Human Potential, the solo project of Andrew Becker, returns with Eel Sparkles, an album that feels less like a conventional record announcement and more like a surreal dispatch from the fringes of pop experimentation. Due out March 6 via What Delicate Recordings, the album arrives alongside its lead single, Practice Songs For The Unloved, now streaming on all platforms.

Becker’s pedigree is already well established for those who track the more idiosyncratic corners of indie and experimental music. A former drummer for Dischord Records’ Medications and Brooklyn provocateurs Screens, Becker has long balanced rhythmic rigor with an appetite for chaos. Outside of music, he’s also an award-winning filmmaker, a detail that feels essential when approaching Eel Sparkles—an album that unfolds cinematically, with scenes, characters, and sudden tonal shifts that feel deliberately unhinged.

“Practice Songs For The Unloved” sets the tone. Built around a jangling chord progression filtered through a Silvertone guitar case amp, the track nods knowingly to the iconic Hal Blaine “Be My Baby” drumbeat, while guest vocals from Amira Nader elevate the chorus into something lush and communal. Becker describes the song as an ode to “a community of outcasts banding together to make music nobody else would care about,” a sentiment that doubles as a mission statement for Human Potential itself. It’s warm, strange, and disarmingly sincere—an invitation rather than a performance.

From there, Eel Sparkles widens its scope into something both playful and disorienting. Becker pulls liberally from the pop song canon while warping it into unfamiliar shapes. Tracks like “Sun-E Corporation Teenage Anthem” flirt with glam excess before sliding into unexpected soul references, while “Do You Remember Albert?” rides distorted marimba into warped, airline-terminal psychedelia. Elsewhere, “The Sightseer” dusts punk-funk grooves with skronk and soot, refusing to settle into any one lane for long.

Lyrically, Becker’s world is populated by murderous movie stars, ghost arsonists, death-starved relatives, unicorns, and obscure cultural detritus, all woven together with a darkly comic hand. It’s the kind of songwriting that feels absurd on paper but deeply intuitive in execution—each image serving the album’s larger emotional logic rather than narrative clarity.

In classic Human Potential fashion, the mythology surrounding Eel Sparkles is as surreal as the music itself. A supposed journey to Inner Mongolia, a hijacked vessel, forced screenings of Dr. Giggles, fermented horse milk, and hostage-era performances scored live—whether taken as fiction, metaphor, or elaborate joke, the story reinforces what the record already suggests: Becker operates in a space where imagination and reality are happily interchangeable.

Ultimately, Eel Sparkles thrives in the margins—between pop and noise, sincerity and satire, discipline and derailment. It’s a kaleidoscopic, deeply felt project that rewards curiosity and repeat listens, landing somewhere between experimental indulgence and oddly comforting familiarity. For fans of Deerhunter, Real Estate, Wild Nothing, or Tame Impala—or anyone drawn to music that embraces the weird without losing its heart—Human Potential’s latest offering is less an album to consume than a world to step into.

How much of that mythology is metaphor, and how much is exactly how Human Potential records get made?

Why, it’s all true of course.

“Practice Songs For The Unloved” started from a Silvertone amp tremolo and spiraled into an anthem for outcasts. Who are “the unloved” in your universe, and what does community look like for you as a lifelong musical outsider?

I’ve always found that the true outcasts aren’t the ones wearing the most interesting clothes, ensconced in some fashionable scene, or playing in the right club.  I’ve always had an admiration for people that tend to toil in the shadows…folks who seek more, require less and expect nothing…nor think they deserve anything.  
You describe the track as something that “seemed to write itself.” When a song arrives that quickly, do you feel like you’re composing or just catching something falling out of the sky?
There are moments that do sometimes feel like some kind of quasi-cosmic, kismet…when an idea does seem to just materialize, be it a chord sequence, melody line or drum pattern, though I suppose one could attribute the idea of “catching something falling out of the sky” to pastiche, or unconscious synthesis of experiences and sounds stockpiled over one’s life.  
 
The composing element for me, is more the structuring of these ephemeral ideas and engineering them into something that sounds interesting as a whole.  So, I suppose when I say the song, “wrote itself”, it was more that the ideas came very quickly, which then had to be sequenced in a way that made a compelling pop song.  
 
Ultimately, I find both processes fascinating and enjoyable.  I’ve always thought that the main tenet of writing good, interesting pop songs is the idea of taking a general formula and manipulating it so you’re doing things that the listener expects, in an unexpected way.

Amira Nader’s vocals add a kind of retro-cinematic sweetness to the chaos. What drew you to her voice, and what does she unlock emotionally in the track that wouldn’t exist otherwise?
“Retro-cinematic sweetness.” That’s super.
I think, historically, I’ve been drawn more to female voices than male (Trish Keenan, Miriam Makeba, Liz Fraser to name a few off the top of my head).  In fact, when the Human Potential project was in its very nascent stages, I wanted it to be a collaboration with a female vocalist.  Alas, this did not come to pass.  And I guess by my 4th or 5th record, I was ready to “de-dick”™ the music a bit.  And the first person I thought of was Amira.  We’ve known each other for quite a long time, stemming from our days back in Brooklyn during which we lived up the street from each other.  However, I didn’t really discover how mellifluous her singing voice was until a few years ago.  So, she ended up singing quite a bit on my last release, “I Write Wedding Songs” and I cajoled her into singing on even more tunes this time around.  Dicks often have a penchant for getting in the way of things, emotionally, so to me, Amira’s voice helps emotionally augment the music and bring more of a dimensionality to the songs.
Additionally, I’ve always loved the energy and beauty (and perhaps, cinematic sweetness) that Linda Sharrock brought to the chaos of Sonny Sharrock’s “Black Woman” (one of my favorite records ever made) so that’s always been a huge inspiration for me.
Eel Sparkles pulls from glam, punky funk, marimba distortion, and even “sloppy, poppy porridge.” What’s the connective tissue between these stylistic leaps or is the disorientation the point?
Well, I didn’t set out to disorient people intentionally, though I suppose that is, occasionally, an interesting characteristic that can be ascribed to certain records.  For me, as I assume it is for most musicians, I am, first and foremost, an avid music listener which undoubtedly informs the music I make.  
 

Ultimately, for me, it’s not about creating something disorienting, but rather implementing new strategies in order to not become stagnant.  This often comes in the form of changing how songs are initially created, be it changing the instrument I’m primarily writing on, etc.  For this record, I initially wrote a lot of bass guitar, which I’d never done.  Additionally, I occasionally began building songs by incorporating samples and manipulating them (time stretching, pitch shifting, etc.), finding little phrases to build off of.  This helped me find chords and sequences I haven’t used in the past, and carried the songs off in a number of different directions I hadn’t before followed.

You’re a drummer, a filmmaker, and an experimental songwriter. How do these identities clash or merge in the studio? Are you directing the songs… or drumming your way into a narrative?

Every medium informs the other.  I feel like I’ve become, perhaps, more adept at songwriting as a result of being a film editor and a director, and vice versa.  Rhythm, building tension, developing a distinct aesthetic…these are all inherent in both filmmaking and music and the tools are only sharpened by time, experience and experimentation.
Your lyrics mention everything from movie-star murderers to ghost arsonists to Tsetse flies. Where do these characters come from? Are they internal mythology, cinematic obsessions, or found artifacts from your subconscious?
They come from many different places.  Dreams, often.  Misheard statements…eavesdropping on others…and yes, cinematic obsessions.
A few Easter eggs: “I Have Always Been Some Human” is a phrase that Hardy Fox (founding member of The Residents) wrote in one of his last interviews before he passed away, though the phrase is not a direct reference to the narrative of the song.  
“The House That Kept Hemingway Alive” was a phrase that I was pretty sure I had dreamt, but I Googled the phrase the next morning to make sure I hadn’t read it anywhere.  Turns out I did dream it, but in researching, I ended up stumbling across an article detailing how the house in which Hemingway shot himself is the only one that isn’t open to the public.  And in the years since his death, it has become a site for fans to make a pilgrimage, trying to sneak onto the property as a vestige of connection to the author.  So, the song is written from Hemingway’s perspective…his attempt to end the pageant of his celebrity by burning his house down.
“Sun-E Corporation Teenage Anthem” and “Do You Remember Albert?” sound like transmissions from alternate pop timelines.Do you think of Eel Sparkles as an alternate-history record, or a commentary on how pop could sound if we broke all the rules?

Wow…thank you for the kind words.  Hmmm…while I’m certainly interested in breaking new sonic ground and flouting any and all rules…I don’t really think about the record in any kind of grand, conceptual way.  It’s really about just making songs that I think are interesting and are enjoyable to write, record and play live.

You’ve played in cult-loved bands, made films, traveled across continents, and survived Dr. Giggles screenings under duress. What personal moment, or ordeal, most shaped the emotional core of this album?

There’s certainly been an uptick in the amount of unfortunate events that have occurred over the past year within my orbit…not to mention things that have played out on the domestic and international stages.  I don’t think I would point to one, specifically, that informed this record, but I suppose my relationships with friends and loved ones have taken new shape as tragedy and more vivid concepts of mortality move increasingly more to center stage.

The album supposedly fills “the long glaring void between Phil Niblock and J Rock,” which might be the best description we’ve ever read. If listeners walk away with one sensation, physical, emotional, or cosmic, what do you hope it is?

Nocturnal emission.