Review
The 83 on Metacritic signals broad approval, but the debate around Ö is more interesting than the aggregate. Shannon Wise and Jackson Lewis deliver percussion-heavy New York club music that critics have found difficult to resist, even when they're trying. Beats Per Minute puts the tension plainly: the record is "often exhilarating, at times frustrating, and occasionally underwhelming" — an honest accounting of an album that runs hotter on instinct than craft, and knows it.
NME cuts to the right defence: Ö is "an album that is about feeling, rather than thinking," and that framing explains both its charge and its limitations. Paste Magazine observes that Wise and Lewis have "carved out their space as these semi-anonymous, cooler-than-cool figures, meant to be something of a blank canvas for party aspirations" — which reads as admiration and quiet reservation simultaneously. The duo offer no autobiography, no confession. They offer the floor.
Whether the trick holds over time is the question critics keep circling without fully settling. For now, the answer is: mostly yes.
