brakence never learned about restraint. The arc of his career, from the aspirational fever of 2020’s punk2 and the snarled hyperpop of 2022’s hypochondriac to his new album, marroW , has been a process of burdening himself with ever more density and torment. Time and age can resolve doubt, and brakence spent the last four years almost completely quiet; it’s an abnormal absence these days for a 24-year-old artist, especially one who came up in hyperactive online circles where data dumping is the norm. But he still can’t stop dissecting his beleaguered psyche, or the beleaguered psyche of a character he’s made up. marroW unfurls like a dark romantasy novel, or a grisly theater production with its own sprawling cast and bootleg effects machine. The color is red velvet; the sound brims with sickly pulses and crocodile-teeth percussion; the playwright is a cross between Charlie Kaufman and Muse .…