Isolating his various traits into easily defined tracks, the Baton Rouge rap star’s new 30-song album suppresses the knotty, uncomfortable nuances that make his best music distinct.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again: The Last Slimeto

The Last Slimeto

YoungBoy Never Broke Again has long positioned himself as an outsider, but he’s more of the music industry than he likes to believe. The 22-year-old Baton Rouge rapper’s latest project, The Last Slimeto, slots right in with some of this year’s other middling major-label rap releases—where the goal isn’t to make the best album possible, but to make an album that preserves an artist’s stardom. Think of Gunna’s DS4Ever, Lil Durk’s 7220, and Future’s I Never Liked You: drawn-out albums that have their fun radio hits but function more like fan service.
Despite an overwhelming 30-song tracklist, The Last Slimeto may be the neatest YoungBoy album, which in a way feels contrary to the point. His best songs are messy: They fluctuate between fickle emotions like pain, anguish, and paranoia, usually with a hint of bitterness bubbling under the surface. On “Make No Sense,” one of the most commercially appealing singles from his 2019 tape AI YoungBoy 2, the celebratory lyrics can’t quite disguise a feeling of being underwhelmed, as if the rush of success hasn’t quite brought the relief he’d expected. Like so many of YoungBoy’s most memorable songs, it’s too complicated and raw to be described with only one emotion.
Meanwhile, too many of the tracks on The Last Slimeto are simplified. They’re types of YoungBoy songs rather than the temperamental excerpts from the confessional booth that made his best work distinct. It’s music that aims to appeal to everyone by isolating the traits of YoungBoy’s persona into crisp, easily defined tracks. If you prefer lovestruck YoungBoy, here is “My Go To,” an unromantic and chemistry-free duet with Kehlani set to a generic pop groove. If you’re partial to the YoungBoy who sulks on top of gloomy acoustic guitars, then “I Know” is that and nothing more. If you follow YoungBoy’s life like a reality television show, check his Lil Durk diss “I Hate YoungBoy,” where the rapping is solid but the over-the-top aggression is more attuned to YoungBoy the meme than the person. They’re dumbed-down YoungBoy songs—not an entirely new trend, but more visible than ever on The Last Slimeto.
On an album nearly as long as a movie, you’ll have to dig a little to find the meticulous details that make YoungBoy songs great. “Fuck Da Industry” is similar in spirit to “I Hate YoungBoy,” except that the beefs and drama are secondary to how seamlessly his flows transform and tempos shift: In one instant he’s in a rageful holler, the next trying to calmly croon as he holds back another outburst. His verse on “Home Ain’t Home” swings skillfully between reflection and regret, though Rod Wave’s melodramatic wails break the mood. On “7 Days,” his writing and vocals finally click at the same time; when he belts out, “I ain’t tryna say a thing, nigga, I can barely think/I said I quit for seven days and then I’m back on drank,” the words are defeated but the rumble in his voice makes it sound like he’s fighting with himself. That’s a YoungBoy track right there: Bring a different aspect into focus and it’s a whole new song.
But moments like that shouldn’t feel like anomalies on a YoungBoy album. The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate, even as competitors have tried. Commercially, that’s not necessarily a problem: DS4Ever, 7220, and I Never Liked You were similarly muted and each of those records are well on their way to becoming the most financially successful solo albums by their respective artists to date. In the past YoungBoy was a breath of fresh air because he scoffed at playing the game. Now that he’s gotten access, it’s proving hard to pass up.


The latest tape from the 20-year-old rapper is dense and mystic. MAVI delivers revelations from the shadows, concealed and mysterious, in search of fresh air and sunlight.

Let the Sun Talk

MAVI is a kid studying neuroscience at Howard University, who is asking existential questions in his raps during his spare time. There is something profoundly mystic—even shamanistic—about how his raps attempt to bridge gaps between the mind, body, and soul, best encapsulated by a lyric from his song “moonfire”: “Cap trapped in my schooling, rap asking for time to spit/Unwinding brain, mind, and consciousness.” Some scientists believe that the same region of the brain that processes language processes spirituality as well, and MAVI seems to be tapping into both at once. “I try to use hip-hop as a conduit to do something, rather than being a composer of hip-hop songs,” he said in April. “My songs are statements, and poems, and equations of their own.” It’s effective to think of his music in each of these ways: as affirmations of deep-rooted personal ideology, enigmatic and beautifully lyrical poetry, and equations to be balanced and then figured out.
Released for download on his website and uploaded to SoundCloud as a single, 32-minute-long track, Let the Sun Talk is a young sage discovering the full extent of his powers. These are revelations from the shadows, concealed and mysterious, in search of fresh air and sunlight. “We be hanging in the dark/We surprise ’em with the prowess/If it ain’t to give a spark we’d be still hidden,” he raps on “daylight savings.” The most recent stage of his music, he has said, is about teaching and learning black aestheticism, and the album’s terms and conditions are a mantra on what it means to be “pro-black.” He has classified it as three movements of four songs broken up by interludes, but it can be taken as a lesson in form: As one long song, the album feels limitless, like you’re wading into his inner monologue.
MAVI started piecing things together in October 2017 with the mixtape No Roses, full of fleeting but dense songs in pursuit of a clear head. His heavy raps and unsteady flows were supported by a beyond-his-years insightfulness. The names frequently associated with his music are Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, and for good reason: they too had this same knack for silver-tongued philosophy as teens. Not only have both co-signed MAVI’s ponderous songs and produced a couple of them (on this album), but his music shares traits with theirs. Let the Sun Talk exists in the same loopy, lo-fi realm that governed Some Rap Songs and Tears of Joy. What distinguishes MAVI’s music is its heady, nonlinear flow, as if he’s performing incantations. In the years since No Roses, he’s grown far more comfortable when lost in thought.
Some writerly rappers are so obsessive about cramming words together that their rhymes lose their shape. (A self-possessed technician like Logic is so concerned with the formatting of his bars that they’re nearly soulless.) MAVI’s raps have an understanding of capacity and intervals and margin that eludes many seasoned rap veterans. “‘What kinda songs you make?’/I make the kind you gotta read, baby/I leave the silence you can see baby/I weave the darkness you can hear baby/I leave my carcass in the field, baby/I parse my garden on the real daily/And you can sense it,” he explains on “sense.” It’s a spatial awareness that shows great feel and balance. He doesn’t sacrifice meaning for empty tongue-twisting displays. Instead, their equilibrium is dependent on how layered and carefully organized the writing is. (Fittingly, all of his lyrics are available fully transcribed on his website.)
Choruses are few and far between, and none of them could be considered “hooks,” which only feeds the stream-of-consciousness flux of his bars. Sometimes he raps like he’s foraging for some sort of spiritual nourishment; sometimes he raps like he’s leaving something behind for someone else to find and decipher. The crypticness can make these songs feel like riddles, but attempting to unpack all they have to offer is crucial to the experience. They start to crack open eventually, and out come MAVI’s fundamental code of ethics. “I’ll take the nigga hitting cars up over cops any day/Who more often called upon for guarding all the chocolate babies?” he asks on the stark “ghost in the shell.” On “selflove”: “Offer free smoke to all the niggas behind a me too/To my niggas: we ain’t free until she free too/To my sisters: we ain’t free until they free too.” Each bar on Let the Sun Talk is building toward something greater.
In the album’s waning moments, MAVI raps, “Can’t wait until my raps is more than stashes for my secrets.” It’s interesting to imagine what his songs might sound like if they were more open and direct or they took more of a narrative arc, but what they lack in clarity they make up for in mysticism. Let the Sun Talk rewards (and often demands) close listening and there are instances where parsing the album can be like trying to unscramble a coded message in another language. There are seemingly many answers buried within it, but only you will know when you’ve found yours.


The Canadian power-pop duo take underappreciated micro-genres for a test drive in a bid to make music that’s as funny as their lyrics.

Saturday the 14th EP

Partner, the endearingly dirtbaggy duo of Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, lie somewhere on the spectrum between Tegan and Sara and Bill & Ted. Their 2017 debut, In Search of Lost Time, paid joyous homage to pot, pussy, and the golden age of power-pop, with wickedly funny songs about lusting after lesbian jocks and hitting the supermarket while too stoned to function. Lost Time flew under the radar in the United States, but at home in Canada, the record netted Partner a nomination for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize.
A singular gift for humor is at the heart of Partner’s work. Their new EP, Saturday the 14th, takes this project a step further; the music itself is now as critical to Partner’s comedy as their lyrics. On these five songs, Partner devote their considerable skill to shining up underappreciated sounds, departing from the stylistic uniformity of their debut to explore several distinctly lowbrow micro-genres.
The lead single, “Long & McQuade,” is the sound of Nirvana as rendered by Kurt Cobain-worshipping suburban teenagers. With no life experience to speak of, these aspiring rockers are reduced to constructing an epic song around a trip to Long & McQuade, Canada’s staid answer to Guitar Center. There, they drop their allowance on flame-spackled guitar straps and hog the demo instruments. Mercifully, Caron and Niles have more charisma and stronger musical chops than the dweebs they’re skewering, making for a rewarding parody. “Stoned Thought” is more subtle, plumbing elements from the iPod of a weed-loving college freshman: a fried funk bassline here, a smattering of bongo drums there, some whistling pipe-organ keyboard for good measure. Mirroring the narrator’s attention deficit, each instrument holds its own for a phrase or two at a time before disappearing into the smoke.
The overtly goofy “Tell You Off” opens with an orchestra of barnyard sounds and bounces along on an impish, folksy rhythm. It recalled a band from the primordial ooze of Canadian childhood—was it Barenaked Ladies? The giddy Maritime folk of Great Big Sea? Finally, I recognized the unmistakable influence of the Arrogant Worms, the seminal Canadian comedy-rockers whose hits, like “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate,” made them minor national icons. It’s a treat to see Partner, like Amy Nelson and Captain Tractor before them, working in a distinctly Canadian tradition of musical comedy.
If all of this sounds haphazard, or even sloppy, fear not. Just as Caron and Niles grounded Lost Time’s randy humour in masterful construction, they steer Saturday the 14th with careful attention to the intricacies of maligned genres. The jam-band favorites of collegiate stoners, the meanderings of amateur garage bands, the niche comedy derived from Maritime shanties; none of these are critical bait. But all contain goofy, genuine pleasures, which Partner mines to mostly glorious effect. The exception is “Fun for Everyone (Minions),” which fuses the musical stylings of pre-YouTube flash animation with the ubiquitous meme of Facebook moms. It’s stiff and shticky, in contrast to the genuine warmth of the other, funnier songs.
The final track, “Les ailes d’un ange,” doesn’t bear a wisp of humour on its surface. Lyrically, musically, and linguistically—physical copies of the EP include a version sung in English—it is an unabashed borrowing of Céline Dion’s bilingual power balladry. We hear the requisite soaring guitar solo on the bridge and the requisite soaring key change on the final chorus, but never a wink at the song’s origins, nor a smirk at the sound’s inherent corniness. Nestling lyrics about assumption and damnation on a soft bed of piano and gently insistent strings, Partner drives in Dion’s lane for fun, allowing themselves to be swept away in her sparkling grandeur.
Listening to “Les ailes d’un ange,” I recalled a moment in Carl Wilson’s indispensable contribution to the 33 ⅓ series, Let’s Talk About Love, in which Wilson, a devoted Dion hater, finds himself weeping at her Vegas residency. “The songs of devotion began to probe at the open sore of my own recent marital separation, and even coaxed a few tears,” he wrote. “For a few moments, I got it.” He cringes, recalling “what a subcultural snob I was… how vigilant I was against being taken in—unaware that I was also refusing an invitation out.” Rather than resting in the mode of polished power-pop, Partner have written themselves an invitation out of their comfort zone—and perhaps yours.


The Portishead singer and conductor (and film-music icon) Krzysztof Penderecki deliver a surprisingly disquieting take on Henryk Górecki’s canonical symphony, a piece so familiar that it’s often taken for granted.

Beth Gibbons / Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra / Krzysztof Penderecki: Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)

We will never be done with Henryk Górecki, the Polish composer whose Symphony No. 3 won some obscure cultural lottery by entering the popular consciousness in a way 99.999 percent of new orchestral works do not. The work is quite simply deathless: Just three years ago, avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson offered his own version. Stetson, normally associated with more pitiless and hair-raising stuff, like the score for the modern horror classic Hereditary, bowed before the solemnity and the soft curves of Gorecki’s piece with a faithful interpretation, as does nearly everyone who approaches it.
And now comes Beth Gibbons—the voice of Portishead, and thus, by extension, the purveyor of trip-hop’s most vivid bad moods. Gibbons is not a powerful singer in the athletic sense—she’s never going to threaten the structural integrity of a chandelier. But her grainy, sour wail, coated with streaks of dried spilled coffee and nicotine stains, strikes deep chords of clammy fear, of desperation, of vulnerability.
Her voice, from the moment it arrives over the breath-bated haze of strings in the first movement, is arresting and close to your ear. Symphony No. 3 has a nightmarish undertone that tends to get smoothed out in dulcet recordings—one of the texts is meant to be the sound of a woman calling out for her murdered child—and Gibbons brings that squirming danger right to the surface.
Part of the tension comes from hearing her untrained voice scale these rocky heights. Her vibrato, tight and trilling and barely controlled, sounds an awful lot like someone fighting off a panic attack. This would get her dismissed from a traditional opera audition, probably, but it is magnificently effective at sending raw shudders through what can be a pretty well-worn work.
That second movement, in particular, has been wrung dry through a few too many TV spots—and yet again, here, when Gibbons sings, it feels positively Gothic. Gibbons learned the Polish text, despite not speaking a word of the language, and she manages to clear that hurdle impressively, too; there is no distance, no remove in her performance. She is accompanied by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, himself an icon of Polish classical music (that’s him you heard on The Shining and The Exorcist) and the orchestra seems to feed off her brittle, searching interpretation. The sheer intensity of the string playing here produces a diamond-like hardness, a glittering beauty that feels like it could cut you. It fairly thrums with nerves, which is a remarkable achievement for a piece that for decades has been associated with a sort of classical easy listening.
One of the reasons Symphony No. 3 remains evergreen is that there is nothing remotely “modernist” about it—whatever the term might mean to you, whether it’s fragmentary collage or sharp fierce angles or a complete lack of sentimentality. Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible of mid-20th-century modernism, allegedly shouted “Merde!” from the audience during the symphony’s premiere. It is flowery, it moves in big billowing breaths, and it could have been written in a time before there were cars driving on paved roads, maybe by Anton Bruckner or Gustav Mahler. It has long since outlived its disdain, but there is still something magnificent about what Gibbons, Penderecki, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra have accomplished here: They have managed to make the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs feel dark, even dangerous.


The Io Echo singer’s debut solo album expands on the gothy, mythical undertones of her earlier work.

Thalassa

The music Ioanna Gika made as one half of dream-pop duo Io Echo was watery and celestial, her crooned vocals swimming through a pastiche of synth, koto harp, and violin. Their style was dubbed “New Orientalism” by some, as she and her musical partner Leopold Ross donned kimonos in music videos and released songs titled “Shanghai Girls” and “Tiananmen Square.” The surface-level gesturing at pan-Asian culture was culturally insensitive, as well as a questionable musical choice: Mining influences without a clear purpose often led to songs that felt muddled and directionless.
Gika’s debut solo album, Thalassa, thankfully abandons the orientalizing and instead takes its name from a Greek goddess of the sea. Here, Gika expands on the gothy, mythical undertones of her earlier work, wisely foregrounding her strongest asset: her voice. At once delicate and looming, it establishes a gauzy eeriness that underscores wistful songs with lyrics about crumbling cities and rising seafoam. She wrote the album in Greece during “a period of familial grief and romantic dissolution,” and themes of loneliness and romantic strife provide a through line.
Throughout the album, Gika’s winding falsetto cuts through propulsive, pointillist production reminiscent of video game soundtracks or Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network. On highlights “Roseate” and “Out of Focus,” the juxtaposition of her voice against jabbing synths and staccato drums creates a thrill of dissonance and momentum, a surreal dream where molasses flows like water. Slower songs like “Swan” display her vocal dexterity, allowing her to pivot to a husky smoulder that adds emotional weight to lyrics like, “I'm in love here, but I don't belong.”
Gika’s music requires commitment to convincingly pull off. The baroque imagery of her lyrics gesture at grand sentiments—falling statutes, golden dawns, and headless ostriches symbolize unrequited love and burning longing. The arrangements swell and pulsate. Thalassa lacks the necessary conviction, particularly on its latter half. Gika is clearly experimenting, pasting together combinations of synths, strings, chimes, and vocals that evoke the searing darkness of Zola Jesus one minute and the meandering, layered instrumentals of Solange’s When I Get Home the next. This playfulness results in a diverse array of textures and lends the album a sense of potential. But because she never fully commits to one mood or genre, it is difficult to feel fully immersed. Gika’s songwriting is sometimes too vague to resonate emotionally, and her delivery, though gorgeous, never feels fully unencumbered.
There are certainly moments that get close. The layered vocals on the title track are lovely, and the droning repetition of “New Geometry” is magnetic. But, unlike its namesake deity, Thalassa never quite masters the ferocious power of crashing waves nor the beguiling, mysterious vastness of a calm sea.


London's Idjut Boys, the duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonell, deploy heavy dub FX on their mischievous house sides while their remixes are often rendered in a delicious haze of reverb and delay. Versions nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals.

Versions

Each generation comes upon Jamaican dub and its stoned spacetime elasticity in their own way. Twenty-first century dubstep fans might have traced that wobble back to the likes of Jah Shaka’s soundsystem while alternative rock fans in the '90s learned about such music thanks to the likes of Tortoise and the Lee "Scratch" Perry cover of Grand Royal. But dance music fans were well aware of the mind-altering properties of dub since the days of disco. While hot singles were on the A-side, club DJs often spun the more adventurous and unfamiliar B-sides for their dancers, as that's where producers like François K., Jellybean Benitez, Walter Gibbons, and Tee Scott (to name just a few) went deep into dub elements on their remixes. And as the '80s emerged, such experiments got higher and wilder, the ideal soundtrack for the wee hours at the Paradise Garage.
A great many of these experimental American dubs were compiled by Dimitri from Paris on the heady Night Dubbin’ comp, which boasted an hourlong mix from London's Idjut Boys. Ever since their start in the '90s, the duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonell have deployed heavy dub FX on their mischievous house sides, But when the duo finally got around to their noodly debut album, 2012's Cellar Door, that spacey, playful side of them took a backseat to placid, at times flaccid, instrumentals. Versions, presented now as a complete overhaul and re-imagining of Cellar Door, nudges their Balearic soft rock tendencies back toward their dubby fundamentals, offering drastically warped takes on that underwhelming album.
Their dub of two-minute acoustic guitar sketch "Rabass"—now as "Ambient Rab"—inverts proportions, the acoustic guitar now swinging in and out of earshot amid copious amounts of delay, with great gobs of bass pushed to the fore. But even at twice the length, it leaves me as unimpressed as the original. Things fare far better on the piano-led "Kenny Dub Headband", which isn’t so surprising in that "One for Kenny" was already the original album’s standout. The driving piano provided by Norwegian jazz musician Bugge Wesseltoft on the original (named for deceased British DJ Kenny Hawkes) now gets run through all manner of effects, making the Steinway sound monstrous as other details: scratch guitar, handclaps, electric gurgles, and snare drums lurch in and out of the mix. By dilating the track to about twice its length (nearly 10 minutes), it gives the Idjuts an ample playground in which to run wild.
The longest track on Versions is the 11-minute "Another Bird". But rather than swing wildly like "Kenny Dub Headband", this is a more gentle, blissed-out Balearic ride, reminiscent of the Idjuts’ subtle and effective remix of this slow-chugger. Full of guitars arcing towards the horizon, it’s perfect for manning a sailboat at sunset. Or as Phil Sherburne recently put it on a round-up of all things Balearic: "If you're not full-on levitating by the end, you need to check the settings on your stereo."
"Going Down"’s dub benefits from a few minutes more than the original, which got diluted by the vocals and guitar. Here the Idjuts accentuate the darker turns that got lost amid the nylon-string strums of the original, but it takes a few minutes before the druggy effects take hold. When it does, they push into a far stranger headspace, the echoed female vocal asking "Why you going down to hell for love?" particularly effective. And while the driving beat of "Love Hunter" was the previous album’s other highlight, in the dub the duo scale it back by three minutes. In narrowing the space and pushing the hand percussion and all its Echoplexed permutations up in the mix, as well as distorting the guitar into alien timbres, the track tarts to resemble the strange productions of Arthur Russell circa "Schoolbell / Treehouse", suggesting yet another world of echo still to be discovered.


Three weeks after We Don’t Trust You, Future and Metro return with another 90-minute cinematic project that’s mostly the same but a little bit better.

Future / Metro Boomin: WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU

WE STILL DON’T TRUST YOU

Earlier in their careers, Future and Metro Boomin always sounded committed to bringing the best and the weirdest out of each other. The menace in the pits of Metro’s beats matched Future’s drug tales and bouts of dead-eyed hedonism, and darker, stranger variants on that chemistry kept things exciting. Whether it’s the seething snap of an “I Serve the Base,” the creaking minimalism of a “My Collection,” or the fidgety pomp of a “Jumpman,” the duo always pushed the boundaries of mainstream trap in seedier directions.
And that was the biggest issue with their first official collaborative album We Don’t Trust You. They still crafted a few mean sleeper hits, but outside of the rich-guy rapper beef simmering in between the lines, their edges had dulled. For all the buildup, too many of those songs took the Capital-R Rap Album prompt too seriously, rehashing old ideas in grander, blander ways. The double-disc sequel album, We Still Don’t Trust You, is a more encouraging heel turn. Future and Metro sharpen some of that bite by bringing their ears to a brighter, slightly sappier space.
It’s still familiar ground for both of them. Future, in particular, is back in the emotional headspace that fueled so much of HNDRXX, swirling between flexing from his throne and lovesick come-ons. He still relishes playing the villain on occasion—“One Big Family” is about juggling upwards of 20 women at a time, three of whom share the same name—but there’s just as much tear-soaked reflection over exes and post-coital shopping sprees. On the neon-bright “Drink N Dance,” he croons about racing Maybachs and throwing lavish sex parties in Abu Dhabi like he just found a rare foil Pokemon card. Later, on “Mile High Memories,” he’s looking for silver linings in a lover who might be doing him dirty, belting “You can fuck on him as long as you thinkin’ ‘bout me,” trying and failing to sound above it all. It isn’t often that Future gets the short end of the stick, and hearing him jump between player and patsy, sometimes in the same song, remains electrifying.
For Metro’s part, he’s actually found a way to turn the Achilles’ heel of his post-COVID output—production that sounds too polished and anonymous—into a strength. The title track veers toward synth-pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Weeknd’s Dawn FM, complete with Abel mocking his old label OVO in falsetto (“They shooters making TikToks!”). Several songs dip into various shades of R&B, from the new-age Isley Brothers smoothness of “All to Myself” to “Gracious,” which sounds like a stripped-back version of the kind of plugg&b that Summrs or Highway would drool over.
Don’t get it twisted: Metro still has plenty of the brooding maximalist thumpers that powered both 2022’s Heroes & Villains and Metro’s soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse, but it’s a bit looser, more willing to explore and have fun slightly removed from Metro and Future’s comfort zones. At the very least, none of it sounds as forced or unnecessary as when he conducted an actual orchestra through some of his greatest hits.
It’s also nearly 30 minutes longer than the already overstuffed original, which makes the slow sections drag even more. Future and Metro shine brightest when they’re shrugging their way through the prettiest or nastiest music you’ve ever heard, but a handful of songs are just lethargic, existing solely to spin their designer wheels. Cuts on the 18-track first disc like “This Sunday” and “Came to the Party” overcome generic beats because Future sells his jet-setting and chauvinism just well enough to earn a chuckle or two (I laughed at Diddy’s name being audibly omitted from a joke about The Notorious B.I.G. on the former). But the seven songs that make up the second disc mostly pale in comparison, back to the self-serious recycling of the first album.
We Still Don’t Trust You is in an odd position compared to We Don’t Trust You, and that may or may not be by design. Kendrick Lamar turned the heat up on a decade-long rap cold war with Drake during his appearance on “Like That,” and a handful of the album’s main and guest verses were fueled by that roiling sense of animosity, even if it boils down to a bunch of rich musicians jabbing at each other for sport. But outside of a handful of snippy soundbites from The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky and a candid verse from feature-killer-turned-beef-dodger J. Cole, the feud isn’t the binding agent it previously was. Instead of trying to manufacture a viral moment within a long-awaited collab from two icons of 2010s rap, the tenuous trust in We Still Don’t Trust You is aimed mostly at the lovers instead of the fighters. It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak.

Epic / Freebandz / Republic / Boominati Worldwide


Working with pop architect Andrew Watt, the agelessly incendiary rocker unfurls a parade of timeless archetypes: profane punk, seedy crooner, lovable curmudgeon. It’s Iggy Pop as a jukebox musical.

Every Loser

Iggy Pop’s improbable survival has been part of his act for years—way back in 1996, Trainspotting found the punchline to a joke about the perennially bare-chested rocker in the fact that he was still very much alive. Today, the human being born James Newell Osterberg, Jr., age 75, remains uncommonly lithe and spry, with a million-dollar smile. But for much of the past decade, rock’s eternal real wild child has been slowly crowd-surfing his way into the sunset—he ended the last Stooges album with a pair of battle-scarred, soul-searching ballads and ventured deeper into existential reflection on 2016’s Post Pop Depression, while 2019’s Free suggested his periodic detours into after-hours jazz experimentation had become a more natural end state. All the while, Iggy has seemed perfectly content to ride out his golden years in his adopted home of Miami and play the role of punk-rock priest, handing out blessings to underground upstarts like Sleaford Mods and Chubby and the Gang through his BBC Radio 6 show.
But as history has shown time and again, any assumptions of Iggy’s demise are premature, and with Every Loser, he tosses away the gold watch to reapply his dog collar. Like almost every Iggy Pop comeback album before it, Every Loser was created in close collaboration with a savvy big-name producer—though, unlike past compatriots like David Bowie, Bill Laswell, Don Was, and Josh Homme, this one resides far outside Iggy’s usual avant-rock milieu and age cohort. Andrew Watt won the 2021 Producer of the Year Grammy for his work with mega-stars like Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Ed Sheeran, but he’s a modern pop architect with a classic-rock heart: After helping Post Malone get in touch with his inner George Harrison, Watt has emerged as a Rick Rubin-like guru for veteran rockers (Eddie Vedder, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne) in need of revitalization.
For Every Loser, Watt doesn’t try to turn Iggy Pop into something he’s not but rather gives him the space to be every Iggy Pop he wants to be. Over the course of its 11 tracks, we’re treated to a parade of iconic Iggy archetypes: the profane punk, the seedy underworld Sinatra, the Euro-bound futurist, the lovable curmudgeon, and (via the Warhol-inspired comedic interlude “The News for Andy”) the world’s coolest infomercial pitchman. Watt effectively approaches the album as an Iggy jukebox musical—a shiny, over-the-top, but briskly entertaining celebration of its subject—while surrounding him with a supporting cast of acolytes (including GNR’s Duff McKagan, Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro and Eric Avery, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, and the late Taylor Hawkins) eager to do their hero proud.
Watt’s platinum touch can be felt even in the album’s most unruly rockers: Iggy has probably written a thousand songs as petulant as the opening “Frenzy,” but this one gets blown up to stadium proportions with a chorus chant fit for a terrace full of soccer hooligans, along with turbo-charged riffs that remold Fun House into nu-metal. Likewise, “Modern Day Rip Off” retrofits Raw Power with funk finesse, yielding a piano-powered rager about how Iggy can’t really party anymore (“I ran out of blow a long time ago/I can't smoke a J or my guts fly away”). But as that song demonstrates, there’s a knowing humor coursing through the record that undercuts the cranky-old-man caricature. A tribute to his beloved Miami, “New Atlantis” has the sort of breezy, sun-kissed vibe you’d expect from an elder rocker singing about his retirement destination, but Iggy’s peculiar words of affection (“a beautiful whore of a city”) and visions of its imminent, climate-change-induced obliteration render the song the anti-“Kokomo.” He saves the album’s best joke for “Neo Punk”: Any aging anarchist could write a sneering two-minute blitz about the dilution of punk into celebrity fashion-spread fodder, but only Iggy could get face-tatted tabloid fixture Travis Barker to agree to play on it. (“I guess he walked right into that one,” Iggy quipped in a recent interview, though to his credit, Barker responds with the sort of furious, snare-busting display that proves he doesn’t just wear Black Flag shirts for show.)
There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances. The synth-streaked “Strung Out Johnny” channels Iggy’s Berlin phase with Bowie, both in its “China Girl”-esque sophistication and its addiction-ravaged lyrics, which function as a sobering sequel to the orgy of excess celebrated on “Lust for Life.” Free of the doom and gloom that marked Iggy's previous attempts to get serious, the elegiac sway of “Morning Show” practically renders it as Iggy’s answer to U2’s “One.” And fittingly for a partnership that began when Watt enlisted Iggy for a feature on the next Morrissey album, Every Loser ends somewhere between the Smiths and the Stooges on “The Regency,” a surge of shimmering jangle that nonetheless goes for the jugular. In its tug-of-war between grace and grit, the song is a distillation of Iggy’s existence—the sound of a celebrity punk who’s survived long enough to be welcomed into the showbiz establishment, yet still very much an outsider even when he’s inside, and still game to burn it all down from within.


Debut album from balladeer Marissa Nadler, whose luxurious, resonant soprano are reminiscent of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval and cabaret stars such as Marlene Dietrich.

Marissa Nadler: Ballads of Living and Dying

Ballads of Living and Dying

Over the past couple of centuries, the definition of "ballad" has been stretched to include virtually any slow-tempo sentimental song, even on those occasions when it merely means Tommy Lee is coming out from behind his kit to play the piano. But once upon a time the word indicated a more specific, codified form of verse. In the days before widespread literacy, a ballad was a dramatic (frequently tragic) story-poem that functioned as something of an oral newspaper, constructed simply with recurring rhymes so that it could be easily remembered and repeated. And on her captivating debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler does her small part to return balladry to its vivid and illustrious past.
On the surface this might not sound like a compelling proposition, but fortunately Nadler has the sort of voice that you'd follow straight to Hades. Her luxurious, resonant soprano is immediately transfixing, and throughout these songs it envelops the listener like a dense fog rolling in off the moors. Nadler's vocals are highly reminiscent of Hope Sandoval's-- with perhaps the faintest glimmer of the languid phrasing of cabaret chanteuse Marlene Dietrich-- and her unadorned arrangements recall the rain-weary solitude of early Leonard Cohen met with Mazzy Star or Opal at their most hazily narcotic.
Nadler is clearly savvy enough in her material to know that a true collection of ballads must include a body count, and the most obviously successful auld school example here is her arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Annabelle Lee". As you might recall from junior high English, this is a classic tale of ill-starred love with a stretched-by-your-grave finale that fits the ballad form to perfection, and Nadler's melodic rendition here is flawless. And poor Annabelle Lee is not this album's only casualty; there's also "Virginia", which respectfully chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf, as well as dreamier, more ambiguous songs like "Undertaker" and "Box of Cedar" which certainly contain whispers of foreboding for their subjects.
Each song on the album comes lightly-dressed, usually borne along by little more than Nadler's voice, her fingerpicked guitars, and ornamental flourishes from the occasional accordion, autoharp, or blurry wisp of feedback. On "Hay Tantos Muertos", one the album's loveliest tracks, Nadler branches out from the strict balladic format, quoting lines from Pablo Neruda's haunting "No Hay Olvido" ("There Is No Forgetting") in a manner resembling a traditional Portuguese fado, and on "Days of Rum" she busts out a banjo and takes an enchanting turn at a Dock Boggs-style country blues.
It's worth noting that, aside from the Poe and Neruda quotes, all of these songs are original compositions rather than the traditional works they appear. Throughout the album Nadler writes and performs with a weathered maturity that belies her young age. In fact, several tracks ("Mayflower May", "Days of Rum", "Fifty-Five Falls") seem to be narrated from the perspective of older women looking back upon the adventures and mistakes of their youth. Also an accomplished visual artist, Nadler's lyrics showcase a perceptive eye and a genuine empathy for her creations; and when coupled with that intoxicating voice the resulting landscape is one you may want to get lost in for a century or two.


On what is billed as his final studio album, the late reggae legend is treated as an afterthought, buried in the mix beneath an incongruous blend of electronic styles.

King Perry

Late dub reggae godhead Lee “Scratch” Perry flung his creative moon dust so far and wide over six decades of music-making that pinning him down is impossible. King Perry, a posthumous entry in a discography that numbers hundreds of recordings, and apparently his final work, does little to untangle the thorny knot of Perry’s genius as producer, songwriter, singer, and musical mystic. But it does serve as a reminder—albeit a rather muted one—of Perry’s late popularity as a guest vocalist, a position he embraced on records by everyone from the Beastie Boys to the Orb.
King Perry is, in name, a Lee “Scratch” Perry solo record. But the album’s brash electronic instrumentation, from Grammy-nominated producer Daniel Boyle and Bristol maverick Tricky, have the unfortunate effect of making Perry feel like a guest on his own record, his voice often buried low in the mix, where it battles in vain against ear-rinsing sonics.
Perry was always open to new music, be it punk in the 1970s or ambient house in the 2000s. But King Perry’s experiments in blending reggae with electronica, breakbeats, and pumping 4/4 beats ring a little false. On “Jesus Life,” Perry’s gentle chitchat sounds lost and unloved amid an ominous electronic bass line, drum machine thud and (uncredited) Tricky guest vocal, a strand of saffron thrown into an unforgivingly thick musical stew.
“Green Banana” takes a further step backward, making both Perry and Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder—a potentially inspired vocal pairing—sound like they’ve wandered into the wrong studio, where some young punk is laying down acidic breakbeats. A lot of the album’s production, for all its genre-bending, is dull, and it doesn’t help that Perry’s vocals are borderline unintelligible, his gentle croak unable to compete against the studio noise.
This, more than anything, is King Perry’s downfall. Scratch may be best known as a producer—for Bob Marley, the Congos and the Clash, to name but three. But he was also an enchanting vocalist, his magical tone imparting a wistful melancholy on later albums like 2019’s Rainford. This, perhaps, could have been the case here. Perry’s vocal on “Goodbye,” apparently the last song he recorded, should be an emotional shoo-in. But its impact is deadened when overlaid with a prominent drum beat and humming synth line. There’s a fond farewell in there somewhere, but you have to strain like hell to hear it.
King Perry rings with the call of missed opportunity. Boyle did a decent retrogressive production job on Perry’s 2014 album Back on the Controls, and King Perry contains the germ of what could have been achieved by surrounding Scratch with modern production and guest vocalists. “100lbs of Summer” is a green shoot of summer-blushed pop reggae, thanks to a mournful horn line, rolling bass, and what sounds like genuine chemistry between Perry and London singer GreenTea Peng. That congenial feeling extends to Peng’s other appearance on the album, “Jah People in Blue Sky,” a sprawling, but very charming, digi-dub number with an ear-worm chorus and genuine momentum, while the guest-free “King of the Animals” locks into a satisfyingly hypnotic reggae groove that actually leaves some space for Perry to freestyle over.
It’s not enough, though. An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.


The Melbourne jangle-pop quartet hits all the right ‘80s pleasure points with an understated sense of humor and anthemic songcraft.

Golden Doubt

In an era when listeners can sample new music like sommeliers, slurping up tracks and spitting them out after three-second snap judgements, it makes evermore sense for a fledgling band to put their strongest song in the track-one/side-one lead-off position. And on their first proper stateside release, Melbourne quartet Quivers fully abide by that rule by opening Golden Doubt with “Gutters of Love,” an instant anthem that charts its journey from heartache to healing by gradually building from a solitary strummer to a skyscraping chorale. It’s the sound of bedsit 1980s college-rock thrust into the big-tent environs of 21st-century indie, like a Go-Betweens with Coachella-conquering ambitions or a Smiths with greater pub sing-along appeal. And it’s absolutely glorious.
Alas, “Gutters of Love” also sets a mighty high bar that the rest of Golden Doubt doesn’t attempt to clear again, as Quivers are largely content to cruise instead of soar. But even when the band is working within more modest proportions, they still exude a disarming charm. Quivers began as a therapeutic outlet for singer/guitarist Sam Nicholson, who spent much of 2018’s homespun debut, We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses, mourning his brother’s sudden death in a free-diving accident. After Nicholson and fellow guitarist Michael Panton relocated from their native Hobart to Melbourne, Quivers solidified into a four-piece with bassist Bella Quinlan and drummer Holly Thomas. While little has fundamentally changed about Nicholson’s songwriting since that first record, the addition of Quinlan and Thomas’ lustrous harmonies provides a welcome blast of sunshine to break up Nicholson’s rainy-day ruminations and point a brighter light on his understated sense of humor.
Golden Doubt abounds with the sort of effortlessly tuneful jangle-pop you’d expect from a band that released a full-album cover of R.E.M.’s Out of Time last year. They’re the kind of songs you swear you’ve heard before but can never quite place. On “You’re Not Always on My Mind,” you’ll hear traces of the Chills’ Kiwi-rock gallop, Echo and the Bunnymen’s psychedelicized guitar melodies, and the Cure’s mid-’80s shimmer. But the song is ultimately a showcase for Nicholson’s wry romanticism: When he sings “you’re not always on my mind,” he swiftly answers it with “just mostly all the time,” crystallizing the push-pull between outsized passion and self-preservation playing out across his lyric sheet.
While it hits all the right ‘80s-indie pleasure points, Golden Doubt is perpetually torn between reveling in bygone sounds and trying to outrun the specter of the past. Over a funereal drum beat, “Videostores” bids farewell to its titular subject alongside other outmoded phenomena like payphones and horse-drawn transportation. But the song isn’t so much looking back as trudging forward, as it reluctantly acknowledges the impracticality of clinging to days gone by, be it through obsolete technology or memories of extinguished flames. Another track puts a finer point on it: On the doo-wop-tinged “Nostalgia Will Kill You,” Quinlan and Thomas practically function as a Greek chorus cautioning Nicholson against his wistful tendencies: “You can’t go back! Everywhere you want to go!” But with the laid-back country rock of “Laughing Waters,” Nicholson works up the courage to carry on once and for all, as he declares, “I don’t wanna sing about death no more/We’ll go there one day and we’ve been there before,” en route to a sumptuous disco-stringed coda. For as much as it looks back musically, Golden Doubt is really an album to summon the better days that lie ahead.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his fourth album, singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold refines and hones Fleet Foxes’ crisp folk-rock sound, crafting another musically adventurous album that is warm and newly full of grace.

Shore

For Robin Pecknold, the music of Fleet Foxes has been a coming-of-age story. Pecknold founded the band in Seattle with childhood friend Skyler Skjelset when they were just about 20 years old, making unpretentious yet studied folk music and quickly signing with Sub Pop, who released the band’s pair of landmark 2008 releases, Sun Giant EP and their self-titled debut. Fleet Foxes hid their youth in plain sight, singing fables and channeling musical influences—like Judee Sill and the Byrds—that signaled nous and maturity. By 2011, a 25-year-old Pecknold began to show his age with the existential Helplessness Blues before disappearing and returning, at 31, with the more confrontational Crack-Up. Over the course of just a few releases, you could trace the arc of a songwriter shedding his past, finding his voice, and making more personal, complex, and, often, brooding music.
Shore, the fourth album from Fleet Foxes, brings gratitude back into the fold as Pecknold ascends to a graceful new plateau. The record’s mood is born largely from existential worries and the shadow of death, common concerns of Pecknold, who, now 34, has spent his career transforming anxiety into euphoria with towering, wall-of-sound choruses that belie the unease that inspires them. Career-making songs like the barnstorming “Helplessness Blues” were strengthened by a sense of overcoming despair, the feeling that we could all stare down obsolescence and say, That’s OK, I’m OK. Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.
On Shore, being grateful also means staying true to yourself and expressing what comes naturally. The album is bright and open, recalling, at times, the sunniness of their early songs, as well as the lighter moments of 2017’s Crack-Up, like “Fool’s Errand.” Instead of turning away from major-key melodies and blissful vocal harmonies, Pecknold leans into musical happiness on songs like “Sunblind” and “Young Man’s Game,” among the most jubilant entries in the band’s catalog. On the latter, Pecknold acknowledges the futility of faking it, singing: “I could worry through each night/Find something unique to say/I could pass as erudite/But it’s a young man’s game.” Reinvention, he implies, is deceitful; refinement and reflection, instead, are the paths to progress.
The idea of refinement is crucial to Fleet Foxes because, on the surface, the band sounds remarkably similar to how it did 12 years ago—without feeling like it’s retreading past sounds or themes. The resurgent Crack-Up demonstrated Pecknold’s evolution as a lyricist and songwriter, someone who could write stirring couplets while commanding extended metaphors and maintaining a degree of writerly distance. The album also contained more intricate arrangements, something that Pecknold has carried onto Shore, where the compositions are even more textured and buoyant. The new album, which Pecknold performs almost entirely by himself, is lively, as if he has broken open previous albums’ ambitious centerpieces (namely “The Shrine / An Argument” and “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”) and spread bits of those proggy endeavors across the whole record. “A Long Way Past the Past,” for instance, layers horns and a shifting guitar line beneath Pecknold’s harmonies and words about letting go of regrets. The crisp production details give Shore a natural feel, as if the guitars, drums, and horns warble and float in the breeze alongside the birds, whose chirps lead “Maestranza.”
Elsewhere, there are explicit nods to contemporary classical music, as on “Jara,” which features hocketing by Meara O’Reilly, and “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman,” which pairs O’Reilly with a snippet of Brian Wilson counting to resemble Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and, in its sampling, also recalls the early work of Steve Reich. These moments don’t last long, serving as intros to their respective tracks, but they do signal Fleet Foxes’ continued willingness to experiment and venture beyond the confines of their reputation as a folk band whose music sounds as accessible and pleasant coming out of the speakers at Whole Foods as it does to Post Malone.
In composing some of the most vibrant music of his career, Pecknold also opens up as a writer, returning a bit to the nature imagery of his early work while turning his poeticisms into actual reflections of his thoughts. On the striking “Sunblind,” Pecknold shares his love for late songwriter heroes, including Richard Swift, John Prine, Bill Withers, Judee Sill, Elliott Smith, David Berman, and Arthur Russell. He mourns their loss and thanks them for leaving behind the gifts of their music, while also connecting their art with a life lived fully. “I’m gonna swim for a week in/Warm American water with dear friends,” Pecknold sings, alluding to Silver Jews’ 1998 opus and juxtaposing the jagged brilliance of Berman’s songs with the physical act of “swimming high on a lea in an eden.” “Sunblind” is made all the more exhilarating by how Pecknold arrays the darkness of American Water and the ocean’s vast beauty, acknowledging the former and embracing the latter. He returns to Berman on the sedate closer “Shore,” specifically recalling the day of the songwriter’s death. At the song’s end, Pecknold repeats, “Now the quarter moon is out,” again turning to the landscape in mourning.
Pecknold’s appreciation for life, his joy in spite or because of death, continues throughout Shore. Dark figures creep into the edges of the songs—e.g., “These last days/Con men controlled my fate” from “Maestranza”—as if their invitations to give into self-pity or hate are necessary to propel Pecknold toward music that’s rich and fulfilling without becoming overly sentimental. Every moment feels earned. The album’s climax arrives on the back half of the propulsive “Quiet Air / Gioia,” where Pecknold exalts, “Oh devil walk by/I never want to die.” It’s a consciously excessive declaration that does nothing to obscure our greatest fear, earnest and vulnerable in its very willingness to make the admission.
Fleet Foxes’ music has never been overly heavy, but each release brings expectations. Pecknold said that he wrote some of Helplessness Blues to have new material to play on tour with Joanna Newsom. And the tangled, prog-folk of Crack-Up, of course, came after a six-year hiatus, landing like a great unburdening of every idea gathered during Pecknold’s time as a student at Columbia University. Shore may be the first Fleet Foxes album without such a burdensome weight, arriving somewhat by surprise, without a long layoff, and into a cultural landscape that no longer foregrounds indie rock at the center of the musical universe. There’s a freedom to it that shows in the lithesome “For a Week or Two” and “Thymia,” or at the beginning of the record with the singing of Oxford student Uwade Akhere, suggesting that Pecknold does not feel the need to lead the way or come back immediately with some massive statement. Shore looks to the world and realizes there is already enough, as if staring into a darkness and responding with beauty, acceptance, and light.


The Manchester electronic producer Andy Stott creates ghostly environments filled with glitches, pops, hazes, lurid synths, clarion vocals, graceful footwork, and enormous bass. Faith in Strangers, his first substantive solo release since 2012’s masterful Luxury Problems, offers an expanding set of sounds and ideas.

Faith in Strangers

Andy Stott must thrive in limbo. For much of the last decade, the Manchester producer shifted restlessly between varied electronic niches. He darted from spartan techno to luxuriating dub and so on, releasing singles with the enthusiasm of a keen listener trying to stake his own artistic identity. In 2011, he claimed that place with unapologetic if muted audacity, issuing two immersive EPs within four months. Passed Me By and We Stay Together flooded his self-made world of gray sounds and surface static with beats that, in retrospect, he seemed to have spent years learning and bending to his will. The deep house thuds of "Cherry Eye", the footwork splendor of "North to South", the slow-motion stutters of "Execution": They all cohabitated within Stott’s new twilit mode.
The addition of Alison Skidmore’s clarion vocals and Stott’s evermore-aggressive rhythms only enhanced the ghostly environment of the masterful 2012 LP, Luxury Problems. Mixing field recordings, vocal takes, and an assortment of technical processes, Stott operated both inside an uncanny valley and within its inverse, making the artificial seem natural and the alien seem familiar. After more than a dozen releases, Stott could now call an approach—a liminal state of the human and inhuman, of the driving and the drifting—his own.
On Faith in Strangers, Stott’s first substantive solo release since Luxury Problems, he applies that kilned aesthetic to an expanding set of sounds and ideas. If that 2011–2012 trilogy found Stott codifying his style, Faith in Strangers is his attempt to stretch it by piggybacking that recent system onto his early adventurousness. It’s a bold move, one made with a new vote of public valediction. Luxury Problems, for instance, began with its most instant hook. Her voice wrapped in a lacework of effects, Skidmore seductively repeated "touch" until Stott’s shuddering beat fell in behind her. But Faith in Strangers starts with something that belongs more on the landmark sound-art label Touch. "Time Away" opens in silence, or at least the room tone of a field recording. A horn slowly intones one note, which decays against a bed of quiet and creepy field recordings. It’s as though Stott’s world breathed in the long-tone pieces of minimalist composer Yoshi Wada and exhaled them through his trademark filter of glitches, pops, and hazes.
Skidmore’s voice arrives for the second track, the stunning "Violence", but it’s reversed and filtered, pieces of her syllables simply cut off at the root. "Clap your hands/ clap your hands," she sings as though to tease an audience about a beat that, nearly nine minutes into the album, has yet to arrive. When at last it does, the pulse is one of the most forceful of Stott’s catalogue, the shuddering bass and snare snaps suggesting that the producer has now welcomed trap into his vocabulary, too. But it’s damaged and distorted in much the same way as all Stott sounds. He pulls new influences into his fold without allowing them to push him outside of his preordained spheres—a nightclub built with pillows and wired with headphones, or a narcotics den affixed with mirror balls and strobe lights.
Faith in Strangers starts soft and light, only to have Stott gradually amplify the energy across its 54 minutes. By the time the record enters its second half, it’s climbed from half-graceful, half-spectral footwork to minimal rhythms rattled by enormous bass and lurid synths. And then, on "No Surrender", an organ run that suggests the house music at Timothy Leary’s Daheim Castle introduces a catastrophic beat. The kick pounds and snares pop through a sheet of static, moving as if they’ve ruptured every speaker system upon initial impact. Stott applies that distortion to the splintered IDM of "How It Was" and, most tellingly, to the remarkable "Damage".
The meat of that aptly named number is an enormous, bass-backed melody, the exact sort of chirping hulk that turned TNGHT into a set of five adrenaline injections. For Stott, though, it’s just another plaything, an element to drag into his mix. He lets the hook blow out until it’s degraded into low fidelity, and he surrounds it on all sides with caustic noise. The harsh cymbal splashes at the start recall a Max Neuhaus experiment with drums, the clipped ending the manic cut-ups of Hrvatski. "Damage" is the shortest and most magnetic song on Faith in Strangers, Stott’s real shot at a legitimate single. But he rejects the notion wholesale, as though boasting that the rubric he’s rendered simply won’t allow something so straight.
In the last three years, Stott has not only cemented his approach but also upped his ambition, moving from a producer who made disjointed singles to a musician hoping to craft albums with unspoken narrative action. "It sounds cliché to say a ‘journey,’ but it’s got to be a story in some sense," he told Tiny Mix Tapes of this LP. "It does intensify from start to finish." At this point, actually pulling that off remains Stott’s main challenge. Despite his increasingly disciplined and unified technique, Faith in Strangers can feel disorganized when taken as a whole. The intended arc from invitation toward aggression occssionally scans more as zigs and zags between a few distinct suites. Still, the separate moments are astounding, evidence of a musician who has managed to remain inquisitive even as he’s established his signature.


Jim O'Rourke's first solo album on Drag City in six years finds his brilliant ear for arrangement and love of dark humor intact.

Simple Songs

There was a time, from the late 1990s to the mid–2000s or so, when Jim O’Rourke sat at the center of a peculiar intersection of experimental, indie rock, and electronic music. His name on a record was an assurance of a certain level of quality, and he had his name on a great number of them. During these years, he engineered, produced, mixed, and played on records by Smog, Sam Prekop, Faust, John Fahey, Wilco, Stereolab, Tony Conrad, Sonic Youth (of which he was a member), Beth Orton, Superchunk, Phill Niblock, and many more. In a suspiciously high number of cases, he was involved in one of those artists' best records.
We’ve heard so much about the abuses of digital technology over the last five years—the compression, the brick-walling, the poor mastering, the lack of dynamic range. Well, O’Rourke didn’t do that stuff; in fact, he defined himself against it (he’s never released his solo work on mp3 and, in fact, only released his solo albums digitally at all in the past month). The music he worked on didn’t necessarily surface on radio, but it sounded fantastic in your living room. Throughout the period just before and just after the millennium, no one better exemplified the promise of what was then called post-rock—music steeped in tradition that also looked beyond it, integrating traditional tools with new technologies and exploring new contexts. And then, on top of all that, there were Jim O’Rourke’s solo albums.
Starting with 1997’s Bad Timing, O’Rourke has released a series of what are usually called his "pop" albums on Drag City. Not all of these have vocals (Bad Timing focused on steel string guitar and whimsical Americana, while 2008’s The Visitor is a difficult-to-classify proggy electro-acoustic instrumental suite), but O’Rourke’s Drag City solo records have threads running through them, from shared title inspirations to artwork to musical quotations from one album to the next. O’Rourke enjoys games and references and limitations that allow him to create a world where his music exists. Each album stands on its own but also feels like a brick in a slowly building wall. No two of O’Rourke’s solo albums sound alike; each exists in its own space. For Simple Songs, that space is firmly in the smart singer-songwriter world of the 1970s, the place where Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman might be hanging out and drinking and telling dirty jokes.
When O’Rourke first sang on Eureka, his voice stuck out like a crumpled bag of Cheetos on Queen Elizabeth’s dinner table. Part of the charm of the music came from hearing a guy who could not sing gamely do so, voicing complicated melodies while surrounded by luxurious production. It made no sense and somehow, because of that, it worked. With Simple Songs, O’Rourke’s voice has deepened and become more gruff, and he sounds almost normal. There’s a timbral similarity here to Cat Stevens, though O’Rourke couldn’t have that kind of innocence and sweetness even if he wanted to. Instead, the lyrics are the usual mix of dark humor and misanthropy, with occasional glimpses of warmth. Album opener "Friends With Benefits" begins with "Nice to see you once again," and it seems like he’s addressing it to listeners who haven’t heard from him in a while, but then he follows that with "Been a long time my friends/ Since you crossed my mind at all." O’Rourke’s songs are saying real things, but they are also constantly subverting themselves, in love with pop-lyric tradition while pushing against it. O’Rourke is the kind of songwriter who titles a closing song "All Your Love", but makes the chorus "All your love/ Will never change me" and then cuts that sentiment with "I’m so happy now/ And I blame you."
O’Rourke is always clever and funny, but the driving force in his music is the art of the arrangement. Many of the greatest pleasures on Simple Songs come from how certain instruments are layered together, how the chords are voiced and the harmonic progressions unfold. The songs, played by O’Rourke and a cast of Tokyo-based musicians, are generally driven by guitar and piano, but strings, pedal steel, mandolin, horns, and woodwinds are all featured prominently. There are gorgeous instrumental bridges and codas, like the one in "Half Life Crisis" that finds O’Rourke braiding a Fripp-like electric guitar lead and pedal steel around a violin line. Getting the mix perfect is supremely important; there’s never too much of anything, and nothing is ever buried. Midrange detail is prized over booming low end. Dynamics are powerful but not overpowering. Every instrument has its place.
All of which is to say that Simple Songs is a subtle record that avoids extremes, which also makes it a record out of time. It’s a record that asks you to come to it. If O’Rourke ever felt the need to keep up with every development in music, that time has passed. After moving to Tokyo in the last decade, O’Rourke has been a less central figure. He stays busy in music, art, and film, but much of his work doesn’t travel beyond Japan. He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a  2007 album that permanently altered the pop-punk landscape and marked the arrival of the ambitious and brilliant Hayley Williams.

Riot!

Sitting at her computer as a Southern teenager, with anger, confusion, sadness, and God, Hayley Williams opened a web browser, seeking answers: What is emo? “I totally researched the term ‘emo’ before I knew what it was,” Williams told Rolling Stone in 2008, a year after she and her band Paramore became the subculture’s new studded-belt poster children with their breakthrough second album, Riot! “There were websites like Howtobeemo.com… I became so obsessed with punk bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral that I started doing all sorts of research.”
Kids search for a reason. By her pre-teen years, Williams had seen a lot. She has said her earliest childhood memory was standing, at age 4, between her feuding parents who were soon to divorce. Later, Williams and her mother fled her abusive stepdad, relocating from Meridian, Mississippi to Franklin, Tennessee, living between a hotel and a trailer, with the support of friends and a local church. “Mom and I ran away as I was turning 13,” Williams told The New Yorker this year. “I knew almost immediately, when we got past the state line—now my life is starting.”
On her first day of school in 2002, Williams met 12-year-old powerhouse drummer Zac Farro, who introduced her to his guitarist older brother, Josh, and together they would plot a phenomenon. Before Paramore, Williams played in a local funk cover band—she cited her favorite selection, Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good,” as “basically why I sing”—and, to make extra cash for herself and her mom, she cut some country demos in Nashville. But it was camaraderie she craved. “I wanted to be part of a family,” she once said. In a rock band she found one. Paramore’s vision of misfit pop-rock brought the catharsis of clarity to William’s discontent, in every tidal riff and manicured gang vocal, in the brick-heavy drumming and each soaring, structured woah-oh-oh.
In a rabid international pop-punk scene made for the kids, Paramore were, themselves, children: Williams was only 16 when the band released its 2005 debut; Zac Farro, 15, was a ninth-grade dropout. As Paramore legend goes, Atlantic originally hoped to sign Williams in 2003 to mold her into an Avril-style pop star, and her parents didn’t want her to pass up the opportunity. “Explain to me this conspiracy against me,” she sang out, describing her professional torment with pitch-perfect teen angst, on the first tune she wrote with her to-be Paramore bandmates, who she convinced Atlantic to keep along for the ride. On the strength of Williams’ demo CD, the Atlantic A&Rs came to Franklin to check out the band in the bassist’s parents’ living room—majors shipping out to the suburbs to scout emo savants was not uncommon in the wake of Dashboard, My Chem, Taking Back Sunday, et al—and they were allegedly amazed: “Okay, yeah, Paramore, sounds good!” Williams’ own chronicle of how she defiantly rejected a solo career is decidedly more emo: “There was a heated conversation with a team of people [at Atlantic] in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life. It was a very empowered moment. My voice was shaking. I was crying.” She changed music.
Atlantic decided to soften the optics of major-label backing by bringing the band to the bastion of mall-punk excellence, Fueled by Ramen, which was riding the successful debuts of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Fueled by Ramen was originally founded by a member of ska lifers Less Than Jake, but by 2004 Atlantic already had a stake in the label. Paramore played its official first show that year opening for small-town dreamers Copeland (“Coffee” was away-message canon), quickly released the thrilling All We Know Is Falling, and became a fixture of the teen-punk caravan and marketing apparatus of Warped Tour. The band chronicled its own ascent, of course, on LiveJournal.
As commodified-for-Hot Topic dissent abounded, one could have easily viewed the release of Riot! cynically, as a brazen attempt to exploit the passion of underground rebel girls as much as the hunger for candy-coated girl power. Paramore practically dared you to feel that way, and to then reckon with the fact that you just couldn’t. Whether they were grassroots, industry-core, or, more realistically, a group of kids for whom bits of both experiences overlapped, is no matter: Paramore were too good to be denied. Williams, the only woman fronting an emo band of their stature, knew they had to work extra hard to prove themselves. The very feeling of their pop-emo has few analogs still. As Williams asked, “Why do we like the hurt so much?” and confessed, “We are broken”—as she screamed “This time we’re not giving up” and “We were born for this”—the genre’s typical despair was tempered by the uplift in that collective we, so distinct from emo’s persistent I, a unity perhaps learned in the Southern Baptist congregations where she first trained her multi-octave voice. “What a shame we all became such fragile broken things,” she sings on “Let the Flames Begin,” capturing the shared self-pitying spirit of the scene while setting it ablaze.
She wielded her I with tact. “I’m not so naive, my sorry eyes can see,” Williams sings on opener “For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic,” as her youth brightens every note. The whole album cuts as lucidly as that first statement of self-possession, in dimensions rendered by church singing and arena dreams, by Williams’ love for gospel, Motown, and ’90s R&B as much as the incendiary post-hardcore and screamo bands Paramore favored, like Thursday and mewithoutYou. Paramore’s chart-conquering heroes in Jimmy Eat World turned the directive “sing it back” into pop-emo scripture; the teens heeded that call. Paramore pressurized all of these overdriven elements into a swooping, syncopated, ennui-scorching singalong so molecularly dialed-in that it still feels like alt-rock on Adderall. They revved up everything on Riot!: the gloss and scene-defining bitterness, the spite and Smiths-caliber melodrama, the moxie and anthemic scale.
Pop ambition was Riot!’s racing heart. “I’m in the business of misery,” Williams sang at the outset of the avenging lead single from the ultimate mall-punk album, and the rest followed suit. Paramore was a four-piece in 2007—Williams and the Farros plus bassist Jeremy Davis, who she met in the funk cover band—but soon-to-join guitarist Taylor York helped pen its most colossal “emo bop” (as Williams called their early tunes). “That’s What You Get” crashes open with towering riffs that quickly give way to such a staggering procession of sweeping hooks, lightning-bolt drumming, and high-note dynamism; it sound like four kids so certain they’re on the brink that they play as if it’s their last song. “That’s what you get when you let your heart win,” goes the now-iconic refrain, a fantastically cool-headed retort to an era of mostly male romantic apocalypse. These career-making hits scraped the sky with adrenaline and range, with depth and high kicks.
Equally as crucial were the power ballads. Paramore’s cover of Foo Fighters’ “My Hero,” recorded in 2006 and included on a special edition of Riot!, underscores their intent to catapult as high as a crew of suburban teens could. “When It Rains” is a wistful, stadium-sized daydream, from the angel-haloed harmonies to the participatory hooks to its disarming tension and release. On the midtempo “We Are Broken,” Williams bared her soul gravely, belting a tale of innocence lost, capturing the essence of third-wave emo: a movement of despondent young people who were, despite their self-loathing, out to prove themselves.
Paramore didn’t consider themselves a Christian band—and by Riot!, Williams had already publicly questioned the rigidity of her religion—but the album’s Christian sentiment is unmissable. In the thank-you’s in Riot!’s CD booklet, each member of Paramore first expressed gratitude for Jesus Christ. The solemn triumph of “Hallelujah” was allegedly a song that Williams and her bandmates wrote before they’d ever released an album, in order to show Atlantic that the guys in Paramore shouldn’t be fired. Like a prayer to not lose the musical family she’d discovered, Williams pushed her conviction into a gospel-tinged panorama so divine it played like an appeal to a higher power, and an illustration of her worth. “If only time flew like a dove/We could watch it fly and just keep looking up,” Williams sings, as the dropped-D high-note riffage hits the exact tone of discomfiting teen yearning. The band’s churchly upbringings left a mark on “We Are Broken”’s theme of renewal, on “Miracle”’s aggressive bid for salvation, and the fiery exaltation of “Let the Flames Begin”: “This is how we’ll dance/When they try to take us down/This is what will be, oh glory.” It also charged the puritanical subtext of Riot’s biggest hit.
Anti-girl bitterness was third-wave emo’s defining theme, and with “Misery Business” it reached a sinister apex: pitting girls against each other. The vindictive lyrics were a literal page from the 17-year-old Williams’ diary, in which she verbally obliterates her crush’s new girlfriend for seducing him away. Williams claimed that, on Riot!, she drew influence from no band so much as mewithoutYou—whose post-hardcore brewed and convulsed into a storm so menacing, it could be scary—and as the tornado of “Miz Biz” collects power, it’s believable. When she screams “I watched his wildest dreams come true/Not one of them involving you”—“Just watch my wildest dreams come true,” she adds on the bridge that’s carried every emo kid this side of Myspace, on the song that exploded Paramore into the stratosphere—it all sharpens the slash of her revenge.
That the crush in question was her bandmate Josh Farro only foreshadowed the persistent intraband turmoil to come. Paramore became the Fleetwood Mac of 2000s emo—and they did it while mostly straight edge. (The Farro brothers eventually quit Paramore in 2010 in protest of how Williams’ lyrics contradicted the Bible.)
The latent misogyny of “Misery Business” has been analyzed so scrupulously this decade that Paramore stopped playing the song live for four years. At the time of its release, Williams rooted the song’s story in faith and redemption: “every word i wrote was like a thousand weights lifted off my shoulders,” she admitted on the band’s LiveJournal. Regarding the line “God, does it feel so good,” Williams said that when she wrote it, she was taking the Lord’s name “in vain,” which she regretted. “i might have led some of ya’ll to believe that i take my saviour lightly. and i don’t,” she wrote, adding that now, “when I am singing those lines, i’m telling God that it feels good to stand up for myself and be victorious after long months of confusion and pain.”
LiveJournal confession booth notwithstanding, it is also true that Williams came of age during a singularly oppressive time for girls in popular culture, when flawless pop stars were grossly hypersexualized and music’s prevailing youth subculture could be as smugly sexist as its mainstream. So while there’s no question that the line “once a whore, you’re nothing more” holds up poorly, it also follows that a young woman who did not want her music to center her sexuality would seethe at how the status quo threatened her. “It’s easy if you do it right,” she sings, “I refuse! I refuse! I refuse!” By any measure—though “Misery Business” hit No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100—it’s powerful to hear a teenage girl scream her refusal to conform.
A few Riot! songs are helpful if stark reminders that this is music written by kids who were young enough to put Cocoa Pebbles on their tour rider (per a Riot!-era Alternative Press story) and cram homework between gigs. The swagger of “crushcrushcrush” adds another dimension to Riot!’s sound—an homage to Head Automatica, the Glassjaw dance-punk side project—but the lyrics are lackluster. The jarring theatricality of “Fences” bears the influence of Panic! at the Disco and, though its narration of young fame is a gut-punch—“You can’t turn back/Because this road is all you’ll ever have”—its drama-club flourish has not aged particularly well. But Riot! is sequenced so seamlessly that even these potential missteps fold into the album’s bigger story of a seismic band’s genesis and its time capsule of a now mythic scene.
Riot! marked the true arrival of Paramore as astronomic aughts-emo heroes. It sold 700,000 copies in its first year, eventually went multi-platinum, and earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Paramore performed “Misery Business” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien looking like they’d just rolled off a tour bus, with swoopy haircuts and chain wallets and synchronized head bangs. They brought the song to TRL and guest VJ Rihanna sung along to every word. When, one year after Riot!’s release, the band landed two songs on the Twilight soundtrack, the blockbuster teen vampire movie exploded their celebrity even further. “We have an advantage being young because we have our whole lives ahead of us to establish this band,” Josh Farro said in an interview around Riot!’s release. Paramore’s greatest music was to come.
Success wasn’t without its share of Behind the Music-worthy breakdowns for rock musicians who had grown up in public with the hyper-scrutinized lifestyle of child stars. “‘Pressure’ isn’t just the name of one of Paramore’s songs—for these kids, it’s a way of life,” wrote Alternative Press in 2007, referencing a single from their debut. On top of that was the “brutally misogynistic” atmosphere of the pop-punk scene, as Williams herself described it, a bias that would often miscast her as the all-controlling manipulator behind Paramore’s public falling-outs.
But in a fraught era, Riot! was a reset, a brash joyride, a door reopened by a woman overtaking a male-dominated scene. Fifteen years after its release, in 2022, when Paramore headlined the inaugural When We Were Young festival, Williams refused to look back with rose-tinted glasses. “We find ourselves a pillar of the very scene that threatened to reject us. And me,” Williams wrote in an Instagram Story, addressing those who changed it, “young girls, queer kids, and anybody of color.” “WE have shifted this scene together,” she wrote. “Messily, angrily, heartbroken, and determined.” Paramore’s sharp songwriting on Riot! and beyond meant they not only defined and transcended their moment, but also redeemed it. Today the band’s influence has become so essential a block in the DNA of popular music, from zoomers like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo to songwriting colossus Taylor Swift—who called Williams a primary lyrical inspiration for Speak Now—it’s like a color or blood. (Footage exists of Swift and Williams dueting “That’s What You Get” on the Speak Now tour as the young country singer pogoed in a prom dress.)
The paradox of pop-emo, for still-malleable kids to whom it was delivered, was to have an obsessive, germinal love for music so wound up in diffident feelings of self-hate, to experience (as with most sounds descended from punk, however removed they might be) disconnection at the heart of connection. “To be a young girl in love with this scene was to have the hope that I might find my own way to belong,” Williams continued in her statement. “It took years to find that belonging.” But Riot!’s sleek, biting songs of brokenness and strength reproduced the feeling eternally: of not being alone in your pain or fury, of being out of step together—the most enduring definition of emo her generation would offer.


On the new EP from Canadian producer Phoebé Guillemot, she presents tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms, suggestive of old Ethnic Folkways Library records.

Phobiza "Noite" Vol. 2

For the past five years, Canada’s Phoebé Guillemot has been unobtrusively building up a peculiar little soundworld as RAMZi, mostly on small batch cassettes (now available on her Bandcamp page). But over the past few years, Guillemot’s profile ticked upwards, with a release on the 1080p label, an eye-melting video, an art collaboration for RVNG Intl., and a full-length on Total Stasis (the label also responsible for Elysia Crampton’s The Light That You Gave Me to See You). She quickly follows all that up with a tantalizing EP for the buzzing Mood Hut imprint. And the more of her music we become privy to, the weirder, wormier, and more immersive that little world becomes.
Guillemot’s sound echoes trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell—who, on a 1980 collaborative album with Brian Eno, called Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, presented his notion of a “fourth world” to listeners. A mix of Western electronics and indigenous sounds, it drifted between minimalism, jazz, world music, and ambient, preferring the ether above them all. But Hassell’s sound was exotic in much the same way as the painter Henri Rousseau’s jungle canvases were; they came not from globetrotting, but from introspective imaginings of other cultures. Guillemot is not alone in her ethnographic electronics, as a new generation of producers like Don’t DJ and Andrew Pekler (as well as Oneohtrix Point Never) concoct pretend world rhythms and then twist them into curious new shapes.
RAMZi presents her tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms; the sleeve designs for last year’s Phobiza Dia: Vol.1 and “Noite” Vol. 2 resembled old field recordings. Inside, Guillemot takes on aspects of Ethnic Folkways Library records—foreign voices, animals sounding in the landscape, tribal drumming patterns—and spins them through her circuitry.
As the album title playfully alludes, opener “For Vanda” might be the sound of Ibiza right after sunset. Cricket sounds mingle with spring gurgles. A synth patch mimicking a bamboo flute echoes a kilometer away and a voice (maybe Guillemot’s own) gets pitched down until it rumbles like a tribal elder. A hand drum enters, as resonant as a heavy stone splashed into a pond. As it all comes together and grows denser, it approximates the environmental moments of the Orb’s Orbus Terrarum.
RAMZi’s sounds are tangible and tactile, yet each piece feels slippery as river rocks. Guillemot’s voice slides across “Fuma” like a little cloud, and soon other altered voices arise and mix with it. With a grounding tabla pattern, “Messiah” is the most DJ-friendly track on the EP, but RAMZi still makes it feel like it’s floating four inches off the ground. Her whispered exhalations get pitched up until it wavers like a broken spider web. Equally playful is when she slows down her vocals of “Male heya” until they resemble a wobbly AutoTuned hook. She then sets it against another gently dubbed out ecosystem, suggesting what Future backpacking through Hassell’s Fourth World might sound like.


Well, it's been two weeks now, and I guess it's time to tell you guys something about Cassius ...

1999

Well, it's been two weeks now, and I guess it's time to tell you guys something about Cassius' 1999. I've been diligenty listening to it in my cubicle, my car and at home, thinking, always, of what to tell you, faithful reader. Sad thing is, there ain't much to say.
The concept behind this music is plausible-- relatively easy techno grooves filled with '70s disco sampling and flava. But I found myself too often wondering if these trax benefitted at all from these wistful roots. Maybe I need some coke to truly delight in the seething vacancy of 1999, but I'm pretty sure that it's clearly not happening.
Don't get me wrong-- as pure dance music, this album can stand side by side with the legions of house, techno and rave comps that stress booties on their covers. I mean, it could just be the pompous prick in me, but I've come to expect a more cerebral quality from Astralwerks artists. Sure, there are some decent tracks-- the synthesizer in "La Monde" is a squeezy delight. I'm sure "Foxy" is pumping out the loudspeakers of a club somewhere as you read this. And "Club Soixante Quinze" is just plain groovy. However, it's pretty tepid overall depite its origins in France, the beloved land of quirky DJs. Don't bother with it. There are far better techno records on the market.


The veteran Chicago footwork producer tests the genre’s stylistic limits on a bracing, sometimes harrowing album that documents her struggles with depression.

Painful Enlightenment

Veteran Chicago footwork producer Jana Rush says that Painful Enlightenment, only her second album since she debuted in 1995, isn’t a footwork record. She might be right: Painful Enlightenment’s abstract passages, tortured rhythms, and sprawling webs of sound have little to do with footwork’s classically coiled energy and perpetual forward motion. But fans of the Chicago genre might also see Painful Enlightenment as an unwitting tribute to footwork’s versatility: Created partly as a document of Rush’s struggles with depression, the album both tests the genre’s stylistic limits and expands its customary subject matter.
After a short introductory track that pairs skeletal drums with determined blasts of saxophone, “Suicidal Ideation” establishes the album’s mood with nine minutes of migraine bass throb, eerie piano, and collapsed rhythms, suggesting the anguished disorientation of personal torment. Desperate vocal snippets jab at the beat like yelps of despair; it’s an exceptionally evocative, if alarming, musical portrait of a mental state. “Drivin’ Me Insane,” featuring Nancy Fortune, is similarly disturbing: An anamorphic vocal flattens the song’s title into the enervating drone of a digital distress signal, while a triplet rhythm drops with the excruciating near regularity of water torture.
Jazz is a major influence on Painful Enlightenment, both in the album’s sample sources—the saxophone trills on “Moanin’,” the swing of the title track—and in the freeform geometric shapes of the songs, which don’t so much go from A to B as crawl about with vague purpose. Not unlike free jazz, Painful Enlightenment sometimes requires a leap of faith from the listener, who has to believe that contradictory rhythms will eventually make sense. “Mynd Fuc” appears to be operating at two entirely opposing tempos, as languid piano intersects with frantic electronic percussion. But it is the combination of these apparently antithetical impulses that gives the song its unique rhythmic feel, like walking in weary zig-zags down a crowded city street, or going out dancing to cover up the pain.
All of this is far from footwork’s familiar terrain of dance crews and rolling basslines. But it would be wrong to entirely dismiss the genre’s influence. Even at Painful Enlightenment’s most abstract moments—“Suicidal Ideation,” say, or “Disorientation”’s patchwork of elevator-machinery funk—footwork’s signature is legible in the songs’ fidgety sub bass and samurai-sharp hi-hat workouts. “Disturbed” takes things even further back, its diva-esque vocal samples and comparatively strait-laced 4/4 rhythm suggesting classic Chicago house, even if the context makes the song’s twin vocal hooks of “I need someone” and “I need you” sound considerably more desperate than they might on a record by the late Paul Johnson, whom Rush counted as a mentor.
Footwork’s durability over the past decade, as it spread out from its Chicago home, has been rooted in its adaptability, with the genre incorporating everything from jungle rhythms to romantic R&B melodies (as heard on DJ Manny’s excellent new album Signals in My Head). Painful Enlightenment matches footwork’s musical malleability with expanded emotional range, using the genre’s base ingredients to explore a world of trauma and resilience.  It’s a grown-up album in a world where growing up is frequently painful.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Working in a professional recording studio, the DIY lifer goes big by going small. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made—but it still gets you riled up.

HELLMODE

Jeff Rosenstock doesn’t want your money. In the 2000s, as the mastermind of Bomb the Music Industry!, he turned down record label offers, gave away his music for free, and spraypainted his fans’ shirts instead of selling merch at shows. With an ethos equally indebted to the militant anti-consumerism of Fugazi and the fraternity of Less Than Jake, the jack-of-all-trades has long believed DIY is the only answer. “Not only do I think it’s sustainable, I can’t imagine how else to do it,” Rosenstock said before the band’s hiatus. This spirit has remained consistent during his solo career, but as the Emmy-nominated musician stared down 40, he stopped refusing financial assistance and accepted a fancy studio session to record HELLMODE, his fifth solo album, at the behest of Polyvinyl.
Inspired by System of a Down’s recording sessions for Toxicity, Rosenstock and go-to producer Jack Shirley booked a week at EastWest Studios, a space more famously known for Whitney Houston and Pet Sounds. While the luxe setting could have presented an ethical compromise, Rosenstock inhabits it on his own terms. Just as he’s begun playing 2016’s “Festival Song” at major festivals, he isn't sanctimonious enough to deny partaking in the capitalist machine he criticizes in his songs, especially if it involves pushing the limits of how his art can evolve. Rosenstock and Shirley avoid the pitfalls that major studio sessions can tempt, like using every instrument within reach or cranking the production beyond recognition. Instead, he went big on HELLMODE by going smaller. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made, but it still gets you riled up.
That level-up is most audible in HELLMODE’s punk-rock tracks, which offer a dialed-in but not dialed-back tone. “LIKED U BETTER” takes a bite out of Rosenstock’s bread and butter: simple chords strummed aggressively, a bumpy beat, a shout to intro the guitar solo. “DOUBT” takes another classic Rosenstock route: an ambling first half that gives way to a double-time rhythm and gang vocals. Instead of sounding scuzzy like previous albums We Cool? or WORRY., he incorporates textural space. Even the nods to ska—jubilant “oi oi oi” hollers and shimmering trombone by SKA DREAM star Jer Hunter—are tempered. Nowhere is this clearer, or more fun, than “FUTURE IS DUMB,” where Rosenstock commits to ferocious screaming. With every repetition of “The world doesn’t owe you,” his voice grows hoarser—and when the song reaches its euphoric breakdown, he kicks into overdrive for one last wail.
HELLMODE turns the volume knob down halfway for its remaining tracks, opting for a contemplative, refined mood that emphasizes the lyrics. He sings about self-acceptance by way of keeping himself in check, calling out his own hypocrisy, privilege, and paranoia: “Does the weight I’ll carry from here on out even compare to the damage that I’ve caused? No!” His attention to detail on the acoustic “HEALMODE” is particularly moving, as he revels in a newfound appreciation of rain after relocating to Los Angeles from his longtime Brooklyn shoebox. He ponders with a humble romanticism akin to Paul Baribeau: Where do neighborhood coyotes take cover? How do pine needles stick to the car?
In downshifting from punk-rock fervor to indie rock respite, Rosenstock nods to unlikely peers in the genre. Two separate Built to Spill-esque guitar solos pierce through “GRAVEYARD SONG” with elongated whole notes. The Hold Steady’s classic rock-tinted synths and guitar uphold “I WANNA BE WRONG.” There’s even the distinct eras of Weezer between the Blue Album and Green Album adulation on “LIFE ADMIN” and “SOFT LIVING,” respectively. Though they warrant these comparisons, the songs still boast the trademarks of Rosenstock’s songwriting: scratchy sing-yells, x0.5-speed tempos, a buzzing sense of urgency. Listen closely to decipher old Bomb the Music Industry! stylings that have matured through the pristine lens of HELLMODE, like the glockenspiel-dotted refrain of “WILL U STILL U” echoing “Vocal Coach,” or the meter derailment of “Bike Test 1 2 3” spinning out of control on “HEAD.” Even when he careens towards indie rock, it’s with the inextinguishable spirit of a DIY punk stalwart.
Although HELLMODE is more polished than his previous solo albums, Rosenstock is still the same ripped jorts-wearing workaholic laughing his way through the stress. “If I can’t help myself from freaking out, how am I gonna live?” he sings on seven-minute-long closer “3 SUMMERS.” He doesn’t have the answer, but he’s got the next best thing: a cohort of friends—Laura Stevenson, PUP, Chris Farren—supporting him and singing along. Even now, with Spotify and Bandcamp allowing fans to stream his music for nothing, Rosenstock still uploads his albums for free download on his digital label Quote Unquote Records to pay that generosity forward. A day before its scheduled release, HELLMODE appeared there, the most expensive album of his career one click away from being yours forever to spread wherever you please. For all the doubt and unpredictability in his songs, there’s comfort in knowing some things never change.