The press materials reach for “dystopian disco meets psych-pop,” and for once the marketing department has not lied. But the phrase flatters the music by making it sound tidier than it is. *Totemic* is messier, more physical, more insistently alive than any genre hyphenate can contain. Keeble is building something closer to a private mythology here \u2014 a set of emblems, talismans, and warning signs drawn from the wreckage of modern selfhood.<\/p>
It opens with **’Planes’**, and the momentum is immediate: a track that feels like watching the ground fall away beneath you, all soaring melodic urgency and the clean, specific anxiety of altitude. If you’ve ever boarded a flight wondering who you’ll be when you land, Keeble has written your soundtrack. The production is wide-screen without being wasteful, and he has the rare instinct to leave space in the arrangement \u2014 to let the feeling breathe before the beat drops.<\/p>
Then comes **’Caged’**, and the album reveals its appetite for contrast. The claustrophobia here is expertly engineered: the track presses in from all sides, the vocals tightened and compressed, the soundscape designed to replicate the sensation of walls. This is not merely a song about confinement; it *enacts* confinement. The best political songwriting works this way \u2014 not by explaining the trap, but by springing it.<\/p>
**’Bruiser’** deserves its name. A bruising, forward-leaning thing, it has the blunt kinetic force of someone who has decided, finally and irrevocably, to stop being polite about their own anger. There is something almost cathartic in hearing Keeble commit this fully to aggression \u2014 it earns the tenderness that follows.<\/p> And it is **’Return to Centre’** where *Totemic* stops and catches its breath, and it is here that Keeble proves he is something more than a skilled mood-architect. Vulnerable vocals laid over an 808 beat and wistful piano: the combination should feel incongruous, and instead it feels inevitable. This is the emotional fulcrum of the record \u2014 the moment of stillness at the centre of a spinning thing. Everything before it has been circling this point; everything after radiates outward from it.<\/span><\/p> **’Wilderness’** is the album’s most immediately pleasurable track \u2014 an expansive, disco-driven thing that reminds you how much ground that word “disco” covers, from Donna Summer’s transcendence to LCD Soundsystem’s longing. Keeble finds somewhere between those poles and plants a flag.<\/span><\/p> **’The Great Adaptors’** and **’Inertia’** form an interesting pair, one celebrating the human capacity to bend without breaking, the other examining the cost of not moving at all. **’Gradient Sky’** is the album’s most atmospheric moment, painterly and unhurried. **’Luvvedup’** is the closest Keeble comes to pop pleasure for its own sake, and she earns it. **’Decibels’** closes the record with the kind of ending that doesn’t so much resolve as *release* \u2014 the ritual complete, the totem standing, the self intact and altered.<\/span><\/p> The totemic imagery of the title is not decorative. These ten songs function as personal objects \u2014 charged, symbolic, marking territory between the self that was and the self that might be. Keeble is interested in transformation not as triumph but as ongoing, effortful, occasionally violent process. The album’s great achievement is that it makes this feel universal without making it vague.<\/span><\/p> Some debut albums are dry runs. *Totemic* is not a dry run. It is a declaration of intent from an artist who already knows, with some precision, what she is for.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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