Placid Cactus explores uncertainty and memory on ‘SUBMARINE’

Recorded in a home studio, a hospital ward’s shadow and the back of an Icelandic road trip, the second Placid Cactus record turns two chaotic years into eleven tracks of warped, warm-blooded pop

In April 2024, Mikey Recupero was lying in a hospital containment unit in Ohio with a virus nobody could name. Around fifty tests came back with nothing. The doctors shrugged, prescribed strong antibiotics and waited. Recupero, who records woozy, synth-heavy pop as Placid Cactus, had spent the previous months in a creative sprint, carrying demos around in his headphones wherever he went. Suddenly the only thing he was carrying was uncertainty. Six months later he was on a cliff in Iceland proposing to his now fiancee, laptop still in the rucksack, still chipping away at the same songs. SUBMARINE, his second album under the name, is what happens when both of those moments end up on the same hard drive.

Inside the Placid Cactus sound

Recupero describes Placid Cactus as a solitary operation. The Akron-born, Columbus-based musician plays every instrument, engineers every session and mixes his demos in a home studio, a habit he credits to the DIY scrappiness of the Columbus scene. “I like to wear all the hats, not out of pride or anything, just because it’s fun and it lets me utilise different versions of myself,” he says. You can hear those different versions arguing productively across the record’s eleven tracks, which swerve from R&B-indebted backbeats to bursts of dancefloor abandon without ever quite settling. His reference points run from J. Dilla and Jai Paul to Hans Zimmer scores and Studio Ghibli films, and somehow the record wears all of it lightly.

Where memory meets melody

The organising obsession here is liminal space. Recupero talks about buildings that no longer exist, the demolished primary school and rec centre of his childhood that now survive only in his memory. “It’s such a weird feeling, like a type of mourning but with a gloss of mystery,” he explains, and that phrase could sit on the album’s spine. Lead single ‘dywae?’ floats on a patter of broken guitar and stacked vocals while Recupero circles the unanswerable: “I don’t even know who’s inside / Do you wish anyone else?” It is a love song asked through a keyhole, and it sets the record’s emotional temperature.

The album hits its stride

The strongest stretch arrives mid-album. ‘Five for the Louvre’ opens on the lines “Shaky legs / Lost at home again” and plays out like a dash through an empty museum after closing time, all echoing tiles and galleries of gold.‘Masquerade’ follows with droning, sidechained bass beneath helium-pitched vocals, creating one of the record’s more unpredictable moments. Then ‘Confluence’, the second single, drags you out of the water gasping. Built on a swaying groove crowded with frantic guitars and buzzing synths, it borrows some of Frank Ocean’s atmospheric patience and finds Recupero interrogating his own reliability: “Confluence holds the weight of my confidence.” By the bridge he is practically begging, “Just tell me what I gotta do / I don’t know how / Will you take my arm?” It is one of his most exposed moments on the record.

Not everything hits with that force. ‘missedthetrain’, the instrumental at the album’s centre, works better as a palate cleanser than a destination, and a couple of the back-half tracks blur into each other on first listen. But the writing keeps pulling focus back. ‘Sahara’ turns insomnia into a heat mirage, ‘Twilight Run’ finds him vowing to “fight for the surface right before it’s gone”, and closer ‘HOMEBOUND’ finally lets the tension out of his shoulders, trading the record’s anxious circling for a plain, repeated promise to show up for someone. After forty minutes underwater, it lands like the first full breath.

Big sound, built at home

SUBMARINE is out July 31.

Image credit: Placid Cactus