What is Success by Open Head

Modernism promised emancipation through all its products, from factories that provided financial security to architecture that emphasized workers’ wellbeing to art that glorified the future. We now live in that future, and the scattered remains of this ill-fated optimistic fever inspire the sonic landscape of What Is Success by Open Head. Specifically, the band treats the built environment of New York’s Hudson valley as source material, a region dominated by the imposing smokestacks of abandoned factories and the brutalist offices of a vanishing middle class. Raw power oozes through the record’s industrial percussion, heavy rhythms, and desperate vocals, balanced by the gothic horror of active, growling bass-lines, haunted, droning guitar tones, and cavernous, foreboding compositions. The visible remains of this carcass of unkept promises make believing any present-day assurances foolish if not downright impossible, a cognitive chasm between what we see and what we’re told that this record effortlessly communicates.