A song brought into the room
How to Dress Well’s “Decisions” first sounded enormous despite appearing to arrive through broken equipment. Tom Krell packed voices into a rough miniature choir, bent the rhythm into an uneasy waltz and allowed hiss and distortion to soften the boundary between melody and noise. The new performance filmed by Yours Truly changes that relationship. Krell is still singing a brief, emotionally unsettled song, but now he is doing so in a studio with a chamber ensemble, where the people producing the sound are visible and the arrangement has physical space around it.
Pitchfork documented the session on July 13, 2011, identifying the clip as a studio take and linking it directly to the orchestral project Just Once. A separate contemporary account from Hypebeast describes a short introductory monologue before the performance begins. Neither detail turns the film into a conventional narrative video. Its central event is the recording itself: Krell and an ensemble testing how much of How to Dress Well’s character remains when a song is no longer protected by its customary veil.
The timing makes that experiment especially clear. Just Once was released digitally on July 12, one day before the performance circulated. Apple Music lists it as a four-song, 16-minute EP, while the label’s more detailed track listing places the 2:56 orchestral version of “Decisions” at the end. The film therefore arrives as part of the release’s first presentation, not as a later attempt to rehabilitate or reinterpret a neglected track.
The earlier life of “Decisions”
“Decisions” predates both the new film and Just Once. When Stereogum introduced the song in March 2010, it was attached to the forthcoming Can’t See My Own Face: The Eternal Love 2 EP. That early notice heard it as a denser and less whispered variation on How to Dress Well’s initial recordings. It also clarified the unusual credit to Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan: Arslan was an aesthetic inspiration, not a guest musician heard on the recording.
The song subsequently became a highlight of Krell’s 2010 debut album, Love Remains. That record collected material from a rapid series of online EPs alongside newer work, establishing How to Dress Well as a project built from the friction between recognizable R&B gestures and deliberately unstable recording. In Pitchfork’s review of the album, Mark Richardson described “Decisions” as a lurching waltz whose stacked voices achieved near-symphonic scale despite the modest recording. The observation matters now because the chamber version does not impose orchestral ambition on a song that lacked it. It makes literal an expansiveness already compressed into the original.
The A.V. Club reached a compatible conclusion from another angle. Its 2010 review of Love Remains characterized the record through fragmentary beats, ambient layers, obscured lyrics and multitracked falsetto, but singled out the cumulative movement of “Decisions” as a pocket symphony. The original recording’s abrasion was therefore doing two jobs at once. It made the music feel private and partially inaccessible, yet it also gave a very short song the apparent depth of something heard through several rooms at once.
That is why “Decisions” is a stronger candidate for this treatment than a song whose identity depends entirely on a beat or an isolated production trick. Its pulse, vocal layers and compressed rise already imply multiple parts moving together. The chamber setting enlarges those parts without requiring the composition to be rewritten beyond recognition.
The limited premise of Just Once
The official Yours Truly Bandcamp page defines Just Once as four orchestral versions and explicitly presents the method as a one-time approach to How to Dress Well’s sound. The sequence consists of orchestral versions of “Suicide Dream 1,” “Suicide Dream 2,” “Suicide Dream 3” and “Decisions.” At 16 minutes, the record is concise enough to function as a concentrated inquiry rather than an announcement that Krell has permanently abandoned the corroded production of Love Remains.
The credits also prevent “orchestral” from becoming an empty marketing adjective. All four songs are credited as written by How to Dress Well, with arrangements by Minna Choi. Nic Atamaniuk recorded and mixed the project at Different Fur Studios, and Pete Swanson mastered it. Those divisions of labor are significant for an artist previously identified so strongly with solitary, inexpensive recording. The new clarity comes from collaboration: an arranger translating Krell’s material for an ensemble, performers realizing those parts and engineers preserving the result.
The EP’s official page dedicates it to Ryan Douglas Hitchon, described there as How to Dress Well’s best friend, who died in August 2010. That dedication supplies necessary context without assigning a fixed meaning to every musical gesture. An advance report from Under the Radar connected the project to Hitchon’s death and presented “Suicide Dream 3” as the new composition around which the memorial release took shape. DMY’s June report on the earlier Yours Truly studio film likewise introduced Krell discussing and performing that song while announcing the July 12 EP.
Yours Truly’s own surviving Vimeo page for the “Suicide Dream 3” film documents how carefully the physical edition was framed. It advertised 1,000 ten-inch copies, a handwritten letter from Krell with each one, access to behind-the-scenes footage and a one-dollar donation from every physical sale to MindFreedom.org. XLR8R’s contemporary release notice also reported the four-track format and the planned July 21 vinyl release through Love Letters Ink. The object, the documentary footage and the music were conceived as parts of the same small-scale presentation.
Clarity without a victory narrative
The obvious way to describe this version of “Decisions” is to say that it reveals the real song beneath the noise. That formulation is tempting, but it underrates what the noise accomplished. On Love Remains, distortion does not merely conceal shortcomings that a better studio might correct. It creates distance, makes language uncertain and causes familiar R&B vocal shapes to resemble memories whose precise details have worn away. Removing that surface changes the emotional logic even when the chords and melody remain.
The chamber performance consequently offers an exchange rather than a simple upgrade. Krell’s voice is easier to evaluate as a live instrument, and the separate components of the arrangement become more legible. The song’s asymmetrical movement feels deliberate instead of accidental; its scale comes from coordinated performers rather than from layers merging inside a damaged recording. In return, it gives up some of the ambiguity that made the original feel as though it might vanish while playing.
That exchange produces real tension. A string arrangement can confer seriousness too easily, especially when applied to music first admired for its homemade strangeness. Just Once avoids the worst of that trap through brevity and explicit limitation. The project does not claim that chamber instruments validate songs previously hidden inside lo-fi production. It asks whether those songs can survive a different kind of exposure, then closes the experiment after four tracks.
“Decisions” supplies the most concise answer. The piece remains unstable and emotionally mixed even when its outlines are clearer. Its stacked vocal conception still suggests a crowd contained within one singer, while the ensemble gives that internal multiplicity an external form. The transformation is substantial, but it does not make the earlier recording redundant. Instead, the two versions illuminate opposite strengths: one turns arrangement into atmosphere; the other turns atmosphere back into arrangement.
A performance that fits its medium
Yours Truly’s role is crucial because this is neither merely a live session nor merely a label advertisement. Pitchfork described Love Letters Ink as the imprint run by the performance blog, and the label’s Bandcamp profile identifies documentary video and boutique vinyl as connected parts of its work. A studio performance could therefore function simultaneously as evidence of musical process, an introduction to the collaborators and a way to give a limited release a public life beyond the physical object.
The “Decisions” film is especially effective in that context. A conventional video could have supplied images to accompany the finished master, leaving the orchestral premise as background information. A studio document makes the premise observable. The change in How to Dress Well’s sound is tied to people sharing a room, not to an anonymous preset labeled “strings.” That distinction gives the performance its archival value.
What emerges is not a definitive “Decisions,” but a second perspective on an unusually compact song. The original demonstrates how grandeur can be suggested through distortion, falsetto and crude recording; the Yours Truly performance tests that grandeur in open air. Released beside Just Once, it catches How to Dress Well at a productive boundary—clearer but not simplified, collaborative but still intimate, and willing to expose the construction of music whose first power came from sounding partially concealed.