Toro y Moi

With Unerthed (Hole Erth Unplugged), Chaz Bear surfaces the songcraft of 2024's Hole Erth, his eighth full-length studio record as Toro y Moi. Rearranged for guitar, piano, drums, and strings, the collection adds a curious postscript to Hole Erth's unexpected, inspired, madcap pivot into rap-rock, hyperpop, and Y2K emo. Daring in its own right, Unerthed reveals a deft songwriter unguarded, inhabiting lyrics and instrumentation with uncomplicated poise and clever turns of phrase and melody. It's a return to basics for the shapeshifting Bay Area artist, a chance to excavate and shed new light on the material. These elemental revelations have been at the core of Bear's project all along, from his earliest CD-Rs to the many mutations of psych-funk, synth-pop, deep house, and beyond that have kept the independent music world transfixed and guessing for nearly two decades. But Unerthed sounds it out more clearly, underscoring that there has only ever been one genre here: Toro y Moi.

Before a haze-crazed blogosphere crowned "Blessa" at the top of the 2010s, Bear experimented in a more traditional mode of homespun folk akin to that of early Sufjan Stevens or Iron & Wine. He returned to it with his 2023 EP, Sandhills, and here, he taps further into that come-up story and style. The treatment is fitting for "CD-R", itself a nod to the DIY grind of his formative era, when he would burn handmade mixes and pack the trunk with merch for poorly booked tours. In place of the original's trap beats and autotuned sad boi bars are soft strums and flourishes of lap steel, with Bear's voice left wistful and clean, howling in the key of Alex G. "Everyday's a different interstate, tell me what's today? It's transcendental," the lines land differently in the open air.

"HOV" transforms from a pop-punk anthem to an Americana spiritual. Where Bear delivered angst with a playful wink on the LP version, now, above arpeggiated keys and the string-backed highway sprawl, he's "biodegradable / an energy angel" in a more earnest, raw kind of way. Both takes are true, because they're his; yet, the unplugged presentation of "HOV" and the work across the album lend extra gravity to the wordplay. "All the constellations still look the same / Poor navigation, who am I to blame?" he sings on the nostalgic "Hollywood", first realized with Ben Gibbard on Hole Erth. The Unerthed version finds Bear alone and just as lost under the stars in Tinseltown. What felt intentionally emo in the original registers here as more classically bleak, deeply rooted within a lineage of songwriting melancholy that predates its millennial touchstones (from Leonard Cohen to Elliott Smith).

The poignant reframings continue throughout; "Madonna", pepped up in a western swing, becomes the love song it had flirted with, "Heaven" doubles down on the suburban daydream, "Starlink" reappears far less flexed, the tender, jetlagged ballad it's always been. An album, in part, about burnout and reclaiming oneself, Hole Erth came together unusually quickly for Bear, recorded in the span of a few months. Unerthed makes the case that the instinctual songbook captures more emotion and personality than initially meets the eye. Revisited, stripped back, and unpacked, what's left is the sheer strength of these songs. A worthy stop along the winding catalog of a musical chameleon, one of our contemporary greats.

Chaz Bear adds:

"The idea to begin this project came while listening to Nirvana’s ‘MTV unplugged’ record. I love how the rearrangement brought out so many intricacies of their songwriting and gave context to the original recordings and the decisions made. During the recording of ‘Hole Erth’, the sonic palette was more aggressive and angsty than what most of my listeners were used to hearing from me, but I felt these songs were strong without any production. I wanted to be able to play them on guitar live. One day, after posting an acoustic version of ‘CD-R’, I saw a huge amount of positive responses. I guess it was a modern-day version of crowdsource testing a song—which led to me completing this vision. It reminded me of how folks were asking for a full-length record of my ‘Sandhills EP’, and I figured I’d this is the perfect opportunity to present something completely different conceptually. Americana has always been a major theme in my music. I asked myself what could be more edgy than Rap-Rock turned Alt-Country? Hole Erth and Unerthed was meant to be a dual album from the beginning, the vision is complete. Enjoy…”