It continues to fascinate me that works you explored years ago but didn’t enjoy or appreciate at the time can be returned to considerably later with an entirely new outlook. I’ve often wondered how many records there are from years gone by that I snubbed at the time, but now may come back to with new ears and the right (or perhaps simply adjusted) temperament to unravel properly. Love Remains is realistically one of many, a victim of youthful rejection yet also of fortuitous revisitation.

Having not made any notes it’s hard to say what my younger self didn’t get here, but I can probably make an assumption. Krell’s debut is smothered in distortion, its dreamy pop and crushed RnB vibes suspended in late-night lo-fi, the minimal percussion clipping and the vocal lines regularly lost to a smokey veil that holds them just out of reach. Everything here is so tantalisingly close to tangible determination and yet so frustratingly far, with only snatches of thoughts caught here and there to create sketches or impressions of context. For a younger me, I can imagine an impatience at the somewhat distant and unclear approach.

This lack of clarity and this ambiguity is, however, precisely what makes this a good listen: specificity is lost, language eroding in the face of the brutality of feeling, complexity of thought impeding the ability for mere speech to convey emotion. Instead it regresses, mulching down to some basal state where resonance is strongest in absence, nostalgia and mourning and love distilled into these blurry and haunting passages.

There are vocals in every track, but in each instance they are subsumed by processing, Krell’s falsetto pitchings and papery poetry all but lost to the void, some scratchy and blistered evocations the only remnants. Take for example the spectral minimalism of “Can’t See My Own Face”, snippets of some philosophical musing unravelling alongside super-stripped-back percussion in dusty shufflings. Or perhaps the uber woozy lo-fi wafting of decrepit “Lover’s Start”, whose soft coos barely touch the senses yet scream of some ancient and suppressed heartbreak. In the same vein, mid-album gem “Escape Before The Rain” has been an evergreen nugget for me personally; piano strokes drip out with painful clarity, the whole piece melting around their melancholic backbone as voice bleeds into noir loss and off-kilter synth flanging sends reality into a slow spin.

There are some impassioned moments here too, which equally dwell in a realm of obscurity and damage. “Walking This Dumb” is probably the heaviest, advancing in pulsating bass spasms that simply smother the listener in their insistence: hear my song, live these crushing feelings with me, but don’t ask of the why. We’re not here to play psychologist and unpick the source of these feelings, only to experience their outwash, their keenness for resolution. Penultimate “Decisions” sees that closure in sight, pitching and heaving in dense bass slaps and echoic expanses, rushing with heady energies that tilt madly, beautifully, into the hypnagogic closing “Suicide Dream 1”. Piano rakes the bristling static surfaces of Krell’s destroyed speech, suggestions of lightness glinting off its sanded and chaotic fascia as it continues to soldier on in this world with its scoured and altered self.

After all’s said and done there’s something left, something strong and concrete left untouched and solid beneath its otherwise tarnished edifice. Where words have failed and the once familiar has eroded into a new shape with which to fit into this changed life, a current of love blows away the scorched threads of thought and feeling away in a cathartic burst of solar wind. A memory of place, of time, of knowing, of caring, these are the only things worth retaining.