Superdestroyer and Leave Nelson B embrace the moment on ‘Nelson Comes to Visit’

When Superdestroyer started to make music four or five years ago, they initially chose to do so anonymously out of an abundance of caution, describing their chosen moniker as an attempt to keep the recording project walled off from their day job in education. While these concerns have since dissipated, the Columbus musician now appreciates how anonymity allows them to maintain increased malleability, each release bending and shifting to their whims in a way they said might not be possible were an actual name and face attached to the project.

“I get to reinvent things all the time,” Superdestroyer said in a mid-August interview with Cleveland musician/producer Leave Nelson B, the two having recently collaborated on the full-length Superdestroyer album Nelson Comes to Visit (Lonely Ghost Records), due for release on Friday, Aug. 23. “I’m decentered from it, in a way, so I can change the direction of something or switch the vibe up on a whim.”

Nelson Comes to Visit is a direct byproduct of this approach, with the bulk of the tracks emerging from unplanned recording sessions that took place when Nelson B visited Superdestroyer in Columbus in February – the first time the two had seen each other in person in nearly a decade. “I think I was 14 when I met him,” Superdestroyer said of Nelson B (both musicians are now in their 30s). “We used to swap demos, but we never really made music together in the same room, so it was really exciting. … We were sort of trying to complement one another, like, ‘Hey, that sounds cool. What if I added this?’ And then you’d wait to see the other person’s reaction. If their eyes lit up, it was like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’”

Aspects of the album harken back to the video game sounds that defined the early years of the pair’s friendship, with Superdestroyer utilizing a newly acquired synthesizer capable of recreating Sega Genesis FM synthesis tones. As a result, chiptune-indebted songs such as “:::nelson:::comes:::to:::visit:::” conjure the image of a modern punk band transported into the side-scrolling, 16-bit digital world, combining ping-ponging throwback electronics and crunchy nu-metal guitars. Then there’s “:::snow:::,” a comparatively hypnotic turn built on warped and extruded synths, the steady click of electronic drums and a disembodied guitar riff that ripples atop the mix like a gleaming specter. “:::green:::hill:::” splits the difference between these disparate realms, pairing disorienting synthetic chimes with propulsive drums and breathless, stream-of-consciousness vocals.

While some of the lyrics call to mind the deep bond shared between the two – “I needed someone like you,” Superdestroyer sings on the title track – the concept for the album is actually rooted in an entirely different relationship. 

“I used to live 50 minutes from my partner. And when I would [drive] there every night, I would call her on the phone so we could talk about work and stuff before I got there. And that sort of inspired all of it,” said Superdestroyer, whose explanation gives new context to lines such as “I’m just a minute away.” “[The album is] kind of a retelling of my relationship with my partner by way of this sci-fi story where we’re stuck in a video game loop and forced to relive the same events over again and again. And over time, the characters fall in love. And then they gradually learn that they can’t control the world around them, but they can control the world they create for themselves.”

This reality resonates most fully on the album-closing “[only in death will you truly know rest…].” “We can do/Do what we want to do,” Superdestroyer recites atop a haunted digital backdrop. “We can be/whatever we want to be.”

Though rooted in romance, the album also exists as a sonic document of the friendship between Superdestroyer and Nelson B. “If we could have told our teenage selves 20 years ago that we would one day make an album together, they would have thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Superdestroyer said.

Musically, the recordings strike a balance between Nelson B’s production skills and Superdestroyer’s sonic curiosity. “My biggest issue is that when I add things [to the music] I don’t always know how to make everything fit,” Superdestroyer said. “Nelson’s production knowledge was especially useful in helping make the pieces work together, and to make the songs a little bit weirder. For example, the song ‘:::nelson:::comes:::to:::visit:::’ sounds like a nightmarish fever dream in a lot of ways. And that was accomplished by making all of these different textures, which are then all doing different things, so it’s very polyrhythmic. … And it only works because Nelson was able to figure it out.”

It helps, of course, that the two have a personal and musical history that stretches back nearly two decades. Steeped in an early fondness for punk, grunge and hip-hop, this bond is perhaps best exemplified by an affinity the two share for Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, the 1995 solo debut from Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard. “The whole album is based on the idea of does this work? As wild as this is, does it work?” said Nelson B – an attitude the two embraced in creating Nelson Comes to Visit. “We bond over the rules we break. It’s not always necessarily about the best way to do something. … And that’s probably the true meshing of me and Superdestroyer, the idea of really creating things in the moment.”