Slow Focus

Released

Andrew Hung and Ben Power are Fuck Buttons, and it’s important to think of them in the way you think about Boards of Canada and Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers: duos that come across as electronic but know how to play instruments. You don’t get a bag of thunder like “Brainfreeze” without being a drummer and you don’t get an album like Slow Focus without knowing how to play a live set. This is instrumental music that accretes slowly into little ziggurats of dread. It’s a golden bummer! The Buttons have a few moves nobody else has. One is a sound, sort of a robot yawn, a vocal kind of filter that makes it sound as if the machines are reaching through their dimension into ours. Maybe the purest version is “Stalker,” which is like a panic attack turned into data and set through a fuzzed out Arp Odyssey and back into an EZ-Pass scanner. It just gets worse and worse and more beautiful once you realize you’re through the gate and free—free to go.

Sasha Frere-Jones

Suggestions
Yanqui U.X.O. cover

Yanqui U.X.O.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor
The  Fool cover

The Fool

Warpaint
Ali cover

Ali

Vieux Farka Touré, Khruangbin
Currents cover

Currents

Tame Impala
Microphones in 2020 cover

Microphones in 2020

The Microphones
Luminous cover

Luminous

The Horrors