Prying Open Warpaint's Gorgeous Musical Fortress 

As far as debut records released in 2010 go, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything as smartly woven and emotionally messy as Warpaint's The Fool. Its founding LP is a tightly plotted map of concepts: XX-esque postpunk hooks that are as sleek and fleet-footed as a deer, female voices peaking and falling in foreboding echoes, song structures writhing in decisive but unpredictable patterns. It's too inert an experience to simplify, especially since it makes an unsatisfying first listen. You have to wait for this demure, complex stuff to unravel at its own pace.

But there's one lyric that hints at the album's layers of meaning, a few lines that make a good point of entry for the Los Angeles quartet's mysterious world. "Undertow," The Fool's most extraordinary song, is led by Emily Kokal, Warpaint's guitarist and primary vocalist. She begins by confessing her adoration for a lover ("Your brown eyes are my blue skies/They light up the rivers that the birds fly over") as they go diving together. Soon, she's taunting the subject from a distance, perhaps above water, as her fondness begins to sound like a ploy: "What's the matter? You hurt yourself?/Open your eyes and there was someone else." All the while, the song moves like it's heading somewhere dark and dire — likely right into the titular current — and this is Kokal's strange way of teaching her thinly sketched lover/opponent a lesson. Then she chants the giveaway: "Nobody ever has to find out what's in my mind tonight." When she reprises that line later, it's at a time when "Undertow" picks up, expanding from omen into actual destruction. These are the consequences of "running from the trouble," a line she repeats until the song's close. And when we — the lover, the listener — have been swallowed by this undertow, that line about nobody finding out what's in the vocalist's mind grows especially crucial. She (and Warpaint) will never give straightforward answers. It's just not their style.

In a contrast to the secretive drama that unfolds in "Undertow," Kokal has described The Fool as a record about vulnerability. It's about being not afraid to make mistakes — "the risk of laughing at the wrong moment or to choose not to act like you know everything," she told Interview. "As a band, we're all trying to be naked, if you will."

To an extent, Kokal's explanation holds true. The Fool's lyrics read like LiveJournal entries of the highest order (this is a compliment), scratching away at past situations to reveal emotional truths. But their metaphors can be so vague — walls are broken, fires are stepped through — that after nine tracks, there's little telling what circumstances and experiences inspired the songs. Hurt feelings clearly played a part in writing these lyrics, and the members of Warpaint want something transcendental to rise from their pain, even if they won't tell you what. The Fool is a fortress of sorts, with no concept or background attached, multiple songwriters at work, and only the thinnest stabs at scenic detail. ("It's not, like, a breakup record," she offers in a rare hint.) Despite their opacity, the lyrics invite analysis, if only because its music is so gorgeous.

Similar to their songs, the members of Warpaint hold secrets, too. According to Kokal, the band communicates in a language only the members can decipher. The specifics of this are sketchy, but the communicative chemistry apparently rears its head while the members are writing songs and hanging out. "I didn't really realize how inside jokey our jokes were until we had some random people around, sitting there not laughing and not getting anything while we're all laughing harder than we've ever laughed," she says. "It's like a family, where the way you've been raised, you just develop something very similar."

Knowing the band's arcane tendencies — it also has a rule that every song must include a "stall," where the song drones or loops — contributes to the sense that Warpaint's world isn't for anyone to automatically enter. But as Kokal explains, the allure of The Fool comes from finding your own answers to its mysteries. "It's anyone's freedom to do whatever they want with it," she says. "It's fun to know facts, but you should still be able to keep your images of what it means. That's one of those great things about music: it can be yours."