2021 • Post-Rock / Noise • Sub Pop\
Cassette Tape Album
This is the last album Low ever made, though when I bought it, I had no idea that was going to be the case.
At the time, I compared *Hey What* to Lou Reed’s *Metal Machine Music* because it seemed to come out of that same noise tradition. But knowing what I know now, the better comparison is David Bowie’s *Blackstar*.
Because little did I know Mimi Parker was suffering from cancer while making this album. She was fighting it the whole time. And 1 year after *Hey What* came out, she died.
Low was always built around a husband-and-wife core. So Mimi isn’t just dealing with her own mortality here. Alan Sparhawk—whose bouts with clinical depression are well-known—is clearly reckoning with it too.
The result is one of the greatest final albums in rock music.
This was a band that had never put out a bad album, and for the swansong they went all the way.
And *Hey What* is innovative as hell. Yeah, there’s cacophonous noise. But right beside it are some of the most beautiful, cosmic vocal harmonies I’ve ever heard. Screeching distortion crashes into male-female vocals carrying unbelievable love and sadness at the same time.
There’s a reason this album was nominated for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical at the Grammys. Pulling off that balance takes nerves of STEEL. This could have turned into nothing but unlistenable screech, but producer BJ Burton somehow made it work.
This is also the album that got me back into cassette tapes.
Because *Hey What* is one of those records where the unpredictability of analog actually helps. Tape wow and flutter, hiss, all that instability—it makes the album even better.
One of the best albums of 2021.
And when the dust settles, this might be one of the best albums of the 2020s.
