The Chainsmokers’ ‘Memories’: Do not open is good advice
Male angst is arguably modern music’s most reliable source of inspiration. From Mozart and Miles Davis to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, many great works of art have sprung from the minds of angry, horny, depressed and/or
lovelorn men. Memories... Do Not Open, the moody debut album from the Chainsmokers, is not one of them. The story behind the Chainsmokers’ inexplicable rise reads like a screenplay for a Coachella-themed remake of This is Spinal
Tap: After forming their EDM group in their Syracuse University dorm room, production duo Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall landed an unexpected hit with their 2014 track #SELFIE, the hashtag included in the title.
They spent the next several years cultivating personas akin to the most obnoxious guys in your junior-year apartment complex, advertising their hard-partying ways in embarrassingly thirsty interviews and comparing the sizes of their junk on their band’s official website.
Even the group’s decency-challenging name has a bratty backstory, with Taggart and Pall explaining in interviews that they don’t smoke, and only chose the name because its Internet domains were available.
All the while, the duo steadily released EPs and one-off singles, until one track became the biggest song in America: 2016’s Clos
er, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 straight weeks.
Now, the Chainsmokers are near-household names already enjoying the spoils of their success, their next few months booked solid with a lucrative Las Vegas residency, guest-starring stint on Saturday Night Live and a summer arena tour. Perhaps they should’ve continued limiting their releases to singles, as Mem
ories, their official 12-song debut, is better left forgotten.
One of the Chainsmokers’ trademark quirks is Andrew Taggart’s hilariously bad vocals, which almost sound intentionally weak, like he’s trolling critics who actually expect him to sound like a professional. Taggart couldn’t sing on the Halsey-bolstered Clos
er, and he can’t sing now. While the group mercifully invites vocalists to assist with most of Memo
ries’ tracks — like Emily Warren, whose twisty-voweled performances on Don’t Say and My Type belong in a mid-2010s time capsule alongside Lorde and Halsey.
The Chainsmokers came of age in the 2000s, and hints of the decade’s musical influences peek through in interesting ways on
Memories, from their Coldplay-featuring hit Something Just Like
This to Break Up Every Night, a distant cousin of one-hit-wonder Metro Station’s Shake It. But for most of the album, Taggart and Pall stay in their house-music lane. Thankfully for the group, enough groundwork has been laid by their EDM peers that their passable production talents still sound on-trend. But Memories’ potential hits lack the thrilling parade of guest stars that have made Calvin Harris’ Slide and
Heatstroke so enjoyable, or a unifying aesthetic like Kygo’s signature trop-house.
And to their detractors, the Chainsmokers’ success is yet another example of mediocre white men ascending to outsize levels of power and fame, the celebrities that 2017 deserves.