What’s Up

Felix Walworth was born on Broome Street. Before they were a fixture of New York City’s 2010s DIY circuit, before they adopted their signature standing bmss drum on a keyboard stand, before they wrote piercing reflections on identity that earned cult followings from kids on Tumblr, they were a kid growing up across the boroughs, growing to love a city that eventually became unrecognizable. What’s Up is Walworth’s fourth album as Told Slant, the moniker under which, since 2012, theyVe released aching albums of spacious, raw-nerves indie rock. This is their New York record: a collection of songs about watching your hometown change and feeling the ways it has in turn changed you. It’s a record about commitment to a precarious music life, and all the beauty and indignities that come with it. If the first three Told Slant albums were about self-interrogation and trying to survive as an artist, What’s Up is about what happens once you’ve committed “somewhat maniacally to the project of self expression and subculture in one of the most hostile environments on earth,” and must contend with all of the people and places and dreams that have died along the way. Across songs like “Manhattan,” “Draw Blood,” Three Anchovies,” and the title track, Walworth captures grief, anger, devotion, and fleeting moments of connection, tracing the disappearance of beloved neighborhoods, DIY spaces, friendships, and ways of life with equal parts heaviness and humor. What’s Up is also Told Slant’s most collaborative and adventurous record to date. Built over a month in a makeshift upstate studio and recorded primarily to an eight-track reel-to-reel, it is the project’s first mostly analog release, featuring contributions from Hannah Pruzinsky, Jonny Baker, Ceci Sturman, Hellen Ballentine, Emily Sprague, Mari Maurice, and Elijah Wolf. The songs emerged in part from Walworth’s work as a portrait and street photographer during the pandemic, revisiting the streets, parks, venues, and storefronts that shaped their life only to find many of them gone. That sense of loss runs throughout a catalog that began with Still Water (2012), continued through Going By (2016) and Point the Flashlight and Walk (2020), and has long been defined by painfully honest songs about self-discovery, friendship, mortality, and the slow loss of connectedness with community. On What’s Up, Walworth turns that lens outward, documenting not only their own relationship to New York but the costs of staying, creating, and believing in a city and music culture that helped raise them.