Toronto duo Intensive Care (Andrew Nolan and Ryan Bloomer) and Rhode Island duo The Body (Chip King and Lee Buford) have joined forces for the brilliant collaborative album Was I Good Enough?. With glitchy, bellowing vocals and an icy industrial backbone, these eight tracks showcase the respective pedigrees of their creators while summoning a dynamic and dangerous beast through the distortion.
Today, the album’s pummeling second single “The Riderless Mount” has arrived. Andrew Nolan from Intensive Care shares that the song is both groups “ode to different eras of hip hop. We stripped the song back as much as possible for this, deciding that the first half should be carried primarily by vocal performance and an amplified Roland TR 808 drum machine, at the halfway point when The Body takes over the guitars were slowed down significantly, imported into a sampler, and chopped up and rearranged on the pads.” He continues, “Chip’s vocals were recorded in the green room on Nolan’s iPhone before a show that both bands were playing.”
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 ahead of the album’s March 14th release date.
