In the past couple of years, chill has become ubiquitous, not just as a verb (“Netflix and chill”) but as adjective (the “chill bro”), prefix (chillstep, chilltrap), and even noun: Per SoundCloud hashtags, at least, “chill” has become a genre unto itself. Contra Moore’s Law and all the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill has been elevated to something like a state of being: a lifestyle, a philosophy, a categorical imperative.
A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. But as the aforementioned chillstep and chilltrap (faded variants of dubstep and trap, if you hadn’t guessed) suggest, ironically enough, the chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, exaggerated gestures, a kind of weaponized softness; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not coincidental that the rise of chill has appeared alongside not just marijuana’s widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
Odesza may not be the biggest stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to Australia’s Flume), but they’re close. If their YouTube stats are impressive—23 million views for 2014’s “Say My Name,” 14 million for “Sun Models”—their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for “Sun Models,” nearly as much for “Say My Name,” close to a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. Not bad for a couple of guys who started making music together just five years ago, shortly before graduating from Western Washington University.
The first Odesza album, 2012’s Summer’s Gone, offered a fairly innocuous contribution to the emerging chill canon, taking cues from Bonobo, Tycho, and Four Tet and smoothing them into a tantalizing array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery drum hits. Two years later, In Return bathed in an even more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade’s default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying real fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.
Today, Odesza are a proper stadium act. In May, they did two sold-out nights at Colorado’s Red Rocks, complete with electric guitar, eight-person choreographed drum line, and visuals by in-house live creative director Luke Tanaka. The new album is accordingly ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It’s full of billowing vocal harmonies and seismic rumble and turbo-charged trap beats; its default mode is a kind of eyes-closed beatitude, and every climax is but a stepping stone to a bigger climax. That it’s an album about desire is obvious; you can sense their anticipation at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips.
