A saccharine pop scrapbook where commercial voices are broken, bent and reconstructed

Somewhere within the almost-infinite polythene scrap heap of pop music, Giant Claw is sitting and assembling a new voice. Using off-cuts of melodramatic female vocal trills, pitched-up shavings of methodical mass-market lyrics, in what he calls “free-pop”.

Once obsessed with the concept of “interrupting music”, exemplified in the clattering Soft Channel, the artist still switches up styles here, but now a poppy sprite – amorphous and energetic – bounces along with the more easily-parsed momentum.

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The opener, Pulled Me in Dark, introduces this voice to us with a stumbling, gurgled refrain over plucked strings. Unfurling and delicate vocal trills lead the instrumentation from its stoic beginnings into the more yearning second half, as bright MIDI bells light this voice’s way out of the dark.

Giant Claw showcases just how willing they are to distort their source material on Something to Believe In, as Ariana Grande’s voice is repurposed, pulled upwards in register, creating a kind of strange digital strain, melding emotion and technological emulation. Thankfully, Giant Claw creator, Keith Rankin’s talents at vocal chopping are pronounced enough to keep up with his composition skills, as the track unfolds into something resembling spandex-clad workout music mixed with electro-metal drumming.

It’s an interesting listen due to this vocal methodology, and it’s helped to perennial strangeness by this dynamic genre-switching style. But when we consider his admitted desire to mesh “distortion with cleaner electronic elements” on Decadent Stress Chamber, the sonic makeup of these songs makes much more sense.

No Life finds him pulling this artificial pop voice from pillar to post, setting out an expansive and theatrical, RPG-style track that somehow ends up in thundering rock drums. This song is focused on the instrumentation, but the vocals appear like jewels in its crown.

Keith Rankin’s time in the mainstream vaporwave group deaths dynamic shroud shows in this more straightforward style. Where classic vaporwave obscured its creator through corruption and hypnagogic patchworks of plundered sound, DDS – and Decadent Stress Chamber – embrace more pridefully clean sampling. Here, it is employed an attempt at digitally-aided pop star synthesis.

This methodology, this patchwork that’s created, takes on a strange kind of sentience. The listener is taken aback at points by what feels like professional pop vocals, only for that voice to stumble suddenly and robotically, reminding us that it is only a facsimile. Decadent Stress Chamber is a saccharine pop scrapbook, personal emotion cobbled together through magazine cuttings of vocals.