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“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”