Tom Krell never meant to be an indie-world It Boy. Last October, when he started posting a series of free EPs under the name How to Dress Well, his blog at howtodresswell.blogspot.com was just an infrequently updated collection of short posts about music he liked (Bobby Brown, Fever Ray, Gorgoroth, Salem), consisting mostly of YouTube videos and the occasional spread of bite-size record reviews. That content provided some clues about what had inspired the music on Krell’s EPs—ghostly, washed-out lo-fi pop shot through with a surprising streak of radio R&B—but otherwise How to Dress Well remained a black box. He didn’t reveal his name or post a photo, and when How to Dress Well started releasing videos, he wasn’t in them, at least identifiably. He barely referred to himself in his posts.
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“It sucks,” he says. “It’s no fault of any of the people in the industry, but music is not the main focus of my life. I never really planned on it being that way. When I meet people on the business end of this music-industry thing, they tend to really gross me out. I’m not trying to make money through this.”
He’s only played two other live shows, one in Sweden and one in Brooklyn. The band photo he likes to use looks like a black hole in the shape of a person cut out of a landscape. At one point during our interview he wondered aloud if I could write this profile without using his name, and when I asked how old he was and where he was from, his first answer was, “The question’s whether or not that’s relevant to my music, you know?” (For the record: 26 and Colorado.)
Krell’s murky recording style would keep How to Dress Well out of the mainstream even if his songs worked in more traditional ways, but his music is cozy with radio pop—current pop, like what you’d hear if you turned on WGCI right this minute, not the nostalgic kind more commonly cited by indie acts. This suggests an intersection between countercultural art music and the work of unapologetically populist producers and songwriters like The-Dream, Max Martin, and R. Kelly—territory already being explored by indie-pop acts like JJ and Beach House (both of whom have covered recent rap songs) as well as hardcore-derived groups like 3OH!3 and Brokencyde.
