urika's bedroom

The bones and performance of a urika’s bedroomsong 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 hyphenatedamalgamation of melodically-inclined indie or alternative rock.

But the true character of these songs revealsitself in their transmission. Coated in digital gauze, urika’s bedroom’snear-whispered exhortations are cast against spindling and silvery guitarlines, transmogrified vocal layers, fascinating artifacts of malfunctioningaudio interfaces, and intrusive textural figures that hit like ambulance sirensbleeding into one’s private headphone symphony. The sound design isidiosyncratic and immaculate, a cryptic and modern rock idiom birthed from adiplomatic sonic union between Billy Corgan and Christian Fennesz.

On BigSmile, Black Mire — the full length debut due out November 1, 2024 on TruePanther — urika’s bedroom presents this unique vision in full, rendering ashadowed yet lucid depiction of longing, alienation, and multivalent emotionalexperience with an assured command of avant-garde gesture. It’s a marvel ofscene-setting, a showcase for urika’s bedroom’s instinctive understanding ofwhat makes for an evocative and devastating arrangement.

“A lot of it is pulling from this point ofemotional juxtaposition, the ability to feel multiple emotions at once,internally as well as externally,” urika elaborates. “You’re never 100% sad or100% happy. On this album, I’m subconsciously tapping into that conflict, offeeling one way and being another.”

BigSmile, Black Mire is the culmination of several yearsof artistic growth and refinement for urika’s bedroom. After a warm receptionto early singles “Junkie” and “XTC” — both of which appear on bsbm — the LA-based artist brought theproject’s insular sound into the real world, touring with the likes of YouthLagoon, Nourished By Time, and Chanel Beads while also collaborating as aproducer and co-writer with untitled (halo) and Ded Hyatt.

Self-produced and engineered by urika’sbedroom with additional mixing by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House,DIIV), Big Smile, Black Mire is builtupon the modern art of guitar processing and recontextualization. By and largeeschewing synthesizers, urika’s bedroom — with contributions from ub touringguitarist Silas Johnson, who otherwise records as Tracy — sculpts an expansiveuniverse of timbres and tones, ranging from trashy and lived-in skronks totremulous and liquid beams of melody.  

For instance, “XTC” is a grime and glitterdaydream, while “Video Music” is a collision of glitchy percussion and surrealimagery, scrambling to make sense of a romantic preoccupation: “how to keep you out my head / today, don’tyou think it’s all the same? / racing through this bloodswept cage / today, ittastes like lithium and rain.” Meanwhile, “Circle Games” is ominous andindustrial, a rattling meditation on societal decay and “post-war everything.”

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

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

BigSmile, Black Mire is an adept and artful expression ofthat duality — as urika puts it, “taking a selfie in front of a burningbuilding.”