Fire-Toolz’s work has always felt designed for life indoors. Listening to Chicago producer Angel Marcloid’s psychedelic splatters of new age, prog metal, vaporwave, and digital noise captures the distinct feeling of growing up online, with the entire history of recorded music just a keyboard click away. As with similarly minded artists like Galen Tipton and 100 gecs, Marcloid depicts the internet as a place where leaping between genres is as easy as switching tabs, the line between “good” and “bad” taste is all but meaningless, and you can let your personal soundtrack get as weird as you want from the safety of your headphones. The internet often acts as an incubator for our hyper-specific tastes to develop unfettered, a place for personal expression to take on wild new forms as we find our own niche communities that accept us. Marcloid’s music incorporates that boundless freedom and unleashes it like a modern take on an epic, confessional GeoCities blog post, full of typos and spinning unicorn clipart.
The fantastical world-building of prog rock has always figured in Marcloid’s personal mythos, and bands like Rush and Dream Theater act as a guiding light for the Fire-Toolz project with their arcane sci-fi lore, highly technical compositions, and shamelessly excessive approach to songwriting. On Eternal Home, Marcloid offers her own take on the prog-rock epic: an 80-minute purging of ideas that melds screamo, smooth jazz, and IDM as if they were always meant to be together. This long-form project is a dense proposition from an artist whose music was already overwhelming to begin with, and parsing through the album requires dedication. However amid the chaos lies some of Marcloid’s most focused, welcoming material yet.
Although following the themes of Eternal Home will require a lyric sheet to comprehend Marcloid’s distorted shrieks, a close listen reveals the album to be a search for self-fulfillment and purpose, narrated from the isolated confines of the house. From the first moments of opener “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈,” chintzy synth chords clash in all directions as Marcloid muses about mundane tasks like doing the dishes, shouting pissed off affirmations like, “I’m owed strength now” and “I’m not paying for a mantra.” In Marcloid’s hands, being a stay-at-home stoner is a journey of self-discovery. “Lellow< “Birbs<” contrasts suburban imagery of neighborhood puppies and “macho sports dad-isms” with a gradually intensifying blastbeat, culminating in a simple, spoken-word declaration: “It’s always a nice day when we can be nice together.” It feels absurd, and yet Marcloid has a way of making these words sound completely earnest, like a kid screaming for peace from the cruelty of the playground.