Gotye - Making Mirrors [15th Anniversary]

Wally De Backer spent two and a half years in a barn on his parents' property on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, building an album out of secondhand keyboards, found sounds, and whatever he could sample. What came out in 2011 was one of the most improbable global success stories in recent pop memory, and fifteen years later it still sounds like nothing else.

"Somebody That I Used to Know" was the song that broke it open, built around a nylon-string guitar figure lifted from Brazilian bossa nova player Luiz Bonfá and turned into a duet with Kimbra that made the breakup postmortem feel like a courtroom cross-examination. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 and charts around the world, and took home Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, with the album itself winning Best Alternative Music Album. But the record around it is stranger and more generous than any single track suggests. "State of the Art" was built almost entirely on a Lowrey Cotillion organ Gotye picked up for a hundred dollars in a secondhand shop, its vocoder sales-pitch delivery landing somewhere between comedy and dread. "Eyes Wide Open" pushes toward widescreen pop, "I Feel Better" lifts off into full Motown revue, and "Bronte" closes the album as a quiet, devastating farewell.

Fifteen years on, Making Mirrors rewards the repeat plays it always asked for. The production is dense with detail, and new textures keep surfacing with every spin.

This 2LP edition is pressed at 33 1/3 RPM on cream white vinyl and includes the original booklet.