Our editors round up their favorite records of the year, from electronic to indie rock
In its five years together, the Brooklyn quartet Parquet Courts has gone from self-releasing its music on cassette tapes to indie-rock band semistardom. With its latest and most fully realized album, Human Performance, which combines anxious postpunk with a more emotionally vulnerable troubadour vibe, it’s clear that the band is still climbing. Before the group plays its concert in NYC, we caught up with guitarist-vocalist Austin Brown (pictured, far right) while he was bedridden in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, recovering from a sprained ankle. (Poor guy.)
The new album seems more thought-out and less frantic than your past recordings.
Going into it, it was important to us to feel like we were making a step forward in the evolution of the group. There’s no button or knob that you can turn that’s like, “Write songs with more depth and meaning,” you know? It’s hard to be honest, I think. It’s hard to be sincere. I think that we took that as a challenge. This time around, you can listen to a track and know exactly what it’s about the first time.
You came into making this record off a big couple of years for the band. Did you feel any pressure to live up to the level of buzz you’ve been generating?
Not really. All the pressure really came from inside the group, just to make the record as good as we could. I don’t think I’d release something that I thought wasn’t good. Even [2015 EP] Monastic Living—a lot of people hated that, but I still think it’s good. Actually, I kind of liked seeing all those negative reviews. A lot of people use the word unlistenable for that record [laughs], which I think is hilarious. Maybe they’re just not taking the right drugs.
This record has a distinctly New York feel to it. How does the city influence you as an artist?
I think it does in a lot of ways. The song “Captive of the Sun” has references to the J train, specifically, but also all the references in the song are about living on a street in Brooklyn that’s maybe a little bit more busy than I’d like it to be. I live in Williamsburg, and every time I come back, the neighborhood just looks totally different. It’s hard to have a sense of identity in a place like that. Sonically, there’s lots of elements of New York music in the record, like Talking Heads, the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan. I would like those bands and play the kind of music that I’m playing in any other city, but maybe it just makes more sense in New York.
What’s the band’s collective musical taste like? In the van, do you guys agree on the same stuff?
For the most part, I think the music taste is really broad. There are moments where I sense some tension, where someone puts on a record and someone else is just not having it. No one ever says anything, usually. I think there was one time when I got vetoed, and it was kind of my fault. We were playing a music festival in Europe somewhere, and I was a bit drunk, and I got back in the van and played the same Drake song too many times in a row. I think after the third repeat I got shut down.