Photo by: Alana Wool
Despite the outright denial in its title, death is present in every one of the songs on Never Die, the collaborative album from Midwife’s Madeline Johnston and Matt Jencik (of Implodes, Don Caballero, and Slint’s live band) — out July 11 on Relapse [pre-order]. Jencik held the tenderest thought imaginable when he came up with that phrase—‘Never Die’—the fact that the people he loves eventually would, a certainty that feels impossible and remote, until the day it absolutely doesn’t. Never Die represents Jencik’s desperate bid to hold onto everyone he loves, to keep them on Earth so fiercely that they might enter the grave with claw marks on their skin. Johnston, who recognizes the grace of mortality (and who, as Midwife once sang: “I don’t wanna live forever,” over and over) serves as the spiritual guide for the album, transmuting the fear of death into an incentive to live more keenly and dearly.
Johnston and Jencik met in 2015 when they first shared a bill and again in 2018, when they eventually became friends. A year later, Jencik started working on what would become Never Die. Following a number of ambient-industrial drone instrumental albums, he felt the need to set himself a new creative challenge: to write vocal-heavy songs. He worked on them alone in his basement, recording directly to a four-track cassette. He sent those demos to a different collaborator to tinker with before that partnership eventually dissolved. Then, he thought of Johnston: the way her voice glowered in her songs, as well as her commitment to minimalism, which fell squarely within the project’s aesthetic and spiritual impulses. “I was immediately drawn to what she was doing,” Jencik says. In both of their work, Jencik and Johnston understand minimalism as a vehicle for enormous, desperate and universal emotions. Entire worlds come in and out of existence between each of their sparse notes; a great breadth of feeling is bedded into the simple structure of their songs.
“It took me a few weeks to get up the courage to ask her, but I’m so glad I did,” says Jencik. They began the project with a ground rule: Johnston would provide the vocals, so long as Jencik came up with all the lyrics and melodies. “Even though I was not the songwriter on this project, the work falls in line with all the themes that Midwife explores,” says Johnston. While the collection of songs is personal to Jencik, their specificities tap into the more universal feelings of what it means to be human. “Each song tells a story, an experience documented and preserved, like a moment trapped in a snow globe,” says Johnston.
Johnston figured herself as a conduit to Jencik’s vision, mostly shutting down her conceptual brain and refocusing on an engineer-type role. With a slightly more mathematical approach to composition, she re-amped tracks, added keyboard and lead guitar parts to round out missing frequencies, while situating Jencik’s tight songwork within an absorbing context. “Working with Madeline couldn’t have been easier,” Jencik says, “it was the type of collaboration you dream about.” He sent parts to her, and what she returned was almost exactly what he imagined, often better. Johnston’s subtle, spectral grace invariably peeked through the harmonies and overdubs she sent back. They rounded out the project within a year, Johnston adding parts and mixing the tracks from Trinidad, CO, and Jencik recording from his basement in Chicago. To this day, they’ve yet to record in the same space.
That distance mapped perfectly onto the album itself and the dynamic between Jencik’s voice, which sounds close, rooted and direct, and Johnston’s, which is more guiding, enveloping and disembodied. She sounds as though she has been summoned by a mesmerist, her voice calling out somewhere from beyond the black curtain, on the bridge between two worlds. Together, their repeating, meditative rhythms realign the listener’s senses so that they’re utterly locked into their willowy sound.
Never Die offers a calm confrontation with the dour inevitability that bookends our lives. When the fact of death looms over life, it tends to denature every experience we have and every relationship we know we’ll eventually have to forfeit back to the Earth. No one, no matter how hard we love, makes it out of this thing alive. But we feel anyway. And we love anyway. And we sing anyway. Here, Jencik and Johnston have sung ‘die’ over and over, snowglobing life in the process.
