ALBUM OF THE DAY
Album of the Day: Essaie Pas, “New Path”
By Amaya Garcia · March 15, 2018

Essaie Pas’ 2016 album, Demain est un autre nuit (“Tomorrow Is Another Night”)—their first for DFA Records—established the duo as the new, cool, slightly stoic faces of electronic music. The Montreal outfit’s mix of techno, EBM, industrial, and electro called to mind the gray soundscapes of Berlin’s electronic music underground in the ’90s, yet their take on the music felt fresh and extremely relevant in today’s grim political landscape. The fusion of Pierre Guerineau and Marie Davidson’s hard, thumping beats, and airy, eerie vocals—which were often used to decry the isolation, vices, and pitfalls of the late-stage capitalism—made for a sensual soundtrack to a dystopian world. Despite employing synth lines that sound like the aural equivalent of Vantablack, Essaie Pas still managed to maintain a tangible sense of hope.

Their new album, New Path, puts them on a slightly different path within that same journey. Heavily influenced by A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick’s 1977 sci-fi novel about a hellish Orange County, California of the future, Path explores a world of addiction, loss, grief, and panoptic surveillance via explosive basslines, subdued synths, and distorted vocals. The album opens with “Les Aphides,” a track with a menacing bassline that, listened to via headphones, feels like it’s throbbing inside your skull. Paired with Davidson’s unsettling whispers, the song sets the mood for a record that, much like A Scanner Darkly, is full of paranoid intensity. “Futur Parlé” and “Complet Brouillé” sport industrial synths and electro beats, making for the kind of music that could score an apocalyptic party scene during the climax of a sci-fi film. “Les Agents des Stups,” with its speedy synths, space-like blips, and racing hi-hats, offers a momentary reprieve, but as Guerineau points out in the album notes, this moment of relief is an illusion—the opening of a doorway that may ultimately lead nowhere. New Path is a dizzying, intense, and rewarding ride into an unsettling future, offering glimpses of darkness and light in equal measures.

-Amaya Garcia
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