Honey

The other day, I was reading in New York Magazine about how “Everything is a kids menu now.” New York’s food editor Alan Sytsma had observed that a lot of newly opened restaurants in the city were “recreating childhood food memories more or less exactly,” citing elevated takes on buttered noodles and McNuggets; given the state of the world, he concluded, “We should probably eat some pudding cake while we have the chance.”

The “kids menu” article struck a chord with me, in part because I have a profoundly unrefined palette—I only ate raw fish for the first time a couple of years ago, in large part to save face in front of friends—but mostly because I couldn’t help but apply the same logic to music right now. So much of what comes across my desk seems to offer a gourmet take on something that millennials and Gen X-ers would have loved at some point from childhood to early twenties: Chappell Roan taps into Teenage Dream-era Katy Perry and early Gaga; Phoebe Bridgers and Boygenius superimpose the vocal tone and lyrical directness of pop-punk onto office-friendly folk-rock; Frost Children made an album of shouty ’00s pop, à la Cobra Starship, then one of wintry indie, à la Bright Eyes.

Honey, the new album by Caribou, is also ordering from the adult kids’ menu. The dance music milieu with which Dan Snaith tends to be associated has trended this way in recent years: Four Tet remains hard to pin down, thanks to left-field collaborations like last year’s “Darkness, Darkness,” with William Tyler, and the intermittent use of his alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ, but he’s now best known to many people as the happiest guy ever to headline Coachella, grinning maniacally onstage next to Fred again.. and Skrillex as they drop walloping crowd-pleasers. Floating Points’ latest record, Cascade, is a sharp pivot to extremely danceable dance music after years playing with ambient jazz and modular synthesis. Music with mass appeal—particularly music that harks back to a time in which its intended listener may have been more limber, and had more stamina to stay out dancing till 6 a.m.—remains very big business.

With Honey, Snaith shoots his own distinctive style of dance-adjacent music—tracks that sound like they were composed entirely with stuff you could find at a high-end earthenware store—into the cheap seats, toning down the rose-tinted melancholy of 2020’s Suddenly and 2014’s Our Love in favor of tracks that feel rambunctious, bordering on aggressive. The songs on Honey resemble the thrill-seeking dance tracks Snaith usually releases under the alias Daphni, but more in the way you might describe them than in the way they actually sound. The stank-face-inducing womp-womp-womp drop of this album’s title track, for example, is only related to the manic Latin jazz loop of Daphni’s “Always There” in the same way that we all come from the Cradle of Africa.

Snaith has not been doing interviews around this record, but a press release says that the impetus for Honey was a desire to make music that’s broadly relatable. These songs, which twirl and dive like gamboling otters, certainly have mainstream appeal: the glorious looping synth arpeggio on “Climbing” chops electro-house and disco into confetti; “Come Find Me” is crisp, euphoric French touch, its searching lyrics appropriately tempering the joy for a few bars towards the song’s end.

Imagine I’m saying “mainstream appeal” with the most ardent love and respect. Shifts in purview like this tend to invoke scorn, but I think you’re a liar, or at least profoundly disconnected from your own sense of fun, if you say you’re not moved by hearing a gigantic, eyeball-vibrating drop in an airplane-hangar-sized club. And I can understand why artists like Floating Points and Four Tet, upon seeing the monumental success of festival-headlining dance acts like Fred and Peggy Gou, would want to get in on the fun: If all anyone wants to eat is a spicy tenders combo, why not try your hand at whipping up a Michelin-starred version?

Snaith—who, fairly or unfairly, has been accused of baiting Calvin Harris fans since the beat dropped in “Can’t Do Without You”—is very good at dressing up these familiar sounds in finery. Honey is awesome, and it’s also really easy to take down, and it thrives in settings like “Getting dressed for the Charli XCX show” or “Writing a review of Caribou’s new album Honey.” Despite the ease of use, though, there is little mistaking the production credit: “Dear Life” may be unusually forceful in its approach, and “Got to Change” may have the DayGlo positivity of a Fred again.. album closer, but most quintessential Caribou textures, like the ’80s daytime TV gloss of “Over Now,” or the rhythm in “Do Without You” that sounds like it was bashed out on wine glasses, are still firmly in place.

Most, because the one quality that previously linked nearly every Caribou song—Snaith’s distinctive, wavering falsetto—is noticeably sidelined on Honey. It pops up here and there on the album’s back half, but for the most part, Snaith’s vocals here are augmented with AI, as if this were a Caribou record featuring a host of anonymous vocalists. On “Broke My Heart” and “Honey,” the two barnstormers that open the record, those vocals are used in the way one would a sample, but on “Come Find Me,” an entire verse is processed as to sound like a cool, slightly warbly young singer, perhaps a Helena Deland or Adrianne Lenker type.

Even mentioning this feels like bursting a bubble: Ever since I was told all the vocals on Honey are by Snaith, it’s been hard to hear them as anything other than AI Dan Snaith. It’s blindingly obvious once you know—the phrasing and expression is so clearly him—but I also didn’t clock it until I was told; it felt more like I was hearing verses sampled in their entirety from other songs. I am not particularly freaked out by this development: As mentioned, this album sounds distinctly Caribou, even in all the ways it doesn’t sound like Caribou, and using these techniques likely required more effort than if Snaith had simply performed his vocals as Dan Snaith and bunged them into Ableton. AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well—to complicate and expand the abilities of an artist well into his career, whose creative impulses can no longer be entirely satiated through the means previously available to him. There is one exception: The rap verse on “Campfire” is also Snaith, and it edges toward racial ambiguity in a way that feels queasy. At best, it’s a misguided experiment; at worst, outright minstrelsy. Even if his reasons for doing so are unrelated, declining interviews around this record looks, from the outside, like a way to avoid speaking publicly about this specific aspect of Honey. Given that Snaith is willing to toe the ethical line in this way—an ill-defined line, to be clear, since there still isn’t a generally accepted public view of how AI and art should interact—it might at least be clarifying to hear him explain his process.

Has my ill feeling about this one particular moment on Honey tempered my overall experience of the album, or stopped me from returning to it? Honestly, no—as with Snaith’s previous records, the primary joys of this album come in musical form: the way “Climbing” does just as its title suggests, increasing in volume and density and pressure until it threatens to burst like a shaken Coke can; the aforementioned bassline in “Honey,” which pushes past the limits of good taste into a zone of pure enjoyment. Those who initially gravitated towards Caribou’s music for its supposedly intellectual take on peak-time dance music may be disappointed by these simple pleasures—but, then again, there’s still plenty to think about on Honey, just not where you might expect.

Caribou: Honey

$24 at Rough Trade