Goodbyehouse

Snuggle’s Goodbyehouse is a Trojan horse for psychic hurt. Some of that pain is inescapably direct, like when Andrea Thuesen Johansen quietly intones, “Yeah, I’m broken,” on “Sticks.” But the Danish duo of Johansen and Vilhelm Tiburtz Strange typically veil their distress with the prettiest ’90s alt-rock. Take “Dust,” their self-described “love song for an apocalypse.” It sounds a bit like Loveless if the shoegaze classic were honest about its feelings. My Bloody Valentine’s album, and so much of the music it influenced, reveled in waves of reverb, as though treating heartbreak and infatuation alike as emotions to burrow inside instead of confront. Snuggle don’t succumb to the same sonic fantasy. Even when the vocals sound frothy and the drums approximate a breakbeat, Johansen’s voice cuts through the tactile sounds and imagery—kisses on necks, fingers digging into orange peels—with sobering clarity: “It’s gone… everything is dying.”

The music coming out of Denmark, particularly on record labels Escho and 15 love, is remarkable at capturing this feeling of bittersweet existentialism. It’s never epic or cathartic or even particularly satisfying; it’s just what life feels like when exhaustion is imminent. And while Snuggle appear right at home in their country’s ever-increasing roster of gauzy pop savants, they’re especially adept at nailing a particular well-trod musical style with rich detail. They peddle a sort of slacker shoegaze mixed with drab dream pop; crucially, none of it’s really a bummer or self-loathing. A song like “Playthings” begins with a naked confession: “I’ll do anything you ask me/Like being in a trap/Out of touch with real life.” That dissonance is telegraphed by dubby percussion and slanted guitar chords, and the chorus is sung like a haunted children’s singalong accepting the fraudulence of a relationship. In these trying times, a false love will do.

A large part of Goodbyehouse’s success lies in Johansen’s vocal delivery. It’s got a bit of detached cool, but it mostly just sounds calm and clearheaded. And despite the downer atmospheres, she doesn’t come off like a killjoy—she still finds pleasure in what’s available. On opener “Sun Tan,” there’s delight to be found in her slurring, which moves from “wasted” to “low waist pants” with a lithe, measured cadence. She relishes every word as they glide alongside driving guitar chords. And with its shuffling drum groove, the song feels like indie rock for road-tripping, conveying all the pleasure of wind in your hair in the hazy, processed vocals and fluttering synths. She sings about the spell of a romance breaking once morning arrives, and the chorus, with its decidedly confessional demeanor, lets you down gently.

Maybe these songs should feel queasy, maybe they should create pause. But Snuggle don’t want their emotions to appear contradictory, and the music follows suit, occasionally oblique but always intuitively coherent. On “Marigold,” the cello both weeps and creates erotic tension. The guitar on “Driving Me Crazy” sounds like vintage Smashing Pumpkins, but then the band throws in a weird, rubbery bassline that sounds like a joke. Eventually, it fleshes out the lyrics alongside whooshing cello and skittering drum fills, making the transition from “never forget, never forgive” to “drink to forget, drink to forgive” understandable. It’s in these juxtapositions—pretty and wonky, heavily edited and straight-ahead—that the volatility of emotional convictions feels authentic. Even the instrumental title track, with its uneasy ambient washes and steady piano, conjures a nostalgia that’s neither fully enchanting nor entirely wistful.

Two songs, “Woman Lake” and “Water in a pond,” summarize the album’s prevailing spirit. The former, about Minnesota, throws you into the dreamy highs of a fling (“Always together/We said, ‘It’s forever’”) before crashing down (“Nothing ever is”). The latter, a Mazzy Star-like rumination on Copenhagen summers, captures the expansiveness of experience (“There for it all/The highs, the lows/The cries, the laughs/The fights, the talks”). Johansen sings about drowning, and never being good at change, but there is hopefulness in the track’s endlessly pliable bassline. It makes me think of a classic dream-pop song, one that has an entirely different perspective on things ending: “Just give me an easy life and a peaceful death,” goes its indelible lyric of post-breakup resolve. Snuggle don’t seem interested in anything so simple or idealized; they know that hurt and sorrow and loss go hand in hand with beauty, that these things are concomitant to a life richly lived.