Here’s the beginning of an unfunny joke: “Thurston Moore walks into an In Utero session.” Here’s the beginning of another unfunny joke: “Umpteenth indie rock band tries to sound like Thurston Moore walked into an In Utero session.” Influences become jokes when they’re hollow, “worn on sleeves” like designer on a mannequin. (Better get in line.) In the right hands, homage is a launchpad—less about the past than the weird, oddly familiar thing it’s growing into. Few understand this better than Voyeur, a New York band that runs the city’s history through a funhouse mirror and emerges with a twisty, well-studied take on decades’ worth of alt-rock squall. Something Becomes You, their latest EP, is No Wave meets Nirvana meets the sweaty solipsism of lonely subway rides. It isn’t a joke; it’s the work of a band worth taking seriously.
In an underground New York context, Voyeur nearly qualify as a supergroup—you might recognize singer-guitarist Jake Lazovick as Sitcom, bassist Joe Kerwin as the brain behind the newsletter You Missed It, or singer-guitarist Sharleen Chidiac as a founder of the performance space Pageant. Their approach to post-punk is both starry-eyed and squalid, like the strange affection a lifelong city-dweller might feel for derelict buildings. Similar dichotomies—ugly and lush, filthy and romantic, serious and slightly self-deprecating—comprise the scaffolding of their formula. But what makes them such a jolt is how adeptly they dart between extremes. Ugly, the debut EP they released last February, so proficiently channeled alt-rock’s past that at times it seemed like a really good parody. Take “Big Decision,” in which a foamy-mouthed Lazovick plays frenzied incel over a fee-fi-fo-fum rhythm section. It sounds like Kurt Cobain stumbled into the wrong rehearsal space, said what the hell, and started jamming with Steve Shelley. It also sounds unbelievably solid—like a band that’s played together for 20 years, not one.
This holds true throughout Something Becomes You, a follow-up that keeps alt-rock influences at the forefront, but reroutes them in riskier ways. It’s more insular than the lovestruck Ugly, a wintry antidote to that project’s roaring romantics. The frigid glare of this new EP befits a New York lineage of off-kilter bands who extracted epics from emotional distance. It’s one thing for a two-guitar lineup to weaponize both six-strings as a wall of scuzz, but another—slightly more difficult—thing to make both guitars interlock uneasily, a tightrope of arpeggios and sickly sustain. The interplay makes even the most straightforward songs, like “Spirit,” feel imbued with something sinister: a creeping feeling that at any moment, this could all fall apart. Sometimes it does and the deconstructions are gut-churning and sublime, like watching a controlled demolition. By the final minute of “Look Through You,” a slow-burn guitar showcase that devolves toward “The Diamond Sea” territory, the only survivor is screeching feedback, wailing like an eternal police siren.