On March 12, 1951, Hank Ketcham debuted Dennis the Menace in the Post-Hall Syndicate, which supplied content to newspapers across America. In the UK, on the same day, David Law published a comic strip of the same name in The Beano, a children’s magazine. The odd anecdote inspired the title of Sega Bodega’s third and latest album, Dennis. For Sega, aka Salvador Navarrete, the coincidence is a precursor to what today we might call the internet hive mind. “I have this theory that all of our brains are connected to a machine that is pumping out information to all of us all at the same time,” Navarrete told Interview. His statement might bring smartphones to mind, but the Irish-Chilean producer means something more enigmatic, predating Google and social media—closer to divine fate than a viral meme.
Dennis is the most recent entry in Sega Bodega’s increasingly personal body of work, framed through his singular lens of murky, club-ready pop and confessional lyrics. Where Navarrete has always balanced ballads and euphoric production, often in the same song, on Dennis the line is practically nonexistent. From the one-two punch of early standouts “Adulter8” and “Elk Skin,” Dennis puts dark pop in the service of visceral pleasure, pairing addictive, tactile synth arpeggios with muffled vocals and acoustic guitars. Inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (see “Tears & Sighs,” whose title comes from two of the Three Mothers), sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the internet’s omnipresence, Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.
Where other artists might shy from fusing acoustic and electronic sounds so closely, Navarette embraces them as equally worthy of attention, although his palette is distinctly digital in color. Much as in his contribution to Caroline Polachek’s “Sunset,” trance motifs and acoustic guitars effortlessly converge, particularly on “Elk Skin” and “Tears & Sighs.” Dennis is more playful than Navarrete’s first two albums, incorporating cryptic spoken-word “sleep talking” interludes from Miranda July and others. “Elk Skin” opens with a Greek fan asking Navarrete to sample her voice; “Dirt” concludes with July repeating, “My water bottle is bird transition”—the kind of “beautiful nonsense,” Navarrete has said, that “comes out when someone is absolutely comatose.” He seems to be using these voices more for their sonics than for the words’ literal meanings; the same applies to Navarrete’s lyrics, which take a back seat to his dazzling, sometimes unpredictable production.