Toronto duo Intensive Care (Andrew Nolan and Ryan Bloomer) and Rhode Island duo The Body (Chip King and Lee Buford) will release their brilliant collaborative album Was I Good Enough? on March 14th. Today, they’ve shared the album opener, “Mistakes Have Been Made.” Intensive Care’s Andrew Nolan says the song “…is probably the most traditional sounding song on the album, the idea was to have it start sounding close to a traditional Body song and as the album progresses to start devolving into something else. The song was slowed down 20%, then the drums were rerecorded at normal speed. The end of the song is an 808 playing through the Intensive Care bass rig.”
With glitchy, bellowing vocals and an icy industrial backbone, Was I Good Enough? showcases the respective pedigrees of its creators while summoning a dynamic and dangerous beast through the distortion.
The union of Intensive Care and The Body dates back to a tour in 2018 but the idea for a collaboration remained on the backburner until 2021. The Body established the framework for the album and shared it with Intensive Care, and all four musicians tinkered with it for the next year-and-a-half. Lee from The Body comments, “What started as years and years of admiration both musically and personally has led to us convincing IC into making our love into a concrete physical release.” Bloomer says the collaboration was “based on our friendship and appreciation for The Body’s approach—which is quite similar to ours.” He continues, “In a conventional sense, we’re both grounded in heavy music. We all try to transcend the boundaries of the genre and redefine what heavy means to us.”
They did so by adopting a production technique widely used in hip-hop and originally popularized in Houston: chopped and screwed. They combined samples, instrumentals, drum loops, vocals, and other elements into a corrosive and caustic collage. “We took what The Body gave us and ran with it,” Bloomer recalls. “We were deliberately slowing parts down and doubling up to emphasize certain vocal lines. Hip-hop was a huge inspiration. We tried to lean on those techniques in order to create this record and put our own spin on it.” He concludes, “There’s a real contrast between our voices. You really hear the back-and-forth of two bands who have come together to make a record.”
Pre-order Was I Good Enough? here.
