About a minute into Beware Beware Beware (More Lullabies)—Quelle Chris’ new instrumental album—a warped, robotic voice cuts through the haze, muttering a chilling refrain: “Body after body after body.” It returns later on the title track, stretched and twisted until its tone shifts from weary monotone to desperate squeal. At first, it sounds like the boast of someone lost in endless hedonism, bragging about their perpetual cycle of highs and hangovers. But as the pitch rises and the words disintegrate, it begins to feel more like a cry from the void—an echo of the mass destruction that scrolls endlessly across our screens. The repetition turns from seductive to sickening. Beneath it, a ritualistic beat churns—a trance of toms, handclaps, and an ominously climbing bassline. Quelle traps us inside that rhythm, his message clear: we’re caught in a feedback loop of doom, stumbling from one dopamine hit to the next.
Beware Beware Beware is a companion piece to 2016’s Lullabies for the Broken Brain, a similarly shadowy beat tape built from warped loops and unpredictable drum patterns. But while Lullabies drifted inward, reflecting on solitude and psychic exhaustion, Beware looks outward—toward a society fraying at every edge. It’s an album about collapse: social, moral, and technological. The song titles say it outright—“What They Truly Fear Is What We Fear to Be,” “Be Afraid of Everything Trust No One.” Despite the warmth of its lo-fi textures, Beware sounds more like a document of collective burnout than a balm for it. It hums with anxiety, exhaustion, and the constant static of modern living.
That tension gives the album its power. Building on the thick, gritty atmosphere of his 2022 record DEATHFAME, Quelle leans into distortion and disorientation. Each track feels half-dreamed, as if you’re hearing it through the fog of dissociation. The melodies drift and decay; the rhythms loop just long enough to hypnotize before unraveling. The Ethio-jazz shimmer of “Camouflage Cameras” and the smoky pulse of “AI Hearts fka Walk Close to Me aka I Need Somebody” lull you into motionless contemplation. Elsewhere, “Good Earth” veers into vaporwave surrealism, while the off-kilter chops of “Again My Friend” evoke the fractured funk of J Dilla’s Donuts. “Money vs Passion” feels like a brief, blissed-out detour into Lonnie Liston Smith’s astral jazz cosmos. Quelle doesn’t imitate any of these worlds so much as let them collide—layered, flickering glimpses of different eras and moods dissolving into one another.
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The sound design is meticulous and unsettling. On “We Raise Hell Behind Those We Love,” the percussion hits like distant explosions, while the hi-hats tick at the front of the mix like a countdown. “Everyone’s a Winner in America” plays like a dystopian soundscape of the modern U.S.—sirens, screeches, car crashes, and gunfire forming a grotesque symphony beneath a disembodied, sneering voice repeating the phrase’s bitter irony. Quelle isn’t documenting chaos so much as embodying it: his beats sound like cities overheating, like the internet glitching in real time.
And yet, amid all the dread, Beware Beware Beware carries a flicker of hope. It’s not a comforting record, but it’s one that insists on staying awake—on refusing numbness. Quelle’s protest is subtle but radical: he’s reminding us that awareness itself is resistance. To look directly at destruction, to listen through the noise, is the first act of rebuilding. Even his choice to sidestep streaming platforms—to release the album only as a limited cassette and digital download through collaborator Cavalier’s website—feels pointed. It’s a rejection of algorithmic convenience, an invitation to step outside the endless scroll and listen with intention.
By the time the album closes, the voice returns one last time—synthetic, stuttering, near collapse. Through the distortion, a phrase emerges, fragile and human: “Thank you. Stay strong. Never give up.” It’s the album’s only clear statement, and it lands like a small act of grace amid the ruin. Quelle Chris has always found beauty in discomfort, but here he finds something rarer: perseverance. Beware Beware Beware (More Lullabies) is not just a reflection of our fractured world—it’s a reminder that, even when everything breaks, the beat still goes on.
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