On her second album, the Northern Irish musician graduates from lonesome singer-songwriter to bold art-pop auteur; her growing confidence translates to emotionally probing songs of startling candor.

Grim Town

When you’re an adolescent, your world doesn’t extend far beyond your school or your neighborhood. On her 2015 debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream, the Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson—aka SOAK—provided an unflinching portrait of what it felt like to be trapped inside such a confining space. Written while she was still in her teens, the album bristled with equal parts restlessness and resignation, communicating both the desire to break free of one’s humdrum surroundings and the soul-crushing difficulty of actually attempting do it. “Come on, come on, be just like me,” she sang, a lost soul desperately trying to attract kindred spirits into her own special club. Then she laid out the membership requirements: “Come on, come on, be a nobody.”
If Before We Forgot How to Dream was the direct product of SOAK’s experience growing up gay in the Catholic stronghold of Derry, its indie-folk outcast anthems proved highly relatable to a lot of other nobodies out there: The album made her one of the youngest-ever nominees for the UK’s Mercury Prize. The SOAK we hear on her second album is different; now in her 20s and based in Manchester, she’s at a physical and psychic remove from the dark days that inspired her debut album, and there’s a greater sense of levity and adventurousness to her songcraft. But even if she’s managed to escape her own prison, she’s continuing the rescue mission for those still trapped in theirs.
As Monds-Watson revealed in a recent interview, Grim Town is a cheeky phrase she and her friends use to describe something that’s “a bit shit.” Bringing an inside joke to the outside world, SOAK imagines Grim Town as an actual place where hopes and dreams go to die, complete with its own railway service delivering daily trainloads of society’s rejects. The album opens with a cinematic vignette where a conductor delivers a stern platform announcement: “Please note this train is for the following categories of passenger only—recipients of universal credit or minimum wage, the lonely, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the lost, the grieving. Those who are unmedicated and who have salaries or pension plans should vacate the carriage immediately.” It’s the sort of declaration that, when set to a funereal organ drone, conjures public transportation's history as a vehicle of segregation and much worse—that is, until you hear the cabin full of ne’er-do-wells in the background, affably chatting away and cracking cold ones open in anticipation of the ride ahead. It’s SOAK’s way of saying: These are my people—let’s roll.
Following that scene-setting intro, Grim Town swiftly drops any explicit pretense of being a concept album. But its overall structure is not unlike a railway trip, with 14 discrete tracks that each chronicle different scenarios yet feel emotionally of a piece, like individual stations on the same line. SOAK has graduated from lonesome singer-songwriter to wide-eyed art-pop auteur, and her growing confidence is palpable from the get-go: The elegantly aching, cocktail-shaken shuffle of “Get Set Go Kid” suddenly shifts gears into an urgent percussive coda topped with a squealing sax solo, while “Everybody Loves You” begins as grayscale post-Portishead trip-pop before swerving into arm-swaying “Hey Jude” territory. But rather than smoothe over the blunt quality of SOAK’s writing, Grim Town’s widescreen sound amplifies it. “Maybe it’s all in my brain/People don’t look at me the same,” she sings on “Knock Me Off My Feet,” elevating the song’s wistful, “In Between Days”-styled shimmer from retro window dressing into pure dancefloor escapism.
SOAK’s confidence can also be measured by her willingness to rip off the bandage and poke at her deepest wounds. In Grim Town’s more delicate turns, she homes in with microscopic clarity on details like the panic attacks that followed her parents’ divorce (“Fall Asleep, Backseat”) or the crippling, post-breakup bawling fits spent curled up on the bed, “pushing your face out to the fabric” (“Crying Your Eyes Out,” which, along with “Valentine Schmalentine,” is one of two songs here that depict the purchase of cheap supermarket flowers as the death knell for a floundering relationship). SOAK’s voice is at once an immediate and elusive instrument, variously recalling the outsized ardor of Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell, the peculiar interior dialogues of Lorde, and old-school Dylanesque grit. She takes particular delight in heightening the tension between medium and message: “Deja Vu” emerges from a synth-pop fog with an ominous opening line (“I haven’t seen you for months/I’ve been waiting up on a call/For a stranger’s voice to ask if I’m sitting down”) and only gets bleaker from there, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, thanks to its ebullient, sun-kissed chorus.
In light of its opening train-ride motif, Grim Town winds up being almost too faithful to the travel experience, in that the excitement you feel at the start of a trip inevitably gives way to a certain fatigue. The album’s back half settles into a predictable pattern of alternating between upbeat, 1980s-slicked indie pop and desolate, dark-night-of-the-soul piano ballads, without the surprise change-ups that animate Grim Town’s standout tracks. But with the waltzing closer “Nothing Looks the Same,” SOAK arrives at her desired destination, delivering not so much a grand finale as a sigh of relief. “I don’t wish I was somewhere else all the time,” she reveals, which is as close to a declaration of peace and happiness as she can likely muster. SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.


The cult artist's first new studio record since 1995's devastating Tilt was written and produced over a seven-year period, and, like its predecessor, its stories are taken from a varied, almost overstuffed horizon of literature, news stories, Walker's half-forgotten dreams, and otherwise poetic neuroses.

The Drift

Forty years into his recording career, Scott Walker is still making music that he wants to make; like all great artists, he's making music that only he can make-- and hoping (or not) that other people catch onto something, anything in the big, dark, dense vacuum of The Drift. Walker beats the noise-mongers in New York, the conservatory-schooled theater kids, the gallery poseurs, the reclusive art-pop geniuses, all the perennially stylish genre tourists, celebrity revolutionaries, and outmoded underground icons. He, despite little more than a cult status in his native (and long since abandoned) country, has emerged a visionary, maker of some of the most texturally complex, viscerally emotional, and downright horrific music this side of anyone at all.
But then, the composer of The Drift, Walker's first new studio record since 1995's devastating Tilt, didn't appear from out of nowhere. Rather, the Ohio-born artist (born Scott Noel Engel) staked a claim to the musical territory somewhere between orchestral pop and psychological soliloquy from his earliest solo records. After garnering major success in the UK as one-third of the pop act the Walker Brothers (none of whom were actually related, or born with the name Walker), Scott Walker left the group and released four LPs between 1967 to 1969 (Scott, 2, 3, and 4), each of which is held as a classic by diehard pop sophisticates. The earliest of these records were also successful in the UK, though as Walker's themes became weightier (influenced not only by Belgian singer/composer Jacques Brel, but the dark end of art-house cinema and literature), his audience slowly dwindled. Walker released a string of albums in the early 1970s that retreated drastically from the ambition of his first four before unexpectedly reuniting with the Walker Brothers for 1978's Nite Flights, and unveiling the first glimpses of the major musical artist we hear today.
Walker's Climate of Hunter from 1984 furthered his movement towards the abstract (albeit very gradually), though it wasn't until Tilt that his gift for radical songcraft and sound sculpting came to the fore. If his earliest solo music contained unusual themes for a pop artist, they did at least contain fairly conventional orchestrations and melodies. Tilt threw all that out in favor of a hybrid mixture of modern classical music, found sound, dissonant avant-rock, and hyper-personal vocal expression. It was a masterpiece, even as it alienated fans hoping for a return to comparatively calm waters.
The Drift is still further down an unbeaten path. Written and produced over a seven-year period, this record, like a painstakingly fine Ingmar Bergman film, moves slowly and deliberately, with an intense focus and refusal to turn away from disturbing "images." Like Tilt, its stories are taken from a varied, almost overstuffed horizon of literature, news stories, Walker's half-forgotten dreams, and otherwise poetic neuroses. Speaking visually, the music is mostly darker hues, though sudden flashes of blue light or explosive white beams punctuate an otherwise intimidating monolithic landscape. Walker describes working with "blocks of sound" as opposed to written arrangements, and the record betrays a broad, almost brawny movement, as if being slowly, persistently kicked in the gut by the characters (or characterizations) of the composer's songs.
Lyrically, The Drift (like its predecessor) practically invites volumes of analysis, especially after repeated listens-- but then, the best part about them is that they aren't usually explicit. "Cossacks Are", with pulled quotes like, "A moving aria for a vanishing style of mind" or "A nocturne filled with glorious ideas" could very well refer to Walker's own music, or even poke fun at his reviews. It's hard to say for sure, but impossible to resist looking for clues.
Throughout the album, textures change without a moment's notice: The solemn organ and drum pulse of "Clara" leads like a brick to the head into the wallop of sticks on animal flesh and churning, nauseating strings, only to shed its skin into muffled-scream violins, and back again. Walker sings about a body "dipped in blood in the moonlight/ Like what happen in America," and later describes a vision of the song's namesake ("Sometimes I feel like a swallow/ A swallow which by some mistake has gotten into an attic and knocks its head against the walls in terror"). The images fly by as they would in a nightmare, and the music is no less surreal or paranoid. "Cue" looks at the parasitic life of a virus, proceeding like a Stanley Kubrick movie, free of any particular morality or obligation to end happily, and full of exquisite imagery, as considered as it is obscene.
"Jesse" begins with the hum of jet engines and a mutilated take on Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" guitar riff. Walker has described this as his "9/11 song," and uses the motif of Elvis and his stillborn twin brother to make a statement about American mythology and hubris-- and yes, that's pretentious, as is most of Walker's output for the last 30 years. It also reminds that "pretension" isn't always synonymous with "bullshit": Walker earns every one of his conceptual pretexts via the iron-fist dynamics of the songs, and his own deep, wet baritone, deepening the scope of every measure it inhabits. Sometimes, his words seem secondary, as on the explosive noise rock intro to "Hand Me Ups", which sounds akin to legendary experimental Japanese band Ground Zero (check the bass sax!), or the pounding, jittery middle section on "Psoriatic". Elsewhere, Walker's voice is held afloat and given center stage by the gentlest accompaniment, as on the subtly wry album closer, "A Lover Loves". If you don't think the guy has a sense of humor, check the "psst-psst-pssts" between every verse.
There will doubtlessly be many listeners who don't understand how anyone could listen to such relentlessly "bleak" music, but Walker is the kind of artist that exposes a lot of would-be art as background entertainment-- and like a great artist, he doesn't actually make a value judgment out of it; he merely goes on about his work, distancing himself from the fleshy pile of pastimes and people who would obscure the most ambitious functions of art. Walker inspires, scares, confuses, provokes-- not because he wants to manipulate you, but because he's an interesting person who's worked a long time trying to make interesting music. Even at its most dissonant and abstract, this record is human to the core, and if you're ready to face a few demons, it's as inspiring as music gets.


The Reminder elevated Feist to something approaching a household name, but the follow-up doesn't pander to her much larger audience. Lacking a clear hit single, the album instead goes for a group of thematically linked songs that meditate on nature, love, and life itself.

Metals

The headline of one of the best Hollywood gossip stories you're likely to encounter this year reads, "Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Got in a Really Big Fight Over Feist." To prepare for an emotional scene in Transformers 3, LaBeouf plugged his iPad into a pair of on-set speakers and was vibing to The Reminder ballad "Brandy Alexander" when Bay abruptly shut the song off. Things got heated, "spit [was] flying," and Bay stormed off set. Whatever this incident tells us about Michael Bay (like maybe he's just really impassioned in his opinion that Let It Die was a better record), it tells us even more about where we're currently at, culturally speaking, with Feist. Even among Hollywood titans, she's divisive. She has probably, over the past couple of years, helped an infinite number of jocks and action stars get in touch with their latent emotions ("It's a little feminine," LaBeouf told the Los Angeles Times of "Brandy Alexander", "but it touches me"). But most importantly, the low croon of her honeyed, creaky-door voice has become pop culture shorthand for "the diametrical opposite of what robots blowing shit up sounds like."
And yet, her third album, Metals, is full of dynamic outbursts. There's the chorus of austere, male shouts that punctuates "A Commotion", the towering, climactic swell of strings in "Anti-Pioneer", and plenty more folk-pop numbers that begin small but explode suddenly into stomping, hollering, densely peopled jamborees. Building on some ideas she first explored in The Reminder's lively take on the folk traditional "Sealion", Metals is a record animated with, as she put it, "the movement of a lot of humans." Though her least immediate album-- it lacks The Reminder's pop showstoppers or the charm of Let It Die's restless genre-hopping-- Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself.
To record Metals, Feist-- along with her trusty producers Chilly Gonzales and Mocky (who've been working her since she was Peaches' hypegirl back in early-2000s Toronto)-- headed out to Big Sur and built a studio on the side of a cliff. All the things you might associate with the area (majestic expanse, outdoorsiness, and Kerouac-sized spiritual interrogation) seep into Metals' sound, which conjures panoramic vistas with quiet ease. String and brass arrangements (the latter of which heavily feature avant-saxophonist Colin Stetson) are omnipresent but never overworked: check out the way they briefly balloon into the frame toward the middle of "Anti-Pioneer" and then gracefully recede a moment later. Metals is invested in subtle, textural detail and shifting dynamics; it sometimes stays so quiet that a whole flock of birds would feel compelled perch on it, and then in the next breath it does something surprising enough to send them scattering in a flurry.
Metals is the Meek's Cutoff of Feist records, both in the way it eschews the traditional rules of the crowd-pleasing blockbuster, and also because there's a lot of talk about pioneers and mountains. Nature imagery is everywhere: the serene meditation "The Circle Married the Line" escapes the busy squiggles of modern life ("I'll head out to horizon lines/ Get some clarity oceanside") by boiling down a sunset to its simplest geometric forms, while the gorgeous acoustic number "Cicadas and Gulls" takes flight: "The land and the sea/ Are distant from me/ I'm in the sky." Metals displays a shift in Feist's perspective as a songwriter; after The Reminder she's said she's now less interested in writing songs that could be read as intimate and personal but instead crafting lyrics that read almost like sparse proverbs. (She's likened some of the lines on Metals to "adages and morals that you find embroidered in junk shops.") The resulting tracks feel universal, and not unlike Bill Callahan's Apocalypse, in their attempts to use the contrast the elegance of the things around us with the weird, erratic ways of human beings.
And now to address the break-dancing, earbud-wearing, silhouetted elephant in the room: there's no "1234" on this record. In fact, though it's by no stretch a difficult album, Metals feels deliberately uninterested in courting pop audiences or crafting easy hooks, which is why it feels like such a refreshing and slyly badass statement of artistic integrity. At the same time, this is also the reason it doesn't reach The Reminder's heights. It's a bit too even-keeled to incorporate the sense of pastiche that made her earlier two records so exciting.
Side B's most exquisite highlight is "Anti-Pioneer", a song that Feist started working on 10 years ago but could never quite capture to her liking on tape. Here, she got it so right: An unhurried guitar lick and the bluesy gust of her vocals roll like tumbleweeds over a minimal soundscape as she sings about a woman who was used to moving but, "for a year," set down her roots and "was anti-pioneer." A touring musician since her teens, Feist has spent the past 15 years more or less on the road, so it's hard not to read these lines as autobiographical. But the chorus brings in the universiality, applying that sense of restlessness to a healthy creative process: "When the flag changes colours/ The language knows." It's a fitting statement about Metals, and Feist herself-- shifting between moments of repose and restless explorations of new frontiers.


The debut from Rich Brian has the fun, wit, and snark of a choice tweet but lacks the essential qualities of a solid well-made rap album.

Amen

Brian Imanuel learned to be an entertainer online. Of Chinese descent but raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, Imanuel joined Twitter at 11 and started posting oddball, almost absurdist Vines that verged on black comedy. He learned English scanning random videos on YouTube and broadened his vocabulary watching Judd Apatow movies. He was intrigued by rap after seeing a Tyga video on TV, and, at 12, first tried his hand at rapping, over Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” As Rich Chigga—a portmanteau of “Chinese” and “nigga”—he flipped a life online into a rap persona on his breakout song “Dat $tick,” saying things like, “I’ma hit you with that .45/Bullet hit yo neck round the bow tie,” while brandishing guns and wearing a fanny pack in the video. But where viewers were open to his sickly clever use of satire on social media, they were less forgiving of the epithet in his name, his flagrant gunman posing, and his blatant use of the n-word. At the top of the year, he shed his problematic alternate skin, rebranding as Rich Brian.
On some level, the appeal of “Dat $tick” was all spectacle. The caricature Imanuel created—taking Asian and black stereotypes and turning them on their heads for a cultural mash-up—was a transfixing, if not controversial, show. It’s part of why his label, 88rising, commissioned a reaction video of other rappers gawking at the song’s visual, finding power in their glee and bemusement. That’s also why some listeners have taken offense, citing his cartoonish portrayal of black culture as thoughtless, causing the uproar that led to the name change.
Brian says now he “regrets” going by Chigga, telling The New Yorker: “I want to write from my own experience.” On his first full-length project, Amen, Rich Brian makes amends by simply being himself, playing up his bizarre origin story. He is still improving as an artist, but he is extremely limited in what he can do at this stage. Not only is the project largely basic in its writing, it doesn’t sound like he’s having any fun whatsoever. It seems like he’s still playacting a rapper on Vine, and many of his songs would benefit from that medium’s brevity; they go on just long enough to expose themselves as replicas.
Brian promised that Amen would abandon the trap posturing, and there are several songs on the project that do try to answer who exactly he wants to be. Some songs consider his rise from internet it-boy to full-fledged rapper, while others involve the toll even moderate fame can take on an introverted, lifelong outcast. But in diverting from his former trap ways he overcorrects, listing off the Snapple facts of his life. On “Arizona,” he raps, “I just talk and they call me a lyricist,” an unwitting self-critique.
Amen borders on autobiographical, and Brian produced or co-produced every song on the project. Some beats are very “listens to Mike WiLL Made-It once,” but then there are details that surprise, like the xylophonic synth plinks on “Occupied” and the oboe whine of “Trespass.” His deadpan, sometimes half-murmured flows chug along between minimalist synth arrangements, rattling off various common occurrences, sometimes as if simply reading back the minutes of his day. Brian is a decent rapper, technically speaking, though he can go long stretches without actually rhyming anything. He could become a good beat maker, but his current strength lies in his wit and the ability to translate his online lifestyle into workable rap boasts.
Brian is most perceptive when he examines his proximity to the internet. There are bars about converting his money to Bitcoin and observing America through a digital lens from Indonesia. He raps a lot about taking Lyfts and staying in Airbnbs. When imitating an overly enthusiastic fan who claims to know him, the character’s tenuous connection to the rapper is that he Postmated him once. “Pressin’ on keys, got my life so sweet man/GoFundMe on your bitch’s pinned tweet man,” he adds on “Cold.” This is who Brian is, really: a web-savvy gag rapper who folds in the snarkiness of a choice tweet. But while he understands how rap songs are supposed to sound, he doesn’t yet know how they actually work, or what exactly they’re supposed to do.
When Rich Brian isn’t just trying to condense his Vine act into one-liners, he’s using pretty cringe-worthy storytelling mechanics. “Flight” documents his first trip stateside without nuance; it’s almost touristy in its snapshots building to his first session in America with Pharrell (who he identifies as “this dude made ‘Happy.’”) And “Kitty” is a convoluted story about a girl’s mom busting in as he loses his virginity just before a friend helps him escape, only to then find out the girl was his friend’s sister. (The logistics of the story don’t really make sense on the song, either.) His narration of the encounter is as painful and clumsy as the events therein. It’s hard to determine if the whole thing is a joke or not, which is telling.
That isn’t to suggest songs on Amen are unlistenable; most work on at least a surface level, and several jam. The Kid Cudi-indebted “See Me,” in particular, is an example of what Brian can be at his nicest. But there is very little happening within his verses right now, and even as he’s pivoted toward the personal, he’s still doing impressions, sonically and stylistically. “Man, let’s face it, they don’t really listen to the music/They just want to take a trend and then go use it,” he raps on “Arizona,” either completely without self-awareness or fully committed to self-parody. That bemused and baffling feeling remains Rich Brian’s best and worst trait.


On the band’s fifth album, singer-songwriter Channy Leaneagh grapples empathetically with the daily life after a terrible accident, but the band behind her can’t keep up.

When We Stay Alive

In the winter of 2018, Poliça singer Channy Leaneagh was clearing ice off her roof when she slipped and fell 10 feet to the ground. The landing broke a vertebra, damaged her spine, and left her unable to walk. What at first seemed like a curse—being stuck in a brace prevented her from working or taking care of her children—quickly became an opportunity, giving Leaneagh time to sit with her thoughts and confront traumas old and new.
Poliça’s fifth album, When We Stay Alive, features some of the most piercing lyrics of Leaneagh’s career, half of which were written after the accident. But the rest of the Minneapolis electro-pop group doesn’t sound emotionally invested in their performance. As a result, the album is less a humanistic look at what it’s like to be given a second chance at life than it is an example of what happens when your bandmates leave you hanging.
Filled with a renewed appreciation for life, Leaneagh found herself writing songs about her daily lived experience—the chase for stability in parenting, her experience protesting pollution in her neighborhood—which draw empathy from small details rather than grand gestures. She sounds newly raw when wrestling with her post-injury demons, as on the glossy “Feel Life.” “Screaming at death/‘Why won’t you stick?’/To feel I’ve failed, and I felt it,” she sings gracefully, despite the audible fear lingering on her tongue. Her voice alternates between soothing coos and a downtrodden lilt as if she’s breaking bad news gently, a singer finding her form in undesirable circumstances.
But the rest of the band—producer Ryan Olson, bassist Chris Bierdenand, and drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson—can’t keep up with Leaneagh. They dial the production in to the point of sterile perfection, sounding occasionally like a pre-loaded backing track, divorced from the meaning of Leaneagh’s words. The percussion is hollow, and the synths are like afterthoughts; on songs like “Be Again” and “Steady,” unexpected samples pierce the atmosphere like the blade of a pocketknife accidentally swinging open, distracting and damaging instead of flashy or fun. Poliça’s members recorded the parts of When We Stay Alive separately, exchanging files over the internet, and the isolation of that process is discernible.
The band also invited a cast of dance and hip-hop producer pals to tinker with the tracks as they saw fit, which may have exacerbated the emotionless feel of the instrumentation. Poliça intended for this to be a form of musical collaging: a little cello here, some extra keys there. But the end results resemble a boardroom’s out-of-touch predictions for what cool music sounds like right now.
For a band that found fame with live shows verging on jam sessions, Poliça strangely embrace the opposite now: impassiveness, rigidity, disconnectedness. When We Stay Alive finds a certain stride when it emphasizes that mechanical tendency. “Fold Up,” moored by electronic drums and croaking synths, flourishes by upping the tempo, veering toward the pleasantly mysterious territory of Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. A few other tracks start off similarly strong, like the sweeping “Sea Without Blue” and the aptly titled “Driving,” but eventually lose steam, leaving Leaneagh adrift in tepid beats. For a record born from a second chance at life, When We Stay Alive sounds disenchanted with its own message.

Buy: Rough Trade
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From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of Caroline Sallee’s witty and beautiful second album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight

No Fool Like an Old Fool

A friend recently admitted that she hadn’t listened to Caroline Says because the Austin band is named after a Lou Reed song (itself a sequel to a Velvet Underground song). My friend likes Berlin plenty, it’s more about the reference being too on the nose, too eager to broadcast a sensibility before the listener has heard a note. You can’t really blame a band to for sticking its foot in the door before you slam it shut by skipping to the next YouTube video or whatever, but Caroline Says’ sophomore album is anything but pushy. It’s almost funny how much the introspective whisperings of the project’s sole songwriter, performer, and producer, Caroline Sallee, do not sound like one of Reed’s most tragic songs. But No Fool Like an Old Fool does recall a number of other bands and borrow a few song titles. Reference points, it seems, are kind of Sallee’s thing.
The story on Sallee is that she moved from her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to Austin in 2013 to pursue a career in film and the following year put out a tape inspired by her interim travels out West. Titled 50,000,000 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong (after the King’s 1959 compilation), the record of gorgeous surf-pop and psych-folk songs was reissued last year as a prelude to No Fool Like an Old Fool. Sallee made the album as she was settling in Austin and gaining perspective on her hometown, all of which casts a dreamy, dreary feeling on the record. Informed by her new surroundings (a basement apartment where she could hear her crazy landlords’ every move), Sallee recorded the guitar, drum machine, and various other parts during the day and murmured the vocals at night. From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of the album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight.
Even when Sallee fills her quiet rooms with troubled characters, she evokes overwhelming beauty and understated humor. In one of the record’s darkest moments, “A Good Thief Steals Clean,” Sallee coos in ominous reference to a love affair with a heroin addict (inspired by the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park), but her sentiment of half-knowing someone you thought you loved rings true well beyond the admittedly Reedian scenario she hints at. Over a drowsy drum-machine drone, she ends with this ironic but poignant metaphor: “But a person can love a song without knowing all the words/Some people even think words don’t matter much at all.” Perhaps the references strewn throughout No Fool Like an Old Fool are borrowed wisdom, but the crucial knowing wink is all Sallee’s. This is an album that sounds familiar but feels new in its specific way of manifesting dread.
That seems to be the case on the album’s first single, “Sweet Home Alabama,” a swirling, soulful, ’60s-ish homage to realizing you have to leave your hometown. Even as the song twinkles with its looping riffs and gauzy la-la-las, Sallee plods along in her sad little town until she realizes there’s nothing left for her. Like the other standouts on No Fool Like an Old Fool, the sad-happy juxtaposition on “Sweet Home Alabama” is perfectly balanced. Sallee does not wallow in overwhelming uncertainty, but it is something you can drop in on by listening more closely to the cloudy passages in otherwise sunny songs. With its conjuring of Parisian sidewalk cafes, “I Tried” hides someone falling apart just under the surface of its eternal breeziness, pausing the pop jangle just long enough to show a patch of grey.
Occasionally the songs feel a little less her own, recalling the sedated swoon of Real Estate (“Mea Culpa”), the cinematic folk of Grizzly Bear (“First Song”), or the updated surf-pop of the Drums (“Cool Jerk”). Initially off balance, the latter gives way to a less jittery interlude of dejected chanting that suggests how Sallee really feels. The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds. Caroline Sallee isn’t any band’s mirror—she’s too busy reflecting herself, in case you didn’t know.


Accolades be damned, the UK star blasts a music industry that has left her feeling drained, adding her voice to a chorus of Black British artists pushing back against the status quo.

NO THANK YOU

Little Simz did everything she was supposed to. She worked hard, minded her own business, built a fanbase on a string of acclaimed releases. When the time came, she lasered in and made a bold, thematic album with a clear arc—a shoo-in for the coveted Mercury Prize, which she picked up in October. There were other honors too. She smiled and said “Thank you” when she was handed the prize for Best New Artist at February’s BRIT Awards, despite being 12 years and four studio albums into a well-documented career. She showed up to the cover shoots, wore designers on the red carpet, nattered at the afterparty. She clung to independence, and exalted its values, even as her distributor AWAL—an initialism of Artists Without a Label—sold out to Sony Music for a cool $430 million. She shouldered the pain of cancelling U.S. shows after the numbers didn’t add up. But now, she’s had enough. On NO THANK YOU she stashes the fanfare and goes back to rap basics, blasting the industry that will claim to have made her but in reality has left her drained. In doing so, she adds her voice to a chorus of Black British artists whose calls for reparations are only getting louder.
When Saul Williams laid out his blistering “List of Demands” back in 2004, there was pent-up rage in the chugging beat and his exasperated delivery. Simz channels the same anger, but her tack is different. From the patter of drums and looping coos that open the album on “Angel,” you’d be forgiven for expecting lullabies or love songs; but with her aim trained on the suits, Simz is unsparing: “They don’t care if your mental is on the brink of something dark/As long as you’re cutting somebody’s payslip/And sending their kids to private school in a spaceship,” she raps in a tight volley, before asking, “Did I stutter?” In seeing how far fame and its accordant trappings can drag art from its purpose, she appears to have found an answer to the question that dominated the Mercury-crowned Sometimes I Might Be Introvert: “Simz the artist or Simbi the person?” Turns out there was never any need to split the difference—and so she lets rip. “You don’t even recognize who it is that you’re becoming/They don’t give a shit, long as the gravy train running,” she spits, coolly, on “Heart on Fire,” her disillusionment distilled into the image of industry parties where the music can’t be heard over the din of people talking shop.
Childhood friend and longtime collaborator Inflo is at the helm across all 10 tracks. His deft touches were threaded through Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and 2019’s GREY Area, and he had a brush with the spotlight’s glare when he was tapped to work on Adele’s 30, but he’s generated the most intrigue for his work at the center of the mellifluous—and mysterious—musical collective SAULT, who have captivated an increasingly cultish audience with their run of rangy R&B albums and apparent willingness to discard industry playbooks (dropping five free, password-protected LPs with no more fanfare than a tweet being just the latest example). Often, NO THANK YOU sounds like a SAULT record fronted by Simz—see the gospel swells on “Broken,” or the slick, cool-as-fuck, plucked-bass bop of “Gorilla”—not only because of the palette of satin strings and funky drums, but because of the charming confidence and faith in collaboration that seep through, as they do on all of SAULT’s transformative records. There’s a lightness to Simz’ tender explorations of Black fatherhood, the failure of her community to help those struggling with mental crises, and the slippery loss of solidarity across economic divides on “Broken.” Sometimes the production’s soft edges can belie the bite of the words, but overall it’s a pairing that brims with possibility.
NO THANK YOU isn’t the first time Simz has channeled pain or frustration through her pen. In 2019, she described the writing process for GREY Area as like attending therapy—but without going “to sit on someone else’s sofa and dish out my issues to a stranger so they could charge me by the minute.” The killing of her friend Harry Uzoka—stabbed to death in 2018—hung as an unsettling shroud over that album. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’s potency was pricked with self-doubt. Here, Harry is the opener’s titular angel “listening from heaven on repeat” as Simz discovers clarity, along with the power of saying “no.” By the end, she sounds exhausted. But she’s no less steeled against her situation—the lines more clearly drawn, she doesn’t stutter. Fuck the spaceship school runs.


Descended from Yorkshire’s lineage of extreme computer music, the UK producer’s astonishing second album fuses jungle, singeli, acid, dancehall, and more into audacious yet danceable hybrids.

File Under UK Metaplasm

In 1962, an American ad man named Martin Speckter proposed a new punctuation mark. The sublimely named “interrobang” combined question and exclamation into a single expression of quizzical incredulity: “What are those‽‽‽” This space-age innovation sadly didn’t catch on, but the spirit of the interrobang is close at hand. If you’ve ever found yourself laughing out loud in the middle of an especially audacious guitar solo, or shaking your head at the brazen WTF‽-ness of a track being mixed into a DJ set, then you’ve felt it move through you. Rotherham, England’s Rian Treanor knows how to punctuate his hyper-rave tracks with such bold-faced moments, and his second album strings dozens of them together into an astonishing suite of interrobangers.
Treanor’s signature is readily apparent in all the music he has released since his first EP in 2015: pointillist impressions of the rave continuum wrought from maddening modulations, airless spaces, and nano-shards of footwork, garage, and bleep techno. Danceable yet distinctly academic, his output resembles the contemporary hypno-worlds of Don’t DJ or Barker, as well as a grand lineage of extreme computer music led by fellow Northerners like Autechre and Mark Fell (who happens to be Treanor’s dad). Over time this sound has warmed up a bit, shedding its technical outerwear and moseying towards the center of the dancefloor. On 2018’s RAVEDITS, Treanor fired Whigfield’s ’90s Eurodance smash “Saturday Night” through a splatter gun to hilarious and bruising effect; last year’s debut album, Ataxia, featuring a clutch of stuttering vocal edits, took its name from a condition that leads to uncontrolled bodily movements.
Shortly after the release of RAVEDITS, Treanor traveled to Uganda to play at Nyege Nyege Festival, an offshoot of Kampala-based label Nyege Nyege Tapes. In its four years in operation, this small imprint has had an outsized effect on dancefloors at home and abroad, and the trip was by all accounts revelatory for Treanor. After the festival he spent a few weeks in the Nyege Nyege studio in Kampala, further attuning himself to the speedy vernacular of East African singeli. That influence is unignorable on the opening track of File Under UK Metaplasm, “Hypnic Jerks”—the first of many moments that come stamped with a huge, inky interrobang. What, and indeed, the fuck: A track that starts at 180BPM and still sees fit to accelerate the rubbery kicks into a quadruple-time assault? The recollections of a rappelling window cleaner forced into battle with a swarm of mbira-playing drones? A washing machine filled with rubble and Lego about to combust on its final spin? Words, words, words; the feeling would be more succinctly expressed with a single, unequivocal glyph.
After passing through the molecule-separating centrifuge of “Hypnic Jerks,” the album takes many forms: tough-nut acid footwork on “Metrogazer”; strange dancehall on “Opponent Process,” his sputtering tribute to Equiknoxx; breathless grime’n’breaks on “Debouncing”; and an expedition into an abandoned power station on “Closed Curve.” Treanor’s gyroscopic pattern modulations generate curious conversational phrases, like birds mimicking robots mimicking humans. Surfaces are squeaky, atmospheres arid. The melodic and textural elements resemble the lab-coated curiosity of studio wonks like Errorsmith, Beatrice Dillon, or Gábor Lázár, whose recent albums float upward like helium airships. Underfoot, meanwhile, lurk jackhammer kicks, ricocheting percussion, and sub-bass pulsations—movements from the mind of a DJ, closely aligned with recent gabber revivalism and the binding branches of footwork and jungle. In the spirit of the interrobang, there are laugh-out-loud moments too: On “Vacuum Angle” he twists old-school hoovers into the whoosssht of a CDJ spinback, a time-travelling rave vortex that’s further confused by tabla hits and what sounds like the buzzer from oldies TV game show Catchphrase. Not pulling a screwface to this would be like scoffing a doughnut without licking your lips.
Treanor’s intention is to push “functional” music to the edge, “using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up,” he has said. “I’m really interested in how far you push that before it's just like—no.” In his somatic understanding, the body is the locus of the listening act: functionally calibrated for dancing, but ready to be rendered jelly-limbed by the music’s dysfunction. He nails this on “Metaplasm,” the album’s outrageous apotheosis, a just-about-danceable maelstrom of riddim, bass, and toxic squarewaves that leaves no joint unsprained. File Under UK Metaplasm is the grand synthesis of a long investigation, a record that sounds unmistakably contemporary and, it’s not unreasonable to suggest, immediately classic.


On a charming new solo album, the HTRK vocalist writes lighthearted folk music about loss and longing.

Maritz

The trajectory of HTRK’s music was irrevocably altered by the death of bassist Sean Stewart after the group’s first album. Each subsequent release was a step in the grieving process, as vocalist Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang chose to leave gaps in their recordings where Stewart’s low end should be. When Standish finally picked up the bass, she lit a candle and called upon his spirit to ask permission. On her new solo album, Maritz, she performs a similar spiritual reunion with her late mother, who passed away when Standish was only 21. The album is titled after her mother’s maiden name, which she calls “the most haunted word I know.” Maritz is less a eulogy for Standish’s mother than a voicemail message to her, a brief and playful one-sided conversation that nonetheless communicates loss and longing.
With eight songs in only 18 minutes, Maritz sounds like Standish snuck into a haunted house with a four-track and quickly made do with what she found there. Her arrangements feature a broken metronome, a plastic recorder, and a scavenged glockenspiel, and she is frequently interrupted by birds squawking, dogs barking, and sirens blaring. Despite the album’s tragic theme, this ad hoc approach lends the music a lighthearted air. Opener “I Put a Little Thing in Your Pocket” assures us, “There is no such thing as being haunted/Those of us who walk the earth are not cursed.” Instead, Standish confronts death with liveliness, using comedy to combat tragedy. On “Tea for Two (Boo),” two ghosts named Joe and Stephanie have tea in a graveyard: “Don’t interrupt them,” she warns, “or they might interrupt… Boo!”
While HTRK’s 2021 album Rhinestones stripped their songs bare by trading in layers of fuzz for sparkling acoustic guitar, Maritz leaves only skeletons. Like Devendra Banhart’s Oh Me Oh My…, the album sounds like a demo that has been sitting in a cobwebbed attic. “There is something quite generous about sharing an idea before it is overthought,” Standish explained in an interview. “Here’s where I’m at with this idea, how about you take it over?” At times, she invites us to participate directly: “I Put a Little Thing in Your Pocket” is one fragment of a perfect pop song that can be completed simply by pressing repeat. As with the best folk music, other songs share universal sentiments through melodies simple enough to be sung by anyone. On “Portrait,” Standish croons, “I don’t know, can you sing the song back to me?/In the hope that you’ll hear my prayer/Before you know it you can hear the words everywhere,” an open invitation to take the song and make it your own.
At times, the colder, more detached pose of early HTRK clashes with the charming tone of Standish’s new material. On “There’s Nothing There” and “Blissfully Unaware (of You),” Standish adds reverb and echo to her vocals, as if she isn’t quite convinced yet that she’s making a folk record. As a whole, though, Maritz is a beguiling release, with memorable songs stretched across it like trinkets in a charm bracelet. You’ll want to carry it around with you: a keepsake that you can fit in your pocket.


Chelsea Wolfe plays folk music but counts plenty of metalheads among her fans. Abyss, her heaviest (and best) collection to date, was produced by John Congleton. Featuring more musicians and a deep, distorted doom guitar, the record is expansive and teeming, adding an anthemic dimension that you won't find in her other work.

Abyss

When people talk about Chelsea Wolfe, they'll often mention that the Los Angeles musician covered the controversial Norwegian black metal artist Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction" a few years ago, and that though she plays folk music she counts plenty of metalheads among her fans, including Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley, who regularly retweets her "Grow old and let your hair grow" adage. That line, about sticking to your given path as a lifer, shows up on Wolfe's fifth full-length, Abyss, during the smeary, intense late-album standout "Color of Blood", and it's a fitting sentiment for her heaviest (and best) collection to date.
Wolfe has incorporated metallic elements into her music since the beginning—especially on 2013's Pain Is Beauty—but she's never really gone full-on metal. And, honestly, she still hasn't, but on Abyss she comes closer than ever, externalizing those tendencies. She's thrown in moments of distortion, animal-like growling, or hiss on her other records, but it could come off like an affectation or add-on; here, it's built into, and integral to, the music, which frequently booms with distorted doom-metal guitar.
Recorded in Dallas by John Congleton, Abyss features Wolfe's longtime collaborator, multi-instrumentalist and co-writer Ben Chisholm, plus regular drummer Dylan Fujioka and viola player Ezra Buchla. The real difference is Mike Sullivan, guitarist for mostly instrumental Chicago post-rock band, Russian Circles. Wolfe sang on the sole vocal track on Russian Circles' excellent 2013 album, Memorial; he returns the favor here, adding an anthemic dimension to a handful of the tracks that you won't find in her other work.  Overall, this is the first time you feel like the music consistently lives up to the power of her voice.
The other big difference: She previously produced her albums with Chisholm, and they've done a fine job, but Congleton makes everything sound so much bigger. The production is ambitious—in the past, it could sometimes come off as a bit ill-fitting or unnatural. On Abyss, the sound is fully realized, her voice always at home. Congleton is a prolific producer, who's worked with the likes of Swans, Angel Olsen, Explosions in the Sky, and St. Vincent. If you focus on that small sampling, you'll have an idea of what Wolfe sounds like on here: The songs don't wait around, or take time to build—they are immediately full on, and never stop raging. Wolfe's early work felt solitary, like it was made, and meant to be listened to, alone. The music here is expansive, and teeming, and you can easily imagine it on a large stage, with a crowd singing along.
The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness. "Survive", which opens with a bluesier feel, sprouts Swans-like tribal drums, ghostly and vicious feedback, a super-heavy Mudhoney bass, and a forceful bit of noise that comes off like a football stadium full of cheering zombies. The gorgeous "Iron Moon" was inspired by a Chinese factory worker, and poet, who killed himself because of the monotony of his daily grind and a failed relationship: It explodes in a way that didn't seem possible for Wolfe previously. "Dragged Out", a proper doom track that comes off like a more interesting Windhand, folds in noise, a tolling bell, haunted ghost howls and squeals.
She's said these songs were inspired by sleep paralysis, something she's dealt with her entire life. It's a condition where you want to wake up but can't, and when you finally do, you can't move, and there are a number of lyrics about the different sides of sleep ("In sleep there is no sorrow," "When I dream it steals my wonder," "I’ve been waiting/ In this silence/ While you’re sleeping") and being unable to escape from it ("I’m screaming/ But I can’t wake up," "Set me free from my slumber," "Chasing the sun/ I can’t wake up"). Abyss is night music. As Wolfe put it, "Abyss is meant to have the feeling of when you’re dreaming, and you briefly wake up, but then fall back asleep into the same dream, diving quickly into your own subconscious."
The previously mentioned "Color of Blood" is not that far off from early Zola Jesus, and it's interesting to see that, where Nika Roza Danilova has downplayed her goth tendencies on her more recent, big-pop albums, Wolfe has found a way to remain backed by candelabra and decked in minimalist corpse paint and still locate pop melody alongside the bombast. The sultry ballad "Simple Death" is dark, but it's also gorgeous and catchy: Wolfe is not simply going heavier for heavier's sake, she's mastering her craft, writing songs that you remember immediately, and that you'll find yourself humming now and then. The bigger sound is what the source material, her sleep/dream issues, needed. Which brings to mind that line about letting your hair grow as you get old, of not changing your course. We're all frail and imperfect, and that's fine. But instead of inventing a persona or finding an easier way, Wolfe went deep into herself, doubled down on the horrors of life, and came back with a bleak, beautiful masterpiece—she kept going, especially when it started to hurt.


Though often plodding and generic, the R&B singer’s third studio album contains vivid flashes of her best songwriting.

To Be Eaten Alive

Here’s a tweet that recently made me laugh: “You think you know your friends then boom you see them posting Mariah the Scientist lyrics on their Instagram story.” It’s a reference to the 26-year-old R&B singer’s famously raw and diaristic lyrics, which, at their worst, tip into the maudlin—the stuff of high-school journals and Tumblr art. Still, when Mariah’s writing does work, as on 2019’s Master and 2021’s Ry Ry World, her poetic vulnerability stuns. “I use my telescope at night, it won’t be for stars/Instead I hope that I can love you from afar,” she sings, resigned to her solitude on Ry Ry World standout “RIP.” Mariah might not have the disaffected tragedy of Summer Walker or the gut-punch neuroses of SZA, but she still knows how to pick apart the remains of a failed relationship with scavenger-like precision.
To Be Eaten Alive, Mariah’s third studio album, ditches the well-drawn, sometimes-treacly origin stories of her first two full-lengths. In their place is a collection of disappointingly aimless and often impersonal takes on distant love. Mariah has been in a highly publicized relationship with Young Thug since around 2021, and the strain of maintaining their bond during Thug’s incarceration could, in theory, make for compelling songwriting material, more so than simply being scorned. Instead, she sounds bored and uninspired, too exhausted by her circumstances to jolt herself awake.
The beats are often the problem here; Ry Ry World blended everything from melancholy trap and muted boom bap to moody Justin Timberlake and Beach House samples. That inventive approach balanced the pitchiness of Mariah’s voice and her limited vocal range, both of which work in her favor when she’s recalling disastrous fights in a deadpan tone. Unfortunately, when she scream-belts her heart out, those qualities are more like liabilities. Save for a few surprising collaborations, including the out-of-place but refreshing Kaytranada-produced “Out of Luck,” the beats on To Be Eaten Alive are mostly plodding and bland, making the album’s 27-minute runtime feel twice as long as it actually is. dvsn’s Nineteen85, a previous Drake collaborator, helms three of the songs here; his mud-thick BPMs and drums drag Mariah down with them, practically damning the songs before they take off. It’s a shame that any of these tracks could appear as a sleepy “Mariah’s Interlude” on a hypothetical Aubrey Graham album.
The listless “40 Days n 40 Nights” and “Good Times” waste flashes of vivid songwriting (“I’ll put a hundred miles on the AMG tonight/And take it anywhere but home,” she sings on the former). Equally sunk are “From a Woman” and “Lovesick,” where Mariah unleashes strained choruses that somehow disappear into the ether; she sounds more like she’s complaining than pleading. When she does find an instrumental with some life behind it, more similar to those on Ry Ry World, she finally sounds awake. The thumping, WondaGurl-produced “Bout Mine” is the Mariah the Scientist sweet spot: a trap-R&B hybrid offset by swaggering, too-cool vocals. It’s also one of the only song titles you’ll remember from the album, even after repeated listens.
When Mariah confronts the excruciating circumstances she and Thug find themselves in, her best songwriting emerges. “I think of your kids, your mother/Then I have to commend my lover/When I think of how it must feel to be you,” she sings on “Lovesick.” She mourns shared dreams of “painting the crib blue” on opener “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” later alluding to the times they “had to keep sticks and illegal tints on all these cars.” It’s heartbreaking all around, a glimpse of the catharsis a more focused album could’ve provided.
Thug himself shows up on album closer “Ride,” the couple’s second collaboration after Ry Ry World’s excellent “Walked In.” Their chemistry remains through the roof. What a joy it is to hear Thug, in full Beautiful Thugger Girls mode, professing his love with his characteristic whine and humor: “I drip love, do you need an IV?” Thug’s chorus is an adoring, slightly overliteral testament to loyalty, but it’s still more enjoyable than the majority of To Be Eaten Alive. Mariah, for her part, returns to the cheeky flirtation she showed on “Walked In,” this time musing that she might change her last name to match her partner’s. It’s bittersweet given the stakes of Thug’s high-profile RICO trial, but as a tragic fantasy, it serves up more feeling than anything else on the album. That’s an unfortunate reality check for a talented young singer who, for the first time, can’t sing her way—or anyone else’s—out of heartbreak.


As Fire-Toolz, the Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid creates an abrasive sonic world: Mundane internet ephemera swirls around in a boiling industrial centrifuge, powered by her fearsome growl.

Drip Mental

Shortly before the turn of the century, the Chicago-based experimentalist Angel Marcloid began self-releasing electronic noise music under nearly two dozen names: WEBSITE ツ, Path to Lobster Believers, and DJ Eyebrow Ring are but a few of the guises. Her first album as Fire-Toolz, Further Down the Files, arrived in 2015, followed by Even the Files Won’t Tough You. The Fire-Toolz project is akin to a postmodern bildungsroman, transcending aesthetics, scenes, and genders. Marcloid came out as transgender during the gestation of the latter release, thereby assuming a new pedestal. “It was like the trans-community handed me a mic and they all were standing there, staring at me blankly, waiting for me to say some angry shit,” she told Life Is Noise last summer: “It did provide a new perspective... But I also felt like I had nothing to say, even though I was (and am) a girl.”
Certainly, Marcloid doesn’t say much on Fire-Toolz’s third album and Hausu Mountain debut, Drip Mental. Instead, she screams—unleashing yell after sandpapery, cord-shredding yell, reducing words to rubble and pushing the listener’s focus outwards into the surrounding digital din. Call it vaporwave hell: an intimidating world where mundane internet ephemera (AIM message sounds, cat purrs, library music samples) swirls around in a boiling industrial centrifuge. Marcloid’s soundscapes are powered by IBM drum machines, cyberpunk synths, and the odd, brittle hip-hop beat. Throughout, her fearsome growl sounds straight from the throat of a black-metal banshee, alternated every so often with a disorienting, pitch-shifted rasp.
On “The Graying of the Crocs,” euro-dance synths and leaden drum machines stab with reckless abandon, rendered all the more dizzying by Marcloid’s mechanized warbling. This Auto-Tuned nightmare doubles as a facsimile for the record’s nostalgic mission writ large: aural salves repurposed as toxins. Intermittently, the artist blesses us with an opportunity to nod our heads (“Libra Virgo Cusp Shit,” “At the Pig Well”), but for every direct connection Marcloid forges with her audience, there is plenty of ugliness and abrasion. In terms of spectacular self-sabotage, it’s on a level with the MTV reality starlet Farrah Abraham’s 2012 album My Teenage Dream Ended, a similarly frankensteined pop record; the only difference is that Marcloid’s self-immolation is intentional, and far more engrossing.
No matter how massive her sound, Marcloid is ultimately a deconstructionist—if not musically, than philosophically. As with the discographies of Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Vektroid, and other “post-internet” luminaries, Fire-Toolz poses a timely, bleak query: How can we humans possibly hope to accomplish our starry-eyed goals of taming the machines, of finding nostalgic refuge in a void so glutted with information? *Drip Mental *serves as a scathing, passionate reminder that we can’t—but we may as well try, or at the very least, wreak as much havoc as possible. Musical formalism, Western pop psychology, the gender binary: Marcloid’s already laid waste to plenty of long-standing systems so far, and it’s hard not to cheer her on from the sidelines as she marches down the warpath.


The UK producer expands into ambient territory, finding drama in negative spaces and downtempo explorations.

Slow Fade EP

About a year before Daniel Avery’s 2013 debut album, Drone Logic, launched him into techno’s elite, he compiled a cassette-tape mix titled Divided Love. Released in a limited edition of 100 copies, it was a token of the British musician’s dual interests: The A-side featured dancefloor-friendly tracks from underground producers like Chad Valley and Boddika, while the B-side emphasized more ambient works by London bands like HTRK and patten. With fame came headlining gigs, and in the years since then Avery has leaned heavily on the first half of his musical makeup, tastefully refashioning classic rave sounds—acid synths, techno rhythms, long-distance trance builds—into cutting-edge club cuts. Now, it appears he’s eager to broaden that palette with deeper, downtempo explorations. On his introspective new four-track EP, Slow Fade, Avery finds as much drama in the negative spaces as in the concrete forms.
Although the release of the EP was itself a surprise, the expansion it represents probably shouldn’t have been. Even as he’s made a name for himself with big-room sounds, Avery has kept winking at ambient music in sets and compilations (his 2016 DJ-Kicks mix closed with the glacial original “Space Echo”). He frequently praises the emotional power of drone and noise in interviews. And last summer, Avery quietly released Sun Draw Water, a beatless, two-track collaboration with Nine Inch Nails contributor Alessandro Cortini that artfully evokes feelings of blistering heat (“Sun”) and vast, undulating ocean (“Water”).
The evolution heard on Slow Fade is both less radical and less specific. With a wide range of pitches and frequencies spanning meditative and eerie to euphoric and industrial, these songs exist somewhere in the space between the dancefloor and the chill-out room.
The title track sets a sinister mood with staggered percussion and synth swells that bleed into a steady din of white noise. Hair-raising and psychedelic, it resembles the hi-fi, trippy techno of contemporaries Donato Dozzy and Svreca (owner of the avant-garde Semantica Records). It also carries echoes of early Aphex Twin: The kaleidoscopic keyboard loop in “Slow Fade” nearly mirrors the melody in “Schottkey 7th Path,” a haunting number from Aphex’s canonical debut, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, that toes the line between sadness and paranoia. Avery finds brief relief in a shower of radiant cymbals, but the loop inevitably snakes back in. Those dark shadows feel like a U-turn from Avery’s best-known past work, particularly from hits like “Drone Logic” and “Naive Response,” though there are precedents in the more understated corners of his catalog (see 2013’s “Simulrec” and 2015’s “Clear”).
Without distinct beats, vocals or melody lines, “After Dark” is the EP’s contemplative deep breath. The song’s production forces listeners to inhale every little detail as rich layers of gloomy synths oscillate slowly, forming sheets of notes that waft through the air like fumes. The EP’s fourth and final track reverses that mood: “Fever Dream” is a thrilling, warehouse-worthy cut that rumbles with the momentum of an approaching helicopter. Although a subtle wave of warmth washes the song’s second half, the intensity never wavers. What “Fever Dream” lacks in colorful experimentation, it makes up for in sheer velocity.
Avery’s vision comes across most clearly on “Radius,” sequenced between those two poles. “Late nights and hazy mornings,” he said in a press release, “eyes closed as opposed to hands in the air.” The song’s rhythmic foundation is established by a faint kick drum and marching snare that pulse along, patient and soothing. When shoegaze synths crescendo up into the high register, they sing like crystal bowls in a Himalayan sound bath, a dreamworld of vibrations and melody that lasts for a blissful eight minutes. It’s a satisfying resolution of the style hinted at six years ago on side B of Divided Love, and a tantalizing hint of where Avery may be headed when his next album, Song for Alpha, arrives in April.


The debut album from the Against Me! singer’s new side project doubles as a deserved break from her very public role as a trans ambassador, but the songwriting too often feels like rock-band karaoke.

Laura Jane Grace / The Devouring Mothers: Bought to Rot

Bought to Rot

Laura Jane Grace needed a break from her own very public identity. Six years ago, Grace famously announced that the traces of gender dysphoria in many songs by her bracing Florida punk band, Against Me!, had not been fictional muses. For her entire life, she had been uncomfortable in a man’s skin and clothes, so she had recently started the transition into the gender identity and body she’d needed for so long. Grace was an early, essential participant in a much larger conversation about transgender rights and visibility in the United States that soon included past Olympic heroes and current Olympic hopefuls, the right to choose a restroom and the right to exist at all. Grace has shied from neither the spotlight nor the microphone since her announcement, using her platform to explain transgender identity and explore related issues in a frank book, talk show, and more interviews and essays than lead singers of most 20-year-old punk bands get. Those same ideas became the grist of subsequent Against Me! albums, too, the band’s former antiwar and anti-consumerist reflections largely swapped for public examinations of very private matters. It must have been exhausting.
Bought to Rot, Grace’s debut with her economical trio the Devouring Mothers, is the distraction she wanted. Relatively free of expectations and history, the record is intended both as an escape from Against Me! baggage and as an outlet for songs that don’t fit the band’s incisive agitprop schema. Nevertheless, the players are familiar: Veteran drummer Atom Willard has been the Against Me! anchor for five years now, while bassist Marc Jacob Hudson produced the flagship’s most recent live and studio albums. Grace forgoes most any mention of gender dysphoria or politics here, instead exploring rather extreme versions of entirely pedestrian emotions—new friends so simpatico they make the world make sense, relevancy anxiety so intense it induces existential dread, breakup pains so bad they make you curse an entire city. These songs are the sounds of someone sorting through the exigencies of life itself, not meeting spokesperson demands. That’s about the best thing they manage.
This set, Grace has said, is meant to play out like a mixtape, with disparate styles and moods shaping a winding emotional and musical path. For opener “China Beach,” she howls, “Don’t breathe, don’t swallow,” over guitars and drums that sound like teen spirit. Then she   offers a shout-out-loud anthem for goths in love, an open-road pop-punk tune about a relationship that never had a chance, and an emphatic acoustic strummer about a friend who even makes the impending apocalypse OK. There’s a born-this-way celebration that echoes the glory days of Butch Walker’s Marvelous 3 and a placating ode that flips between the twinkling reassurance of a lullaby and the power of post-rock with the same wonder as pre-recession Death Cab for Cutie. At the very least, the Devouring Mothers avoid any facile Against Me! echo.
But this turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke, new lyrics dropped into old frames already built by songwriters working at a higher level. “The Airplane Song” is a less vivid version of a Mountain Goats song about the doomed Alpha Couple, from the breakneck verses to the backing vocals as Grace heads for the chorus. During “Amsterdam Hotel Room,” you can picture Craig Finn onstage circa 2005, agitated into a maniacal froth and pushing his glasses back up his nose. “The Friendship Song” is a Hallmark version of the Moldy Peaches with better chops, “Manic Depression” a Shellac-style tirade badly buttressed by soft-core noise-rock. Only the hilarious “I Hate Chicago” seems to have its own personality. At first a philippic against the pizza, music, sports, traffic, and general lack of congeniality in Grace’s home base of the last six years, it’s a feint, a stand-in for Grace’s disdain for any place her ex likes. Unlike the rest of Bought to Rot, “I Hate Chicago” feels upfront and unmitigated, not the product of a preassembled mood board of inspirations.
You can’t fault Grace for needing a diversion from the weight of the last six years, even in a moment where her voice seems necessary. Her openness about her gender and her transition have become so pervasive that almost no one hears Against Me! anymore without viewing everything as another dysphoric breadcrumb. Bought to Rot is an act of self-care, a new hobby meant to lessen the strain of one’s actual occupation. And, who knows, given enough time and attention, it could become Grace’s primary outlet, as it’s long been clear that she has interests outside of bristling pop-punk. But this is an uncharacteristically tentative first step from someone so given to bold moves.


Soul Jazz reissues the work of this Detroit jazz collective, most striking for its eclectic, without-borders approach.

Various Artists: Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-1976

People play music for many reasons: to express something personal, act cool, meet people, have fun-- maybe even to make money. Sometimes, people play music because they want to belong to a community. And once in a while, community-driven sounds intersect with a historic and political moment, and music takes on special significance.
Such was the case with the Tribe, a creative collective founded in Detroit in 1972 by trombonist Phil Ranelin and reed player Wendell Harrison and whose media arm included a label and quarterly magazine. The Tribe was born out of the African-American consciousness of the Civil Rights era, and its mission was to further the cause of black empowerment. Its magazine featured news and editorials on the issues of the day-- busing, government corruption, the dimming economic climate-- alongside discussion of music. The label issued the work of area musicians, some of whom made a living as session players for Motown (the company left Detroit for L.A. the year Tribe was founded) while simultaneously pursuing jazz. Everything about the Tribe was local, intent on reflecting and documenting the surrounding community. There was a lot of uncertainty in Detroit in the early 1970s-- the auto industry was declining, parts of the city had been destroyed during riots in the late 60s, and population was in the early stages of a long, dramatic decline. The Tribe was a group of people banding together, trying so sort through it all as it happened.
Message From the Tribe, originally issued in 1996 and now re-issued by Soul Jazz's Universal Sound imprint with new packaging, gives an overview of Tribe's output during its five-year run. The music is most striking for its eclectic, without-borders approach: though "jazz" is an appropriate catchall term and the music feels of a piece, the individual tracks defy easy categorization. In the notes, comparisons are drawn between the Tribe's mission and that of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but the music here is comparatively accessible, with a steady, danceable pulse, and it never veers into avant-garde abstraction. Ranelin, represented as a leader on three of the comp's 12 tracks, plays jazz, but he was ultimately re-discovered [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| by the rare groove set, which gives an idea of his dedication to hypnotic rhythm. While his "Vibes From the Tribe" combines the ethereal harmonic drift of Miles Davis circa Nefertiti with the bass-driven grooves concurrently being explored by Herbie Hancock, "For the Children", though certainly still jazz, finds him singing as well as soloing on trombone. The music billed to the Tribe-- basically an all-star band drawn from members of the collective, including Ranelin and Harrison-- ranges from the nimble funk blowing session "Beneficent" to the politicized message of hope "What We Need", with vocals by Jeamel Lee. Another vocal cut, Doug Hammond's "Moves", is a strange and haunting ballad featuring Hammond's earthy voice trading melodic lines with violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog.
The music from Message From the Tribe is strong, a great set of open-minded and accessible jazz from an exciting time in the music's history. But the full impact of the package, which includes a 60-page booklet featuring reprints from the magazine along with postcards containing additional covers from the publication, provides depth. Looking through the essays and news alongside the advertisements for black-owned businesses, the music's context as the center of a community becomes clear. There's an article by a student from Wayne State University on Watergate, a piece outlining the basics of the then-current recession, and a feature on Jesse Jackson's burgeoning Operation PUSH. There are also music reviews and interviews. In Tribe-- "Detroit's First Magazine for Black Awareness" was the subtitle-- the lines between politics, activism, art, and entertainment are not just unclear: No one seemed to see any reason to draw them in the first place. When you spend so much time enjoying the easy benefits of commitment-free consumption, it's easy to forget about such possibilities.


Diplo and Switch recruit vocalists such as Santigold, the women of Nina Sky, Vybz Kartel, and more for an eclectic dancehall-heavy party record.

Major Lazer: Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do

Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do

Major Lazer-- a cartoon Jamaican commando who looks like a sort of military "Mean Joe" Greene-- lost his arms in the secret Zombie War of 1984, before later receiving prosthetic lasers as replacement limbs from the U.S. military. At least according to Diplo and Switch, the producers behind the Major Lazer project and its debut LP, Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do. Why Diplo and Switch (known to your parents in film trailer-speak as "the guys behind 'Paper Planes"') decided to create the unnecessary backstory is a mystery. If it's just to have a little fun, to put together some sort of Super Ape-like cover art, hey fine; if it's in any way about the fact that a white American and a white Brit are here making a dancehall record...this is really an issue?
It feels like it is, in some circles anyway. But the musical dialogue between Jamaica and the U.S. has been strong ever since New Orleans jazz and American R&B began to reach the island via radio, mixing there with calypso, nyahbingi, and other African and Caribbean sounds. In the time since, resourceful Jamaican producers have borrowed from and tweaked soul, Afropop, disco, electro, hip-hop, and more, and the U.S. and UK gave us, uh, Sublime and the Police. (OK, and the Slits, the Pop Group, the Clash, etc., etc.) Plus, you know, there's this whole globalization thing. If it's your first experience with Jamaican music (tsk, tsk), the variety on hand here should help dispel the myth that dancehall or any other Jamaican sound is monosyllabic. (If you need further proof, Soul Jazz's Dynamite! series is a great place for the uninitiated to start...try 200% and 300% first.)
But if you're bugging out over the whole authenticity thing for some reason, Diplo and Switch have lined up a who's-who of Jamaican vocalists: Vybz Kartel, T.O.K., Ms. Thing, Turbulence, Mr. Vegas, Mr. Lexx, and more. Wisely though, they still know their probable audience (i.e. hipsters) and kick this off with "Hold the Line", a song featuring Santigold. (the CD case calls the song "I'll Make Ya", but some discs have been printed with a sticker letting us know the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| song is indeed called "Hold the Line", as already indicated from mp3 tags, MySpace streams, and its music video.)
Whatever you want to call it, with its rumbling bass, "A Milli"-like vocal hook, and spaghetti western atmospherics, it's a hell of a way to kick off the solid-to-killer six-song stretch that opens the album. Well paced and immaculately produced, the first half-dozen Guns songs nicely move between the past 30 years of Jamaican music, from the sweet "Can't Stop Now" [ft. Mr. Vegas and Jovi Rockwell], which recalls the rocksteady-indebted, pre-digital sounds of 80s dancehall, to the politically charged "Anything Goes" [ft. Turbulence], steeped in modern ragga and the give-and-take between the island's music and American hip-hop, particularly that from the post-Cash Money South.
The record derails in the middle, and no points for guessing where based on the tracklisting. "Mary Jane" is the requisite weed song, and sadly it's played off as a sniggering novelty, making it both obvious and annoying. (Major Lazer do humor much better later, taking the Baby T-Pain meme and turning it into a clever skit.) There's also a song featuring Amanda Blank, "What U Like", that's of course a minimalist electro track full of boilerplate sex talk. (Einstein asks the appropriately named Blank if she likes it when badman fucks her, etc.; Blank says yes, actually, I do.)
The rest of the back of the album, despite not having the awesome ebb and flow of the first half, features some of its heaviest hitters: Vybz Kartel and T.O.K. (with a return appearance by Ms. Thing) show up and kill on "Pon de Floor" and the Man Parrish-sampling "Bruk Out", respectively. And closer "Jump Up", with co-production from Crookers (of "Day 'N' Nite" remix fame) would be the perfect au courant dancefloor filler if it weren't for the record's weird trojan horse: "Keep It Goin' Louder" [ft. Nina Sky and Ricky Blaze].
So, yeah, buried deep into Diplo and Switch's dancehall record, they went and hid one of the best pop songs of the year. Let's not declare death of Auto-Tune quite yet-- if this thing could get a foothold on the Hot 97s and B96s across the country it would deservedly shoot up the charts. With about three ridiculous hooks, "Louder" serves as a nice calling card for Diplo and Switch as crossover producers and a reminder that Nina Sky are weirdly underutilized.
Five years after teaming with M.I.A. for the Piracy Funds Terrorism mix and making his excursions to favela funk balls in Brazil, Diplo seems oddly underespected these days. Perhaps it's because he's a better DJ and producer than remixer-- and in the immediate aftermath of his rise to fame, it was a remixer that he got his most work. Perhaps it's because to either those who want pop/youth culture to be somehow segregated-- or to those who believe they've graduated from collegiate suburban solipsism into something more open-eared and less purely straight and white, yet still remain suspicious of other white kids who also enjoy disco/hip-hop/dancehall/pop-- he's an easy go-to negative representation of young white urbanites and their encroaching interest in global black culture (which, historically, is the definition of hipsterdom right there).
Whatever the case, he and Switch are kicking off summer with an armful of perfect cookout-, top down-ready songs, like the daytime soundtrack equivalent of all of the summertime night's rooftop music that's been coming from Swedes Air France and the Tough Alliance and their new wave of American indie disciples, such as Real Estate and Memory Cassette in the past year-plus. Best to enjoy it now, even though it will still also sound great in six months.


The debut collaboration from classical composer Brendon Randall-Myers and metal vocalist Doug Moore is an unflinching testimonial on grief and endurance.

Aveilut

During the lockdown in the spring of 2020, the composer Brendon Randall-Myers would leave his New York apartment largely to do one thing: run in the dark. Sometime after midnight most days of the week, Randall-Myers—a former collegiate runner who nearly turned pro—would zip down empty streets and deserted bike paths, thinking about all he had recently lost. A year earlier, an aunt and a close friend both unexpectedly died within one month. He was still stuck in aveilut, the customary Jewish year of mourning for the dead, a cycle compounded by a recent breakup. Running helped him push through those feelings, as did the music he was tracking back home and contemplating while he exercised in the dark. The result, Aveilut, is his debut as Scarcity, and it’s a compelling testimonial to dealing with the long tail of someone else’s death.
A guitarist in the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Randall-Myers has long flitted at metal’s periphery. His songs in the band Marateck sometimes teased black metal, while his compositions for boundless classical collective Invisible Anatomy and pianist Miki Sawada often hinged on a headbanger’s love of density. His remarkable 2020 album Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies, a harsh-to-halcyon performance for an electric guitar quartet, suggested a theoretical “Instrumental Evening with Krallice” in some posh uptown theater.
But Randall-Myers wanted these new pieces to speak directly to the woe at hand, so directly they actually screamed. He recruited Doug Moore, an accomplished metal vocalist he’d met long ago through running, to write and sing to five interlocking instrumentals, a cohesive suite about emotional upheaval. Aside from a decade of expansive tirades in death-metal adventurers Pyrrhon, Moore has also howled over thrash, doom, and black metal. He was an apt choice, since Randall-Myers’ mix of radiant arpeggios and haunted drones, grim noise and mauling blasts had more to do with fully processing his pain than adhering to strict subgenre convention.
Aveilut opens with a foreboding hum, its glowing synthesizers slowly strangled by a tense riff and marching drums that push toward a feverish gallop. This is claustrophobic black metal, caked in the kind of compounding overtones you might expect from a Branca acolyte; it feels overwhelmed and overwhelming, mirroring a mind incapable of outpacing its own burdens. Moore arrives after six minutes to roar a short, reassuring psalm: “They are never truly gone/Those who have shed their forms.” He seems to be convincing Randall-Myers, trying to shout down his collaborator’s suffering.
Moore returns to these same lines 20 minutes later, at the start of “IV,” but he finds the comforting words empty now. He hisses the verse through sculpted doom, colossal drums occasionally punctuating the long tones and feedback screeches. These dual settings for the same text speak to the unsteady way we mourn, how we sometimes slip back into sadness we thought we’d already overcome. “IV” ends in a low tide of curdled noise, like Merzbow trying to make nachtmusik. “We, the shattered, we shall endure,” Moore seethes through the haze of broken circuits, arriving at a terrible truth most of us will one day face—for survivors, someone else’s death is often hell.
Every facet of death has been fodder for one form of metal or another, from lurid celebrations to melodramatic wails. But as a relative outsider, Randall-Myers approaches the concept with a thoughtfulness and honesty that’s independent of expectation or orthodoxy. Aveilut sounds how loss actually feels—spans of misery, flashes of hope, bouts of anger, all lumped into a messy collage that has little to do with some clean Kübler-Ross progression. Where “IV” wallows in despair, for instance, “II,” the album’s masterstroke, tries to find meaning or even redemption in its certainty. An 11-minute sprawl of backlit black metal, coruscant with guitar harmonies and relentless with roiling drums, it has the same passion and intensity as Blut Aus Nord or early Liturgy. “Be without grief when they bear down, those years,” Moore demands, attempting to negotiate with a mortality he well knows is merciless. Desperation soon follows.
Perhaps it’s strange to find such a harsh record about death life-affirming, to hear in its menacing tones and lyrical opprobrium any reassurance. But for Aveilut, Randall-Myers took a particularly challenging time as a chance to try something with which he’d long toyed. Alongside a friend, he turned deep troubles into a work of endurance, of running into the dark hoping that someday you might even emerge from it for a spell.