That sound...

That one synth sound that runs through all of Pup Xander's 2026 solo album, SMOKE. It's warm and rounded, with the attack sanded down to almost nothing, so it swells instead of hitting. The bass bubbles, the beats stay gentle, and the vocals sit right at your ear. Tempo, subject and mood change from song to song, and that sound keeps showing up. I loved it at first, but by track 16 I must admit, I wanted to reprogram the synthesizer.

Xander builds a very coherent sonic world with its own temperature, texture and light. The problem is that once the room is built, there's no sign of them ever wanting to leave it.

Loving the Sound

The opener, "INVITATION / WE SING THE LAND ALIVE," makes a good case for Xander's aesthetic. It's beautiful, dreamy trip-hop with wub wub bass, and the pareidolia-picture that stuck with me was of a ballerina walking out of a club: dark, dirty, exhausted, beautiful and broken.

"GLOVES" follows without a seam, lighter and happier, nice catchy pop but nowhere near as interesting. "I WISH YOU WEREN'T DEAD" shows what Xander can do with a specific subject. The narrator is mourning a friend who was a chronic secret drinker, and the song works through what's left behind: bottles, labels, smells, stains. It's grief as forensic investigation, and it moves through longing, anger and absurdity, including the grim joke of demanding the dead person answer the phone. It also has compassion for the shame behind the secret drinking, and lands on "it's not my death to regret." 

"SAMHAIN" is one of my two favorites. Musically it's the same room, but the writing gives the familiar sound a different job. It's playfully bleak, a song for autumn and sweater weather, and the lyrics reminded me of Noah Kahan: conversational, image-heavy, seasonal. "Autumn uses a knife to hack away / piece by piece / the light of day until it is gone." Then comes the closer: "There are discos in heaven, but country pubs in hell." Xander lets mortality, absurdity and real feeling contaminate each other instead of holding one solemn register.

"GRAND PIANO" has to be my favorite. I first heard it as narrative and biographical and couldn't tell whether the piano was literal or metaphorical. Turns out, it's both. As a kid, the narrator dreamed of owning a grand piano, and their mother laughed at the request, but not unkindly. They were working-class and poor and doing their best. They still can't afford one. They found other ways to make music, learned other instruments, stayed away from the kids who disliked the odd kid, and named themselves queer, autistic and ADHD. Then the song widens into who gets to make music and with what tools, answering the idea that working with modern technology makes the result somehow unreal. Music has never been a privilege, they say, "don't ever lock it away from me." 

Tiring of the Sound

Around "END TIMES" the fatigue set in. It's a lovely psychedelic ballad, major key, with what I hear as an I-IV-iv-I, the borrowed minor iv supplying the nostalgic ache. But it comes after so much softness that the beauty starts to feel oppressive.

I felt surrounded by fluffy pillows, soft blankets and cups of cocoa, a cocoon heavy enough to put me to sleep, with only the occasional rasp of analog bass to wake me up. My verdict? Interesting sonic risks inside a fundamentally safe framework, which turned out to be my verdict on the whole album.

Up close, these songs are all different. Pull back and they sound like one musical statement spread over different lyrical subjects. Truth is, different melodies and words don't add up to large-scale contrast if everything runs through the same musical vocabulary.

These sanded-attack synth leads are everywhere, and the sound stops being a timbral choice and becomes an organizing principle. There's very little I dislike hearing, but I badly want to hear something different.

"THREAT NOT PET," track 11, annoyed me at first because the sanded synths and boom-bap rhythm were back. I thought, "Xander found some audio vocabulary they liked and wrote different words." Then I noticed the tempo was up and the sound was cold and danceable. The lyric has a real arc, too: projected threat, resentment, then taking the threat on. The narrator ends up saying they're a nice dog, a pet, but they could make an exception and bite. The song should have been track 2 or 3. If Xander had shown early that the vocabulary can, in fact, change occasionally, the long soft stretches might have felt intentional instead of soporific.

Then "FREE" put me back in the same room as tracks 1 through 10, and that feels like a wasted opportunity, though the unguarded optimism is hard to dislike.

"THE GHOST RETURNS" is a comic existential short story about consciousness after death, with memory as cloud storage and a list of references that includes Grindr, Doctor Who, toilets, Oasis and The Smiths. This is a young composer's piece. Too many ideas and too little selection, and they multiply until the cleverness damn near cancels itself out. It's accumulation mistaken for development, which is also what the album does musically.

"DOGS WHO WATCH" is groovier, and this is where I decided tempo isn't the culprit. Lyrically it's more than an ode to dogs, invoking Anubis and Hecate for guidance and protection, and it ties into the pup identity that runs through the whole project.  It's that damn synth again though: warm, long attack, short decay, ramping up and articulating the rhythmic space. That envelope stamps the same identity on everything, so a signature sound becomes an overused one. The song has too many words to dance to and not enough dancing to help me stop listening.

 Which raises the question I'd been circling for a few tracks: the music is too rhythmically active for ambient, too static for dancing and too dark to be sensual, so what do you actually do with it? 

Living With the Sound

After my first listen I kept playing it. I listen to records in different situations because music behaves differently when life is going on around it, so I played SMOKE while driving and working. It grew on me. The haze that wore me out in a focused listen works better alongside another activity. It sits next to life without demanding the foreground, and it travels well.

It didn't fix my main complaint. By the end the self-similarity becomes bland. The same consistency that makes the album easy to live with makes the songs hard to tell apart. Xander found a sound that's recognizably theirs and holds together, and at its best, on "GRAND PIANO" and "SAMHAIN," the personality outplays the house sound.