Spencer Krug - Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One (2022) Hi-Res

Since the start of 2019, Spencer Krug has posted a new song to his Patreon page every month. The songs on the aptly named Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One are selected from those posted throughout 2020 and 2021, and remixed and remastered here into one album. This latest solo work from Krug is laced with the vague sense of anxiety that the world provided so many of us during those years, but was also made while he entered into the chaotic, blissful fog of parenthood, and so contains a necessary dose of optimism.

While no stranger to self-producing, 2020 and 2021 found Krug diving deeper than ever into the possibilities of his home setup, and therein refining a distinct blend of richly analog-acoustic with unabashedly artificial sounds. This self-aware juxtaposition is the texture making up a lot of the album, adorned as always with Krug’s half-baked, confessionalist poetry; ill-informed takes and recluse-revelations sung out from within his backyard studio.

Living in rural Vancouver Island, loosely watching humankind repeatedly unravel and then gather itself again, from the safe, sleepy vantage point of a new father keeping himself and his family away from most others, locked in a beautiful, boring bubble, wherein every day, every month, is a kind of recurring dream, bright yet slightly troubled, a quiet walk down a too-familiar country road, the cooing of the baby who doesn’t yet know… Krug has unwittingly made a collection of sonic journal entries in Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One, each one guarded yet celebratory, cynical yet hopeful.