Chromatics set their surprise “seventh” album at the witching hour, telling a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm. Across nearly 200 releases, L.A.-based producer Johnny Jewel’s Italians Do It Better label has perfected an unmistakable aesthetic. While the music ranges from abstract instrumentals to sugary synth-pop, the design of each record envisions its creators as would-be movie stars and their music as the cult classics we ought to remember them for. Few of the label’s many acts play so directly into the conceit as Chromatics. Since Jewel reinvented his band in the mid-2000s as a dark pop group with a taste for oblique theatrics, Chromatics have imagined their albums as soundtracks, imageless films in the language of music. It’s impossible to discern clear plots or specific characters from a given record, but that’s not the point. Jewel and his band—singer Ruth Radelet, drummer Nat Walker, and guitarist Adam Miller—excel at constructing settings and engulfing them in dramatic atmosphere. For 2007’s Night Drive, it was a meditative, lamplit film noir viewed through a car windshield. Kill for Love, released in 2012, played like a tumultuous, naive romance in the solitude of a Lynchian suburb. That Chromatics can conjure such elaborate moods with little more than a synth, drum machine, and guitar to accompany Radelet’s uncommonly restrained voice is testament to the strength of their vision. It may also explain why these albums take so long to finish. Jewel once said that his writing process involves recording multiple ideas at once, waiting for months, and then revisiting them to bring their meanings into focus. Given this circuitous approach, as well as Jewel’s numerous solo records and film scores, a seven-year gap between Chromatics albums is perhaps to be expected. Closer to Grey was announced only a day in advance, and its arrival wasn’t the only surprise: After teasing the now-mythic 21-track opus Dear Tommy for the past five years, Chromatics had instead put out their most modest record to date. Think of Closer to Grey as an auteur’s niche art project—satisfying to the superfans, though not necessarily winning over new ones.
