Every now and then a track pops up that feels like it slipped through a wormhole from a dreamier, slightly skewed version of our own world. Tim Carr’s new single “Pleasure Drives” is one of those tracks — warm, electronic, and weird in all the right ways, like a joyride through a heat-hazed suburb where the houses are blinking back at you.
I know it is weird but there is some strange comfort in the disorientation. There’s a float to the whole thing — synths softly pulsating like distant sirens, drums that never quite settle, and Carr’s voice, which doesn’t fight the chaos but leans into it. It’s all shiny on the surface, but not too polished. More like a VHS tape found in the back of a glovebox marked summer ’99 that turns out to be a slow-motion sci-fi love story. The track loops that uneasy-but-beautiful mood over and over, hypnotic enough to feel like it was made in a cathedral on Venus. The organs would support that theory.
What’s also worth noting — and felt from the first seconds — is how “Pleasure Drives” is built to be felt more than dissected. There’s a deliberate messiness here, and Carr owns it. He said he wanted to write from a celebratory place rather than his usual melancholy, and while this doesn’t sound like a party, it does feel like a private kind of freedom. There’s futurism in the choices: sub bass, collage-y electronics, and that crackling DIY production that threads the whole thing together like an old extension cord. Think early Hot Chip if they had just moved into a dusty mountain town and got way too into walking at sunset.
About Tim Carr:
We’ve been quietly watching Tim Carr‘s shapeshifting path for a while now. From jazz drums at CalArts to time behind the kit for Perfume Genius and Hand Habits, he’s long been in the background — but his solo work keeps nudging its way into something stranger and more special. His debut “The Last Day of Fighting” had that early-days Bon Iver intimacy, but with “Pleasure Drives”, he’s swapped the acoustic laments for neon-drenched synths and something that feels like release. It’s also the first preview from his upcoming LP of the same name, out August 29 — and if the rest of the record has this kind of electricity humming underneath, we’re in for something quietly wild.
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