Whitney - SPARK. LP [Indie Exclusive “Milky White” Vinyl]

Whitney - SPARK. LP [Indie Exclusive “Milky White” Vinyl]

‘SPARK’ reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What’s more, Whitney reduce three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks assingable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. 

The recalcitrant ennui of opener ‘NOTHING REMAINS’, the devastating loss of ‘TERMINAL’, the sun-streaked renewal of ‘REAL LOVE’: However surprising it may sound, ‘SPARK’ is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. 

SPARK maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney’s early work; these songs glow with the newness of now. Listen closely, and you’ll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout ‘SPARK’, itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. “We found a way to live while the world was burning/ Real life was caving in,” Julien sings almost merrily during ‘BACK THEN’, an anthem for finding out what’s on the other side of hardship. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. 

‘SPARK’ is not only Whitney’s best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season of woe.