Perfume Genius

urika’s bedroom

The bones and performance of a urika’s bedroom song are, approached from afar, certainly recognizable as rock music. Eagle-eyed genre-spotters might see it as slowcore, shoegaze, dreampop, emo-adjacent bedroom pop, mumblecore, or any other heavily hyphenated amalgamation of melodically-inclined indie or alternative rock.

But the true character of these songs reveals itself in their transmission. Coated in digital gauze, urika’s bedroom’s near-whispered exhortations are cast against spindling and silvery guitar lines, transmogrified vocal layers, fascinating artifacts of malfunctioning audio interfaces, and intrusive textural figures that hit like ambulance sirens bleeding into one’s private headphone symphony. The sound design is idiosyncratic and immaculate, a cryptic and modern rock idiom birthed from a diplomatic sonic union between Billy Corgan and Christian Fennesz.

On Big Smile, Black Mire — the full length debut due out November 1, 2024 on True Panther — urika’s bedroom presents this unique vision in full, rendering a shadowed yet lucid depiction of longing, alienation, and multivalent emotional experience with an assured command of avant- garde gesture. It’s a marvel of scene-setting, a showcase for urika’s bedroom’s instinctive understanding of what makes for an evocative and devastating arrangement.

“A lot of it is pulling from this point of emotional juxtaposition, the ability to feel multiple emotions at once, internally as well as externally,” urika elaborates. “You’re never 100% sad or 100% happy. On this album, I’m subconsciously tapping into that conflict, of feeling one way and being another.”

Big Smile, Black Mire is the culmination of several years of artistic growth and refinement for urika’s bedroom. After a warm reception to early singles “Junkie” and “XTC” — both of which appear on bsbm — the LA-based artist brought the project’s insular sound into the real world, touring with the likes of Youth Lagoon, Nourished By Time, and Chanel Beads while also collaborating as a producer and co-writer with untitled (halo) and Ded Hyatt. Self-produced and engineered by urika’s bedroom with additional mixing by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House, DIIV), Big Smile, Black Mire is built upon the modern art of guitar processing and recontextualization. By and large eschewing synthesizers, urika’s bedroom — with contributions from ub touring guitarist Silas Johnson, who otherwise records as Tracy — sculpts an expansive universe of timbres and tones, ranging from trashy and lived-in skronks to tremulous and liquid beams of melody.

For instance, “XTC” is a grime and glitter daydream, while “Video Music” is a collision of glitchy percussion and surreal imagery, scrambling to make sense of a romantic preoccupation: “how to keep you out my head / today, don’t you think it’s all the same? / racing through this bloodswept cage / today, it tastes like lithium and rain.” Meanwhile, “Circle Games” is ominous and industrial, a rattling meditation on societal decay and “post-war everything.”

However, any solipsistic dread is cut with a steadfast sense of hope — as on the swirling devotional “Metalhead” — and a resounding empathy for the struggles of others. The spoken interlude of “bsbm,” one of several tracks featuring vocals from multidisciplinary artist Vivian Buenrostro, works through word association to grasp for pure humanity amid the technological ennui.

“Lately when I see somebody encountering challenges, I still recognize the innocent child they once were,” says urika. “On a social or individual level, life is always about growth or collapse. But even in that collapse, there’s a capability to find light and darkness.”

Big Smile, Black Mire is an adept and artful expression of that duality — as urika puts it, “taking a selfie in front of a burning building.”