A Requiem for Crystal Castles, Because They Were Fucking Awesome

The first time I saw Crystal Castles was in 2007, when they were just an obscure opening act for the much-more-famous band Metric. I was a fresh New York City transplant, just a few weeks into my freshman year in college. When the lights went low, everyone was still looking at their flip phones. Then, an assault of strobe lights and razor-edged distortion sliced through the air. Everyone was forced to look up. I didn't know it yet, but what I was about to see would send waves of repercussions far into my future. Many years later, I would be able to look back and be like, "You know, that was the moment that changed everything."

A pale wisp of a girl appeared on stage, clutching a megaphone. For the next hour, she screamed undecipherable lyrics into the void, backed by the ghostly keyboards and lo-fi synths of a shadowy figure standing in the back. Their sounds were electronic, abrasive—even catchy, in their own doom-and-gloom way—but this was worlds away from the hyped-up electro that was dominating popular dance music at the time. Let's not forget this was the era of hedonistic kings like The Klaxons, Crookers and Boys Noize, of scene queens like Uffie and Ellen Allien. When the 8-bit bleeps of "Air War," came on, maybe it sounded for a second like the lo-fi party music filling the airwaves—but as the song swelled with childish voices yammering in gibberish, hissing and muttering to themselves, I realized that Crystal Castles was swimming into a space far weirder than any of their contemporaries.

Alice Glass climbed up the speakers, conveying more urgent despair with her high-pitched whelps than most vocalists can achieve with actual words. Ethan Kath's productions, whether charged with jagged brutality or melancholic beauty, never failed to be the perfect foil. I gazed up at Glass in total surrender, letting her urgent gibberish swallow me whole. To watch Crystal Castles perform live is to watch a throbbing heart open itself raw and baptize you with anarchic glee. By the end of their short set, I wasn't sure if I wanted to fuck Alice Glass or be her. But I knew that I loved her.

This week, after ten years of making some of our generation's most hauntingly beautiful music at brain-splitting volumes, Glass announced on (where else?) Twitter that the duo is dunzo. Her first tweet cut straight to the chase:

I am leaving Crystal Castles.

— ALICE GLASS (@ALICEGLASS)

October 8, 2014

The second one was a statement that few could argue with:

My art and my self-expression in any form has always been an attempt towards sincerity, honesty, and empathy for others.

— ALICE GLASS (@ALICEGLASS)

October 8, 2014

Glass' third tweet was the most enigmatic:

For a multitude of reasons both professional and personal I no longer feel that this is possible within CC.

— ALICE GLASS (@ALICEGLASS)

October 8, 2014

But she ended on a more hopeful note:

Although this is the end of the band, I hope my fans will embrace me as a solo artist in the same way they have embraced Crystal Castles.

— ALICE GLASS (@ALICEGLASS)

October 8, 2014

Who knows what really transpired between Glass and Kath, the producer who she met when she was just fifteen years old. I was bummed, but not exactly surprised; the duo hadn't played a show together in almost a year, and there hadn't been an announcement about their next release since their last album in 2012. Instead, they've both been performing DJ sets separately—Glass recently appeared alongside Jupiter Keyes of Health, Mike Simonetti and Prince Terrence at a party in New York City, while Kath DJed at Atlantic's Imagine Festival in August. But the announcement signaled a definitive end to their decade-long collaboration—and to me, the end of an era.

The story of Crystal Castles begins not in some smoky club or bar—but a stint of community service. Glass and Kath were both charged with reading stories to the blind atonement for undisclosed crimes, and they started talking about how they felt like no one was really doing anything new in the contemporary music scene. Glass was a teenage runaway in an all-female crust-noise band with the amazing title of Fetus Fatale. Kath was also in various bands, playing bass or drums. They decided to get together and "try to create a new sound and genre as best we could," as Kath put it. They cribbed their name from a commercial for She-Ra toys—based on the animated female superhero from the 80s TV series. "The fate of the world is safe in Crystal Castles. Crystal Castles is the source of all power," the ad jingle went. (None of them had ever seen an episode.)

Crystal Castles taught me that the best music doesn't have to sound shiny and polished. In fact, their first single, "Alice Practice," was actually kind of a mistake. As the story goes, Glass and Kath were recording songs in in a local Toronto studio in 2004, and one of the studio's techies secretly recorded Glass' mic test. If you listen carefully, you can hear her say "Hi!" as the song starts up.

Crystal Castles also taught me that music at the dark, gritty end of the spectrum can rise above pure nihilism and meaningless melancholy. Despite Kath's shaggy black hair and Glass' eyeliner-smudged raccoon eyes, they weren't play-acting at being goths for the sake of cool pictures. They even called themselves "an axe in the face of emo." In fact, Glass probably would've kicked you if you called her a #sadgirl. Instead, her bleak lyrics railed against social injustices with the vigor of a punk poet, and neither of them were ever afraid to be political. The album for their third (and last) album, III, is a striking picture of a woman in a burka, craddling her wounded son in a way that distinctly recalls the Virgin Mary and Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà sculpture. It was taken at an anti-government protest in Yemen.

Alice Glass was one of the first feminist musicians I looked up to for her no-bullshit attitude towards misogyny. While other women might try to mince their words for the sake of good PR, Glass would just straight up say, "we need an army because the mainstream hates women." In interviews, she would fret over abortion clinics getting shut down, or blast Katy Perry for her oversexualized image. Actually, what she said was, "Fucking Katy Perry spraying people with her fucking dick, her fucking cum gun coming on fucking children." But the greatest Glass quote is also the most direct: "I hate homophobic, racist, misogynist dickweeds."

Most of all, Crystal Castles taught me that music that makes you dance can also make you think. That songs with chopped up, distorted or incomprehensible vocals can blast more emotion than even the most eloquent lyrics. That you can talk about social issues through "party music." That you can be earnest and fierce at the same damn time. And that you can do it all with swagger.