ADULT. (duo and partners Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller) say their newest LP, Becoming Undone, was borne from loss: loss of an album and tour in 2020 (their last record, Perception is/as/of Deception, came out in April 2020) and the loss of Nicola’s father, with the couple acting as his hospice caretakers.
“When you take someone, literally, to their last breath, it really puts things in perspective,” Miller says. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take a toll on you, but it makes you go, ‘You know, this art is super important for us. We believe in it all.’”
ADULT.’s sound has never been easy to categorize, the newest LP arguably their most non-conformist, out the gate resonating fully in the backdrop in which it was created: unprecedented isolation and grief.
“With the lyrics or the themes—there’s a lot that deals with cultural breakdown, obsessions, and purpose,” Kuperus says. “I would say that one thing we feel like this album is different from a lot of the other stuff, it’s a lot more dissonant. There’s not a lot of melodies, so to speak.”
On Becoming Undone, they deal with liminality, a state of transition, more than ever before: “You’re born, then you’re liminal, and then you’re dead,” Miller says.
“That’s one way of looking at liminality, but the pandemic, that liminality we had to finally get comfortable with,” he says, nodding to his booking agents, who had to redo their tour process four separate times.
“So, if it’s not already hard enough to put those things out in the world, then put it out April 10, 2020, and into a void. It’s like, it didn’t go into a single record shop,” Kuperus says. Miller chimes in, “There wasn’t a brick-and-mortar shop open in the entire world.”
Heading out on tour, they are not only sharing Becoming Undone, but also performing Perception for the first time, about a year and a half overdue, playing their first live show since quarantine in Chicago back in September.
“It felt like a total exorcism,” Kuperus recalls. “It was like, ‘What? How do we do this?’ And then it just felt, like, really like you just shed a layer of skin.”
“We were driving back to Detroit, which is about a five-hour drive, and Nicola kept saying, ‘I can drive,’ and I was like, ‘I’m so fucking happy; I got this. I can’t stop smiling,’” Miller adds.
It was a small festival and also the first time they got to see live music from bands they admired. Miller says, “Being the spectacle and the spectator in one evening, after two years, it blows your mind.”
The duo released their first single and video, “Fools (We Are…),” from the album in late 2021. I jested that hearing Becoming Undone in full was a suitable substitute for my morning coffee as I give up caffeine, referencing a comment from the music video I resonated with, saying the pair “always manage to look and sound more like ADULT. than they did before.”
“My number-one criteria when I’m looking at artwork, is I want to hear an individual voice,” Miller says. “I want to see a language of vocabulary, that’s like looking at a foreign language and takes me a minute to figure it out. When I saw that comment, that’s how I saw it. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so great, because it means that we have a vocabulary.’”
Watch the video for “Fools (We Are…)” here:
For more from ADULT., find them on Instagram, Facebook, and Bandcamp.
Photo courtesy of ADULT. and The Artist
