The rise of Linear Downfall

Linear Downfall speaks in the language of extremes. The Nashville-bred quartet has spent a lifetime translating emotional tension into a balance of discord and delicacy. With Sufferland, the group’s latest record and accompanying film, the group uses its mastery of contrasts to synthesize the human experience of abuse and recovery into its most compelling offering yet.

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Chance Cook started Linear Downfall as a solo project in high school, years before his sister Charlee took over vocal and synthesizer duties. Their entry point into music was the same as many who grew up in the shadow of Nashville’s country legacy. Their parents blasted bluegrass and country, offset by their aunt and uncle’s disco cover band.

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“The first memory I have of hearing stuff that’s different than country music would be hearing Pink Floyd on the radio,” Chance says. “It branched out to Radiohead and from there you hear the other stuff that goes deeper.”

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Charlee recruited drummer Will Hicks, a crucial part of the band’s ability to juggle warring sounds and compact them into a cohesive whole. “Will is like an octopus,” Charlee says. “Each of his arms and legs are completely separate and he’s usually playing all these completely different parts together.”

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Linear Downfall’s first two albums, Daydreaming at Night and gloomillume, were written by Chance, Charlee, and Hicks, and sound like a different entity. “Recycled,” from Daydreaming at Night, focuses on the operatic qualities of Charlee’s voice as Chance’s guitar slithers around menacing-yet-mellow chord progressions.

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Guitarist Dom Marcoaldi joined roughly three years ago, providing the last piece of the band’s anti-formula songwriting. “We found Dom playing in a blues band doing some crazy guitar noise stuff over it and we were like, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’” Charlee says.

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Songwriting splintered into dizzying fragments of ideas, fractured harmonies, and psyche-splitting textures. Songs such as “The Evil Twins Stole My Mind” from Fragmental Hippocampus evoke the Dirty Projectors, Silver Apples, and Sunn O))) all in under three minutes.

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“Our songwriting style started because we saw people in the audience looking at their phones and the live show is supposed to be an experience,” Charlee says. “If our music was changing like that then they would be too distracted to be somewhere else during the show.”

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Translating the band’s twisted web of sound into a live setting seems near-impossible, but Linear Downfall’s greatest strength lies in its visceral performances. Its gear is decked out in neon pink, and Charlee’s stage presence falls somewhere between Billie Holiday and a televangelist.

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Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne stumbled upon this live intensity by accident one night, and was so impressed that he recruited the band for an experimental side project called Electric Würms. While the collaboration produced a compelling mess of kaleidoscopic pop, Linear Downfall’s particular creative process works better on its own.

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“What The Flaming Lips do is a little more of ‘this sounds cool’, though you can hear emotional qualities in their music, which is fine,” Charlee says. “But our style comes more from emotion and experiences and not really thinking about the music as much but the whole picture.”

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Even without the accompanying music, the Sufferland film captures the Linear Downfall of the past few years. The movie centers around a tale of sexual abuse and recovery told through powerful and deeply unsettling imagery inspired by David Lynch’s domestic nightmare, Eraserhead. Chance gleaned inspiration from Lynch’s use of industrial machinery in Eraserhead’s sound, similar to the high-pitched trains that shrieked past the Cook’s childhood household.

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Sufferland’s soundtrack mirrors the movie’s story arc, starting out with electronic dissonance that segues into warm analog synths in order to parallel the narrative leap from anxiety to bliss. Both the music and film embrace the necessity of portraying personal and existential angst. In particular, the caustic noise from “Violence” sounds like a full-blown panic attack.

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At its most dissonant and hushed moments, Sufferland is a deeply personal project. Many of the movie’s themes are drawn from painful experiences within the band. “This album and movie has been a healing process,” Charlee says. “It deals with sexual abuse and how years can go by and you can feel like you’re in prison in your brain, and trying to figure out how to become free and how you were before.”

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Linear Downfall’s reliance on extremes can be jarring and ear-splitting for some people, but the band’s ability to give distress and euphoria equal credence allows its music to be so compelling.

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“Seeing the film in front of you is really hard because I didn’t think I could be that blunt,” Charlee says. “But once you do it you take away the fear and you free yourself.”