For more than two decades, Chicago musician Sacha Mullin has worked at the intersection of art-rock, experimental music, and adventurous vocal songwriting. On Social Touch, his fourth solo album, he moves closer to pop without surrendering the eccentricity that has made his previous records distinctive. The result is a record interested in accessibility, but not at the expense of emotional ambiguity.
Produced, recorded, and mixed by William Parker Wood, Social Touch brings piano, synthesizers, programmed rhythms, guitar, and layered arrangements into a more immediate setting. Mullin’s voice remains the album’s defining instrument. His ability to shift between measured intimacy and theatrical intensity gives these songs a human unpredictability that polished production alone cannot supply. Rather than treating his range as a showcase, he uses it to navigate the uneasy distance between what people feel and what they can admit.
The eight-track album moves through that tension from different angles. “Joy” opens the record, while “Don’t Wanna Hurt You” introduces a more conflicted emotional register. “Hypocenter,” featuring returning collaborator Emily Bindiger on backing vocals, places the personal at the center of the album’s sonic ambition. Later, “Bed All Day” brings a lighter pop sensibility to the discomfort of uncertain intimacy, while “Mime” suggests the strain of performing a version of oneself for others. The title track and “Tears Into Platinum” extend the album’s inward-looking concerns before “Odd Radio Circle” closes the standard sequence.
What makes this direction compelling is the friction between the music’s relative immediacy and Mullin’s instinct for complexity. Synthesizers and programmed percussion offer a clearer rhythmic framework, but his vocal phrasing and harmonic sensibility resist the neatness pop sometimes demands. Wood’s production gives that tension room to breathe, allowing the arrangements to feel deliberate without reducing the songs to exercises in technical display.
There is a risk, of course, in making a more direct record: accessibility can become a substitute for discovery. Social Touch is most interesting when its pop structures accommodate uncertainty rather than resolve it. Its emotional world depends on awkwardness, hesitation, and the difficulty of genuine connection.
Mullin’s move toward pop is therefore less a reinvention than a change in emphasis. Social Touch argues that experimental instincts and memorable songwriting need not occupy opposing camps. Its strongest idea is also its simplest: sometimes a clearer melody gives complicated feelings more room to speak.
Featured Image: Michael Izquiero
