Originally released last year on Ledse Records to surprisingly little fanfare, How To Dress Well’s Love Remains is one of the most absorbing and original albums we’ve heard in recent years.

Dividing his time between the States and Germany, Tom Krell applies his own cracked, intuitive and abundantly sincere singing voice to the kind of melodies one most readily associates with chart-routing R&B and new jack swing. More than pastiche, these vulnerable vocal takes are framed in reverb-heavy soundscapes that variously recall isolationist electronics (think Lull, Experimental Audio Research, etc), Hannett-influenced goth productions circa 1980, and the most radical outliers of ambient black metal. It’s meta-pop, un-pop, post-pop, call it what you will – coaxing out the doom and disquiet latent in the most saccharine and radio-friendly songcraft, exploring, and extrapolating from, the unconscious currents of loneliness and yearning that course through even the most studio-buffed unit-shifters.

This month sees the re-release of Love Remains on Tri Angle (oOoOO, Balam Acab, etc), the perfect home for How To Dress Well’s (nec)romantic R&B experiments. FACT took the opportunity to talk to Krell about the man/animal divide, finding one’s own voice, and the arbitrary business of names.

Love Remains comes across as a very coherent record, with a strong narrative thrust – but we gather it’s made up of a hotch-potch of material, old and new…

“It is coherent, yeah – some people say they find it all over the place, but for me it’s a really unified experience. I mean, I only ever record with multi-song sequences in mind, so even though the record was gathered from older stuff, I already had a sense of the connections or guiding threads in the sounds.”

What’s life like in Cologne?

“Cologne was awesome. I went there for work and couldn’t have guessed how many great friends I’d make. I didn’t really socialize with musicians – some of my musician friends hang exclusively with other musicians and that’s never been my style. Cologne is a great place to live though, a great place to dance too, because Kompakt is based there so there’s always a great DJ spinning somewhere.”

“I was thinking a lot then about animals, the man/animal divide…yeah…that music never felt right because it was just too premeditated.”

Tell us about some of the music you made when you were growing up, before you found your own voice…

“Yeah, I was in black metal bands and noise projects. Lots of drone stuff. Played a lot of emo too [laughs]. It’s funny though, the project that came right before I recorded the stuff on Love Remains was kind of happy, musique concrĂ©te stuff with me singing really high-pitched, like even higher than I do on Love Remains. And I was thinking a lot then about animals, the man/animal divide…yeah…that music never felt right because it was just too premeditated. It never filled me with joy like some of my other music projects – like when I was in middle school I took a summer school thing at a local radio station and me and my friends made like 100 rap cuts there and we felt so free. We thought we were gonna get signed [laughs]. But yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot – because for me, Love Remains really feels like the moment I properly found my own voice.

How did How To Dress Well first take shape? Did you have the concept and parameters of the project established before you began recording, or did these arise out of experimentation?

“There was no planning at all or conceptualization… Like I said, I was doing these musique concrĂ©te things that felt kind of stale, so then I said fuck it and decided to just start singing more straightforwardly, singing these choir-like pieces. Then, one day, I recorded ‘Suicide Dream 1′. It felt amazing and purgative in a way the music I had been making previously just never did. Then I recorded like 45 songs in four months. I’ve been recording at least 10 songs a month since ‘Suicide Dream 1′. I still don’t really know what the identity of How To Dress Well is: I feel like it’s growing a lot right no, changing, like I’m becoming more confident, like I’m starting to feel ready to really record something special. Love Remains is just the beginning.”

“I’m becoming more confident, like I’m starting to feel ready to really record something special. Love Remains is just the beginning.”

When did your love affair with R&B begin, and how has it developed over the years?

“I mean, I was a little boy watching MTV and listening to the radio. And since I could sing, I liked singers. I liked Hi-Five a lot. I like New Edition. I loved melodies and I loved Starter jackets. My life’s sadness and the R&B music I make now and the R&B I loved first, as a boy, are separate I think.”

What have been your other significant musical awakenings in life…?

“Xiu Xiu. Seriously. I listened to nothing but Xiu Xiu for like an entire year in 2002-2003. Jamie Stewart is definitely one of the main reasons I make music. When I was 12 and got ATLiens. So dope. Oh in 2000, I got this Current 93/Antony/Immortal Bird/Cripple and The Starfish 7″ that completely changed my life. Watching Totally Fucked Up around the same time changed my life, though that’s not music…”

“Another big awakening for me was getting a synthesizer, and liberating myself from songwriting via the guitar. This opened up the whole domain of pop music for me. I know a lot of other artists like me, artists I’m friends with, who feel like the synthesizer is the key to freedom. It’s through the synth that I found my voice, that I found myself as a post-pop artist.”

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