Words by: Julia Poholek

Raleigh-based electronic artist Animalweapon has returned with a new album, Set of Constraints. Ethereal and trance-like, the piece offers an opportunity to blissfully float along its current. It acts as a chrysalis, an opportunity for people in a transitional period to ruminate and find identity in the in-between. At eight tracks long, this album is the perfect companion piece to the hopeful feeling of reinvention that accompanies Springtime.

Patrick Cortes, the mind behind Animalweapon, shows tremendous growth since his most recent album, 2019’s Tyrannosaurus. At the time, he was quietly coping with personal challenges that centered around mental health. Without realizing it in the moment, those internal battles ended up presenting themselves on the album. When moving forward with Set of Constraints, Cortes found himself ready to put forth a new project that showed the progression of his journey with these battles. Additionally, the album shows his progression as a music producer. Cortes remarks, “Anyone who produces knows they never stop learning, no matter how good you are, and I think it shows on this one both in terms of my production by myself, and the choices I made as far as who to collaborate with and when.”

We’re dropped into the dreamy world of the album with “Check Engine Light,” a subdued, gradual build of synth and soft vocals. The song winks at us with the soft ding of cymbals sprinkled under a steady rhythm. Lyrically, the speaker likens himself to a car that’s breaking down, whose headlights are out. Lost in the darkness. This seems like bleak subject matter, but rather than hinting at fear or uncertainty, there’s instead an air of acceptance. The sense that it’s okay to not be okay.

“DST (Wreath)” continues the records with a heavy pour of lo-fi beats that inspire calming tranquility. You can easily just vibe to this song and enjoy all that the multi-faceted production has to offer. We’re led into the languid “After All,” which is book-ended by what seems to be faint sounds of wind rustling through trees and birds chirping in the distance. “Could’ve been so much easier/I wish that I could let go of everything I carried.” The lyrics express a deep, almost regretful longing for a relationship that has ended. “Every strand of hair in my apartment/every contact you left on the carpet.” Here, Cortes says so much with so few lyrics. Often, the poignant feelings of a relationship are the most deeply felt through sense-memory. This sensation is captured beautifully in these lyrics, and it makes the song incredibly relatable.

Through the track “August,” we’re treated to a quicker-paced cadence that skips and jumps through an array of sounds, ranging from deep bass thumps to light notes dancing along an upper register. “Summer’s Over” grabs our full attention right away with direct, assertive lyrics. “How long was I out?/And what did I miss?/Think that I’d have heard from you again by now/If there was anything important.” Here, we can appreciate the attention to detail that Cortes has put into laying the backing sound for this track. We hear crickets chirping, and what is perhaps the crackle of a fire or the sound of a footstep on crunching leaves. This is such a valuable contribution to the album’s overall wealth of visceral sensations. It’s clear that Cortes allowed himself to be creative and play freely with different modes of production.

Interestingly, this piece was never meant to be a full album. “I’ve learned how to not agonize over every detail and just have fun with it. That’s been the biggest difference between everything I’ve done up until now but particularly since the last album, which was not fun to finish at all. This album went so much more smoothly in no small part because I wasn’t planning for it to be an album to begin with – it was supposed to just be a four-track EP. I basically wandered into an album.”

The track “Deserve” overflows with breathy vocals and distant echoes, full of effects that swirl around each other and dance in harmony together. We’re also given a music video for this song. We see Cortes seated at a bar, lost in thought and slightly sullen. He pays his bar tab and leaves to wander the streets of Raleigh. We follow along as he walks past shop after shop, caught in that purgatorial energy of being downtown in the middle of the night. In providing no satisfying end or destination that he reaches in the video, we’re encouraged to find contentment in these transient spaces – to just allow ourselves to exist in a state of constant flux.

The title track, “Set of Constraints,” delivers on all fronts. Laden with a rich soundscape of instrumentals and vocals, this song feels like a culmination of the production and lyrical endeavors that Cortes has achieved on the prior tracks. “I don’t know what you expected/fumbled around and found you in the dark/Catching up catching up now tearing at the seams/Everything everything exactly as it seems.” The album is rounded out by another take on “Summer’s Over,” this time partnering with the accomplished, multi-genre Nashville-based cellist, TELALIT. Titled, “Summer’s Over (Coda),” the song’s original energy is preserved and accentuated tenfold through the addition of the breathtaking string arrangement featured throughout.

Unlike the overly-produced, intricately perfect production quality inherent to so much electronic music, Set of Constraints retains a beautifully unique sense of personhood. This is an artist who has had lived experiences ranging from joyful to painful, and he draws on all of it in service of creating this piece. Cortes explains, “After Set of Constraints is out in the world, I feel a little break is certainly in order, but I really don’t want to take too long of one. After Tyrannosaurus, I was super burned out, but this time, I’m ready to get back into it, as long as I keep taking it easy.” Animalweapon has a tangible, relatable identity, and Set of Constraints allows us to feel less alone in our contemplative stasis.

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