The South Hill Experiment - EARTHBREAKS - S/H/E 003

EARTHBREAKS (out March 21st, 2024 via S/H/E), the South Hill Experiment’s third LP in two years, opens with an indeterminate resonance, a strange whirr that slowly amplifies and pans across the stereo field—apparently, bowed acoustic guitar paired with the sample of a seismometer recording the movements of tectonic plates.

“We wanted the Earth itself to literally provide the sonic foundation of the album,” says Gabe Acheson, who is one half of the Experiment along with his brother Baird. “At the risk of beating our titular metaphors to death, there’s a gravity here that’s not present on our previous projects.”

Named for the address of their warehouse studio south of downtown Los Angeles, the South Hill Experiment began as a vehicle for the Acheson brothers to tool around with recording techniques. Armed with a manifesto, they released MOONSHOTS (2023), its exuberant follow-up SUNSTRIKES (also 2023), and the EP South Hill & Friends (2024). They live-streamed a 24-hour jam, ran a marathon for a music video, and hosted a series of free, packed rooftop concerts above a nearby abandoned tire shop. They also work at the bleeding edge of contemporary pop production, having earned their fair share of notable credits— creating samples for Danny Brown and The Alchemist, collaborating with Karriem Riggins and Jeff Parker, producing for Arlo Parks, opening for Mount Kimbie and David Longstreth— while making expansive, exploratory solo projects as Goldwash and Baird.

Completing a trilogy begun with their first 2 LPs, EARTHBREAKS carries forward their iconoclastic spirit, with eleven songs that showcase the brothers’ prodigious gifts. Themes of resignation—from dread and longing toward acceptance and willfulness—are reflected in a melancholy production style built on blue-feeling instrumentation: faraway vocals, detuned synths, muted bass, fractured guitars, prepared piano.

If the record feels heavier than past efforts, it is not at the expense of immediacy or humor. Groove here intermingles with a wilted beauty, like a Stevie Wonder record left to molder in the cellar. The strangeness of the post-Low End Theory east LA underground occasionally meets the exuberance of Motown. Several tracks sound straight-up like blue-eyed soul.

“Yes, it's an album about the sixth mass extinction, but we're still gonna do our best Hall and Oates impression just for shits,” Baird says when asked about this juxtaposition. “I think dancing on the grave of this dying art-form, the studio album, is fun enough to keep doing for a while.”

Despair and ambitiousness are strange bedfellows. The Baltimore-born brothers are self-aware enough to know that the impending catastrophe is not necessarily something they can control with music. Still, the lyrics, mantra-like, reflect the anxious mind’s attempts at self-encouragement. “Maybe it takes time, here for a long while,” they sing on “Maybe It Takes Time.” “Let it go, let it fall away," go “Rifting” and “Passion Fades.” “I think I’m getting older, I think I’m getting over it,” is the refrain on “Silver Bullet.”

These expressions of surrender are just as much directed at a broken industry as much as they are at our unsustainable ecology. “I definitely see the problems with the music industry as a small symptom of bigger social and political issues, but I'm not sure how much we can really address it,” Baird says, knowingly.

“The shake-up in the music industry is tiny compared to this seismic shift in billions of peoples’ minute-to-minute reality,” Gabe says after a short lecture on the role of streaming and social media in the diminishing returns of music discovery in the mid-2020s. “What are we gonna do, give up on making the best shit we can?”

Certainly not. EARTHBREAKS, then, is a study in long odds, a beating back of the justified suspicion that so many have that all this work is, perhaps more than ever before, likely for naught. The music shows, however, that perseverance is beautiful, even if, after trying so hard and getting so far, in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

“The Experiment is both fueled by and generates belief,” Gabe says with an empiricist’s flair. “It could only be a true failure if we weren’t proud of the work.”

With EARTHBREAKS, the boys have labored toward sounds both remote and familiar, remaining committed to recording as a medium and the studio as a tool for a unique kind of multitrack expressionism that slots alongside the decade’s most progressive pop music.