Discussing Low and Mormonism has kind of been my thing for a few years now, ever since I wrote an essay on the topic for the Eugene England Foundation, published it with Sunstone, and even posted a Director’s Cut of the same on this very site. As I argued previously, “it is Low’s minimalism, their fearlessness in embracing the silences between notes, that allows them to create a space for the very things that can’t be said, that can’t be represented, the ‘unspeakable’ thing outside discourse that is most responsible for Mormon spiritual conversion”.

The irony (perhaps even the serendipity) of that Sunstone article is that it dropped the exact same day as Low’s 2018 album Double Negative, which would turn out to be the most radical reinvention of their career. Instead of their trademark minimalist guitars and drums, the album was drenched in static, distortion, industrial grooves, filters, and feedback—each time it felt like they were about to break free and soar, they seemed to get pulled back under the suffocating ambient noise. When Alan Sparhawk sang on Track 8, “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope,” it almost felt like a stark repudiation of their 1994 debut I Could Live In Hope and everything that followed it. As numerous critics said at the time of Double Negative‘s release, it was astonishing to hear a band 25 years into their career suddenly change their sound so drastically—not to mention so anti-commercially.

Hence the even greater irony that Double Negative garnered Low some of their ravest reviews in nearly two decades, finishing 2018 on multiple publications’ Year-End-Best-of lists. But then, perhaps that critical love wasn’t so strange after all, since the album felt like such an apropos response to Trump’s America, didn’t it—the child prisons, travel bans, Nazi marches, the flagrant lies, nepotism, “alternative facts”, and climate change denials while the world literally burned—for many of us, Double Negative expressed those anxieties far more fully than any empty sloganeering ever could. In my Sunstone essay, I argued that Low finds the Holy Spirit in the empty spaces between the notes, not in any maudlin lyrics; in 2018, I realized the same could be said of their protests.

Naturally, the question arose as to how Low could possibly follow up a record as audacious as Double Negative. But then, this was not the first time Low released a politically-charged electronica-experiment in response to a disastrous Republican presidency: that distinction belongs to 2007’s Drums and Guns. With song titles like “Murderer,” “Belarus,” “Sandinista,” and “Violent Past,” the album was a clear response to the Iraq War and the outrages of the Bush administration. Even if their lyrics never explicitly referenced the White House (Low lyrics are rarely explicit), their strange new tape-loops, synthesizers, and ambient noise seemed to express our collective anger and weary exhaustion far better than any mere anti-war chants.

It may be instructive, then, to compare how Low followed up Drums and Guns with how they are currently following up Double Negative.

Notably, their first new album of the Obama era was named invitingly, intimately, C’mon—like we were all getting back together after a long estrangement (an Atonement, if you will). The 2011 record was a return to form of sorts for Low, splitting the difference between the slowcore of their ’90s output with the cranked-up distortion of the mid-2000s. They’d returned from the icy-despair of electronica for the warmth of good-old-fashioned guitar work. While the album still had its fair-share of darkness and melancholy, C’mon also opened with a surprisingly-touching lullaby in “Try to Sleep,” featured a bona fide love song in “$20” (with its moving refrain of “My love is for free, my love”), and penultimately finished with the triumphant, slow-burning anthem, “Nothing But Heart,” the song I want played at my funeral. Though their optimism was still deeply cautious, Low appeared overall to be in a better place on C’mon—largely because it felt like the world was in a better place. We’d turned a corner; and if we weren’t yet where we wanted to be, we were at least moving in the right direction.

Hence the crushing disillusionment of 2016; hence Double Negative. But now it’s the Year of our Lord 2021 (10 years since C’mon), and though Obama’s VP is now back in the White House for a de facto third term, our optimism is also even more cautious than ever, because we now know just how quickly this can all get reversed.

Yet though Low full well understands our precarious position too, they still appear to be proceeding with a modicum of hope anyways (as Mormon himself wrote amidst his own civilization’s collapse, “A man must needs hope”). Hence in a striking parallel to C’mon, they have named their latest offering the deceptively casual, all-caps HEY WHAT. Although the phrase HEY WHAT is more of an exclamation than an invitation like C’mon, it nevertheless still preserves that same sense of easy intimacy, of familiarity between friends, like we’re just now catching up again and/or noticing something about each other for the first time, even if it’s something that had been there all along.

Also still there: the static, distortion, filters, and feedback from Double Negative—they have elected not to move on from the electronica this time—save that now these studio tricks have been repurposed, redesigned, shifted from a minor key to a major one. Case in point: lead single “Days Like These” is (like C’mon‘s “Nothing But Heart”) an unapologetic anthem. In vocals and performance, it’s the closest the band has ever sounded to a Top 40 pop-song—that is, until the last 2/3rds of the track descends into ambient drone. But this ambient noise sounds different from, say, the brooding back half of Double Negative‘s “Dancing in Blood:” it instead feels re-creative, rejuvenative, restorative, calming, peaceful. It’s like they destroyed the world on their last album but are now rebuilding it with the same tools on this one.

A better example: their stunning second single “Disappearing” also makes heavy use of the pulsating studio reverb and filters they deployed on Double Negative. But instead of using them to express hopelessness or despair, they’re now used to express a certain sense of awe, power, even holy reverence for the mystery and immensity of the ocean, which itself is but a metonym for the mystery and immensity of Eternity. This feels integral, because as Jane Bennett (whom we’ve quoted before) has written in The Enchantment of Modern Life, “One must be enamored with existence”, that is, one must feel enchanted by life, if one is going to feel moved to make the world a better place (as Moroni might say, one “might with surety hope for a better world”). On “Disappearing”, Low appears to be carefully recovering their own sense of enchantment—not by pretending the last 5 years never happened, but rather by shoring up their spiritual reserves for whatever comes next: politically, emotionally, environmentally, even cosmically.

It’s as though on Double Negative, Low was watching in real time the end of the world wherein all “the elements shall melt with a fervent heat”, while on HEY WHAT, they are already anticipating the Earth then celestializing into “a sea of glass and fire.” There’s burning and terror either way, but the first is destructive while the latter is creative. Opener “White Horses” may sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse approaching, but it’s the apocalypse in the original Greek definition of the word for Revelation. Lyrically, Low may have let their faith fly higher on, say, 1999’s Secret Name or 2013’s The Invisible Way, but an argument could be made that these two most recent albums are their most LDS ones to date, for how they literally look forward to the Latter-end (how apt we are to forget that we are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…). As Neal A. Maxwell once said, we know Armageddon is coming, but so is Adam-ondi-Ahman.

Another noteworthy contrast between the two albums: Double Negative closes out with the barn-burner “Disarray,” which takes for granted the coming dissolution of all things, singing “Before it falls into total disarray/you’ll have to learn to live a different way.” The victory of the Evil One, of “This evil spirit, man, it’s bringing me down,” is presupposed to be complete, as something merely to be survived and endured. But on HEY WHAT‘s “All Night,” they sing about how “you fought the adversary.” No other reviews have mentioned this yet, so I will: in an LDS context, “the adversary” always refers specifically to Satan. The adversary is who tempted Christ in the wilderness, attacked Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, and assaulted Joseph Smith moments before the First Vision–and is also who “you” are fighting “All Night,” every night. That alone feels like a significant shift, because, well, the Evil One is now something that can actually be fought, resisted, perhaps even overcome, not just helplessly endured. That implies not resignation but action; that implies the possibility of redemption; that implies hope.

Not that this album is flawless; not all their experiments succeed (title track “Hey” meanders a little too long even by Low standards; “There’s a Comma After Still” could just as well be named “Untitled;” and third single “More,” while I’m sure sounds killer live, still doesn’t make me fall back in love with Low quite like “Disappearing” does). But they do seem to have retained a strong sense that the old tools aren’t sufficient anymore, that we need to be trying radically new strategies in the face of much more monumental challenges. Perhaps on C’mon they thought they no longer needed the electronic-experiments of Drums and Guns, now that the worst was behind us; but on HEY WHAT, Low isn’t making that same mistake again (and I say this as one with great affection for C’mon), and are instead choosing to push forward with their experiments, to keep mining down this particular vein, in order to forge something not only new, but necessary.

That is, this isn’t just reinvention for novelty’s sake, but a “feeling-out” for new tools, new ways of living, of transcending, of rejuvenating spiritually. And I honestly suspect this not only taps into our national zeitgeist, but also the Church’s: how many hitherto-unthinkable changes have occurred under President Russel M. Nelson’s administration—two-hour church, revising the Temple endowment, etc.? Now, I’m well aware that in many corners of the Bloggernacle, these rapid-fire changes have been criticized as being all too much like spaghetti thrown at a wall to see what sticks, a scatter-shot approach unworthy of men claiming direct revelation from God Himself.

However, like Low choosing to exercise a particle of hope again on HEY WHAT, I also choose to read the Q15 slightly more charitably; and just as it was impressive to see Low so radically re-invent itself a quarter-century into their careers, so too I think we should at least acknowledge just how wild it is to see men in their 80s and 90s, old and largely stuck in their ways, suddenly attacking some of the most sacred cows of the Church. They, too, are feeling out for new tools, new ways of living, of transcending, of rejuvenating spiritually, “if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us”. That is, for the Brethren, this feeling things out, this experimenting, “trying all things and holding fast to the true”, isn’t an abdication of prophetic responsibility, but a model to follow—another avenue to revelation, of ceaseless forward momentum towards the divine. For both Low and the Church, the gospel is not static, but an Eternal Progression. May we follow their examples—and the stranger the better, so as to better match the world to come.