Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits." The first pairs Dev Hynes of Blood Orange with lo-fi singer/songwriter Connan Mockasin. There’s enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off.

Connan Mockasin / Devonté Hynes: Myths 001: Collaborative Recordings

Myths 001: Collaborative Recordings

Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits," and the label will be hard pressed to find spirits more kindred than the two it landed for this inaugural installment. On his 2013 breakthrough as Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe, Devonté Hynes conjured vapory, psychedelic R&B that played like a bizarro soundtrack to water-warped VHS recordings of early Cinemax After Dark broadcasts—the same aesthetic New Zealand's Connan Mockasin shot for on his own LP from that year, Carmel. Like this year's No Life for Me from Wavves and Cloud Nothings, the EP gathers two like minds whose tastes and skill sets overlap so fully that partnering them almost seems redundant.
There's enough variation in how Hynes and Mockasin approach their leftfield pop to create some interesting contrasts, though. Hynes is the more polished and more versatile of the pair, an industry songwriter-for-hire who, for all his iconoclastic tendencies, has long been tempted by Top 40's allure. Mockasin's recent process has been more hermetic: He recorded Carmel entirely alone in a hotel room in a foreign city, and next to the open-armed vulnerability of Cupid Deluxe, it sounds rogueish and distant. Mockasin doesn't necessarily shy from heartfelt expressions, but he often cloaks them behind a smirk.
So the two make good foils, and Myths 001 is never more amusing than when it plays Hynes' sincerity against Mockasin's oddball falsetto. The duo recorded the EP in Texas over about a week during the Marfa Myths festival this spring with little planning, but all that feels rushed is its 11-minute runtime. The production is nearly as luscious as Cupid Deluxe, all soft-rock decadence and red-light ambiance, and two of its three tracks, while not quite knockouts, are distinctively peculiar. "La Fat Fur" opens the EP with a gust of trembling post-punk, imagining what Wire might have sounded like if they'd gone through a Prince phase in the '80s. "Feelin' Lovely" similarly has some fun scribbling across genre boundaries, piling bluesy riffs and jazz-fusion keyboards and saxophones over an unusually funky quiet storm groove, playing like a funhouse homage to Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love.
The slow-burn closer "Big Distant Crush" could use a little bit of that eccentricity. It's the EP's most earnest number, but also its most meandering, five minutes of aimless heartache that can't help but feel like an attempt to pad an otherwise skimpy EP. There's enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off. This is probably to be expected from an EP whipped up from scratch in just a week, but whichever artists end up on Myths 002 might do well to consider reserving a few extra days in the studio in case they hit it off.


L’Rain, Jlin, Kelsey Lu, Jason Moran, and more join the sculptor and sound artist for a meditation on the complex histories evoked by the antique cotton gin at the center of his 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition.

A View of a Landscape

Kevin Beasley is barefoot in the Museum of Modern Art. He’s seated on the ground, perched over three turntables, a mixer, and a laptop connected to a stereo system that fills the museum’s atrium with disembodied voices. Specifically, they’re the voices of dead rappers from the ’90s, like the Notorious B.I.G., whose song “Long Kiss Goodnight” gives the performance piece, I Want My Spot Back, its name. Another iteration of the performance included clips from the 1962 Malcolm X speech “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” and the 2011 Theo Parrish track “Black Music,” as well as the voice of a witness to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “Say he had his hands up and everything. Still shot him,” the voice says. “The man laying in the street, dead as a motherfucker.”
The piece is stark and abrasive, erupting into noisy chaos that leaves the walls shaking and at least a few listeners in distress. It also asks guests to sit with complex feelings and process grief in a social setting, which some may have been unprepared for. “I wish I could have answered, ‘You should spend more time with it’; or ‘Maybe we should talk’; or ‘You should hear it again’; or something,” Beasley later said of the letters he received in response to the piece. “I feel that there is something missed in those letters. I can’t expect everyone to feel the same way, or to even have the same response.”
Beasley is a visual artist by trade, primarily producing sculptures and installations. He uses ordinary materials like T-shirts, durags, and house dresses to create pieces defined by absence, dwelling in the negative spaces his artifacts afford. This approach extends to his engagements with sound; works like I Want My Spot Back and Strange Fruit—a series of sculptures involving dangling pairs of Nike Air Jordans rigged with microphones and speakers to produce harmonic tones from the surrounding air—introduce a temporal dimension to this Cartesian relation in repose, rising and falling with an intensity rooted in each piece’s source materials.
In 2012, Beasley purchased a one-ton electric induction cotton gin motor on eBay with the intention of using it in his practice, and the artifact became the centerpiece of A View of a Landscape, his 2018 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Beasley installed the fully functional motor inside a soundproof glass vitrine on the museum’s top floor, surrounding the roaring engine with microphones that piped its output into a nearby listening room. Slightly removed from the engine itself, the artist filtered the audio through a mixer and various Eurorack synth modules, sculpting the raw material into a time-based work that meditates on the violent and intertwined histories of slavery and industrialism. He also hosted a live performance series at the Whitney, inviting experimental acts like Jlin, Eli Keszler, and Taja Cheek to perform with him and the cotton gin.
Four years later, Beasley continues to explore the installation’s collaborative possibilities. His debut album, a double LP also titled A View of a Landscape, brings together artists from his initial Whitney performances, as well as a sprawling network of poets, musicians, and performers that includes L’Rain, Laurel Halo, Kelsey Lu, Moor Mother, and Jason Moran. “I wanted all the artists to consider the questions surrounding the sound of the motor, its history, and how one could generate a sonic experience with it,” he wrote in a statement. Paired with a 300-page monograph containing essays, photos, and other documentation, the multimedia project is both a retrospective look at Beasley’s career to date and a conscious effort to reframe his practice in terms of the community it’s fostered.
The album opens softly with a ringing metallic drone, followed by the voice of Fred Moten. The poet, critic, and theorist has devoted decades to writing about the lingering traumas of history, and here, Moten returns to a piece that also appeared on his 2022 jazz album with bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver, placing the existing poem in dialogue with Beasley’s work. “All that blood is the engine,” he says. “Is that gin a computer?” By bringing Moten/López/Cleaver’s closing track to the front of his own album, Beasley suggests a continuity between the two projects that runs deeper than thematic overlap. About two minutes in, a barren kick drum enters at the pace of a slow heartbeat as the noisy mechanical drone intensifies and rattling loops of industrial percussion fall in and out of sync. The piece sets the stage for a series of collaborations that situate Beasley’s source material in new environments, wading further into the harrowing soundscapes that define his artistic practice with rigor and grace.
Much of the album is subdued and instrumental, with soothing ambient patches punctuated by moments of focused tension. On “Resin,” the composer and producer Laurel Halo considers the textural qualities of simple synth and organ tones, uncoupling each element from the originating instrument to build an organic assemblage reminiscent of her 2018 album Raw Silk Uncut Wood. Pieces from L’Rain and Kelsey Lu layer looped keyboards over rumbling noise likely taken from Beasley’s installation, bending and pitch-shifting the audio like any other sound on the album. Toward the end of Lu’s “Lines,” thumping kicks and synth chirps are overtaken by a knotted string arrangement that leads into “Face the Rock,” the sole contribution from composer and jazz pianist Jason Moran. High-pitched noise peeks out from behind a wall of carefully arranged piano lines that take cues from Minimalism, impressionistic film composition, and free jazz. It’s a standout moment in which the churning mechanical rhythm present across the album feels not only atmospheric, but as essential as any other element.
For all of its guest collaborators, the album adopts a clear structural arc that moves from experimental performance to deconstructed dance music in the second half. Sparse electronic percussion gives way to furious outrage on “Oil Rivers,” where Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa shouts about labor, death, and the environment. Less outwardly distressed, Eli Keszler’s “In a Landscape” is jagged and atonal, combining his kinetic drumming with strident samples that flatten into gentle soundscapes. Piercing hi-hats and siren-like synths cut through the mix in the abrupt transition to Jlin’s “Vernacular,” as the album falls back onto ringing, ambient hues that evolve into lurching Jersey club with SCRAAATCH’s “Save ur flesh, Captured Dancer.”
A View of a Landscape feels more like a mixtape than a pointed statement from a single artist: While every piece started with recordings captured from the engine, the album prioritizes the ongoing creative practices of its guests over a clear authorial gesture from Beasley. Yet from his curatorial instincts a community emerges—one that extends to the audience through their engagement with the unspeakably difficult histories the album presents. On “by,” Beasley is joined by choreographer and curator Ralph Lemon, who originally brought I Want My Spot Back to the MoMA as part of his Some sweet day performance series, and vocalist Okwui Okpokwasili, who sings about the challenges of bringing a project like this one to fruition. “Try to tell the story with terrible earnestness/Try to tell it anyway,” she says. It’s an impossible topic to speak about comprehensively, and the album ultimately isn’t interested in didactic explanations. Instead, there’s catharsis, collectivity, and a desire to build something new.


Featuring members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, J.R. Robinson's chamber-doom project coheres beautifully into a meditation on the banality of evil.

Light Falls

Given the abundance of heavy music that addresses theatrical horror, it’s a shame how only a tiny fraction of it confronts the real-life horror that lurks under our noses. With Light Falls, Wrekmeister Harmonies help offset this imbalance for the third album in a row, as bandleader J.R. Robinson continues to hone-in on the mundane roots of evil. Along with likeminded acts such as SubRosa, Wrekmeister Harmonies weave chamber elements into metal-based forms. Like their previous album Night of Your Ascension, Light Falls presents new angles on the doom sub-genre. But where Ascension’s long stretches of choral chanting and plodding, monolithic doom sections gave the music an impenetrable facade, here Robinson finally achieves the seamless integration he’s been pursuing since launching the project in 2006.
A large part of Robinson’s success comes from a less heavy-handed approach. Yes, Godspeed You! Black Emperor drummer Timothy Herzog plays big and bombastic, sometimes openly emulating Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham’s signature kick-drum pedal work. But Herzog swings more than Robinson’s previous guest drummers, and the drums on Light Falls occupy a more discreet position in the mix. Robinson also carves out more space for the arrangements, giving even the heaviest of the new material a vintage texture unlike the wall of distortion that characterized Ascension. Core member Esther Shaw is joined by Sophie Trudeau (also of Godspeed) who both use the increased space as an opportunity to steal the show.
With both playing piano and violin, Shaw and Trudeau shine on the album’s gentler tunes, “Light Falls I: The Mantra,” “Where Have You Been My Lovely Son,” and “My Lovely Son Reprise.” Most remarkably, though, their violin work also mesmerizes on the crashing “Some Were Saved Some Drowned,” an invigorating example of how Wrekmeister Harmonies are locating flexibility within the rigid patterns of doom metal. Shaw and Trudeau don’t merely hold their own but threaten to engulf the guitars the whole way. Not only does the song highlight the significant progression between the last album and this one, but it also brings into communion all of the musical and thematic qualities that set Wrekmeister Harmonies apart.
Wrekmeister Harmonies’ body of work makes it clear that, as an artist, Robinson is driven to reconcile with our most disturbing impulses. At the same time, his music attempts to illuminate the humanity at the heart of our darkness. “Some Were Saved Some Were Drowned” derives its title from Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s book, The Drowned and the Saved, which according to fellow author and essayist Tim Parks “must rank as one of the most powerful and upsetting attempts at moral analysis ever undertaken.” As Parks points out, Levi’s writing hardly spares the concentration camp prisoners it documents. In fact, one of its biggest takeaways is that the victims at Auschwitz could succumb to as much cruelty as their torturers.
Taken together, Night of Ascension and Light Falls work as a triptych portrayal of human depravity. Ascension first deals with one individual's act of double murder, then escalates in scope to address the Catholic Church’s institutional complicity in its molestation scandal. On Light Falls, Robinson ups the ante yet again by turning his gaze on the Holocaust. Because Robinson tends not to overplay his lyrical hand (Wrekmeister Harmonies albums contain only a sprinkling of vocals), it’s not like you can listen to Light Falls and walk away with a better understanding of what drives human beings to commit unimaginable acts of violence.
But understanding isn’t the point here. The mysteries that Robinson can’t seem to turn away from might elude our understanding forever. With Light Falls, though, he makes a most convincing case to go toward them rather than try and evade or ignore them. He also turns that case into an immensely rewarding listen that takes both his band—and the hybrid genre he’s helping invent—to new heights.


On what feels like a companion to Time Skiffs, Animal Collective explore some surprisingly traditional psych-rock modes, but without abandoning their essential trickster spirit.

Isn’t It Now?

For nearly as long as Animal Collective have been a band, they have reserved some of their best material for follow-up EPs. They may have originated as leftovers, but each stands on its own as a body of work. Isn’t It Now? is a full-length—in fact, at 65 minutes, it’s the longest album they’ve ever made—but it seems of a piece with those compact and giftlike interstitial releases. It arrives a year and a half after the late-career triumph Time Skiffs and features material from the same batch of songs, composed just before the pandemic, that populated that record. Two decades into a career full of left turns, it is perhaps the Animal Collective album that sounds the most like the one before it. But if anyone has earned the right to settle into a particular lane for a while, it’s Animal Collective. Isn’t It Now? demonstrates that they needn’t constantly reinvent themselves in order to make deep and rewarding music.
On Isn’t It Now?, as on Time Skiffs, Animal Collective present themselves as something like a rock band. There are guitars, electric bass, and a full drum kit, rather than a ragtag assemblage of floor toms and sampler pads. For the first time since Feels or so, piano plays a central role, and not a piano that’s been distorted beyond recognition or looped infinitely through a delay pedal, but a regular old piano. The songs have adult concerns: “Defeat” and “Stride Rite” are odes to acceptance and perseverance; “Gem & I” namechecks simple pleasures like seeing the sun and cracking another beer; “Magicians From Baltimore” is about a hometown you love but had to leave. Accordingly, the band has toned down its most antic musical impulses. No screams, no sudden explosions of noise. The crescendos, when they happen, are subtle and patient. The tempos, like the volume level, are easygoing.
Within that limited dynamic range, Animal Collective remain a spectacularly creative band. This mellower zone suits them: On albums like Centipede Hz and Painting With, the overstimulation that characterized their groundbreaking earlier work was showing signs of wear; in this most recent period, it’s as if they’d challenged themselves to reach listeners without relying on that playbook. Sometimes, that means making use of idioms outside the insular Animal Collective world. “Stride Rite,” for instance, is a contender for the most straight-up normal song in their catalog. Elegant and candlelit, featuring a rare Deakin lead vocal, it reminds me of something you’d hear on a singer-songwriter album from the twilight of the hippie era, where the protagonist is trying to piece together a meaningful story about what’s next after the utopian dream has fizzled out. “Let’s invite all the songs that we wrote so we’d know/And let them go,” he sings, with a melodic leap at the end that sounds like some combination of regret and hopeful anticipation. Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s songs tend to be so wrapped up in their respective idiosyncrasies as writers and singers that it’s difficult to imagine other people delivering them convincingly. If Deakin’s sensibility is a little more traditional, it’s also a little more universal: “Stride Rite” feels like it could belong to anyone, including you.
But Isn’t It Now? also retains the band’s knack for defamiliarizing their influences, in the same way that Sung Tongs could make you feel like you were hearing a guy strumming an acoustic guitar for the first time in your life. “Gem & I” has a rhythmic basis in Jamaican music, a longstanding area of interest for the band, and perhaps some inspiration from contemporary Top 40 in a structure that unfolds as a series of ever-escalating hooks. Avey Tare’s backing vocals and a massive synth bassline both stab crosswise against Panda Bear’s lead vocal in a manner that’s so satisfying that it’s easy to overlook how unusual it is. The song rivals anything on Merriweather Post Pavilion in its combination of sonic inventiveness and pop appeal. The high point of the nine-minute “Magicians From Baltimore” comes when Deakin plays a piano riff like a looped fragment of a Scott Joplin rag while Panda Bear accompanies him with a variation of the Purdie shuffle. In any other indie-rock band’s hands, this would be a recipe for horrible fake jazz. By committing to the strict repetition of this single idea—and heroically resisting the temptation to noodle or show off—Animal Collective make it ecstatic and uncanny.
“Magicians From Baltimore” isn’t the longest song on Isn’t It Now?; that designation belongs to the 22-minute “Defeat.” It has a curious structure for an epic: halfway between an atmosphere to explore and a narrative to follow. A climactic upbeat section in the middle is almost perversely brief compared to the rest of the parts, which are uniformly slow, sparse, and drifting. The song both challenges and rewards your patience; it’s just that most of its payoffs are extremely subtle. The most moving details are in the margins: a tapped cymbal, a quietly churning violin figure, a scraping sound like a pick against the low strings of a guitar. It’s an audacious move to stick something like this right in the middle of Isn’t It Now?, an album otherwise filled with immediate and obvious pleasures. Which is to say it’s typical for a band that has never tempered its own eccentricity in favor of wider appeal.
One part of Animal Collective’s early mystique lay in a certain amateurism, which I don’t mean pejoratively, but only as a way of describing their apparently innocent disregard for the way other people played their instruments or put songs together. Through some mix of deliberate cultivation and genuine outsiderness, they made you feel like they could only make the strange music they were making. This most recent period involves a certain demystification on that front, by showing just how proficient they are with more commonly legible forms of musical technique. The rhythm section, in particular, finds deeper and funkier pockets in the songs of Isn’t It Now? than we have any right to expect from the guys who made Danse Manatee.
But they’re still contorting and combining these methods in ways that no other band could pull off. Take “Genie’s Open,” which at first is reminiscent of the proggy Canterbury bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s—psychedelic in the sense of fungal overgrowth rather than good vibes and tie-dye, with a series of dank minor-key harmonies that seem to twist in on themselves as the song progresses. Then, on a dime, they switch to an airy two-chord vamp so simple they could play it in their sleep, ornamenting it with the sort of cascading vocal layers that have provided connective tissue for almost all of their otherwise divergent work. Even the sound of Animal Collective themselves, at this point, is an idiom with diffusely observable parameters, attempted but never paralleled by the legions of bands that arose to imitate them at their peak of popularity. This moment is the purest expression of that Animal Collective house style on Isn’t It Now?, and it’s also one of the album’s most thrilling highs. If they’ve stopped putting so much emphasis on reinvention from album to album, maybe it’s because they’re still so good at being themselves.


After contemplating retirement, Mitski returns with a new album that’s warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.

Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

The tiny desert town of Valentine, Texas got its name after railroad workers laying tracks east from El Paso first reached it on February 14, 1882. Or maybe its namesake is John Valentine, the American expressman who supervised transit routes out west before becoming the inaugural president of Wells Fargo. Whichever the true origin story, it’s where Mitski gazed at her first dust devils on a trek across America—thinking about the whirling forces of love and commerce, how to insulate her passion for music from an extractive industry.
These heavy thoughts guided “Valentine, Texas,” a 2022 song off Laurel Hell on which Mitski cast her inner turmoil onto the natural world: observing clouds that resembled mountains, then visualizing those mountains drifting off, wishing for her burdens to dissipate like vapor. It introduced a chilly, fatalistic album that hinted at commercial pop ambition while anticipating the end of her career—a sense of doomed finality reinforced by its title, an Appalachian folk term for rhododendron thickets where wanderers die after getting stuck. But after Laurel Hell’s release, Mitski wrestled forward: “I renegotiated my contract with my label, and decided to keep making records,” she announced. Now “Valentine, Texas” appears like a guidepost along a long, winding road to the wide expanses of her seventh album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.
Here, the alchemical imagination that turns cumuli into sierras meets fireflies that hurtle like cars and freight trains that clomp like wild cattle. Mitski conjures scenes of stark and spectral beauty, backed by sweeping orchestral arrangements written by Drew Erickson, the man behind the Old Hollywood grandeur of Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20st Century and the cosmic bloom of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Gone is the claustrophobic synth-pop that landed Mitski her first Billboard hit, the tense sound of the big city; now the blinding lights of the stage seem to appear only as a memory. The result is a warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding record that foregrounds her evocative songwriting. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.
As always with Mitski’s albums, loneliness is an inescapable feature of the geography: “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings to empty space on “The Frost,” realizing that she’s alone in her grief. Her steely, vigilant stance—so prevalent on 2018’s Be the Cowboy and Laurel Hell—has softened, the starch dissolving from her personality. So even when connection seems impossible, she reaches for company. She sends love to a benevolent moon, hoping it will pass on the sentiment after she fades to dust. She pours herself another glass, because “sometimes a drink feels like family”—and over solitary, minimal guitar strums, a chorus of voices swell up behind her like a cruel hallucination: “FAMILY.”
This wilderness might seem like a godless place, but Mitski finds scattered signs of divinity: in the body of a drowned insect contaminating the last sips of Jameson, a corpse that from a different vantage looks like an angel. Or the blind, nameless mutt who “shits where she’s supposed to” and embodies hope in breathing, primal form. Strange creatures prowl throughout The Land Is Inhospitable like deities, delivering flashes of frightening insight. An oracular bird mockingly reminds Mitski of her spiritual imprisonment on “The Deal” after she bargains away her soul: “Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” A pack of dogs executes a kind of Biblical punishment on “I’m Your Man,” yapping as cicadas chirp, a toad shrieks, and angels harmonize from above. “I’m sorry I’m the one you love,” Mitski laments to a partner, “I’ll meet judgment by the hounds.”
These are among some of the most surreal, existential, and fascinating songs of Mitski’s career, zooming out from the exigencies of her vocation to probe the essence of the human condition and our place in the cosmos. The album still offers portraits of routine suffering, like on “I Don’t Like My Mind,” on which Mitski plays a self-loathing workaholic who only rests on “an inconvenient Christmas,” gorging herself on cake only to vomit it back up. But the broader universe seeps into even the most mundane settings, intimate moments charged with otherworldly significance. “Heaven” is a tableaux of domestic bliss in which Mitski becomes one with the environment, comparing herself to murmuring brooks and bending willows as she luxuriates in private moments with her lover: “I sip on the rest of the coffee you left/A kiss left of you/Heaven, heaven, heaven.” The misty orchestral swirls at the song’s end make it feel like we too have ascended.
From up above, what do we see? Tiny individuals hubristically trying to make something of ourselves, to push ahead, while knowing that one day the culmination of all that effort will disappear. Evidence of alienation and brutality, but also of softness and beauty. On “Star,” Mitski sings an elegy to a lost love from the other side of isolation, using the galaxy as evidence of a greater hope. The land may be inhospitable, but pan out and you’ll recognize what she does—hardship and pleasure, the choice to embrace love, and the belief that in the end it will have been worth it.


Stuart Howard’s third album veers off into the abstract, somewhere between a classical and post-electro mindset. Its many guests are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul.

Ruinism

Until now, the music that Stuart Howard has put out as Lapalux has masked his tendency to labor over details until he’s achieved perfection. The London producer built his previous two full-lengths and four EPs on a solid foundation of beats and melodies. On Ruinism, his third full-length, Howard abandons his trademark emphasis on grooves, vocals, R&B, hip hop, and jazz in favor of a less immediately listener-friendly blend of abstract sounds. This move isn’t as drastic as, say, Amon Tobin’s like-minded shift from jazz breaks to Foley-based sound sources on his 2007 album The Foley Room. Still, Lapalux fans will likely be scratching their heads wondering where the meat of his sound went.
Whether or not those fans take a shine to Ruinism, Howard’s determination should be applauded. Lapalux’s debut full-length, 2013’s Nostalchic, and preceding EP, 2012’s When You’re Gone, also drew from Foley sources and field recordings, but they weren’t the main focus. Howard appeared content to make sultry, soulful songs that owed a great debt to groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba. Lapalux’s mix of tentativeness and a strong pulse made it the ideal soundtrack for that headspace when you’re either getting ready to go out clubbing or just coming back—this decade’s answer to chillout with a kick of adrenaline.
The time, the mood shifts dramatically. Howard’s last album, 2015’s Lustmore, gets a jump-start from singer Andreya Triana right off the bat, her smoky voice as full-bodied and looming as a pipe organ resounding in a church. By contrast, the first sounds to take center stage on Ruinism track opener “Reverence” are a repeating loop (a kind of digital version of a railway station bell) and a bouquet of strings. The strings increase in tension and come to a near-boil, but the track simply dissipates, never developing into a hook or even a form.
Singer GABI makes an entrance at the outset of the next track, “Data Demon,” her wordless, operatic chants blending with strings to mimic the sound of a theremin or musical saw. GABI’s voice soars to the uppermost reaches of the human register (at least it sounds that way), but again no hook emerges. And when Howard adds some bass drops, he does so as a harsh counterpoint, a kind of punching-bag effect in the middle of a classical concert hall.
By this point, it becomes obvious that Howard isn’t making a pop record here. Several of the new tunes feature guest vocalists—JFDR, Louisahhh, Talvi, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Camella Lobo, and Szjerdene Mulcare all appear—but few of them supply a conventional “lead” vocal. Similarly, Howard’s beats don’t ever quite cohere into grooves, while the overwhelming majority of the album pushes the fabric of its sounds in front of everything else. Other than the Talvi feature “4EVA,” it’s even fair to say that Ruinism doesn’t actually consist of songs. Which leaves little left but Howard’s attention to detail, now strikingly and undeniably apparent from start to finish.
Following "4EVA," Howard’s dance side tentatively returns on the holographic house groove of “Essex Is Burning.” From there, the album features beats more prominently. But even then, Ruinism lingers in a state somewhere between classical and a kind of post-electro mindset characterized by non-functional beat-making, as if the stuttering pulse of the songs were emanating from broken pieces of machinery. It is to Howard’s enormous credit that he is able to make this music flow given the secondary role that rhythm, harmony, and structure take.
Though far less accessible than his previous material, Ruinism isn’t the clinical listen it could have turned into. Its performers are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. It is the kind of album that tends to frustrate a fanbase while cementing its maker as an artist for that very willingness to alienate the faithful. You could say that Ruinism is Howard’s coming-out party as a composer, but even that incorrectly implies an adherence to tradition. With Ruinism, Howard sets out on a whole new path to conceiving his music.


On her second album, the kaleidoscopic future-folk sounds of Odetta Hartman are brought into immaculate focus.

Odetta Hartman: Old Rockhounds Never Die

Old Rockhounds Never Die

In 1935, a 20-year-old Alan Lomax traveled south with author Zora Neale Hurston and folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle to conduct a series of field recordings documenting traditional African-American music in Georgia and Florida, and folk songs of Haiti and the Bahamas. Over 200 discs of music detail a trip that was, by all means, unconventional: A white kid traveling with two 44-year-old women, one black and one white, sharing rooms and meals in a segregated environment where such mingling elicited withering side eye at best. It also marked an early use of a new Presto recording device, which captured sound instantaneously to blank discs. Lomax celebrated the past by embracing the future, in the equipment he used and the company he kept.
This bit of history is key when distilling the beautifully moonstruck, virtuosic future-folk of Odetta Hartman. Seemingly born for a folk singer’s life, she was named for icon Odetta Holmes, and the Lomax trip was a focus of her thesis at Bard College. In turn, such presentations of traditional sounds via modern technology forms the basis of her newest work, Old Rockhounds Never Die. It also speaks to her working relationship with partner and producer Jack Inslee, a studied technician who stitches throbbing low-end with her violin squeals, and 808 taps with her plucky banjo, with the precision and grace of a fine tailor. The whole thing is born of a DIY ethos—Hartman plays all of the instruments herself, and Inslee created most of the beats in their home. You’d never know that, though, given the album’s rich quality of sound.
The act of field recording is as much an extension of Hartman as her striking voice, which lives somewhere between the countrified jazz singer realm of Jolie Holland and the breathy incantations of Cat Power’s Chan Marshall. She and Inslee carry a Zoom H4N Handy Recorder everywhere they go, from the streets of New York to the medinas of Morocco, on the chance they’ll encounter some lightning bolt worth bottling. When paired with the autodidactic banjo playing, violin, electric guitar, and bass of Old Rock Hounds Never Die, Icelandic birds, D.C. thunderstorms, and New Orleans frogs become essential players in an unlikely and utterly magical symphony.
Like a cowboy on acid, Hartman whispers, warbles, and howls tales of California train travel, gunfights, and lost lovers—marvelous, rattling, and bit different each time they’re experienced. Album standout “Sweet Teeth” is as bitter a love song as anything that’s crossed Lucinda Williams’ lips, guided by Inslee’s guttural vibrations and Hartman’s frenetic banjo. “I got a sweet man/He’s trapped in my claws,” she proclaims. These things that should not go together, in fact, do, with an elegance and energy that belies a dissection of its parts.
“Misery” flips the script on the murder ballad. Throbbing beats, plucky banjo, and blood-curdling yowls reclaim the legions of female bodies killed and commodified for the sake of a song. It raises the heart rate at a sprinter’s pace, no-doubt mimicking the internal pounding of the woman who holds the gun. Terrifying as the song becomes, there’s comfort in such defiance: A woman who is reclaiming tradition with a man who is happy to assist.
All of the auxiliary percussion on the album is foley: Snare sounds were made from a running faucet; the glockenspiel heard on “Freedom” is stainless steel mixing bowls; there are pepper grinders and keys on a radiator, all recorded at home. In a musical ecosystem where singular is overused and haunting is all but nauseating, Hartman and Inslee’s work here is deserving of such accolades. There is nothing quite else that ties together such imaginative incongruence with ease, a quilt of scraps that cannot be replicated. What should be a hot mess is a marvel, a constellation of sounds shining bright and mysterious.


The rising road-rap talent has built his name on a mixture of sinister detachment and bristling ambition. Yet despite his aloof, exacting style, he stretches himself thin on this 28-track mixtape.

Rap Game Awful

In the creative doldrums following UK drill’s ascent to the mainstream, that style’s musical forebear, road rap—the cruddy sound spearheaded by Giggs and co. back in the early 2000s—is getting some shine, with a new generation of rappers swapping VHS grit for VVS glint. Chief among the reemergent scene’s new talents is North Londoner Clavish, whose cold precision and pugilistic wordplay have gained him a cult fan base among both aging UK rap fans and newer followers discovering a taste for slower beats and greater introspection than pop-leaning drill can offer.
Clavish first captured imaginations back in 2018 with a 40-second clip of a louche freestyle delivered from the back seat of a hatchback; he followed up with an eight-minute monologue of sharp, guarded storytelling. Since then, he’s kept his output to a trickle, using the scarcity of his releases to heighten their impact. His character recalls The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield, sharing the clean-cut antagonist’s mixture of sinister, sunken-eyed detachment and bristling ambition. A lazy observer might call his demeanor effortlessly cool (which, yes, it sort of is); but the more studied critique is that paradox is central to almost everything Clavish does.
Clavish is witty—“The streets aren’t for everyone, that’s why they made the curbs,” offers “No Interview”—yet unswervingly humorless, too. He cuts music checks to free himself from a street lifestyle he holds in contempt, but, like Pacino in the Godfather, forever flirts with being pulled back in. He seems to relish the obvious contradiction of rapping immaculately for minutes on end while reiterating that he’s not trying or doesn’t care for recognition. “This mixtape's just for everyone to know I'm hard/Don't care about being in the charts,” he sighs on breezy highlight “That’s Silly,” as if waiting to be tested on his claims. It’s puckish, and enticing. However, the unignorable inconsistency at the heart of Rap Game Awful is that despite his aloof, exacting style, Clavish has turned in a debut album that is, inexplicably, 28 tracks long. Stretched out like this, the few holes in his game—namely a dearth of stories that stretch beyond his immediate North London environs, and a limited selection of flows—are at risk of crowding out his shows of genuine excellence.
Rap Game Awful checks a full NC-17 bingo card of drugs, sex, and violence, all peppered, like a movie premiere’s red-carpet backdrop, with an endless spool of designer brand names. “When I’m upset I fly Sloane Street, Louis Vuitton, and Prada,” he spits on the midnight glide of “1 More Than 6.” But splashing cash can only offer so much succor, which leads him to pleasures of a more carnal kind; jewels and intimate violence provide the rest. His lyrics, for the most part unanchored from any discernible choruses, flit between these topics in a kaleidoscopic melee both entrancing and unsettling, conjuring patterns from shapes that simply shouldn’t fit. It’s an experience to gorge on.
That is, until it’s not. The uniformity of each song’s contents, and the inevitable return to each familiar theme—fucking, fighting, flexing—ends up spotlighting where Clavish hits and where he misses: He sounds untouchable as he glides a hopscotch flow over hotel lounge piano on “That’s Silly,” but then he stutters on the inapposite “Eleanor Rigby”/“Thong Song” strings of “Traumatised.” The chorus on “I Told You So” sounds half-baked, but on “FR” he’s soaring. The intro and outro tracks offer narrative bones to pick over, along with glimpses of the man behind the designer garments; on “22 Missed Calls,” he experiments with more conceptual song structures, with promising results—but moments like these risk being lost amid a wash of sameness.
Like the clip that kickstarted Clavish’s career, Rap Game Awful leaves you wanting more—just not in terms of quantity. There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion. What you want more of, really, is what you suspect Clavish could do, not what you already know he can.


On her second full-length album, the Baltimore rapper indulges in the time-honored queer tradition of plotting a great escape from it all.

Love Is Love

Lor Choc sings, “What if you and I/Can get away together/Right now?” as her voice intermittently curdles with Auto-Tune. The song, “Get Away,” joins Bronski Beat’s synthpop voyage “Smalltown Boy” and Tracy Chapman’s folk-pop hit “Fast Car” in a lineage of forlorn runaways. In all three, the speaker’s home is little more than an oppressive shell they must break out of on their way to freedom, acceptance, peace. “You and I can both get jobs/And finally see what it means to be living,” Chapman postulates in her earthy alto. Choc’s vision is more tempered: “It’s whatever/I’m just trying to live better.”
The idea that real life hides somewhere just beyond the horizon is not constrained to queer music, but it takes on extra urgency there. Softer and more wistful than Lor Choc’s 2016 debut tape Worth the Wait, Love Is Love finds the artist caught in the liminal space between where she is and where she’s going, between her allegiance to her hometown and the suspicion that somewhere better lies in wait. These love songs come with disclaimers. “I got a girl that really love me/But I’m too caught up in this money/I’m too caught up in these streets,” she muses on “Love Me.” On “Wrong Rights,” she saddles a cliché with additional poignancy: “If loving you is wrong/Then I don’t wanna be right,” she murmurs against a spat of ultra-compressed synth strings. Because she’s singing to another woman, the tired couplet wakes up. If the world stamps her love as morally wrong, then fuck the world, let’s find a better one.
Compared to the exuberant mosaic of Worth the Wait, Love Is Love’s production rings a little sedate. Hi-hats fall like snowflakes, and synth riffs chirp tinny and thin. Choc steps in to fill the space that’s been left open, proving herself a versatile and charismatic presence behind the mic. She can play tender, as on the gently tuneful “Vibe,” and she can wail up a storm like she does on “How I Feel.” Whether she’s nursing a crush or self-soothing after a bad breakup, she doesn’t hesitate to push her voice to its natural breaking point, often rippling it with filters for additional emphasis.
In the years leading up to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage across the United States, “all love is equal” was used as one of many slogans in support of LGBTQ rights. After the 2016 mass shooting at the Orlando gay club Pulse, Lin-Manuel Miranda read a sonnet at the Tony Awards that condensed the sentiment to “love is love.” It’s legal now to marry anyone, but such a law hardly ensures the safety of queer folks figuring out how to negotiate a deeply heteronormative world. Laws don’t tell stories, and there are still yawning gaps in the ongoing history of queer storytelling. There’s no hard script for relationships that diverge from straight coupling, which is both confusing and exciting: It means you get to write your own. Lor Choc, a young artist with a sharp curiosity around her craft, sets out to do just that — to turn the relative vacancy around her experience into an opportunity for forging something new.
In Choc’s vision, the intimacies of female friendship coalesce into a romantic bond between equals. “They be mad cause we be fussin’/And we still be clique-tight,” she raps on “Ride.” “Don’t be scared to tell me nothing/Secret’s safe on this side.” They’re sharing secrets, close like best friends, and they’re also in love like girls aren’t supposed to be. “Tell me you’ll never leave me,” Choc sings at the hook. It’s not possessiveness; it’s a wild, gleaming hope.


The breakout NY rapper’s emotionally affecting, piano-heavy street tales start to run together at 17 tracks.

True 2 Myself

Three years ago, a 15-year-old Lil Tjay was sentenced to a year in a juvenile detention center for a robbery. In late 2017, he was released back into the Bronx’s Fordham Heights neighborhood, with a promise to his mother that things would be different. At first, he fell back into his old ways, skipping school to run the Bronx streets. Then, he stepped into a studio for the first time and recorded his breakout single “Resume.”
On “Resume,” Lil Tjay sing-raps in a soft voice about his crushes with the charm of a mischievous early 2010s teen R&B star (think Prodigy of Mindless Behavior). At the same time, he reflects on the drug addicts he passes on his block everyday and the friends he’s lost while incarcerated. He perfectly captures the feeling of being a kid in a New York environment that rapidly forces you to mature. That conflict only becomes more profound on the singles that followed “Resume,” which he began uploading to YouTube every month or so. “Long Time” is a bittersweet ode to all of the friends he’s lost; “Goat” reflects on the low points he’s overcome; “Brothers” dredges up the past he’s still trying to distance himself from. By the end of summer 2018, Tjay’s melodic sense was refined and his stories tapped into an emotional honesty that made him a relatable breakout star in New York.
Lil Tjay’s music was always suited for singles. There’s nothing wrong with that; so much of rap is consumed through playlists and YouTube videos. But when stretched across a 17-track album, like his debut, True 2 Myself, issues that were irrelevant before begin to surface: uniform vocals, half-cooked production, and writing that pulls from the same stories.
True 2 Myself is more like a compilation than an album. On “F.N,” Tjay’s vivid reflections are given life by lush piano. “I was stuck up in the streets, but I had a brain/I ain’t have no money, we was looking for a nigga chain,” he raps, while keeping a steady melody. The album’s intro, “One Take,” is Tjay at his sharpest; every line over the sparkly keys has a purpose, especially when he addresses comparisons to fellow Bronx crooner A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: “They said I’m the new A Boogie, relax/I ain’t never tried to copy his swag.” Each of these songs is just as good, maybe better, than early tracks like “Goat” and “Brothers”—both land on the album—but lose some of their luster when they’re all run together, and padded out with blander versions of the same piano-heavy street tales (“Dream That I Had,” “Post To Be”).
The album format gives Tjay a little room to stretch, something that’s nearly impossible when he’s only releasing one single a month. Some experiments work, like the traditional R&B ballad “Mixed Emotions.” The “BET Uncut” slow jam “Sex Sounds,” meanwhile, is way too much: Hearing him sing “The way you kiss me when I’m stroking deep inside” is like finding porn in your little brother’s internet history.
Lil Tjay wants to grow up, and an album feels like part of that process. But Tjay didn’t need an album; he notched a Billboard Top 15 single and became one of the rappers leading New York’s melody-driven scene without one. True 2 Myself is a playlist of soon-to-be singles grouped under the industry-formality heading of an “album.” Inevitably, one of these brooding piano ballads will catch on, followed by another, and Tjay, just like he did less than two years ago, will go on another run.


The indie rock band made two filler-free albums full of primal thrills and then disappeared. This reissue feels more like a reintroduction than a reassessment.

Gone Glimmering

Chavez were a perfect comet of a band: At the height of the mid-’90s indie boom in New York, they made two filler-free albums in two years that sounded like each other but not like anything else, then didn’t break up so much as quietly stop existing. They never made a Difficult Third Album; they didn’t fade away because there wasn’t really anything to fade from. They were great and then they were gone.
Their 1995 full-length debut Gone Glimmering and 1996’s Ride the Fader feature interstitial snippets of people gawping in delight at fireworks displays and roller coasters, and the songs that surround them aspire to that mood and that level of entertainment—primal thrills that are simple to understand but complicated to deliver. Chavez were Coney Island’s rickety, beloved Cyclone; you can hear the parts grinding and the danger of collapse is part of the fun.
Chavez began life as a supergroup of sorts, at least by an extremely 1995 metric. Lead singer and guitarist Matt Sweeney had been in Skunk, who put out two albums on Twin/Tone that sounded like New Jersey’s answer to old Twin/Tone Soul Asylum. (This is a compliment.) Guitarist Clay Tarver had been in Boston’s Bullet LaVolta, which put out a couple of albums of East Coast grunge before breaking up in 1992. Chavez was (significantly) greater than the sum of these parts.
Reveling in deeply unfashionable, doomy ’70s prog and proto-metal—titles like “Wakeman’s Air” and “The Flaming Gong” are signposts even if the dressed-down Lower East Side vibe isn’t—the nine songs on Gone Glimmering, built around Sweeney and Tarver’s call-and-response guitars and getaway-car squeals, all feel of a piece. You could listen to this album steadily over the course of 25 years and still not clock the exact moment when opener “Nailed to the Blank Spot” turns into “Break Up Your Band.” “Laugh Track” and “Ghost By the Sea” might be the perfect distillation of the band’s innate, almost symphonic sense of quiet-loud-quiet drama, and jittery closer “Relaxed Fit” bakes the ethos right into the title. Meanwhile “Pentagram Ring” is what happens when they trade that dynamic for an actual groove.
They were tagged with the quixotic “math rock” label, signifying a bookish intent that the band’s influences and underlying hesher vibe couldn’t quite support. They were highly skilled musicians—drummer James Lo in particular—which almost seemed beside the point. An exhaustive, charmingly geeky video interview between Tarver, Sweeney, and Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13 pegged to the Gone Glimmering 25th anniversary reissue goes deep into the weeds about tunings and approach, ultimately exposing the band’s signature assault as a series of happy accidents, a point Sweeney is adamant about. “I cannot play a single guitar part that Clay does in Chavez and he doesn’t know what I’m doing,” he told FRONTRUNNER in May 2020. “But those two guitar parts would work together well.”
Compared to other recent Class of ‘95 reissues like Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura, Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes, Matador’s anniversary reissue feels less about nostalgia or a valedictory salute than a re-introduction. The 1995 Pentagram Ring EP fills out this deluxe edition, with four tracks that feel in turns sludgier and more rudimentary than what wound up on the album proper. “The Nerve” is a heaping slab of “Custard Pie,” and “You Faded” is as straightforward and tuneful as they get.
Once Chavez wound down, owing mainly to members getting grown-up jobs and a general lack of popular deterrent from doing so, Sweeney began his rise as alt-rock’s own Waddy Wachtel, playing with everyone from Billy Corgan, Guided by Voices, and Will Oldham to Neil Diamond, Adele, and posthumously, Johnny Cash. Tarver was an executive producer on Silicon Valley while bassist Scott Marshall (son of Garry, nephew of Penny) dove into the family business. Chavez regrouped for a handful of shows and a three-song EP in 2017, and while all this has helped burnish the band’s legacy, it hasn’t added any artificial weight or import to Gone Glimmering. The album hasn’t retroactively become a touchstone for a new generation of rock bands nor does it feel tied to its era as some indie artifact. But it may stand as a model of how to present a fully realized vision from moment one and then get out before anyone has a chance to fuck it up. Break up your band.

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The latest from Kurt Wagner’s shapeshifting group is its darkest yet: a haunting ode to everyday American pain and the small ways we make it through.

The Bible

“The room is warmer than it should be,” Kurt Wagner sings in the opening line of The Bible, instantly capturing an air of unease in the kind of unassumingly mundane way that has practically become Lambchop’s signature. Recounting a visit with his father as he nears the end of his life, Wagner’s low voice droops over a bed of empty, ringing piano keys: “Now these days are measured by the number/Thirty summers from today.” As Wagner mulls over the increasingly meaningless distance between his father’s age and his own, a miniature orchestra of electronics joins in—the chintzy harps and weeping strings give an unearthly effect, like watching a funeral service through a low-resolution livestream. But just when it seems like the uncomfortable emotion might be too much to bear, Wagner pulls the rug from under us once more. “It should get easier with time,” he contemplates, before following it up with a wisecrack: “No one’s edgier than I.”
After over 30 years as the ringleader of “Nashville’s most fucked up country band,” the sheepishly subversive songwriter has broken down and rebuilt American music time and time again, albeit much more subtly than most iconoclasts. Wagner’s world operates on a smaller scale: He writes songs that feel suffused with importance despite being about lonely house dogs, or stopping for donuts on the drive home. For Wagner, wiping the slate clean on his band’s sound is less about testing out new genres than it is about gently revealing more wrinkles to his worldview. Though he’s always freely tinkered with oddball electronics, in recent years he’s pushed his sounds even further into the ether, shrouding his own voice in Vocoder and breaking down his music into a ghostly haze. For an artist who’s always thrived on a certain level of modest obscurity, Wagner’s later years have been a steady process of vanishing almost completely into thin air.
The Bible is easily Lambchop’s darkest work. Now 62 years old, Wagner spends its songs wrestling with death, confronting the passage of time with the same amused eccentricity that’s always been the lifeblood of his music. Stylistically, the band sounds freer than it’s ever been, as Wagner, pianist Andrew Broder, and producer Ryan Olson concoct a shapeshifting cocktail of Bacharach-ian baroque pop, off kilter digi-funk, glitched out gospel, and deconstructed chamber music. It is to Lambchop what Goodbye to Language was to Godard: the kind of bold late-period triumph that could have only come from an old master playfully grappling with the tools of our uncanny present moment.
There’s a disembodied quality to the songs on The Bible, and even the most ornate orchestral arrangements have the eeriness of a hologram. Each individual song feels as if it could be undone at any moment. “Whatever, Mortal” cruises on a sly smooth jazz build, the bridge slowly climbing to a dreamy swirl of brass and electronics before, out of nowhere, the stock sound of a gun clocking snaps us back to the chorus. Even more jarring is “Daisy,” a touching barroom ballad with all the wry wit of a Randy Newman weeper, where, after a minute and a half, Wagner’s gentle singing is suddenly interrupted by a loud “HEY!” straight out of an Ableton crunk sample pack. It might very well be Lambchop’s equivalent of the Grouper microwave beep, instantly collapsing the reality of the song and thrusting us back into the absurd technological fabric of the world around us.
For all its cold electronic effects, however, The Bible emanates compassion and warmth. As “edgy” as he may be, Wagner’s ultimate weapon is his softness: an ability to command silence like just another instrument at his disposal. It’s in the little moments, such as on the Angelo Badalamenti-like “So There,” where a tremble in his voice flutters out as he sings, “My eyes are open like a screen door to your heartbeat,” imbuing the song with a hushed, elegiac intimacy. In “A Major Minor Drag,” Wagner meditates on the death of Gift of Gab, surrounding his own Auto-Tuned voice in a choir of shimmering bells. “I’m at war now with the obvious,” he croons as the song reaches a triumphant climax, swelling like a solemn tribute to a fallen soldier. Surreal as his approach may be, Wagner never lets his songs’ peculiarities stand above their vulnerability.
The Bible is a willfully abstract record, but for its many experiments, Wagner and company bring an intense focus to these songs. Wagner sounds urgent, even pleading, on tracks like “Little Black Boxes” and “Police Dog Blues,” navigating their twisting and unsettled grooves as if he were trying to reveal some kind of logic in their disorder. The latter song was inspired by the George Floyd riots, and it takes its name from an old Blind Blake song that just so happens to have been released the year Wagner’s father was born. As random as these fragments may seem, Wagner connects them into something unified: a haunting ode to everyday American pain and the small ways we make it through.


Toronto trio Odonis Odonis forgo their rowdy surf/garage mix for a pulsating, John Carpenter-esque goth palette, while their lyrics explore the dire consequences of unchecked technological progress.

Post Plague

On its 2011 debut full-length Hollandaze, Toronto trio Odonis Odonis crafted a rowdy blend of surf/garage and noise, only to dial-down the surf and crank up the noise on the 2014 follow-up Hard Boiled Soft Boiled. At that point it became apparent that Odonis Odonis had a penchant for sweeping change from album to album. But with Post Plague Odonis Odonis take an even more radical step in a new direction, dropping the noise element almost entirely and a re-fashioning themselves as a goth/industrial-styled synth outfit.
If your town has a goth hotspot where people like to twirl to classics by Dead Can Dance, Depeche Mode, etc, you’ll immediately have a sense for the era this album’s insistent synth gurgles and throbbing beats come from. The pulsating, John Carpenter-esque synth pattern that opens the song “Needs” recalls Carpenter’s score for his iconic 1981 film *Escape from New York—*a motif that has by now been mined to death by other bands. Odonis Odonis, however, aren’t invoking sci-fi as kitsch B-grade entertainment but as a dire reminder of the downside of unchecked technological progress. An official statement from the band implores the audience to “take stock of ourselves before we lose something profound, [which] may be necessary to ward off a pending anthropogenic apocalypse.”
Of course, sci-fi has a long history as an expression of collective anxieties about humanity’s future vis-a-vis technological advancement. But Post Plague's authoritative tone makes it resonate more profoundly than superficially similar music by Odonis Odonis' more fashion-conscious peers. Vocalist/synth player Constantin (Dean) Tzenos sings with the conviction of someone who's absolutely certain the world is on the brink of upheaval, but even when he's screaming he foregoes hysteria.
At times, such as on “Nervous,” he chooses to couch his message in reassurance and breathy sex appeal. Tzenos' reserved cool makes for a taut contrast between the music and the lyrics and actually heightens the urgency of the subject matter. He also wrings meaning out of terse, almost monosyllabic lines: “Now fear is cultured from within,” he sings on album opener “Fearless,” whose chorus is built on repetition of a basic two-word line: “Barely conscious/Barely conscious/We’re fearless.” Here and elsewhere, Tzenos says quite a lot with very little, and the implications of these ideas—in this case, emotional suppression and self-narcotizing through media—belie the simplicity of his word construction.
Unsurprisingly, traces of the band’s taste for noise linger. Staccato bursts of Ministry-style guitar/drums strafe across the otherwise hypnotically subdued synth lines on “Nervous,” for example. But, like most of the album, the song teeters at the edge of an eruption but pulls back before going over the edge. Here and throughout Post Plague, the band shows that it has learned the power of holding back. “Nervous” ends with a central synth figure getting the last word with the steady insistence of a vital signs monitor—a fitting metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit in spite of everything we’ve done to dehumanize ourselves. The music suggests over and overthat that resilience is on shaky ground, which sets Post Plague apart from its influences. We could once enjoy dystopian fantasy from a distance; Post-Plague isn't fantasy at all, and its themes are very much rooted in the now.
Occasionally, the band hints at its true range. Post Plague, in fact, falls within prescribed boundaries not because of limitations but by choice. Deeper into the track listing, the spartan, decidedly modern indie rock of “Pencils,” with its splashes of color and guest vocals courtesy of New Pornographers member Kathryn Calder, shows that, creatively speaking, even though this band might like to visit goth night from time to time, it wears no allegiance on its sleeve. Given Odonis Odonis’ track record, Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map.


Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.

Plastic Hearts

For the better part of a decade, Miley Cyrus has been an avatar for entertainment capitalism’s most insidious processes. She is a living embodiment of the child-star-to-tabloid-fixture pipeline, and typifies the music industry’s fondness for adopting the aesthetics of rap music as a way of courting clicks as much as she does its tendency to disavow the genre as “materialist” as a way of virtue-signaling. Her music is inexorable from social media, both in the frenetic, real-time updates of its visual style and its tendency to spark loud, mindless discourse. She has been canceled and revived more than pretty much any other star, save, perhaps, Justin Bieber. Provocative, talented but directionless, passionate but confused in her politics, she is a star for whom headlines have almost always outweighed output.
Although Cyrus’ various musical projects have rarely been good, a few have been, at the very least, historically significant. Focus exclusively on the drama and it’d be easy to forget that the three-year period of Cyrus’ output that yielded 2013’s Mike WiLL Made-It-produced Bangerz and 2015’s Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz was one of the most intriguingly bizarre pop eras of the past decade, throwing a spanner into a fairly staid, Max Martin-run commercial landscape and making discourse around thoughtless co-opting of Black art accessible and understandable to a new generation of pop fans.
In the years since, Cyrus has attempted to outrun that glittery, twerk-heavy chapter of her career. In 2017, she pivoted to back-to-basics country-pop with the painfully dull Younger Now, before, with little explanation or contrition, returning to the rap sound that had defined her Bangerz era on the 2019 EP She Is Coming, the first installment of a planned trilogy that replaced the former record’s freewheeling joy with a cursory nod to GothBoiClique-style emo rap and a typically inane guest verse from RuPaul. Both projects were relative commercial failures, attempts at image rehabilitation that instead removed a once-inescapable star from the conversation entirely.
Before Cyrus could release the sequels to She Is Coming, her life was upended, the vast majority of her new album destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire, and her decade-long relationship with actor Liam Hemsworth ending in a messy, highly-publicized divorce. In the wake of the split, Cyrus reset, scrapping her two unreleased EPs and pursuing a darker, classic rock-indebted sound. In August of this year, she released “Midnight Sky,” a cocaine-dusted disco track that addressed her divorce and subsequent high-profile flings in a surprisingly mature way. In the months following “Midnight Sky”’s release, Cyrus attempted to back up her newly conjured goodwill not through the release of more singles, but through heartbroken covers of Blondie, the Cranberries, and more. The writing on the wall was clear: Miley’s “rock era” had begun.
Plastic Hearts is not without precedent: Cyrus has been playing covers of the Smiths and Bob Dylan for unsuspecting audiences since her Bangerz tour, and, although a little reverential, her recent run of covers was enjoyable and endearing, a transparent attempt at proving her classic rock bona fides. Cyrus’ covers of “Heart of Glass” and “Zombie” are tacked on to the end of some versions of the record, almost like a gesture of goodwill, but there was little need: Plastic Hearts is a genuinely pleasing pop-rock record that, through a handful of canny stylistic and lyrical choices, staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.
Although the album artwork—shot by famed rock photog Mick Rock—and the “Heart of Glass” cover would seem to point towards a certain strain of classic rock revival, Plastic Hearts is a stylistic grab bag. Running the gamut from modern radio rock to industrial pop to new wave, Plastic Hearts is unified not by Cyrus’ commitment to any particular era, but to her cosplay as a kind of iconic rock siren lost to the annals of time: Were the production a little less clean, you might be able to pass this off as the greatest hits of a Top of the Pops-era rock diva.
Cyrus’ voice, lower and more guttural than it had ever sounded, was the focal point of those covers, and Plastic Hearts makes clear why: her sandpapery alto has never sounded more natural. Try as she might, Cyrus can’t really rap, and Younger Now made it abundantly clear that Nashville isn’t her calling. Here, she tries on a handful of different styles, and each one works immaculately: Her rasp induces chills on the stadium ballads “Angels Like You” and “Never Be Me,” out-Billy Idols Billy Idol on the “White Wedding” remake “Night Crawling,” and pays homage to “Edge of Seventeen” without cowering in its shadow on “Midnight Sky.” The bulk of the melodies here are gilded and soaring, and she’s never forced to work her tongue around a clunky, focus-tested quasi-rap lyric like “Hallelujah, I’m a freak/I’m a freak, hallelujah/Every week I’mma do ya.”
Lyrically, Plastic Hearts is still vintage Miley, albeit with the edges sharpened: songs about fame and love and being a little too fucked up, whether chemically or emotionally. There’s a thread of unfiltered honesty that positions the album as an emotional twin to Bangerz; that record, beyond the twerking, was largely about Cyrus’ devotion to Hemsworth, opening with what was essentially a marriage proposal and ending with a recitation of Corinthians 13:4, exploring the stresses and caveats of eternal love throughout. A couple of songs here play as if in direct conversation with songs from that record, an older, divorced Cyrus more eloquently echoing realizations she was only beginning to acknowledge seven years ago.
Those only dipping into the beginning of the record will be stung by some of the album’s most hamfisted cuts. “WTF Do I Know,” with its confused provocations (“I’m the type to drive a pickup through your mansion”) and clean, propulsive 2000s rock chorus, plays more P!nk than Pink Floyd, while the staccato hook and showtune-y bounce of “Plastic Hearts” unearth repressed memories of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High. A lot of these songs sound like the canned, Muzak versions of rock songs thanks to the production by Louis Bell and Watt, hitmakers generally associated with top-tier pop artists like Camila Cabello and Post Malone. Still, the various successes of Plastic Hearts make you wonder what Cyrus would sound like if paired with someone like Jonathan Rado—who has helmed classic-sounding records by the Killers and Tim Heidecker, as well as past albums by Weyes Blood and Whitney—or Ariel Rechtshaid, who produced Haim’s Women In Music, Pt. III with Danielle Haim and Rostam. More than anything, Plastic Hearts raises questions like this, in the process highlighting a potential future career path: What if Miley Cyrus became an actual rock star?
When Cyrus reunites with past collaborators Mark Ronson—with whom she made the 2018 country-disco stomper “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”—and Andrew Wyatt, the results are thoughtful and surprising. The country-adjacent ballad “High,” one of a handful of future karaoke classics on the album, contains some of Cyrus’ most beautiful lyrics: “You, like a rolling stone, always building cities on the hearts you broke,” she sings, the crags in her voice given space to resonate, rather than erased. A line like “I don’t miss you, but I think of you and don’t know why” might seem simple, but it’s honest and heartbreaking. Best of all is “Bad Karma,” a raucous slow-build of a song featuring Joan Jett on vocals and Angel Olsen on guitar. Snot-nosed and silly, it’s a high-camp panto of ’80s hard rock, finding Cyrus and Jett trading one-liners—“I’ve always picked a giver ’cause I’ve always been the taker,” goes the delirious chorus—over one of the record’s few live drum tracks. It’s strange, outsized fun, and a glorious example of what Cyrus can do when she lightly plays with her own self-image.
The most interesting, and most complicated moment is saved for last. On “Golden G String” Cyrus attempts to show some kind of contrition for her mid-2010s antics:

I was tryin’ to own my power
Still I’m tryin’ to work it out
And at least it gives the paper somethin’ they can write about
And oh, that’s just the world that we’re livin’ in
The old boys hold all the cards, and they ain’t playin’ gin

It’s an intriguing idea that doesn’t really land. An “I did it for the patriarchy” apologia doesn’t quite address the layers of privilege and capital that have been involved with Cyrus’ most egregious missteps. Still, there’s a refreshing openness to a simple lyric like “There are layers to this body/Primal sex and primal shame/They told me I should cover it/So I went the other way”, which does more to explain Cyrus’ thought processes than any number of foot-in-mouth interviews. Explanations, though, are beside the point—“Golden G String” is a warm, inviting ballad, one of Cyrus’ most deeply-felt in years. Ultimately, that’s Plastic Hearts’ greatest success: for the first time in a long time, a Miley Cyrus record is music first, headlines second.

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The Canadian singer and songwriter’s fourth album is an ambitious collage of ’90s R&B and orchestral dramatics, welded together by her versatile, gossamer voice.

Sparkles & Debris

Lydia Ainsworth songs are spectral but aching, like the feeling of being watched in an empty room. Her music is often concerned with monsters and make-believe, setting them against sheets of synth and harmony. And since the glitchy art pop of her 2014 debut, Right From Real, she has blended genres with increasing gusto, indulging in richer, more complex composition and linking her music to a spiritual practice of magic. Her latest album, Sparkles & Debris, is a showcase of this progression, a candy jar of orchestral R&B that asks you to believe, too.
At first pass, Sparkles & Debris feels like a continuation of the synth-assisted R&B from Ainsworth’s 2019 album Phantom Forest, with more groove and less shiver than her first two albums. Songs that start off with one expectation—a silky drum beat out of a ’90s ballad, a celestial synth layered like whipped cream—soon dissolve into something different. “Cosmic Dust” begins with a floaty synth pad and promptly sways into a TLC-type beat. Then, a harp comes in. The collaged nature of these songs can exhilarate, like on “Amaryllis,” where foreboding, gnawing strings give way to a plinky electronic melody. The unexpected elements feed off each other rather than competing, building like papier-mâché.
But although intriguing within themselves, these songs don’t always work alongside each other. The sparse and shadowy Chic cover “Good Times” feels confusing following an art rock song like “Halo of Fire,” and Ainsworth’s more Celtic, voice-led melodies in the second half of the album are a difficult transition from the smooth, rhythmic ’90s pop sound of the first half. Sparkles & Debris is Ainsworth’s most enthusiastically genre-bending album to date, and it’s as occasionally fractured as that distinction would suggest. But Ainsworth’s distinct, gossamer voice welds it together: Regardless of production style, she is always at the front, weaving, tying down airy vocal runs with low whispers, pushing things to feel softer and more rare.
The way the album’s genres and concepts bleed together feels like a watercolor dream. The odd-fruit production makes a perfect home for the lyrics, which tell stories of girls walking to the “fairy place” and crying “liquid fire,” or deploy specifics in the way that a fairytale witch might, like when Ainsworth requests that a blackbird “speak thy name three times.” Like magic, pop songs ask you to harness your ambition, to seek to create a world that’s brighter, more full of love, sex, or in Ainsworth’s case, imagination. Sparkles & Debris is concerned with possibility—everything that shifts and changes and hopes to catch up.

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The experimental musician’s radiant new album explores love’s rapture within the confines of more traditional pop structures.

Powders

Eartheater songs, which reference chrysalises, diamonds, and other natural symbols of metamorphosis, sound like they emerge from an analogous process of transformation. Alexandra Drewchin takes amorphous elements and alters them into something rare and precious, incorporating grinding digital noise and austere beats into works of ornate avant-pop. Over the years she has steadily centered her voice as her primary instrument, the centrifugal force pulling together the dissonant pieces of her tracks. On her sixth album Powders, the first of twin records, she gets the closest she has to mainstream pop, exploring more traditional song structures and less adorned production.
When Drewchin approached pop in the past, it was typically in the form of absurd meditations on attraction; she told a partner to “grow gills, bring a snorkel” on 2019’s “Supersoaker.” On Powders, Drewchin aims to capture the transformative power of love. Flute arpeggios shoot out from under trembling synths as she details total rapture on opener “Sugarcane Switch”: “Put the sun to sleep, he’s tired/And I’m awake and inspired.” The lovestruck mood continues onto “Crushing,” an ambling trip-hop ballad composed of a series of interlocking lyrics, the end of each line becoming the beginning of the next. “You’re the fuse that detonates my body/You’re the body that blows my mind,” she sings. It’s a song that could reasonably keep going until language runs out. The two tracks are some of Drewchin’s best work as Eartheater, showcasing her skill for guiding surreal beauty out of sprawling, fluid arrangements.
Drewchin’s voice—sometimes multi-layered and distorted, other times untouched—has been her anchor since her solo debut Metalepsis in 2015. On Powders, it takes on a more prominent role, less processed than on previous records. While her performance is often impressive, her voice can feel trapped within the album’s more structured writing. On “Mona Lisa Moan” and “Pure Smile Snake Venom,” two of the most by-the-book songs Drewchin has ever released, her delivery sounds dulled, especially in contrast to the album’s radiant beginning.
In exploring her primary interest, a person’s capacity for change, Drewchin routinely evokes violence. It’s present in her monstrous stage name and was central to her last album, 2020’s Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin. It’s present in System Of A Down’s nu-metal classic “Chop Suey!,” which she covers halfway through Powders, singing of “self-righteous suicide” and dying angels. But instead of staying true to the original, Drewchin drains the song of its aggression, pairing her quiet voice with a simple guitar melody before the song blooms with percussion and piano. Transformation can be brutal, she seems to imply, but the most radical change can also be lovely and gentle.


Across her latest album, the pop star’s high-octane, inoffensive dance-pop plays it way too safe and never really finds a point of view.

Feed the Beast

Tacked right onto the end of Feed the Beast, Kim Petras’ so-called debut album, is “Unholy,” the German-born pop singer’s collaboration with Sam Smith. Released last year as a single from Smith’s fourth album Gloria, the track quickly became a source of internet ire for its curiously family-friendly attempt at transgressive, sex-positive pop. It also quickly shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100, thereby becoming the track that finally, after six years of striving, pulled Petras from IYKYK fame into the mainstream.
As a business decision, it’s a savvy move: “Unholy” has over a billion streams on Spotify alone, and remains a staple of pop radio; it will likely, by sheer proximity, make Feed the Beast look like a huge success. As a creative decision, it’s questionable. For all its theatrical faux-transgression—and for all the theatrical performativity with which it was promoted—“Unholy” was genuinely eclectic, an earworm with Gregorian chants and diet-SOPHIE synths. It arrives after 14 songs that largely sound like Teenage Dream rejects, a painful reminder that to become the kind of magnetic, world-beating pop star that the 30-year-old Petras is supposedly such a keen student of, you have to take real risks. And for about 40 minutes, Petras does little more than play it safe.
Petras took the title of Feed the Beast from an executive at Republic, who advised her to keep churning out music for the label to market. It’s unclear if there is any irony there: This is, for the most part, high-octane, inoffensive dance-pop that will sound great in Sephora and adequately pad out the playlist at your nearest shipping container bar. But it’s more than a little depressing, conceptually: A great pop star might make a melodramatic Faustian bargain part of her art, inviting you to watch on Instagram Live as she sells her soul in hope of being the next Madonna. A lesser pop star might deliver a song like the title track—“Throw you my heart, like eat me please,” Petras sings—which is more like a slot machine to be rung again and again, in hope that the three dollar signs will eventually line up. On Feed the Beast, she is rarely doing anything other than pure recreation, her posture of self-awareness hiding music that has no real point of view.
Petras has been spending a long time trying to perfect her sound. This is her third full-length album, after 2019’s trend-hopping debut Clarity and Halloween-themed mixtape Turn Off the Light. (She also scrapped a whole record, Problématique, after the majority of it was leaked online, and released last year’s Slut Pop EP that she said was intended to champion sex workers but only contained one line—“OnlyFans kind of shit”—about sex work). The enthusiasm and sheer love of pop history that Petras displayed on Clarity is replaced with a mercenary neutrality. Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion. Petras is at her best on “Coconuts,” a winking, frothy disco-pop single about her boobs that went gay-Twitter-viral in 2021 and is included here. But the remarkable density of clichés on the rest of Feed the Beast just drags everything down: “You gon keep on playing till you go too far”; “When you touch my body, I hear the angels sing”; “Hold me tight for one more minute.” Petras has spent years proving that she is smarter than this kind of lowest-common-denominator pop. Though Petras has always dealt in purely mainstream sounds, she’s never sounded so listless.
Even “Sex Talk,” a synth-funk bridge between the aggressive ribaldry of Slut Pop and the starry-eyed positivity of an early banger like “Heart to Break,” feels uninspired: “I like sex talk/Can you make my bed rock?” she asks, her voice carrying all the enthusiasm of a 2 p.m. Grindr thread. Petras has a knack for transmuting simple, stupid turns of phrase into pop gold—“Before you break my heart/Can you hit it from the back?” she sings on “Hit It From the Back,” the album’s best track—but she seems to have lost this particular skill here.
If Feed the Beast had a more defined personality—fizzy and extravagant like Clarity, or dumb to the point of genius like Slut Pop—it might be worth mentioning that half its songs were co-written by the infamous Dr. Luke. But Feed the Beast doesn’t need such a wrinkle: It is unlistenable on its own merits, a torrent of pure mid. Why doesn’t it possess the same sparkle as Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” or Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream or Kesha’s Animal or, indeed, any of the other great songs he’s written with Petras over the past few years?
It’s hard to square Feed the Beast with the kind of musician Petras appears to be. Even on the songs she released as a teenager, such as the Timbaland-meets-nightcored-Beach-House oddity “Die For You,” she seemed hungry and brazen, going for broke in her avowed quest to be a pop star. Online and in interviews, she is funny and smart, clearly a master of the subtle irony that stan Twitter adores. But there is such a thing, perhaps, as wanting mainstream fame too much—so much so that you let all your edge get sanded away.


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 the sleek pop, British nationalism, and commercial girl power of the Spice Girls’ debut.

Spice

During a frantic television interview in 1997, the Spice Girls, at the very height of their global fame, are laughing raucously and slapping one another on the arms. They have a magnetic energy, half engaging the interviewer's questions, half conspiratorially chattering their own side-conversations. The host asks a question about whether the band feels that they are risking over-saturation in the media. Geri Halliwell says: “If you wanna call it over-exposure, or just mass media attention, I think that’s just the way society is: When you like strawberry ice cream, you eat loads of it.”
The Spice Girls had materialized suddenly, seemingly fully formed, with their debut single “Wannabe” in June of 1996. It remains the biggest-selling single ever released by an all-female group in the UK. Complete with a one-take video in which they raised hell in a fancy London hotel, the song was bratty, with a ridiculous strutting drum track and a made-up refrain of “zig-ah-zig ahh.” It caught like wildfire.
A succession of No. 1s followed, quickly leading to the September release of the debut album Spice, which sold two million copies in its first two weeks, and went on to go multi-platinum in 27 countries. Not only did the Spice Girls' numbers dwarf the blockbuster releases of the modern era, they introduced a new model of pop success. They dispelled the tired mythology that people weren’t interested in all-women pop groups; they pioneered shameless musician-brand partnerships; they made music and videos that directly targeted children—Melody Maker labeled them a “teenypop act”—and, launching their music in Asia first, they always set their sights on going global.
It’s generally believed that the Spice Girls were the product of a master plan by their manager, Simon Fuller. It would be more accurate to describe them as the result of a plan that went completely wrong. The group was in fact created by a talent management agency, but it wasn’t Fuller—it was father-and-son team Bob and Chris Herbert, otherwise known as Heart Management. They were the ones who placed an ad in showbiz magazine The Stage in early 1994, looking for “streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated” under-23 women for an “all-female pop act.” Through rigorous auditions, the hundreds of applicants were narrowed down to Halliwell, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm, Melanie Brown, and Victoria Adams. Later, the UK press would rename them Ginger, Baby, Sporty, Scary, and Posh.
Unfortunately, the Herberts chose too well, and the five young women (aged between 18 and 22) turned out to have more ambition than their management. In David Sinclair’s whirlwind biography of the group, Wannabe, he tells the story of their heist: After becoming frustrated with a protracted development period and no contract with Heart Management, Geri, Mel C, and Mel B paid a visit to Heart’s offices, where they absconded with the master recordings of demos they had written so far (including “Wannabe”), met up with the rest of the Spice Girls at the side of a road, and drove up north.
From there, the five booked their own sessions with songwriters and negotiated a new management deal with Fuller. It’s true that Fuller was crucial to the success that came next: He assisted them in auditioning for every major label in the UK and Los Angeles, eventually signing with Virgin. Spice was completed in early 1996, long before “Wannabe” was released, so that the Girls could dedicate their time 100 percent to promotion when they launched.
Having the privilege to record an entire debut album before anyone has even heard your name is all but unimaginable in today’s music industry, where viral success usually precedes the record deal. But creating Spice this way meant that by the time “Wannabe” was an international hit, the group already had a cache of pop songs ready to go. The record can be broadly split into two modes: Its backbone is the brassy, attitude-filled, Northern soul-styled singles like “Wannabe,” “Say You’ll Be There,” and the madcap disco of “Who Do You Think You Are.” Then, there’s the softer-edged R&B-influenced ballads like “Mama,” “2 Become 1,” and “Naked.”
The album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits, a genre pastiche to suit every taste. But their gimmick also spoke to what made the Spice Girls so likeable, their infectious “have a go” ethos. Five women in a band together, sharing songwriting credit and vocal duties equally, was a new concept in British pop in 1996; the Spice Girls were all about making everyone feel included, even if that resulted in Geri awkwardly rapping in a coquettish faux-American accent on “Last Time Lover,” or the paper-thin verses that aim for a register that’s just slightly out of reach on the sentimental “Mama.”
Reviewing a Spice Girls song was like trying to review a can of Pepsi. In a music landscape saturated by Oasis on one side of the ocean and Alanis Morrisette on the other, “authentic singer-songwriter” was the dominant archetype of the day—by comparison, the jingle-like “Wannabe” was a freakishly polished commodity. And like brands that become too ubiquitous, subsumed into language and separated from their identity, the Spice Girls seemed to be taken less seriously the more successful they became. (Rolling Stone panned Spice, saying the Spice Girls had commercialized the riot grrrl movement, and their lyrics “made Alanis Morissette’s sound like Patti Smith’s.”) But Spice is endearingly unrefined. Even if nobody else was taking the music seriously, they were: Auto-Tune wouldn’t be introduced to pop for another two years (with Cher’s “Believe”), and the Girls—none of them trained musicians—spent hours in the booth trying to nail their takes. Just as you see Halliwell wobbling on her gargantuan heels in “Wannabe,” you can occasionally hear the straining and goofing in the voices on the album.
Spice has its dorky and amateurish moments, but if nothing else, that should prove that the Girls had a claim to authenticity themselves. Rather than just a savvy way to get a cut of publishing royalties, the Girls had a songwriting credit on every song on Spice because Stannard & Rowe and Absolute—the two production teams responsible for the majority of the record—worked closely with them to craft each one. Andy Watkins, one half of Absolute, told Sinclair: “None of them are musicians... But the thing about all of them at that point was they worked so incredibly hard at it. They knew their shortcomings. And the drive—it was unreal.”
This was at odds with a press and public who largely characterized the group as a product to whom the music was secondary (a 1997 Guardian review of their second album began: “Anyone idealistic enough to think the Spice Girls are in it for the Girl Power, or even the music…”). On the nascent internet, surrealist, hate-filled webpages sprang up to accuse the Girls of being, as the Miami New Times put it, “talentless hacks.” Despite the vitriol, there are real moments of weird magic in the production: most notably the cocktail party chatter that sits underneath the G-funk-inspired melody of “Say You’ll Be There,” the synth squeals throughout “Who Do You Think You Are,” and the sample of Digital Underground on “If U Can’t Dance.” But the heart of the record is in the relentless optimism and tight friendship of the five voices at its core. It’s an album designed for karaoke with your best friends: silly, easily memorable chants like “swing it, shake it, move it, make it” sit alongside repeated cries that romantic love is no comparison to having a best mate.
That optimism was the tip of a cultural iceberg at that time in the UK. It was a year before Tony Blair would stride into Downing Street to a soundtrack of D:ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better.” Blair led the left-wing Labour party to its first victory in nearly two decades, representing a mood of political hope that Britain hasn’t felt since. Simultaneously, with Oasis and Blur flooding the international music market, Newsweek declared the mid-’90s the era of “Cool Britannia”—a label that was sealed in pop history when Halliwell performed at the 1997 BRIT Awards in an instantly iconic Union Jack dress. Writing in The Independent in 1996, Emma Forrest claimed that the Spice Girls “could only have come about after 17 years of Tory rule... The message is ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And then pull everyone else up with you.’ Spice Girls are New Labour.”
The Spice Girls themselves didn’t subscribe to this analogy. In an infamous interview with the right-wing Spectator magazine shortly after the release of Spice, when asked about Conservative ex-prime minister and evil incarnate Margaret Thatcher, Ginger proudly announced: “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites.” Posh chipped in: “We met Tony Blair... His hair’s all right, but we don’t agree with his tax policies.” (While much was made of the Spice Girls being Tories at the time, it should be mentioned that Baby’s only contribution to the interview was to ask who Conservative magnate Sir James Goldsmith was, and Sporty later clarified in a different interview: “I think Thatcher is a complete prick.”)
The Spice Girls were emblems of a time when—in mainstream culture at least—it was cool to be proud to be British. It’s bittersweet to reflect on this now, as they return for a reunion tour (without Posh) in the same year that Britain is staring down the barrel of the greatest political crisis it has faced in the 21st century. Now a decade into cruel Conservative austerity which has slashed public services, we’re waiting to see what further damage Brexit will do to our economy. In pop culture, our biggest stars have a much more scathing approach to the establishment than they did in the ’90s. Northampton rapper slowthai just released his debut album Nothing Great About Britain, and MC Stormzy made the most impactful BRITs performance since Halliwell’s dress when he used the stage to ask Prime Minister Theresa May why the government had so spectacularly failed to help the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire.
But while the Spice Girls’ nationalist tendencies look garish in a more divided, pessimistic UK, there was nevertheless a keen sense of social mobility to their success. Outside of rap and grime, in the mainstream UK music industry today, you’ll struggle to find a rising artist who didn’t attend either private school or the BRIT school. As poet and novelist Kathy Acker put it when she interviewed the Spice Girls for the Guardian in 1997, “The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities.”
This praise was valuable, at a time when the divide between highbrow and lowbrow culture was much starker than it is now. In today’s critical landscape, we have gone some way further towards recognizing the agency of female pop songwriters, and in the melting pot of the internet, memes sit in conversation with masterpieces. We would—hopefully—recognize detractions of the loud, rude, young working-class women who made up the Spice Girls as something perhaps rooted in snobbery. Their own brand of “girl power” was based on some flimsy feminist ideas, but Spice remains an audacious achievement. Like the “Wannabe” video, it snuck five Girls who were not on the guest list inside the establishment, causing chaos for a brief, surreal moment.


A new project from the Chicago vaporwave maven eases off the aggression of her Fire-Toolz alias, finding new inspiration in the clash of new age, smooth jazz, prog rock, and video-game soundtracks.

Bubble Universe!

Chicago multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has become one of vaporwave's most fearless daredevils, merging seemingly incompatible sounds into mutant fusions that push the genre to new places while maintaining its taste-eradicating post-internet power. She did this first under a gang of pseudonyms, often on her pioneering labels Rainbow Bridge and Swamp Circle, but hit a bullseye with Fire-Toolz, a potent cocktail of dazed Muzak, noise, and happy hardcore spiced with the occasional hissed black-metal vocal. After refining that project with two albums on Hausu Mountain, another Chicago haven for the weird and wonderful, Marcloid returns as Nonlocal Forecast with Bubble Universe!, a new project inverting Fire-Toolz’s crackling aggression with the help of aquatic new-age synths, smooth jazz, and prog rock.
As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid made her knack for impossible genre combinations feel like a rollercoaster, but Nonlocal Forecast subtly accomplishes a harder task. It flies through ideas but builds track by track with purposeful progression, and it only gets better once the initial thrills wear off and you learn its trajectory. With Bubble Universe!, Marcloid spreads her ideas out like a rainbow, encapsulating everything in a seamless spectrum from hot to cool. It’s a perfect introduction to what already feels like her best project.
Bubble Universe! explodes with gleefully clashing ideas from the start, opening with dramatic synth flourishes and dizzying drum patterns on “Celestial Nervous System,” a tightrope walk between jazzy prog and proggy jazz. Though Marcloid is programming drums on a computer rather than playing live, her background as a prog-rock drummer translates to fills that feel both spontaneous and mathematically dazzling. The result hijacks the soothing soundtrack of the Weather Channel and charges it with metal’s cathartic energy, a combination that only grows on the following “Planck Lengths,” which echoes the ornate MIDI symphonies of James Ferraro’s vaporwave blueprint Far Side Virtual before a sprawling drum solo takes it to light speed.
By the third song, the brightly emotive burst of “Cloud-Hidden,” Bubble Universe! has crystallized this sound so fully that it feels natural when Marcloid largely leaves it behind for the rest of the album. “The Direct Path” slams the brakes with a spacious synth melody and a luxurious guitar solo that only grows softer and sweeter as it lands on delicate percussion far removed from the opening tracks’ energy. On “Triangle Format,” Marcloid’s Fire-Toolz moniker makes a featured appearance, but here she eschews that project’s metal vocals in favor of a rush of synths and distant coos that carry Nonlocal Forecast into its contrasting second half.
Drifting further from the metal influences sparking the album’s early tracks, “The Evolutionary Game” and “Classical Information” shine like some of the most distinct video-game music of the 1990s. The former rides a simple 4/4 beat with twinkling synths and a middle section that nods to David Wise’s naturalistic soundscapes in Donkey Kong Country, while the latter’s jazzy MIDI lines and funky bass synths create a kind of synesthestic accompaniment for imaginary Sonic the Hedgehog levels. It all leads to a closing trio of tracks as soothing and ambient as the beginning was kinetic. They make a powerful bookend for Bubble Universe!’s impressive range and focus, as well as a welcome invitation to hit replay and start the game all over again.