This year marks Yo La Tengo’s 30th anniversary, and they’re celebrating it by reissuing their sixth album, Painful, released nearly a decade into their career. The cardigan-cozy sound of the record effectively established Yo La Tengo as indie rock’s great romantics, and featured a couple of significant firsts for the trio.

Extra Painful

Nineties indie rock was the sound of '80s hardcore kids growing up. And for many get-in-the-van vets, it was a transition that necessitated a clean-slate reboot, whether it was Lou Barlow channeling Dinosaur Jr.’s roar into Sebadoh’s trembling whispers, Jon Spencer reshaping Pussy Galore’s skronk into the Blues Explosion’s funk, or Davids Yow and Sims harnessing Scratch Acid’s strangulated squeals into the Jesus Lizard’s militaristic might. But for Yo La Tengo co-founders/cohabitants Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, the ascent to the Amerindie frontlines was a more gradual, unceremonious process, one that involved downsizing their band from a quartet to a trio, jumping from label to label, and a chronic inability to hold onto a bassist for more than one album at a time. Where they began as a prototypical college-rock outfit in the Velvets-via-Feelies mould (with an unabashed soft spot for '60s-pop covers), Yo La Tengo would go on to define '90s indie—and its evermore sophisticated post-millenial permutations—not by refining their sound, but by blowing it wide open. Painful was the moment of detonation.
The importance of Painful to the Yo La Tengo narrative can be gauged as such: This year marks the band’s 30th anniversary, and they’re celebrating it by reissuing their sixth album, released nearly a decade into their career. Painful marked a couple of significant firsts for Yo La Tengo: it was their first album made with eventual long-time producer Roger Moutenot, and their first to be issued through Matador Records, whose post-Pavement popularity (and resultant Atlantic Records parternship) afforded the band their widest distribution yet. And though Painful was actually the second Yo La Tengo album to feature bassist James McNew, it was the first to fully enmesh his sensibilities with Kaplan and Hubley’s, shirking the typical new-guy/third-wheel dynamic for a more polyamorous professional relationship that continues to this day.
As recently as 1992’s May I Sing With Me (McNew’s debut with the band), Yo La Tengo albums tended to slide back and forth between narcotic noise-pop and hushed folky balladry, producing music that was unerringly charming and consistent if not exactly transcendental. But with the introductory organ hum of the prophetically titled "Big Day Coming", Yo La Tengo’s musical universe instantly turned three-dimensional, projecting a vastness their previous records never really approached; by the time they kick into the dizzying tremoloed groove of the following "From a Motel 6", you can already hear their hearts beating as one. Remarkably, Painful thoroughly expanded Yo La Tengo’s sound by emphasizing two basic ingredients: a little shaker here, and a lot of Ace Tone there (a development so notable, it even earns its own celebratory rock-out in "Sudden Organ"). But taken together, they temper the band’s once-scrappy vigor into hypnotic motorik motions and droning reverberations, while casting Hubley’s plainspoken vocals in a dreamy haze, and inspiring Kaplan to drop the bratty insolence of old for a more congenially conversational drawl.
The cardigan-cozy sound of the record effectively established Yo La Tengo as indie rock’s great romantics. Though musical-cum-matrimonial partnerships weren’t exactly a novelty at the time (see: Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez), Kaplan and Hubley were the rare pair to use their songs to openly address matters of the heart. But while Kaplan and Hubley’s exchanges on Painful can resemble scenes from a marriage, it’s not necessarily their own; rather, a hazy-headed ballad like "Nowhere Near" conveys both an intimacy and non-specificity that make it applicable to any long-distance relationship spent waiting for the phone to ring. And the album’s most tender moment—with Kaplan crooning "baby, I’m in love with you" like a lonesome doo-wop singer abandoned by his crew on some moonlit corner—comes through a to-die-for cover of UK power-popsters the Only Ones’ "The Whole of the Law" (yet another sterling example of Yo La Tengo acting out their record collection). Even Painful’s most blown-out moments are infused with an unspeakable tenderness—Yo La Tengo were no strangers to extended, feedback-screeching jams at this point, but never before had they pulled one off that could actually make you weep ("I Heard You Looking").
What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue, appropriately retitled Extra Painful on account of its enlarged 2xCD girth (not to mention an additional album’s worth of download-only odds and ends even more revelatory than the bonus disc proper). More so than any other band in recent memory, Yo La Tengo’s body of work hinges on the notion that no song is ever a completely finished, end-state product; what we hear on any given album is seemingly a function of what mood they were in the day it was recorded, what the weather was like on the day of mixing, or how much studio time was left before the budget was blown. There is no such thing as a permanent record; songs have many lives before they’re officially documented and continue to evolve long thereafter.
It’s a concept that Yo La Tengo had hinted at before with the two oppositional treatments of "The Evil That Men Do" on 1989’s President Yo La Tengo and the double, duelling dose of "Upside-Down" on the 1992 EP of the same name. Painful continued the conversation with dramatically different versions of Kaplan’s "Big Day Coming"—the gauzy, weightless opener and the penultimate, fuzzed-out chugger—but Extra Painful ups the ante with three more wildly varying live mutations: a laid-back acoustic take sung by Hubley, a revved-up rendition that’s almost twice as fast as the second Painful one, and a mammoth 19-minute distention that fills in the canyon-like divide between Yo La’s soothing/squalling extremes. Likewise, a percussion- and fuzz-free CBGB performance of "Double Dare" foregrounds the pent-up longing that gets washed over by the original’s shoegazey drive, while an Ace Tone-free demo of the same underscores just how important the organ was in achieving it. And it speaks volumes about Painful’s superior quality—and the band’s surging creative energies at the time—that the steely, Stooges-inspired stomper "Shaker" could be earmarked for a non-album single, while the spectacular slow-dissolve ballad "Slow Learner" would be shelved altogether.
From this point on, Yo La Tengo could no longer be described as mere Velvet Underground wannabes (unless, of course, they were playing them in a movie), and within just a few years, you’d be hard-pressed to even call them a rock band anymore. But then, such a free-ranging future seemed almost predestined when, after a decade of playing the rock'n'roll classicist, Kaplan opened up Painful by declaring, "let’s be undecided." As Yo La Tengo’s post-Painful path would prove, indecision has never sounded so assured.


Released five months after the catharsis of Sweetener, these songs of affirmation feel lighter, freer, and more fun, carried effortlessly by Grande’s undeniable voice.

thank u, next

In 2016, Ariana Grande manifested herself a future scandal. It was the premise of her self-aware monologue as a first-time host on SNL, but the gag was cutting. “I think I’m in a place where I’m ready to be caught in a real adult scandal, something to take my career to the next level,” she said. By that point, three years into her chart-topping musical career, her only offense of note had been licking a bunch of donuts. Grande continued, over a bed of lounge piano: “Miley’s had ’em, Bieber’s had ’em, everyone’s had ’em, and each day, I sit by my window and I dream, ‘What will my scandal be?’” She was joking, but not really. A couple of years earlier she’d suggested as much in a New York Times interview: “Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty.”
Of course, Grande couldn't possibly have known back then what exactly was in store for her, how difficult and cruel the world would prove to be. After confronting the aftermath of a deadly attack on the Manchester stop of her 2017 Dangerous Woman Tour, she retreated, reemerging a year later with new resolve. The story of her personal 2018 is a little too familiar now: She broke up with Mac Miller, quickly and very publicly became engaged to Pete Davidson, and then called that relationship off while grieving Miller’s death. In the midst of it all was Sweetener, a potent album that soundtracked her newfound role as pop's most lovable personality. With Rihanna focused on makeup and lingerie, Beyoncé preoccupied as the better half of the Carters, and Taylor unwilling to share anything beyond an entry-level grasp of politics, Grande ascended.
In retrospect, Sweetener was a bridge, a necessary post-tragedy assertion of survival and strength. In contrast, thank u, next, released just five months later, feels like the deliverance following Sweetener’s catharsis. When she put out the title track as a single last fall, it felt like something had finally clicked. She’d not only survived a real adult scandal, but she’d also cracked it, and herself, wide open. She was untouchable. That seems to be the ethos of thank u, next, which stands out in sublime contrast to her previous releases. There are no wonky guest features or unconvincing, if always technically adept, ballads, as on past albums; she no longer needs those distractions. But as usual, it’s Grande’s voice—gently whistling here, totally annihilating there, always undeniable—that carries the album.
The release of “7 Rings” as a single last month brought scandal anew. She was immediately accused of both theft and appropriation, and an unfortunate misspelled tattoo punctuated the episode. And while she kinda-sorta engineered her own absolution in the form of a 2 Chainz remix, Grande’s collaborators on the song—Victoria Monét and Tayla Parx—are also her longtime friends and co-writers, not simply anonymous voices hired because Black slang and Atlanta rap rhythms are trendy. In general, thank u, next is a calling card for Monét and Parx, both signed artists with forthcoming projects of their own, who have helped Grande capture the zeitgeist in clever lines and melodies. (Almost too perfectly, “thank u, next” producer Tommy Brown is co-writer Monét’s ex.) But “7 Rings,” frankly, is just as good as any track on the last album or this one. I suspect it was actually the jarring shift in her tone that left people confused and disarmed; it seemed she’d ditched the inspiring moral high ground, luxuriating instead in Tiffany’s jewelry and pink Veuve Clicquot.
Though thank u, next’s 12 songs are inspired by romantic and sexual relationships, taken together, they are actually assertions and affirmations of self, a reflection of millennial group chats the world over. “needy” is a therapist’s dream: “You can go ahead and call me selfish/But after all this damage, I can’t help it.” The extended space metaphor of “NASA” is The-Dream-lite by way of Kacey Musgraves, executed in good faith. Soul singer Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” most famously sampled by Wu-Tang on the heartbreaking “Tearz,” is cleverly repurposed into “Fake Smile,” possibly thank u, next’s most compelling song and the thesis of this current era in Grande’s life. “I can’t fake another smile/I can’t fake like I’m alright/And I won’t say I’m feeling fine/After what I been through, I can’t lie,” she sings in reclamation.
There are more high points throughout—the soaring hook on the Max Martin classic “Bad Idea,” the slinky emotional honesty of “Ghostin,” the delightful Beyoncé facsimile “Make Up”—but it’s still the album’s existence at all that thrills. The gentle familiarity of Grande’s musical references makes for effortlessly digestible, of-the-moment pop songs, but they’re elevated by a palpable despair that sits just below the surface. Beyond her four-octave soprano and robust wielding of it, thank u, next is buoyed by an urgency that could only come from the depths of her self-described “Damage.” That it comes so soon after an already-spectacularly received album only swells the effect.
Grande explained in a recent Billboard interview that her motivation is “to release music like rappers do”—without the burden or unwieldiness of the major label machine, but certainly with much of its power. For all its spontaneity, thank u, next still registers as a big event. She has bragged that the album was written in a week and recorded in a couple more, and while that expediency gives it its weightlessness, it also accounts for the occasional notes of sloppy writing; I can’t get past, for example, the premise of “Bloodline,” which seems to confuse genealogy with hypothetical procreation. But in the rare spots where the production is grating and the writing limp, Grande makes up for it with skill and intuition. thank u, next may be an imperfect album but it’s a perfect next chapter.


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 Lady Gaga’s most divisive and conceptually ambitious album.

ARTPOP

In 2013, Lady Gaga was in pain. Ten months into touring the world with her Born This Way Ball, the singer exacerbated a hip injury while performing in Montreal, causing her to cancel all subsequent shows and withdraw from the spotlight. What was reported as a labral tear was actually much worse. “Before I went to surgery, there were giant craters, a hole in my hip the size of a quarter, and the cartilage was just hanging out the other side of my hip. I had a tear on the inside of my joint and a huge breakage,” she said in an interview that July. “The surgeon told me that if I had done another show, I might have needed a full hip replacement.”
There were also creative and business tensions happening behind the scenes. A week before ARTPOP hit the shelves, Gaga split from her longtime manager, Troy Carter, citing creative differences. Later, she suggested greed and doubt: “I was not enough for some people,” she wrote to fans on her Little Monsters forum. Six years later, the album buried under personal career highs like her in-studio kinship with Mark Ronson and Oscar nominations, she tweeted, “i don’t remember ARTPOP.”
At the time, Gaga was guarding herself against the music industry’s intentions for her as she tried to reconcile her status as both the public-facing vessel of a creative hivemind and a singular visionary. The album plays with the friction between vulnerability and persona, object and agent, trauma and ambivalence over a glutted EDM backdrop. It’s an unruly prototype for the polished and hopeful Chromatica but maintains an enduring fanbase who relish its sludge of sonic and theoretical ideas. Although full of her own experience and pain, she invited personal projection from listeners eager to co-opt. “Come to me with all your subtext and fantasy,” she sings on the title track. “My artpop could mean anything.”
The goal was to channel Andy Warhol, only with one essential difference: “Instead of putting pop onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can,” she told the UK telecom company O2 in a promotional interview ahead of the album’s release. This meant commingling her pop aesthetics with fine art, past and present. She collaborated with the pop artist Jeff Koons—known best for his massive mirrored balloon animals constructed in stainless steel—who turned her into one of his Gazing Ball sculptures for the album cover; then, its photograph was spliced with pieces of Botticelli’s famous Renaissance painting, The Birth of Venus. It’s a gesture of turning the inaccessible into the ordinary but with an additional undertone: In the orb’s reflective surface, you see yourself looking, engaging, and perhaps trying to possess something. You’re implicated in the gaze. It’s a theme that runs throughout ARTPOP.
But the art, or the reception of Gaga’s use of art as wildly pretentious, dominated the early conversations about the album. There are many reasons for this: She commissioned a drone-looking garment so she could have the world’s first flying dress. She collaborated with performance artist Millie Brown, known for her work with vomit, at a Doritos-sponsored SXSW performance. She remade conceptual artist Marina Abramović’s Portrait with Scorpion (Closed Eyes) for the artwork to a single and appeared in the Kickstarter promo for Abramović’s eponymous Institute “dedicated to the presentation and preservation of ‘long durational’ works of art.”

Even without all these trappings, the very sound of ARTPOP did not have much of a chance in 2013. Crunchy, aggro synths were met with EDM fatigue from some despite it all pushing beyond simple womp-womp-drop compositions. Others were just underwhelmed. The songs are hooky and encompassing but not with the easy cheese of Katy Perry’s “Roar” or Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” and the lyrics about power and agency are shrouded in metaphor, unlike Lorde’s simple and sincere “Royals.” All of them received an easier public embrace than ARTPOP, whose reviews were uneven across the board. Rolling Stone called it “bizarre,” while The Boston Globe welcomed it as a return to form after the “preachy” Born This Way. At the conclusion of 2013, ARTPOP found one of its champions in veteran critic Robert Christgau who wrote it was “berated by online rockcrit’s ever-shifting gaggle of dunderheads crying ‘insincerity’... this was not only the rawk album of the year for me, it sounded fresh. Really, who needs guitars?”
The idea that pop music should be taken seriously echoes the same struggles of agency and objectification that Gaga does with ARTPOP. If a critic finds value in commercial music made for the masses, does an intellectual examination still make the critic part of the major label’s gain, or does it mean the critic is transcending the expectations of their format? Ultimately, it is not possible for artist or critic to escape the specter of the machine, and an album full of drama-club dubstep does warrant some critical skepticism, especially compared to the feel-good arena anthems of the multi-platinum Born This Way.
Gaga herself was braced for the institutional response. With lead single “Applause,” she opened with the lyrics, “I stand here waiting for you to bang on the gong/To crash the critics saying, ‘Is it right or is it wrong?’” She craves distance from censorious headlines, love from an adoring audience, and freedom from the song’s dissection.
But in the world of ARTPOP, meaning can be quarried out of literally anything, and never is that so apparent than in the director’s cut music video for “G.U.Y.” In it, Gaga gorges on symbols of artifice while also doubling down on the message that the major label ivory tower doesn’t understand what she’s trying to do. Suits clamor for hovering cash before gleefully retreating with their money, leaving a winged Gaga in the dried grass to find her way to recovery. Her refuge is Hearst Castle, where five Real Housewives of Beverly Hills play musical accompaniment in matching pink frocks with bell sleeves as if in worship. They are entertainment but bolstered by this juxtaposition to Gaga in her era of fine art; surrounded by revelry among the Ancient Greece-evoking Mediterranean Revival architecture, they are a reminder that stories with high-octane dramas have been popular since the dawn of theater.
“G.U.Y.” is the album’s best song and was Gaga’s career-best dance track up until her Ariana Grande- featuring trauma-balm “Rain on Me” was released in 2020. From the hook’s bright and buttery vocals to the spiky melodrama of Zedd’s production, the track has the stickiness of traditional pop. Its lyrics play with the power dynamics of sex and gender and affirm the mutability of prescribed identities with lyrics like, “Our sex doesn’t tell us no lies.” The song is a slick laugh and a totally serious implication that the construction of power is absolutely fucked. It has great companions in the spacey “Venus,” which apes from Sun Ra’s “Rocket Number Nine Take Off For the Planet Venus,” and DJ Snake-assisted “Sexxx Dreams,” a disco-bright come-on punctuated with a grotesque pre-chorus of layered Gagas, slinky and feral, singing, “Heard your boyfriend was away this weekend/Wanna meet at my place?”
Sex is an inevitable subject for a project so concerned with power and access, and these themes have a kinship with songs like the snotty “Donatella.” According to Gaga, this paean to the Versace designer is about not caring what people say about you, “not so much about Donatella as a brand as it is Donatella the person, about me as a person, that idea of what the public wants from you.” But with lyrics like, “This purse can hold my black card and tiara,” and, “Just ask your gay friends their advice/Before you get a spray tan/On holiday in Taipei,” it’s way more tongue-in-cheek than revealing. So much of ARTPOP is that kind of tease. Gaga asks early on the album, “Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura?” then shirks being straightforward for almost the entirety of the album. Denying entry is the point. Denying entry has been the point of a lot of what Gaga does. Mostly, it’s a tool of self-preservation.
“When they wanted me to be sexy, or they wanted me to be pop, I always fuckin’ put some absurd spin on it that made me feel like I was still in control,” she says in the 2017 documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two. “If I’m gonna be sexy on the VMAs and sing about the paparazzi, I’m gonna do it while I'm bleeding to death and reminding you of what fame did to Marilyn Monroe and what it did to Anna Nicole Smith and what it did to… yeah.” That “yeah” is presumably a stand-in for Diana, Princess of Wales, a figure who Gaga and her mother idolized and was the subject of “Princess Die,” a piano ballad originally intended for ARTPOP. The track was ultimately scrapped at the urging of execs, but the theme of public perception and possession are still present on the album. In particular, “Do What U Want,” a duet with R. Kelly about a separation between body and personhood. Woof.
The song is absurd. Its concept and execution are appalling. Kelly’s then-known history as a sexual predator—mainly an alleged marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah and a 2008 recording in which he engaged in sex with and urinated on a 14-year-old girl—was treated more like a barely-visible scar than the open wound it actually was. But it wasn’t only Gaga doing this at the time. Until later that year, Kelly’s behavior was largely overlooked, and Gaga was flippant about his reputation. When asked about the controversial collab at a Japanese press conference, she said they both had “very untrue things written about [them], so in a way, this was a bond between [them].” This grim comment, with its soft-touch victim-blaming, also feels in service of the song and its presentation.
For a performance at that year’s AMAs, she and Kelly did Oval Office-affair burlesque, pantomiming fellatio that invoked Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, all while Kelly lyrically hoisted up John F. Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe. A never-released music video directed by Terry Richardson featured Dr. Kelly hosting a softcore orgy with Gaga’s anesthetized body, a nurse straddling the passed-out pop star as she dances a lobster next to Gaga’s sheet-covered breasts. “[She] had a video directed by an alleged sexual predator, starring another sexual predator,” a source told Page Six after a 30-second clip was leaked. “With the theme, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want with your body’? It was literally an ad for rape.”
To be clear: In 2022, there is no such track when you stream the album. A month after ARTPOP was released, The Village Voice published an interview with journalist Jim DeRogatis. The Chicago reporter was a witness in Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial—for which the singer was acquitted of all charges—and has done extensive investigating into Kelly’s history of sexual predation on young girls. Earlier this summer, Kelly, who is 55, was sentenced in New York to 30 years in federal prison for racketeering and human trafficking; he still faces trial in his native Chicago for federal charges of “producing child pornography and luring minors into sex acts” according to The New York Times.
A “Do What U Want” redux performed on The Voice with Christina Aguilera was an attempt to bury the blunder, but it wasn’t until 2019 and dream hampton’s Surviving R. Kelly Lifetime series debuted that Gaga truly disavowed the song via Twitter. “I stand by anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault,” she wrote. “As a victim of sexual assault myself, I made the song and video at a dark time in my life [and] my intention was to create something extremely defiant and provocative because I was angry and still hadn’t processed the trauma that had occurred in my own life. I think it’s clear how explicitly twisted my own thinking was at the time... I’m sorry, both for my poor judgment when I was young and for not speaking out sooner. I love you.”
Perhaps the flash of fine art, the salacious party tracks, and this foul duet were part of a distraction—creative compartmentalization that we survivors of sexual assault and rape have a tendency toward. But that pain has its place with the rubbery “Swine,” a track Gaga said “put a lot of rage into [the] album” and that it would be hard to let go of it. When she did, she wasn’t shy about what it meant.
“The song is about rape [and] demoralization,” she told Howard Stern. “I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release, and I said to myself, ‘I want to sing this song while I’m ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull, which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear, and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, ‘You know what, you can never ever degrade me as much as I could degrade myself and look how beautiful it is when I do.’”
Pain is ultimately a stronger foundation for art than a soup can. And while ARTPOP does trade in camp—i.e, rhyming “Uranus” with “ass is famous”—the album, as it now stands, is at its best when it collides with what’s hurt her. It just doesn’t need to be drenched in symbols and winks. When she endeavors to reveal how hard it has been to survive and begs to be loved clean on the piano ballad, “Dope,” she herself becomes the reference. Reminiscent of The Fame Monster’s “Speechless,” a self-described “plea” to her father about his drinking, and a suggestion of what was to come on the gritty Joanne, she sings achingly for forgiveness from her loved ones around whom she’s smoked herself numb. The confessional is too dark to be a stripped-back breath, but it does reveal that Lady Gaga’s best when she’s centering herself.


The veteran ambient musician pushes back at the hollowing out of the form with a burly, physically imposing release peppered with moments of gentle beauty.

No Highs

Ambient music is in crisis. Passive listening is no longer an alternative or fringe idea but the model on which the entire streaming industry is built. YouTube radio stations guarantee hours of chilled-out, challenge-free audio, and albums on Spotify fade into endless loops of sound-alikes. How to preserve the tradition of thoughtfully made ambient music in a market inundated with corporate-friendly fluff, or to convince listeners of the importance of artistic vision when an AI program can churn out a perfectly good drone? On No Highs, a self-described “beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient,” Tim Hecker gives his answer.
The Canadian musician’s first album in four years isn’t a grouchy get-off-my-lawn statement, nor is it an abrasive audience-thinner like Vladislav Delay’s Rakka. In fact, it’s less confrontational than a lot of Hecker’s albums, even ones that don’t seem intended to be difficult, like his recent experiments in Japanese gagaku music Konoyo and Anoyo. What No Highs argues for instead is the importance of a wizard behind the curtain. The album is strongest when it makes you aware of the artist’s invisible presence, standing behind the scenes and summoning thunder and lightning at will, playing the audience like the director of a good thriller.
The most satisfying passage comes less than two and a half minutes in. “Monotony” begins with one of the many Morse code-like, single-note sequencer patterns we’ll hear throughout. Atop that, Hecker creates a wilderness of sirens and street sweepers that begin to slow and morph into grand minor chords. Then—here is the moment—Hecker introduces the magisterial growl of a church organ, blowing the track’s low end wide open with vivid color and high drama. It’s a sound he’s used many times over, and it comes across here as a personal stamp, like Shinichi Atobe’s echoing piano or GAS’s kick drum. It’s his way of saying, You are listening to a Tim Hecker album, a reminder that this stuff couldn’t be made by just anyone.
No Highs can be physically discomforting to listen to, not because it’s particularly noisy or dissonant but because it seems to consciously resist syncing with the bodily rhythms of the listener. “In Your Mind” introduces a throbbing sequencer pattern in its first few seconds, but Hecker keeps slowing it down and speeding it up, fading it in out, preventing the brain from getting a foothold. Saxophonist Colin Stetson appears throughout the album, exhibiting his usual burly, physical approach to his instrument. As he commences his endless runs on “Monotony II,” the clack of his keys clear as day, the listener might actually find themselves contracting their lungs in sympathy with his gobstopping breath control. This music is not going to align with your chakras.
But No Highs can be beautiful in passing, and its last 10 minutes are devoted to two remarkable tracks that conjure the spirit of ambient’s early years. Mewling steel guitars make “Sense Suppression” a cousin of Daniel Lanois’ work on Brian Eno’s Apollo, a ghost of a country song drifting on the wind. “Living Spa Water,” meanwhile, is based on a metallic twinkle reminiscent of Laraaji’s zither, even if Hecker undergirds it with big synth blats that that gentle soul would probably find disquieting. These two tracks nod to ambient as a tradition—a noun rather than an adjective.
For a state-of-the-genre address like this to work, the music has to present a viable alternative to whatever it’s railing against, and the physicality of Hecker’s approach allows the music greater range and freedom than if it were merely trying to set a mood. But Hecker’s primary concern here appears to be staking out a certain patch of turf rather than experimenting or expanding the possibilities of his music, and he shies away from extremes. No Highs is muted in comparison to the Gothic grandeur of Harmony in Ultraviolet, the buffeting noise of Ravedeath, 1972, the thorny ruggedness of the underloved An Imaginary Country. But Hecker’s title seems to already anticipate this criticism, and No Highs ultimately works as an example of what ambient music can be, rather than a suggestion of where it might go.


UK producer's debut full-length inches closer to pop than his post-dubstep contemporaries James Blake or Jamie Woon.

SBTRKT

The debut full-length from UK producer SBTRKT comes as a bit of a surprise. Up until now we knew him mostly for some high-profile remixes and his original, instrumental tracks, which were solid but nothing to flip out over. He was loosely dubstep in the way, say, Floating Points is, using the genre as a rough guide but also weaving in several other strains of contemporary bass music. But with this self-titled LP, SBTRKT is something different: Recruiting guest vocalists to sing over his arrangements, he's working more as a traditional producer, and his music, while still grounded in experimental bass, is inching much closer toward pop.
You might call what SBTRKT is doing here "post-dubstep". That's not a totally accurate term (for one, he's building off more than just that one genre), but his approach is certainly similar to what guys like James Blake and Jamie Woon have been up to in the last year or so. The central differences here are that a) SBTRKT doesn't sing himself (he's brought in vocalists Sampha, Jessie Ware, Roses Gabor, and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano for that); and b) his music is more immediate than both Blake's and Woon's. Rather than go for showy, scene-stealing productions, he keeps things tight and purposeful: The focus is on the overall song and the vocal, and beats are just one part of that equation.
The record pits some emotive and occasionally downcast singing against arrangements that throb nicely, and there's a good sense of balance and variety throughout. First single "Wildfire", for example, is a squelchy, Timbaland-like pop moment, where "Trials of the Past" is spooky and slower-paced. The reason the tracks work individually and as a whole is that SBTRKT has a keen sense of how to draw the most out of his guest vocalists. UK singer Sampha, who is featured heavily on the LP, has a warm, higher-range croon that seems built for R&B, and SBTRKT arranges accordingly, giving him stuttery tracks that draw from American urban pop and smoothed-out drum'n'bass.
Importantly this makes the album greater than the sum of its parts. "Dubstep dude with a bunch of singers" becomes something much more collaborative and cohesive. SBTRKT is ultimately a colorful and highly enjoyable future-pop record, an extension of bass culture but not indebted to it. The other crucial thing is that the album is actually quite accessible, which is something that's eluded similar post-bass projects. Those other guys-- Blake, Woon-- might have a purer artistic vision, but of the three, SBTRKT has arguably assembled the broadest and most listenable collection of songs. And in a field where approachability isn't always given a ton of weight, it feels brave to take this more song-oriented path and pull it off.


The third album from the extremely chaotic pop star, battle rapper, and edgelord is a thrilling ride that puts her eclecticism on full display.

Planet Her

Doja Cat is a triple threat: a pop star, an edgelord, and a hottie. On the surface, she resembles an e-girl making fart jokes who’d peak at 70,000 Twitter followers more than a masterful, total-package artist. Or the intensely hermetic version of that: a popular, anonymous forum shitposter everyone assumes is a man because the assumption is women—Black women, especially—mobilize against offense instead of causing it.
On June 11, Doja released the second single, “Need to Know,” from her third studio album, Planet Her. It’s one of three tracks from the album produced by hitmaker Dr. Luke (and they’re not the best ones, the Y2k-produced ones are). Dr. Luke is better known these days for his legal battle with Kesha regarding allegations of assault. Like many women, Doja entered into a working relationship with a man before the whole story came to light, which, in our modern world, isn’t that scandalous. What is scandalous, however, is Doja’s track record of not performing penitence for her audience. Whether it’s using of the f-slur in her apology for using the f-slur or her perceived indifference following a “showing feet in racial chatrooms” brouhaha, Doja isn’t ensnared by the predictability of pop stardom.
Planet Her is a kaleidoscope of pop versatility that benefits greatly from a market that currently values eclecticism. It feels both premeditated and casual, well-crafted yet trenchantly frivolous. All of Doja’s music—from her early SoundCloud offerings to 2019’s Hot Pink—is perfunctory and unpretentious. Whether it’s her lackadaisical enunciation or carefree lyrical quips, she doesn’t need to recapitulate retro aesthetics as a gimmick (Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa), eschew long-term replay value in favor of chasing TikTok hits (Megan Thee Stallion), or attempt to out-diva her peers by misguidedly channeling her efforts into sentimental ballads nobody wants to hear.
She entertains and enthralls with minimal effort, especially in her delivery. Doja, who is often accused of jacking flows (namely Kendrick Lamar’s), can rap adroitly like Nicki Minaj. (She shouts Minaj out at the end of “Get Into It (Yuh).”) Her hyponasal vocal switch-ups—including the deployment of a nonspecific African accent (likely inspired by her own heritage) in “Woman” on Planet Her and “Got to Town” off of Amala aren’t theft, but rather evidence of her chameleonic, limitless flows and intonations.
From the introductory guitar chords and anguished operatic background vocals of “Alone” to the 808s of “Options,” Doja Cat skates on Planet Her’s impeccable production. But her candy-sweet melodies are the star, whether it’s the crystalline falsetto in “Love to Dream” or the way her voice flutes up to a “woohoo” in the chorus of “I Don’t Do Drugs.” In “You Right,” the longing and yearning in her restrained pre-chorus segues effortlessly into a resigned hook. But Planet Her’s true standouts draw on the same cinematic, life-affirming spirit that propelled Hot Pink’s “Bottom Bitch”: The harpsichord-assisted digicore of “Payday,” ft. Young Thug; the uniquely Black girl celebration of life contained in “Get Into It (Yuh)” as it encapsulates the two seconds that preempt twerking—the pre-leg kick—while Doja rattles off the prerequisites to “get into it.” (“And if she ain’t she got a butt, fuck it, get into it, yuh.”)
Even “Kiss Me More,” which shares attributes with other songs you might hear while perusing Forever 21, is too inspired to be just that. It’s more immediate than the kind of charmless session throwaway that has to be aggressively top-lined into something listenable. SZA’s breathlessly idiosyncratic verse distinguishes it further: “All your niggas say that you lost without me/All my bitches feel like I dodged the county/Fuckin’ with you feel like jail, nigga/I can’t even exhale, nigga.”
But while SZA’s words ripple with angst, Doja is unconcerned. She exceeds the mark without ever appearing like she’s trying. She’s an underachieving overachiever, singing the lines to “Imagine” (“Imagine, imagine, put the studio in the mansion”) like she took a muscle relaxant. Her attitude feels perfectly calibrated for a burnout generation. Some artists release albums that function as grand gestures, but Doja Cat doesn’t have to; Planet Her is an enormous shrug, the edgelord hottie pop star telling the world that it’s not her job to care.

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The Stuttgart producer Michael Fiedler’s debut album under a new moniker distills ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form.

Damaged

Back in 1994, tasked with curating the fourth volume of Virgin’s ambient series, Kevin Richard Martin coined a new subgenre when he dubbed the compilation Isolationism. Less a hard-and-fast category than a general air of desolation that might crop up in any number of contexts—drone, post-rock, industrial, and more—isolationism cast a long shadow across subsequent decades of dark ambient. Yet Martin himself didn’t linger there. Though he has made many different types of music under many different aliases over the years, he became most closely identified with the industrial-strength dancehall that he records as the Bug. That range makes Michael Fiedler a natural fit for Martin’s Pressure label. Using aliases like Tokyo Tower and Jah Schulz, the Stuttgart producer has been turning out dub reggae for nearly two decades. But in 2020 Fiedler began putting out a series of drone-driven ambient albums under his own name, tapping into the claustrophobic dread that haunted the original Isolation comp. The two sides of his musical persona now come together on his debut album as Ghost Dubs, a distillation of ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form.
Fiedler has been moving toward this sound for a while. On 2020’s Dub Over Science, he slowed his tempos and muffled his bass, luxuriating in the murk. But on Damaged, he takes that process to new extremes. This is dub compressed to the point of abstraction, everything extraneous stripped away. A uniform palette carries across the album: ultra-low sub-bass pressure, hi-hats sanded down to silvery streaks, an omnipresent crackling fizz. Monochrome chords slosh back and forth like water in a bucket; whatever they began as—guitar? keyboard?—now they’re just fleeting smudges smeared across the tape. The bass is remarkable—even at a relatively low volume, it seems to vibrate the walls, turning the room into a larger-than-life speaker cabinet. Yet Ghost Dubs’ sound is also remarkably refined, accentuating the contrast between crystalline details and a swollen low end that wants to devour everything in its path.
This is by no means an original sound—but then, things associated with reggae rarely are. The most obvious antecedent is the music that Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald made as Rhythm & Sound, shifting from the club vestiges of their Chain Reaction label—home to ethereal recordings from Porter Ricks, Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and Shinichi Atobe—to a more vaporous vision of ambient dub, which gradually abandoned the “techno” half of dub techno. There are also echoes of Deepchord Presents Echospace’s The Coldest Season, a canonical ambient dub album from 2007; Pole’s alternately lilting and lurching studies in throb and crackle; and Andy Stott albums like Passed Me By and We Stay Together, whose air of Sisyphean effort anticipates the trudging uphill gait of Ghost Dubs’ agonizingly slow-motion grooves. Where Ghost Dubs stands out is in the intensity of his productions. Lots of people have tried their hand at this tradition, but few have achieved the heaviness, or the strangeness, of Ghost Dubs’ best work.
In “The Regulator,” a dogged 4/4 behemoth, the chords sound like something dredged up out of the murk. In “Dub Lobotomy,” a metallic loop of tone has been completely severed from its origins; the track’s maze-like acoustics suggest slamming doors, footsteps on cement, heavy objects being dragged downstairs. Vocals, when they appear, are no more than disembodied sighs. Some of the most captivating tracks are the most disorienting: “Second Thoughts” is little more than a fistful of coppery chords held up against a backdrop of substation hum, the kick drum stumbling and irregular, the form barely even recognizable as dub.
Not everything here is as memorable; in a genre like ambient dub, where there are few chords at the producer’s disposal, it all comes down to the novelty of the detailing. Over the course of the album’s 48-minute run, tracks invariably blur together. But given the hypnotic aspect of Ghost Dubs’ sound, I suspect that’s partly the point. And in any case, every so often a chord rings out in a way that sounds completely new. For me, it happened with “Dub Simulation,” the album’s penultimate track; outwardly, it barely differs from its companions, yet there’s something about the chord’s heft and proportions, at once pillowy and leaden, that immediately stood out. On tracks like that one, Ghost Dubs’ project feels like a formal experiment and a philosophical argument. The popular imagination frequently conflates reggae with sunshine and repose—prelapsarian idyll as stoned fantasy. But what if it were really the soundtrack to darkness, struggle, and enervation? That’s the sound of Damaged, channeling the friction between sensuous pleasure and strenuous physical effort into a virtual boulder of a sound—massive, smooth to the touch, and stubbornly unyielding.


Inspired by house music’s roots in the queer and black communities of her hometown, the Chicago DJ delivers a DJ set joyfully at odds with the dominant strains of contemporary dance music.

Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1

It often feels like the word “rave” means about as much to electronic-music fans these days as “punk” does to the rock crowd. The term can still conjure certain iconic images—booming sound systems, dancing masses, Day-Glo attire—but there’s no denying that rave culture long ago lapsed into caricature. You’re as likely to hear the word used by a hectoring politician or youth marketing specialist as by someone actually in the know.
So it’s curious that Eris Drew has titled her latest mix Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1, which kicks off her T4T LUV NRG label with her partner Octo Octa. There are some genuinely ravey moments—particularly the organ vamps and piano stabs toward the end of the mix’s latter half, which she’s dubbed “I’ve Got a Story to Tell…” (The first half is called “Good News Boppers!” and yes, that’s a reference to 1979 cult classic The Warriors.) On the whole, though, the session showcases her deep affection for a particular strain of early- and mid-’90s breakbeat house music that likely soundtracked many of her youthful nights out while growing up outside of Chicago.
Drew, who still calls the Windy City home, came of age when house music was still emerging from the local black and queer communities in which it was born. That history is inextricable from this mix, even on a technical level, as Drew relies not only on vinyl, but also on uniquely Midwestern techniques such as doubles (cutting back and forth between the same record on both turntables) and fast-paced “hot mixing” (rapid transitions between records). For a generation of electronic-music aficionados brought up worshipping ultra-precise, nearly imperceptible transitions, Drew’s quick cuts and sudden turns may sound odd or even jarring, but Raving Disco Breaks offers a window into how many of dance music’s originators operate behind the decks.
That window also includes the music itself, which drips with elements of funk, soul, disco, and even hip-hop. The mix is full of black voices, many of the diva variety, and although there’s no rapping, the music swings with the same sort of euphoric abandon and loose shimmy that characterized hip-house during its brief heyday. These days, it’s easy to conflate all electronic music with the rigid, four-to-the-floor march of Instagram-ready tech house and Berlin-style techno, but back in the ’90s, house and techno tunes were just as likely to sashay down the runway as they were to pummel you into submission.
Where does the raving come in? It’s there, but Drew isn’t waxing nostalgic about glowsticks and JNCOs. Her artistry is driven by what she calls the Motherbeat, a sort of divine feminine energy and ancient healing force that she says first came to her in a vision while she was being driven home from a party, high on LSD, in 1994. Simply put, her rave roots run deep, and she’s interested in the culture’s most powerful element: freedom. She is a trans woman whose life has been profoundly shaped by experiences on the dancefloor, so it makes sense that Raving Disco Breaks’ connective thread is one of joy, elation, and release.
Drew not only found herself on the dancefloor; she also found a kindred spirit and loving partner in Octo Octa, and their T4T LUV NRG label—which sprang out of a series of back-to-back DJ gigs under the same name—is both a celebration of that love and a full-throated celebration of trans visibility. (T4T is short for “trans for trans.”) All profits from Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1 will be donated to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a nonprofit working in defense of gender identity and expression.
Given the “Vol. 1” of the title, we can assume, or at least hope, that additional installments are on the way. If they maintain the vibe of this first Raving Disco Breaks, celebrating dance music’s marginalized past while optimistically working toward a more accepting future, then perhaps the term “rave” might still have some legs after all.


The first of two albums released within seven days of each other, FUTURE is an ambitious Future exhibition, but replicating his brightest moments is often a hit or miss proposition.

FUTURE

Future is certainly a prolific artist, though it is getting a bit excessive. Since 2011, he has released at least two projects every year, often three or more. His work ethic, long a point of personal pride, paid big dividends across an excellent mixtape trilogy (Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights) in the run up to his commercial peak with Dirty Sprite 2 and his cash-in collaboration with Drake, What a Time to Be Alive. Since then, his music is either chasing those highs or stuck in cruise control. His Purple Reign tape introduced some moving new deep cuts to his catalog but was modest by his standards and he rushed out EVOL a month later for an Apple exclusive. His new self-titled album is the first in a pair of projects released in a seven-day span. Perhaps for Future, prolificity is about excess, not just because it’s a flex, but because it always requires giving more of oneself—almost too much. Both nonstop motion and overindulgence are in his DNA. FUTURE, in many ways, unmasks Future: he’s a creature of habit.
The Atlanta rapper has funneled most of his music through three personas: Super Future, Fire Marshal Future, and Future Hendrix (he explained them as the hitmaker, the party packer, and the rockstar, respectively). The alter egos have characterized much of his output, giving names to his various aesthetics. FUTURE is meant as a Future exhibition, a portrayal of his many sides—superstar, romantic, heartbreaker, hedonist—which have previously only been showcased in flashes. But it doesn’t do anything past Future projects haven’t done already, and ironically it doesn't tell us anything new about Future.
Even under these circumstances, FUTURE is true to form for Future in both content (the first lines rapped are “Got the money coming in, it ain’t no issues/I just a fucked a rapper bitch, I should diss you”), and the sounds he chooses to channel. A song like “Poppin Tags” is “Commas”-esque and “Super Trapper” is forged in the image of 56 Nights’ “Trap Niggas”; both are indicative of Super Future, lining pounding 808 bass with clustered raps. “Flip” is reminiscent of 2013 one-offs like “Finessin’” with warping synths and cracked vocals. The ballad “When I Was Broke” harkens back to the romanticism of Honest or “Turn On the Lights.”
There are bits and pieces of nearly every part of his past here, but replicating his brightest moments is a hit or miss proposition. In bringing all these previous personas together, he creates an album that’s mostly retreads. And there are a few moments that completely lack Future’s patented dynamism and evocation, particularly “Good Dope” and “Scrape.” But even on autopilot, Future can churn out some truly high octane flows (“POA”), sweetly-sung gun ballads (“Draco”), and some pleasant surprises (like the hum-heavy throbber “I’m So Groovy”).
The highlights come when Future journeys into uncharted waters or deep into his own memory bank. “I lost so many niggas to the streets this year,” he opens on the affecting cut “Feds Did a Sweep.” “I ain’t even talkin’ ‘bout,” he pauses to clarify. “They ain’t even dead.” The song recounts days trafficking drugs to survive, police raids orchestrated to suppress said trafficking, and state-sanctioned oppression against black ghettos, all while using intensely lucid writing (“Started cooking work and skipping Chemistry”). Like “Feds,” the ominous “Mask Off” tells a similar tale of crime as a means to survive poverty, but it relinquishes the former’s mournful tone, opting instead to be brazen—doing a robbery without a mask is reckless and implies either carelessness or apathy. He takes drastic measures: “My guillotine, drank promethazine/Tec and beams, go to those extremes.” The two songs have some symmetry—in one, Future is the raider; in the other, the raided. These encounters provide a counterbalance to all the braggadocio and a sharper, behind-the-scenes look at the world that shaped him.
Sonically, FUTURE plays with a pretty interesting array of textures, from the Arcade Fire-sampling minimalist piano chord on “Might As Well” to the whiny, xylophonic chimes on “Zoom” to the wobbly frets screeching on “Outta Time.” Some songs mimic the unpredictable strobe of a laser light show; others induce oriental flute music. Some are fixed, oscillating to and from a single point (like “POA” and “Flip”). Others are slightly off-balance (“Massage in My Room”). But its drum kit patterns are beginning to sound old hat, perhaps a result of overtaxing the same core group of producers (Metro Boomin, Southside, Zaytoven, and Tarentino) the last few years. The songs almost all have the same exact pulse, but they usually manage to intrigue with subtle tonal shifts.
Seventeen tracks is clearly a profusion, but it's a fitting display given Future’s commitment to mass production. The glut of songs create a sampler that allows listeners to pick and choose a handful of favorites, and the cult classics will likely be the ones that make it into his sets. Future has a formula now. That means that we can expect less spontaneity and more sustainability. FUTURE is a fine mix of the stylings of past Futures layered in a rich blend of sounds from a now refined sonic palette. It doesn’t communicate the same intense and complicated emotional concoction that fills his songs when he’s at his most vulnerable and compelling. But it doesn’t have to. It is prototypical of Future, who continues to overshare, often for better but sometimes for worse. He will continue to do the things that allowed him to reach this point: amp up the output, stay active, and feed a ravenous, culture-obsessed public. That is, until he’s ready to surprise us again.


Heady, self-loathing, and occasionally overwrought, the Ohio singer and producer’s new album plays like an obsessive process document of internet-mediated anxiety.

hypochondriac

brakence’s songs surge with combative angst and agitate with electronic detail, never resolving to easy conclusions. “argyle,” the lead single from the 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album, hypochondriac, is indecisive, a spiraling emo-pop garden without a path. As brakence wrestles with dissatisfaction at his music career (“I was tryna make a living/Well, I did, and now I don’t wanna live at all”), his drums feel just as speculative, wandering between careful, metallic snares and clipped scratches.
In July, a fellow producer asked the r/brakence fan subreddit for advice on how to make similarly distinct sounds. brakence himself answered, rattling off different technical approaches, linking some sample packs to try out, and offering a visual exercise: “Try closing your eyes and ask, what do my [percussion samples], or the beat in general, feel like?” he suggested. “Wood? Oil in a frying pan? Water droplets? Bugs? Industrial machines? [...] Use your imagination!”
Despite its surface-level similarity, brakence’s music doesn’t originate in hyperpop, as he’s often categorized, but painstaking beatcraft. He’s a self-described “synth nerd from the suburbs,” one of many Ableton wunderkinds who, in the wake of the 2010s EDM boom, found a home in an online ecosystem of traded samples and tutorials, staggered drum programming indebted to the L.A. beat scene, and vibe-based YouTube channels. Although brakence is somewhat private—he didn’t reveal his face until a couple years into his career—he’s become a zoomer star with an eager internet audience. On hypochondriac, he warps pop structures with gauzy sound design and hair-trigger songwriting, always bristling at the ill-fitting expectations of his artistic persona.
hypochondriac upgrades the woozy beat-tape presentation of brakence’s previous albums to a neurotic polish, so thick with effort that its psychic assault can sometimes be hard to take. He cocoons himself within his audio software to tweak his songs as they stack and unfurl. On “5g,” his feverish, drill-inspired instrumental and emo rap hooks feel like they’re in different dimensions, held together by a ghost in the machine. Vocal samples surface like glitches in the Matrix, often with a disarming, nerdy sense of humor: On “caffeine,” he reimagines the infamous Super Smash Bros. Melee “wombo combo” soundbite as an EDM riser.
Moments like these illuminate the album’s closest link to hyperpop: the way its litany of online reference points lets you see the gears turning in an artist’s head, soliciting emotional investment through audacity. brakence begins “caffeine” like a clunkier version of his 2018 single “effort,” with self-satisfied bars that recall the most annoying kind of YouTube rapper: “How this shit ain’t obvious to you? I’m not even 21/My music be the snobbiest, somehow I’m still gon’ get it done.” Two minutes in, he injects the track with Jersey club stimulants and becomes increasingly frantic until he sounds almost possessed. brakence’s irascible vocals pull from the streaming-era tones of singer-songwriters like EDEN, but lurch in all directions as his attitudes shift. They make fumbled overshares sting, like when he likens playing guitar to “finger-fuck[ing] strings” on “bugging!” But they also fill out his studied songs with volatile personality, making his intentions difficult to pin down.
On hypochondriac, brakence fixates on a familiar catch-22: the realization that when you express your vulnerability to an online audience—through a tweet, a lyric, or a DAW —the performance can curdle into something that feels dissociative, even parasitic, draining your energy as it rewards you with attention. “I hit control-alt-delete/And yet I can’t stop manufacturing heat,” he frets on “teeth”; constant visibility lingers at the back of his mind even when he’s alone. Some of his younger peers, like his touring partner Jane Remover or quinn, have worked in a similar songwriting mode before. Here, brakence makes his anxieties his muse. His solipsism can grate over a full album, but the wealth of imagery he finds to describe it—Greek mythology, DMT hallucinations, his titular fear for his health—gives hypochondriac a writerly quality.
This is a heady, self-loathing, and occasionally overwrought record, but its best songs stumble upon something earnest. The regimented pop groove of “cbd” pulls brakence out of his shell: Even as he insists no one cares for him, the smallness of his voice seems to reach out for connection. He finds pathos in clutter, too, like on album highlight “intellectual greed.” Tangled guitars, piano rolls, and electronic scrawls skitter across the track, as if brakence were crumpling up ideas and tossing them aside. “I know everything,” he sings, his voice overwhelmed with mania; he could be bragging about his musical technique, lamenting information overload, or lashing out at the millions of eyes watching him work. hypochondriac’s strength is how, in its obsessive commitment to an impenetrable style, it can suggest all of these readings at once.


New Orleans musician Christian Scott craves a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. Stretch Music finds him experimenting with moods and electronic textures, bumping against the genre's conventions even as he remains rooted in tradition.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Stretch Music

Stretch Music

Stretch music, according to New Orleans jazz musician Christian Scott, is an approach that engenders a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. "We are attempting to stretch—not replace—jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can," he says on his website. He titled his fifth album after the concept, but this sensibility is visible even in his earliest work as a leader; the title track of 2007's Anthem is jazz in its instrumentation, but it also obeys the rhythms and structures of post-hardcore, a series of contrasting shapes which build an atomically tense and spectral space, like a cathedral at night.
His description of "stretch music" somewhat resembles the omnivorous jazz approaches of bassist/singer Esperanza Spalding and pianist Robert Glasper. It's similarly collaborative and elastic. But Scott's genre splicing is not as mosaic as Glasper's. It’s doesn’t lock different genres together in unusual patterns as much as it melts them down into asymmetrical and indivisible sculpture. It's almost curious to call it "stretch music" when it feels as if jazz isn’t so much expanded here as collapsed into small, oblique jewels.
Later in his mission statement, Scott describes his intention to draw unusual instruments through distortion. This is how Stretch Music begins: A piano, played by Lawrence Fields, struggles through noise, as if pressing and blurring against a force field. Instruments undergo a kind of metamorphosis in Scott’s aesthetic, which is reflected in the album cover: his trumpet bends and warps into elastic shapes.
On record, Scott’s playing is patient and crisp, and it seems the product of spatial reasoning, more concerned with the area around his notes than their actual occurrence. He is sometimes accompanied by the ribbony flute phrases of Elena Pinderhughes, which contrast pleasingly with the routine collapse of the backdrop.
This collapse is occasioned by the percussion, played by Corey Fonville and Joe Dyson, Jr., alternately on drums and SPD-SX pads. Snare rolls are enhanced into dense exaggerations, glitching in and out of compressed rattles which physically approach vortexes of static. It lends the songs the accelerated yet organized rhythms of accident; it reminds me of sparks convulsing from a severed cable.
Sometimes the instrumentation is more obscure, as on "Tantric" and "Perspectives", each chord landing and shimmering with a kind of blurred phosphorescence. There are also more typical fusion exercises, as on "West of the West", where Matthew Stevens’ guitar recalls the metallic echo of Sonny Sharrock.
When Scott played at this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he said "West of the West" describes the sense of dislocation he felt when he lived in L.A., a place that seems unlocked from its own geography, released into imaginary and aggressively blank space. His music is the opposite of dislocated; it is thoroughly articulated, busy and compressed. The reach of Stretch Music can often feel literal—even as the threads warp and drift a deeply woven structure is preserved.


Taylor keeps her re-records very close to the originals, but five previously unreleased songs add depth and context to what was then her galactic, career-shifting pop debut.

1989 (Taylor’s Version)

For Taylor Swift, 2014 might have felt like one long debutante ball. On her fifth album, 1989, she emerged as a pop superstar, platinum coursing through her veins, Victoria’s Secret models flanking her like groupies, and a jewel-encrusted microphone permanently affixed to her right hand. For the first eight years of her career, she had been known for her intimate, open-hearted songwriting. On 1989, she traded in six-minute open letters and vivid diary entries for songs that were bright, punchy, and dramatic. It was her “first official pop album,” as she herself put it at the time (dubstep drops on 2012’s Red be damned), inspired by the decade of her birth but totally contemporary in its single-minded pursuit of chart domination and Grammys supremacy.
The gambit worked: Your aunt who only listens to Whitney Houston probably bought 1989; the guy who thinks his indie records are much cooler than yours definitely told you it contained “some really well-crafted pop songs” on a Tinder date once. The album yielded five Hot 100 top 10s, including three No. 1s, and hovered in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 for its entire first year of release. Behind Adele, it was the best-selling album of 2015. And it crystalized an image of Swift that she hasn’t been able to shake off over the intervening decade: that of an invulnerable, sweetly Machiavellian pop deity, arranging her music and the world around her with equal precision.
1989 (Taylor’s Version), the fourth entry in Swift’s series of re-recordings, goes some way toward fleshing out this chapter in her career. The “vault” tracks packaged with the Taylor’s Version series range from astonishing (“Nothing New”) to feeble (“Castles Crumbling”), and while the five songs added to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) lack the wallop and precision of the album proper, they also sometimes reveal humanizing depth—the equivalent of seeing a star exhale and slump their shoulders the minute they step from the afterparty into the Escalade. Toward the end of “Now That We Don’t Talk,” a glittering catwalk-stomper shot through with the bitterness of Speak Now’s “The Story of Us,” Swift basically positions the poise and shine of 1989 as a way to cope: “The only way back to my dignity/Was to turn into a shrouded mystery.”
If 1989 lacks some of the texture and nuance that defines her best work, the vault tracks can be encumbered by their wordiness. On “Suburban Legends,” Swift writes in the dense, largely rhymeless run-on style that defines later records like Folklore and Midnights. The second verse builds to the lines, “I am standing in a 1950s gymnasium/And I can still see it now”—an unwieldy contrast to the appealingly quantized bounce of 1989 cuts like “How You Get the Girl” and “Style.” But this messiness can yield the kind of bittersweet gems that are Swift’s specialty: As ever, she excels when channeling the cocktail of victimhood and superiority that foments in the aftermath of a breakup. On “Now That We Don’t Talk,” she tells an ex that “from the outside, it looks like you’re trying lives on.” “You dream of my mouth before it called you a lying traitor,” from “Is It Over Now?” is an instant addition to Swift’s already-heaving canon of perfect last words.
The most striking moments of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) are shivering and defensive, taking a bat to the knees of the pageant-ready main record. The title of “‘Slut!’” raised a lot of eyebrows upon announcement, with many assuming that it would be a rejoinder to misogyny in the style of “Blank Space,” Swift’s comment on her treatment in the tabloids. Really, it’s far meeker than that: Over a Chromatics-style synth fog, Swift sings about trying to hide a relationship for fear of becoming gossip-rag fodder once again. When she attempts an empowering chorus—“If I’m all dressed up/They might as well be looking at us/If they call me a slut/You know, it might be worth it for once”—she delivers it listlessly, unable to hide the false sentiment. It’s a compelling idea that nonetheless is the weakest of the vault tracks, ambling and aimless in comparison to the songs that come after it.
By contrast, “Say Don’t Go,” the best new addition to the record, shimmers with tension. Where much of 1989 wears its ’80s influence loosely, if at all, the patient verses of “Say Don’t Go” seem like a shot at the glowing slow builds of Phil Collins, to whom Swift would pay tribute a few years later with an exceptional “Can’t Stop Loving You” cover. Its booming chorus is like her take on the grand, percussive hooks of her friends in Haim, but the lyrics bridge the gap between 1989 and Red, almost vicious in their angst.
“Say Don’t Go” is the only vault track written with an industry stalwart: Diane Warren, who penned a swath of megahits through the ’80s and ’90s. The rest were written with Jack Antonoff, whose rise to pop music ubiquity largely began with these songs. (Max Martin and Shellback, who co-wrote and produced most of the record, are absent, and their tracks on the main album were recreated with Christopher Rowe, Swift’s main re-recording partner.) Many of the new songs could slot easily onto Midnights, the pair’s first album-length collaboration. I don’t doubt that chunks of these songs, whether large or small, date back to the original 1989 sessions—“Is It Over Now,” in particular, feels mostly shorn from the same cloth, as does “Say Don’t Go”—but it feels as if many of them were fragments that were built out at a much later date. Swift’s style has changed dramatically in the past nine years; melodically and rhythmically, these tracks don’t wholly match the original 1989.
Not that it really matters. Although the vault tracks extend 1989’s runtime to about 81 minutes, they also make the record’s cloying moments seem more palatable. The fresh-start optimism of “Welcome to New York” is more believable when set in relief against wearier breakup tracks; “I Know Places,” a boilerplate on-the-run-from-the-media narrative, plays like a flipside to the defeatist “‘Slut!’”. These songs aren’t technically better now, but they’re certainly easier to understand. Not everything can be saved by this added context: Nearly 10 years later, “Bad Blood” sounds more basic, bratty, and boring than ever. And while I have a soft spot for the peppy, doe-eyed “How You Get the Girl,” I suspect that no amount of time will mellow its HFCS-level sweetness. (Aside from the slightest tweaks in vocal delivery or processing, the 1989 recreations are the closest to their source material yet.)
No new wrinkles are necessary to appreciate the record’s immaculate highs: the tug-of-war between yearning and anthemic on “I Wish You Would”; “Style”’s Miami Vice strut; the Tumblr-teen euphoria of “New Romantics.” It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.


The Los Angeles pianist, a collaborator of Solange and Frank Ocean, sinks back into spare soul-jazz and meditative new age, occupying a middle ground between deep and easy listening.

My Garden

Composition is a kind of cultivation: All the best stuff a product of daily toil. Beauty, for those who work at it, is as much a process as a physical product. It’s invisible and stashed deep below the surface, until it occasionally blooms for the benefit of us all. The producer, pianist, and composer John Carroll Kirby, a consummate cultivator and songwriter on recent records by Solange, Frank Ocean, and Harry Styles, has no difficulty coaxing beauty out from the depths of his own square of earth (or home studio). But on this new solo album of cloudless piano compositions for the Los Angeles label Stones Throw, Kirby unintentionally reveals a crucial trade secret of each job: Beauty itself is often no more important than the labor that brings it into the world.
My Garden catches Kirby in the middle of this work, mostly at the piano, and on an array of digital accompaniment: synthesized pads, flutes, and sparse programmed drums that never get in the way of the keyboards. As a pianist, Kirby falls somewhere on a scale between Sun Ra’s blissed-out tappings and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s architectural precision. Despite the clout of Kirby’s past collaborations, who have taken him to unexpected corners of the musical world (location: Kali Uchis), he hasn’t used his solo albums to burnish a reputation as creative polymath or production guru. He’s taken a much quieter path on the music that bears his name, stretching back to 2018’s Meditations in Music, an eight-part ambient suite composed of Minimoog leads and minimal DX7 voices, released on the new-age-inclined Leaving Records. Kirby recently released a collection of piano-only compositions titled Conflict, recorded sometime last year, with the intent to “induce inner calm” in listeners shaken by the global crises triggered by the ongoing pandemic.
The California-raised musician’s songs are so dogged in their pursuit of total aesthetic pleasure, they sound almost aloof in the context of a full album. Kirby’s production taste, melodic invention, and feel for surfacing grooves with the sparest of parts make him an unusually compelling musician. But the songs on My Garden seem unable to make a case for themselves, or for your attention, beyond this. The result is an album that wouldn’t sound out of place in the mood-based playlists of the Spotify universe, even if it would represent the very best of that world.
Take album opener “Blueberry Beads,” which sounds heavily inspired by Head Hunters-era Herbie Hancock. Its sound alone is striking enough for repeat listens—block chords chomp through a swinging drum pattern, each instrument glued together by the sinewy upright bass work of JP Maramba, making this the album’s only collaboration. The song is essentially a single vamp played with laidback force and swagger, and it’s one of the album’s high points. But its single-mindedness amounts to nothing much more than one very cool groove which runs until it doesn’t run anymore—perhaps the point at which Kirby lost interest. There are few dynamics shaping or redirecting the energy flow on My Garden’s nine songs, making for capricious endings. For “Beads,” which runs three and a half minutes, Kirby simply removes the song’s core elements one by one before his piano freestyles across the double bar lines.
There’s a diaristic air to My Garden. Kirby’s songs commence with little preamble, as if we’ve stumbled into a folder containing his works in progress. This isn’t to say the album is carelessly dashed off, but Kirby is content to move quickly and chase new leads when they appear. New ideas pop up in rapid succession, even though the tempos on My Garden never break out of a leisurely stroll. In “Night Croc” and “San Nicolas Island,” Kirby crafts melodies with a neat geometric precision, playful inventions that sometimes seem like they are leading Kirby by the hand, rather than the other way around. Still, his arrangements perpetually expose a deft studio touch. He expertly inserts divergent textures—shimmering Moog swells and paunchy synth-bass hits that break over a song’s surface—without interrupting these daydreams, casting each song in subtly different light.
But these subtleties box My Garden into a gray zone of sorts. This isn’t quite a background accompaniment; nor is it an immersive, deep-listening experience. It’s a collection of short stories, where a novel might make more sense for the approach. Kirby’s competent home production, and his economic arrangements, amount to a rich product that still manages to sound one-dimensional on repeat listenings, with little sonic depth. And his predilection for the occasional bright melody line works at cross purposes with his atmospheric tendencies. The album can never fully let itself recede into pure ambience.
Instead, like the “my” in the title, Kirby’s latest album does feel a tad possessive. Instead of inviting listeners into his music, he’s exposing us to it. You can hear how he works his way through a musical fantasy, but it’s difficult to access the feeling of it, perhaps with the exception of album closer “Wind.” The longest song, it opens with cascading lines that have been digitally edited and chopped in a way that recalls the sloshing runs of Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Kirby’s hands work expressively at the piano, teasing at a melancholy style that’s somewhere between rag and gospel, before the chords settle into the grip of a steady drum pattern. It’s the clearest moment of levity across the album—a lone pianist playing with the sounds in his head, not stopping to wonder if anything beautiful will come of it.

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On one of his most ambitious and definitive projects, Mach-Hommy reunites with Westside Gunn and puts on an unforgettable clinic with his razor-sharp bars and an exceptional eye for detail.

Pray for Haiti

On Pray for Haiti’s opening song, “The 26th Letter,” Mach-Hommy raps about a sort of alchemy: “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and ebonics.” The spectral Newark rapper’s work blurs the sounds and images of past lives, be they rap songs from his adolescence or his ancestors dating back generations. He will interpolate Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album cuts then slip into Haitian Creole, nod to ritualistic healing practices and then to Thirstin Howl III. His slang and diction shift depending on the narrator, depending on the mood, the beat, the threat or the plea being conveyed. His work is not designed to be decoded; its success does not hinge on the listener knowing which words or cadences are borrowed from Vol. 3 or Mm..Food?, or on the Creole being translated exactly. Mach reveals himself slowly, through allusion and immersion, an image loading grainily. Pray for Haiti is his most ambitious, definitive project since his 2016 masterpiece Haitian Body Odor, a collage rendered in full.
Pray for Haiti is a reunion with Westside Gunn, the Buffalo rapper whose Griselda collective included Mach before the two had a falling out. Gunn serves as executive producer and raps three times, though his added value is clearest when he shows up to ad-lib under Mach’s verses or talk neo-Puff shit between them. Mach has long been a chameleon, rapping or singing over some of the drumless loops that are a staple of the post-Marcberg underground, but also beats that are far more punishing, or far more maximal; the unifier has been a jagged mix. (On “Makrel Jaxon,” he speaks directly to that omnivorous streak: “Next tape might hear me sliding on flamenco/Or calypso/Maybe you should tip-toe.”) The beats he and Gunn have assembled here—mostly from Griselda mainstays like Cee Gee, Camoflauge Monk, and Denny Laflare, plus, notably, three in succession from Kansas City’s Conductor Williams—are varied enough to draw out of Mach each of his many styles: see “Magnum Band” and its low growl, the deceptively rich vocal arrangement on “Kriminel”’s chorus, the way “Makrel Jaxon” sounds like a copy of Donuts that was left out in the rain.
Broken into discrete parts, Mach’s rapped verses would seem more conventional than they end up being: They are full of de rigueur punchlines, clever similes that were once the default setting for East Coast rappers. Some of these are ordinary (“Got lawyers on retainer just like an orthodontist”) and others exceptional (“Lotta these rappers big 12 like March Madness”). But they are stitched together in strange ways and at unexpected times and delivered with a flat affect that draws attention to the fact that the punchline is being placed here, as if he’s creating his own source material to quote and interpolate. And then there’s the level of detail he brings to his records. Mach is worldly the way you imagine a spy would be, or at least upper management in a global oil conglomerate: He knows how to order coffee in Damascus and a hit in Paris, knows which local toughs to muscle out and which to charm into his service.
This caginess makes it even more arresting when Mach is totally earnest. On “Kriminel,” when he raps about being unable to eat and seeing visions in his sleep, the verse has a desperation deeper than what would be apparent on the page. That song, like many others, is augmented by his practiced, scratchy singing voice, a mode that Mach slips into not only to vary the textures but to provide a tonal break from the step-ahead slyness of his raps.
Pray for Haiti is 16 tracks, and its 13th is simply the audio from an academic discussion of Haitian Creole, where it is noted that speakers in one region of that country might use terminology that is totally foreign to speakers in another. The interlude underscores a central theme—Mach revels in specificity, and seems to enjoy that it makes his work elusive, even illegible to some—but it also serves a structural purpose on the album, cordoning off the final three songs as their own suite. This begins with the melancholy “Au Revoir,” where the material things Mach sometimes raps about so gleefully—the yachts, the “thousand-dollar brunches”—sound almost terrifyingly hollow. But he qualifies this tone, as he so often does, with the album’s closer, “Ten Boxes - Sin Eater,” where he cheekily conjures the image of a messiah resurrected “in Vetements linen.”
While his singing is a reliable vehicle for sorrow and longing, Mach excels while rapping in this lighter palette, when that tongue-in-cheek venom seeps out in unexpected ways. See “The Stellar Ray Theory,” where an extended sun metaphor inevitably recalls the song that was meant to open Ghostface’s Bulletproof Wallets but was cut due to clearance issues. Mach is not often compared to Ghost—the whine in Westside Gunn’s voice sometimes is—but he shares some of the same writing instincts, from the impulse to cut off vignettes in the middle and pivot to something syntactically different, to the way he often finds himself in the [location] with the [fucked-up detail about location]. And like Ghost, he’s extraordinarily funny, though not eager to let you in on every joke—he is perpetually Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, asking you “funny how?” He will quip about all the Andrei Kirilenkos he’s accumulated, indifferent to you remembering the Russian’s jersey number.
Speaking of Ghostface: The album that casts the longest shadow over this corner of rap is Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, its sneering crypticism xeroxed and xeroxed to ever-paler returns. That album’s most famous skit, of course, is about biters. But its second-most famous is the one where Rae asks Ghost where he can buy the Clarks he’s wearing, and an ecstatic Ghost explains that he dyed them himself using a new technique he’s developed. “Just imagine,” he muses, willing his friend to see a pair of cream Wallabees with a homemade navy-blue accent. It tracks that Ghost and Rae would be this excited and this exacting about their clothes—everything they wore, like every shard of their slang, came to be part of an inimitable whole.
Mach has carefully guarded his identity, and this opacity has a strange effect on his music: It collapses time. When he raps about coveting Gore-Tex, the verse is not moving rotely through, say, his teenage years; it evokes the people of a certain place in a certain era, and it isolates the desire as a feeling that can be accessed now, rather than something tied to a stage in his growth. It doesn’t even matter if it was true for him—it was true for somebody. In Pray for Haiti’s first verse—the one with the line about old Polo—Mach raps: “Mach-Hommy is a icon, end quote/This gon’ be the year I get my python trench coat.” A python trench coat is exactly the type of item Mach might pull from the closet of his mind, stupid expensive and absurdly exotic. But it also pays off “Tunnel Vision,” HBO’s thunderous second song, which opens with Mach demanding the garment that he now transforms into a marker of accumulated influence, a tiny prophecy fulfilled, his next skin until he molts into something even newer.

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Originally intended for release in 2018, the second album from the short-lived Philadelphia-via-Albany DIY band is a pristine time capsule powered by lo-fi ingenuity.

Visions From the Bridge

Jouska existed in the space between greatness and legend that breeds the truly definitive bands of an era: those that aren’t quite transcendent, but memorable enough to serve as shorthand. The Albany group’s story is a familiar one for emo-adjacent DIY artists during the mid-2010s: Upstart band in burgeoning local scene attracts national attention, signs to a respected label, and moves to Philly, generating momentum that soon stalls on side projects, life commitments, and a pandemic. A new album that’s actually quite old, Visions From the Bridge brings Jouska back into conversation by confirming their four-year silence as a permanent hiatus. Dated December 2018 and quietly dropped on Bandcamp several weeks ago, it serves as a bittersweet relic of a promising band and a reminder that talent doesn’t always reach its full potential.
Then again, the appeal of Jouska’s music lay in its constant threat of collapse. Reminiscent of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s unruly and unpredictable post-rock, The Glow Pt. 2’s mercurial naturalism, and LVL UP’s cashed-bowl cosmology, Jouska’s debut Topiary arrived in autumn 2016, when the leading lights of emo’s revival were starting to recede, outshined by more immediate weed’n’meme and alt-country strains of the genre. Topiary’s rickety production left much to the imagination, though an eventual re-release on Tiny Engines proved the duct tape and bubble gum holding it together was load-bearing; the album’s immersive spell was broken by an altered and inferior track sequencing that facilitated its pressing to vinyl. The 2018 EP From Elson to Emmett was both more ambitious and antagonistic than its predecessor, its cleaner sound contrasting with pricklier melodies and complicated song structures; it was a weighty and presumably transitional work.
Had it been released a few months after Emmett, as originally intended, Visions From the Bridge is where it all could’ve come into focus. Jouska had taken their vision to the most forbidding outskirts of post-rock and returned seeking the simple pleasures of following a single, propulsive groove, carrying a verse into a chorus, and clocking out in less than three minutes. The sound of guitar-oriented indie rock hasn’t shifted enough for Visions From the Bridge to sound dated, though it serves as a pristine time capsule of “Philly indie rock in 2018”: a distinctly American and extroverted form of shoegaze, heavy on the low end, with analog trickery attesting to the gravitational pull of Alex G and Spirit of the Beehive on out-of-towners.
Whereas Jouska once compartmentalized their influences, Visions From the Bridge coalesces into browned-out psychedelia, bad vibes without the passivity. Doug Dulgarian’s vocals are usually battered by harsh, trebly reverb, an effect that emphasizes an unmistakable and constant struggle rare in this style of music; his images are borne of gravel, dirty water, chloroform, and cancer. “Fall asleep with my teeth clenched,” he shouts under plush weighted blankets of distortion on “Exit Spell,” capturing the persistent stalemate between depressive paralysis and anxiety. The extraterrestrial, pitch-shifted vocals on “Humming” provide the album’s most beautiful and most unnerving sound, like if My Bloody Valentine spent their post-Loveless hiatus getting stoned and watching The X-Files.
In moments like these, Visions From the Bridge pointed forward, recapturing the boundless creativity and lo-fi ingenuity that powered Topiary with newfound concision. But the lengthier numbers that close out side B lie in a netherworld between these two qualities, their sights set on “epic” but abandoned about 80 percent of the way through. It’s an anticlimactic and revealing end to Visions From the Bridge, an album with enough exciting ideas to get Jouska started, though maybe not quite enough to carry them to the next level. As Dulgarian’s current project They Are Gutting a Body of Water gears up to release a split and a second album, Visions From the Bridge provides closure: Jouska’s story might have come to a quicker and quieter end than expected, but it’s likely part of a bigger one to come.


If Mark Ronson’s previous albums were united by formalizing principles (retro-soul makeovers of alt-rock standards on 2007’s Version, odd-couple duets on 2010’s Record Collection), the producer's strategies on Uptown Special are more conceptual. The Bruno Mars collab "Uptown Funk" is already a massive hit, and other guests include Mystikal and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.

Uptown Special

Crowning the Song of the Summer has become an annual tradition akin to the Super Bowl for music pundits, spawning its own Billboard chart, a seasonal stream of speculative think pieces, and official betting odds. But no such fanfare exists for determining the Song of the Winter, an arguably more impressive achievement, given that it must seize our attention from the hectic pre-Christmas crunch through to the post-New Year’s onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder (and all the grueling family gatherings in between). Where Songs of the Summer are readymade soundtracks for the happiest moments of your life, Songs of the Winter must be scientifically engineered with enough exuberance to fire up your serotonin during the most miserable time of year. Lest we forget, some of the most universally embraced, monoculture-fortifying singles of this millennium—from "Hey Ya!" to "Crazy" to "Happy"—all surfaced during the chilly season, making their outsized energy not just welcome, but psychologically necessary. And if 2014 was indeed the hottest year on record, we can thank "Uptown Funk" for raising the mercury during its dying days.
A year ago next month, Bruno Mars appeared at the Super Bowl half-time show in a rare, shared bill with Red Hot Chili Peppers—the implication being that, even with two multi-platinum albums under his belt, the singer was somehow still too young or unproven to carry the show on his own without the help of some rock veterans. But on the heels of "Uptown Funk"—his inescapable, undeniable chart-topping collaboration with producer Mark Ronson—Mars could not only claim the show for himself this year, but make everyone in the stadium forget there was a football game going on. If "Uptown Funk" represents something of a supernova moment for Mars’ ascendant star—unleashing a braggadocio that’s several degrees sassier than what we’ve heard on his more congenially soulful solo hits—it’s a hard-fought moment of Stateside redemption for Ronson. Though his name can be found in the fine print on some of the biggest British pop records of the past decade, Ronson’s own collaboration-heavy albums failed to establish the London-born producer as a star in his own right in his second home of America (where his sister Samantha is arguably more famous for being Lindsay Lohan’s long-time party pal). His productions for others have cracked the Billboard Top 10, but this time he has a monster hit to call his own—that is, if you discount the veritable syllabus worth of '80s-funk sources "Uptown Funk" so unapologetically references. Between the Morris Day-schooled mojo and Michelle Pfeiffer name-drops, all the song is missing for maximum period detail is an Eddie Murphy cop flick to soundtrack.
There’s more where that came from on Uptown Special—though not as much as you might think. Where last fall's "SNL"-showcased double shot of "Uptown Funk" and its gloriously profane, Mystikal-manned counterpart "Feel Right" suggested Uptown Special would be Ronson’s star-studded reenactment of a Revolution-vs.-Time First Avenue showdown, the album is actually more like a five-CD-changer shuffle through styles that dominated pop radio while Ronson was still a grade-schooler. Pieced together in several cities spanning Toronto to Memphis to L.A., the album represents something of a Sonic Highways-style journey for Ronson, and like Dave Grohl, the producer boasts both the chart-pop and alt-rock bona fides to attract luminaries from the mainstream and indie-verse alike. The guest list here includes everyone from a hall-of-fame legend like Stevie Wonder to an unknown choir singer, Keyone Starr, recruited from Mississippi State; from electro-pop pin-up Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow to reigning psych-rock king Kevin Parker of Tame Impala; from the guy who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the guy who wrote "Shake Ya Ass".
If Ronson’s previous albums were united by formalizing principles (retro-soul makeovers of alt-rock standards on 2007’s Version, odd-couple duets on 2010’s Record Collection), his strategies on Uptown Special are more conceptual. For several songs, he enlisted novelist Michael Chabon to pen pulp-novel-like lyrical vignettes of crime and passion on the outskirts of Las Vegas and hipster identity crises in L.A., providing the album with, if not a linear narrative, then a recurring motif of dislocation. And in the spirit of Todd Terje’s producer-cum-artist-album gold standard, It’s Album Time, the tracklist follows a loose dusk-till-dawn trajectory, welcoming us in with Stevie’s signature harmonica squeals on the sunset-summoning intro "Uptown’s First Finale" before slipping into the cocktail-hour psychedelia of "Summer Breaking" (the first of Parker’s three leads). But before the album’s 15-minute mark, Mystikal has already gotten up and offa that thing, Mars has completed his one-and-done deal, and newcomer Starr has held her own with the jazzy, jittery R&B of "I Can’t Lose", rendering Uptown Special as an album of all-too-brief, berserker highs followed by a protracted, increasingly ponderous comedown period. The problem isn’t that Uptown Special’s incongruous collaborators clash with one another, it’s that Ronson sounds like he’s mashing two entirely different albums—one libidinous, one languorous—together.
In sharp contrast to the scene-stealing performances that dominate the album’s first half, Uptown Special’s second act essentially sees Parker and Wyatt trading smooth soft-rock volleys overtop chill grooves, with refereeing from Jeff Bhasker (who plays the same role on "In Case of Fire" as Todd Edwards did on Random Access Memories’ "Fragments of Time"—i.e., a big-name producer making a rare vocal turn on a thinly veiled Steely Dan tribute.) Parker’s contributions—be it the Toro Y Moi-style cosmic funk of "Daffodils" or Ween-like bounce of "Leaving Loz Feliz"—provide a prophecy of what a tamer Tame Impala might sound like another five years down the road should they ever trade in heavy-duty guitar jams for streamlined pop; Wyatt’s "Heavy and Rolling" cops its strut from "Billie Jean" but none of its dramatic tension, denying Uptown Special the late-game climax it’s begging for. Before you know it, Stevie Wonder’s returned for the sunrise swirl of "Crack in the Pearl, Pt. II" to send us off with another unmistakably Stevie-esque harmonica line (while making you wonder why the hell Stevie Wonder isn’t doing anything more on this album other than playing harmonica). Too top-heavy to sustain its momentum, yet too fleeting for its thematic framework to cohere, Uptown Special is that rare beast: a concept album that actually could use more fat.


Producer behind the recent reemergence of Dipset and Cam'ron strikes out on his own, making lush instrumentals with his own fully developed aesthetic.

Electronic Dream

Alongside the roaring Harlem rapper Vado, Rhode Island native AraabMuzik has been one of the key figures in the re-emergence of Cam'ron, Dipset's language-bending figurehead. After a long period of complete disappearance, Cam's been going through something of a comeback lately, aided in large part by tracks like Araab's punishing "Get It in Ohio". Araab's work for Cam, and for other freelance clients, sounds dollar-store cheap but knife-edge tense; it reminds me of Steve Jablonsky's score for Friday the 13th. He makes ferocious, diamond-hard gangsta rap beats with a pervading sense of dystopic anxiety. Araab's sense of vision comes through even more strongly in the web videos he's been releasing, in which he shows off his MPC virtuosity and slices up samples of, oh, say, Cannibal Corpse. Like fellow underground rap visionaries Clams Casino and DJ Burn One, Araab makes freelance beats that hint at a fully developed personal aesthetic. And like those guys, he's now striking out on his own, making instrumental music that brings that aesthetic to the forefront.
Electronic Dream is Araab's first commercially available album, but it works more like a collection of remixes. Rather than creating his own tracks from scratch, Araab spends his debut album dismembering a series of cheesed-out hairgel-house superclub anthems: DJ Nosferatu's "The Underground Stream" on "Underground Stream", Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night (Fall in Love With Music)" on "Golden Touch", Starchaser's "So High" on "Feelin So Hood". This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected direction for Araab. With a little bit of Googling, you can find plenty of online screeds from fans frustrated or even enraged at Araab for making an album based on this music, or for dishonoring his sample sources by leaving large pieces of these tracks unchanged while neglecting to properly credit the original producers. But Araab's changes, relatively minor though they may be, turn a sound built on populist uplift into something darker.
It's tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it's virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself-- ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab's snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he's applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab's using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album-- something at once anxious and euphoric.
As hard as his drums punch, though, Araab still let the textures of these anthems shine through. And in Araab's hands, these melodies work differently; the anonymous dance divas wailing ecstatically over their original beats become lost, lonely souls, anxiously whispering to themselves that everything will be OK. Araab's music doesn't allow for dizzy buildups and cathartic breakdowns; instead, it's all murky tension, all the time. At times, his tracks can sound a bit like the woozy bass music of L.A.'s Brainfeeder scene, but Araab is always more direct and more ferocious than those guys. And yet the sugary beauty of those melodies sound like they belong on his tracks; nothing is out of place. "Got a feelin' so high," the singer on "Feelin So Hood" coos, and the drums beat that feeling down while the gorgeous ripples of synth lift it back up.
There's something truly fascinating about the entire LP: An up-and-coming hardcore rap producer leaving his genre behind so that he can twist and scramble this hands-in-the-air big-room sound. And in peeling back its excesses and substituting in his own eccentricities, Araab uncovers a primal emotional force in this music, one that fits beautifully with his own air-raid siren aesthetic. Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade-- you don't want to fuck with it.