no scope

In video game lingo, to take someone out “no scope” is to rush directly at them with weapons blasting, not bothering to aim but shooting directly from the hip. It’s less cold-blooded than picking someone off from a distance, executed in a rush of pure adrenaline and energy. You’re running and shooting, undefended and reckless, willing to risk it all for the sake of an ambush or else just out of impatience or boredom. This is the energy the alt-pop duo crushed say they’re bringing to their debut, a collection of songs about heartbreak rooted in the hazy, quantized world of mid-’90s Garbage and Massive Attack. What they deliver is something closer to a high-level combo attack—a rigorously disciplined, tidily executed exercise in pushing the right buttons at the right time, whether emotional or otherwise. It’s a precise and inventive record that shows off Shaun Durkan and Bre Morell’s technical skills, but its rigorous perfection means no matter how advanced its rendering may be, the end result sometimes feels flat.

no scope follows 2023's extra life EP, and yes, it’s a theme. Video game concepts show up across both records (extra life’s “respawn” refers to a slain character coming back to life; no scope’s “oneshot” is inspired by an obnoxious boss fight in Elden Ring). It’s fitting, considering Durkan and Morell live in different states (Oregon and California, respectively) and treat crushed as a kind of immersive online co-op project. But it’s also a nice mirror of their philosophical approach. As with extra life, no scope ruminates on what might have been, navigating the seemingly endless terrain of heartbreak like it’s wandering through an open-world game with no real task in mind.

To build their sandbox, Durkan and Morell drew heavily from a shared playlist of ’90s radio faves like the Sundays, Dido, and Cowboy Junkies. You might hear a touch of those artists, as well as the aforementioned Massive Attack, scattered around no scope’s remarkably dense but well-organized soundstage. But where the long shadow of VH1-style adult alternative looms largest is in the record’s overall tone: This is music that seems to take place right after the ugliness and unpredictability of catharsis has passed. Morell’s vocals are higher in the mix than they were on extra life, putting more emphasis on her straightforwardly beautiful melodies and giving these songs a greater sense of clarity.

When it works, as in opener “exo,” which cracks into sunlight right as Morell’s narrator strides confidently into the chorus, it can be affecting. The songs bleed into one another with the tear-soaked associational logic of a breakup. Guitars slide off of breakbeats, pitch-shifted vocal samples and weird funk jams web the space between tracks in reveries of dissociation. There are handclaps so tiny they sound like fingersnaps in “starburn,” and a guitar whose delay effect puts it off-beat with the rest of the song. It feels like there are never fewer than eight things happening, and even when those eight things seem to be taking different paths, they always end up in the same place. It’s ready-made pop music à la Durkan and Morel’s fave Natalie Imbruglia, but the level of a synthesis here is a reminder that what can look like broad strokes are often the results of hundreds of fibers all moving at once.

Shoot for the moon, the saying goes, and that seems to have been the guiding principle for a lot of no scope. It’s admirable to hear a bedroom-pop project not just take influence from past hits, but to actually try to recreate their sense of scale; pop ambition is its own form of experimentalism in this context. But at times on no scope, crushed overshoot their mark and wind up in a place that might look majestic but feels remote. Nowhere is this more clear than in “heartcontainer,” whose conventionally beautiful melody and processional tempo come off like contemporary praise and worship music, something not helped by the opening couplet being, “I’m on my knees/I’m crying for you.” Morell sings it with admirable poise and grace, but that’s part of the problem; the emotional devastation toward which the lyrics point is incompatible with the song’s flawlessness, a problem that recurs throughout the album.

This is a question of emphasis and not approach: There is plenty happening on no scope that proves the emotional durability of crushed’s sound. At a time when seemingly a third of all bands are mining the ’90s for parts, Durkan and Morell have arranged their recovered scraps in what feels like a genuinely novel way. Rather than call it a day after assembling their pastiche, crushed paint a line between the sexy glum of trip-hop and the plainspoken confessionals of artists like Madi Diaz and Phoebe Bridgers. In the end, this future-facing, tech-savvy, hyperslick music most resembles a vintage, analog form: no scope is a singer-songwriter record.

crushed: no scope

$27 at Rough Trade

$23 at Amazon

$23 at Target