ken

Dan Bejar has been recording as Destroyer for over two decades, and each of his 12 full-length records feels uniquely unmoored in time: It’s as if he’s never been of any era, but merely adjacent to several, attentively noting the mores of the day from some vaguely aristocratic, martini-sipping remove. It makes sense, then, that ken, Destroyer’s first new release since 2015’s Poison Season, contains lessons, both musical and spiritual, about how history repeats itself—all the ways in which we are destined (or doomed) to fulfill old prophecies.

Bejar named ken after the working title of Suede’s “The Wild Ones,” a tense and thrilling ballad first released in 1994 (“Oh, if you stay/We’ll be the wild ones, running with the dogs today,” Brett Anderson sings). “The Wild Ones” is a sad and wistful song about wishing someone wasn’t about to leave you; on it, Anderson sounds both imploring and lost. Bejar has called the song “one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so,” and said he was “physically struck” after discovering it was initially called “Ken”: “In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It’s unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era.”

Bejar was born in British Columbia in 1972, which means he was 18 when Margaret Thatcher, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was forced to resign, in 1990. Thatcher’s legacy is, at best, hugely divisive; a very large faction of the world believes her aggressive economic policies led to an era of unfettered greed and cruelty, from which we are still (barely) recovering. During her three terms in office, many artists responded musically to her policies, including the post-punk band Gang of Four, whose 1979 album Entertainment! is considered a direct and furious indictment of Thatcherism. “It was violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time,” Nick Cave later said of the scene in London then.

Those words, of course, don’t feel any less applicable to late 2017. ken isn’t overloaded with explicitly political lyrics—although plenty can be read that way—but it does cultivate a paranoia that feels especially germane to our cultural moment. On “A Light Travels Down the Catwalk,” Bejar sings of alienation (“Strike an empty pose/A pose is always empty”). His voice sounds dry and desperate over acrid, wobbling synthesizers, but his breath and enunciation—especially on the line, “On bullshit for the night,” which closes the first verse—make him feel extra close, as if he’s just appeared over your shoulder to intone heavy warnings. This is the Bejar of 2011’s Kaputt: slinking around in the shadows, checking to see if you’re paying enough attention.

It’s hard not to reference the synth-pop and smooth jazz of the 1980s when contextualizing Bejar’s musical aesthetic —he uses saxophones and keyboards to express a particular kind of sleazy, noir-ish longing, a yen for anachronistic romance. The images ken conjures can feel nearly cartoonish: a midnight walk down a foggy street, smoking under the tepid yellow glow of a streetlight, wearing an elegant trench coat with the collar flipped high. Yet for Bejar, songwriting is almost exclusively about evocation. His lyrical work isn’t particularly narrative, nor is it directly engaged with the self; this can feel like a revolutionary choice in our present era, in which even more outré genres tend toward confessionalism, or intimate and specific narrations of loss and alienation. One gets the sense that Bejar finds these sorts of unmediated first-person pronouncements garish, if not corny. He isn’t interested in telling anybody exactly how he’s feeling; ergo, there are no easily discerned thematic arcs. Instead, he builds a strange, anxious atmosphere, writing couplets like, “Asleep in cars, theatre under stars/Shakespeare in the park, you’ve come undone.” All that computes, ultimately, is menace. Which means ken is a record that’s more easily felt than interpreted.

And while Bejar is often compared to David Bowie, ken Bejar’s playful and seductive approach to narrative also recalls Leonard Cohen. Take the verses that open “Sky’s Grey,” the first track:

Sky’s grey
Call for rain
Every day
You cancel the parade

Give up acting? Fuck no!
I’m just starting to get the good parts
Walk into a room and everything clicks

It feels like an egregious critical cliché to describe new music as “Lynchian,” yet there’s something about Bejar’s sensibility that plainly evokes the director’s whole gestalt—particularly the way he manipulates and weaponizes nostalgia. Both warp familiar sounds or images until they feel not just foreign, but unsettling. It’s all cocktails and smoking jackets until suddenly, blood is dripping from somewhere weird. Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up.