Although she’s three albums in, Vicky Mettler (aka Kee Avil) has never seemed particularly comfortable with constructing albums in any kind of traditional sense. Her debut Crease took up to four years to come together fully while its 2024 follow-up Spine came about much more quickly but thrived at its best moments from the restrictions Mettler set for herself (limiting each track to be created from only four elements).
Mettler continues on this path of deconstruction for her new album and first record with NNA Tapes, Vapor. The album came to listeners a piece at a time, each track released after the other until the album was completed. Attempting to capture spontaneous creative energy and letting them out into the world “while they’re still fresh and breathing”, Mettler in turn has created her most accessible and pared down album.
While Vapor may not have the laboured stress and angst of her previous releases, it does utilise many of the same elements that Mettler has come to use as a foundation for her work. Warped, distorting electronics, flecks of guitar, and close-to-the microphone lyrics that verge on being Sprechgesang. This is still music that feels like it’s imploding, compressing, contracting; it’s avant pop music squeezed through machines and distortion pedals. Mettler still has a way of taking a repeated phrase – “I’ve been a dreamer / I’ve been a sinner”, “Say it again / I’ll say it again / and I’ll say it again” – and having it wriggle its way into your head. Best of them all is on “beg” where the line “Selfish and I know it and I’ll do it all again” is delivered with deformed multi-track effects that lend it an undeniably unsettling tone.
And yet, despite this certain arm’s-length experimental tone that Vapor has, it may be her most human and most approachable album to date. Across the eight tracks, there are repeated references to what sounds like a break up happening in real time, like Mettler is processing a new found solitude as she reckons with it herself. Repeated references to water, tears, and rivers might be mawkish on reading, but Mettler has never been one for overdramatising anything or even peering at the prospect of being corny. If anything, it helps act as a thread to what can often feel like disparate songs.
Over gloomy, decaying piano chords on opening track “itch” she laments “I’ve been alone my whole life / Grasping the edge of you and I” with a grief that penetrates through the unearthly feel the layered vocals have. On “crying” she sounds at odds with the fast-changing mood of another (“In between, you’re laughing out the words / And I’d always try to read the lines / Cause at every turn your smile can shift and burn”). Meanwhile on “sen” (inspired by Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder) she eventually utters “I’m terrified that I’ve lost my voice, but look at me now, I’m screaming” with a smirk and a sort of twisted glee, like she has come out the other end of a breakup with a renewed sense of self-worth.
Vapor certainly won’t convert any skeptics of Mettler’s work with any sort of ease, but it does at least offer a new sort of ‘in’ that her previous albums arguably lack. Its brevity certainly helps (at 25 minutes it’s easy to consume) but also does make it feel like it’s missing a certain swell or peak that Crease and Spine had at their centres. Certain elements stand out – the fidgety distorted guitar chords played with an itchy, angsty temperament on “un”, the flourishes of warped keys on “delay” – and help act as memorable stopping points along the way, but aren’t quite high points compared to Kee Avil’s best output. Instead Vapor simmers more evenly across its runtime. It even tries to reckon with the very creative energy it has been made with (“clic”) and isn’t afraid to scrape out some wry humour too (“I started to write a song / Try to explain how I’m feeling these days / Got distracted, made a list”).
Final track “meld” ends the album on an apt note: serving up subdued and skewed nightclub synths, the track is made from and features various glitches and unintentional feedback that served the creative process. And while others would lean into a leering delivery, Mettler even manages to make the line “Choke me, I’ll smile through it” sound simultaneously forthright and disquieting. It’s one of her strengths on an album that offers a snapshot of what she can create in the moment. Some of it feels unfinished and some feels more untethered than you would care for, but it all feels undeniably like her own work: quietly feverish with creativity and, as ever, looking for new ways to convey ideas and present them to the world.
