In gaming slang, to take someone out “no scope” means to charge straight at them—no aiming, no hesitation, just fire from the hip and hope instinct guides you home. It’s the opposite of calculated: reckless, impulsive, pure adrenaline. That’s the energy the alt-pop duo crushed claim to channel on their debut album, no scope, a collection of breakup songs built in the glittery ruins of mid-’90s Garbage and Massive Attack. In practice, though, their music feels less like a wild sprint and more like a masterfully choreographed combo attack—every move perfectly timed, every hit precisely placed. Shaun Durkan and Bre Morell’s meticulous production dazzles with control, but the polish sometimes blunts the sting.
no scope follows 2023’s extra life EP, and as the titles suggest, video game logic runs through both records. extra life referenced respawning—coming back after defeat—while no scope nods to the impulsive strike. It fits: Durkan and Morell live in different states (Oregon and California) and treat crushed like a kind of long-distance co-op campaign, a creative world they log into together. The metaphor also reflects their emotional landscape. Like extra life, no scope wanders through heartbreak’s open world, revisiting what might have been, moving without clear objectives but always searching for some kind of resolution.
Their sonic map is built from shared nostalgia—a playlist of ’90s radio staples like the Sundays, Dido, and Cowboy Junkies. You can hear traces of those influences, along with the moody trip-hop of Massive Attack, threaded through no scope’s dense but impeccably arranged soundscape. There’s something unmistakably adult about its atmosphere: the emotional storm has passed, and what remains is the quiet, aching clarity of reflection. Morell’s voice, pushed higher in the mix than before, brings that clarity to the surface. Her melodies are clean and luminous, standing out against the record’s thicket of guitar delays, dusty breakbeats, and vaporous synths.
When crushed strike the right balance between emotion and precision, the results can be stunning. Opener “exo” cracks open like sunlight through blinds as Morell strides into the chorus with quiet confidence. The songs bleed into each other with the dreamlike continuity of heartbreak—guitars slide off breakbeats, chopped vocal samples drift like fog, and tiny details flicker in the periphery: finger-snap handclaps in “starburn,” a guitar delay that lands just off-beat. There’s an obsessive craftsmanship to it all. Even when the arrangements seem to be spiraling in different directions, Durkan’s production ensures everything eventually converges, neatly, inevitably.
That meticulousness is both crushed’s gift and their limitation. Shooting for the moon, as the saying goes, often means missing the ground beneath you—and no scope sometimes floats a little too far into the ether. “heartcontainer,” for instance, swells with a stately beauty that borders on reverence, its slow procession and devotional lyric (“I’m on my knees/I’m crying for you”) recalling contemporary worship music. Morell delivers it with unwavering poise, but the song’s emotional devastation feels airbrushed out, the heartbreak smoothed into symmetry. This is the paradox of no scope: for all its digital daring and emotional intent, its control can make its pain feel safely contained.
Still, crushed’s ambition is deeply refreshing. In an era when the ’90s are being endlessly recycled, Durkan and Morell don’t just borrow the era’s sound—they reimagine its scale. Their music stretches trip-hop’s sultry melancholy across the emotional intimacy of modern indie pop, drawing lines between the sleek gloom of Portishead and the bare confessions of Phoebe Bridgers or Madi Diaz. Beneath its shimmering layers, no scope is, at heart, a singer-songwriter album disguised as a futuristic pop experiment.
Durkan and Morell might talk about chaos, but their version of it is exquisitely engineered—feelings rendered in high resolution, heartbreak simulated at 60 frames per second. For all its polish, no scope still glows with a pulse that feels human: two players, miles apart, learning to sync their hearts to the same beat.
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