Doohickey Cubicle

Each moment of a Doohickey Cubicle song is built from the ground up by Francis Hooper and Alli Deleo. No small task for these lounge-pop mosaics. It’s easy to take those grooves for granted — they fly by on a cloud of fragments; intricate, sax-laden, they’re relaxing and energizing in equal measure. But each swirl in their soundscape is as intentional and ornate as a big band jazz orchestra. Take their debut LP Don’t Fix Anything ;) for example, released in March 2021. It begins simply, with a little droning synth and the clicking of a drum machine but give it a minute and it gives way to bass lines that frantically skip all the way up and down the neck, rolling brass sounds, organic and digital rhythms that ornately pock the album, all sitting on infectious melodies that stick in the back of your brain for the rest of the day. That’s Alli singing on the opening track, Francis takes the hook in the middle, and the two play off each other seamlessly throughout the album. They sing about indulgence, public pools, untraceable thoughts, changes, broken airbags. They have downy effortless voices and they peak out through those gloopy and whispering synths and the stories they sing are mixed like they’re instruments themselves. Francis mixes and masters their music in Doohickey’s studio and the homespun quality is evident in how complete the quilt of their work feels. The result is this soft wall of sound, bursting with ideas, simple, full, dense yet you can hold them in your hand like they don’t weigh a thing. “Super Smeller,” the first single on their sophomore LP will be released soon ahead of the rest of the album out this November.