Reviewing Kanye West’s Ye in 2018, many critics singled out the same guest: Danielle Balbuena, who records as 070 Shake. The 070 is the start of the ZIP codes around North Bergen, New Jersey, where she started out on SoundCloud with a crew of local rappers and producers. Pusha T, then president of West’s GOOD Music, signed her in 2016. In 2018 came her six-song EP, Glitter, and then West’s sessions in Wyoming, where she sang the hook of Pusha T’s “Santeria” and appeared on West’s “Ghost Town” and “Violent Crimes”. Announced in June 2019, Modus Vivendi kept slipping while she reworked it and came out on GOOD Music and Def Jam on 17 January 2020.
Most of it was made with Dave Hamelin, who played drums and later sang in the Canadian indie band the Stills. He produced nine of the 14 tracks, aiming, he told Pitchfork, somewhere between shoegaze, post-rock and hip-hop. Billboard reported that she recorded about a hundred songs in a Los Angeles studio in just over a month with Hamelin and GOOD Music’s in-house producer Mike Dean, who mixed and mastered the album. She found the title in a book called Raising the Curtain: the Latin phrase means a way of life, an arrangement that lets conflicting parties coexist, and she told Office magazine she wanted its songs to coexist the same way. In August 2019, worried it sounded too polished, she told Pitchfork she wanted distorted vocals and a rawer sound: “I don’t want to make it better, I want to make it worse.”
“Come Around” rests on a sample of Kalyanji–Anandji’s music for the 1975 Hindi film Dharmatma, and “Rocketship” samples one of Isao Tomita’s synthesizer arrangements of Claude Debussy. Hamelin thought his beat for “Divorce” was too strange to be more than an instrumental until her demo changed how he heard it, and he called “Terminal B”, co-produced by Francis and the Lights, his own take on the Cocteau Twins. Dean produced “The Pines”, which reworks the folk song “In the Pines” with strings arranged and played by Sarah Schachner, and he plays a Moog solo on “Microdosing”. She met Myles William, who produced “Guilty Conscience”, by chance in her neighbourhood, and told Nylon she was after her own version of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me”.
In a track-by-track for i-D she described the songs: wanting something until you need it to survive on “Come Around”, couples who stay together out of habit on “Divorce”, one story of suspicion and betrayal across “The Pines” and “Guilty Conscience”, and holding part of yourself back from a partner on “Microdosing”. The closer, “Flight319”, takes its numbers from her interest in numerology. “Morrow” and “Nice to Have” came out together in April 2019, “Under the Moon” in December and “Guilty Conscience” a week before the album.
Most reviews were warm. Rolling Stone’s Will Hermes gave it four stars and called it an emo-rap Dark Side of the Moon; Shake told Nylon she first heard Pink Floyd’s album while making hers. NME praised a debut with no features, and the Observer called it “an impressive statement of intent” despite songs that blur together. Pitchfork’s Reed Jackson gave it 7.3 and called it GOOD Music’s most complete release since Daytona, but felt the heavy vocal processing kept her at a distance. The Guardian thought its themes wore thin over a whole album, Clash rated the choruses above the lyrics, and Consequence of Sound found “Guilty Conscience”, Clash’s favourite, overproduced. In the US it missed the Billboard 200 and reached No. 10 on the Heatseekers chart.
The roughness is part of the appeal. This is a pop record at heart, and she told Clash she wrote the hooks hearing a crowd chant them back, but the distorted vocals and the swerves from ambient drift to Dean’s heavy bass are what make it hers. It is held back by lyrics that often stay vague and by a few songs more polished than she said she wanted. In January 2020 it made her look like the most promising young artist on GOOD Music’s roster. By 2022 she was telling Complex that GOOD Music was not really a working label and that she worked with Def Jam; You Can’t Kill Me (2022) and Petrichor (2024) still carry both names, and Hamelin produced them too. It is still the place to start, and she kept adjusting it: less than two weeks after release she told fans the running order had changed, though Spotify still has the original.
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