Album Review: The Competition by Lower Dens

In a line-up that has halved since Escape From Evil, following the departure of Geoff Graham and Walker Teret, the vocals of Jana Hunter retain a constant melancholic mystique at the heart of the outfit's oscillating synth-propelled beat. Often compared to fellow Baltimoreans Beach House , Lower Dens ' searing treatment of societal issues has ensured distinct demarcation from contemporaries. In this respect, The Competition proves consistent, focusing upon the role of the capitalist system and social networks in encouraging an oppressive state of superficial rivalry.

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The end of Lower Dens' video for "Young Republicans" shows a scene of people in red suits in a red room eating Jana Hunter's insides. Before getting eaten by the rich, Hunter, visibly transgender in a glitter jacket and crew cut hair, sings "we lift our heads and see that the world is burning." Doors are being locked, and blinds are being closed in broad daylight. The Competition (the fourth Lower Dens album) comes four-and-a-half years after Escape From Evil, and Hunter, the singer (who goes by the pronoun they), says this is the first time they have been fully representative of transgender.

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Three consecutive tracks on Lower Dens' fourth album, The Competition, are marked as "EXPLICIT" by Spotify, due to instances of the word "fuck" and variations thereof. However, that flag could be used to mark almost every track on this album. It's not as though they've become the Baltimore dream-pop answer to 2 Live Crew. Rather, these songs are "explicit," not in a profane sense, but a direct one.

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It might be hard to believe in 2019, but at the turn of the decade a lot of the more notable innovations happening in alternative music seemed to be coming out of Baltimore. At the forefront were Beach House, whose album 'Teen Dream' sparked a full-on dream-pop revival. But whilst they took many of the plaudits, fellow Maryland-band Lower Dens were steadily building a cult following.

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In The Competition, Lower Dens' defiant return after a four-year absence, lead songwriter Jana Hunter questions the fantasy of a capitalist utopia—how much do we have to fight to earn our happiness rather than find it within ourselves, and how it disconnects us from one another. Closely following 2015's Escape from Evil—which found Hunter exploring the more escapist sounds of eighties electro-pop—the songs on his fourth album (Hunter is now only joined by drummer/multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Nelson) use a surfeit of synthesizers and icy sequencers with even more abandon. Hunter bares more of himself than ever before, laying out his pessimistic view of how things currently stand instead of providing a false sense of hope.

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By the time of 2015's Escape from Evil, Baltimore's Lower Dens had significantly reconfigured the eerie dream pop of their earliest albums into something equal parts disaffected indie rock and '80s-inspired synth pop. The scrappy haze of distortion and reverb that the band started out with cleaned up nicely with sharper guitar lines, more distinctively mixed vocals, and most melodies being delivered through beaming synthesizers. Fourth album The Competition doubles down on Lower Dens' moves towards maxed-out synth pop, reducing the dreamy rock band nature of their past to a whisper sitting at the core of their neon-lit low-key pop constructions.

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The Baltimore band Lower Dens are no strangers to fitting sophisticated political thinking into pop songs. 2015's Escape From Evil imagined a queer utopia built from the sounds of the past, and frontperson Jana Hunter's rich voice made that future sound both vivid and elusive, an inspired marriage of sound and message. Their latest record The Competition might be their most explicitly political and theoretical yet, which is to say it is also their most didactic.

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