Damage

In the opening moments of his second album, Damage, Los Angeles-based songwriter John Errol references the opening riff from Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” As he sings, the melody is redolent of one of Ethel Cain’s slowcore ballads. Halfway through, the band comes in, blown-out like Have a Nice Life took over the mix. Then, an echoing outro recalls one of Thom Yorke’s perishing melodies. That’s just the first song: Damage may remind you of Garbage, Elliott Smith, but no one more than Trent Reznor—specifically his band’s poppier songs, when Reznor contrasts the distortion around him instead of disappearing into the noise. It sounds like a pileup of ill-fitting ideas, but it’s also earned Errol a Nirosta Steel opening slot.

All those references, even the borderline hacky ones (yes, “Loser” interpolates Beck), serve a purpose. When they show up on Damage, they sound broken, like they’ve been fed through an FM radio processor before they even made it to the record. Errol has lyrical hooks and a voice smooth enough to deliver a conventional pop song, but every time he approaches convention, it’s always a little too lo-fi and lyrically challenging to pass for a song from his eras of inspiration. This is a deeply weird album, somehow both bombastic and elusive.

The material is deadly serious, and the methods verge on tasteless: a song about stepping back from a suicide attempt (“God Today”) sounds like “Freedom ’90,” and a song plausibly about intrafamilial sexual abuse (“Simon Says”) is uncomfortably smoky in the vein of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Errol walks an impossible tonal tightrope, if not without precedent for queer art—John Early’s Maddie’s Secret and Todd Haynes’ May December similarly infuse harrowing subject matter into dramatic forms that are familiar to the point of camp. It would be insensitive if it weren’t Errol’s own story and production work. The clichés he invokes feel intentionally jarring, like when “Turn off the light” uses “Down on my knees/Begging you please” in a verse depicting assault.

Damage is most rewarding when it uses that same dissonance to explore Errol’s own behavior, particularly when grief mutates into something more sinister. In the incongruously catchy title track, he vows revenge on a manipulative ex, echoing the words “I’ll wait,” “no return,” and “my turn” until the song abruptly ends on a hard rock jam. If, for some reason, you need a melodramatic eight-minute power ballad about an ex-boyfriend using DARVO tactics to ruin your reputation, look no further than “Shifting Sands” and its gloriously ridiculous lyric, “Memories fall down around like rain made of knives.” There’s a sense this narrator is unreliable; it’s not clear who’s DARVOing who, especially when he goes, “Don’t tempt me to cross a line/’Cause I’ll do it this time.”

Songs like “Float,” an effective piece of industrial-rock worship, and “Allison,” a simple, guitar-based song about the allure of a self-destructive friend, prove that Errol’s songwriting can hold up without the conceptual gambits. But the album I’m most reminded of isn’t The Downward Spiral or Adore, but something like Blue October’s Foiled, the kind of uncomfortably earnest, often outright bizarre post-grunge not even the most meticulous 2000s revivalists dare touch. It turns out the sounds and textures of embarrassing radio rock are way more interesting when the artist is actually taking risks, instead of throwing on some distortion and calling it a day. Even Errol’s big climactic pop song is hard to take at face value: “Like it like that” is intentionally overproduced power-pop, stuffed with ad-libs and instrumental layers to convey the desperation of its narrator.

No song here is riskier than “What’s needed of me,” a three-minute pocket symphony in the middle of the tracklist. Over an instrumental that slowly morphs from Midwest emo guitar arpeggios to an overblown nu-metal finale, Erroll’s narrator faces sexual trauma head-on, jumping across time from age 4 to 22 to 16 as men crawl into his bed and ignore his protestations. The chorus unites these experiences in a longing for self-annihilation: “How am I supposed to unsee it?/The basement light flickering/Pick every part off of me/And rid me of all of my meaning.” Even on a song this bleak, there is gallows humor like “Sadim touch” (“Midas” backward) and a bitterly ironic “sweet sixteen.” For all the times Damage references other musicians, I can’t say there’s anything else like it.