Frailty

One of the first albums the teenage producer bought on iTunes (or, rather, that their mom bought for them) was Childish Gambino’s *Because the Internet*; that title is also a pretty spot-on description of digicore, the genre pioneered by Gen Z bedroom artists that sounds like the internet feels. Still, there’s a realness to *Frailty*, the second album from dltzk, that transcends the digital. With its fuzzy guitar chords and yearning high school poetry (like “Time passed with a slap to the back of my head,” from the hyper-catchy unrequited-love ballad “Your Clothes”), this is emo music rigged with the pyrotechnics of EDM and the absurdity of meme culture, minus the irony. There’s a sweetness to the youthful chaos, something to relate to even if you didn’t spend your adolescence scrolling.

The official debut from the young digicore producer and songwriter is riveting, a shapeshifting emo-electronic record that sounds like new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss.

The New Jersey producer’s debut is a testament to how everything we consume infiltrates our psyche.