quilium’s last record took two weeks to write and ran thirteen tracks in thirty-three minutes, a compressed, darkwave-lit sprint through interior weather. climatoGRAFIQ is the opposite move entirely: twenty-six tracks, seventy and a half minutes, art rock and experimental electronic pulling in Laurie Anderson’s spoken cadence, Bowie’s theatrical shapeshifting, OutKast’s rhythmic elasticity, and Com Truise’s synthetic haze all at once. Where the last album felt like someone working fast because the feeling wouldn’t wait, this one feels like someone finally giving a much bigger set of feelings the room they’d been asking for. The bedroom producer framing still holds, quilium says the record was written for a destination the same as its origin, but a bedroom this size has clearly been renovated.
Lead single “CATwash” announces the record’s sense of humor before anything else does, flipping Rose Royce’s “Car Wash” fifty years on into an extended capitalism gag that never stops being funny while it lands its point. “My job is to wash cats,” quilium sings, “a metaphor you dumbass, for all the dumb tasks that capitalism demands.” The chorus keeps circling back to the working title like a shift whistle, and the back half turns openly threatening, “with these cats you must comply, or a bastard will put one between your eyes,” which is a wild swing for a song built on a pet-grooming pun and one the track earns by never softening the joke into something safer.
The record’s ecological despair runs clearest through three tracks spaced across the sequence. Opener “between the universe, that hurts” starts on an ironic “hallelujah” before sliding into decay imagery, “outer decay becomes all that remains of everything else in the spaces between the universe,” a cosmic-scale grief dressed up as a hymn. “being ALIVE to begin WITH” gets more direct, watching “the heat death of the planet in slow motion” while warning that “future generations will not absolve you for your ignorance,” the track’s Vashon reference grounding all that cosmic language back in the Pacific Northwest quilium actually lives in. “smooth snailing” closes that thread out on resignation rather than anger, “just delaying the dying a slow death,” a quieter register that suggests exhaustion has replaced fury by the time the album gets there.
Accountability shows up in sharper, more direct language on “lying in the snake pit,” where the OutKast influence is easiest to hear in the internal rhyme and sibilance quilium leans into on purpose, calling it out by name mid-verse. The track cuts straight at historical whitewashing, “the KKK in the history books, cooked, not a crook, not crooked,” before pivoting into a shoutout to Froggy Z that keeps the track’s politics from tipping into a lecture. “Ridin’ the bus” works the same territory from a different angle, turning a bus ride into a running argument about public transit, car culture, and the Cuban Special Period’s forced pivot away from automobiles, landing on the plain observation that “the gluttonous automobile took a back seat” when it had to.
Not everything here is aimed outward. “nothing sure of it” sits with relationship uncertainty in circular, unresolved language, ending on a line that contradicts itself on purpose, “there’s one thing sure of it, there’s nothing sure of it.” “Adulting Is Hard” is the record’s most nakedly vulnerable moment, a parent talking directly to a child about falling short, “when you fail as a parent, the guilt eats you from within,” without ever losing the warmth underneath the guilt. “LET’S practice” plays as the deliberate exhale between those two, repetitive and almost childlike in its call and response, proof the record can downshift into something playful without breaking its own mood.
“smooth ESCAPE” gives the album’s stated interest in escapism its clearest outlet, stacking odd, specific images, a mantis, a radish, an agromanic Socratic figure, against a hook that just keeps repeating the title like a mantra until the song’s back half tips into hazier, substance-blurred territory. It’s one of the record’s most purely textural songs, more mood than argument, and it earns its place by giving the album’s heavier tracks somewhere to exhale.
Closing on “Born Silent II” ties the record back to quilium’s own catalog rather than out toward the wider world, a small structural choice that matters given how far outward climatoGRAFIQ has spent seventy minutes reaching. For an album this expansive, ending on a sequel to something only quilium’s own listeners would recognize is a way of saying the bedroom framing was never just a modesty claim.
climatoGRAFIQ is available July 20th.
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