Tim Hecker - No Highs (2023)
deprivation - november 26, 2025
The image doesn’t quite look right. It’s supposed to be some sort of fantastical techno-futuristic dystopia. But it’s wrong. The signs are illegible. The neon is just a suggestion-- its glass warping, the gas inside evaporating. Skylines fade into sketches and half-baked renders below a melted, draining sky. It’s too incoherent for you to truly enter without falling through the concrete into the abyss. But it’s there, unnerving, rooting under your skin and activating your survival reflexes. No Highs gestures to this great expanse of empty, lifeless rot and lets you come to the realization yourself:
Your world’s not too healthy, either.
Tim Hecker is no stranger to allowing his music to scrape against the cruelty of reality and the institutions within it. The grinding of nations that churn away at this planet always emerges somehow, from their culture to their economies to their guns. Nations and nationalism (both in lowercase- and uppercase-N forms) are baked into the DNA of several of his greatest works, from the anti-fascists’ memorial that complemented Harmony in Ultraviolet to the war crimes committed by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison that informed the creation of Virgins. It’s a tough sell to describe ambient music as “political,” but the consequences of life-encompassing, artificially created political and socioeconomic structures form a backbone for understanding much of Hecker’s work.
Here, we watch such a system well on its way along the process of dying. No Highs was intended primarily as a protest against the corporate dilution of ambient into a sludge of featureless, disposable trash, but in its painting, the textures of the machine behind the canvas become almost as apparent. This is a machine that will take everything you love and are and then pulp it into a sellable mass. It will continuously, forever, seek profit, driving up margins, stretching you thinner and thinner until you shred. It will swallow you whole and only then determine if you are economically viable enough to continue existing within it. There is no stopping it as it thrashes and hisses and howls and slowly, inexorably approaches death, toppling everything around it as it lurches about.
No Highs itself is cold, with a sense of anxiety that plucks like strings away at you until you’re backed into the corner. It’s always uneasy, every single step an unsure, stuttering, hesitant one, ever more so after the last. It lurches out and fades away again, driving a constant panic into you that never finds itself justified. Constant percussion feels more like a heart arrhythmia than anything you can stably latch onto. Keys tap like they’re the news ticker announcing the exact date of the end of the world. You can never find your footing, for stable ground does not exist here by design. There is little in the sense of solace, and what spaces you do have to hide in are quickly found and smothered under the light.
The layer of beauty, then, that coats this album warps it into something otherworldly. “Lotus Light” sounds like a fever dream Vangelis had one night, plodding along an unknown course to ever-shifting synth patterns. If you get too comfortable, don’t worry. An alarm placed right in the middle of the track will wake you right back up again. There’s always something sour to the calm, something evil lurking behind everything, something wrong that’s just wrong enough to perk your ears up enough for the anxiety to set in again anyway. Colin Stetson is here, too.
No Highs is a mirror to another world that reflects your own within itself. Through the decay of alien landscapes, the decay of your own becomes apparent. You are always lonely, always on edge, always paranoid, always dealing with the currents of hate and alienation moving through you like a wretched plasma. The walls are crashing in around you. The horrible machine is dying and it’s taking you and everything else with it. In the end, the question posed, implicitly or otherwise:
How much can you bear to watch it all rot?
like a daydream. or a