quilium’s debut holy shit arrived as a twenty-track argument that genre boundaries are suggestions. can of whoopbass, the follow-up, arrives with twenty-three tracks and a different argument entirely: that restraint and sprawl can coexist, that a bedroom can be a studio, and that music made without the pressure of professional expectations sometimes gets closer to something true than music made with all the resources in the world.
Where holy shit leaned into electronic architecture and genre collisions, can of whoopbass slows down and spreads out. The production is lo-fi in the most honest sense of the phrase, not as an aesthetic choice borrowed from a trend but as a natural consequence of someone making music on their own terms. Reverb hangs over almost everything. The percussion has a looseness to it that flirts with falling off the beat without ever quite doing so, a laziness that feels less like sloppiness than like a drummer who knows exactly where the pocket is and has decided to live just outside it. That dissonance runs through the whole record as a kind of governing principle: quilium is consistently interested in what happens when things don’t quite line up the way they’re supposed to.
The album opens with “out of pocket” and moves into “INCIDENTAL MONUMENTAL,” where the lyric “don’t call me a country boy, don’t consider me a toy, if you do I’ll destroy all your armour” arrives with more directness than the surrounding sound suggests. It’s one of the record’s clearest lyrical moments, a brief assertion of identity before the album drifts back into more ambiguous territory. The sprawl of twenty-three tracks across forty-three minutes means most songs run short, sketches rather than fully developed compositions, and the sequencing rewards patience over attention to individual tracks.
“Lazy Bones” is a centerpiece of sorts, its hook built around the title phrase repeated over a beat that quilium has cited as a personal favorite. The repetition does what good minimalism does: it stops being a lyric and starts being a texture, the words losing their meaning and becoming rhythmic material. “all around me (with CHAD.),” a collaboration, opens with “must be all around me, must be down,” the fragment carrying a weight that the spare production amplifies rather than undercuts. The featuring credit is casual in a way that fits the album’s overall sensibility, two people making something together without making a big deal of it.
“Feel No Consequence” is one of the album’s more striking moments, its guitar work carrying the kind of distorted, unguarded energy that puts it in conversation with early-nineties Nirvana without copying anything specific. The lyric “feel no consequence at all” reads differently depending on whether you hear it as liberation or dissociation, which is probably the point. quilium tends to leave that kind of interpretive space open rather than closing it.
The album’s second half, from “Sleeping While We Can” through closer “True Through Stereo,” maintains the same unhurried quality without repeating itself too obviously. “the goal is to be better people” and “somehow you’ll know” carry the kind of titles that sound like notes to self, and the music surrounding them has that quality too. “retrogradation” and “the counterweight” suggest a structural awareness in the sequencing, the album moving toward something even as it refuses to name what that something is.
Whether the lo-fi production carries the songs or the songs carry the production is probably the wrong question. On can of whoopbass, the two things are inseparable. The homemade quality isn’t a limitation the melodies have to overcome. It’s the environment the melodies were grown in, and pulling them out of it would change what they are. quilium is keeping their day job, making underproduced music for people who enjoy that sort of thing, and the lack of ambition in that framing is itself a kind of ambition. Not everything needs to be a statement. Sometimes forty-three minutes of honest, imperfect, occasionally dissonant songs is exactly enough.
can of whoopbass is available now.
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