Exploring the Boundaries of Experience: Toso Toso Tops’s Medium-Breaking Album
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The multi-talented musical coalition Toso Toso, based in New York, heralded the release of their eponymous first album in 2025. The quartet’s music, an avant-garde variant of pop, intertwines wild innovation with intricate design. Powerfully gentle yet fervently unrestrained, the band deftly skates through torrents of sentiment and activity, bridging the gap between the rambunctious and the austere. The outcome is a sound piece unusually stunning, weaving a tale through texture, and sprouting from the roots of experimentation.
The band, Toso Toso, was pieced together around 2020, the components being Kabir Adhiya-Kumar, who is responsible for the sound design, drum score, and production; Rahul Carlberg, delivering the synths and keyboards;Guitarist and producer Celia Hill and Isabel Crespo Pardo who are contributing as the lyricist and vocalist. The communal background for these band members lies in their shared experience with improvisation, which informs the method they employ when composing collectively. The inception of their songs often begins with a single idea, plucked from the mind of a member. This idea then undergoes a communal transformation, being stretched, looped, and chiseled into unfamiliar forms. These pieces, once whole, are dismembered and reshaped under the light of the collective perspective of the band, in the process creating music that is simultaneously fluid and fractured.
The sonic avatar of Toso Toso, distinct from genres, is woven from the threads of a unique collaborative spirit and a profound creative trust that is founded in the roots of friendship. They concoct novel and stimulating mixes from a diverse sounding board, with the resonances of punchy synths coming into contact with speculative verses, explosive drums emerging from reverberations, and morphing into intense, angular textures. Their songs precariously tread the line between tranquility and tumult, balancing sentimentality and intimacy with aural extremes.
Embellished by compelling lyrics and soaring verse lines, their front-runner single “lluvia de meteoritos” reflects a meteor shower – grand, astral, and ethereal. This track’s atmosphere, highly immersive and expansive, has been curated by harmonizing reverberating string samples and a skewed drum track, punctuated by distorted chords floating suspended in the ether. The track is steered by the unwavering vocals of isa. As the single unfurls, the lines separating personal recollection and celestial events blur, creating an emotional landscape as vast as the world, oozing with a cosmopolitan flair.
Their following single “corre que corre” clarifies the influence of ceaseless metamorphosis on the ideology of the band: “en la nube, la lluvia sigue su camino / y lo que cobra vida no se detiene y sigue su camino” (“The rain continues its journey in the cloud / and what is reborn doesn’t stop – it continues on its path”). The single is utmost explosive and relentless; it turns inversion into a primordial phenomenon. Bursting with raw vitality, the boundless form, and the sheer immensity of its sonic horizon over its 8-minute span encapsulates transformation as a musical and existential tool. Across the range of seven songs, a nuanced but conspicuously symbolistic album shapes up. Rendered luminous and succinct by the band, their debut is an advent into a musical territory previously uncharted. Their sound, eternally mutable, perpetuates the definition of Toso Toso – a state of continual evolution.
The band derives their sound from a blend of genres and techniques. This diversity layers the music; such as the celestial aura of micro-sampled chaos integrated with Isabel Crespo Pardo’s soaring vocals, and Rahul Carlberg’s dynamic synth and keyboards achieving a delicate balance of harmony and anarchy. Their collective efforts produce an original, immersive sound that sets them apart. Simultaneously lush and emotive, the album teeters on lava-hot creativity that is both exhilarating and thrilling.
Drawing parallels to the styles of other versatile musical artists such as Julia Holter and Sam Gendel, Toso Toso pushes the envelope of avant-pop music with their audacious attempts to contravene conventional boundaries while exploring uncharted musical territories. Their sound, resulting from a conceptual hodgepodge of disparate styles, pays homage to the transformative power of collective improvisation while setting new standards for contemporaries to aspire. In the end, Toso Toso’s inaugural album is a testament to the thriving experiment that underpins modern music – a journey that commenced in the chaos and found its apex in the serenely beautiful.
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