Grills, guitars, Auto-Tune, CS:GO gameplay footage, Wisp, flashing lights, shooting guns, skeletons, scuzzy CCTV shots. In the overstimulating music video for “I Heard You,” nu-gaze and SoundCloud rap congeal into an onslaught of digital debris, like an A24 take on corecore. The mastermind is Max Epstein, a Los Angeles workaholic whose rap sheet—live guitar for Jane Remover and quannnic, production for post-emo prodigies like daine and Blair—often outshines his own feverish output. But within the vast sprawl of his collaborations, his spunky solo catalog feels like a buried treasure. His latest and lengthiest LP, the 18-track I look at her and light goes all through me, is equal parts guitar album and producer tape: feature-flecked, genre-agnostic, scattered, and sincere. Across 30-odd searing minutes, Epstein synthesizes his impulses, allowing his frenzied vision free rein. The result is a delightfully dizzying collage, not unlike the “I Heard You” music video: shards of inchoate ideas, cascading until the clamor becomes cathartic.
Busy as Epstein is, I look at her scans as a document of his downtime: hours spent fiddling with old demos, jamming on tour buses, dreaming on studio floors. He pays the bills by nudging peers towards their voices, but his back-catalog betrays a years-long struggle to find his own. His earliest releases as Photographic Memory, which date back to 2014, brim with hazy slowcore, like a (very) low-budget take on Duster. As his footprint expanded, his sound followed suit: Everything Nice, his 2018 mixtape, compiled fleeting bedroom demos; 2021’s eponymous LP sported a fuller feel, though without shedding his early sadness-soup songcraft. (Arpeggios! Auto-Tune! Abjection!) It’s bad practice to judge an album by its cover, but his aesthetic identity has long suggested the subtlety of a peripheral figure. Take the album art for said eponymous LP, a dusky, out-of-focus take on Either/Or. Intentional or not, the allusion is telling of its contents: a young guitarist shrouded in the shadows of his peers and influences.
But I look at her is not the triumphant, swaggering comeback album in which the reclusive unsung hero finally roars. And this isn’t at all bad. Epstein has managed to distill his defining qualities—production prowess, spotlight aversion, frenetic collaboration—into a vivid snapshot of digital music in 2025, when producer tags, power chords, live instruments and Ableton plugins coexist in chaotic harmony. Perhaps the most effective voice for Photographic Memory is that of the auteur, the half-visible center of an immersive experience. Fittingly, the most brilliant moment on this project is not a solo track, but “Heartsyle,” a glistening single in which Wisp flits over an Epstein-produced plugg beat. It is disarmingly odd; like much of I look at her, it basks in the strange collisions forged by an amorphous, oversaturated era. I laughed the first time I heard “Recently,” in which Gucci Mane raps “Woppenheimer” over what sounds like a scrapped Tired of Tomorrow demo. The next time I played it, I realized that it was really, really beautiful.
Beautiful, too, is Epstein’s voice, which sounds stronger here than it ever has. While his vocal timbre—something like a lonely, androgynous android—has remained relatively consistent over the past few years, the textures on I look at her grant it more room to command. Digi-rock epic “Clearly” is a loud-quiet-loud stomper, all twinkling synth stabs, soft acoustic pluckage, and the occasional pulsating kick. At certain points, it risks scanning as a Snow Strippers remix of “Fireflies.” But what rescues the song from its potential pitfalls—overstimulation and ennui—is the push-and-pull between Epstein’s voice and production, a complex soundscape braved by a careful, somewhat childlike protagonist. Regardless of your definition of “nu-gaze” (“new shoegaze” or “shoegaze à la nu-metal”), there’s something on this record for members of all sects: compare the glitchy pathos of “Emo Tour Track” to the growling thrash of “Love in My Heart.” Epstein the singer is undergirded by Epstein the producer, who is undergirded by Epstein the curator. When these multiple selves converge here, their handiwork is the strongest proof yet of his singular vision.
