LP – Limited Edition Gold Vinyl.

There are ghosts all across AVANTI, the debut album from Malice K – the record wades through a disarray of chaos and loss with a sharp-toothed fervor. At points its howling and unhinged, a grungy layer atop a lush foundation of melodic capital-s Songwriting akin to the golden-age pop of the 70s, but in other moments it dissolves into a gentle, wistful haunting. Malice Ks songs are blunt, uncomplicated and unflinching as he probes the interiority of memories, of mistakes saturated with an innate intensity that sucks you into his gnarled and visceral world, so barbed it could draw blood.

Malice K is a New York-based project helmed by visual artist and songwriter Alex Konschuh, but he was born and raised in Olympia, Washington. Following a stint living in Los Angeles, where he delved further into his music making and became a member of the artist collective Death Proof Inc., a trip to New York funded by a prospective label resulted in him simply never leaving the city. A period of chaos ensued, Malice K exhausted and unmoored and ultimately, unwell: I was just… I was trying to be like a full-time performer constantly in my day to day life, he says. I was at every party, and doing everything, and I just wasnt me.

That partying and instability caught up to him, and through necessity he found ways to let go of what wouldnt allow him to continue making his art, or even to survive. He wades through that turmoil on AVANTI, which acts as a diary of the last two years of his life. The album title offers a double meaning, named for both the formative alternative performing arts high school Malice K attended and the Italian adverb, which, translated to English, means to go forward.

He started writing the songs here across the last several years, one song at a time. Perfection is never the point. As reflective as his songwriting is, Malice K isnt interested in belaboring the work, or even his own story. Leaving room for catharsis, for connection, for a community, is whats most important. He prefers to distill the feeling and sound of the room, of the immediate present, the way he feels when he performs it, to tape.

A microphone just recording the room, whats around you – theres something that comes through there and I like to preserve that as much as possible, he says. Even though you cant define exactly what someone was feeling when they made a song, you can tell when somebody felt something when you hear it. Its like how a camera can save a photo I want to do that, but with sound.

And the resulting AVANTI undulates with a singular acuity, strangely romantic but tragic, tense and startling, even in its quieter, ballad-skewing moments.

The record is unpredictable across its 11 songs. The album opens with a jarring scream on Halloween, Malice Ks breathless vocals buried beneath a grungy, roving Nineties riff. The track emanates a manic energy, enveloping. Its a fitting entrypoint for the record, and for the vividness of Malice K. The snarling and obsessive Youre My Girl has a swaggering paranoia: I got so high I thought my hand touching my hand was your hand. But AVANTI exists in a lot of quieter moments Radio, with its fluttering morose cello (Malice Ks first time composing for the instrument), which moves at an almost glacial pace comparatively, or the aching wistfulness on both the The Old House and Blue Monday. The Old House is an album stand-out, anchored in an acoustic guitar, an uneasy lullaby that never quite settles into itself: I think to myself I got the things that I wanted, but I cant help think theres something else that I forgot to do.

Theres an underlying theatricality throughout – but it works because its built on whats simple and true. Like on the penultimate track, Raining, with its propulsive, percussive heartbeat, where he wonders: You set me on fire and put me out / for what is trust / but making up for how you fucked up to begin with? Its the closest the album comes to a thesis a flawed, lovesick devotion but the idea of a guiding story is something Malice K squarely rejects.

I dont like albums formed solely around themes, or where you have to be told what it is, Malice K says. I dont like being told what to think or feel about something I stray away from projects where it needs to be explained to be heard properly, or where theres only one way to hear something.

A recent press interview called Malice K a shapeshifter, but hes not amorphous in that way. Hes decisive and intense, more concerned with carving his own path, and building his own world, rather than finding ways to fit into what already exists. Every part of Malice K is distinctly himself felt even in the visual components, like the Radio single tape-and-scissors artwork, the illustrations for the inside of the album packaging, the AVANTI album cover featuring a sculpture he made in collaboration with Cheeky Ma. From his sweaty high-octane shows to the high-flash high-contrast photos; from his gnarled and unsettling illustrations to the studio recordings that vacillates between grief and tenderness at the drop of the hat, theres an exceptional ferocity across everything Malice K touches. AVANTI feels lived in, like peering into an abandoned house through a window smeared with grimy fingerprints, relics of a life well-lived scattered inside – despite being a debut, theres the sense that Malice K arrived fully-realized, imperfections and all.

Tracklist:

1. Halloween
2. Hold Me Up
3. Song For My Baby
4. The Old House
5. Weed
6. Radio
7. Youre My Girl
8. Concrete Angel
9. FADE
10. Raining
11. Blue Monday