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93. Treats - Sleigh Bells (2010)

Noise Pop

In 2010, Google’s AI was still years away from public awareness. The incredibly trippy photos of this AI’s “dreams” hadn’t yet been created. The AI-penned scripts, which would later become meme-fodder, had yet to be written. And yet, Treats (2010) finds Sleigh Bells creating such an otherworldly sound that it could pass for the creative offspring of artificial intelligence.

There are recognizable attributes to the album. The raucous wall-of-guitars harkens to the My Blood Valentine project Loveless (1991), though it mostly lacks the warmth that made that album seem more humane. The shoegaziness is there, but it’s less manicured and it emphatically trades the organic qualities for an unapologetic digital glitchiness. The lyrics on most tracks could also have been developed by an embryonic AI engine. “Kids” sounds like the meme “I forced an AI to listen to Grouplove a million times, then asked it to write a song.”

None of these hyper-synthetic traits are a knock on Treats. Conversely, they’re precisely what make it great. To this day, I’ve never heard anything even remotely like it, except for maybe “Rill Rill”, which is easily the catchiest and most accessible track on the album. There’s an oddly alluring “rah-rah-rah” quality to the vocals, hinted at by the band on the cheerleader-adorned artwork on the album’s cover. The faces of the cheerleaders are distorted and unrecognizable, almost as if an AI designing it couldn’t quite manage that degree of granularity...

*image; cover art for the album Treats by the artist Sleigh Bells