{"id":11821,"date":"2020-06-23T16:19:19","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T21:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/?p=11821"},"modified":"2026-05-06T15:52:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T20:52:49","slug":"max-blooms-album-of-isolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2020\/06\/23\/max-blooms-album-of-isolation\/","title":{"rendered":"Max Bloom\u2019s Album of Isolation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by Jacob Perlmutter<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

by Ben Waldman<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Yuck frontman\u2019s solo debut is a break-up album for a lonely era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Max Bloom knew his solo debut would be a little lonely. After all, it\u2019s called a \u201csolo\u201d album for a reason: no matter how many fingerprints are all over every track, there is one name on the album cover, one account on Spotify, one person whose reputation rests on the music\u2019s reception. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a startling proposition for Bloom to make music by himself. In his mid-teens, he helped with Daniel Blumberg to form the nucleus of Cajun Dance Party, a London five-piece that caught the ear of Thom Yorke with their sound, a heady elegy to the Brit pop of the \u201890s. Soon, Bloom and Blumberg went a different route, forming Yuck, a band whose name belies the pretty sounds they made. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuck\u2019s start couldn\u2019t have been much more auspicious: their self-titled debut was welcomed with open arms by critics, who both breathlessly celebrated and questioned their romantic nostalgia for the early work of bands like Teenage Fanclub, Pavement or Yo La Tengo. Pitchfork gave 2011\u2019s Yuck <\/em>a glowing review, and the band drew raves at home in the U.K., and in Japan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloom\u2019s solo career got off in dramatically different circumstances: his debut record, Perfume<\/em>\u2014which he\u2019d been working on for two years and which was entirely about the end of a decade-long relationship, a time he calls the loneliest of his life\u2014was released on April 24, as London was in lockdown and any semblance of a concert could only be done on a livestream: the gorgeous break-up songs Bloom had written by himself\u2014 \u201cTo Be Alone,\u201d \u201cCall Me When It\u2019s Over,\u201d \u201cWill It Last a Lifetime?\u201d \u2014 were now gorgeous songs written for the era of self-isolation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a Tuesday in May when Bloom logs onto Zoom to speak with Stylus, <\/em>and his chosen background is a palette of colourful donuts. \u201cSorry, let me get rid of this,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been experimenting with weird backgrounds.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His Hackney apartment is spare, from what\u2019s visible: a brown easy chair with an acoustic guitar resting on it, a TV, a record display. He seems happy to do the interview. It\u2019s nice to meet someone who heard what he put out into the world. He\u2019s been playing live sets on Instagram , and it\u2019s tough to tell what the audience thinks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it isn\u2019t a Yuck album, it is the best music that Bloom, 30, has made since that band\u2019s first album. It\u2019s raw, yet polished, and you can almost hear the freedom its creator found in processing the end of an era and what had been a nadir for him \u2014 mentally, creatively, financially. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we broke up, I started living with my parents,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t have any money, and I didn\u2019t have a job, and I was just kind of floating. I felt like my life was broken, so I was trying to put the pieces back together and analyze what went wrong.\u201d He watched a lot of Bojack Horseman. \u201cI was grieving, and the album was documenting the process of that grief,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the first note, you can hear it: \u201cTo Be Alone\u201d was the first song Bloom wrote, and it begins with him plaintively singing, \u201cYou are the girl that I love the most, when we got drunk we burned our cheese on toast.\u201d On Yuck, <\/em>Bloom was nostalgic for the 1990s. Here, he\u2019s nostalgic for burnt sandwiches \u2014 anything that connects him to his past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He listened to a lot of Car Seat Headrest\u2019s Twin Fantasy <\/em>when writing, and you can hear that too in the way he sensibly layers his sounds. \u201cThinking \u2018Bout You Forever Now\u201d is a jaunty dirge. \u201cBottle\u201d is a gritty soliloquy for the end of an era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I smell your perfume, it pulls me under,\u201d Bloom shouts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nature of album releases is that Bloom is a different man now than when the melodies popped into his head two years ago. As the songs developed, he sent snippets to Patrick Fitzroy and Anna Vincent of the London band Heavy Heart, two of his best friends. As time went by, Bloom and Vincent started dating, and are now riding out the pandemic together in self-isolated bliss while working on new music together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite exciting for me,\u201d Bloom says, lighting up. \u201cAnna is a really talented musician and an amazing lyricist. Having her in the room just to bounce ideas off is a really fun thing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis little time period, we\u2019ve made so much music,\u201d he said, indicating the makings of another album are already being written; he didn\u2019t rule out more Yuck though. \u201cA good sign that something is going in a good direction is if I can\u2019t stop thinking about a song in my head, and that\u2019s happened a couple of times.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It might be a while before the world hears those songs or Perfume <\/em>at concert venues, Bloom realizes. But he seems at peace with it: it\u2019s a lot less draining to tour from your webcam than in a minivan driving across Europe. He\u2019d be fine staying at home to write music; it\u2019s what he\u2019s done since he was 14 years old. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ben Waldman The Yuck frontman\u2019s solo debut is a break-up album for a lonely era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1739],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11823,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11821\/revisions\/11823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}