Over a Decade Later, YACHT’s Future Still Looks Pretty Uncool
Back in October 2015, even YACHT did not know just how ahead of time they were. Over a decade later, it’s a Past Blast Musique spin for INYIM favorites YACHT and their funky, bass-driven “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” — a song that looked at the supposedly shiny future and found something much stranger staring back.
And YACHT are art to the max. With Claire L. Evans and Jona Bechtolt, the music has rarely been the whole object; records become design systems, videos, websites, technology experiments and ideas that keep spilling past the edge of an ordinary album campaign. For I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, that instinct was everywhere: the album was announced with a Los Angeles billboard filmed by drone, artwork could be delivered by fax, and another video experiment only played when Uber surge pricing kicked in around Los Angeles.
Released on October 16, 2015 through Downtown Records, I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler stretched that idea across 11 tracks. The record moved from the opening “Miles & Miles” through “White Mirror,” “Matter,” “Ringtone,” “Hologram,” “Don’t Be Rude,” “War on Women” and “The Entertainment,” with the title track sitting right at the center of YACHT’s argument about technology, identity, inequality and the not-quite-utopia we were supposedly building for ourselves.
The clever part is that YACHT wrapped all of that anxiety in music that still wanted to move. The album kept their electro-pop and post-disco instincts intact — bright synths, rubbery bass, clipped rhythms and hooks that could make a fairly grim observation feel strangely danceable. That tension is part of what makes the record worth returning to now: the future may have been disappointing, but YACHT never sounded defeated by it.
The rollout was just as YACHT as the album itself. Instead of simply posting a track list, they introduced the songs through a “tracklisticle” of GIFs and short statements, turning each title into another piece of the larger concept. “White Mirror” looked at technology as an endless reflection of ourselves, while the title track took aim at police violence, social-media manipulation, content replacing art and the absurdity of everyday gadgets being sold back to us as progress. The album wasn’t really asking where the jetpacks went; it was asking what kind of future we actually built.
The title-track video pushed that same idea even further. Directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko, it treated then-current technology — VR, drones, hoverboards, telepresence robots, selfie sticks, Soylent and vape pens — as its version of science fiction. The joke was that none of it needed to be invented. The future was already here, and it was considerably weirder, more commercial and less glamorous than promised.
Images: YACHT / YouTube, from the “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” official video.
The future is still uncool. But YACHT isn’t.
YACHT — “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” Official Video
Directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko, YACHT’s 2015 video turns the technology already surrounding us into its own crooked version of science fiction.
Sources: YACHT / YouTube; NPR/WBUR; Pitchfork; The Verge.
