Few acts were capable of skewering the decay of society in the 2020s with as much potent disgust as
Adult. Since the late '90s,
Nicola Kuperus and
Adam Lee Miller's music has been the audio equivalent of a withering glare at humankind's worst qualities, and while they've always had plenty of inspiration, the disinformation and unchecked selfishness ushered in by the COVID-19 global pandemic (and more personally, the death of
Kuperus' father) adds a visceral rawness to
Becoming Undone that was missing from their last album, 2020's trippy
Perception Is/As/Of Deception. This time,
Miller and
Kuperus wanted to capture what it's like when things fall apart, and once again, they execute their concept thoroughly. If possible, their expressions of humanity's malfunctions sound more like machines going haywire than before. "Our compulsion is our destruction"
Kuperus intones over the paranoid metallic clang of "Undoing/Undone"; on the fraying rant "We Are Fools," there's no moral high ground to claim. To illustrate
Becoming Undone's descent into entropy,
Adult. acquired new percussion pads and a vocal loop pedal, the latter of which adds several new shades of darkness to their sound. "I, Obedient" gives its hypnotic loops a dash of kink, while repeating fragments of
Kuperus' vocals unfurl like black tendrils on "She's Nice Looking," an unsettling song even by the duo's standards. However, the album's uneasiest moments are the most abstract: "Normative Sludge" puts
Becoming Undone's mood into an endlessly swirling vortex with results that recall the experiments of
Detroit House Guests. "Teeth Out, Pt. II" is even more purgatorial, proving that
Miller and
Kuperus don't need beats to sound formidable. It all makes
Becoming Undone one of
Adult.'s most harrowing albums -- and all the more impressive because of it. ~ Heather Phares
