folx

Last November, an anthropomorphic iPod had an idea: “What if the next No. 1 album didn’t come from the industry? What if it came from all of us?” Unfortunately, “all of us” is never as simple as it sounds, and the crowdsourced Everybody’s Album—which did not chart, because of a technicality—was not simple in the slightest. Somewhere in this bloated, gestating glut was a topography of internet music, all bitcrushed MIDI and fried Focusrites. And to the opinionated blogger-musician friends&, who recently released a gestating glut of his own, its blending of “hyperpop’s futurism” with “millenial optimism” represented a soundtrack for a generation of conflicted artists, who “receive their most meaningful platforming from a crypto company while they vote mamdani into office.”

A similar dilemma appears in the extensive liner notes of folx, a 112-track concept album about capitalism, autism, copyright law, corporate labor, Mark Fisher, My Little Pony, and “the contradiction between my belief in marxist ideas and my impulse towards accelerationist cultural production.” friends& is a “bunch of Canadians on Discord,” a semi-anonymous sampledelia band, and, at its core, “jc,” a web-trawler with two claims to fame: a cult-favorite gooning album, and the term “laptop twee,” which he coined for giddy “twee-indietronica,” à la Worldpeace DMT. If “laptop twee” exemplifies his love of innovation, it’s chiefly by reinterpreting 2000s indie pop—a bastion of “millenial optimism,” reborn in Zoomers with sample packs and situationships. But beneath this bliss lies rot, and not just brainrot, which folx caricatures, but capitalist rot, which folx aims to critique. Elsewhere in the liner notes: a dedication to “my father, an autistic rateyourmusic user who died before he could retire from his job at td bank.”

At some point in the near-decade it took to produce this record—which was written “after reading capitalist realism 300 times,” a manifesto states—a crucial decision was made: the cover could not be a soyjak. Yet if there were any face to this faceless dissertation, whose bug-eyed sprawl bridges Estranged Labour and Legend of Zelda, I imagine it would be pretty close: a drooling, slack-jawed dude, soyfacing at a screen while eternity plays on loop. The general “sound” of folx—the sum, that is, of its many stitched-together sounds—is a sort of derpy plunderphonics, speedrunning through glitched-out ruins with delirious glee. It is ecstatic, exhausting, and unseriously serious, a treatise that cites socialist theory as readily as Sonic the Hedgehog. More importantly, it is conflicted: desiring, all at once, to be both cringed at and canonized, anti-capitalist and accelerationist. Across this convoluted glut, which hides a compelling statement in a clusterfuck, these competing impulses largely cancel each other out.

This is not to say that folx lacks genuinely exciting moments, or that its ambitious attempt to “reinvent pop music production” is entirely uninteresting. For all its size and scope, it does resemble an album, which is itself remarkable: Somehow, this sprawling behemoth sort of sonically coheres. (Not nearly as coherent: many of the verbose, densely intellectual, and frankly insufferable track titles, which I will not be typing out.) Anchoring the chaos is a chorale of singsongy voices, whining, Travis Morrison style, through fried 2010s folktronica, or SOPHIE-meets-Xiu-Xiu bricolage, or—what the hell, sure—the “My Sharona” riff spliced, along with S3E6 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, into a glitch-pop polemic against modern dating. The combined whiplash of these zigzags weirdly simulates corporeality. The caveat: Those cartoonish, album-centering vocals are almost entirely AI-generated. Which really makes you wonder: Where does the irony-tinged tech experiment end and the working-class concept album begin?

The problem with folx is that you should not have to ask these questions. But you do, because its intentions—no matter how clearly stated—are simply too numerous, too conflicting, to not constantly negate themselves. If this is about the “consequences of shitpost culture subsuming all artforms in the 21st century,” then how is an AI-generated Jeff Mangum screaming about Capitalist Realism anything but another consequence? Are we mourning “the death of the music industry,” critiquing its bastardization of “ageless oral traditions,” or making a maximalist parody of both?

The central contradiction of this album—between Marxist ideas and accelerationist impulses—is particularly apt for its moment. Our dumb dystopia makes conflicted constituents: critical of a rotting culture, yet unable to escape it. friends& sees something similar in indie rock production, a one-time subcultural beacon that has flattened into “essentially Christian worship music.” And part of me sees folx as a desperate, brute-force attempt to imagine innovation, even—especially—if it means constantly compromising, like a crypto-backed creative fighting cognitive dissonance. This album does a terrible job of critiquing its claustrophobic, hyper-capitalist hellscape. For better or worse, it does a much better job of embodying it.