering their guard enough to come out and tell you how hurt they feel. As such, they rely on the listener’s sense of intuition and empathy to do the work in filling in the blanks, which has a certain effectiveness. You can’t help but apply Warpaint’s elliptical lyrics to your own most recent memories of relational disengagement. The cloudy musical atmospheres that have become their trademark allow the words to attach themselves to a range of sensations from sullen to wistful to yearning. And as much as Warpaint’s songs often address dark figures with questionable intentions, the music never adopts a defeated or victimized posture.

That said, do verses like “Did you come undone?/Did you become someone unknown?” or “I will not be defined/Don’t wanna define myself” give us enough to put ourselves into the shoes of the characters in these songs? Or do they function more as stage lighting without any real action unfolding onstage? Adapting the meaning of music to fit one’s own feelings has its rewards, but it begins to feel cheap when the songs don’t necessarily push you to care about the people in them. “Can’t you tell me all your secrets?/I’ll tell you mine” goes a verse on “So Good.” At this point, though, after enticing listeners to lean in closer for a glimpse at those secrets, we might have to question whether Warpaint have any to tell.

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