Computerwife
Computerwife
DANGER COLLECTIVE
Computerwife’s digital footprint reads more like a series of personal diary entries than a vast web of communications and clickbait. The the self-titled debut from the NYC-based project of Addie Warncke is the sort of album you could only make on a laptop cluttered with your deepest secrets bogged down by demands for constant updates—the kind that could crash at any second despite being password-protected, leaving you without the encrypted hints as to who you really are.
This tenuous grip on identity is laced throughout the album, a problem which Warncke is never one click away from troubleshooting even with endless amounts of information at her fingertips. It seems like the answers that really matter remain elusive—there’s no Reddit thread to offer a quick solution to the emotional uncertainty of lead single “Lexapro,” or the frustration of “You Make It Look So Easy.” Instead, armed with a free trial of Ableton, she synthesizes the data and digits of the deep web to make swirling shoegaze flush with the influences of emo and Sonic Youth.
Computerwife is as niche as the online presence we all curate, with samples from Texas Chainsaw Massacre spliced with recovered MP3 files and intelligence obtained from internet rabbit holes. Still, it’s not all glitch-craft; instead, the co-mingling of analog and digital elements give the record the intrigue of early technology-think, the excitement surrounding the first generation of Mac computers or the original iPod. It’s the kind of LP that sounds best through janky wired headphones, yet which could only be produced in 2023.
But Computerwife is captivating not just due to the distant vocals and dense basslines decorating tracks like “Happy Girl,” but for the questions that Wancke asks. Despite how tempting it can be to plug in and zone out, Warncke uses the tools at her disposal to make sense of who she is and what all of this means. Over 11 tracks she proves that even in a world full of pretty distractions and electronic ease, there’s no way to escape the confusion of everything that makes us human.
