The Soft Pink Truth began as a lark and a provocation—an invitation to cut rugs and undercut binaries in one fell swoop. Drew Daniel’s debut album under the alias, 2003’s Do You Party?, operated on multiple levels: A rejoinder to the (straight, white) seriousness of the experimental dance scene, it slipped funk, rap, and disco into a subversive take on glitch-techno aesthetics. The following year, the more expressly conceptual Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? reimagined punk classics from groups like Crass, Minor Threat, and Angry Samoans as insouciant electro-pop bangers, erasing the divide between Daniel’s hardcore youth and his electronic adulthood while queering the punk-rock canon. A decade later, Why Do the Heathen Rage? took similar liberties with black metal, gleefully torching underground music’s ultimate temple to genre purism.
But the project has taken on a distinctly utopian tenor in the 2020s. The music has gotten deeper and sweeter; jokey gambits and herky-jerky sounds have fallen away, replaced by a rapturous fusion of deep house and ambient. You can trace the influence of artists like Moodymann, Matthew Herbert, and DJ Sprinkles, but Soft Pink Truth’s last two albums—2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? and 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?—are also awash in chamber music, spiritual jazz, free improv, and classical minimalism. A spirit of collective reverence prevails. Both albums feel like illuminated manuscripts advancing the simplest argument ever made: A better world is possible.
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A doubtful undertone creeps into his new album, Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? The record might be considered the third in a trilogy exploring the importance of community, collectivism, and solidarity, in both joy and defiance. Sinning was expressly framed as a response to Donald Trump’s first term as president, a kind of “We Shall Overcome” rooted in the chosen family that Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, his husband and partner in the duo Matmos, have gathered around them over the past three decades. Deeper was more ecstatic, more sensuous. Like those albums, the new one favors human players over machines, but it goes a step further, largely abandoning overtly electronic tropes in favor of an acoustic palette informed by chamber music and film composition. More than merely a formal experiment, it feels like a political choice: a way of expressly centering people, and the relations between them, at a time when our rights and our autonomy are increasingly endangered by the predatory politics of AI.
It’s a side of Daniel that we’ve rarely heard. “Mere Survival Is Not Enough” launches the album on an unabashedly sentimental note, romantic strings cresting in waves before falling away to reveal a plucky melody that would suit the opening credits of an HBO dramedy. The mood turns more contemplative with “And By and By a Cloud Takes All Away,” closer in spirit to the last two Soft Pink Truth records: Rolling piano chords and wordless vocals sketch out the drifting shapes of the title; pulsing saxophones nod to the American minimalist tradition; pitch-bent chords rise vertiginously, mirroring agile harp glissandi. The dimensions are always shifting, acoustic elements smeared into synthetic arrays and back again.
