KATE NV - WOW

Released: 03/03/23

The Russian electronic producer Kate NV’s absolutely bananas new album, Wow, is hands down one of the greatest things I’ve heard in the last couple of years. Any hope of describing what a record sounds like is, at the best of times, tricky, because it attempts to subsume the abstract sonic into the concrete written – but with Wow, such an act is nigh-on impossible as it is an album so chimerical that I have no idea what genre it’s even adjacent to. A mixture of hubris and subconscious logocentric bias, however, compels me to try, so here goes; Wow is like: Purple Rain if all the musicians, including Prince, were replaced by Laurie Anderson, the Japanese city pop band T-Square, and the Seinfeld synth bass guy; Beatrice Dillon’s Workaround played with a stylus made of Gruyère; a circuit-broken Speak & Spell thrown into a well of aspic jelly. Wow indeed.