One-third of the way into the video for “Black Walls,” vocalist Ruth Radelet can be seen holding up a copy of a cracked vinyl album. The image should be sweet torture for Chromatics fans. Last year, claims surfaced that Johnny Jewel, the project’s label head and production guru, had destroyed every physical copy of Dear Tommy, the new Chromatics album that was first announced almost four years ago. A promotional photo for the group’s suitably eerie appearances on “Twin Peaks: The Return” even teased a broken Dear Tommy LP. They’ve dashed our expectations time and again, and this new single—which coincides with official word that the follow-up to Chromatics’ staggering 2012 effort Kill for Love is now due out in the fall—asks us to take the risk of crushing disappointment once more.
“Black Walls,” though, almost makes all broken promises worth it. Absent from previous Dear Tommy tracklists, despite the fact that the long-delayed album was purportedly going to be the same as the obliterated version (except “better”), the song is quintessential Chromatics. With frosty vocals, urgent guitars, ominous synths, and crisp beats, all within a sumptuously designed soundscape, it finds Chromatics concocting a gorgeous new version of themselves that feels the same but also somehow reborn. They’re “turn[ing] water into wine,” perhaps, as Radelet sings, in the haunting lyrics. Later in the video, which has the neon glow of a ’90s glamour shot if it were set in a retro sci-fi dystopia, the camera drifts across a vinyl record by one of Jewel’s other groups, Glass Candy. This feels like a reminder that Jewel hasn’t actually been gone at all. Maybe it’s Chromatics who’ve been waiting for us.
