Shlohmo's armour against the algorithm

Rising to prominence in the late noughties as part of LA’s lauded beat scene, Laufer's lo-fi, off-kilter instrumentals would act as a forebearer to one of modern music’s more curious phenomena (more on that later). Before this became prominent, Laufer was already diversifying and darkening the shades of his music with EPs such as 2012’s Vacation and 2013’s Laid Out; ramping up the emotion for a sound that was bathed in melancholy but imbued with a true warmth.

It wasn’t long before major pop stars began knocking, with Laufer contributing standout tracks for the likes of BANKS, Post Malone and Joji, with a full EP alongside R&B icon Jeremih setting the stall for just how adaptable his stark sonics could be. 2015’s Dark Red found him taking inspiration from the fuzzy, unforgiving texture of black metal, allowing him to present a record that was expansive but no less raw. 2019’s The End explored an apathy towards the incoming apocalypse integrating distorted guitars around a varied palette of alien soundscapes and rap-inspired percussion. Following 2020’s Heaven Inc. EP, Shlohmo’s solo output slowed somewhat. He never truly went away though; his fingerprints are all over the highly anticipated sophomore album from witch house pioneers SALEM, and he had continued to work alongside artists from his WEDIDIT label such as Groundislava and LST.

Today, Laufer breaks a five-year hiatus from solo releases with the fourth Shlohmo album, REPULSOR. As you’d expect from an era-defining producer whose break from the spotlight has seen many sounds come and go; it’s an indefinable clash of ideas that will go down as his most imaginative work. REPULSOR feels like a guided tour of so many hallmarks of the Shlohmo sound over the years; the emotive ambience, the lo-fi textures, and of course, the wall-of-sound fuzz of his guitar tone… all delivered with a confrontational attitude that shakes the listener, telling them that the end times are here, and now we all have to find a way to live through it.

Ahead of his first live show in six years at London's Hoxton Hall, I sat down with Laufer to discuss REPULSOR’s digital overwhelm and shoegaze-tinged wall of sound.

BEST FIT: It's been five years since the last Shlohmo project. What was the moment where you decided “Okay, I'm gonna do this again”?

SHLOHMO: I think I'm always working towards it in some capacity, whether I know if it's going to be like an album or otherwise… or if I'm just making stuff to make stuff at the time. But this time, it just took a little bit longer to culminate, just because of life. Covid meant that I just got caught in a really weird time. Obviously, the whole world did. But personally, how the timing was for my last record, I was about to tour it again. Yeah, it was like, I hadn't really, like, made stuff for the next record yet, so I kind of got caught in this period of no forward public motion. Everything for the past several years has just been me kind of head-down working. A lot of it has been trying to find the balance with life stuff. It’s been a rough couple of years personally, so things took a bit longer than I anticipated.

Even without the personal stuff, having something like covid hit, and, like you said, not being able to do the traditional cycle of touring a record and having that routine to see if people even like the music…

You ask yourself “how do I know that this is the right time for a new thing? Do people even want a new thing?” I know it was something that everybody who is in music or film or art went through. So I think during that time period, it's been a really common thing to just find what you want to say in a vacuum now, because you end up thinking “well, if I don't get to, you know, nothing's promised anymore.” Even coming into this, I didn't know that I was even going to get to play shows off this record, or what was going to happen. Everything feels so much more abstract and nebulous than it used to, and it feels like we're still trying to refine that way that used to feel so permanent.

It's weird, isn't it? It's like there's not really been an acceptance of “Okay, this is a new era.” It's more like everyone's trying to chase what it was before.

I think we got really caught in this loop of the industry. The industry felt like it was etched in stone – permanent. No. Everything's kind of only the same for like, 20 years at a time.

And then now we're in this new weird, where no one knows what's going on where digital culture is concerned, and because of the nature of consumption within the digital era, I feel like things in the industry are moving even quicker. It's hyper-accelerated at the moment, and that as an artist, must be really destabilizing.

It's really easy too to get caught up in the dialogue with your fanbase in the social world. The past 15 years really created a dialogue… the back and forth. That is becoming more meaningful to people, and sometimes more than the art itself. This whole last five years really put a lot into perspective for me; thinking about why I put stuff out in the first place. And because of that, I think everything got way more focused and intentional. And I think that's why I wanted to just smack people over the head with this album.

I’ve also been having so much distance from my previous music. You know, I think any creative person gain distance from their last work think “Ew. I would have done that differently” or something like that in lighter terms. So really, just having this extra time gave me so much distance from the last project and the project before that, that I could really strike a line. I feel like I learned a lot in that time. I grew into a very different artist in that time. So this album is obviously similar tropes of previous work, but just technically and conceptually. I feel like I've gotten more dialed.

I was gonna say, especially within the guitar work on this record, there's such a marked step away from anything that you've done. Not just your overall playing of it, but in the processing of it too. You’ve spoken a lot about shoegaze being like an influence within your work, but it actually lives within this record in a big way.

I think I just have been really dumb this whole time. I knew that I loved the guitar, and I grew up around it and playing it, but I never was technically good. It’s the same of processing… like I just never knew. I never was into amps and I just never knew what I had. I would just try and make them sound as good as I could in Ableton, but that was about it. After doing a couple live tours, playing more and figuring out what I like and what is necessary to make things sound the way I like, it was just fine tuning pedals and processing and just learning a lot about mixing. What I learned the most during this process was just like, “Oh, I was doing this wrong before."

Especially with something like mixing, there's always new techniques, different genres, people who have messed up before, and it's become a sound within itself…

And that's a lot of the stuff that I take from too - people that either accidentally or intentionally innovate. In terms of black metal, where people were intentionally fucking their amps up, or playing out of smaller amps, whatever, that's the stuff that inspires me the most.

You record to cassette for a large majority of things too, right? Which is a big black metal technique… Recording straight to cassette, messing it up as much as possible, and then sending out.

Yeah, right? And I think about that Brian Eno quote about old mediums a lot. The things that made them bad will be the things that we are nostalgic for. A lot of what inspires me is those things that reveal themselves in other mediums, you know. Even digital Ableton stretching is nostalgic.

It feels like 2010s trope now, in a good, nostalgic way. It’s in the sound of the pitch stretching, because it's a very specific sound. It's not a DJ Screw type of sound.

It's wrong. It's chopped up a little bit. It was doing the best it could, but we all knew it's not right. And that anomaly became the thing that we love.

With the songs on REPULSOR, it definitely feels like you're tapping into different chapters and parts of yourself. How did you go about starting things that were tied to different eras of your sound?

Some this album was really all over the place, random creatively in terms of how I would start stuff. One was started just on a drum machine. A lot of them started just on guitar; finding a riff, and then little melodies come outside of that. Then some were just like made in a super covid depression; just like looking at a synth, going through knobs, just being like, “Oh, this sound is nice.”

And through a lot of covid –like early covid– I was challenging myself to do minute-long loops, and not anything deeper than that. Just for myself, like not to give to people or anything, but just to because there was just nothing to do. I was just trying to be inspired by anything. So I made micro vignettes.

When you're in a period where there's literally no way of stimulating yourself, that part of your brain can die, at least for a moment. And I don't think people realise how detrimental things like depression and your mental health can be to the creative process. So you creating those vignettes keeps the spark alive.

So from those vignettes, were all of these songs that made the album?

No, some were, like, created in a day and then took a long time of fine tuning, but it's all different. I think it was a really confusing record process, with just how weird life was outside of the actual making of the record. It all felt so trivial. But a lot of it came from those little vignettes. And some of them are just basically finished versions of those. Both ‘Resin’ and ‘It Could Take A Lifetime’ were both made in that period.

Both of those songs were very much like minimalist projects where I was wondering “how little can I make this song?” You know, while still being engaging.

Was that an overall philosophy when making the album?

I don’t think so. There usually isn't any overall philosophy. I feel like if anything, the overall philosophy will just appear. It's kind of like what I like or don't like - that becomes the philosophy.

“Does this sound sick?”

Yeah! “In my mind's eye, is this sick?” I think I always, no matter what it is, have the same view on music and what I want to sound like. As I age, it changes a little bit, but I think it's the same at its core.

I think that's quite discernible on the album. It's taken all of the parts of every era that I've loved of your music, and just pushed them harder. which is excellent. Were there any overt musical influences on this album?

I was just listening to a lot of Sabbath again. Honestly, it didn't end up going as dark as the stuff I was listening to. Yeah, I was listening to EYEHATEGOD and Grief. I was getting back into a lot of crust and sludge metal stuff.

I was going to say, a lot of that sludge and crust metal influence comes through at times on this record.

The stuff that I've been making since wrapping up the record is more even like sludge-oriented, but more like wall of sound. It's funny… I wasn't listening to My Bloody Valentine at all during this period, but they’re always kind of on my mind, just in terms of the scope…

You can hear that, especially on things like, "A Fistful Of Dirt". That felt like you were interpreting that kind of shoegaze.

I was going back into Gish and Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins. I don't think there's a better guitar tone ever. I think a lot of my even like stuff since the record has been just trying to mimic his guitar tone. It's the most present fuzz of all time… and it's so wide… it's like the most all-enveloping fuzz. And then I’m just continuously always so impressed by Electric Wizard. And then I'm always listening to newer rap. It’s kind of the stuff I mainly listen to, which is funny, because I think that stuff comes across the least in this record.

There’s definitely a southern rap sample in ‘A Light In A Tunnel’ which leans into a specific moment in time.

I think that side has been present in my music before; like Memphis, Oracle, and all the tape stuff from the early 90s has been a huge influence. Tommy Wright, Lil Terror… Obviously Three Six Mafia - that stuff is the pinnacle of aesthetic sound to me. You can't do better than that.

It's nice to see Tommy Wright getting the kind of flowers he deserves.

Man, it’s great but it's really weird. Also seeing Lil B just becoming an A-List artist… I'm like, fuck, you know what? I love it.

It's so funny being this age and living through one of these cyclical moments. Yeah, I don't think we really had that for our generation before, of seeing the starting point and having the full circle moment.

But with the cyclical nature of culture, I feel like when certain people who weren't there tried to recreate something, the magic gets lost as well. So I think it's good that you still use those inspirations that you've always had because it's still an authentic version.

It felt like the pendulum was swinging so far away from us, or people like me and Salem. I've been working with Salem guys for a while now, and in 2019, right before we released their record, it felt like we were so far from Salem in culture. It felt like everyone wanted to be really pacified. I don't know if it was the younger millennials that commodified everything and it just turned into this sweetgreen-amplified world of creativity, but I was like, “oh shit, this is how it is now.”

We didn’t know what it was, but we weren't changing shit, and they were gonna be who they were; as essential and as effective as possible. It's really great to see that that wasn't the permanent end of things. Culture’s really swung back in a weird way - from it feeling like there wasn't even any new music for a long time, to now and I can’t stop finding new shit that I love. It's wild and genuinely weird… and not even just for the sake of being weird. People are just genuinely influenced by weird shit. I feel like we were really stuck in time for like, almost 10 years before this. I got scared.

Salem are also featured on "Chore Boy" on the album. Was that a song that came from the Fires In Heaven sessions?

No, actually, I had made it as an instrumental completely. It was actually the last song that got made for the record. It was at the top of 2024 and we were about to play a show together. We were practicing for a few days beforehand, and John hadn't been in LA for a while, and so we were all together for the first time in a long time. I was just playing them some of the new demos because I was just still working on the record. I played the instrumental and John was immediately, just like, “I hate you and I want to sing on this.” I was very flattered because if John says he hates you, it usually means a great thing. We recorded his vocals that night. It was two takes, and I think that what we used was a full continuous take. He came up with the lyrics on the spot and it just matched perfectly. I felt like the instrumental was good, but this made it a fucking song.

He has such a textural voice that lends itself to a different kind of emotion that it’s hard to replicate instrumentally.

He's like a fucking ghost. It's very its own thing, depending on how you process it. That was kind of the main thing that we were dealing with with this song specifically. There's a way to process his vocals where it sounds like this explosively hissy, mean thing that's happening, but also really laid back and calm, and it’s almost like a pad. It’s hard to explain.

How did that working relationship come together?

We got introduced through a mutual friend around 2017 or 2018. I think I had met Jack once or twice before that but in passing. They were right about to move back to or to LA for the first time from Louisiana, and they had all this demo material, and they were like, finally getting their shit together to finish a record. We just had a hang session at my old studio, and it just clicked. We said we’d just keep trying to do it and it turned into a very fruitful relationship!

I came to REPULSOR expecting a certain thing, and as soon as I pushed play, you get the little recording at the beginning, and then it's straight in with something extremely hectic. There are moments on there, like ‘Lola's Theme’, oh yeah, where it feels like a straight-up hands in the air dance floor moment and, and I think it's really cool to see you still pushing what you're doing.

I've had the misfortune of a lot of the things that I've created in the past, not directly from me, but via different avenues, being co-opted into commerce a lot. That's changed the context of everything for me. Now I don't even like to think about my early stuff, because it's so tied to it.

Do you mean “lo-fi beats”?

Yeah. Like dude, that's fucking AI music. Now it's literally background elevator music. It's bizarre, and so I don't even want to take any claim for it. I'm deeply embarrassed, which is hilarious.

It's insane, because at the time when the beat scene thing was happening, it was all of the most exciting production minds out there.

It's something that came from the exact opposite of all the shit that it's getting used for. At the time, those avenues were being completely eaten up by just pop stuff. There was such a separation between commerce and DIY and underground music.

When I first started making that music, the main thing people said was that it sounds “wrong”. At the time, it was very divisive to people when I didn't mean it to be. But it ended up being this weird, subversive thing, because the whole point of it was making stuff sound like it shouldn't. And then that became a genre… And the genre became generative, and it became study beats, or whatever. The main thing that I’ve heard people say about it is it's great because it has no words. I'm like, “Whoa, that's a different type of brain.” I guess I can't be mad at anything, but I just think that's crazy.

I don't expect anything to stay the same. It’s like what we were saying earlier about the industry changing so much to the point where there are no avenues that existed before. It's almost amazing that we're doing an interview right now for a publication. That's incredible and I don't take that for granted. So with the old music becoming this kind of co-opted environment, I never was sour about it in that way.

So then is the kind of extreme nature of some parts of this album a reaction to what happened with your early sound? Like a “Fuck you, co-opt this!”?

Yeah, partly. And it’s just genuinely where I want sound to go… what I want to hear. I do what I think I can apply in terms of things that I haven't heard yet. It's funny being in the place that I'm in, because a lot of the things that I'm inspired by don't lend themselves to music. I think it's becoming more and more common to kind of incorporate really fucked up, “wrong” things in even pop music now. So we probably have to think about what’s next. Like a Justin Bieber song nowadays will have a static or something in the first downbeat.

You kind of did that years ago with the BANKS stuff and the Jeremih project. You were kind of the forebearer for that…

I know. I fucked it up, man.

I think you made it more interesting – a lot of the work you did for those people, you weren’t bending to their sound. You were telling them to meet you where you were, and I think that attitude is kind of a precursor to where we're at with pop right now. There's a lot of artists like Bieber, who are making more interesting production choices.

Yeah and with social media and being influenced by what people think of you. And if you listen, people will try and tell you who you are. I think that the downfall of a lot of art in the social media era – letting people tell you who you are.

It's almost like user generated content.

I'm just stoked now to be this age and not feel tethered to Instagram or something, or an image, or letting people know what my image is. I’m just making the records and being okay with that. I also don't want to chase that industrial part of what music has become. You really have to show your ass.

I get it, everyone has to eat so, like, I'll never knock anyone for doing it, but I'm just like, Fuck, I can't do it. I would much rather figure out other ways to do stuff.

I think that in the era you came up in, things were still very social media based, but it wasn’t an open forum for everyone.

It felt like the accessory, and now it's the only avenue. It felt like interviews and your music were the main thing. If you found someone's Instagram, it'd be this weird slice of life thing. And your Twitter was where you talk shit and were funny. Like, you get the cut scenes. But now it's the only thing, and the music and everything else is the accessory to that.

I've seen this really interesting thing about how kids promote music now. They basically don't. I've been seeing this a lot - if I know someone that's younger that has a song, they're almost embarrassed to post it and it's on Spotify. They've chosen to put it out, but they don't want to draw attention to it because it's corny. It's lame to them. That's interesting, and I'm excited for that. I'm excited to see what comes from that type of mentality. A feed free of links. Just treating it like ephemeral, like it's just as ephemeral as anything else that they put on, which is, could, you know, people could see that as really scary.

Does that fuck up the balance of being an artist?

Yes, but at the same time, I don't think that there's ever like a permanence of a balance of being in art. And I think also in this time, as we get further along in time, art is as meaningful or as meaningless as you want to make it. And I think it's just all perspective.

So you're looking at it like a spectator. Being on the outside and seeing it like a case study.

Yeah, I never feel tethered to stuff. I'm very much an observer. That's a good place to be because it doesn't touch you, and you carry on doing your own thing.

I think it goes back to what I was saying about the Salem guys too. Culture does its thing, and the pendulum swings and now we're 15 years from King Night and they're just as important to people, the young kids like they're just as important.

Have you noticed your audience changing at all?

No, but only because I haven't done anything yet. I think I'm about to see what happens. I haven't played a single live show since 2019.

To a lot of people, this record is quite a big deal. And it was announced with very little fanfare in the sense of there not being a huge build up to the announcement. Was that a conscious decision to not feed into the rat race of industry hype?

A lot of hype commodity comes from the build up, and no matter how flattering it is to have hype and people talking about you and whatever, I feel like for me, I feel weird posting stuff when there's no physical material, when you can't listen to something. I don't want to keep people hanging and on nothing, and have one of the Instagrams where every post is spamming a pre-save link.

Even having to do some of that right now, I'm like: “wait, can we actually not do that and just stop post it when it's out?” Like, who cares? I don't give a shit. Why would anyone else give a shit? I think I want to operate now just publicly how I would want to operate, or how I would want to see someone else operate.

From the outsider's perspective, you’ve never had to cater to a machine as such, because you've had a long standing relationship with Friends Of Friends, and you’ve had WEDIDIT in partnership for some of the releases. Then there was True Panther for Dark Red and now it's R&R releasing REPULSOR. None of those feel like systems where you're going to have huge amounts of pressure.

It was always friends first, you know? So yeah, I’ve never felt pressure to fit into indie stuff. It’s always felt very outsider.

I know that artists from WEDIDIT have released sporadically. Do you feel like you're may reignite that now that you're more active?

We’ll see! It’s not just up to me, like it's, it was always very much collective based and I don't want to force people to do something. If people want to do it, then we'll do it, but the last couple of years, everyone had to focus on their own stuff, especially during covid. It became something where I was not focusing on myself where I should have. I've put a lot of effort into other people's records and other people's stuff and that's also why stuff takes so long. I was trying to be a really shitty label boss and not succeeding, and simultaneously executive producing half of the people's records, and like making the album covers and my own stuff in the process. For me, what is most gratifying to me is my own albums.

I love producing for other people too, and in certain circumstances, and especially for WEDIDIT, and the friends that got brought in. LST was the last one that I really worked on, and that was so fun. She's so underrated too. I don't understand what how music gets to people these days, but she deserves it. All the energy was just coming from me doing stuff, so I had to put it into this record for now. But we're never like closing the door, no.

There's still quite a community based element to a lot of your work, regardless, like reoccurring faces that you've worked with across this record with the likes of SALEM and Corbin. How was the process of having Corbin on "Antivenom"?

We were actually working on a song for his record that came out a couple months ago, and in that same session. I think we made the whole thing in three hours. That's also a one take. So both features on the album are a one take - no re-dos or comping.

Do you think that like speaks to like? I guess the creative synergy that you have with those people?

I think it’s more so that we speak the same language, you know? I think the thing that is a through line in my music, and I think all of our music, is this kind of uncanny first try, like in this kind of effortless and “wrong” way.

A lot of things with Corbin, even in recording, so much magic comes from a first take that just can never be replicated. We tried to punch in on takes so much, but we always ended up going with the first take. He's a really special guy; he's really talented and can sing so well. His delivery is really precise that he can do things in one take.

There's other vocal parts on this record that are you, right? What sparked that decision?

It’s me, and it's like, the first time I've done that. I’m shy! I've used my voice sparingly in the past, but it's never been as forward. I think I'm just overcoming it a little bit. I'm mainly just shot, honestly, I just hate the idea of singing, and I've never been lyric-driven in the past so it was more of an experiment.

I think a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do felt more complete with vocals. Where before it felt like I didn't want it, and I didn't need it, this time it's what made me feel more comfortable with having vocal features on the record too. Before it never felt right to do this.

You've had a few though, right?

Only on EPs. Never on an actual album.

I suppose on an album, it's a wider statement. It feels more personal.

My records very much feel like a sketchbook. It just never feels right to have a glossy feature in a sketchbook. It's very bizarre. Usually it's just a sketchbook. This time, it felt like it was painted, not a sketchbook.

Does this feel like the most complete work you've done?

Weirdly, yeah, especially even after all this time of confusion and not really knowing what the product was gonna be. I feel like it ended up being really solid. It's really rounded and really diverse. Where I feel like a lot of my other projects just have two settings.

I do feel like there are songs on this that really bridge the gap between the two settings. There are sharp left turns on that spin you into another world. Songs like ‘Lola’s Theme’ or ‘The Thing’ are like nothing you’ve ever done.

That was one where the second half almost became the whole song, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't make the first half not that first half of that song. It needed to be a song that was divided in half.

It feels like an evolution. It feels like you're adding strings to your bow. There has previously been a dance focus on Dark Red with the jungle percussion, but that felt more textural, whereas this feels a bit more kinetic.

That was the song that started with the drum machine. That was just me going crazy on that.

Does the word 'repulsor' have a meaning to you? It’s so visceral as a term.

It's a made up word. It comes from video games. In Halo, there's a repulse tool. I don't know what they call it, but it's the concept for all the language and the visuals on this record. It also came from this swan; this photo of a swan in the sewer or in a canal in Amsterdam. They make floating nests of trash, and they lay their eggs in these nests of trash. Yeah, and so there's this one photo from a beautiful photo series of this swan tending to its eggs in this nest of 7-Eleven cups and packs of cigarettes, like a water version of a dumpster baby.

It spoke to me. I feel like as a person now, in order to live happily, you have to have more armour on than ever just to be normal and not completely fried by all this extra information and people trying to guilt you into doing shit. The internet is a very bad place, and armour is adapting to harm, basically. Which is what that swan is doing.

I think repulsing something that's repulsive can be obviously foul, but it's also an action of repulsing modernity, of repulsing bullshit. I think that's what my intention with this record was.

When I listened to the first track (‘Eggtooth’), straight away, it reminded me of digital overwhelm; “Fuck, I open up my phone, and I've got a million stories and beheading videos and like, all of this crazy shit flying at me, and I'm overwhelmed.” That was literally the first thought that popped into my head when it hit, so to hear you say that, you know, you need more armor than ever to live in this kind of world really brings me back to that thought. Was the record all made in LA?

Yeah, pretty much.

And do you think your surroundings there reflected what you're making? Because it hasn't been the easiest time for the city over the last four or five years.

Yeah, it's been fried. Obviously the fires sucked but this record was me retreating from feeling like I lived there I actually thought about it a lot. Had moved or had I not grown up there – would I make the same record? And I think I actually would. I live in a very strange part of the city that feels like Midtown… just absent of any type of soul, and so it just feels like just people in yoga pants. It just feels like I don't live anywhere. Yes I’m travelling a lot for work, and now it just feels like I'm in between. I'm one block in between the next Joe and The Juice and a fucking Costa or some shit. I'm just like, okay, everyone's the same.

Like a kind of numbness in existence?

I think you really have to have armor to feel okay about shit. Even this neighbourhood [Shoreditch] has changed so much since the last time I've been here. It's fucking insane.

It's so soulless.

That's what I'm saying. I don't expect things to stay the same or whatever, but it's happening everywhere. Life's being drained, personality is being drained from every aspect of life. And how could it not be?