The Formalist

Imagine standing at a doorway and hearing, wafting from a distant room, sounds from your past – pop music, but atmospheric and wistful in a way you can't quite place. From the other side of the door a deep, throbbing beat has you wondering “what sort of party is happening in there?” As you linger, immersed in these things simultaneously, that's The Formalist.

On new album A Trace Of Yourself, the New York-based duo drapes elegant electronic pop in shoegaze ambience to capture a pensive sense of tension and self-exploration. Released by Mother West this winter, A Trace Of Yourself straps decades of indie rock, dream pop, and trip-hop inspiration to early lockdown’s lurking sense of foreboding.

“There was a moment there of feeling intense vulnerability,” recalled The Formalist’s Stephen Krieger. “It forced me to look back at my whole adult life and start to question, what is it all for? What’s the legacy of everything that I’ve done?”

Formed by Brooklyn-born Krieger (beats, sampling) and Norwegian Erik Laroi (vocals, guitar) back in 2006, The Formalist is a fascinating fusion of the former’s ambient and experimental leanings and the latter’s more song-based sensibilities. When they first met, Laroi was the drummer for late ’90s shoegaze band Closer and Krieger was in experimental outfit The Freight Elevator Quartet. The Formalist became their outlet for melodic pop songs that both juxtapose and blur the lines between electronic and organic, connecting through Laroi’s memorable melodies and aching delivery.

“It’s almost like an ambient record is playing in the background,” mulled Krieger. “You’ve got the song playing and then you’ve got this atmospheric version of the song playing at the same time.”

The Formalist recorded their eponymous debut in 2008, but it was 2019 before Mother West released the collection, after Laroi had released a series of solo records on the L.A. label. By comparison, the follow-up was conceived in early 2020 and has appeared briskly. “We didn’t really plan on making this record, but circumstances and situations brought us together again,” Laroi explained. “The Formalist is something we do when we feel like we need to do it.”

Accordingly, A Trace Of Yourself comprises ten ultra-authentic ruminations on what lingers from our past and might survive into our future. It’s a lonely, rainy-day album flecked with guarded optimism, some of it from the very act of making music as a survival mechanism. Recorded in Laroi’s Glass Box studio in Brooklyn, it’s unmistakably The Formalist – meticulous, nuanced arrangements framing frank, unadorned vocals – but richer, deeper and more provocative than the duo’s prior work. 

“We knew that a lot of the sound design was going to get a little bit out there, so it's really important to have a clear narrator and a clear vocal presence to tell the story,” said Krieger. “[But] actually, a fair amount of the background textures is also Erik’s voice.”

Inspirations from the turn of the Millennium remain – Radiohead, Aphex Twin, My Bloody Valentine, Damon Albarn – embroidered by influences from more recent artists like Broken Bells and James Blake.

A compliment of contrasts, Krieger composed on an Akai MPC workstation and teenage engineering gear and Laroi on electric and acoustic guitars. But when their ideas collided in the Glass Box, each would be fastidiously disassembled, reassembled, morphed and melded until the human and digital were almost as one.

Lyrically, “A Trace of Yourself is a record about struggling to see the world though clear eyes,” Krieger continued. “Realizing the past and the future can both sneak up on you in unexpected ways.” 

A case in point is first single “Happenstance,” where a cold electro beat is thawed by lush synths, distorted bass, and Laroi’s airy timbre. This most accessible face of A Trace Of Yourself, and the song from which the album’s title is culled, explores the idea that the traces we leave behind are happenstance rather than those we intended or fought so long and hard for.

With its plaintive, one-word chorus (literally just “please”), “Finite” is a tingling, overtly personal document delicately fluttering around cinematic lyrics of loss, lament, and longing. “Specular Reflection” hangs the metaphor of mirrors as challenging the line between reality and perception on angular bass, jazzy grooves, and ethereal vocals, Laroi’s insistent guitar infusing recurring urgency. 

A Trace Of Yourself’s gorgeous future-noir outlier, “A = N” swathes an almost doo-wop chord progression in ghostly auras from which its “Every day we trade amnesia for nostalgia” hook cyclically emerges. “We create our reality through both remembering and forgetting,” said Krieger, alluding to both “A = N” and themes across the album.

Mixed by Erin Tonkon (David Bowie, Sad13, Grace Ives’ heralded debut “Janky Star”) and mastered by Simon Scott (Slowdive), A Trace Of Yourself instinctively revives the concept of a hidden-layers “headphone album,” yet never at the expense of singable songs and emotionally resonant delivery. “I hope that it’s a record that rewards close listening,” said Krieger. “That whole notion is sentimental to a certain generation, and I think this album taps right into that.”

Expect to hear cuts from A Trace Of Yourself in film and TV placements – a natural home for such evocative and exquisitely emotive creations – and reimagined as genre-specific remixes.

“You want a record to take you out of your ordinary place, like a sonic dreamscape,” Laroi concluded. “A meditative thing; a way to lose yourself.”