The title of Crushed’s debut album, ‘No Scope’, could mean one of two things. In gaming parlance, it refers to shooting from the hip with a sniper rifle to kill an opponent. Or, in Bre Morell’s words, “just going for it, which is what we’re doing on this record.” Friends of the musician who don’t play video games have given it another definition: of “having no hope, no outlook, no prospects”, she laughs, her background on our Zoom call showing a scene from the far reaches of outer space – if only to obscure a messy bedroom. “I feel like our music taps into both of those emotions. We’re uncertain about the future, but fuck it, you know?”
In 2022, Morell and the other half of Crushed, Shaun Durkan – who both share instrumental, production and vocal duties – didn’t know each other, but were both wallowing in the latter of those emotions. Morell was feeling isolated in Los Angeles, far from her native Texas, navigating the devastating breakdown of a long-term relationship and the death of her pet dog. Durkan, too, was struggling to adapt to life in a new city – in his case, Portland.
“I was poor, I had just moved to a new state, I was in a band that was falling apart,” he says, his energy a little cagier than Morell’s, his words chosen slowly and deliberately. He was newly sober, too, following a period in rehab, “trying to get back in touch with what I loved, what motivated me as a person that wasn’t drugs or alcohol”. Little did he know that by playing a song by Morell’s former band Temple Of Angels on a local radio show he was hosting, he had taken the first step towards the answer.
Morell, as it happened, had played music by Durkan’s old band Weekend on a radio show of her own as a student a few years earlier. The serendipity led to an online friendship and a collaborative playlist, through which they discovered a shared love for ’90s pop, rock, and alternative music: The Sundays, Cowboy Junkies, Dido, and The Cardigans, the kind that both heard via the radio in their youth, inflecting their suburban upbringings with a sense of a wider, more exciting world outside. (They both plumped unironically for Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’ as the first track on the shared compilation.) Before long, they started drawing on the playlist as they began work on music of their own, swirling woozy trip-hop grooves, rushes of fuzzy guitars and unabashed melodies into their debut EP, 2023’s ‘Extra Life’. The release would go on to change their lives.
Not that that was the goal. Working on the EP had given Morell “something to focus on and get excited about when I didn’t have anything else”. There were no wider expectations. “We had joked about not even sharing the songs at all, but they turned out even better than we could have thought. Then people liked them even more than we expected.” Work on a follow-up began as soon as ‘Extra Life’ finished, but in the background, the EP was outstripping expectations, racking up hundreds of thousands of plays and international press acclaim. “We’d be sitting at our jobs texting, like, ‘What is going on right now?’”
The experience wasn’t entirely alien. For Weekend, too, whose debut album was acclaimed by the music press upon its 2010 release, “things happened really, really quickly”, Durkan recalls. “There were a lot of growing pains associated with that, a lot of people telling us the right way to do something, or that we needed to work with this or that person.” The experience, he says, left him with the realisation that “almost all of those suggestions are wrong. That the reason why people are responding to something that you’re doing is because you’re on to something, and that we need to trust ourselves more than anyone else.”
Nevertheless, the reception that greeted ‘Extra Life’ “was a real perspective change”, says Durkan. “It really motivated me. Made me really laser-focused on what we were doing.” You can hear that increased confidence on ‘No Scope’, where that welding of influences becomes tighter, the extremes between the ‘go for it’ and the ‘life’s uncertain’ interpretations of the title are pushed further. Atmosphere-building samples are used more sparingly, allowing the music itself to do the world-building. Morell’s vocals are nudged closer to the front. “In my previous band, I was able to be buried in the mix, but now we’re hiding a little less,” she says.
Those influences from the ’90s, songs the pair had first heard during simpler, happier times, are also pushed even further forward. “Everyone’s influenced by something, and if you’re going to do something, you go all the way,” says Durkan. “Part of that is being proud of what you’re influenced by, unembarrassed to reference things that you love. I think when you start borrowing and taking from other artists but you’re ashamed of it, it loses all its power and becomes this washed-out, milquetoast version of something you love.”
That said, Morell is keen to stress that they’re not just revivalists. “Out of the gate, even though we were bonding over a lot of the ’90s stuff that we both have an affinity for, we wanted to make sure it’s not just a pure throwback. We wanted it to feel fresh.”
“We both grew up listening to ’90s music on the radio, but I think this music is still very much rooted in the modern day,” adds Durkan. “There are a lot of approaches to the songwriting and production that wouldn’t have existed in the ’90s. It’s a bit more of a postmodern approach, taking all these different things that we love and mixing them into something new.”
“We’re uncertain about the future, but fuck it” – Bre Morell
Crushed’s role as a vehicle for personal recovery and growth has intensified, too. “During the writing, I was doing a lot of trying to see myself from other people’s perspectives to try and understand myself a little better,” says Durkan. “I definitely had a lot of ups and downs. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to make it as good as possible, and I think that the nature of that, how much dedication it really requires to do something great, means that other things tend to suffer,” he says. During the album’s creation, he experienced a relapse: “I kept it from people for six months or so. But luckily I’m on the other side of that now.”
On ‘Cwtch’, named for the Welsh term for a warm and comforting embrace, he confronts that battle with addiction head-on. “I need a little something, please / Just a bit to push myself through this,” he sings over a sweeping, melancholy beat. Elsewhere, on ‘Meghan’, he uses the track’s titular character, isolated and lonely, as a means to process “that period of my life where I was really lost and lacking direction, trying to rediscover what I wanted to do with my life. I have this problem where I feel like my life happens to me, and I’m not in control of it.”
For Morell, ‘EXO’ retains so much emotional power “that I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sing this live every night”. “I had this before where I wrote a really happy love song, but then that relationship ends, and you’re being reminded every time you sing it of how pure and happy that time was before the heartbreak,” she explains.
The title of ‘Oneshot’, meanwhile, refers to the way a super-strong video game boss can wipe out a player in a single move, setting back their progress and forcing them to battle their way back to the fight, only for the same thing to happen all over again ad nauseam. “There’s a particular boss fight in Elden Ring that a lot of people joke about because it’s such a pain in the ass to get back to it again,” says Morell. In the song, she uses that experience as a metaphor for a doomed relationship: “Getting defeated over and over again until you can finally have the strength to come out the other end.”
The use of gaming imagery in Crushed’s work (see, also, the tracks ‘Respawn’ and ‘Heartcontainer’) is no coincidence. “Gaming is somewhere I go to in life to escape, to unwind, to focus on life,” says Morell, “and that’s similar to what writing ‘Extra Life’ was like. It was an escape from what we were going through in our personal lives at the time.”
“If you’re going to do something, you go all the way” – Shaun Durkan
Video games are also an art form whose success relies on world-building. “There’s music, there’s sound design, there’s animation, it’s a complete experience,” says Durkan. “There’s something magical about that. So introducing elements from games is a way of heightening our lived experience in these songs, making them a little bit more fantastical, a little bit more magical.”
The incorporation of found sound samples from the band’s personal lives speaks to that aim. On ‘Extra Life’, there was the sound of Morell’s late dog’s breathing, and voicemails from Durkan’s mother, while on ‘No Scope’ this is pushed even further via two ‘Airgap’ interludes, where Durkan and an old bandmate Conrad Vollmer took snippets of years-old demos, unused ideas and voice memos and cut them up into short, but intensely evocative psychedelic breaks.
“There’s an element of self-mythology,” Durkan says. “If you’d told me 15 years ago that a guitar riff I recorded in my basement in Bushwick was going to be in a song coming out this year, there’s no way I’d have believed you.”
You suspect that even a few years ago, had you told Crushed how much their informal online connection would evolve, how much it would changed their lives for the better, they might not have believed that either. Though progress isn’t linear, and there have been – and will continue to be – setbacks along the way, both musicians attest to just much the project has helped them process and recentre. Or, in Morell’s words, “I’ve beat that boss for sure.”
Crushed’s ‘No Scope’ is out on September 26 via Ghostly International.
Listen to Crushed’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Patrick Clarke
Photography: David Milan Kelly
Hair: Amanda Brown
Makeup: Kris Yung
Label: Ghostly International
The post Enter the emotional, evocative world of Crushed appeared first on NME.