‘A=N’ is the latest single from The Formalist’s 2023 album, ‘A Trace Of Yourself’. The duo, comprising Stephen Krieger and Erik Laroi, make music that transports you from darkness into light, with intelligent, cultured, and mysteriously complex lyrics and music. We speak with Stephen about the single, the video, and the album, as well as what The Formalist have coming up.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and how The Formalist came into existence?
The Formalist is composed of Erik Laroi and myself (Stephen Krieger), and we met back in college in the ’90s when Erik was playing drums in a shoegaze band called Closer and I was playing drum machines in an experimental electronic music outfit called The Freight Elevator Quartet. Over the years he and I found ways of creating electronic pop music together and The Formalist was the way for us to do this. We recorded our first album as The Formalist over 15 years ago, but we finally released that album officially on Mother West in 2019, which is kind of what kickstarted us working on the new album “A Trace of Yourself.”
Around that time the early-Covid period in New York moved us to create the new record. It was a tense, emotional, uncertain, and kind of lonely time with all the isolation and shuttered activities. So we would get together once a week at his Glass Box studio and gradually build and develop and write the songs; creating this Formalist album got us through that period. I was working out a lot of my concerns about how temporary and fragile life felt at the time through the lyrics, and I think there’s a sweeping emotional sound on the record that was a reflection of how things felt at the time.
What inspired you to choose the name ‘The Formalist’ for your musical project?
The name speaks a little bit to how we make our music and also maybe try to live our lives — a sense of precision, the desire for everything in its right place. While not being in The Formalist, Erik is a film and video editor, and I’m a neurologist in New York. So I think there’s a certain meticulousness and detail-oriented approach to both our careers and our music, and the Formalist name captures that as well. So it’s not about formality, really, but I’d say it’s more about being intentional.
How would you describe your music style, and what influences have shaped your sound?
I think we have some classic influences from the shoegaze era — Slowdive, MBV — and trip-hop artists like Portishead, and of course, Radiohead will always be inspirational. But more than any one artist I think trying to capture a certain nostalgic, emotional mood is what we were going for. A more modern influence I’d say would be James Blake, not because our record sounds anything like him but just because he uses voice and sound and elegant instrumentation in such a modern way. I think the Broken Bells collaboration is another great example of something that sounds really nostalgic and current at the same time.
In his solo musical work, Erik is more of a traditional singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and there’s much less of an electronic or experimental quality to his other music. So what we bring to each other and these songs is the ability to push both of us outside of our talents and our comfort zones.
‘A=N’ has a distinctive sound. Can you explain the inspiration and meaning behind the song?
Well, it’s certainly the only ballad on the ‘A Trace of Yourself’ album! I think it is maybe the most explicitly retro-futuristic of any of the songs on the record, and it kind of ties together a lot of our themes into one sort of dreamy abstract place. There’s a bit of a 1950s doo-wop sound that hangs out in the background, and I would say there’s a little bit of noir influence, maybe more from the film than from songs, a little touch of David Lynch, Blue Velvet, mixed with the sort of lush guitar washes of early shoegaze from the 90s. I think the vocal melody here is one of the most romantic and singable things we’ve ever recorded.
‘A =N’ is a nice example of how Erik and I create as The Formalist. I wrote the baseline on a synth, but then Erik took it up on electric bass and performed the version you hear in the finished track, which allowed it to feel grounded and performed. On the other side, I took some of the high guitar parts that he played and turned them into ambient washes of sound, almost unrecognizable. Much of the beat for this is an electro shuffle created on MPC, but what makes the song feel organic is the tambourines and percussion that Erik then played in the studio. So it’s a nice example of how it’s hard to tell where what he created ends, and what I created begins.
As for the lyrics, a lot of the songs on the album explore ideas of identity and what we leave behind. ‘A = N’ is a song about amnesia and nostalgia, and how both remembering and forgetting are the ways that we create the story of our lives. It’s kind of a wistful track — someone recently described it as a romantic breakup ballad — but I think of it more as being about how we lose or forget who we once were, and find ourselves all over again. Setting up the title as an equation was kind of a nod to the fact that there is a real process in remembering and forgetting and that the struggle to see oneself reflects that problem or equation to be solved.
The lyric video for ‘A=N’ is visually captivating. What was the concept and inspiration behind it?
The song is really about how the loss of memory is transformed by nostalgia, and how we see ourselves in our changing world. It is essentially two stanzas — there’s no real verse or chorus in it — and we ultimately came up with presenting the two stanzas twice, the second time in different sonic contacts from the first, separated by a wistful wordless bridge that changes the feel of the song completely. In this way, the song enacts its lyrics — a lot of things change around the narrator’s perspective, but he’s still singing the same song.
When I was designing the cover art for the ‘A = N’ single, I created a dreamy but photorealistic scene of a lonely, Hopper-esque cityscape. This was the starting point for the lyric video, which nods to the sort of hazy noir, slightly David Lynch-influenced sound of the song. The background images are all of these 1970s-looking cityscapes at night, dark shadows, and streetlight sidewalks, to set a sense of place. Depicting the lyrics in the visual language of glowing neon signage evoked that noir out-of-time feel, and I liked the idea that the signs would fritz out throughout the song, grow harder to read, more abstract, the way memory fades and we fill in all these gaps to understand them. As the neon lyrics blink out there’s the struggle of reading them clearly until all that’s left is the A = N from the title.
How involved were you in the design and production of the lyric video?
I designed the cover images and all the cityscape backgrounds that we used in the video and wrote up a detailed treatment for it with the neon signs concept. We worked with a very talented video artist to render it out, Max Golberg -– he might say I was a little too involved in the design and production of the video -– but we do call ourselves “The Formalist” for a reason…
What do you hope fans take away from both the song and its lyric video?
Erik has said that one of our goals with The Formalist is for it to be transporting, and I hope ‘A = N’ accomplishes that – I’d like people to be transported to this nostalgic space where they can think about how their memories change over time and the feelings that endure. The world changes and moves so quickly, and this song is like an emotional pause.
Can you tell us about any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re excited about?
This track is on our full-length album ‘A Trace of Yourself’, out on Mother West records, and the record includes songs both heavier and lighter than ‘A = N’. We have a series of remixes in the works for later this year which will reimagine some of these songs in a range of genres — from club-ready to wistfully acoustic -– bringing out all the elements that are part of The Formalist. I think I’m allowed to say that one of them, for a track called ‘In Slow Motion’ is being remixed by Sisko as we speak.
Is there anything else you would like to share with your fans and listeners about ‘A=N’ or your journey as The Formalist?
Well, Erik and I have been friends and collaborators since college, and The Formalist has been a really meaningful way to get certain ideas and inspirations out in the world. Right now I’m enjoying having ‘A Trace of Yourself’ out there and I’m excited to see the remixes come out too – it’s about time The Formalist let go of the controls of our tracks for a bit and let some other artists have at it…
You can watch the music video for ‘A=N’ here. Find out more about The Formalist and their music online on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
