Drowse Cold Air

After a severe mental breakdown, Kyle Bates of Portland, Oregon’s Drowse was prescribed a plethora of antipsychotic drugs. Several unmedicated years later, anxiety resurfaced and he turned to Klonopin and alcohol—it was during this time that he wrote and recorded this second full-length album, Cold Air, marked by fanatical self-exploration and expansive detuned instrumentation.

This album is a peek inside the mind of Bates, the band’s only full time member, painstakingly recorded over nine months in his home. The house itself appears several times on the album in the form of field recordings and background occurrences. Although Bates is a secular person, his lyrics are influenced by the religious writings of Anne Carson and Karl Ove Knausgaard and their ruminations on death. This is an album that frames big picture ideas within intimate, often shame-ridden experiences: a nose broken while blackout drunk, a seizure followed by feverish hallucinations, a father’s stroke, the death of a close friend. It is the sound of the uncertainty beneath our lives surfacing.