Krell operates as How to Dress Well by channeling R&B and pop sources through experimental methods, yielding results that feel simultaneously moving and spectral. The 2011 debut Love Remains encased late-'80s and early-'90s R&B melodies inside impressionistic washes of distortion and reverb that probed nostalgia and memory. Certain How to Dress Well projects place hooks and melodies foremost, as with Care from 2016, produced in part by pop specialist Jack Antonoff; others foreground Krell's avant-garde impulses, such as Anteroom from 2018, which integrated spoken-word segments and suggestions of noise and industrial music. Yet every release has reflected his drive toward connection and greater significance, elements that moved to the foreground on I Am Toward You in 2024.
Born in Colorado, Krell received a B.A. from Cornell College and later earned an M.A. in Philosophy from the New School. While based in Brooklyn he began presenting live experimental work as How to Dress Well through looped vocal layers, then started recording under the name after settling in Berlin. The first How to Dress Well EP, The Eternal Love, appeared in October 2009 as a free blog download, with further EPs following through April 2010. Signing to Lefse Records, Krell issued the first official single, Ready for the World, in July 2010. That October brought the well-received debut album Love Remains, which gathered material from the earlier EPs. He continued with the 2011 Just Once EP, a limited release centered on a late friend whose vinyl sales directed a dollar per copy to a mental illness awareness nonprofit.
Krell returned in 2012 with the more transparent Total Loss, shaped by attempts to stay positive amid hardship and co-produced by Rodaidh McDonald and Forest Swords. The same partnership yielded the ambitious What Is This Heart? in 2014. Two years afterward Care steered the project toward pop, enlisting Bleachers' Jack Antonoff along with Dre Skull, Kara-Lis Coverdale, and CFCF. In June 2018 the Land of the Overflowing Urn EP signaled a return to experimental terrain, followed by the fifth album Anteroom. Prompted by Krell's isolation after relocating to Los Angeles, that record was co-produced by Joel Ford and merged noise, industrial, and techno textures with ethereal pop.
After more than 150 shows over the next two years, Krell completed his PhD in philosophy and sought to restore the immediacy of his earliest music-making. Extended meditation sessions and psychedelic-assisted therapy formed part of that process, experiences that guided the next album begun in 2020 with Ford, CFCF, Anenon's Brian Allen Simon, Trayer Tryon, and Anarthia DLT. Released in May 2024, I Am Toward You foregrounded the free-flowing, confessional dimensions of the project.
