Total Wife
Carnival funhouses are the closest that many of us come to experiencing surrealism in the physical world. Their dreamlike environments, created with mirror tricks and eschewed perspectives, give visitors an uneasiness as they navigate rooms, attempting to decipher what’s real and what’s an illusion. The tension of a perfect funhouse keeps visitors doubting their senses by making them expect the unlikely — loud noises, jump-scares, trap doors. The balance between darkness and light, loud and quiet, and tension and release is off-kilter, overloading our senses.
That sort of sensory manipulation comes to mind while listening to Total Wife’s new album Come Back Down. As their other releases have established, Total Wife’s music is built around the band’s ambitious sonic imagination filtered through the tools and techniques of the studio. The elements are structured in a fashion that feels more like an expressionist sound collage than a traditional song. The noise-soaked “Peaches,” released as a single with a video animated by the band, is a euphoric meditation interrupted by shrieking guitar that might bring to mind the whale songs My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields coaxes from his Jazzmaster. “Naosia” is dense with waveform-bending electronic skronk and the sort of breakbeats you expect to soundtrack a chase scene in a Guy Ritchie film. The closer “Make It Last” bounces along ebulliently, picking up velocity until it crescendos into white noise. Sounds and themes are often repeated, giving listeners the disorienting feeling of getting lost in a spiral labyrinth.
What the album does best is create sensations using only sound that convey the feelings of touch or sight — even physical sensations like spinning or floating. It’s a rarity in music. Formed in Boston in 2016 by vocalist Ash Richter and producer/multi-instrumentalist Luna Kupper, Total Wife came to Nashville in 2020. The pair relocated after a trip to Tennessee in 2019 became a crash course in the art and music world.
“We went to Drkmttr, we went to Soft Junk, we went to a house show — all within the course of three days,” Richter tells the Scene on a recent call that includes both core members. “And I was like, ‘This is just amazing.’ We hadn’t experienced that yet.”
After arriving in Nashville, the pair went to work releasing an impressive catalog of work on their own label, Ivy Eat Home. Come Back Down is the group’s fifth full-length since 2021 — the year they released their debut To Make Sound in January followed by Total Wife in July — and it’s their first for Philadelphia indie Julia’s War Recordings. Their description of their unorthodox approach to crafting Total Wife’s music comes across like an inventor tinkering in a workshop, revisiting and adjusting the sounds as needed.
Tons of bands and tons of fans joined in for the inaugural Drkmttr Fest at the newly minted nonprofit
“[We were] on our own ... trial and error … pretty much recording albums over and over until I liked how it sounded,” says Kupper. “I never had written songs before trying to record. So I was learning how to write and compose, through the process of having a crack at Pro Tools when I was younger. [I learned] to record that way, which felt visually like collaging audio files and building textures.”
One audio-collage aspect of Come Back Down is the result of necessity. The electronic textures you hear on previous Total Wife records were made with Kupper’s collection of synthesizers. But before making the new album, she sold them all for rent money, and the synth sounds you hear here are sampled from the band’s previous work.
CBD has a dreamlike quality, which the band attributes to long nights of mixing to the point of delirium. Primary lyricist Richter, who has a degree in poetry and a breathy, ethereal chant, focuses much of her lyrical content on themes like childhood, isolation and a relationship to the natural world. You might expect it to be awkward to use synthetic media like digital samples to explore such organic experiences. But Total Wife has figured out how to use the tools to translate their perspective into sound, and the result is a natural fit.
