Album review: Bots, by Pickle Darling

Max Johns hears the sound of someone alone in their bedroom, surrounded by ideas and deep feelings, reassembling them into beautiful and thoughtful things.

To wrap your head around Bots, start at either end. Opening track ‘Obsolete’ is a staticky, artful scene-setter. Samples, synthesisers, and squeaks from fingers sliding on guitar strings evolve into a welcoming ballad. It’s immediately clear why Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo) described the album as being “assembled from fragments”. The magic is in turning bits and pieces into a sum greater than the whole. Musical mosaics. It takes three-plus minutes for the noise to fully turn to signal, then we finally hear Lukas’s voice and guitar. 

​About half an hour later, ‘Infinite Trolley’ is a dreamy and near-instrumental outro, looping around itself like a goodbye that no-one wants to initiate. As much as they’ve always been a scrapbooker, playing with odds and ends and bits and bobs, on this track Pickle Darling is comfortable staying the course. Lingering without getting jumpy, setting moods rather than shifting them. 

​Between these entrance and exit points is Pickle Darling’s most deliberately constructed album yet. The care and attention, obvious throughout, is demonstrated early on as ‘Obsolete’ becomes ‘Violence Voyager’. Six or seven beautifully arranged seconds, across two songs, chop and blend from lullaby to oriental landscape. It’s a delightful transition, like turning a page in a pop-up book.

Bots is a quiet affair, with acoustic guitar and whispery vocals made warm and headphone-ready by plentiful treatments and trickery from the studio (well, laptop in a bedroom). Lukas’ voice is sometimes direct and confessional, sometimes distorted and pitch-bent into different characters. A mix of keyboard-heavy and guitar-first songs give the album variation even as the subdued pace and energy stay steady.

The exception is track 7, ‘Massive Everything’. It’s the most straightforwardly pop song that Pickle Darling has ever created. It’s an earwormy delight, and it lifts the whole album.

There’s something else that stops Bots from becoming a sleepy-time comfort blanket. Lyrically, the album is centred on a roiling human relationship, two people “always in the opposite loops of infinity” while being attracted to each other “like ducks towards an air rifle”. Lukas offers “only a portion” of their heart, “afraid of your judgement”. It’s complicated enough for juxtapositions like, “You look kind of scary / You and me have things under control”. Musically the album couldn’t be more tightly arranged, even as its emotions are never resolved.

This is the sound of someone alone in their bedroom, surrounded by ideas and deep feelings, reassembling them into beautiful and thoughtful things. But will their heart break tomorrow? The tension between how it sounds and what it says is what makes Bots so interesting.