Market

Across his tour de force fifth album as Market, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies, NYC singer-songwriter Nate Mendelsohn develops a personalized musical language designed to mirror the frenzied cadence of modern thought. His autofictional, minutia-oriented lyrical approach becomes the jumpoff point for expansive avant-pop compositions, scored by ghostly electroacoustic orchestras, hallucinatory brass chorales, and degraded samples. Mendelsohn’s writing is narratively hyper-rich, full of anecdotes about family members, past loves, one’s self in simpler times, and digital reflections of all of the above. He fuses iconoclastic songforms reminiscent of, at turns, Phil Elverum and Van Dyke Parks with melodic glyphs and production flourishes from contemporary rap and R&B. Musically and lyrically, Cleanliness 2 represents a huge artistic step forward for Market, blending nostalgic sounds and imagery with contemporary ones to create premonitions of an uncertain future, evoking the perpetual struggle for optimization in an era—or has it always been this way?—of omnipresent, ambient anxiety.
A multi-instrumentalist, producer, and engineer who has collaborated with Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, and many others, Mendelsohn has used the Market moniker as a staging ground for increasingly personal, singular, and sonically dazzling experimentation for well over a decade. Whereas 2024’s pyrotechnic avant-pop outing Well I Asked You a Question and 2022’s folk-rock-oriented The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong felt distinctly communal, Cleanliness 2 is largely a one-man drama in which his collaborators— Michael Haldeman (Dijon), Justin Felton (L’Rain, Big Thief), Rose Droll (Feist), along with mainstays Stephen Becker, Katie von Schleicher, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish—serve as supporting cast and crew, dramatizing plays within the play (see, most literally, Rose Droll’s guest lead vocal turn on “CHURCH”). These songs replay photographic memories of the past or zoom so far in on the present that context disappears. Eventually, the thought bubbles pop, and we return to Mendelsohn alone, backed by a lone warped electric guitar—or is it a trashed synth pad? A sampled Tascam recording? Market’s electroacoustic instrumental beds are as chaotically collaged as the snippets of reminiscence and long-subway-ride-brained aphorisms that make up its libretto.
The songs are shaped by warped electroacoustic sound designs, with heaving surfaces and porous edges. Reimagining Market’s sound once again (as is his mandate release to release), Mendelsohn mixed old and new technologies in the music making, recalling Lambchop’s importation of electronic artifice into alt-country, or the marriage of spun-out electronic ear candy, pop melodicism, and good old-fashioned guitar music in Alex G or This Is Lorelei. Warm, analog, and aged sounds rub up against robotic, cold, and spikey ones. Layered, manipulated chorales surge and vanish suddenly, making room for solo vocal moments so intimate that they sound like the mic is inside Mendelsohn’s mouth. Dynamically, the record charts an EKG pattern of steep peaks and valleys, never lingering in a middle ground. It is this strong and confident structure that makes Cleanliness 2 hard to disengage from once you’ve caught its drift.
In so many ways, Cleanliness 2 deals with the lonely methods we use to remember the past and connect in a fractured present. When he thinks of the record, Mendelsohn describes a Proustian mood board for dejected millennials: “bittersweet Facetimes with [your] family, going for a walk amongst the changing leaves while staring at your phone…digitally degraded, zoomed-in iPhone pictures.” These songs have a matter-of-fact parlance that feels close to a real internal monologue—anxious but accepting, wry but self-effacing, shifting between hyperspecificity and playfully broad-strokes thematic summaries. See the outré-pop miniature “NEIGHBOR,” for instance, in which the narrator listens to a neighbor screaming at their family from a “bird shit covered bedroom” before Mendelsohn pulls out the stone tablets (“Parenting/Lack of self/Abuses/Oh, gratitude/My family’s health,” he croons through gently malfunctioning Autotune.) The spiritual lifeforce lyrically is hip-hop, evident in Mendelsohn’s committedly syllabic approach and flow—for example, the trap-styled speed-ramping vocal rhythms in “40 YEARS,” in which Mendelsohn imagines he has traded places with a toxic ex.
Mendelsohn found himself gravitating toward working off-grid in these songs—that is, suspending clear meter. In “FUCK FAMOUS PEOPLE”—one of the record’s most direct and musically transportative tracks—a stark, free-time exposition builds toward a typically memorable, conversational Market-style lyrical passage: “Man, therapy is something crazy/Every time I go it’s a kind of daydream/I draw patterns on the couch in the sunlight/Maybe that’s the type of thing that you had better analyze.” Trigger lush strings, free jazz drums, and a celestial vocal chorale to make the section into one of the album’s central moments of unsparing self-inquiry. It’s in inventive sections like these in which Cleanliness 2 shines brightest: that is, an oblique, Frank-Ocean-tinged indictment of parasocial relationships morphing into something that sounds more like a crossover-classical piece for chorus and orchestra.
On Cleanliness 2, Mendelsohn hoped to address the experience of, as he puts it, “living as an adult in a world that is unrecognizable from the one we grew up in, and the good and bad that comes with trying to bridge that gap.” Across the album, he seeks to resolve past value sets (from when he was a child, a teenager, a disgruntled 20-something, or a nascent songwriter) with his current realities, not wanting to either fully buy into them but also not wanting to be left behind. He stages this battle against complacency in sonic form, transforming the ever-evolving, always iconoclastic sound of Market itself into a metaphor for personal growth. “I’ll disregard the logic/cause nothing good rides on it/cause all I have are gorgeous technologies,” he sings on “THE GROCERIES”—in the record’s final moments, fittingly, over an uncannily beautiful chorus of saxophone samples. There is a sense of arrival here; a chorus of auxiliary voices rises up to support the lyrics, as if acknowledging that the anxiety of living in the modern world—the unstoppable, breakneck pace of our inner monologues—is a shared burden.
The run-on sentence of life may never end, and our days may never stop jumping to extremes. But though Cleanliness 2 mimics this dizzying energy, it also constantly reminds us to slow down. Mendelsohn makes big swings from a place of even greater control and legibility than on previous releases, pushing us to listen more actively and digest the details in action-packed three minute songs. These songs unfold linearly while maintaining a symphonic sense of unity, with imaginative recurring textures and clever, sticky instrumental motifs. On Cleanliness 2, Mendelsohn strives to be nothing but himself, owning his complexity and contradictions, and standing for the belief that individualism is still something worth chasing in both art and life.