The battle over What Is This Heart

0:00I'm here with SpinQuest where you can play and win from the comfort of your own home with hundreds of slot games and all of the table games you love with real cash prizes. Right now, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10 for new users. It's all at SpinQuest.com that's S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T dot com. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. So in June of 2014, the Guardian reviewed this highly anticipated indie album and just brutally dismissed it. They literally called it a soundtrack to heartbreak and general misery. Yeah, which is quite a statement, just totally savage. Right. But then, that exact same week, Pitchfork reviews the exact same album, gives it an 8.8 out of 10, and hails it as this modern masterpiece of eternal transparency. It's wild. You don't usually see that kind of whiplash between two major outlets.

1:00Exactly. And, you know, welcome to another deep dive, because today isn't just about a record. It's about what happens when an artist just rips away the performative gloss and the, like, structural scaffolding of pop music. And forces you to look at this really uncomfortable, bleeding reality. Yeah. So today, we're looking at a wiki-pedi article detailing a highly specific, very polarizing piece of modern music history. We're talking about the 2014 album, What Is This Heart, by the American musician Tom Crowe. Right. Who you probably know better by his moniker, How to Dress Well. And it's the perfect subject for a deep dive, because it operates entirely on friction. Friction, yeah. Like, it perfectly illustrates that tension between the polished emotional escapism we usually demand from our art and the raw, uncurrated vulnerability that an artist is actually willing to subject us to. And our mission today is to explore exactly that friction. We want to see how this single album used extreme transparency, aggressive genre blending, and just raw emotion to challenge the modern music landscape.

2:01And completely polarized music critics right down the middle in the process. Okay. Let's unpack this. So to understand the critical civil war this album started, we actually have to look at the genesis of the project, like starting with how Crowe framed it for the world before anyone even heard a single note. Right. Setting the stage. Exactly. Yeah. It's a 32014 on a weird world, which is an imprint of Domino, right? The indie label. Yeah. The prominent indie label, Domino. But the title itself is really the first piece of the puzzle here. It is incredibly specific grammatically. The title is, what is this heart? But you have to include the quotation marks and the question mark, which is so unusual. And Crowe was actually militant about this formatting. Oh, absolutely. In a Twitter message leading up to the release, he explicitly told his audience. He said, my new album is called, what is this heart? Just like that, in quotes, like a spoken question. What's fascinating here is how that grammatical choice fundamentally changes the artist's relationship with you, the audience.

3:02Oh, so. Well, usually an album title functions as this definitive thematic umbrella, right? It's a declaration. Yeah. Like a statement. Exactly. But by framing it as a literal spoken question, Crowe shifts the entire dynamic. It's not a statement of fact anymore. It demands an active internal response from you. Oh, I see. It sets this tone of direct, unfiltered intimacy before you even hit play. He isn't presenting a polished collection of songs. He's initiating a very difficult, very open into dialogue. It's incredibly striking for you listening. Think about the psychology of that formatting. It's exactly like receiving a text message from a close friend at 2 a.m. that just says, what is this heart? Oh, that's a great analogy. Great. You instantly know this isn't rhetorical musing. It's not casual, small talk. No, it's a deep, unanswerable late night plea. Yeah. You feel the physical presence of the person asking it. Exactly. And if you're going to demand that level of sudden jarring intimacy with a title, the actual sonic architecture, the album, has to support it.

4:04Which makes sense. You can't ask a desperate 2 a.m. existential question over like a pristine four on the floor club beat. Right. It's like a landscape that reflects that internal messiness. Which brings us to the actual sound and how Krell translates that existential crisis into audio. The sources categorize this album as bridging multiple very distinct musical landscapes. Yeah. He's pulling from a lot of different spaces. Alternative R&B, experimental, ambient, low-fi, and experimental pop. He's pulling from all of these at once. And he's doing it by subverting how those genres traditionally operate, like think about traditional R&B. Okay. Historically, a genre rooted in vocal clarity, passion, rhythm, and these front and center melody. Right. You want to hear the singer clearly. Exactly. But Krell takes those driving R&B vocal runs and he buries them under ambient and low-fi textures. Instead of the crisp highs and deep lows of a traditional studio pop record, he pushes the sound into the murky mid ranges.

5:05So he's intentionally degrading the audio quality to create atmosphere. Precisely. By utilizing heavy reverb, tape hiss, and this slightly unpolished fuzzy production, he removes the barrier of the studio. Wow. It creates a claustrophobic intimate space. It sounds like you were sitting on the floor of a small dimly lit bedroom with the artist while he's actively working through this trauma. That's such a vivid picture. And you know, Krell didn't construct this entire sonic space in a vacuum. No, he did. The electronic artist's CFCF actually co-wrote and co-produced two pivotal tracks on the album. A power in what you wanted. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up CFCF because incorporating an external electronic producer into such a hyper-personal low-fi space seems risky. It does seem counterintuitive. But it makes sense when you listen to the texture of those specific tracks, CFCF's electronic footprint adds this rigid synthetic architecture. And Krell's really fluid, vulnerable R&B falsetto can bounce off of that.

6:06It creates an incredible sonic tension. It really does. It's the tension of organic human emotion trying to survive inside a cold digital landscape. But I have to push back here for a second because blending all these elements isn't a guaranteed formula for success. Like NME gave this album a lukewarm 5 out of 10 for a reason. When you throw ambient drones, low-fi fuzz, and synthetic electron beats into a blender with R&B vocals, don't you risk muddying the emotional core? That's the danger, yeah. Did Krell actually succeed in synthesizing these or did the dense experimental production just act as a smoke screen? Like, to mask the fact that some of these tracks lacked a solid, accessible, melodic foundation. Well, it's a highly valid critique and it's exactly why experimental music often struggles commercially. The assumption is usually that murky equals inaccessible. But the performance metrics from the sources tell a very different story regarding how the public received it. Oh, really? Yeah. Alien-eating listeners with this chaotic wall of sound.

7:08What is this heart actually became how to dress well's highest charting album? No way! Yes, it peaked at number 145 on the Billboard 200. Wait, peaking at 145 for a low-fi experimental record on a domino imprint is wild. It's very impressive. That implies this wasn't just, you know, background study music that people threw on a playlist and ignored. There was a dedicated fan base actively buying this, streaming it and deciphering this emotional puzzle. Absolutely. What was the mechanism driving that kind of engagement? The mechanism was the universality of the emotion cutting through the experimental production. Yeah. Yes, the packaging is unconventional. Yeah. And yes, the vocals are sometimes buried and reverbed. But the core rhythm that alternative R&B heartbeat is so deeply recognizable. Ah. The listener might not understand the complex ambient textures, but they fundamentally understand the sound of a heart and turmoil. The public latched onto the authenticity of it. That makes a lot of sense.

8:09The public was willing to do the work to decode the production because the emotional payoff felt real. Exactly. But while the Billboard charting proves it resonated with everyday listeners, the professional music critics were essentially thrown into a civil war over it. Civil war is the perfect term. The critical reaction to this album is a master class in how subjective art evaluation really is. Totally. Especially when the art refuses to hand you easy answers. Well, here's where it gets really interesting. If you look at the aggregate scores, the album holds a metacritic score of 69 based on 32 distinct reviews. Okay. Over on any decent music, it sits at a 7.1 out of 10. Now normally, a 69 implies a consensus of solid middle of the road B minus grades. Right. Just a generally okay album. Yeah. But that is absolutely not the story here. Not at all. That 69 is entirely deceptive. It is the mathematical result of extreme glowing highs and brutal lows violently canceling each other out. There was no consensus.

9:09None. Let's juxtapose these reactions because the Whiplash is incredible. On one end of the spectrum, you have Ian Cohen writing for pitchfork. He gave the album a massive 8.8 out of 10. Yeah. Huge score. He praised its eternal transparency and framed it as a profound artistic achievement. Right. And on the other end. Well, the AV club gave it a C+. Claiming the music was fundamentally broken because it was torn between pop-escapism and emotional torment. Interesting framing. Spin magazine gave it a 7 out of 10, visibly stating that the album opens a vein, bleeds turbulent R&B. Wow. NME, as we mentioned, gave it a completely indifferent 5 out of 10. And then there's the Guardian. Ah, yes. Yeah. The Guardian's review is legendary for how bluntly it dismissed the entire project. They literally called it a soundtrack to heartbreak and general miseries. It's just... What? Ouch. Imagine pouring your absolute soul into an hour of music and a major publication calls it general misery. It's rough. So I have to ask you, listening, when you put your headphones on, what are you actually

10:12looking for? Are you looking for the emotional scaffolding of pure pop-escapism? Like a song with a kitschy chorus that makes you forget your day. Exactly. Or are you willing to wait into an album of emotional torment, knowing it might ruin your afternoon? It's the ultimate question for any music consumer. And it's the exact dividing line that split these critics. So why were the reactions so opposed? To understand that, we really need to unpack that glowing review from pitchforks Ian Cohen. Because he hit on a profound cultural observation about how we consume media. What did he say? He noted that modern discourse, especially in the age of digital personas and social media, seeks what he called metaphorical blood. Metaphorical blood. That is a heavy phrase. It is. He elaborated by saying that modern culture allows people to disclose more than ever without actually revealing anything. Wait, disclose more without revealing anything. That is a staggering observation. Isn't it? It perfectly dissects the modern internet era. Like, we post a million highly curated photos of our bad days.

11:15We write lengthy, performative captions about our struggles, but we aren't actually being vulnerable. Exactly. It's safe. Right. It's performative vulnerability. Right. We're giving the audience the metaphorical blood they crave, but keeping our actual messy reality hidden behind a filter. Precisely. And critics and audiences have become very comfortable evaluating that kind of curated sadness. Because it's easy to digest. Yes. But Cohen points out that in an era of constant shallow oversharing, when an artist like Krell comes along in demands that you look right into his actual, uncurated heart, it shatters that comfortable dynamic. Wow. It makes true transparency feel incredibly risky because it demands the listener actually carries some of that emotional weight. If the artist isn't faking it, then your reaction to it can't be fake either. Exactly. It makes the listener and the critic profoundly uncomfortable. So the guardian calling it a soundtrack to general misery might not actually be a critique of the musical composition at all.

12:15It might be a defensive reaction. They were looking for the metaphorical blood, like a catchy sad song with a traditional pop structure they could easily grade. Right. And instead, Krell handed them the real thing and they simply didn't want to hold it. That is the exact crux of the divine. Which fork saw that intense discomfort? Recognized the bravery it took to create it and called it a masterpiece of transparency. Yeah. The guardian saw that exact same discomfort resented being made to feel it and called it misery. The sonic architecture didn't change. Right. The music was the same. What changed was the critics willingness to sit in a room with raw unfiltered trauma. But you know, how do you actually sustain that level of intense reality over nearly an hour of music without completely exhausting the listener? It's a challenge. Because to truly understand this critical tug of war between escapism and torment, we have to look at how Krell sequences this experience. If you look at the runtime, he actually builds the friction directly into the track list.

13:15Yeah. The pacing of the album is incredibly deliberate. The source material notes that the album is exactly 55 minutes and one second long. Okay. And it comprises 12 tracks. That is a massive amount of time to sustain the murky, low-fi, R&B atmosphere we've been discussing. 55.01. It's a very specific, sustained, emotional arc. And the titles of these 12 tracks are evocative to the point of being overwhelming. They really are. Let's just look at the narrative progression of a few of them. Track 1 opens the record with two years on in parentheses, shame dream. Heavy start. Yeah. Track 5, the mood violently shifts to repeat pleasure. Track 7 is called poor serial. Track 9 hits you with this massive unwieldy title. This one is a lot. Childhood faith and love, and then in parentheses, everything must change. Everything must stay the same. And finally, the album closes out with track 12. House inside, in parentheses, future is older than the past. Just hearing those titles riddle out, you can feel the thematic weight Krell is wrestling

14:17with. It's heavy. It's also incredibly paradoxical. Look at the whiplash build right into the sequencing. What do you mean? You go from a song called shame dream directly into the orbit of a song called repeat pleasure. Ah, right. That sequencing perfectly encapsulates what the AV club was complaining about when they said the album was torn between pop escapism and emotional torment. Oh, wow. It's literally right there in the track titles. Krell is pulling the listener back and forth between the torment of a shame dream and the escapism of repeat pleasure. He refuses to let the listener settle into just one mood. If we connect this to the bigger picture, you have to look closely at Krell's heavy reliance on those parenthetical titles. The long ones. Yeah. Everything must change. Everything must stay the same. And future is older than the past. They sound less like song titles and more like unresolvable philosophical riddles. Because that is exactly what they are. They're lengthy inherently contradictory statements.

15:20Conceptually, how can everything change while simultaneously staying the exact same? It can't. Right. And from a linear perspective, how can the future possibly be older than the past? These parentheticals are doing immense poetic heavy lifting. They are mirroring the main title. Yes. They mirror the unanswerable paradoxical nature of the album's core question. What is this heart? Krell is using the track list itself to communicate that human emotion does not fit into need logical structural boxes. We're too complicated for that. Exactly. Our inner lives are full of conflicting truths. By needing his tracks this way, he is forcing the listener to confront those contradictions head on, rather than neatly resolving them by the end of the chorus. It's like he's telling the listener, look, I don't have the answers to these paradoxes and neither do you, but we are going to sit in this messy, confusing ambient space together and figure it out for exactly 55 minutes in one second. Which brings us right back to why the critical landscape was so fractured. Yeah.

16:20If you approach music, wanting it to resolve your feelings, if you want a tidy pop structure to make sense of the world for you, this album will frustrate you to no end. It'll feel like general misery. Exactly. If you want art to validate the confusing paradoxical reality of your own emotional state, it functions beautifully. So what does this all mean? Let's zoom out and pull these threads together. Okay. What is? This heart is a 2014 genre-bending sonic experiment that refused to play by the rules of the era. It's a record that used the intimate degraded textures of lofi and the driving passion of alternative R&B to ask a deeply uncomfortable, spoken question. A very brave question. Yeah. And in doing so, it split the professional music world right down the middle, forcing a very public conversation about the value of raw musical torment versus profound, risky transparency. It proves that sometimes the most resonant art isn't the art that gives you a catchy answer. It's the art that forces you to sit with the hardest questions.

17:22And that leads us to a really fascinating final thought. Well, if you look at the larger Wikipedia chronology of Tom Creel's discography under how to dress well, you'll see a distinct overarching narrative arc across his album releases during this era. Oh, the albums themselves tell larger sequential story. They absolutely do. This 2014 album, What Is This Heart, sits squarely between two other major critically analyzed releases, immediately preceding it in 2012. How to release an album titled Total Loss, Total Loss, and immediately following our deep dive subject in 2016, he released an album titled Care. Wait, Total Loss, then What Is This Heart, and finally, Care? Yeah. That is an incredible progression. It's a map of human recovery embedded right into the discography. Think about the psychological journey there. First, you experience a devastating total loss. You are fundamentally broken. In the direct aftermath of that destruction, you are left sifting through the wreckage

18:25of your own life, asking the desperate, highly vulnerable question. What is this heart? And finally, the result of asking that brave, uncomfortable question, the actual reward for sitting in that 55 minutes of musical torment and transparency, is that you eventually arrive at a place of care that completely recontextualizes the misery the critics complained about. I want you listening to consider how that arc applies to the difficult questions we dare to ask in our own lives. We often view emotional torment or the messy vulnerability of a late night plea as a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with us. Yeah, we want to hide it behind metaphorical blood. But what if the messy, contradictory questions we ask ourselves in the dark aren't just misery for the sake of misery? What if asking, What Is This Heart, is the necessary unavoidable stepping stone required to reach our own genuine healing and care? That rips the structural scaffolding right off, doesn't it? It proves that real healing isn't a tidy, three minute, escapist anthem. Sometimes healing is a messy, beautiful, 55 minute question.

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