crushed: The Best of What’s Next

The best part of my job is finding new music that puts me on my ass. And, given just how much new music is coming out every day, that’s not very often anymore. But the first song that really, truly floored me after I took this gig at Paste two years ago was crushed’s “waterlily.” I remember playing it on my laptop, hearing clips of distorted voices tumble into Shaun Durkan’s swirl of drum machines, guitar reverb, bonny synth lines. And I remember how Bre Morell’s hazy falsetto wrapped around me, how the “Can I get back to you without falling in?” chorus pinned into me. It all felt promisingly contemporary yet affectionately hitched to nineties dream pop, splitting the difference between Natalie Imbruglia and Portishead. The accompanying EP, extra life, sounded especially great spilling out of the tape deck in my beater. I was floored. The only thing missing was a CD insert poster of Morell and Durkan tacked to my wall.

Summer officially started when crushed’s debut album, no scope, was announced in June, accompanied by “starburn,” a sexy, catchy emblem of plush alt-rock and sugary trip-hop. The beats swayed and sauntered in my headphones; Morell’s voice floated through colorful lines (“time swings us against the ropes with nowhere to fall back to”; “never thought that I’d be chased down hard by a lifetime, gravity has come to collect on mine”) and Durkan’s plugged-in flashes of humid, poppy explosion. And you don’t get an album like no scope unless one of its makers really fucks with Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane, which Morell does (though she may never speak to me again now that I’ve put that on the record). “I definitely begged for that CD,” she says between sips of coffee, letting her guard down once I, without hesitation, declare that “Won’t Go Home Without You” is one of the best pop-rock songs ever. “I got to see them a couple times at the Houston Rodeo. I was obsessed. Once YouTube came around, in 2007, I was watching an interview with them and they were talking about their favorite music videos, and they said Radiohead. Changed my life, right there. Maroon 5 was over. Now, here I am.”

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Morell, a florist by day in Los Angeles, grew up in a Christian household forty-five minutes north of central Houston. She says she was “sheltered from the world” that she wanted to be a part of, but she never says exactly what that means, but I get the picture: She always wanted to be in a band. In the mid-2000s, she formed her earliest tastes online, in chat rooms, message boards, and a version of Tumblr that’s long gone. She was an MTV kid who’s since turned into a YouTube adult (it’s the only service she pays for). That’s always been her window to the world. In high school, her parents never let her go to concerts—not unless she begged them for a year, anyways. “I’m eternally grateful that my dad got tickets for us to go see Radiohead when I was fifteen, sixteen,” she says. Back then, Morell, embracing any creative outlet she could find, became something of a talent show regular. “That was my one musical thing I would do once a year,” she explains. But when she moved to Austin in 2009, she got involved in the University of Texas’ radio station, KVRX 91.7 FM, and started booking shows. “I really loved doing that, and I became almost embarrassed to say that I wanted to, like, sing in a band. I had a lot of social anxiety and kept it inside. But I thought about it every day, even though I was really scared of failing—of trying—at the thing I wanted the most in my life.”

But at a certain point, Morell decided that she didn’t want to be thirty or forty and still pawing at her childhood dream. So she put out some feelers about starting a band. “All of my friends had been in bands for years, since they were kids, and I was just some girl who was like, ‘I’m gonna be in a band!’ No one took me seriously,” she says. But a friend of hers, whom she didn’t know that well but used to joke with about making music together, came sniffing around for a vocalist for his band Temple of Angels. “He was like, ‘I have this band, and we recorded a few demos, and we’re trying to find a singer. I heard that you like to sing, would you want to come and try out?’” she recalls. “He sent me four or five demos and I was like, ‘Oh, this is so up my alley. I have to do this.’” Morell didn’t know his bandmates particularly well, either, though she’d seen them around at shows. At the audition, her nerves were shot, she got sick to her stomach, and her “mic was turned down so low” that the band could barely hear her. But it worked. “They didn’t turn me away, and I just kept showing up to rehearsal. Here we are.”

Morell knew of Durkan’s music before she knew him, because he co-founded the San Francisco lo-fi band Weekend and she’d play their debut album Sports on her KVRX show. Her friend Joe, who was in charge of receiving, organizing, and cataloguing all the incoming music, assigned Morell to blurb Sports so it could be added to the station’s rotation. “He was like, ‘Bre, you’re gonna love this. This one’s for you.’ I listened to it and I loved it, and they became one of my favorite bands.” Ten years later, Durkan started a radio show in the Bay Area, where he played the new music he was discovering by “looking around on Spotify and checking people out.” Eventually, Temple of Angels showed up. “My friend Brian, who runs Funeral Party Records, suggested them,” he regales over Zoom, a couple of days after my sit-down with Morell. “I was blown away by Bre’s voice. It really stood out from all the music that I was listening to at the time. There’s this power and this confidence in the delivery that isn’t common in music these days, especially music like we make. A lot of dream pop and indie rock has this soft, sweet, tender delivery. And I think, although Bre can do all of that, she has a really bold, powerful voice that stuck out. And I was like, ‘I would love to work with someone like this,’ because I’d never really worked with someone who was a pure singer.”

AFTER BECOMING MUTUALS, Morell and Durkan talked online for two or three months before finally meeting in person—having already written music and shared it with each other while living a thousand miles apart. “We just made the songs for fun, we were not thinking that it would be anything more than that,” Morell says. “We didn’t think anybody would hear it, other than our friends. We’ve never even lived in the same city.” But that’s one of the best parts of crushed, that it was a long-distance, digital friendship first and a living, breathing, creative thing second. It’s a beautiful reward for growing up in front of a PC. “I have lifelong friends that I met online back in the day,” Morell says. “You can find people that you never would have crossed paths with, because they’re on the other side of the world or the country. It’s so cool to get to do that.”

Even now, Morell and Durkan only see each other when they’re playing shows or, in the case of no scope, shooting album promos or finishing vocal tracks. They’re both reclusive, introverted people, which, Morell argues, helps crushed thrive. “We can work on things when we’re in the mindset for it or when we have time for it, because we’re able to do it in the comfort of our own home,” she elaborates. “Shaun writes most of the instrumentals at his kitchen table, and I track demos in my bedroom. It works for us, because we like to tinker away in our caves.” Durkan, who’s now holed up in Portland, reckons that what makes crushed work so well is that he and Morell both have the space to live their own lives without overly influencing each other. They’re not picking apart guitar lines or vetoing lyrics. “We’re bringing ingredients from separate places and making something new from it,” he elaborates. “We don’t ever even discuss it too much. We trust each other enough to say, ‘Hey, you’re into this now. Let’s try it,’ or, ‘Hey, you went through this. Let’s talk about it. Let’s make a song about it.’ It makes you trust the other person more. And we have to trust each other because there’s no other option. It’s that combination of her take and my take that makes the end result special.”

I ask Morell how much she needed that connection and collaboration with Durkan when she got it. “So bad,” she admits. “It really saved me in a lot of ways. It was a difficult time for me. I’d just come out on the other side of some significant life changes, and I was starting to recover from that.” She was isolated and alone in Los Angeles, navigating her long-term relationship falling apart and her dog passing away. In his new home in Oregon, Durkan was caught in a transitional phase of his own. “I was checked out of the music scene for a long time, for a lot of different reasons. I was in a different world,” he says. “I went to rehab and came out and was rediscovering who I was and what I wanted and what I was interested in. I decided that I missed music and missed making music and being immersed in it.” crushed gave them both a no-pressure experiment to get excited and motivated about.

There were no guidelines, Durkan tells me, for crushed at the beginning. Mostly, he and Morell were “following whatever little lead we found that inspired us, or any sort of curiosity, and trying things without the fear of it failing or how it would be received by our peers or critics.” crushed was a selfish interest that offered the freedom to experiment. “We were making music that we really wanted to hear, that we felt wasn’t available,” Durkan says. “And we didn’t even know if anyone was going to hear it. The first five, six songs we made, it was just for us.” But those songs—like “milksugar,” “bedside,” “respawn”—soon took off. They got a track review from Pitchfork for the latter, and extra life landed on our year-end EP list in 2023. The reaction, Durkan contends, was way bigger than he or Morell expected. “People seemed to be surprised and enthusiastic about the poppier side of things, so we wanted to really lean into that,” Morell notes.

crushed has always been a pop act, but on no scope they’re even more so. Morell and Durkan all but abandoned their post-punk beginnings and bonded over the nineties together, naming their shared mix of liked songs “VH1” and hoping to make the kind of music you might stumble into while channel surfing twenty-five years ago, like the Sundays or Dido. The duo finished mastering extra life in late 2022 and began writing new songs until December 2024, coming up with forty demos in total, all of them ending in a different place. “The struggle is to pick ten or twelve that best convey the message—because you can make so many different albums from forty songs,” Durkan reveals. “You could pick ten ballads or ten pop songs. It was important for us to find a balance, because we don’t want an entire pop banger album. We want some mood, some atmosphere, some abstraction.” Morell echoes his sentiment, saying, “We were really excited to have even more diversity with what we were doing, to take it in multiple directions. We wanted to have some much slower, sadder, ballad songs. We were excited to show a fuller variety of what interests us and really send it on some pop songs.”

So they called in Jorge Elbrecht (Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood, Hatchie), a Grammy-nominated engineer Durkan’s known for twelve years now, to co-produce. “He was in a band called Violence for a while, and Violence played some shows with Weekend,” Durkan says. “We went on to co-write the Tamaryn record Cranekiss together, so I had been familiar with his way of working. He has a really specific style, especially for his own music that he makes. He has this knack for melody that is really distinct.” It was a big change for crushed, because everything pre-no scope had been self-produced. But Elbrecht took their sound to the next level, employing his technical know-how, making pivotal edits, and letting his wisdom guide the songs into fuller, richer volumes. Morell says she and Durkan wanted Elbrecht to give no scope a “huge-sounding pop treatment” and be an unbiased counterbalance. “When you spend so much time working on a song, you can’t tell what’s good or bad anymore—not that we’re trying to make something that’s good or bad,” she continues. “We just want to make it feel good to us. But when you’ve been listening to a song over and over again for weeks or months, it’s hard to have clarity. So it was great to have Jorge, because he made it all sound really polished and big.”

In another lifetime, the defining moment on no scope doesn’t happen at all. Lead single “starburn” exists because, when Morell and Durkan had nine songs completed but needed one more during the final week of recording, they ignored their other thirty-one demos and wrote something totally new. “milksugar” and “waterlily” were born that way three years ago, and Morell wondered if it’d work again. That night, Durkan sent her a simple instrumental. “I cried,” she admits. “I was like, ‘This is it.’ I immediately had the melody in my head.” Morell’s fount of lyrics had run dry by then, so she asked Durkan if he had anything that could be a starting point for the demo. What he came back with was exactly what no scope needed, lyrics that fit perfectly with the celestial, dreamy tone Morell had already “free-styled” into existence. Pull apart “starburn” and you’ll find everything that makes crushed great: lyrics that come from a place of real despair and struggle and doubt; a trip-hoppy beat, beautiful atmosphere, and simple, lazy guitars; a metamorphic, surging finale. All of the ingredients fell into the dish just right and became a balm for Durkan, who’d gone through a relapse before the album was finished. “[‘starburn’] makes me feel a little less alone,” he says. “It felt good to put those ideas into a song and realize that there are people that relate to them.”

CRUSHED IS A GUITAR BAND experimenting with software and drum machines. But the instrument, which Durkan has been tinkering with since he was eight years old, has never been more front-and-center than it is on no scope. “I encourage more guitar, because I think that people who are doing similar music to us aren’t really super guitar-heavy,” Morell says. “It’s usually straight electronic and maybe some guitar.” In her context, the cresting riffs on “starburn,” the strumming, post-crescendo afterglow of “celadon,” and the muted, atonal idling on “airgap1” and “airgap2” (pulled from scrapped demos Durkan made fifteen years ago) immediately come to mind. If you boil those songs down, Durkan gestures, they’re just a collection of guitar riffs.

Durkan also sings lead vocals for the first time, on “cwtch” (the Welsh term for “hug”), “meghan,” and “weaponx,” though he found the process to be intimidating. “I can sing, to an extent,” he admits. “I have my little pocket that I’m comfortable in. Bre has a lot of range, and I find that really inspiring and humbling, especially when I’m in the studio and trying to sing simple little lines and realizing how difficult they can be to sing. I think I sing not for the love of singing, but because I have things to say in the songs—things that I’m struggling with, things that I’m hoping for, scared of, and it feels like a natural thing, to work my words into the music that comes from that same place of anxiety or fear or hope or disappointment.” Writing for no scope, Durkan wanted to get a couple of details in there that made the album feel like it was really his. Morell got that too, emphatically in the opening breakbeats of “exo,” where her vocals grow atomic in a wash of maximalist dream pop.

The first thing Morell and Durkan connected over four years ago was videogames. While passing music recs back and forth, they were both playing Stardew Valley and, while writing extra life, the then-newly-released Elden Ring was consuming their lives. “As an adult, there was a period where I gravitated away from those things, for one reason or another,” Durkan tells me. “But they are so good at fostering imagination and creativity. They are works of art in themselves, and I find them endlessly inspiring. The animation, the sound design, the writing—they’re almost richer than films, because you have control over your character you inhabit in these worlds. That’s a beautiful experience, whether you’re a kid or an adult.” The extra life and no scope titles are in tribute to that world-building, and Morell wrote the boss fight-inspired “oneshot” while playing Metal Gear Solid on an emulator for the first time. “I was in the second Sniper Wolf fight and I died the first time and hadn’t saved the game and had to go way back several times, because that fight was really difficult,” she remembers. “And it was making me think about this toxic relationship where you keep running back because it’s fun even though it’s killing you.” There are also nods to The Legend of Zelda sprinkled into “heartcontainer,” and videogame sound effects—which will go unnamed so crushed don’t get hit with a copyright suit—sampled throughout no scope.

I adored extra life immediately and feel the same about no scope. crushed pay tribute to the decade I was born in without becoming the decade I was born in. It’s got a little bit of Sheryl Crow in it, and a little bit of Björk too. There’s a film of Cocteau Twins’ soupy, gothic of fog and reverb on songs like “celadon” and “heartcontainer,” which makes sense, because that’s Morell’s favorite band (though she’s the only person I know that went to both Oasis reunion shows here in LA). But largely, the record tugs at the trip-hop Madonna boosted on Ray of Light twenty-seven years ago, which has since been worshipped by Lana Del Rey, Fontaines D.C., FKA twigs, and Addison Rae in different fonts. In the company of Massive Attack and Portishead’s inventions, crushed’s debut record is the most soothing and exciting recent entry into the conversation. It was crucial, Morell says, for her and Durkan to not be just “pure throwback” music. “It doesn’t feel like all of me,” she admits. “I’m so happy to be alive for the trip-hop resurgence. I was sitting in my bedroom at fifteen, like, ‘I can’t wait to move out and start trip-hopping.’ But I wonder if it’s gonna be like the next shoegaze and I get tired of it. I love it so much, but, if I hear something and it could have come out thirty years ago and you wouldn’t know, I don’t really get much excitement from that.”

crushed couldn’t quite escape the erroneous “shoegaze” accusations upon their arrival in 2023 (even Pitchfork likened “waterlily” to Souvlaki). I ask Morell if no scope is helping her and Durkan beat the allegations. “I pray to God it’s helping,” she laughs. “I actually do think it’s really helping. The guitar elements are more rock, and the hooks are clearer. I don’t think we were ever shoegaze to begin with, but people just throw that word around like it’s ‘indie.’ Like, ‘Oh, you’ve got guitars in your band? Shoegaze.’ If anybody says no scope is shoegaze, I’ll just be like, ‘Y’all need to go to the Wikipedia article for shoegaze and come back to me after that.’” We’re likely not that far away from Nirvana being called a shoegaze band, if distorted guitars are the new standard for the label.

But, as more and more bands prioritize their aesthetic over the substance of their art—or continue to care about dressing their image up in a certain way so they can fit into a specific scene, find likemindedness in certain people, and go on tour with a band they want to resemble over anything else—that distrust of nostalgia becomes more in-demand. But there’s currency in an original idea, and crushed are chasing that. “It’s impressive for someone to be able to nail some shoegaze sound from the early nineties, right? Of course,” Durkan says. “That’s technically impressive, albeit boring. But I think there needs to be a song there to latch onto. It needs to say something, no matter how appealing or beautiful it is.” To make music that truly lasts, you have to have one foot in the past and one in the future, Durkan argues, because “songs, at their core, are timeless.” It’s the production that dates the art. “As long as you’re writing songs that you can imagine standing the test of time in twenty, thirty years and they don’t fall apart if you remove some of the production, that’s how you do it. The songs from the nineties weren’t popular and on the radio because they sound like the nineties. They were massive songs that millions of people related to, and the way you do that is by writing them in an amazing way.”

Like an FPS player doming their enemy without using a rifle scope, crushed operate on instinct. Animated, acidic pop sagas blend into muscular ballads and moody vantages, and found sounds clutter the backdrops of minute-long interludes and outros. It’s all quite splendored, how Morell and Durkan interpret the transmissions of Harriet Wheeler, Aphex Twin, Sneaker Pimps, and the Cardigans into their own melodic brilliance. Three months after hearing it for the first time, no scope is still kicking around in my chest, as songs like “oneshot” and “licorice” yank me back to when MTV programming turned into YouTube obsessions—when television kids became internet adults and lyric videos made in Windows Movie Maker were just as popular as those Vevo official music videos. crushed is exactly what I want them to be: a sidebar band, the type of music you can only find ten feet down a late-night rabbit hole.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

crushed: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: Portishead, Natalie Imbruglia, The Sundays, Dido