Hannah Cole's 'Switchbacks' Is a Debut With a Fourth-Album Sense of Space
Switchbacks is Hannah Cole’s debut album, out September 4th on Tight Knit after a run of EPs. She wrote and recorded it with her longtime collaborator and partner Josef Kuhn at their home studio across roughly two years, the two of them playing nearly every instrument on it. Sonny Diperri — whose credits run from My Bloody Valentine to American Football, Wisp and Julie — mixed.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Diperri’s presence is the tell. Nothing here is scaled down to fit a bedroom; the distortion has actual mass and the drums have somewhere to go. Paste’s Miranda Wollen catches it on the second track: “On ‘MMA,’ a song about the more gladiatorial aspects of the music industry, Cole is all fire and brimstone, flanked by a gnashing wall of distorted guitars.”
The Spatial Dynamics: The record is built as two halves that argue with each other. Wollen describes side one churning “through the endless grind of making it as a creative,” Cole “moody and fanged,” before side two trades the harsh chords for “dreamy, hopeful yet melancholic numbers that climb and fall like a deep breath.” Cole is explicit about engineering that contrast into individual tracks: on “Mechanical Bull,” she says, “I did want that song to feel almost like I was being muffled a little bit.” On “Mosquito Hawk,” “the reverse tape … is supposed to signify me going backwards into this memory.”
Standout Performance
Kuhn, as the rare collaborator who disappears on purpose. Cole’s own description of him: “Jos is such a selfless collaborator … someone who really wants to make an artist shine.” The proof is in the goofiest detail on the record — for “Give,” she says, “we put the microphone out in the hallway, and Jos and I did these crazy, funny background vocals for the song.” Nobody who was protecting their own fingerprints would put the mic down the hall.
Why It’s Certified
Open with “MMA,” sit inside “Mechanical Bull,” and let “Every New Day” walk you out. Our Culture’s Konstantinos Pappis gets at what makes this unusual for a first record: “it conjures a well-defined, multidimensional sound most artists don’t arrive at until several LPs into their career, each song dynamically peppered with distinctive details.” Or, as Paste put it: “it’s hard to imagine Cole moving in any direction but up.” Certified great.