But once the album lands on its fourth tune, the wheels start to come off. The 2-steppy “I’m Just Being Honest” is an overheated Overmono pastiche with perfunctory drums and grating vocal samples, with different phrases pitched up or down seemingly just for the sake of doing it. You can hear frustration in the words, but the vocal processing and generic production dull any emotion, a problem that drags down much of the album. Some tracks are perfectly catchy—like “Obsessed,” with its rolling jungle breaks and atomized vocal samples, or “I Don’t Know What It Is,” a fusion of drum’n’bass, hyperpop, and steel pans—but they lack the vibrancy and openness of her best music.
The album hits its nadir with the orchestral techstep of “It’s in Everything You Say”: Here come more pitch-shifted vocals orbiting around a lightweight beat occasionally sent offroad by big, growling basslines, the kind that Skrillex made famous circa Scary Monsters. It’s a little gutsy, and certainly surprising, but none of the elements gel. Other tracks suffer from a similar lack of focus; “Obsessed” could have been a transcendent banger if it weren’t for the undercooked drums and distracting LFO wobbles, which give the impression that Smith couldn’t figure out how to channel aggression without channeling brostep.
I want to like RUIN: It’s Not Just Music; Smith is a talented composer, and a musician with a special ear for sound, particularly synthesis. But here, she’s trying so hard to fit a template that she ends up drowning out her own voice. In press around the album, she used terms like “sonic forcefield” and “sonic combat,” intentionally separating the record from her past work in new age and ambient. But the record doesn’t convey the forcefulness of those ideas. For all her talk of catharsis and confrontation, outside of its sometimes angry lyrics, she actually feels like she’s pulling punches, and stringing together genre clichés instead. In the wake of truly out-there records like Gush and The Kid, or the beautiful orchestral arrangements of Thoughts on the Future, RUIN: It’s Not Just Music feels like it’s trapped in an EDM-shaped box.
