If you're not habitually on the internet, you'd be excused for not knowing the word incel. A contraction of involuntarily celibate, it's a label applied to (and sometimes proudly worn by) a particular type of man: one who has not had sex and who defines themself by this trait. Around the start of the 2010s, these people began gathering in online spaces like 4chan and Reddit, and by the time of the 2016 US election, these spaces had radicalised. Incels, rather than looking within, lashed out and blamed all of their problems on women as a collective. They progressively got more and more toxic, with influencers like Andrew Tate working to siphon money from these desperate (and often already-poor) young men, whilst radicalising them further.
As disgusting as the community is, as pitiful their cause, incels can't be ignored because they're a symptom of a deeper sickness within the world that has been built for us. Their problem isn't with women; it's with the patriarchal systems we operate within, it's with the alienation of capital, it's with the loss of viable third spaces, it's with the loss of social mobility, it's with the slot machine of online dating, it's with the toxicity of online discourse. To escape the incel community requires self-love, the very thing which they lack. When you're amongst the trees, you can't see the forest, and charlatans take advantage of this, waylaying those who are trying to escape.
The New Sound is 62 minutes of eclectic chaos that captures the absurdity, pitifulness, and plain wrongheadedness of the incel and incel-adjacent. The album features a raft of characters, from the overconfident womaniser (reminiscent of Neil Strauss' The Game) on Holy, Holy, who is revealed to be putting on an act, to the delusional character on Blues who is suddenly aware of his mortality. Greep's creations are insecure, and overly concerned with appearance, yet undeniably tragic. Each of them took a wrong turn at some point and now lives out a strange, twisted life in a world of their own creation - one that only they believe in.
The music is an immaculate mix of vivacious bossa, angular riffs reminiscent of Greep's previous project Black Midi, and theatrical jazz. It's everything, all at once. Thematically, it makes sense within the context of Greep's characters. The album has a twisting mania, an overbearing aura of confidence meant to hide deep insecurity. A schizophrenic insanity. Greep's characters are at the very edge; they could flip at any moment. Even the most pathetic figure can be dangerous, and the growing dissonance signals their march towards the precipice.
Perhaps the scariest thing about The New Sound is that we've all met these people. Sure, Greep turns their worst qualities up to 11, but we've worked with them, or we've met them in a bar, or we went to school with them. They were coworkers, our fathers, our brothers, our friends. They were harmless until they weren't. How do you get through to someone so divorced from reality? How do you convince them that their problem lies elsewhere when so much of their identity is tied up in feelings of persecution, of a sense of unfairness they feel to their bones?