The musical possibility of noise always felt like a significant facet to the L.A. beat scene’s experimental tendencies — a fascination rooted in the lo-fi qualities of early sample-based hip-hop, the glitchy sparks thrown by IDM producers pushing the limits of their software, and the hazy Maxell filter through which this generation of artists remembered the past. Henry Laufer embraced these possibilities in his music when he was barely out of his teens, and maybe that’s why his debut Bad Vibes has a sense of post-adolescent but still youthful mood-swing unsettledness to go with its textural take on abstract beats. It’ll lull you into a feeling of relaxed, meditative warmth at first; field recording-esque opener “Big Feelings” and the Voodoo D’Angelo-as-ether-frolic lead single “Places” use their ambient hiss and haze to bolster laconically skittering beats that might otherwise recede into the background while the basslines carry all the weight. But the vibe shift, while survivable, is something of an emotional ambush. “It Was Whatever” creeps in like a half-remembered astral-jazz patchwork of Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky” and uses its deep reverb to play up an ambivalent melancholy. And that carries through to “Parties” — a Burial-sparse yet tension-escalating downtempo ambient-bass cut which sounds like the opposite of its title, the fidgety isolation of someone observing a rager from a distance and deciding they’d have a bad time if they went. And while Bad Vibes lets some moments of solace into its slow-burn titular conceit — you could be tricked into thinking “Just Us” and its wordless-sigh gaze into a tinkly, delicately bouncy electric piano landscape is actually romantic — its back half shifts from Soulquarian Ambient Works to a smear of clenched-jaw shoegaze atmosphere that ranges from dissasociatively psychedelic (“I Can’t See You I’m Dead”) to metal-shredding drone (“Trapped in a Burning House”) to the kind of sludgy, nightmarish trip-hop that sounds like Mezzanine blown up until you see all the artifacting (“Your Stupid Face”) before it all crumbles to the ground and you’re left quietly combing through the debris (“Seriously”). Maybe that’s why “Same Time,” the breath-catching, glitch-beat and guitar-strumming comedown, sounds like the most startling way to end the album: Shlohmo’s put you through a lot to get back to the state you felt at the start of the record.