“Modafinil Blues” finds Matthew Dear four years removed from his last LP and lost in the low-hanging gloam of Topanga Canyon. The producer and pop auteur wrote it there in the evening hours with Troy Nōka, a longtime Frank Ocean collaborator. The song hints at conceptual roadblocks requiring more than a simple or single solution; the manifestation of a meteoric spike in cognitive function, yearning for some form of collective freedom, followed by the inevitable descent into the complexity of the fix. Dear’s baritone verse acknowledges that this existential arc is flawed, and therein lies the blues. Moody and nuanced, slightly undone and hugging the curves of the canyon; a polyrhythmic glissade through cerebral fog.
