Welcome back,” sings sampledelic indie-pop group Superorganism on “Black Hole Baby,” the opening track from their sophomore effort, World Wide Pop. It’s been four long years since the London-based collective made a splash with their whimsical self-titled debut, which integrated field recordings and YouTube clips of birdsongs and splashing water with songs about prawns and hair gel. World Wide Pop doubles down on the copy-and-paste approach, but this time with much more mixed results.
During the years since Superorganism’s first album, hyperpop has taken up the mantle of assembling disparate sounds into pop pastiche, and songs like “Black Hole Baby” sound kitschy and backward-looking in comparison—more Avalanches than 100 Gecs. Japanese singer Orono Noguchi’s blasé vocals and sardonic personality were driving forces on tracks like Superorganism’s “Everybody Wants to Be Famous.” That album’s groovier, danceable tempos have been replaced with more upbeat, jittery arrangements on World Wide Pop, and while the group’s personality shines through in the album’s aggressive, deceptively cheery production, the songs hint at an anxiety that’s never fully fleshed out.
Ultimately, World Wide Pop succumbs to sameiness, with several songs in a row set to a similarly frantic tempo and overly compressed, treble-heavy sound mix. Rather than allowing individual sounds to stand out, the chaotic placement of samples makes them all run together. The songs are composed of a huge number of moving parts—“Everything Falls Apart” leaps from an explosion to strummed guitar to a chorus that combines layers of pitch-shifted vocals—resulting in fleeting moments of sonic intrigue.
About two-thirds of the way through World Wide Pop, “Put Down Your Phone” alludes to the slow disintegration of our attention spans: “Don’t worry, it won’t take that long/Just stay calm and get a drink/We can’t even do a damn thing.” Unfortunately, merely calling out our hyperactive attention spans doesn’t prevent Superorganism from surrendering to it.
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