It’s been six years since How To Dress Well’s most recent album The Anteroom. Since then, we’ve observed the 10-year anniversary of debut album Love Remains. Today, Tom Krell is announcing his new LP I Am Toward You and releasing the singles “New Confusion” and “No Light.”

About “New Confusion,” Krell said, “It’s about how to relate to the past knowing the hard limits on human memory and the challenges of metabolizing intergenerational-anthropogenetic trauma. ‘At best regret, at worst forgetfulness,’ I sing in the chorus — a tortured concept of memory, no doubt. But I also sing that there is a path to freedom from this bind.”

After The Anteroom, Krell finished his PhD in philosophy with a dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics. He wanted to “find corners of myself that I had never explored,” so he participated in “clandestine and occult meditation.” He became disillusioned after touring The Anteroom: “I had to reorient myself towards music in a purer and less restrictive way in order to retrieve what has made music one of the most heart-opening, instructive phenomena in my life,” he said.

He began working on I Am Toward You in 2020. The songs out today feature contributions from CFCF, Trayer Tryon, and Anarthia DLT, and other collaborators on the album include Chris Votek, Joel Ford, Josh Clancy, Brian Allen Simon (Anenon), and Aaron Charles Read. The album title comes from Krell’s wife mishearing a lyric in Miley Cyrus’ “I Adore You.” “Because I had expressed to her that I thought the song was powerful, she generously attuned her mind to hear something powerful, something profound,” he said.

Hear “New Confusion” and “No Light” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “New Confusion”
02 “Contingency / Necessity (Modality of Fate)”
03 “Crypt Sustain”
04 “No Light” (Feat. Anarthia DLT)
05 “nothingprayer”
06 “On It And Around It
07 “Song In The Middle
08 “Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside”
09 “A Faint Glow Through A Window Of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate Is Shown)”
10 “The Only True Joy On Earth”
11 “A Secret Within The Voice”

I Am Toward You is out 5/10 on Sargent House.