April 26, 2024
Wolfgang Tillmans announces his second studio album, Build from Here. These recent songs find joy and heartbreak in ruin and rebuilding, and hopeful defiance in the face of uncertain, menacing futures. The songs are propulsive, catchy, contemplative, and stylistically various; lush and drumless instrumentals give way to ecstatic, danceable thrumming. But as the songs shift between ballads and club bangers and almost Gregorian devotionals, Tillmans’ voice remains the throughline, the album’s most precious material, whether growling and confrontational or heavily processed and chopped or bracingly bare and tender. His voice is powerfully expressive in each of these modes, all of which showcase a committed vulnerability. The album is driven by a desire to explore, to expose. He communicates this desire sometimes nakedly–-“I wanted to tell you after a week and a half in your arms”, he sings on ‘There’s More That Connects Us’ – and sometimes obliquely: the opening track, ‘Where Does the Tune Hide’, tries to discover “the tune” (and arguably succeeds), undertaking its search in the midst of “an endless sea of change.” “We’re fibers”, Tillmans sings, bringing to mind not only the inky, sperm-like forms that recur throughout his Abstract Pictures but also the complex organic material of which we, both individually and societally, are constituted.
Build From Here is streaming on various platforms.