“When you fall in love with a telepath, you’re never alone“
So sings Diana Crash on the title track of Telepaths, and I haven’t stopped thinking about this record since I first heard it.
Telepaths is the most enigmatic and memorable record I’ve heard in a long time. “I’m Gone Don’t Look for Me I’ll Never be Back” was my first exposure, and the first thing that came to mind was Spare-Ass Annie. The weirdly literary and wildly catchy song was an instant add to the Friday playlist, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this record since. And the more I learn the weirder things get.
Telepaths, which dropped on March 30, 2025, is a 12-track spiral into experimental rock chaos, and it feels like a lost artifact from the ‘90s underground. Whitten is a New York-based veteran of critically-acclaimed but little-known bands like St. Johnny and Grand Mal. He wrote, produced, and played every note on the record, while Diana Crash’s vocals add a ghostly, raw edge that cuts right through you.
The delivery lands somewhere between beat poetry and the kind of idle tuneless singing you might do while tidying the house, but the lyrics are often arresting. Among the channel-surfing backing track that accompanies “How Long?”, Crash repeats the self-flagellating mantra, “How long before I can forget everything and think of myself as a decent person?” accompanied by a propulsive, heartbeat percussion, to devastating effect:
And she’s not even a professional singer! It turns out that Whitten met Crash in a laundromat – they started off discussing books and wound up recording music together. From this wildly entertaining interview in Focus Music:
She’s an adventurous person who does things like surfing and mountain climbing. So I guess it seemed like a fun idea to sing a bunch of songs with some obscure rock musician in a house full of his kids’ toys and drawings. I’d ask her why, but like most of my friends since Covid, she rarely answers my emails. I think she’s in the Chamonix region of France, waiting for the snow to melt so she can start climbing again.
It didn’t come as a surprise that Whitten is also a short story writer. Each song feels a bit like a standalone composition on a mixtape, with samples, found sound and spoken word fragments among the standard lo-fi rock instrumentation.
The whole thing is gloriously weird, teetering between gritty classic rock ‘n’ roll and surreal, literary fever dreams. “Proletarians of Love” has a gentle piano accompanied by a distorted drum beat and weird sample of someone counting, with Crash snarling that “you get your love from a screen / I get my love in the street“. It sounds like something from the 70s but it can’t be:
Then there’s “Elegie pour la Musique Rock,” a slower, haunting track that mourns the death of rock with a piano that sounds like it’s been dragged through the gutter, and a vocal that reminded me of Kim Gordon.
The last surprise is that there are two cover songs on this album. The first is a cover of The Ramones’ “Loudmouth“, which at least lives in the same time zone as the original. The second is a cover of a Tommy Tucker song from 1964. From the same interview linked above, this is his description:
Hi-Heeled Sneakers is another immortal classic, of which Jerry Lee Lewis did the near-ultimate version. But who wouldn’t want to do a cover of it and weave in clips of Jean-Luc Godard talking about “listening to the picture” in The Dick Cavett Show, and of Sam Neill making a phone call in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession ?
Telepaths doesn’t care about being polished—it’s messy, raw, and unapologetic, like something swiped from your friend’s cooler older sibling who thought Lou Reed was too mainstream, which is pretty much how I heard Burroughs’ classic record many years ago. Crash’s vocals takes his sound to a new level of unhinged beauty. Her voice is the perfect foil to his gritty instrumentation, adding a layer of eerie emotion that makes every track feel like it’s about to unravel. It’s the kind of album that demands you listen with the lights off, letting its strange, literary energy wash over you.
Telepaths is a record that feels like it’s clawing its way out of the speakers to grab you. If you’re craving something that’s equal parts nostalgic and completely out of left field, this is it.
Further reading / listening
Interview in fokusmusik.se, and Spotify Playlist by Williams himself for the piece
