On their third album, the New York four-piece forge a more adventurous and experimental path as they lure us ever deeper into the intoxicating mist that makes their sound so addicting.

Listening to Crumb, one can’t help but feel that everything is tilting slightly. The impression that their music leaves is something sensory beyond noise, something brooding and engulfing yet able to linger seamlessly within the peripherals. Like a spotless room skewed by double vision, or that immovable shoreline drowsiness felt sprawled under the baking sunlight; sinking incrementally deeper into a hole of hot sand as the ocean static slowly distorts into a faint, powdery abstraction. 

With every release, the Brooklyn-via-Boston band seem to be refining this distinguishingly off-kilter aesthetic ever more, anchored by angelic vocals and lush synth chords laced with a sort of hallucinogenic distortion. On their new album ‘AMAMA’, self-released via their own label Crumb Records, the contours seem sharper and more lucent still, forging a sound soup for the angst-ridden and under-the-influence to lament and romanticise their lives to. Dabbling more in the experimental here, they slope from jazz through to dreamy psychedelia while maintaining a spooky analogue quality that is unmistakably Crumb.

On ‘AMAMA’ (translating to ‘grandmother’), lead songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Lila Ramani thematically recalls a melange of curious encounters and personal feelings gathered through their many years of touring as a band, making ‘‘an incandescent statement about searching for solid ground, connection, and clarity in a life of nomadic upheaval’’. This ranges from purging the guilt of accidentally running over a turtle with their tour van on ‘Crushxd’ (“Turtle crushed in the road, Forgive me for this sin, Killing a living thing, You were small as a pin”), to mourning sacrifices that were made along the way on the speedier ‘Side By Side’. There is a playful, sometimes elusive poetry within their lyricism, yet the meanings seem less important when cast out by Ramani’s silvery lead vocal, and each word washes over you like a sedative.

There are additional sonic touches too, that give the record an almost diary-like feel of intimacy. On titular track ‘AMAMA’, an homage to Ramani’s grandmother, a WhatsApp recording of her singing in native tongue Malayalam is sampled, interplaying subtly with the main vocal structures to create a familial dance of lush, featherlite voices. On lulling opener ‘From Outside A Windowsill’, a track that pines for a place to call home, police radio static oozes through cracks of bouncing bass and clean acoustic guitar, sampling officers discussing a flock of geese crossing a bridge in the Brooklyn neighbourhood Ramani grew up in. 

Crumb’s increased augmentation towards a freer and more experimental musical landscape really shows on this record, and they manage to integrate this while skilfully maintaining an accessibility and pop-alignment within their arrangements. Alongside an increased use of samples and other non-musical sounds, newly explored rhythmic shifts add a new eclecticism to the mix too. These can be heard in the choppy, Aphex Twin-style breakbeats that occasionally hum out of the fore on ‘Side By Side’, or the contrastingly sluggish, slowed down drums that appear on trippy, underwater interlude track ‘Swarmed’. ‘AMAMA’ is a journey, both symbolically and structurally, and each track rolls so perfectly into the next, it’s the sort of album you could accidentally listen to on a continuous loop until the end of time (or until your laptop dies). Be prepared for Crumb to submerge you into their pooling unease; you’ll want to bathe in it until your ear canals shrivel and prune.