N8NOFACE Builds a Future for the Street Kids on “Tomorrow’s World”
A sober, bigger-than-ever synth-punk album that still sounds like it was made by the kid in the closet.
For years, N8NOFACE made synth-punk out of his closet. Tomorrow’s World, out October 16 on Stones Throw, is the record where that closet door swings all the way open. Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio produced every track, and N8NOFACE imagined the whole thing as what “the punks and the street kids might be listening to in 2077.”
“The tough days sober beat the best days high for me now.”
N8NOFACE, to Atwood Magazine
The Record
Tomorrow’s World is twelve songs in a little over 37 minutes, and it does not waste a second of them. Dave Sitek produced it front to back, with Hudson Mohawke, Angélica Garcia, and Nick Zinner among the people who stopped by. Garcia and Scarlettt sing on “Gray Area,” and Scarlettt returns on “No Take Back.” For an artist who spent years recording alone, that is a crowded and generous room.
Sitek gave him a piece of advice that runs through the whole album. Think about the hit and the strange as two lines, he told him, and find where they cross. “That center where they cross is the magic,” N8NOFACE told Atwood Magazine. It is a useful way to hear these songs. They are catchy, and they are also a little bit off, in the best way.
The title comes from Tomorrow’s World, the long-running British science show that once had Kraftwerk on. N8NOFACE took that old idea of the future and pointed it at the people he grew up with. One of the most personal songs here, “Memories,” came from watching his Tata, his grandfather, lose his memory.
The Long Way
Nathan Hose grew up in Tucson, in his words “among drug mules and smugglers,” the kid people kept asking to turn off Daniel Johnston and Suicide. He did not turn them off. His first band was Crimekillz, and the years after that took him into rooms most DIY artists only read about: work with Eyedress and The Bloody Beetroots, shows with Cypress Hill, and two legs of Limp Bizkit’s arena tour. Travis Barker and Virgil Abloh both championed him along the way.
He also spent seventeen years fighting addiction, and he talks about it with real clarity. “I always used to be scared that if I lost the drugs that I would lose the funk,” he has said. Tomorrow’s World is the answer to that fear. The funk is all still here. These days he lifts weights and makes music every day, and the album has the energy of someone who finally has his whole day back.
Start Here
Start with “Gray Area” for the voices, then sit with “Memories” for the heart of it. It is rare to find a record this loud with a story this tender at its center. We are so glad he made it out of the closet and kept the closet spirit.
Photo
Valerie J. Bower, via Atwood Magazine.
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