Alexander Boe’s debut album is a record as it is a living thing. Made with the full support of his band, The Botanicals, this 10-track odyssey feels like stepping inside an art installation, one that breathes in and out with every loopy groove, every pneumatic whoosh, even every glorious battle between sound and silence.
Constructed from live performances that have been looped, sampled, and shape-shifted into new shapes and dimensions, *The Experimental denies categorization. At heart, it’s a swaggering art rock statement, but Boe’s genius is in marrying performance energy to meditative ambience, post-punk groove, and experimental psychedelia. The result is an uncategorizable piece that mirrors the fragmentation, overstimulation, and loveliness of the contemporary creative mind.
With those hypnotic layers and slowly shifting pulses, the album creates its own surreal and entrancing world, half dancefloor, half dreamscape. “Sleepover” is a standout, haunted and hazy, with looping guitar lines and vocals that sink so deep they beg you to remain lost in the storm. “Promise at Dawn” arrives like a sunrise breaking through distortion fields, fitting emotional abstraction with delicately melodic payoff, one of Boe’s most arrestingly focused songwriting moments.
But the point is not just stand-out tracks. Taken together, "*The Experimental" is fueled by contrasts of chaos and control, movement and stasis, clarity and collapse. In that sense, it’s a reflection of the tension artists face today: how to stay grounded while navigating a highly stimulated world.
Boe’s sound might ring as pleasingly familiar to fans of Thom Yorke, Talking Heads, or Berlin-era David Bowie, but it is warped, reimagined, and, ultimately, resolutely his. It’s not what his voice is doing, but what it’s scratchy through to, something beneath. At 46 minutes, *The Experimental never overextends. It lingers just long enough to challenge, seduce, and disorient, then disappears like a memory you’re not certain was real.
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