Track By Track: Carrousel Breaks Down New Album Magnificent Desolation

Indie rock band Carrousel is challenging the way we think about music with their futuristic pop vibe.

Comprising Joel Piedt (songwriter, vocals, production) and Sharon Piedt (songwriter, vocals), the Los Angeles-based duo is crafting their own unique and truly hypnotic sonic world that incorporates their diverse influences, including blues, psychedelic rock, shoegaze, and new wave, as well as their inseverable ties to the South.

Earlier this month, Carrousel released their new album Magnificent Desolation, a collection of 10 thought-provoking tracks that seamlessly blends the vintage and the modern while also beckoning the arrival of the future. Diving deep into complex themes such as the dystopia of life and the process of depression, both within an individual and within a nation, the album serves as a fascinating ode to the illusory future, juxtaposing its infinite possibilities and the hope that tomorrow holds against the dark realities of mental illness. Magnificent Desolation is also the first installment in a four album project that pays homage to Joel’s hometown, Memphis, TN.

Carrousel broke down the entire album track by track for Musical Notes Global. Check out their thoughts below.

1. “Digital Subterfuge”

For “Digital Subterfuge,” as well as “Scream” later in the album, we created our own vocoder. We were looking for a way to get our voices to sound half-computerized and half human, and finally figured out what to do to make that happen. For “Digital Subterfuge” it’s Joel’s voice going through it; for “Scream,” it’s Sharon’s. It was completely satisfying as vocalists to play with notes in the context of that vocoder. We would stretch and bend notes to an absurd degree for their soulful and human quality, the whole time being fought by the technology we had put in place. It’s a total paradox, but it works nicely.

2. “Psychobabble Drama”

This song is about recurring nightmares I had for the better part of 10 years. Writing this song was very much a facing them head on for the first time. And over the course of producing it, I went to the people who were in the dreams, asked for forgiveness and released my own bitterness. To my surprise and delight, the nightmares stopped.

3. “Exile in NY”

We are invoking our inner Destiny’s Child for those verses. I think when I wrote them I was listening to a lot of Destiny Fulfilled, their last album together. Then comes the bridge/outro section, which turns into that symphonic freakout bonanza. I wanted to fit the whole world into it, complete with choirs, strings, horns, and bombs. We spent an inordinate amount of time getting that section to work. The trick though was making it seem effortless.

4. “A Solitary Soul”

This song also began as a dream, although more particular and literal. It was one of the kinds of nightmares we allude to in “Psychobabble Drama,” and absolutely the most memorable. In it all my friends were together, happy and laughing without me, as simply as the song says. When I woke up, the melody met me almost immediately and from there the whole song came out.

5. “I Wasn't Well”

This song was one of the earliest to come from the initial writing sessions for the record back in 2016. In fact, the chorus goes back probably all the way to 2012 or so. It's been a special one for many reasons, and I just kept working away at it over the years. It feels like where it landed is where I always envisioned it could be but just didn't know how to get to. It's a bizarre sensation when you finally find it though. Like "Ah, there you are. Where have you been all this time?" Or maybe it was waiting for me. I don't know.

6. “My Winter”

“My Winter” was one of the earlier songs we began working on for the record. Our earliest versions of it go back to maybe 2014 or 2015. Sharon and I used to sing “My Winter” in our living room on guitar all the time when we first moved to LA. It’s why our vocals sound so locked-in throughout, because we’d sung it so many times together.

7. “Dust (Hallelujah, Cyber Soma)”

We pulled out all the stops for “Dust”: reverse metal FX that sound like NYC subway system. Choirs, synths, strings, scraping bowed upright bass, theremin, beats, harps, glitched-out chip-tune FX. It may be the most dense sonically as it’s built on this massive bed of sounds. This or “Exile in NY.” The challenge was to get it to be cohesive, listenable, and ultimately, enjoyable. Anyone can throw a thousand ideas at a song, but it usually overwhelms the song itself and the whole thing topples over. To get all these textures to work together in such a way that moves the listener, that’s the miracle.

8. “Magnificent Desolation”

This song was written well into the making of the album, and only took about 15 or 20 minutes to materialize. When it did I knew without a doubt it had to be on the record. It just felt in so many ways to properly sum up the season of depression and suicidality I went through. It was all there, distilled in the most simple terms. We tracked it in a church with a big church organ and had the strings recorded at Abbey Road in London. The two together are magical.

9. “Scream”

Thematically, we wanted to have “Scream” come second to last (it was never a question which song would close the album), and for there to be a little bit of reconciliation, even as the protagonist is on the verge of potential suicide. It comes in the form of the recognition that while the entire record is spent building a lonely cathedral to one’s own inner torment, perhaps every other person on the planet feels the same way. Maybe we’re all alone, together. Earlier on the album in “A Solitary Soul,” we hear the lines: “I had a dream my friends were together without me. All my best friends, all my ex-friends.” But in “Scream,” the character expresses the sentiment: “Maybe they feel the same: all my best friends, all my best friends.”

10. “Feel Like Going Home”

There’s a special place in my heart for FLGH. It’s written as a suicide note, sung from the Brooklyn Bridge overlooking the East River. At the end of the track, you hear a splash of pianos and synths, which sounds like wind and water. But we never hear what happens—the album ends on a question mark. What you hear on the final album is actually quite similar to what this song sounded like back in 2017. You can probably hear that it’s a bit more lo-fi than the rest of the album. Some of that is because we ran the whole song through cassette tape to give it a homespun feel. But the other reason is simply that this is how most of the album sounded back in 2017 and 2018—the other songs just kept getting more refined and polished sounding. But something in me wouldn’t let me do that to this one. It needed to be exactly what it already was, and I couldn’t do much to improve upon it. I adore every second of it.

Listen to Magnificent Desolation below.