Popscene: Lower Dens

The Competition, the fourth album from Lower Dens, is a pop album with a concept both emotionally and politically urgent. The title is the lead singer and songwriter Jana Hunter’s term for a sociopsychological phenomenon that, in different ways, binds us all. Modern capitalism by nature generates a kind of psychosis — an inability to process its constant stimuli and contradictions — that accelerates our insecurities and anxieties to the point of total overload, corroding our intimacies, our communities, and our senses of self.