Sacha Mullin measures the break beneath the greeting on Social Touch

Sacha Mullin has spent more than two decades in Chicago learning how a voice can hold a room without flattening it. Born in California, raised mostly in Minnesota, he came up through early session work, avant-rock bills, and a teaching practice the Chicago Reader eventually marked twice in the same year, Best Pop Artist and Best Music Teacher for 2024. The solo albums have arrived as separate rooms. Whelm in 2013, Duplex in 2017, Casino Wilderness Period in 2023 with Todd Rittmann. The Wire once heard the Duplex turn as an Alpine hike through an otherwise flat landscape. Social Touch, out on Dipterid Records, walks back down into pop. The altitude is still there. The path is clearer.

Seismologists do not start with the dot on the map. They start with the hypocenter, the buried point where the rock actually fails. The epicenter is only the place on the surface where the report arrives. Etiquette used to keep a matching surface word. The social touch meant the small grace of company, the sense of when to speak, when to stop, when a kindness at four in the morning was real. Mullin names the album for the surface skill and spends the record at the break underneath it. Produced, recorded, and mixed by William Parker Wood at Superior Street in Chicago, with the two of them arranging together, Social Touch gives that break a pop body. Synths stack. Drum machines keep a clean pulse. Electric bass and piano cut a human edge through the gloss. The voice moves from a near whisper to a theatrical lift, precise when it is quiet, exposed when it opens.

“Joy” begins in conjuring. A figure returns when Mullin is alone, and the chorus holds to “Joy that lives in me” as if memory could be rehearsed into presence. The rhythm section is agile, the piano elegant, the pads wide. Then “Don’t Wanna Hurt You” drops the temperature. Distorted guitars arrive with the chorus, industrial in weight, and the plea repeats until it sounds less like manners than like damage control. “Hypocenter,” with Emily Bindiger back in the frame, is the album’s buried origin. Kitchen ceramics, copper turning in a cabinet, air that becomes steel. “You are the hypocenter” is not a metaphor Mullin decorates. It is the map. The other person is not standing over the fault. They are the point where it gives. The sung line wants only to love. The spoken close admits the cowardice of excusing too much and defending too little.

The middle of the record loosens its jaw. “Bed All Day” is the most direct confession here, a soft drum-machine groove and a wish to stay inside someone else’s day, afraid to call the thing love and afraid to call it off. “Mime” puts the social failure on a stage. “Tracing a box invisibly partitioned” is the whole condition, a body going through motions inside a frame nobody else can see. The title track makes the diagnosis singable. Isolation, then the question of whose fault, then the line that carries the album: “I think I’ve lost the social touch.” New wave rhythm keeps it moving while the vocal frays. Friends feel better in other orbits. A small spark of aging has become a forest fire, and he is the hunter inside it. The coda keeps saying now you know, tender and stuck at once.

“Tears Into Platinum” is the release valve, and the clearest proof that this pop turn has a point of view. The drum machine runs hot, the bass synth locks, and the chorus treats feeling as alchemy. One line asks even George Michael, when fronting Gong, to give way to the same pulse. Bright enough for a room, strange enough to keep its own company. “Odd Radio Circle” then cuts the power. Reverb, low frequency, a circular melody, a litany for blood and mind and a signal we may never understand. After the dance, the transmission thins to a hand extended into static.

The CD and digital editions refuse to stop at that fade. “Let’s Cruise” picks up the pulse again and sends it off-world, a probe slung around Cassini, dead weight in a ring, then a spinning rock warmed by a star and begging just to get along. “Tall Ask” comes back to the table. Plastic Lego flowers, grey lines beside the eyes, a demand that sounds ordinary and isn’t. Can’t kill our spirits. We will revive. Vinyl keeps the eight-song arc. The longer editions let the night keep arguing with itself. A Wood remix of “Tears Into Platinum” sits on the digital edition alone, the producer answering the song after the fact.

What gives Social Touch its weight is the precision of that argument. Mullin has not sanded the experimental years off the voice. He has given the break a chorus, a bassline, and a room to fail in. The Chicago release night at Café Mustache puts the songs back among people, which is the problem the record keeps naming. Pop, in his hands, is the surface report. The hypocenter is still singing underneath it.

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Social Touch is out now.

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