Lauren Duffus is an astronaut lost in inner space. In the video for “N.U.M.T.E.”, the artist moonwalks through South London in a Ralph Lauren spacesuit, navigating packed dancefloors and streets as cold, empty, and unforgiving as the far side of the moon. Apart from a quick smoke break, she’s hermetically and emotionally sealed off from the city around her, adrift in her own orbit. It’s difficult to tell whether the song’s desperation is being muffled by her helmet or if we’re picking up on a distress signal from a galaxy far away. Through bleary synths and gasping vocals, you can just barely make out the message: “I need you more than ever and I fellawaiiiii…” before the voice staggers and recedes into mournful static.
The British producer excels at channeling hard-to-name feelings into vaporous, borderless tracks. Her songs are composed of pleas without answers, calls without responses, and locked-in emotional states whose tension crests but never resolves. The psychodrama is front and center, but in Duffus’ hands it’s never stifling. She’s enamored of music that paints in washed-out colors on the biggest canvas possible: witch house’s booming, foul air, doom metal’s slow-motion majesty, and the all-consuming dread of UK and Chicago drill. Duffus draws upon their atmosphere to craft weightless, post-genre collages blanketed with tissue-thin layers of voice. Her latest EP, Can’s Gone Warm, is her most fully realized and strangely accessible collection of music to date, giving exciting new shape to fleeting emotions.
Like any number of young British artists working in the Dean Blunt school of deadpan art-pop, Duffus is a cryptic presence who offers little set-up or backstory for her music. But even if her voice billows and blares like a haunted Burial sample, you can still make out the contours of a pop song within her work. Our most reliable guidepost is her vocals, which she layers and abstracts until the shape of the song, rather than its lyrics, becomes the main driver of its meaning. On tracks like “Super” and “Liar,” Duffus pitches her voice somewhere between Janet Jackson and Grouper, articulating her longing in sultry R&B hooks that are sped up and washed out until they resemble pure glossolalia. The interplay between the EP’s misty surface and its effervescent melodies reminded me of Kelela’s Aquaphoria, and suggests that Duffus could just as easily be a straight-up pop performer as an Elizabeth Fraser-style experimental vocalist.
The power of her songs’ blurred outline varies in its intensity. Duffus leaves her greatest mark on tracks where the production seems to shape her voice in real time. Her vocals on “N.U.M.T.E.” streak and smear against ghostly synths and the song’s fast-paced drum’n’bass rush, as though her words were being lost in translation in real time. “Liar” offers some modest stage-setting as Duffus chants “5 a.m. in Deptford” before her airy singing is subsumed by the murder-hornet whir of a synthetic drum break. She doesn’t need to fill in the specifics of what happened; the music is shattering enough on its own. Although it’s just a stone’s throw away geographically, “Lewisham” is a notable step down. The track is pretty but meandering, so feather-light that it’s insubstantial. Over some grounding harp plucks, Duffus churns over the phrase “ooh this is something” with varying degrees of loving clarity and mushy surrender. By the song’s end, it’s hard not to feel like the “something” in question was a whole lot of nothing.
Closing track “Riser Brum” is a bruising reminder of Duffus’ talent and of the strengths and limits of her approach. The song is pitched between the uplift of a choral arrangement and the pendulum-swing blast of a grime synth, sending her voice to scatter and regroup like a murmuration of birds. The sound is panoramic, as she responds with muted anguish to the instrumental violence every time it barrels back her way. Without constant forward motion, the air around her can become heavy and static, but when she kicks up a storm and rides its conflicting currents, Duffus absolutely soars.