Tearless

Amnesia Scanner’s Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala call Tearless their “breakup album with the planet.” As the Anthropocene era wreaks increasing havoc on the only home humans have, that’s an audacious concept, and the music fits the bill. On the Finnish experimental musicians’ third full-length as a duo, they move past “deconstructed club” sounds and into the realm of flat-out destruction. They heap distortion on drums, synths, and vocals alike, until the results sound like the charred wreckage of a wildfire, and they crash together styles—reggaetón with doom metal, techno with shoegaze—like kids hell-bent on smashing up toy cars. Yet for all that aggression, there’s an underlying sweetness to their lilting melodies and Auto-Tuned vocals, and on a song like the pensive “AS Acá,” the tone is as melancholy as it is mischievous. Consider it the flipside of hyperpop, balancing dizzily between sugar high and flat-out exhaustion.