7/10

There’s a beautifully disorientating quality to 'housecAt' from Austin duo art pop. Across the album, brothers Max and Miles Grossenbacher take the emotional language of indie-rock and feed it through warped club rhythms, fragmented production experiments, and layers of distortion until something strangely intimate emerges from the noise.

What could have easily become an exercise in irony instead feels surprisingly sincere. 'housecAt' is a record fuelled by emotional contradiction. Sad songs become dance tracks. Fragile moments are buried beneath blown-out electronics. Melancholy is reframed as movement rather than paralysis. And the result is an album that feels simultaneously restless and vulnerable, like stumbling through a neon-lit afterparty while quietly unpacking unresolved grief.

Recorded over two years across temporary spaces in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York, often with little more than laptop and phone microphones, the album carries the texture of its creation process. Vocals clip unexpectedly. Reverb swallows entire sections. Beats feel half-decayed before they fully land. Yet instead of sounding unfinished, the production creates an atmosphere that feels oddly tactile.

The album’s strongest idea lies in its structural experimentation. Songs reappear in altered forms throughout the runtime, themes folding back on themselves through reversed samples, chopped arrangements, and mutated reprises. Even the reimagining of 'Waiting Room' avoids feeling gimmicky as art pop dismantle and rebuild it into something colder, stranger, and unexpectedly euphoric.

For a project so rooted in fragmentation, 'housecAt' ultimately feels remarkably cohesive. It's a hazy, emotionally overloaded soundtrack for anyone trying to dance through uncertainty rather than escape it.