Low Turns It Up

“When we first started, we knew everyone was gonna hate it,” Alan Sparhawk sighs. “But if you believe in what you’re doing, then it’s OK if no one else gives a shit. It’s OK if you show up to play and everybody leaves.”

Sparhawk, the lead vocalist and songwriter for Duluth, Minn.’s Low (along with wife/percussionist Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally) may be a decade deep into a remarkably successful career, but he’s still surprised by Low’s unbroken reign as the go-to band for kids seeking layers of slow, gloomy drone. “If you had told me when we started that this would last 12 years, I would have laughed in your face,” he confesses.

Sparhawk’s humility is not entirely surprising: Critics have long wondered if Low’s self-ascribed limitations (album after album, the trio has plodded dutifully through thick, majestic “soundscapes”) have left the band creatively paralyzed, trapped by its now-iconic slo-mo restrictions. But 2005 has Low primed for a colossal reinvention: boldly adopting a new label, producer and a freshly tweaked sound.

Since 1993, Low’s desire to transgress its slo-core origins has been impressively steadfast, as the band gently modified its founding aesthetic, deviating from trudging, atmospheric lethargy just enough to persuade most nonbelievers. Low played a Halloween set in the frenzied, leg-kicking style of The Misfits in 1988, and in 1999, the band released a famed Christmas EP of up-tempo takes on holiday classics (the band’s version of “Little Drummer Boy” was featured prominently in a Gap commercial later that year). Low released its seventh full-length in January. The Great Destroyer, a tough, raucous rock record, instantly—and violently—distinguishes itself from the rest of Low’s terse, moping discography. Finally, Low fans have something to sing along to in their cars, bobbing their heads and pounding their steering wheels: The Great Destroyer is not the Low of yesteryear.

“After we made our first couple of records,” Sparhawk admits, “we recognized that [the Low aesthetic] was going to be something we would be leaning against for a long time. The Low sound, essentially, was built on rules—even before we had songs, we knew we wanted to play as slowly and as quietly as we could, and still have it sound like music. But we’ve always been pushing against those rules, and this time we finally thought, eh, let’s just do whatever we want. Let’s just see what these songs want to do.”

With its roaring mood swings (flitting incessantly from introspection to poppy sweetness to something awfully close to metal) and heavy guitar (witness, even classic solos!), The Great Destroyer is brave, brisk and transcendent—a fully realized, indignant hop away from all preconceived Low notions. Both Sparhawk and Parker are casual about the transition, understanding the album as only the most logical, organic step for the band. “It was just something that happened,” Parker shrugs. “There was no discussion, it was never ‘OK, we’re going to do this now.’ I think we’ve been hinting at it for a while.”

Certainly, dedicated fans will recognize traces of The Great Destroyer from previous Low tracks (the prophetic noodlings of “Canada,” from 2002’s Trust, or the leisurely pop of “Dinosaur Act,” plucked from 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire). But Low’s recording habits have long belied a penchant for brash experimentation. Over the course of numerous releases, Low has tinkered with its genre-de½ning swells, investigating new and varied production techniques, opting to record both in shiny, professional studios (working with celebrity knob-twiddlers Steve Albini and Tchad Blake) and in the Sparhawks’ comparably modest Duluth home. “We’ve learned that limitations are what make interesting things happen,” Sparhawk explains. “Don’t feel like you need to go hi fidelity, Pro Tools, 80 tracks—I mean, there are great records that are made that way, but most of my favorite Low stuff was done on a four-track or an eight-track, where we really had to pare down what we were doing.”