What Crystal Castles Washes Away

Baptism, from Crystal Castles’ second album, is three and a half minutes of Alice Glass sounding like she’s singing from inside a burning building. The production buries her vocals under layers of distortion and synthetic noise—not to obscure them but to make them feel less like a performance and more like a transmission, something being received rather than delivered. It’s the kind of song that changes the temperature of the room it plays in.