Sharpie Smile's debut album has one question for you: is your heart good enough to take The Staircase? Sharpie Smile is Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner. They met in 2015, a pair of musically-adept nonconformist teenagers, forming a songwriting and performance duo. Writing initially for a project called Kamikaze Palm Tree, with Dylan on drums and Cole on guitar, they produced two albums of thorny, earwormy art-rock. While continuing to play shows and write, there was some session work with other acts (Cate Le Bon, A. Savage, Tim Presley's White Fence). And then a shimmering new direction came into view. For Sharpie Smile, that direction is up. The Staircase is a lush and energizing contemporary pop record, scaling an ambitious gradient of minimal/maximal electronic production and deep feels. It's a dreamy and ethereal trip through something (you're not sure what yet), on a radiant melodic raft. Reality is breaking and rebirth is happening, one piece at a time -- essential questions deconstructed and pieced together again. Like scanning a new x-ray image of yourself. Finding is losing something else; there's the shadow of 'goodbye' here, too. When Dylan sings 'There is nothing I won't miss' on 'Love or Worship,' you feel broken up -- but if the breakup is with the old way of life (it is), then getting over the hump will provide its own sweet reward. Sharpie Smile's passage there is one of sensuous breaths and serpentine soul-terrain, as Dylan's blue vocal melodies drift glacially through a luminous wilderness of synth keys, guitars and percussion beats, cutting the melancholy milieu of New Romantic pop in sharp new relief. On The Staircase, Sharpie Smile ascend through waves of sound art in a sophisticated musical craft all their own. Inspired by SOPHIE, 100 gecs, Oklou, and other insane futurists, they allow the feeling of discovery to free their evolution, whenever needed. Their collaborators help facilitate and guide their astonishing transformations: The Staircase was engineered and produced by Cesar Maria, with additional engineering by Spencer Hartling, additional vocal engineering and production by Cairo Marques-Neto and mixing by Mikey Weiland. You're in the eye of the storm. A refuge from the unrelenting, where the journey to clarity can be glimpsed, accessed and shared.
