The music that opens M Wagner’s We Could Stay doesn’t fade-up as much as it lumbers into view. It carries a crackling sense of inevitability, as if you’re watching a shelf cloud advance on a city skyline. Suddenly, it’s upon you: An enormous four-chord vamp mangled by distortion and haunted vocal echoes, the song’s shimmering chimes playing around the edges. There’s a seductive elegance to the track’s destruction, like spending your final moments caught in a tornado, marveling at its power. In its last quarter, the noisy layers of “Release Yrself” fall away, leaving the softly glowing embers of a lullaby-like melody. Right when it feels light enough to drift off on the breeze, Wagner brings in a startling, stabbing trance synth, caking it with the blistering overdrive of a tape deck eating itself.
We Could Stay, the Brooklyn electronic musician’s staggering debut, artfully oscillates between moments of hypnotic bliss and jarring violence. Wagner keeps his programmed percussion as uncomplicated as possible, stripping house, garage, and techno down to the studs. His work isn’t at all minimal, though; the utilitarian grooves leave plenty of space, which Wagner fills with interlocking loops, infinitely repeating micro samples, and droning synths that shudder and spiral when agitated. There are shades of GAS and the Field here—Wagner’s an avid fan of ambient techno pioneers like Wolfgang Voigt and Biosphere—but rather than stretching towards an ever-distant horizon, his work operates in a much tighter radius. Some of the dreamier textures he employs could be traced back to Silver Liz, the psych-pop band he founded with his wife Carrie in 2016—he even samples Carrie’s vocals from Silver Liz’s “Terrapin” on We Could Stay’s title track. And despite economical run times, each track is a full journey, Wagner gleefully bending dance music tropes into unpredictable shapes. Inspect his wall of sound a little closer, and you’ll discover the thunderous roar cleverly hiding a pop sensibility.
One of the key aspects of Wagner’s compositional style is the gradual, almost imperceptible introduction of new elements. He often brings in a sample or instrument through a slow fade, so that by the time it’s prominent in the mix, you’ve forgotten what the song sounded like without it. “Marcy Av” starts with a solitary bass drum, and slowly evolves into a simple, swinging UK garage pattern—more DJ transition tool than album cut. As it shuffles along, a sine wave sequence flickers to life, metallic glitches form a melody, and a splashy breakbeat emerges—all funneling into the final detuned, richly harmonic chord.
The ghostly vocal samples on “Never Gone” bubble up so gently, it’s hard to tell if they’re actually there or if your brain’s working to make sense of the song’s cacophonous, shoegazing frequencies. Halfway through “Rome Generator,” you’ll suddenly become aware of the syncopated kicks, but rewind a little, and you’ll discover they’d initially appeared a full minute before, buried beneath a strobing keyboard. Throughout We Could Stay, Wagner pairs these subtle transitions with more traditional, gridlike techno structures, maintaining an alluring dichotomy between the celestial and the grounded. The record loses itself a little near the end, coming down from the neon-streaked jungle climax of “Thanks for Listening” with two ambient pieces that, while gorgeous, tread somewhat similar ground. But for the better part of its 41-minute runtime, We Could Stay is breathlessly thrilling—bruised, beautiful, and completely engulfing.