Heaven To a Tortured Mind

by 
AlbumApr 03 / 202012 songs, 36m 29s
Neo-Psychedelia Art Rock
Popular Highly Rated

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

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8.5 / 10

The iconoclastic artist moves to a plush and magisterial kind of rock music for a gratifying and intense record, one whose pleasures are viscerally immediate.

7 / 10

8 / 10

Yves Tumor takes things to an unabashed glam-pop extreme on Heaven To A Tortured Mind

9.0 / 10

The experimentalist proves they can be nearly anyone and maintain a sense of humor

At one point on Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Yves Tumor sings "I can be anything."

Yves Tumor's new record sends the message that there's always calmness to be found amid chaos

9 / 10

The barriers between real life and science fiction, between tangibility and abstraction, have rarely felt more frail. There's a disorienting...

In the face of information overload, Yves Tumor remains one of music’s last true enigmas.

8.5 / 10

Do you remember when rock music was cool? Not in that aloof bookish way we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years, but in the strutting cocksure sense of the so-called rock gods of old.

8 / 10

There is always more to Yves Tumor than meets the eye. On his fifth studio album ‘Heaven To A Tortured Mind’, the earlier avant-garde

8 / 10

This is another triumphant, multifaceted and unpredictable record from the shapeshifting American artist, and as exciting as anything he's ever done

9 / 10

When you consider the idea of linear artistic development, you very rarely find a musician moving from idiosyncratic noise artist to more conventional rock...

8.5 / 10

Heaven To A Tortured Mind by Yves Tumor, album review by Leslie Chu. The full-length is available today via Warp Records and DSPs

Sean Bowie’s creative imagination is extraordinary: experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood

85 %

Album Reviews: Yves Tumor - Heaven To A Tortured Mind

88 %

2.4 / 5

Yves Tumor - Heaven To A Tortured Mind review: a perplexing labour of love