The room in Williamsburg was packed wall-to-wall with millennials. Onstage, Will Wiesenfeld held their attention with his clear tenor and a set of glitched-out soundscapes—just one man with a microphone and an Akai pad. The simplicity of it all felt surprising. Behind him were calm videos of trees, their leaves swaying slightly in the wind.

The evening felt like a flashback to an earlier era, and no wonder: After all, Wiesenfeld, who performs as Baths, is something of a holdover. He has been around since the blog days—back when the speed and flexibility of the Internet were considered assets and not an existential threat to the business models of newspapers and magazines and record companies. Fifteen years ago, his debut album, Cerulean, put him on the map and had bloggers lumping him in with the then-ascendant chillwave scene. In some ways, Wie­senfeld’s music did conform to the low-­budget, nostalgia-washed aesthetics that characterized the genre. But he always stood slightly apart from his peers in his refusal to commit fully to their easygoing vibes.

On Gut, Wiesenfeld’s latest album—his fifth, and his first in eight years—that old prickliness has matured even further. There are songs about being mean to others and songs about being mean to yourself, and songs, too, about the blighted world we all currently inhabit. But what’s remarkable is how it sounds so contemporary while slotting perfectly into Wiesenfeld’s oeuvre. He has always been ahead of the game; the world has finally caught up.

Cerulean, Wiesenfeld’s first album as Baths—he also records as Geotic and [Post-Foetus]—was a delight. Despite the sweetness of his voice, the sound he produced on the album was hard-edged; the bass thumped even as the melodies soared. This was sunny, clean, enjoyable music that occasionally veered into darkness. Obsidian, his next album, dove directly into the depths: It was about sickness and death. After a bout of illness that left him bedridden for months, Wiesenfeld produced an album of music that sounded like it was conceived in a cave; the only glimpses of light we got were intermittent, as though filtered through hundreds of feet of water. The lyrics about relationships was arresting, and although it sounded like a pop album, Obsidian may as well have been written by a demon temporarily granted human form. Wiesenfeld’s follow-up, the pixelated, technicolor Romaplasm, felt equally unearthly, but for other reasons: It was music that felt as if it were designed for a fantastical landscape—­ancient and modern, futuristic and medieval. Its first song was set on an airship, the second in space, the third in a castle. It was as though Wiesenfeld had cast himself as the intrepid hero of a video game, there to save his beloved.


Gut is like none of these albums, and yet there’s a lot that’s familiar here. It has the pop sensibilities of Romaplasm, the electronic flourishes of Cerulean, and it isn’t afraid to plumb more serious matters à la Obsidian. From the first track, “Eyewall,” with its plaintive, occasionally screamed chorus—“Can you find the patience / to listen to me / I’m asking”—one immediately feels drawn into the world of the album. “Eyewall” feels like it straddles all the earlier eras of Wiesenfeld’s music simultaneously: One can hear the clean production of Cerulean, the most contemplative parts of Obsidian, and the storytelling prowess of Romaplasm. Gut, for its part, explores a slightly less digital aesthetic; you can also hear the occasional real (or well-simulated) instrument here.

“Cedar Stairwell” is a love ballad about being perfect with someone else, a fantasy brought to life by the arrestingly sweet lyrics and warm sound. “The dream isn’t wild, it isn’t new / It soothes and alludes to being two American grooms,” Wiesenfeld sings over what feels like a self-­consciously analog sound bed that is simple, gorgeous, and a little nostalgic. It’s a lovely bit of sequencing that the next track is “American Mythos,” which tells the story of a night out with a shitty partner and their awful friends. It also happens to be the most direct engagement with America’s political reality on the entire album.

“Babe, you’re not thinking / You’re not at all that fun / Your group of friends like saying nothing / And saying it twice,” Wiesenfeld sings. “Out all night / Sweetheart I hate this, you’re / Acting, I don’t know, / Like a fucking American.” The barb is delivered sweetly, of course, but the idea is clear: We, as Americans, have elected for our president a vulgar and vapid figure, someone who’s exactly as cruel and revolting as he seems—and, of course, it implicates us all as “fucking Americans.” Although I’d also say it’s maybe a little less self-loathing than it might seem at first glance—many, many of us did not want this. Regardless, the song ends appropriately: “I hate it / I hate it all, I hate it all, I hate it all.”

As I listen through the rest of the album’s songs—the beautifully erotic “Eden,” the spiky “Governed,” the unashamedly wistful “Verity”—I think about a line from one of its other standouts, “Chaos.” The song is about the good relationships that other people seem to find themselves in, and the narrator’s inability to figure it out for himself. And so the refrain: “How does anybody do it?” Of course, there’s no clear answer—not in the song, and certainly not in life. But I hope we can figure something out.


Speaking of chaos: Lady Gaga is back. She’s just released Mayhem, an appropriately chaotic album. Gaga and Wiesenfeld are two very different artists, and yet Mayhem, like Gut, also feels like a return to an earlier era: to Gaga’s musical roots back in the late aughts. After a polyphonic and multifarious career, Gaga has once again embraced the hedonistic pop with which she started her career. Mayhem is stuffed full of songs that will sound equally good remixed at the world’s most exclusive clubs or sung straight on the biggest festival stages. And it’s very, very fun—like those bad old days used to be, if you were young enough and didn’t have any money anyway.


Mayhem is sonically all over the place, the musical equivalent of how it felt to be alive back then. Although it’s all very classic pop, structurally speaking, the songs traverse a wide range of genres, filtered through Gaga’s unique sensibility; we hear everything from disco to grunge, all of it held together by the power of her voice. It’s something that few other artists would be able to pull off as well as Gaga does here. Not that it’s all soaring vocals and pop hooks; there’s some darkness lurking as well.