Today, How to Dress Well — LA-based musician Tom Krell — has announced that he will be releasing his first album in 6 years, I Am Toward You, on May 10th via Sargent House.
In his 15+ years recording under the How to Dress Well moniker, Krell has often played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be.
I Am Toward You certainly continues that masterful pattern, with some of his noisiest, most free, and most poetic work to date. Krell opens the second decade of his career with an album that delivers on the hallmarks of his best work.
Alongside the album announcement, How to Dress Well has unveiled two singles “New Confusion” and “No Light” — both out today. The new songs feature contributions from CFCF and Trayer Tryon, as well as Anarthia DLT.
Krell offers some insight into “New Confusion”: “It’s about how to relate to the past knowing the hard limits on human memory and the challenges of metabolizing intergenerational-
Listen to the two new songs below and pre-order the new record here.
In 2020, Krell, alongside returning and new collaborators CFCF, Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Trayer Tryon, Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read began work on what would become the new How To Dress Well album, I Am Toward You. For obvious reasons, this was a year where time took on new shapes — Krell suddenly had a lot more of it, and was mostly alone. He sifted through hundreds of snippets he’d recorded in the preceding decade, finding inexplicable samples and snatches of audio that began to cohere into an album that stripped back the density of The Anteroom and resulted in a song cycle of Durutti Column-esque guitar ripple paired with lyrics that treat time itself as an open plane.
Krell oscillates between the present and the past as if it’s happening all at once. In these songs, everything is happening all the time. A memory from 20 years ago holds just as much weight as something that happened yesterday. Each song, too, is linked to the larger world: these tracks are in constant dialogue with not just each other, but the environments in which they were made. It feels like a diaristic approach to how we can find new perspectives on our own lives, as informed by the way Krell transformed himself in the nearly six years between the release of The Anteroom and the release of I Am Toward You.
Even the title of the album itself — I Am Toward You — is the result of his wife mishearing a lyric from the Miley Cyrus song “I Adore You”. “[She said,] ‘wow, that’s a powerful lyric,’ I asked which lyric, and she responded that she heard the chorus as having said: ‘I Am Toward You,’” Krell says. “Because I had expressed to her that I thought the song was powerful, she generously attuned her mind to hear something powerful, something profound.” This relatively mundane moment of misinterpretation suddenly took on extra weight. A straightforward phrase like “I adore you” shifts perception and a newer, deeper meaning emerges. It’s that joy in unexpected connection that carries so much of I Am Toward You.
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