Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, shed wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. Im a psychological mixer Im trying to think of how someones experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way, Kupper says.

And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self-referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the bands own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smiths Between the Bars. In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction.

In her lyrics, too, lyricist and vocalist Ash Richter is as straightforward as shes ever been. She drew on her experience of pandemic isolation to write about connection and disconnection, using her lyrics as a tool for the communication that was missing in everyday life. On the soaring, shoegazey track peaches, a storm that forced the cancellation of a recording session became a metaphor for emotional distance. still asleep chronicles Richters euphoria after Total Wifes first tour, and watches it begin to curdle into paranoia. Thank the full moon, my heart is overflowing, she sings, before: Is there such a thing as too happy? The experience of isolation was prompting Richter to think back to her childhood, a time marked for her by solitude and natural play climbing trees, making mud pies, getting lost in the woods. On tracks like in my head and second spring, she uses the imagery of nature to recall that time and forge a connection with her lonely inner child. I feel connected with transcendentalist writing and magical realism trying to convey things in a concrete way, but with that element of psychology and mystery, she says.

Richter and Kupper, friends from high school, formed Total Wife in 2016, relocating from Boston to Nashville in 2020. Both are visual artists as well as musicians, which they incorporate into their work with Total Wife via layered and purposeful visuals. A DIY streak underpins everything that they do from handling their own artwork and music videos to recording their own music, releasing tapes through their label Ivy Eat Home, and hosting house shows in the basement theyve christened Ryman 2. In Nashville theyve settled into a weirdo scene living under the record industrys floorboards, a hive of collaborative and creative energy that has made them excited to call the city home. They also assembled a live band for the first time shortly after moving to Nashville, consisting of Ryan Bigelow, Sean Booz and Billy Campbell injecting their creative process with a jolt of spontaneity and aliveness that has fed back into Come Back Down.

1. in my head
2. peaches
3. internetsupermagazine
4. naoisa
5. second spring
6. still asleep
7. chloe
8. (dead b)
9. ofersi3
10. make it last