The genre descriptor “dawk,” or “DAW-based rock,” is compelling because it combines two conflicting terms. It was coined by friends&, a Canadian blogger-musician who really likes coining things, and whose label, dawk26, doubles as a conceptual testing ground. “Laptop twee,” its most lucrative cultural export, is loopy and wonderfully giddy, running 2000s indie-pop through Ableton plugins and plotting a rave in Purble Place. But like “dawk,” it is also conceptually split, with a rich central tension between what is being performed, and by whom: childlike innocence by adults who long for it back. At best, that friction breeds not only generational ambiguity, but a sort of bidirectional bliss. In this zany Neverland, the club floor is not littered with beer cans, nor bodily fluids: It is strewn with discarded DSi styluses, sticky with apple juice.
As a self-proclaimed purveyor of “new internet sound,” dawk26 relishes in digital-era tensions, treating records as field reports—from fried new genres, and more broadly, our fried new reality. (Catalog highlights, thus far: a gooning concept album, a dispatch from the world of “brainrot psychedelia,” and friends&’s own musical statement of the 21st century.) Its latest release is Buckle Up, the debut LP from indie-pop band Josephine’s Next Million Miles, whose name evokes open-world video games, and whose go-lucky songs sometimes evoke them, too. In a Bandcamp disclaimer, the group noted the project was “made primarily on a computer,” before listing several preferred tools: among them, Ableton Analog, which humanizes digital sounds, and Virtual Singer, which digitizes human sounds. Across this soppy set of songs, the sum of these frictions is cyborgish and spectral, music from a Macbook whose dying wish was to see the world.
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Now is a good time to introduce the real, breathing humans behind Josephine’s Next Million Miles, who are credited by their first names: Cathryn, Dylan, Lovette, and Mason. Buckle Up embraces wistful insularity, wielding glitchy little-pop as a leitmotif for lost humanity. These textures crystallize the longing of laptop twee; they also evoke the human cost of late-stage capitalism, whereby easy living—or, in this case, easy listening—demands depersonalization. Vocals often sit low in mixes, barely distinguishable from digital debris; beneath the blissful timbre, there is a stench of decay, like the ditty that plays when you die in an 8-bit video game. “Summer Song” is the best song here, and the best symbol, too: an indietronica carol that implores us to “look out, the sun is shining,” before conceding that it “hurts to look at.”
But Buckle Up does still dream of sunlight, and its doomed simulation makes for a tragic, twisted sort of beauty. By one reading, “made primarily on a computer” suggests this album—like its moment—seeks catharsis in a digital world, because the real one is decaying. Its most evocative tracks, like “Next Million Miles” and “He wore a beautiful hat,” channel this desperation into dynamic patchworks, all shifty drum patterns and chorales of cooked strings. Nonetheless, the computerized whimsy is wearying, to the point that “Josephine’s Next Million Miles” evokes Wall-E: a well-intended machine roaming a wasteland. The rustling glitch-beats of “Rug” nicely undergird its cutesy singsong, but when the chorus invites us to “circle the water for hours,” the “circle” (repetitive, mechanical) feels more apparent than the “water” (wriggling, alive). By emphasizing the “laptop” in “laptop twee,” Buckle Up allows the latent longing of the genre to absorb its trademark bliss.
