Дебютный альбом Мэри Луизы Бук «Skinned» исследует переплетение технологий и человеческих эмоций

From its dramatic first synth splash, Mary Louise Buch’s debut album, Skinned, seems as uncanny as an android. Its disorienting first minutes shift between sleek sonic touchstones—sci-fi keyboards, synthesized baroque strings, echoing drum crashes, and a warped, robotic vocal—with mechanical ease. But then we get a true shock: Delicately fingerpicked guitar clears the air for a soft human voice. The song, called “Can You Hear My Heart Leave,” is much like the album that follows: wrapped in technological wonders that never hide the human heart beating at its core. Instead, Buch works the two in seamless conjunction, creating a striking collision of experimental and pop sounds. Primarily based in Berlin, Buch is more closely associated with her hometown scene in Copenhagen, where women like Astrid Sonne, Gel, and PANXING have crafted a fusion of modern classical, cutting-edge club music, and electro-acoustic experiments that sounds like nothing else in the world. Even in that context, Skinned stands out for its remarkable songwriting, fueled by Buch’s soaring voice, tender lyrics, and a guitar as malleable as clay in her hands. No score yet, be the first to add. Technology is a constant on Skinned, but Buch uses it as a means rather than an end. These are songs about love, heartbreak, and the unpredictable space connecting the two—and while technology does populate them, it serves more to frame those human feelings. “I’m a Girl You Can Hold IRL” explores intimacy via webcam with only a tender bassline and an airy vocal, before bursting into a moment of magical realism as she sings, “I’m coming through the screen/Crawling on your table/My mouth against your neck.” It’s a scene straight from The Ring reimagined with synth swells and dreamy romanticism. “Can’t Get Over You With You” inverts that sensation, grappling with breakups in the social-media age and the unsettling voyeurism of clicking an ex’s profile, something she finds unable to resist in the opening lines. Buch may sing a lot about screens, but depending on her approach they become portals, windows, or mirrors. Nowhere is this more powerful or universal than on “Touching Screens,” a bright pop rush that sounds like Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place On Earth” 3D printed in the plastic mold of James Ferraro. The ecstatic chorus (“Touching screens/More than skin”) is delivered with cymbal crashes, guitar fireworks, and, in a perfect final minute, a stadium-sized rush of kick drum. Whoever she’s connecting with is left playfully ambiguous; instead, Buch focuses entirely on the relationship with the object itself, the addictive rush of “picking it up again” captured in balletic images of “fingers gliding” over glass. Whether the notification will spawn butterflies in the stomach or inflict sinking dread is unimportant—Buch focuses entirely on the brief moment between feeling our pocket buzz and checking our phone and blows it out with a surge of endorphins. These colossal songs are well served by the adventurous instrumentals Buch creates as connective tissue. “O” shoots emotional flutters of trance synths, bridging the thrill of “Touching Screens” and the somber aftermath of “Can’t Get Over You With You.” On the atmospheric Astrid Sonne collaboration “Stone Bridge,” Sonne transmutes her viola from ashen drones to silvery high notes, an otherworldly addition that expands her own spectacular 2018 debut, Human Lines. The transformations continue right up to closer “MW,” a track littered with false endings and quick mutations, from a seasick guitar riff to a reprise of “Can You Hear My Heart Leave” to a crash of drums that builds to an overwhelming peak in the final seconds. For all its careful structure and tenderness, Skinned ensures you enter and leave it utterly dazed. Much contemporary music tends to approach the subject of technology with the redundancy of that old Black Mirror joke, “what if phones, but too much.” But it’s so much more complex than that, because people are more complex than that. Technology is how we communicate now; we use it to grieve, and fall in and out love. ML Buch shows a remarkable understanding of our sci-fi present by crafting futuristic songs that, at their emotional core, feel timeless. The question she asks at the start is, “Can you hear my heart?” After Skinned, the answer is loud and clear. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.