Try remembering what 2010 was like, music fans. Twitter and Instagram hadn’t swallowed every waking moment. Bands from the nation’s archipelago of loft and warehouse scenes would fight for attention from Tiny Mixtapes, the Deli, and Impose Magazine, and the lucky ones would ascend to the tastemaker industrial complex’s most rarefied level of validation, Pitchfork. These were the days between SoundCloud and Spotify — fans could hear plenty of new music for free on the internet but couldn’t yet hear all music at all times. Today, anyone can listen to every major release in a given week if they want to; back then, this dubious privilege was still held only by professional music reviewers.
It was a democratizing, some would say flattening musical culture paired with a still fairly traditional system of distribution, consumption, and critical gatekeeping. What it produced was a creative ecosystem that was oddly susceptible to novelty, hype, and joinerism. There was an exhilarating and ever-growing cacophony rising from blogs and crowded basements, but it still took time and money to find and consume the stuff, and the sonic morass couldn’t be navigated without professional assistance. Of course, the professionals could be just as distracted by shiny objects or obsessed with their own coolness as anyone (trust me, I was one of them). There were times when the hype was real and times when it wasn’t — the Deerhunter and Animal Collective bubbles look a lot less baffling than the former enthusiasm for, say, Die Antwoord or Yeasayer. Most fascinating were the bands that indicted and vindicated the system all at once: bands such as Salem, which released its first album in a decade in October. Were the ominous and strangely melodic soundscapes of the mercurial Michigan electronic trio, pared down to two members for last month’s Fires in Heaven, the work of hacks or geniuses? Did they appeal to a 2010 vintage obsession with fashionable nonsense, or did they touch the sublime?
Fires, the unexpected follow-up to 2010’s King Night, doesn’t quite resolve the question of whether the Salem boomlet of a decade ago had any direct link to the trio’s music being good. You’ll find data points on both sides of that argument. The aural gauze and slow, heavy drum beats, hallmarks of the influential witch house subgenre that Salem pioneered, are all over modern music; “Crisis” is both more bracing and less vocally or lyrically elevated than the plentitudes of recent rap with Salem’s influence somewhere in its DNA. Then again, “Sears Tower” is a work of astounding sonic enormity. On “Redlights” or the half-dozen other absolute tidal waves from King Night, a listener didn’t really care whether what he or she was listening to was buzzy or cool or even all that quote-unquote “good.” At its best, that long-ago album is a grand erasure of all context. Maybe Salem was always aiming for self-effacement. In seeming protest against the hype machine that had helped make it, the band was often either apathetic or juvenile in its attitude toward both its fans and the media and soon erased itself altogether. Salem produced nothing between 2011 and 2020, although in 2013, the group’s Jack Donoghue snagged a production credit on “Black Skinhead,” a standout track from Yeezus, Kanye West’s groundbreakingly abrasive noise-rap masterpiece.
Salem has reemerged into a different world, one that it helped make. On several tracks in Fires in Heaven, the vocals are slowed into the opiated baritone popularized by the late DJ Screw, a genre of vocal manipulation that’s now common across mainstream hip-hop and beyond. The heavy atonal sound blasts churning under machine-gun drum machines on “Red River” recall much of the past decade’s more ambitious pop music. Back in 2010, Salem was an early and especially vivid synthesis of ideas that filtered upward in popular tastes. The trio sounds less radical now, but only because its sensibilities won out. Even without a whole lot of creative progression between albums, Fires in Heaven doesn’t feel particularly dated.
In fact, Salem sounds better than its closest present-day equivalents. In 2019, Vice proclaimed that 1000 gecs, the debut album of the much-tweeted-about experimental electro-pop duo 100 gecs, was the best record of the year. Whether 100 gecs is “good” or even listenable remains an open question; as with Salem in 2010, a cynic could accuse the group of mashing together pop genres merely for provocation’s sake. As with Salem, the group contains the pieces of whatever the next step of pop music might be — in 100 gecs’s case, it’s the punk-adjacent tempos and screamy auto-tune vocals that might catch on. As with Salem, the group hogged hype cycles in its particular era, polarizing listeners and critics. And yet, I’d bet against 100 gecs having as long a shelf life as Salem. On the best moments of both albums, Salem made music that doesn’t belong to any era, even with a decade’s worth of hindsight: music that’s crushing and visceral, purpose-made for being played very late at night in the middle of the woods or maybe inside a large underground cavern. Salem was the rare early-2000s hype group that punched through all the noise and the even rarer one that vanished after striking it big.
The new album is imperfect. Fires in Heaven clocks in at a quick 29 minutes, and former member Heather Marlatt’s eerie reverberating mezzo is sorely missed. But moments of dread and exhilaration are lurking on a majority of the tracks, and for that alone, the album must be counted a win in this band’s, and any band’s, unending fight against ephemerality. So few successful groups get remembered as anything more than a passing fad a decade after a moment in the spotlight, and even fewer create music that outlives the prejudices and incentive structures that brought it to our attention in the first place. Ten years ago, Salem wouldn’t have been an obvious candidate for pulling this off. And yet it did it.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
