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].
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.
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— like on the album closer “Rickety Ride.” Jencik says the song is about “…a random unplanned evening I had with someone many years ago. Leaving work one night I bumped into a barista from the coffee shop across the street. She had also just finished working and was sitting alone at a table on the sidewalk drinking a bottle of wine. We started talking and she invited me over to her place to hang out. The next thing we knew we were at a neighborhood carnival then proceeded to haunt the streets of Pittsburgh for hours like proper nighthawks. It seemed like maybe the beginning of something but then it wasn’t. Over the following years I realized it was one of the best, most pure nights of my life. Total freedom without needing to tell anyone where I was or what I was doing. No mobile phone to track my every move. Freedom like that is so rare now unless you just go off the grid.“
Jencik + Johnston began the project with a ground rule: Johnston would provide the vocals, so long as Jencik came up with all the lyrics and melodies. 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.
