Out Friday, Nothing is the third album by DARKSIDE and the first that the group – founded by Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington – have completed as a trio with new drummer Tlacael Esparza. Listen to the new song ‘Hell suite (pt. II).’ Musically, the track is one of the record’s most lush and melodic turns, with a gentle two-chord vamp framing layers of burbling percussion.
Nothing is the third album from DARKSIDE: nine transmissions of negative space, telepathic seance, and spectral improvisation.
On their first two reinventions, Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington entered the studio with a clutch of scattered ideas and loose melodic fragments to mold into what became the revered Psychic (2013) and Spiral (2021). But Nothing reflected a search for form borne out of spontaneous elliptical jams, acoustic riffing, and digital levitations. And in a fundamental shift from their first dozen years as a band, Jaar and Harrington recruited their longtime friend and collaborator, the drummer and instrument designer Tlacael Esparza, to become a full-time member.
The outcome is magnetic and hieroglyphic. This album slips through the cracks of convention with serpentine guitars, extraterrestrial static, and cavernous drums. Haunted rhythms, distorted vocals, and uncanny beauty.
Understanding this evolution requires retelling the journey. Jaar and Harrington originally met at school in Providence during the early years of the last decade. While on tour in support of Jaar’s debut album, an off-day off-hand recording session in a Berlin hotel room caused their speakers to blow. The room filled with smoke and the song divined that day became their first single ‘A1’.
Shortly after shattering the 7-foot double-sided mirror that accompanied them on their 2014 tour, DARKSIDE announced what would become a six-year hiatus. The story resumes in Los Angeles. In the fall of 2022, DARKSIDE booked a series of shows to reintroduce themselves as a live entity for the first time in eight years.
To prep for their return, DARKSIDE rented a storefront in northeast Los Angeles. Esparza joined as a full-time member, fundamentally changing the sound and spirit of the band. Throughout the summer of ’22, the new trio built itself from scratch. At The Spiral House, they deciphered their new identity and vocabulary.
One central touchstone, the ‘Nothing Jam’ emerged from these impromptu sessions. This concept initially came out of the constant search for mindfulness, but also through Harrington’s moments in the morning with his newborn daughter, where he found a deep beauty in just sitting with her on the floor doing nothing.
For Jaar, this concept of nothing became applicable to other aspects of life. “Nothing” is the reflexive answer when asked about what’s wrong, when there’s too much to even begin to express. In this framework, “nothing” means its mirror opposite. Or “nothing” can be a damning illustration of the lack of change in the world. The maddening inaction on climate change, the political hypocrisy, and the recurring cycles of violence against the people of Palestine, the Sudan, and elsewhere.
“Nothing” became a recurring motif on DARKSIDE’s subsequent European tour in the spring and summer of 2023. The sense of absence in the ‘Nothing Jam’ could paradoxically become a generative space for creation. Recording sessions for the album began on a tour off-day, where the trio decamped to a studio in the south of France. Quickly, they locked into a whimsical, loose groove. The sessions in France were followed by another week in Los Angeles and another round in Paris.
Nothing is a record that reveals new wrinkles and vortices with every listen, a slowly bubbling, electro-acoustic symphony of small movements and subtle gestures.
The record begins with ‘Slau’, an atmospheric canvas of bass-heavy dub juxtaposed with slashing electro-clash vocals. Synthesizers pump like a softly beating heart; Jaar’s voice turns into a high-pitched gamma ray.
The title of the finale, the sun-damaged and cosmically fuzzy ‘Sin El Sol No Hay Nada’, harkens back to the original spirit of creation. The genesis of life itself. And in the music, there is the unstinting sense of excitement and open-endedness – where there are no answers, merely generosity of spirit and the desire to break free from the enclosed feedback loop. It’s truly something.
Praise for Darkside – Nothing
“… a record filled with sudden flips of genre and style, from the muggy dub of opener ‘Slau’ to the fried dance punk of ‘Graucha Max’ (…) Most startling is the arrival of pockets of stomping, twangy Americana – making it feel like the equivalent of Faust transmogrifying into the Flying Burrito Brothers before your very eyes” – The Quietus
“(…) a playfully weird set of baroque pop that takes in bluesy ’70s skanking and cavernous grooves (“S.N.C”), wild krautrock fiesta (“Graucha Max”), and, on “Hell Suite (Part II)”, a beautiful Bowie-esque space ballad, the whole thing swaddled in velvety production” – Uncut
“On Nothing, the proggy cosmic blueprint endures (…) but elsewhere there’s a playfulness, a willingness to come out of the shadows” – Electronic Sound
“… genuinely bizzarre mix but utterly irresistible” – Line Noise on ‘S.N.C’
NOTHING TRACKLIST
- Slau
- S.N.C
- Are You Tired
- Graucha Max
- American References
- Heavy is Good For This
- Hell Suite (Part I)
- Hell Suite (Part II)
- Sin El Sol No Hay Nada
