When Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington debuted Darkside, the project was easy to pin down: a brainy techno wunderkind enlisting a hotshot jazz guitarist for astral prog-disco that owed more to the dorm room than the dancefloor. The fact that said brainy techno producer had only put out one album to date, 2011’s spectacular Space Is Only Noise, stoked excitement in the press about what otherwise might’ve been seen as a mere passion project. Their self-titled EP dropped not long after Space Is Only Noise, and shortly thereafter came Random Access Memories Memories as Daftside, a curious remix of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories that filthified that famously luxurious-sounding record.
The common thread between those releases and 2013’s Psychic, released when another Jaar solo album was still three years off, was a respect for the ’70s ideal of the album as a trip (their name even gestured to the album synonymous with that ideal). When they returned after a long layoff to put out Spiral in 2021, Jaar had picked up the pace on his solo work and gotten brainier and weirder, while Darkside still seemed planted in the realm of low stakes.
Nothing, Darkside’s third and best album, absorbs the project into the knotty tangle of passions and obsessions that’s driven Jaar’s music for some years now; nobody is going to be talking about bong rips and lava lamps with this one. Though the veneer of expensiveness and ’70s worship remains — check the demonic clavinet disco of “S.N.C.,” which would give the weirdest recesses of Stevie’s Secret Life Of Plants nightmares — the music seems made of the same stuff as Jaar’s Piedras radio play from last year, which reckoned with the ravages of colonialism and the post-Pinochet psychic wounds of his parents’ native Chile. Rather than blacklight throb and purple, the dominant hues are ash, blood-red, gunsmoke, burnished gold. Jaar’s voice is a sore point for some listeners, but I can’t imagine many complaints here: Rather than the louche microhouse persona he often adopts in a Matthew Dear-Matias Aguayo-Moodymann vein, he actually sounds something like a frontman when he kicks into gear on opening track “Slau.”
Given its kinship with Jaar’s solo work, it would seem counterintuitive that this is Darkside’s most collaborative project yet, bringing drummer Tlacael Esparza into the fold. But the extra muscle might’ve been what Darkside needed to kick themselves out of the space-disco doldrums and up to the level Jaar’s solo work has been on for at least the last five years. It’s a similar power-up to the one the great German electronic duo Mouse On Mars received when they let drummer-singer Dodo NKishi go absolutely bugnuts on 2001’s Idiology. The music screams forth from the speakers and clatters like protest, aided by Esparza’s self-invented Sensory Percussion hardware interface. Nothing is the result of sessions in LA, Paris, and a studio in the South of France, and it sounds lo-fi in a way that lets you know it took a lot of time and money to make it sound so cheap. It’s not the Tascam bruising of a scrappy garage-punk band but something more akin to D’Angelo’s “1000 Deaths” or the underloved Norwegian band Serena-Maneesh, who also liked to spice up their amp noise with snippets of classic-rock riffing.
If it has anything akin to Floyd, it’s the albums Roger Waters led in the early ’80s, The Wall and its lacerating sequel The Final Cut, where he used expensive studio trickery to create a tumult approximating the way atrocities are broadcast to us daily via mass media while resolutely refusing to be numbed by it. Lots of albums want to sound like your newsfeed, centering the artist’s own feelings of helplessness rather than those of the people who are actually suffering. Jaar, who is of Palestinian heritage on his father’s side, calls this attitude out and draws blood: “I refuse to see the question as an answer to what’s real,” he sings on the sarcastically titled “Are You Tired?” He knows that specificities are more important than vague rock-star platitudes or idealized visions of a utopia free from war and tribalism, and the one reference to a bygone rock legend on Nothing exists only to challenge him from beyond the grave: “Imagine all the people,” Jaar sings over spectral doo-wop on “Hell Suite,” “living in hell.”
Nothing’s politics don’t let the listener off the hook, and yet the music is such a treat for the ears it’ll likely end up a word-of-mouth phenomenon even among those who missed Jaar and Darkside’s initial runs. There’s always some textural squish, spiffy reverb patch, or spark of fretboard of badassery to keep the listener engaged, and the beats are propulsive in a death-disco kind of way. A veteran at 35, Jaar still carries himself like a prodigy, dressed to impress. Does Darkside’s showmanship conflict with their message? Not in the least — if anything, it’s a callback to a time when pop was less apathetic, when the mainstream wasn’t necessarily a counter-revolutionary evil, when the UK charts actually had to deny that the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” had hit #1. The earnest dogooderism of Waters, U2, Geldof and the like seems less corny when you consider how flim-flam the values of pop’s self-proclaimed revolutionaries are today.
There’s a thrill in listening to something like Piedras, a five-hour radio play (also available as an excellent double album) that flips the bird to the second-Trump-term trend towards shortened attention spans, treatment of art as a disposable lifestyle accessory, and a studied apathy that will get more insufferable as divides between rich and poor continue to grow. The need to push back against anti-intellectualism is why so many people right now are getting into weird-ass movies like Inland Empire and Possession. But married to pop thrills so direct, to studio trickery so sumptuous, to guitar playing so luscious (listen to Harrington’s jangled-metal Keith Levene impression on “Sin El Sol Noy Hay Nada”), Jaar’s conviction becomes even more inspiring. It feels like something that’d have a good chance of connecting with audiences who don’t know jack about Pinochet or Palestine or Sudan. I’ve long been cynical about the hope that music alone can change people or inspire them to be more active, but in 2025, it’s better than nothing.
Nothing is out 2/28 via Matador.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift
• Cloakroom’s Last Leg Of The Human Table
• LISA’s Alter Ego
• Edith Frost’s In Space
• Mdou Moctar’s Tears Of Injustice
• Deep Sea Diver’s Billboard Heart
• Vacuous’ In His Blood
• Everything Is Recorded’s Temporary
• The Men’s Buyer Beware
• Miya Folick’s Erotica Veronica
• David Grubbs’ Whistle From Above
• Cheekface’s Middle Spoon
• Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s IC-02 Bogotá
• Rebecca Black’s SALVATION
• Gunn-Truscinski Duo’s Flam
• Yves Jarvis’ All Cylinders
• Andy Bell’s pinball wanderer
• serpentwithfeet’s GRIP SEQUEL
• Sally Shapiro’s Somewhere Else
• Hachiku’s The Joys Of Being Pure At Heart
• Constant Follower’s The Smile You Send Out Returns To You
• Koyal’s breathe in. breathe out
• Cornelia Murr’s Run To The Center
• Big Black Delta’s ADONAI
• Overpass’ Dependent
• The Devil Makes Three’ Spirits
• Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures
• bdrmm’s Microtonic
• Nona Invie’s Self-soothing
• Eric Bass’ Eric Bass Presents: I Had A Name
• Bonnie Trash’s Mourning You
• Double Wish’s Deeper Ecstasy EP
• Architects’ The Sky, The Earth & All Between
• Matilda Mann’s Roxwell
• Banks’ Off With Her Head
• The Ting Tings’ Home
• R.P. Mixon’s Here Ends The Story
• Brainstorm’s Plague Of Rats
• Robin McAuley’s Soulbound
• Oversize’s Vital Signs
• you, infinite’s you, infinite
• Dirkschneider’s Balls To The Wall – Reloaded
• The Residents’ Doctor Dark
• Aloe Blacc’s Stand Together
• Domestic Drafts’ Only the Singer
• Avantasia’s Here Be Dragons
• Hope Tala’s Hope Handwritten
• The Vapors’ WASP IN A JAR
• Daniel Carter & Ayumi Ishito’s Endless Season
• Pink Turns Blue’s Black Swan
• Venamoris’s To Cross Or To Burn
• Artemis’ ARBORESQUE
• Kip Moore’s Solitary Tracks
• Michi’s Dirty Talk
• Occurrence’s Real Friend
• Pink Must’s Pink Must
• Kristin Daelyn’s Beyond The Break
• Skinny Atlas’ Nowhere Kid
• Matt McBane’s Buoy
• Bronco’s Bronco
• Allsalt’s Ritual Abstract
• The Unfit’s Disconnected
• Le Motel’s Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ
• Reason’s I Love You Again
• Kasey Tyndall’s Kasey Tyndall
• Mae Martin’s I’m A TV
• Other Brother Darryl’s Roll Shine Roll
• Benthic’s Sanguine
• Archer Oh’s The Internal Theater
• Takuya Kuroda’s Everyday
• G-Dragon’s Übermensch
• Chris Imler’s The Internet Will Break My Heart
• Caleb Hyles’ The Darkness Before Dawn
• saoirse dream’s saoirse dream
• Last Waltzon’s Wethouse
• Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet (Deluxe)
• Raveena’s Where the Butterflies Go In The Rain (Deluxe)
• The Chills’ Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs
• Shannon & The Clams’ The Moon Is The Wrong Place (Deluxe Edition)
• Gyubin’s Flowering mini album
• Chick Corea’s Trilogy 3 live album
• Ella Fitzgerald’s The Moment Of Truth: Ella At The Coliseum live album
• Reggie Watts & CAPYAC’s Songs From Celestial City EP
• Homeboy Sandman & Illingsworth’s Dancing Tree EP
• LP Giobbi’s Dotr (Remixes) EP
• Demora’s Torpor EP
• Lucrecia Dalt’s cosa rara EP
• Pierre Kwenders’ Tears On The Dancefloor EP
