I recently joined a Music League where each round is centered around a specific genre. The most recent round was EDM, upon which I quickly realized I couldn’t articulate what EDM was. There are many styles I can recognize, including some particular niche subgenres, but dance music and DJ-adjacent genres are pretty foreign to me.

For ever rule, there’s bound to be an exception. I first discovered Knapsack, a project of Gabby Start, with the electronic rock track “Blasé” that saw Owl City-esque brightness with the frustrated vocal style of bands like CAKE and Little Image. Musically, the track oscillates between accessible indie rock and crushed synths and filtered vocals. The simple refrain of, “Boys get jealous,” makes this a seamless blend of thoughtfulness and irony.

With this single track as my gateway, Stem dropped only a few weeks later and I found myself further down the Knapsack rabbit hole. “Cherry crush hands” is immediately more synth, with layered vocals and chiptune blips and clipped vocals panned expertly to make use of the three-dimensional space. Bass is thick. Prominent falsetto and some autotune makes for a strong vocal performance. It’s definitely a pop song, but it’s weird. In this case, that happens to be a compliment.

“Cagematch” starts off with the rhythmic cadence of patty cake, features some strange lyrics about a strawberry shopping cart. Chiptune elements are central to this track, but there’s even standard piano and what seems to be standard electric guitar in the mix. If you needed proof that that this album is supposed to be fun, watch the track get increasingly-unhinged toward the end, concluding with, “Girl, just shoot your gun and go to bed.”

If you loved Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” you might notice some similarities on the main string motif on “kiss”. This is about where the comparison ends between the two tracks, for better or worse. There are plenty of more lyrical one-liners to behold, like the absolute poetry of, “I wear the same clothes five days straight.” “kiss” definitely lacks of the energy of some of its compatriots, but its succinct runtime serves as a nice break before things pick up back full-force on “U n Me.”

“tea” adds in some hip-hop and R&B influences on the vocal side. It doesn’t go quite so hard on the low end, but this change in dynamic keeps the album from feeling too homogenous.

As far as late album highlights go, “Racetracks” is easily a favorite. A stuttered piano base remains the constant under shifting vocal filtering and synth layers. There’s a vocal sample tossed in during a break, and it even sounds like there might be some gunshots mixed in. It’s very ADHD, but this comes across in a very endearing.

“Parkour” draws some comparison to LCD Soundsystem, and it has one of the most impressive grooves on the albums. Alongside “Blasé”, “Parkour” serves as another rock-forward track, and the addition of auxiliary percussion elements definitely reminds me of CAKE once again. Production is top-notch and the vocal chops fit in effortlessly.

The album is capped off by the crushed bass of “Free,” a track that at once feels familiar yet hard to find a proper comparison. Maybe Pet Shop Boys could serve as an adequate reference point? Here, the focus is definitely more on the extended instrumental segments that dance a fine line between EDM, goth, and industrial. It’s not necessarily dark, but it does stand in stark contrast to the playfulness of earlier songs.

Stem is a brain trip. I’m a big fan of progressive rock and complicated songwriting; typically, the complexity is a result of change in time signatures, reusing motifs, and carefully building into crescendos. Knapsack’s complexity leans more heavily to the production side: the variety of filters, auto tune, panning, and layering of vocals; the careful insertion of samples and chopping of vocals; the hard-to-place mix of indie pop, EDM, geek rock, British alternative, and hip-hop. I’m sure these are not necessarily unique facets, but for someone who doesn’t tend to listen to what might broadly be described as “DJ music”, I’m impressed by the crossover. The lyrical quips are entertaining, and while they’re not particular deep, the sentiments are at least unique angles on the otherwise-cliche ideations. Yes, most of the album could be distilled to quirky love songs, but this make the weird lines stand out so much more. Stem is hard to follow at times, not because of its flaws, but because of what it does well. There’s a maximalist nature at points, making some of these tracks verge on overstimulating. But that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s the kind of music meant to be played loudly through good speakers.

Knapsack is a good crossover effort between the raw world of modern rock and the synthetic side of dance music and DJ sets. Check out Stem today.