Music/Album Reviews

Alice Glass is angry, and she wants you to know it. She has very good reason: In 2017, she publicized the prolonged abuse she’d faced at the hands of Crystal Castles partner Ethan Kath. Her story, still available in stark, plain text on her personal website, outlines an experience of grooming, trauma and vicious, cruel violence. According to Glass, Kath started pursuing her when she was 15 — he a decade older — and spent the entirety of their relationship physically and psychologically abusing her. When she went public with the story, she was thrust into the crosshairs of a decades-long debate about what we ought to do when trailblazing art comes from terrible people.

The good news, for Glass and for us, is that her debut solo album, PREY//IV, makes it immediately, unavoidably clear that she has always been the creative powerhouse behind Crystal Castles. Kath’s only album without her, the 2016 release Amnesty (I), was a commercial and critical flop; meanwhile, PREY//IV is a dizzying, furious, emotional firestorm that has Glass flexing every creative and vocal muscle.

The album is a relentless trip through trauma recovery. Glass uses industrial, doomy production and eerie vocals to paint an apocalyptic picture of her inner world during the darkest years of her life. It’s notable that in much of Crystal Castles’ work, Glass’s voice was often distorted into oblivion — used more as an ambient instrument than a vehicle for speech. In PREY//IV, her voice is clearer than ever: As she outlines a story of violence, pain and abuse, she wants you to hear every fucking word.

In the album’s centrepiece, FAIR GAME, she intercuts nonstop hyper-pop instrumentation with clean, cold spoken-word vocals. She speaks in the language of manipulation: “Where would you be without me?” screams the song’s refrain. “You screw up everything. I didn’t want to tell you, but I have to, because I care. I’m the only one who cares,” she mimics, hatred palpable in her voice. You are forced to imagine that her abuser said these words to her countless times throughout their relationship — she says them like she’s spitting them onto a police report.

PREY//IV is a triumph; it’s a testament not only to Glass’s strength but to her inimitable talent. It’s a gravestone for an alleged abuser whose last musical output was lifeless and a monument to the woman who is, and always has been, better than him. Glass implies in this album that Kath often asked her where she’d be without him. The question, at the time, was likely meant rhetorically. The implication was that she owed him everything — Kath has said publicly that he thinks he was the sole powerhouse behind Crystal Castles. It’s fitting, then, that PREY//IV provides that question with an answer: Without Kath, Glass proves that she is infinitely better.

Watch the EVERYBODY ELSE music video