puppeteer my corpse at the renegade please

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  Vortex's Album of the Year List '24

  Tom

  I first heard of Gupi by way of food house, their collaborative project with Fraxiom. That album is so completely off-the-wall and unserious that it's kind of hard to tell that the production underneath the mess was genuinely impressive; "Fuck Notch, fuck Musk, and I'll piss on Zedd" might give me incomprehensible amounts of serotonin, but it was kind of hard to tell whether this stuff was actually good or whether that was just the Tiktok-vaporised part of your brain talking. Much of Gupi's early work was devoted to the brainrot inherent in much of modern hyperpop; there's LSD-infused supergoop in albums like paper eater and particularly glow-zone. The former is layered and dense. The latter is dumbed-down lobotomy-hyperpop, which did not get a particularly warm reception.

  In general, Gupi's faced accusations of being "brainrot music" for as long as they've been around. I guess it pissed them off, because puppeteer my corpse at the renegade please is very dark, very cold, and very considered.

  For one, these tracks are pretty damn long! wheyaa wheyaa, the opener, is 4 minutes and 49 seconds. That's not nothing, especially when those minutes are used to layer incredibly well. The key difference that's immediately noticeable compared to something like paper eater is how cold this track is; often in hyperbass/electronic music, you're hit with eight million different elements at once. wheyaa wheyaa lays it all out for you to hear and understand right off the bat, which is not something you'd expect from an artist known for their incomprehensibility. Also, the drops here are insane; you're looking at some of the darkest bass you can get grating against spiky, fuzzy layers of buzzing noise. It's impressive. For the longest time Gupi hasn't particularly liked to show their working, but here everything's on display.

  Mindcrush takes this a step further, moving away from the frenetic energy to something both more understandable and a lot more weird. There's loops in loops, sounds warping and shifting to occupy spaces on the frequency that crest in and out of primary focus. Then we're right back to the frenetic energy with freaks, a track that utilises much more of a "pop" framework. You're getting one main synth that pushes in front of everything... until the switchup. Fuzzy, cavernous bass clears out the track, being recycled later to add some extra punch. It's thrilling and a hell of a lot more digestible than anything else made by Gupi.

  strong independent crybaby is the "hit" of the EP, if you could call a song with eighteen thousand plays that. It's not hard to see why; a lot of the time electronic bubblegum bass feels like it was constructed for the sole purpose of sounding cool, which is fine. independent crybaby is better than that, because there's emotions being pushed at you through the title, vocal samples, and overall murkiness you can hear here. There's a moment where a lot of the loops clear to make way for this immense, dramatic synth that's mixed much closer to the ears than much of the previous instrumentation, and yeah, it feels cinematic! I sometimes struggle to find purpose or emotion in electronic music, but this has it in droves.

  The closer ready is again much more subdued than you'd expect from Gupi. The clarity they've afforded themselves here works wonders; though there's never silence, every single drum pattern and synth is mixed to be right where it should be. It feels mature, much like this whole EP. Gupi's found a perfect balance between restraint and overproduction, and man does it sound good.