Eventually they begin, and together we're plunged deep into the dewy humidity of I Was Thinking, its warped Tropicalia appositely befitting the slapdash murals slathered on the wooden walls beyond. Each song swims past the previous, jostling effervescently like water vapour darting through muggy air, Heave recalling Pablo Díaz-Reixa's sultry Coconot offshoot. They're meanwhile most profoundly entrenched in avant-gaze daze and consequently most evocative of Strawberry Jam-era Animal Collective on the gloriously irradiate Top Bunk. Within what is effectively a tunnel of mirrors, the reverberating loops that whoosh through the backdrop are offered a reflective sheen as they're refracted through an authentic introversion: Rauworth is a rather unorthodox focal point as despite pausing for breath in every break and bridge out of genuine exhaustion, his glasses are geared away from the madding crowd, with all interaction minimised. Halting to question our welfare during one particular interlude, his query provokes the only semi-jovial retort of: "I'm deaf" and behind all the haywire strings, and the dropped tunings, and the harmonic-hefty harmonies, and the tumultuous samples you vaguely sense that that really is, as Rauworth affirms, "the desired effect." Irregardless, that which wriggles through in-ear foam is overwhelmingly affecting and on the night of the BRITs, it's the Yanks who really work it with a wall of sound in the shape of a proverbial middle finger.
