Desire

By Harley Greasley

For your consideration:

Great new releases were in no short supply in 2023. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to my personal Album of The Year - recipient of a nomination for Best Engineered Album at the 2024 Grammy Awards - Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.

Desire is, without question, Polachek’s best work to date. Over its 12-track run, she takes us on an exploration of the most fundamental human experience: wanting. To Polachek, ‘desire’ is not just an emotion: it is an all-consuming immersion, a cruel madness. A madness that morphs the world around us: it is an escape from the mundane, from the memories of past heartbreaks; our lives disguised once again with the glamour of possibility. She invites us to lose ourselves in our need for another, leaving reality behind.

Beyond the emotional, Polachek demonstrates an acute skill of deconstructing what we understand pop music to be. Each track is infused with a distinct genre: she tries her hand at trip-hop, breakbeat, flamenco, and the result is spectacular: a tapestry of an album, woven together by the versatility of her other-worldly vocals and the hungers of desire itself.

Launching us into this record is the maximalist rallying-cry of an opening track, ‘Welcome To My Island’. The song begins with a 25-second howl - an orgasmic release - before settling into a monotonous, bratty, spoken verse. The chorus is an eruption of synths, with Polachek crying out the album’s title: she’s celebrating our arrival on her island, her world of indulgence. She described the track’s placement as “the nexus of a sort of ego death: a necessary starting point in a journey towards the freedom of losing one’s self.” The world she crawls away from on the album’s cover, the muted reality of the rat race, is long gone: we have arrived on her beach, staring up at the volcano - feeling our own glowing, tectonic energy rise within.

Following ‘Welcome’ is ‘Pretty in Possible’, an ambling track with no formal structure - an exercise in flow: it is Polachek’s personal favourite, “constantly tumbling, ricocheting between being internal and external”. Lyrically, it descends into abstraction: the only pervading sensation being the magnetic allure of the unknown - the ‘drug’ of potential. It’s a brilliant ode to freedom that feels like skipping down the street, buzzing with the high of having met someone special.

‘Bunny is A Rider’ finds us in an intricately produced, tropical soundscape, punctured by muddy bass and inhuman chirps. We are lured down the rabbit-hole by Bunny, a phantom woman who delights in her intangibility. The track itself borders on incomprehensible, its prick-of-the-ears whistle and pounding of an ‘unbreaking’ heart our only groundings in reality - we are otherwise, much like Bunny herself, ‘non-physical’.

‘Crude Drawing Of An Angel’ is the first slower, more contemplative track on Desire. The bass, long and low, surges beneath you; percussive drips fall from the ceiling; faintly alien cries whistling alongside the jagged-breath beat. She sings in anticipation of the departure of her angel, observing them in quick, vulnerable glances: “Draw the blinds / Draw the bath”. Wandering away in the pre-chorus, as if having left the room, she returns to pin us - like the angel - down: one final desperate attempt to prevent their departure. Her voice soars as she sings: “Forsake me / Here on the ground / All or nothing” and we can almost see her angel, wings fully spread, disappearing into the night sky. She longs for the ‘all’ - the dizzying highs of devotion - and she’ll do whatever she can to get it: “I’ll not be shy / No, I’ll not be gentle with you”.

‘I Believe’ and ‘Fly to You’ are Desire’s clubbier sister songs. ‘I Believe’ is a pulsing track, dedicated to legendary producer and artist SOPHIE. It is Polachek on a cliffside, water far below, convincing herself to jump. Toes on the edge, she can almost hear the organs of her own funeral - but she throws herself anyway, with a cathartic cry of “Violent love / Feel my embrace”.


’Fly to You’ is a fascinating listen - Polachek and producer Danny L Harle layer Suzanne Vega-esque wandering vocals on top of breakbeat one would expect to find in a PinkPantheress track. It’s a surprisingly harmonious contrast of pop nostalgia and pop future. Polachek recruits Grimes and Dido as the album’s only features, with Dido delivering summer-breeze perfection in her verse, echoing the warm, sparkling guitar of the post-chorus. Grimes’ breathier soprano and Polachek’s rich, full tones blend exquisitely in the outro.

‘Blood And Butter’ (my personal favourite) is Polachek’s sharpest songwriting of her career. It’s a dynamic, buoyant track: she trips neatly over each phrase, the layers beneath her a hypnotic blend of acoustic and synthetic. She conjures visceral images of absorption: she wants to get under her lover’s skin, “closer than [their] new tattoo” - who she was no longer matters. It’s an artful display of her eccentricity: she coins the words ‘mythocological’ and ‘wikipediated’, and manages to make a bagpipe solo feel completely in place.

‘Hopedrunk Everasking’ and ‘Butterfly Net’ are Desire’s most exquisite tracks. ‘Hopedrunk’, a heady ballad - left unadorned to allow Polachek’s vocals to shine - is arguably the album’s most romantic. It’s pillow talk, whispers in the early hours: “Pull close to me and never be alone”. Listening feels like sinking into your mattress, her voice an ethereal choir as your eyes close.

In ‘Butterfly Net’ we are asleep, dreaming alongside her. Soaring over the Thames at dawn, we’re chasing her lover through the air, net in hand. Though on the slower side, it thuds with purpose: the drum’s heartbeat carrying us until the final moment.

‘Billions’, the album’s closer, is an extra-terrestrial catch-and-release. “Capturing the afterglow of a reopening,” she guides us through a love affair of abundance: “Cornucopeiac / Yeah my cup overfloweth”. Despite its many references to overindulgence, ‘Billions’ is the first moment of sobriety - the morning after. It’s an ode to ‘closeness’ - the nearest we will ever get to our fantasies of fusion with another. A children’s choir, almost cherubic, guides us to resolution - not the artistic ideal of resolution, the ‘riding off into the sunset’, but the settling of our whirlwind emotions. The volcano of Desire has erupted, the clouds have cleared - what is left is no longer the idea of the other person, but the reality of them.

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is a triumph. It is Polachek at her most precise, both lyrically and sonically. Her obsession with detail is pronounced in every track; not one corner of this album feels under-appreciated. It is the culmination of a vision for her own version of pop - forward-thinking and unabashedly intellectual. In today’s landscape saturated with references, interpolations and sampling, not many artists can make this claim for themselves.