Night shall eat these girls and boys.: Where Your Interests Lie

Night shall eat these girls and boys.’ Where Your Interests Lie is an exercise in intimacy, as disconcerting as it is inviting. “When we are alone/ I feel anxious and weird,” sings Willy Skillets in the title track; “/… / It’s so hard to be near you / when I know who you are.” His vulnerable voice and close-to-the-bone confessions lend humanity to a soundscape driven mainly by synths and drum machines. His lyrics are dense and syntactically challenging, but well worth unpacking.

For this record, Willy is joined by brother Alex Lopez and multi-instrumentalist Austin Hermann, although the live lineup is a matter of chance and circumstance. They  incorporate synth, guitar, electronic beats, trumpet, whistling, and what sounds like pebbles falling on cardboard. The songs veer between sparse melodic musing and synth-drenched jouissance.  Mostly reserved, the album invites you inside with whispered words and then wallops you with outbursts of polyphony. On the title track, the guitar lilts along in 5/4 time, until it explodes into a shouted “whoa-ohh” bridge. “Mammoth Beat” delivers a wordless (but not voiceless) pulsating dance tune, without the cock and bull of your average synth rock anthem. On “slowdance”, the guitar chimes and bubbles like the soundtrack to a PBS documentary on Jacques Cousteau. “Zip Zap Zup” rocks out, a Gameboy waltz with a theremin-freakout ending.

The last track, “Lily and I”, stands out. It is simple but nuanced, untangling a damaged relationship: “Lily and I are learning becoming friends / We do this by keeping very far away / we’ve already yelled and kicked and cursed / our drinking throats devoid of thirst / and now that’s done / I’ve found the silence left to be much worse.” The song captures Night shall eat these girls and boys.’ modus operandi: smart melodies propel self-aware lyrics while odd arrangements interject to raise questions and wreak havoc. Where Your Interests Lie is an intriguing listen by a promising songwriter.

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