The New York rapper aims for political awareness on his latest, trading out his clever rhyme schemes for more clarity. Though varied and sometimes powerful, its themes feel undercooked.

All-Amerikkkan Bada$$

Joey Bada$$ began his career rapping about his rapping. The subject matter was secondary to how deftly he jammed together as many words as he could into his bars and most often, he executed effectively. Now on his second LP, Joey has elected to use his elevated exposure to address the societal ills of our time. As he said recently, “I personally feel like I was put here on this Earth not only to inspire, but to wake people up.” On All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, Joey raps about police brutality, systematic oppression and its consequences, and of course, Donald Trump. It’s a thoughtful and mature step for the 22-year-old Brooklyn rapper, five years removed from his days as the precocious teenager behind 1999. On the new record, Joey favors lyrical clarity over the tongue-twisting rhymes of his younger days. Despite the directness, however, he does not surpass surface-level awareness, rendering AABA little more than a good intention.
Joey aims for positivity on AABA. The first half, which he calls “The Heroes Side,” is relaxed—a return to form after the darkness of Summer Knights and B4.DA.$$. It’s light and melodic music with boom-bap drums providing the rhythm—the kind of unimposing tunes to soundtrack a backyard party; they just happen to veer near dark topics. The opening tracks (“Good Morning Amerikkka,” “For My People,” and “Temptation”) reflect the sunny mood, sounding like polished and complete updates of the spare Golden Age music Joey revered so greatly on past releases. Later, he cements his commitment to hope when he raps, “I exchange my negative for a positive,” on the back-half cut “Super Predator.” (As with other backwards-looking efforts, it brings to mind Q-Tip’s own 1991 request to “get in the zone of positivity, not negativity.”) The upbeat attitude both underscores and undermines the album. Optimism is an asset in times of progress, but it can sound like blissful ignorance, as on “Temptation,” where Joey chides someone who is “complaining all day but in the same condition,” and apparently “enslaved by their religion.” Yet, he offers no alternative to this ill-established problem, rapping only, “Watch me use my prophets/Get them all to listen/I’ve been on a mission.” The panacean message and “mission” remain unclear.
Joey excels greatest on AABA when he does not try to use the album as a thesis paper that tries to scan as many injustices as possible. “Rockabye Baby” and “Ring the Alarm,” which slot into “The Vindictive Villainous Side,” are tough songs that embody Joey’s anger. They are also his greatest lyrical showcases. He doesn’t prescribe advice, nor does he seek solutions. The former is a boastful call-to-arms, and the latter is a lyrical barrage with lines like, “It’s the double entendre monster/Taking haunting constant trips through your conscious,” which is among his best ever. While constant one-liners were a bit leaden on B4.DA.$$, they are sorely missed on AABA.
Along with his political ambitions, AABA is Joey’s most commercially-minded endeavor to date, containing his first gold single, “Devastated.” It’s an anonymous song that conveys no original thoughts or sounds, with lines like, “Just getting better each day/Stackin’ that cheddar cheesecake.” There’s also the similarly banal “Land of the Free,” which presents many facts but does not advance any discourse beyond what we already know: “Donald Trump is not equipped to take the country over.” Got it, thanks.
All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ is a survey of consciousness. The title of “Super Predator” could potentially prompt a young listener to learn more about the explicitly racist term favored in the ’90s ; the song, however, will teach little. The closing “Amerikkkan Idol” has a bad Lionel Richie pun and tired lines of “killing the game,” but it also has uplifting lines about black excellence, as well as a spoken word outro that name-checks the late Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old black man whose death at the hands of Baton Rouge police last summer sparked national protest and outrage.
The record is a starting point for those who may not have thought much of economic, social, and political disparity. Joey even said as much, explaining recently, “I’ve been watching all these events over the last four years and I’ve been feeling helpless…. But I feel like this is where it starts: me opening up the conversation.” Likewise, it’s a beginning for Joey, who’s still figuring out how to bring broader thinking into an artform he’s, at times, mastered. (A recent “Mask Off” freestyle should be proof enough that he can really rap when stakes are less daunting.) Throughout, the album is trapped between explication and relatability, delivering only undercooked ideas. As he says, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ may be an introduction, but for now, it is a sacrifice of Joey Bada$$’s natural ability as he navigates toward enlightened communication.


Although Protomartyr's debut album takes several Detroit reference points in its stride, it's more than "a Detroit record": Their characters aren't hollow archetypes, but people with ideas, struggles, and stories set to dextrously played speed punk, psych melodies, and gentle fingerpicking.

No Passion All Technique

It's easy to speculate what kind of impact the city of Detroit has on a Detroit-based artist's work. With the general perception of the city's decay (and its "halftime in America" stereotype), anything "angry" in a song could quickly and cheaply be attributed to the artist's surroundings. Maybe that's partially due to some long-held MC5- or Ted Nugent-based aggression archetype. On some records, though, Detroit's presence is pretty well spelled out. Tyvek's last one, for example, had "Wayne County Roads". Similarly, Protomartyr don't hide their hometown on No Passion All Technique, their debut album. There's "Jumbo's", which is about the bar in Midtown, and "Ypsilanti", a city 40 minutes away. On their debut album, they tell stories set in these places (and others), and back them with a diverse rock'n'roll ecosystem.
"Machinist Man" is the story of a night foreman who works all week in the city. Come the weekend, he's drinking High Life after High Life. But then, Protomartyr counterbalance the foreman's story with this sentence: "There are things that are built in the skulls of men." And that line, bellowed in Joe Casey's baritone, embodies why No Passion All Technique isn't just "an album about Detroit". It's set in Detroit, its characters live in and around Detroit, but this album is bigger than one place. Protomartyr's characters are more than hollow archetypes or faceless B-roll factory workers from Searching for Sugar Man. These are people with ideas, struggles, and stories. The three schizophrenic gentlemen detailed in "Ypsilanti", for example: One of them throws books out windows, one of them "could still punch through walls," and the third delivers an enigmatic monologue: "Call me not interference, my name is I.R. Dung. If I see my hands, sir, I know they do no wrong."
These are stories delivered with an alarming amount of sonic dexterity. While "Hot Wheel City" has the anthemic rafter reach of a Hold Steady track, "Free Supper" is pure speed punk. "Jumbo's" falls into a droning, hypnotic psych melody, and though it stays on a specific course, it keeps gradually fluctuating in volume, suddenly adding layers of instruments and suddenly stripping them away. Then there's something like "Three Swallows"-- paced, fingerpicked, warm. There, the band quietly ruminates on drinking-- a topic All Passion No Technique picks up a few times-- plus loss, aging, and heartbreak. It's a devastating and human track, and the song doesn't settle for sonic or tonal simplicity. Midway through, it gets a set of loud and chunky acid-washed guitars. After about two minutes, it's over way too soon.
Scouring the lyrics sheet for No Passion All Technique, you'll find cold detachment and cynicism all over the place. "Jumbo's" opens with the rigidly delivered line, "I will touch the screen no more/ I will not have a drink." But this album is never bitter, and it's never a slog. A song like "Feral Cats" even borders on absurdity. Frantic instrumentals accompany Casey's vocals, which are paranoid about dust, nurses, and warfare. Then, with a big triumphant hook and a shouted vocal, they sing, "Just like feral cats!" Is this a joke? Is this legitimate concern, like how we should probably honest-to-god fear feral pigs? It's a song delivered with either gravity or a smirk, and either way, it's a great song.
What's refreshing about No Passion All Technique is its lack of immediate sonic reference points. There are loose ones-- vocals like Nick Cave, punk guitars-- but this is a record in its own universe. There's jittery instrumentals, cynicism, and paranoia, sure, but you can't define it by those things. There's also heartwrenching loss and awesome guitar solos. And there's a humanness and empathy to this material that's increasingly rare in rock songs. For a debut LP, No Passion All Technique is an impressive showing of sonic, lyrical, and emotional range, and it all falls under a cohesive banner.


Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook’s latest installment of power pop ventures into Laurel Canyon and post-punk without clouding its permanent sunshine.

GUV IV

In 2020, a spring tour opening for White Reaper took Ben Cook, aka Young Guv, as far as New Mexico before the live music industry collapsed. With the remaining tour canceled, Cook’s finances devastated, and his apartment in New York already sublet, all he and his band could do was stay put. They spent nine months in New Mexico, holed up in a sustainable Earthship structure with little else to do but write songs.
This detour resulted in two records—Guv III and this one, Guv IV. The songs on Guv III fit Young Guv’s best-known sound: sunny, Britpop-y power pop, driven by Cook’s sweet, earworm melodies. On Guv IV, he branches out. Leisurely harmonies and intermittent slide guitar give “Change Your Mind” a Laurel Canyon feel. “Cry 2 Sleep” is a little bit yacht rock, while “Maybe I Should Luv Somebody Else” adopts a brazen country strut, and “Nervous Around U” whips out the drum machine for dancey post-punk.
As on all Young Guv albums, the music is lovestruck and yearning. Dreams and memory pervade the lyrics; there’s a sense of absence making the heart fonder, perhaps of Cook filling in imperfections with half-constructed memories. It all gives the songs a feeling of distance; they’re dreamy and not quite solid. This mostly works in Young Guv’s favor. He’s an artist who deals in vibes more than real emotional heft. The swagger in his songwriting, and the way his vocals are simultaneously achingly earnest and crisply nonchalant, make the evergreen breakup themes feel classic, not cliché. His best lyrics float on surface level, short and sharp rhymes arranged around a single-line hook. When he ventures into more poetic territory, like on “Change Your Mind” and “Wind in My Blood,” it starts to get a little purple; still, his knack for melody helps.
Sometimes these songs are too insubstantial and simply don’t stick. “Sign From God” is pleasant, but not much else. Sandwiched by more memorable cuts, the restrained tempo and unaffected vocals of “Love Me Don’t Leave Me” drift into the ether. When Cook works within his signature sound, as on Guv III, the familiar and crafted-to-perfection style promises a reliably good time. But his stylistic experiments are spottier, leaving his weaker ideas more exposed. The album’s best twists, like the hazy slow-down of “Change Your Mind” or the antsy grooves of “Nervous Around U,” prove that a more varied Young Guv would work well with tighter editing instead of sprawling double releases. As it is, Guv IV is a fun summer spin, but doesn’t coalesce into the memorable statement a pop songwriter like Cook could be capable of.


Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart have worked with Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Wilco. On their first album as a duo, they make improvisational art rock with an inquisitive, surrealist bent.

Parts

Like an existentialist in a sundress, the Chicago duo Ohmme has a distant, relaxed allure. On their debut album, Parts, Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham (who works for the company that helps produce Pitchfork Music Festival) let their two guitars gambol as drums nuzzle up to nimble, unpredictable vocals. Their music is improvisational art rock that flings itself high into the atmosphere but lands lightly, like it didn’t just crash down from outer space.
Ohmme have a wholesome origin story: They went to the same high school, a few years apart, and noticed each other’s talents from afar. Cunningham was captivated by Stewart’s voice when she saw her in a high school production of Little Shop of Horrors; Stewart had seen Cunningham play in a local rock band. Deeply embedded in the young Chicago music scene, the pair sang with Chance the Rapper on Coloring Bookand Surf. Stewart co-fronted her high school band with Vic Mensa, while Cunningham sings backing vocals with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on tour. When they formed Ohmme in 2014, it was as an experiment. They mostly improvised in the beginning, and still do in their live shows.
Cunningham and Stewart bring a strange bounce to their music. On the title track, they harmonize on free-associative lyrics like, “We were hot for a minute like two boiled eggs, and at times I want to crush the ceiling in between my legs”; it’s a slipstream shift between reality and surrealism. Like a Carmen Maria Machado short story, their concise, bracing vision of our world is just warped enough to feel accurate. In “Sentient Beings,” they deal with mislaid faith, but they’re so calm about losing their religion that it makes the ordeal even more disorienting. Depending on your tolerance for instability, the lack of solid ground in Ohmme’s landscapes could feel terrifying or thrilling.
If there’s a grounding element in the project, it’s Cunningham and Stewart’s mutual appreciation. Each piece of Ohmme’s sound is flexibly loving of the others—and flexibility is a theme of Parts. They’re into the bendiness of life, the contortions. Lyrics that indulge private thoughts and music that allows the pair to highlight each other’s talents give listening to the record the frisson of eavesdropping. Ohmme’s close harmonies can ascend into bluegrassy exaltation. The improvisational guitars intensify and ease up against each other; sometimes it sounds like they’re poking at one another, trying to tease out a lush, full strum. Percussionist Matt Carroll, a late addition, does astounding work curving around the duo with finesse like Fiona Apple’s collaboration with Charley Drayton on The Idler Wheel.
Parts, for the most part, is mysterious and indirect. This constant elusive smirk could wear on you if you’re not into that type of thing. Ohmme like to raise provocative questions, then fuck off with coy guitars. “There’s a myriad of whys,” they admit in “Liquor Cabinet.” If you would like them to tell you what the answers might be, if you would like them to show their cards, then you have to pay close attention, because it only happens in quick flashes. “Pick me a peach,” they say, and you urgently need to find one. “I want a new icon,” they say, and you’re like, Fuck! I do too! It is really satisfying when Ohmme make demands.
Most of the time, Ohmme linger at the threshold of, and in the spaces in between, feelings: anger, clarity, elation. They’ve gotten close enough to each one to interrogate it with curiosity and sensitivity. Scattering the puzzle pieces, as Cunningham and Stewart do on Parts, has its own function—that’s how you find all the strange little edges. You start to see the insight you can gather when you’re forced to look at each part of the whole.


On their debut album, the German duo Africaine 808 reinvent the entire concept of "world music" from the ground up. Although they sample styles ranging from Nigerian funk to spiritual jazz to cumbia, what unifies their work is its deep sense of musicality. The songs evolve as inscrutably and as naturally as the movements of a crowd.

Basar

Three songs into Africaine 808's debut album, over rippling drum machine and hand percussion, a British DJ named Alex Voice declares, "Sound systems—that's where it began." He's talking about the enormous stacks of speakers that have rocked the UK ever since they were imported from Jamaica in the 1950s, and his voiceover is part history lesson, part autobiography and part sermon. The title of the song, "Language of the bass," comes from a refrain that he intones with the gravitas usually reserved for scripture, and true to form, the song's synthesized bassline writhes like a thing alive, its portamento glide and nimble syncopations as expressive as glyphs.
But Basar isn't really a sound-system album; with the exception of "Language of the Bass," UK dance culture barely figures. Instead, it's an album about hybridity, about the way that far-flung styles and sounds can make excellent dance partners. Refreshingly, there is nothing didactic about the German duo's approach. Rather than reprising established histories, Africaine 808 seem determined to devise their own narrative, one that reinvents the entire concept of "world music" from the ground up.
This has been their way since the beginning. One of Africaine 808's early singles, "Lagos, New York," built a bridge between Nigerian rhythms and New York disco, while "Cosmicumbia" linked cumbia, cosmic disco, and Afrobeat. Basar incorporates a host of disparate musical styles and conventions, but never in a tokenistic way: Instead, it's a joyful mélange of sounds and rhythms, all underpinned by intricately programmed TR-808 patterns. In "Ngoni," a West African string instrument provides the center of gravity for a rich, evolving array of rolling hand percussion, marimba, and fat, throbbing synthesizers. "Crawfish Got Soul" begins with the kind of jokey sample you might expect to find on 3 Feet High and Rising—a barking seal, a vintage recording of an MC exhorting people to loosen up and dance—and quickly launches into a sprightly, Southern-fried mix of upright bass, blues guitar, horns, vibraphone, and Farfisa organs.
Their hybrid approach is an extension of the DJ-friendly edits of African and Latin music that the duo's members, Dirk Leyers and DJ Nomad, have been making for their Vulkandance parties for years. But Basar doesn't limit its perspective to the dancefloor: "The Awakening," the album's opening track, deploys airy horns and strings in a way that's reminiscent of spiritual jazz, and the 808 doesn't even enter until halfway through the track. All of the album's songs tend to follow similarly serpentine arrangements, evolving as inscrutably and as naturally as the movements of a crowd. When they want to, they can also write flat-out beautiful songs: "Ready for Something New" is a tender tune featuring the vocals of the Israeli singer Ofri Brin, while "Fallen From the Stars" sounds like a melancholy response to Beanfield's great broken-beat ballad "The Season."
What really unifies the album is its deep sense of musicality. The album wouldn't be the same without the contributions of the Congolese/German percussionist Dodo N'Kishi, a longtime collaborator of Mouse on Mars, and the Ghanian percussionist Eric Owusu, who has played with Ebo Taylor. On "Language of the Bass," the interplay between bassline, squeaky synth lead, hi-hats, and myriad other accenting sounds amounts to a dazzling feat of syncopation. Despite that song's title and voiceover, what ultimately makes it sing isn't just its bassline, but how the pieces conjure the whole. With Basar, they have assembled a vast glossary of fresh sounds, considerably enriching the language of contemporary dance music in the process.


The Brooklyn band's explosively verbal, shapeshifting, and snarky emo-pop explores how intersectional identities move within predominantly white spaces.

Proper.: I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better

When Erik Garlington changed his band’s name from Great Wight to Proper., his fans immediately assumed the stylization was an Into It. Over It. homage. Considering his rich history of playing emo inside baseball, they could be forgiven. After all, Great Wight included a song about a life-changing Tiny Moving Parts basement show on 2017’s The Suburbs Have Ruined My Life, and while that album title could pass for a Wonder Years lyric, I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better comes from an actual Wonder Years lyric. The reality is that “Proper.” is a reference to the one topic that always takes priority in Garlington’s lyrics: “We got it from white people telling us, 'You talk white. You talk, like, real proper. One of your parents must be white!'” The subject matter hasn’t changed much from The Suburbs Have Ruined My Life—Garlington is still venting righteous frustration over the ways his band’s intersectional identities function in predominantly white spaces, but his view has expanded far beyond their local emo scene or Kansas City to encompass the near-entirety of American society.
Garlington has said he envisions Proper. as the realization of the extremely weird-but-apparently-real Max Bemis and Kanye West collaboration that occurred sometime during The Life of Pablo. Truth be told, there’s far more Say Anything than Kanye in Proper.’s explosively verbal, shapeshifting, and snarky emo-pop, which has earned apt comparisons to Modern Baseball and respect from Los Campesinos! As far as Kanye, Proper. share his tendency to, well, say anything and an insatiable grudge against higher education. As it did on The College Dropout, this tends to result in the rare moments where I Spent the Winter doesn’t quite land right.
On “Toby,” Garlington takes the perspective of a self-conscious high school senior who has no idea what they’re doing in college (“I was just a kid last year, now I’m planning my life out at 18”). He actually manages empathy for the kind of suburban Bible Belters who tormented him throughout his life, those that follow the path of least resistance into their 50s and lack the conviction to follow any ambitions that deviate from the norm—“I start a creative writing class next week/Maybe I’ll finish that novel I started at 20/God, I hope they like me,” he sings. Conversely, “IDFWA (Art School)” vents bile at his peers while also having the greatest number of lyrical clunkers (“You’re just not into politics/Unless it’s about weed/Then you’re a proletariat/Armed with sickle and bong”).
Yet “IDFWA” performs a necessary function as I Spent the Winter’s release valve, given the lifetime of interconnected indignities Garlington can recall at a moment’s notice. “I hope you don’t mind if I tell a few stories about my life,” he meekly asks on “Curtain’s Down! Throw In the Towel,” and every single slight comes under the microscope for reexamination, whether the humiliations are relatively minor (“Joined the band to play drums, they put me on fucking trombone”) or traumatic. “I just want other black kids to like me someday,” he sings as his sixth-grade self on “Lime Green Jheri Curl.” But he’s into Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dragonriders of Pern, which means “my white friends say the n-word more than me and that it’s okay because they’re blacker than me.” Then none of them show up to his birthday.
Trying to take in I Spent the Winter in one sitting, as the man once said, is way too much. In all likelihood, Garlington is trying to make the act of listening to Proper. as overwhelming as experiencing his life firsthand. As with Bemis’ most potent work, I Spent the Winter’s words writhe on the page, emitting the kind of radioactive energy that circulates when someone says something they know can never be taken back. “When you hear this you’ll call me ungrateful, but mom, it’s true,” he spits on “White Sheep,” a song that hinges on the chorus “I hate my family/Fucking hate my name.”
As with “Lime Green Jheri Curl” (“Am I broken/Am I an alien/I don’t think there’s anywhere I belong”), the cracked melodies and universal feelings of alienation in these hooks could be extracted from the most lily-white suburban Drive Thru Records CD, even if they’re attached to the extremely specific experience of Erik Garlington. It’s one of the many ways Garlington validates his choice to forgo college and/or “the military industrial complex” to cast his lot with an all-black emo band in Brooklyn, because this is the kind of music that created a real community for him—“There could be someone who looks just like me that needs to hear they’re not alone/Or at least they don’t have to be.” With the exception of the last Great Wight record, I can’t say I’ve heard anything quite like I Spent the Winter, and Proper. has made it their life’s work to make sure that’s no longer the case.


The restless avant-garde soul singer is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future, now more than ever on the most pop-focused album of her prolific career.

Overload

Picture Georgia Anne Muldrow as a cosmic traveler tinkering with the limits of humanity’s musical norms. You’re dealing with an artist who has deeply studied both the Book of Sun Ra and Baduizm. Her interpretation has spawned one of the most daring catalogs to hit this planet—a vast, urbane suite that draws from historic spirituals, the R&B avant-garde, Afrofuturism, Madlib beats, and the soul of Roberta Flack. The epic scope of Muldrow’s body of work forms the funkiest of odysseys.
Overload is the singer’s 17th album since 2006. With an affinity for warping classic sounds into new forms, Muldrow looked well-placed at the turn of the decade as a group of emerging artists (Miguel, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean) created daring new music that attacked soul’s old boundaries. But the California virtuoso was too different—too out there—to insert herself even into this pack of renegade stars. There are few R&B norms that Muldrow hasn’t looked to contort. Her penance for the approach has been near-zero mainstream reward.
On Overload, Muldrow is in her most pop-focused space ever. The songs are tighter and the melodies are chirpier. It’s a release that refuses to pander to any identifiable trends, using sophisticated cosmic synths, rumbling basslines, and cutting lyrics. Look at this as Muldrow’s second debut—the record that future crate-diggers who have mined this undervalued-in-her-own-time star will recommend to friends first, before they work their way through her weird and wonderful catalog. It also might be her best album yet.
Her first record with Brainfeeder, and featuring Flying Lotus as an executive producer, we get the kind of limitless musical eccentricities that made Los Angeles a beat music mélange. Muldrow’s eclectic tinkerings will play well to fans of label star Thundercat—“Bobbie’s Dittie,” in particular, is cast in the same modern speed-jazz style. But even with Brainfeeder’s backing, Muldrow collaborations roster features some surprise draft picks. There’s Mike & Keys, aka the Futuristiks, whose client list includes G-Eazy, Nipsey Hussle, and Dom Kennedy. The pair helm four tracks here, offering Muldrow fresh looks that fit comfortably.
Take the title track, a loving portrait of a sturdy relationship that’s been built over time. The Futuristiks serve up rat-tat-tat drums, very little bass, and keyboard riffs that flutter like butterflies in the stomach. “I’m on overload and overdrive/I’m overwhelmed,” Muldrow sings sweetly, presumably to husband and long-time collaborator Dudley Perkins. There have been a million songs that cover similar subject matter, but “Overload” boasts a giddy happiness not always found in songs about long-term bonds.
Even as she tests new sonic realms, Overload is defined by one of Muldrow’s long-term remits: immersing herself in as many forms of Black expression as possible. “I.O.T.A. (Instrument Of The Ancestors)” features traditional African vibration delivered with spacey synths and pulsing drum machines. Leave it to celestial star to interpret human history so creatively. “Williehook (Skit)” has some of the same upbeat pop motions as Prince’s “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man,” so it’s disappointing that it only exists here in a 55-second form. Elsewhere, “These Are The Things I Really Like About You” evokes enough flavors of old New Orleans Dixie music and big band swing to give André 3000 a rush of blood to the head. Perkins adds a suitably wonky verse, admiring the inner spirit of “the coolest dame” and granny sweaters.
It’s not all peace and love. “Blam” preaches self-defense as Muldrow, preparing for what she calls an “ancient war,” arms herself to repel all threats against her family. “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave,” she repeats over the song’s back end, evoking the defiance of generations of iron-willed revolutionaries. It’s a reminder that Muldrow’s most potent weapon has always been her pen. On Overload, the pop song structures, coupled with the economic, purposeful instrumentation, yields her most concise and moving set to date. A dozen restless years into her recording careers and Muldrow is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future.


Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but his solo work displays a furiously complicated musical mind chattering to itself. On his new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Aheym, Dessner produces vivid, fierce chamber pieces.

Aheym

Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but he's also a classical composer, and in his side work—working on commssions for the American Composers Orchestra, collaborating on David Lang records—you can hear a furiously complicated musical mind chattering. Dessner's sensibility as a composer is furtive, urgent, intense—nothing at all, in other words, like his rock band. The National's sound has always been mellow and rich,  a rock band as a foaming, blooming cup of pour-over coffee. Dessner's sensibility churns like stomach acid.
Aheym, Dessner's collaboration with contemporary- classical hip-uncle figures the Kronos Quartet, is the result of a working relationship that dates back a few years. Three of its four pieces were written specifically for Kronos, and the title track has been a fixture of their concerts for a few years now. "Aheym" begins with all four members digging into their strings and producing hard, sinewy sforzandos, or sudden, violent accents, before subsiding quickly into an agitated, seething hum. The cello plays lopsided arpeggios, each one nervously edging forward, while pizzicato prickles tension higher. It is fierce, vivid music.
The rock-friendly post-minimalism of Bang on a Can looms heavy over Dessner's work, but that's less a statement on Dessner's originality than BOAC's sheer ubiquity. BOAC's long-running All-Stars summer program is the feeder college largely responsible for populating the indie sphere with conservatory rockers like Dessner in the first place. But they aren't the only audible reference point:  "Little Blue Something" traces lightly bowed figures in the cello against warm surges from the rest of the ensemble, and the effect is like a more earthbound Arvo Pärt. Pärt's touch pops up multiple places, like in the spidery refractions of harmonics that cloud the air in the thirteenth minute of "Tenebre", or the way sobbing vibrato bowing condenses from a dry mist of harmonics on "Aheym."
It's only with the final piece, "Tour Eiffel," that the tension in Dessner's work recedes. The piece is a setting of a poem by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Opening with just the chorus, the piece nudges into dewily picked guitars and some piano, offering the only glimpse of a sound world related, however distantly, to Dessner's band. The textures glow softly, the choir coos, and the ensemble dances inventively between minimalism and something like recognizable song form. There is no obvioustime-stamp on the work, which keeps surging in new directions, making interesting new things happen. Dessner is part of a chummy coterie of musicians, like Annie Clark of St. Vincent and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, and sometimes the air inside the clubhouse can get a little thick. But Dessner's mordant vision is uniquely his; these are real, meaty works, troubling and beautiful.


The grief-stricken Chicago rapper’s latest is a marvel of craft, musicality, and emotion. Through Saba’s inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling.

Care for Me

Last year, Saba’s cousin was stabbed to death in Chicago after a brief scuffle on the train. The killer tailed him for half a block before fleeing, just to make sure he would die. The way Saba raps about his cousin—born Walter Long Jr., who performed as Dinnerwithjohn and was a founding member of Saba’s Pivot Gang crew—you’d think he was magical, kissed by fortune his entire life. He was Saba’s mentor, his wingman, dauntless and deathless until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
To be young is often to be fixated on your own presumed indestructibility. Reality has a way of knocking that right out of you. Saba’s gorgeous, meditative new album, Care for Me, begins with him singing the words “I’m so alone.” Isolation and trauma go hand-in-hand when you lose someone close, especially when that someone served as your shield for so long. “Jesus got killed for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat,” he raps. “I’m tryna cope, but it’s a part of me gone, and, apparently, I’m alone.”
Care for Me processes grief and its attendant loneliness, the paradox of feeling secluded during the most connected era in history, and having to manage that misery inside the social gratification matrix—the machine of hearts, smileys, and dopamine hits. The album, in turn, bears out the exhaustion that comes with simply processing. Saba attempts to grapple with his ongoing depression as he wonders aloud if he’s really the only one. Through this inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling.
“Carefully editing every word, everything got to be charity/Give it my all, these melodies therapy,” he raps on “Grey,” a kind of subtitle for the all-caps plea of the album’s name. The songs are cathartic, yes, but they are also engaging. He seeks solace for his audience as much as he seeks it for himself. His writing carries within it an empathic power, the sensation of peering into a photograph so long it conjures the textures of a memory. “Life” uses personal dread as a lens through which to examine the rat race that is trying to survive. “They want a barcode on my wrist/To auction off the kids that don’t fit their description of a utopia (Black)/Like a problem won’t exist if I just don’t exist,” he raps before nose-diving into a more pervasive existential crisis: “Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that ain’t never had shit.”
Given the context under which Care for Me was made, Saba’s 2016 debut, Bucket List Project, feels almost prescient. That album challenged listeners to see their ambitions through because time was of the essence. It was a sonic wishing well of sorts, a hopeful album of unfulfilled dreams and limitless potential. With a Walter-sized hole in Saba’s life, reassesses that optimism. Through carefully collected and arranged memory fragments—some clear and focused, some concealed and disorienting—Saba considers what it means now for his cousin’s dreams to go forever unrealized.
Composed entirely by Saba with producer DaedaePivot and multi-instrumentalist Daoud, Care for Me is meticulously structured, orchestrated, and arrayed. Songs reveal themselves to be mementos of transformational moments in his life. A choice few attempt to capture something more ephemeral: the fleeting feeling of being safe, being comfortable and well-adjusted. (At one point, Saba waxes nostalgically about a time before insomnia, sleeping peacefully and living sober and college-bound, harkening back to a childlike innocence.) The 23-year-old’s fleet, singsongy raps bend and tuck into his largely piano-centric arrangements, which build sets for the scenarios he’s reliving. His voice can sway from muted and understated to insistent in an instant; he subtly shifts from conversational to explanatory whenever the mood calls for it, but never at the expense of the narrative flow. He sees his reflection in these remembrances and confronts his own mortality, but in the process he finds something divine.
So much of Care for Me is an ongoing conversation trying to reconcile a cruel, unforgiving world with God’s plan. Saba hasn’t lost his faith, but his patience is running thin. Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement. “Fighter” is submerged and glassy, its watery sheen glistening like it’s catching sunlight; Saba surfaces from this shimmer as if cresting in a wave pool. “It’s harder to love myself when all these people compliment me,” he raps, conflicted. It’s brutal moments of vulnerability like this that make Care for Me such an enveloping experience.
Saba’s stunning exploration of loss builds to a restorative climax: the one-two punch that is the dewy-eyed odyssey “Prom / King” and the skyward-bound drifter “Heaven All Around Me.” The former chronicles Saba’s relationship with Walter, as seen through key events in their shared history—Walter finding Saba a last-minute date for prom, the pair getting skipped over at open mics, and early attempts on Walter’s life, leading up to the instant Saba learned his cousin was missing. “We got in the car, but we didn’t know where to drive to/Fuck it, wherever you are, my nigga, we’ll come and find you,” he raps. His writing is so dense yet free-flowing, so delicate and tactile. The drums crescendo into a frenzy on “Prom / King,” to the point that Saba keeps his own time, untethered to rhythm, while never missing a single beat. The song is devastating, but it would feel almost hopeless without “Heaven,” a glowing conclusion to the saga that imagines a reborn Walter ascending to a better place, looking down watchfully at his loved ones and looking after Saba. It’s a remarkably powerful scene, a moment where Saba comes to realize that, despite everything, he was never alone and he never will be.


A new reissue of Lou Reed’s final solo album spotlights a side of the New York icon that few ever got to see: a quiet ambient composer.

Hudson River Wind Meditations

For all the chaos in his music—and despite his famously combative reputation—Lou Reed was a dedicated practitioner of yoga, meditation, and martial arts. He began studying tai chi as part of an effort to get off speed and booze and strengthen his wrecked body as the 1970s drew to a close. An early teacher recalls Reed’s hands shaking so hard he could barely hold the positions, but he stuck with it. When he toured, he brought along his swords and instructional VHS tapes, practicing in hotel gyms and conference rooms; upon returning home he was known to take the taxi straight from the airport to class. In the final six years of his life, he intensified his focus, doing six days of tai chi followed by one day of yoga, week in and week out. Laurie Anderson, his partner of 21 years, said he was “looking for magic.” He was doing breathwork when he died, in fact—eyes wide open and hands in a tai chi position, with Anderson’s arms around him.
Newly remastered and reissued with extensive liner notes by Light in the Attic, Hudson River Wind Meditations was first released in 2007, on a small Louisville, Colorado, label specializing in self-help and spirituality. But in the beginning, it wasn’t meant for public consumption at all. According to Anderson, Reed made early versions of these pieces to accompany guided meditations recited by Shelley Peng, an herbalist and acupuncturist. The music eventually morphed into a soundtrack for his tai chi practice, although not all his classmates were on board. Some fellow students preferred the traditional Chinese music that their teacher, Master Ren GuangYi, typically played, and asked for Reed’s tape to be turned off. One student walked out the door and never came back. (Reed’s drone music always did have a polarizing effect on listeners.)
But Reed and Ren kept playing the tape, and according to Anderson, anyway, some of his classmates eventually came around, saying that it was the best tai chi music they’d ever heard. One wonders to what extent Reed’s fame—or perhaps simply his legendary stubbornness—greased the wheels. In an amusing anecdote in the liner notes, yoga instructor Eddie Stern says that when he worked with Reed, “Whether we were doing yoga or meditating, the Hudson River Wind Meditations came on, and even though I am a silent meditator and don’t normally recommend listening to music when meditating, I would let it slide for Lou.”
The bulk of the release is taken up by two long tracks offering markedly different visions of what ambient music could be. The opening “Move Your Heart” is the more minimal of the two. It consists of a single oscillating tone, or cluster of tones, that opens and closes, over and over, for nearly 29 minutes, with very little evident variation. Rooted in a bassy throb, it begins throwing off sparks as a growling, high-resonance filter combs through the frequencies; for a brief moment, it’s a softly reassuring major triad, and then the filter clamps down once again, grinding everything into the rumbling muck. The cycle moves like waves, or breathing, yet despite its seeming steadiness, the repetition is never quite exact, and that almost imperceptible sense of uncertainty heightens its power. You never know quite what the music is going to do next, even though it never really does anything. It’s calming yet never fully subdued: The piece seems to move with a life of its own, and its raw, unburnished sonics feel far away from the politeness of more placid relaxation music. At times, as the bass tones thicken and congeal, it feels downright unruly.
“Find Your Note” is both wilier and more skeletal. Here, Reed dials up the uncertainty. While a bassy hum scours the low end, eerie tendrils flit across the upper register as ghostly harmonics materialize from out of nowhere. It sounds like a chorus of worried tea kettles, maybe, or a very lonely spaceship whistling to itself, long after its crew has died. More concretely, it recalls the work of drone titans like Éliane Radigue, Folke Rabe, and Kevin Drumm. Filaments flare up without warning and are snuffed out just as swiftly; trembling tones join to form fleeting harmonies, then spin away as if magnetically repulsed. The sense of movement is remarkable. I gave it a meditative test drive on headphones recently, sitting at the wooded edge of a grassy clearing, and was struck by how neatly it complemented the scene playing out before me: hawks circling warily in the distance; sunbeams grazing the flat bottoms of slow-moving clouds; wind rustling in the branches of the trees. When a flock of starlings streaked above my head, the shape of their formation—a kind of controlled chaos, a single organism moving as an elastic assemblage of points in space—felt mirrored in Reed’s trembling, unpredictable tone clusters. Two short closing tracks on the album incorporate the sounds of wind recorded from the window of Reed’s apartment, underscoring the music’s link to the rhythms of the natural world.
There are obvious parallels between Hudson River Wind Meditations and Metal Machine Music, Reed’s infamous 1975 album of multi-tracked guitar feedback—which, depending on your perspective, was either a nastily sarcastic way of fulfilling a record-label contract, or the angel song accompanying the birth of noise music. Both are durational, instrumental works that flirt with atonality. But the similarities end there. Metal Machine Music is abrasive and amphetamine fueled, as cozy as an icepick to the eye socket; Hudson River Wind Meditations is gentle and enveloping, in keeping with Brian Eno’s vision of ambient as something like a kind of musical incense, subtly flavoring the air wherever it plays. “The idea is to make things better, to make things more beautiful,” Reed said in an interview with the spirituality website Beliefnet around the time of the album’s release; to “be able to ground yourself, be able to experience something in a more agreeable environment.” Of course, “agreeable” isn’t a word one often hears in relation to Reed; the album’s most fascinating, and moving, aspect may be the glimpse it offers of a side of the musician that few ever got to see.
To hear Reed tell it, the creation of the music was a fluke. He was working with a Minimoog Voyager and assorted effects pedals; producer Hal Willner says that Reed also played with the feedback from a guitar leaning against his amplifier, much as he had on Metal Machine Music. But Reed claimed that he didn’t know exactly how he came up with the sounds. “I'm not sure what exactly did it, but I’ve never been able to get it back, because I didn’t write it down,” he told Pitchfork in 2007. That kind of caginess is perfectly in character for an unabashed self-mythologist like Reed, but the music really does sound like it was pulled from thin air. It’s easy to imagine him slipping into a trance-like state as he twisted knobs, then coming to and wondering exactly how those sounds found their way to the tape. If Reed was looking for magic in tai chi, he found something very much like it in these bewitching, evanescent transmissions from the ether.


Following a string of albums deconstructing Lambchop’s sound, Kurt Wagner continues to reinvent his band, this time using MIDI-assisted piano melodies to write love songs to music itself.

Showtunes

On Showtunes, Lambchop’s 15th studio album, Kurt Wagner whiles away an afternoon contemplating an old standard. “I’m listening to that ‘Old Devil Moon’ and the day outside is slowly flying by me,” he sings on “Blue Leo,” his voice subtly distorted over a shape-shifting beat. On another verse of the same song, he’s at the supermarket picking out vegetables when he hears “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” right as the sprayers turn on. “The band is getting wet,” he deadpans. These are small moments that gesture to larger feelings and ideas—a Wagner specialty—and in this case the overarching concept is how our favorite songs can hold lengthy, funny conversations with our innermost thoughts.
As Lambchop’s frontman and, lately, sole guiding force, Wagner has always been a keen listener, attuned to the world of sounds and songs around him. On early albums, “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band” (as their label described them) did frequent covers of songs by their friends (East River Pipe) as well as deep cuts by their heroes (Curtis Mayfield). With the notable exception of last year’s covers album TRIP, Lambchop rarely play other people’s music anymore. Today Wagner is more likely to sing about a song than he is to actually sing that song, but on Showtunes, he plants those references in his lyrics so strategically that music seems like an unstoppable force, as invasive as kudzu but certainly not malignant. Listening is the album’s central theme—the pleasure of processing sound, the reassurance of a familiar song, the way a melody or an instrument can remind you that you’re alive and breathing the earth’s air, even if you’re just bumming around the house or buying okra. Wagner just assumes that any fan of Lambchop naturally feels a similar joy or consolation. “Are you listening?” goes the sample that opens the dissembling “Drop C,” to which the sampled crowd responds, “Yeah!”
Showtunes feels like the third act in a trilogy of albums that have deconstructed the Lambchop sound, reassembled it slightly akimbo, and changed the way we hear this band. Working either alone in his home or with a very small group of collaborators who aren’t necessarily band members, Wagner has tinkered with technology in order to bend his songs into new shapes without sacrificing warmth, wit, or humanity. It’s been a wildly productive phase, with FLOTUS and This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) sitting among the best albums to carry Lambchop’s name on the spine. Wagner, to his credit, doesn’t seem to view these recent albums as a break from the group’s early days as a sprawling orchestra, but rather an extension of the anything-goes philosophy that has defined the band for nearly 30 years.
To create these new tunes, Wagner recorded guitar tracks first, then converted them into piano tones via MIDI, re-editing them after the fact. Those new sounds changed the nature of the music, which he described to Fader recently as “show tunes for people who don’t like show tunes,” echoing a sentiment many still apply to country music. He had intended to debut the album onstage, working with Ryan Olson (Gayngs, Poliça), Andrew Broder (Fog), and German producer Twit One to develop arrangements for the Eaux Claires festival in 2020. For obvious reasons, that performance never happened, but those collaborations formed the basis for the album, providing raw material that Wagner could further manipulate into new sounds by cutting, pasting, and rearranging. Even outside the live context, the songs retain their showtunefulness on record. None of Wagner’s songs sound much like Kiss Me Kate, but there is a theatrical flair to the album, as though Wagner has decided to address his audience directly.
Showtunes doesn’t rival its predecessors, but all the album really lacks is surprise. We’ve gotten used to Wagner in this setting, so the sense of discovery that animates his other albums is missing, as is the high-wire excitement of an established artist so thoroughly rethinking his sound. That’s only a minor complaint, especially considering that Showtunes has its own peculiar melancholy. The horn arrangements, courtesy of C.J. Camerieri, have a mournful tone, more like a New Orleans funeral than a Broadway pit orchestra, which color Wagner’s lyrics a dark shade of blue. He ponders the nature of romantic love, how it elevates and also isolates us, but he’s also interested in musical love—the way that songs are both means of expressing affection, and objects of affection themselves. On “A Chef’s Kiss” he even daydreams up plans to go into show business, become a matinee idol, and “blow a kiss to a song.”
By emphasizing the pleasures of listening, Wagner invites you to savor the small, exquisite moments on Showtunes, like the way James McNew’s upright bass thumps against the loungey piano on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone Journalist,” recalling one of Lambchop’s most divisive albums. Or the way he rhymes “man on the streets” with “jumpsuit with pleats” to create a perfect couplet on “Unknown Man.” Or the way he seems to duet with a disembodied opera singer on closer “The Last Benedict.” (Actually, it’s Broder manipulating a recording.) “The interstate and trees sound just like waves,” Wagner observes. “A voice beyond the leaves sings in a lazy kind of yodel, softly spraying airy thoughts.” In that moment, Wagner might well be singing about himself and his own band, imagining himself as the voice beyond the leaves, both music maker and music lover, forever twining those two pursuits together in his own songs.

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The hitmaking producer’s latest album brandishes his ardent ambition, attention to detail, and gift for curation.

Heroes & Villains

In the extravagant trailer for Metro Boomin’s new album, a deranged criminal (played by LaKeith Stanfield) drives a flame-throwing fire truck through a burning city. Metro watches the mayhem unfold from the roof of a compound while Morgan Freeman dissuades him from intervening. “Your place in history is already cemented,” Freeman tells him. “You’ve built a legacy, something people will clearly kill for.” A stoic Metro then snatches a chain floating behind a glass case before hopping into a Batmobile-like whip and jetting into the city. It doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t have to: Like Metro’s music, the trailer is expensive, exciting, and crammed with vibrant characters—the plot or message hardly matters. Enjoy car chases and sinister 21 Savage verses? Spectacular explosions and generic Travis Scott hooks? Metro Boomin has an album for you.
Heroes & Villains, though, is more than just fireworks and big-name features. It’s an ambitious, detail-rich record that splits the difference between streaming fodder and world-building. The rappers featured here are either aging out of the spotlight (Future), transitioning into corporate avatars (Travis Scott) or, unfortunately, serving time behind bars (Young Thug, Gunna). While Heroes & Villains scans as an opus of psychedelic trap and star-laden singles with cool comic book packaging, it almost feels like a last triumphant gasp from the past decade’s most prominent rappers and their favorite hitmaking producer.
But Heroes & Villains proves that Metro aspires to more than hits. He first demonstrated his wide-scale vision on 2018’s Not All Heroes Wear Capes, a project in which his sparse, moody beats grew thicker, grander, and more intricate. When he attempted to swerve from his signature sound, though, his limited range was exposed: Metro is great when he makes Metro-type beats, shaky when he ventures outside of his comfort zone. On Heroes & Villains, he surpasses his standard quota of bangers while also taking a few fun risks. A symphonic, Francis and the Lights-esque intro? Why not. An interpolation of Mario Winans’ “I Don’t Wanna Know,” featuring the Weeknd and 21 Savage? Let’s do it. Metro is thinking outside the box a bit more, without sacrificing the foundation of what makes his music so appealing in the first place.
Chief among these appeals is his ability to mine grade-A material from his guests. His beats are distinct enough to sound good on their own, yet understated enough to afford a vocalist stylistic freedom. Few artists melodically thrive over a Metro beat like Don Toliver, who delivers two of the album’s more magnetic vocal performances on “Too Many Nights” and “Around Me.” Even Future’s got a little pep in his step here, particularly on the anthemic “Superheroes (Heroes & Villains).” But it’s Young Thug, on “Metro Spider,” who steals the show. Slithering over a menacing string note and ominous piano, he snaps off a string of vivid, eccentric bars about luxury watches and feeling more famous than the president. Unlike other Thug verses that have emerged since his incarceration, “Metro Spider” hardly feels like a leftover—in fact, Metro positions it as the album’s centerpiece.
There are some duds, to be sure. Travis Scott sounds half-asleep on the unimaginative “Raindrops (Insane),” and even less compelling on the throwaway track “Lock On Me.” Chris Brown shows up at the end of “Superheroes (Heroes & Villains)” to complain about people who don’t want to see him win, bringing the album’s sporadic flashes of toxicity into stark focus. But other than a few misses, Heroes & Villains is a crisp, cohesive record that nails all the little things: end-of-song outros, dazzling sequencing, surprising beat switches, and perfectly staggered features. The album’s main characters—Future, Scott, and 21 Savage—are spread out in smart pairings, popping in and out of the frame like lead actors in an ensemble cast. Even A$AP Rocky, who joins the late Takeoff on “Feel the Fiyaaaah,” has several small cameos before earning his own song. This sort of attention to detail matters; Metro succeeds in constructing a self-contained universe stuffed with various narrators, antagonists, and anti-heroes.
It’d be intriguing to hear some younger, hungrier rappers on these songs, but it’s hard to fault Metro for having fealty to the guys he came up with, especially when they’re generation-defining artists like Thug and Future. Even the most lauded stars eventually fall out of favor: Travis Scott is embattled in legal issues after the Astroworld catastrophe, Future is nearing middle age, and Thug and Gunna are facing sweeping RICO charges. The album gestures toward these realities on “Walk Em Down (Don’t Kill Civilians),” a run-of-the-mill 21 Savage horrorcore slapper that, midway through, transforms into a piano-backed, choir-lined meditation on grief. Sung by Toronto artist Mustafa, the song’s second act explores the trauma and turmoil caused by 21’s depictions of street violence. The juxtaposition, however, resists landing on a clear moral. Who’s the hero here, and who’s the villain? Metro’s answer seems prudent: Yes.


On the follow-up to their massive 2013 hit Settle, the brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for?

Caracal

Looking back, the intro to Disclosure’s Settle almost reads like a warning to their future selves: "As much as you like to control your environment, the reality is, everything changes." Sure enough, Guy and Howard Lawrence’s sophomore full-length Caracal arrives just two years later but in a markedly different pop landscape—thanks in no small part to the brothers' own influence. Their pristine syntheses of UK garage, Midwestern vocal house, and hook-happy pop structures re-oriented the British pop charts and trickled into the American ones, opening the doors for pop-adjacent neo-house acts like Duke Dumont, Years & Years, and Rudimental (not to mention for Sam Smith). Disclosure have never really been the types to throw curveballs: they do what they do, and they do it impeccably. But it’s understandable they’d start feeling restless, especially as the scope of their influence rendered their own tunes increasingly indistinct. "That sound is everywhere now," Guy, now 24, admitted in an L.A. Times profile this summer. "The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it."
Scrubbed of much of its predecessor's overt 2-step and house homage, Caracal suggests the duo's also grown bored of the conversation that's surrounded them from the start: how dance and pop music can and "should" relate. On one hand, here were two young men making wide-reaching dance tracks that weren’t reliant on drops, builds, or any of festival EDM’s creatine-crazed trappings. These guys scanned as "tasteful," for better or worse. But on the flip side were classicists and underground dance fans who pegged the duo as milquetoast gentrifiers of scenes they were too young to fully appreciate, repackaging history with the context and kinks ironed out. There is some sting in the charge, but it's not entirely fair: Disclosure’s work has always made the most sense within the framework of pop, in terms of both form and demographic. In that sense, calling Disclosure contrived or formulaic misunderstands how pop works. Their music may be one-size-fits-all, but it’s also immaculately crafted and catchy as fuck, smudging the divide between the universal and the personal to the point where "Latch" somehow seemed to grow more poignant the more ubiquitous it became.
Those dance classicists will likely be less territorial with Caracal: the brothers have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. But as they’ve edged away from giddy neo-nostalgia toward a sound with less identifiable anchor points, they’ve begun to blend into the background. On "Omen", the brothers reunite with Sam Smith for a single presumably meant to reprise the massive success of "Latch". And it’s fine—plodding along at a stately downtempo strut with a hint of a 2-step hitch, Smith’s voice a bit mired in that familiar elastic bassline. But it’s nowhere near as immediate, or as gripping; here, when Smith sings of missed opportunities for emotional connection, "Latch"’s obsessive I-will-never-leave-your-side-god-dammit conviction feels like a distant memory. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for?
Meanwhile, where Settle set the tone for years of pop hits to come, Caracal seems content to fall back amidst the pack. Opening track "Nocturnal" is a showcase for R&B’s man-of-the-moment the Weeknd, and it wouldn’t sound out of place on Beauty Behind the Madness. Its synth arpeggios seem to aim for Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principles’ "Your Love", but the vibe is closer to late-'00s Hype Machine dance tracks (halfway through, the track practically breaks into its own Classixx remix). This makes sense, in a way: much of the Billboard pop and R&B charts over the last year have embraced this sound, from Nick Jonas’ "Jealous" to Jason Derulo to the current bumper crop of vaguely Balearic "tropical house" singles and remixes. But for Disclosure, the move feels like a step backward, an aim at broader relevance that’s only watered down what once made them feel thrilling.
There are bright spots: lead single "Holding On" retains their signature bounce and features stunning vocals from jazz songwriter Gregory Porter, and "Good Intentions", with its understated Miguel appearance, is the best example of their smoothed-out new direction, keeping a brisk pace but leaving more open space. Still, it’s getting harder to shake the sense that these redemptive guest spots have become a crutch for a lack of ideas. Both of the album’s two featureless tracks feel instantly forgettable—particularly "Jaded", a beige wash of cheeseball lyrics that chastise a dishonest companion with all the depth of the "Why You Lyin" Vine.
When Disclosure’s hype was at its peak circa Settle, they were often compared to turn-of-the-century acts like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk—acts who successfully recontextualized older house and disco influences into something reverent and contemporary. But a significant part of both groups’ appeal—and, crucially, part of the outright critical revulsion at the time, too—was their lack of self-seriousness, their willingness to get a little cheesy. Those guys’ nostalgia embraced the kitsch along with the classicism; they had fun. The Lawrence brothers have good taste, sharp instincts, and pristine craftsmanship: playfulness, not so much. Even the album’s most unbuttoned track falls flat: "Bang That", a (relatively) raunchy promotional single now relegated to the bonus tracks with a gratuitous sample of 313 Bass Mechanics’ "Pass Out", feels a bit cringey, like Kidz Bop does ghetto house. Ultimately, Caracal just doesn’t feel much fun, and even its highs are nowhere near Settle’s polished bliss. Once trendsetters, here the Lawrence brothers too often fade noncommittally into white noise.


The Japanese producer makes records that are absurd and exhilarating in equal measure—behind every drum hit lies a trap door.

Vacation Package

Bisk, aka Tokyo’s Naohiro Fujikawa, has been chrome-plating chaos for a quarter century, turning out records that are absurd and exhilarating in equal measure. A Bisk song rarely follows a straight line for long: The Japanese producer’s drum programming weaves through knotty thickets of syncopated beats and white-noise bursts, chasing ghosts and dodging potholes. His samples are fragmentary dispatches from far-flung points, and any given musical phrase might shoehorn multiple worlds into wobbly union—free improv with easy listening, kindergarten recess with NASA Mission Control. Beneath each drum hit lies a potential trap door, and his melodies, if that’s what you can call his tangled scraps of electric bass and modal keys, ricochet like pinballs repelled at every turn by shuddering mechanical bumpers. Bisk’s productions give the impression of someone who is both addicted to repetition and allergic to it.
Much like his music, Fujikawa’s career has progressed in fits and starts. Between 1996 and 2000, he recorded four albums for the Belgian label Sub Rosa, a hub for music from the fringes. It was a heady time in electronic music: Disparate traditions from dance and the avant-garde were colliding and accordioning like a multi-car pileup, with sounds like illbient, drill’n’bass, and hypermodern jazz spinning out of the debris. Bisk’s early albums offered a fractured mirror of the times, variously reflecting the breakbeat mutations of Amon Tobin and DJ Krush, the side-eyed synths of Atom Heart and Aphex Twin, and the referential free-for-all of Christian Marclay and John Zorn. Then he disappeared for a dozen years, returning in the mid ’10s to release a handful of sleeker, more streamlined albums before falling silent again. Now Bisk is back—this time on Ominira, a label run by Leipzig’s Kassem Mosse, whose grudging, lo-fi machine minimalism is the virtual opposite of Fujikawa’s hyperactive antics. Bisk, though, sounds as cheerfully unhinged as ever.
“Sectional View” opens the album with a feint—it could almost be a relatively conventional footwork track. But instead of leaning into the groove, all the added elements—cut-up R&B vocals, errant brass stabs, overdriven Rhodes riffs—peel forcefully away from it, as though balking at the idea of falling into line. It all adds up to an octopus’ garden of brightly colored shapes that adamantly refuse to cohere. Similar high speeds and wayward organizing principles apply to most of the album. “Suddenly Appeared” drizzles electric-piano runs over rapid-fire tabla and kalimba, throwing off bright harmonics that dazzle like one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror-dotted infinity rooms. “Like Peaches,” a highlight, employs rippling drum’n’bass cadences and naive synth melodies recalling Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things. There are Zapp-like talk-box leads, cooing choral pads, and so many layers of shape-shifting synthesizer, all in perpetual flux, that they’re almost impossible to tease apart. In “Winter Spreading” and “Sweet Conquest,” rich chord progressions lend a surprisingly sentimental air, as though Paul Bley were sitting in with Flying Lotus.
Music this agitated can wear on the nerves, but Bisk’s doesn’t. His songs are mercifully short; the vast majority are under 3:30. And as much as Fujikawa packs into every measure, he also leaves plenty of breathing room. The rests are so generous that you could drive a truck through them. It helps that it never feels like Fujikawa is trying to be clever; as hectic as the music gets, it’s refreshingly free of “look ma, no hands” showoffery. The album’s material is based on club sets he performed at a “small but very radical” Tokyo venue called Forestlimit in late 2019 and early 2020, and knowing that he pulled all this off live makes his polyphonic pyrotechnics all the more impressive. His music sounds like the work of someone hunched over his computer mouse, diligently mapping out maze-like MIDI sequences on the screen. To imagine this stuff flying out of his machines in real time offers a whole different impression. It becomes clear that jazz, for Fujikawa, isn’t just a reference point, a readymade mood to be cut and pasted into the mix. It’s an ethos. His knotted-up kinks and curlicues are pathways, escape routes, idiosyncratic lines of flight. All that blurred motion is an attempt to capture a snapshot of freedom in mid-stride.

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Dropping the club-centric vibe of his previous work, the New York rapper shifts toward trap and Top 40 rap sounds—an unconventional move that might be more progressive than it seems.

Just as Le1f’s energetic, experimental debut album lived up to its title, Riot Boi, the name of his new EP is fitting. Gracing the cover with middle fingers raised to his bloodshot eyes, the genre-busting rapper (aka Khalif Diouf) titled the record after a particularly relaxing strain of marijuana, and—surprise!–dropped it on 4/20. But Blue Dream isn’t just a not-so-subtle reference to weed culture; it’s also a sonic departure from the club-influenced, dancefloor hip-hop Le1f is known for. While still drenched in his trademark flair, shade, and rapid-fire bars, the record’s beats and production feel more like part of the contemporary rap landscape.
“Blublockers” opens with a hollow, steel-drum-like hook that could be straight off an early Gucci Mane mixtape. A signature trap beat shuffles in before Le1f turns the whole thing on his head, rhyming a mile a minute instead of giving into the track’s syrupy tide. “They wanna cut-copy-paste/I hit delete, I don’t even see ‘em” he spits, with the cockiness he’s effortlessly showcased his entire career. “Yo,” the EP’s opener, feels even more like a new direction, but not necessarily an exciting one: A truly straightforward trap number, it seems rushed next to the type of meticulously produced music that has kept Le1f relevant all these years. His voice sounds weirdly out of place, almost a hair ahead of the beat, as if his speedy rhymes are too intelligent for the woozy beat.
That being said, this definitely isn’t a case of a popular underground artist abandoning their sound for a mainstream bid, and Le1f’s dedication to the genres that shaped him still shines through. “Fatty Acid” is driven by an effervescent beat that’s almost reminiscent of New Orleans bounce, or that sweet spot in pop/dancehall fusion right before Major Lazer took over the airwaves. “Ay yo, New York/The sales is goin’ down at Trader Hoe’s, y’all!” yells Le1f as the track begins, expertly walking the line between banjee realness and hard-edged Brooklyn swag, a space he has rightfully claimed as his own over the years.
While the EP lacks some of the immediacy of, say, his jittery club banger “Koi,” it’s a worthy stab at something slower and darker than the party vibes he’s known for—which may be a more progressive gesture on his part than it seems at first glance. Although rap still has its issues with inclusivity, some of the most innovative players in hip-hop right now have made a name for themselves by aesthetically redefining their masculinity (think Young Thug or Lil B’s fashion choices, or even Migos’ obsession with Versace silk). This may have helped create an environment where the indiscriminate “gay rapper” headline has lost some of its newsworthiness, and in 2018, that’s a good thing. It’s a position that Le1f himself has always seemed wary of: “I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with it,” he told The Daily Beast back in 2012. “As a child, I used to imagine that I would be shot on stage or something just for being a gay rapper. Now I feel it’s more and more probable that there are going to be several cool, mainstream gay rappers in the next few years.” Moving his own music toward the mainstream is one way of making good on that prophecy.


A totemic box set from Numero Group collects the output of the Midwestern emo band, whose melodic, sentimental take on D.C. hardcore served as a microcosm of the genre’s transition.

Current: Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today

Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today

The history of emo is retold with waves, but it tends to happen more in tides—its heady peaks obscure the longer periods of quiet regeneration, but there’s always motion. For instance, consider the eight or so years between Thrasher’s “Notes From the Underground” column that coined the term “emocore” and Sunny Day Real Estate’s 1994 debut Diary, a period filled with out-of-print cult favorites that lack the historical import of Revolution Summer and the commercial visibility of the Second Wave. Over the past few years, Numero Group has become an unexpected champion of this period, and Current is the latest beneficiary, a Midwestern band with a more melodic and sentimental take on D.C. emotional hardcore—neither emocore nor Midwest emo, a band that serves as microcosm of an entire genre’s transition.
The mere packaging of Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today gives a totemic quality to Current’s scant output: about 90 minutes of original material made over the span of about two years, spread over three LPs with the band’s history retold in a loving and thorough 20-page insert. But it doesn’t argue for Current as misunderstood visionaries. At the time of its release in 1993, Current’s sole full-length, Coliseum, would more likely be heard as the tail end of the first wave rather than the beginning of a new era. The artwork, the production, the pressing, and the tour booking were all the product of state-of-the-art, DIY pluck. While Current previously featured a requisite Fugazi-style vocal dynamic, Matthias Weeks ended up taking the role of the singing and the screaming guy. “In beauty you shall be my representation, my song, my medicine,” he barks on its first line, the delivery only bashful in comparison to what surrounded them in the Detroit hardcore scene at the time.
In the next few years, a more accessible style of Midwest emo developed alongside the frat parties and football games in massive college towns like Madison, Urbana-Champaign, and Lawrence. Meanwhile, Current took shape near the University of Detroit Mercy, an urban Jesuit school of 5,000 students and almost no campus culture. The DIY scene in Detroit proper was still at the mercy of the most aggressive forms of metal and punk. As guitarist Justin LaBo recalled, “There was usually skinheads there… there was always fights and violence.”
Much like the peers they’d soon discover in Kalamazoo, Arkansas, Oakland, and suburban Illinois, Current were Dischord fanboys bought into the communal uplift of straight edge but not its absolutist worldview. From the beginning, their striated screams and searching, clean guitar passages were situated somewhere between the more meditative sides of Fugazi and Slint—in other words, post-hardcore in the truest sense. Nearly 30 years later, Coliseum is revelatory mostly in how familiar it sounds; “And I knew that she carried her life on her fingertips, with painted nails she carried her life,” Weeks intones as spoken word, predicting the florid poetry and stoic delivery endemic to the New Wave of Post-Hardcore. The acerbic hook of “Dial”—“I need your ratings to keep me alive/Until tomorrow”—now comes off like a primordial, pre-internet precursor to Drug Church’s hectoring alt-rock. Both the neck-jerk riffs of the title track and the eco-optimism of “Outside Is Better” hint at a future where 311 and hardcore are seen as inherently compatible. It’s worth noting that Weeks is sporting dreadlocks throughout the Yesterday’s Tomorrow liner notes and the cover features LaBo’s very alt-rock Les Paul.
Current’s brief and impressive touring itinerary suggests a promising future had they stuck around; they opened for Jawbox at a 1,000-cap room in Detroit for their third-ever show and later played with Cap’n Jazz, Unwound, and godheadSilo. Perhaps they would’ve emphasized their avant-punk leanings and gone on to a label like Kill Rock Stars or Sub Pop. Or, we could read into their gigs with both the Offspring and Rancid and imagine Current on Epitaph. The sequencing of Yesterday muddles the trajectory; it begins with Coliseum, an album they made as the lineup regenerated itself after cross-country moves, college semester breaks, and Scott Ray’s pivot from vocalist to roadie. He returns on Feasting & Mirth, the third LP which includes an early 7" and a KXLU performance recorded several weeks after the release of Coliseum, an album on which he does not appear at all.
On their Is 4 EP and subsequent splits with fellow travelers Chino Horde and Indian Summer, Current got sharper and sleeker. Some argued that they got too good. The massively influential Maximumrocknroll zine singled out the Indian Summer/Current split as an example of the music they weren’t going to cover anymore, with Tim Yohannon calling it, “today’s post-hardcore answer to early ’70s progressive rock,” i.e., alternative rock, one of the most cutting insults available to a myopically territorial punk at the time. Zines like HeartattaCK and Punk Planet immediately popped up as counterprogramming, as did Green Day’s “Platypus (I Hate You),” the 924 Gilman Street answer to “Ether.” Meanwhile, Current started Ottawa, an aggro side project explicitly intended as a response to MRR. Weeks’ lyrics on “Key” hardly bore any of the bloat or complacency of prog- or alt-rock (“I carve my key from wood/For inexpensiveness/I carved my key from stone/For everlastment,” but the MRR non-review struck a nerve. Despite a successful tour throughout the summer of 1994, Current broke up for the same reason most emo bands do: Some of the members start getting into indie rock, others into metal. Oh, and they had a big fight after their van broke down during their final gig. Yet there’s something poetic about how that final show happened at Fireside Bowl, the Chicago venue at the epicenter of a regional explosion. Where Current ended, Midwest emo began.


Interscope takes further advantage of the holiday shopping blowout with this deluxe edition of yet another 90s alt-rock staple. Here's Trent Reznor's best-known (and most highly regarded) work, The Downward Spiral, bulked up to include Dolby 5.1 surround and SACD mixes, and an entire second disc's worth of B-sides, remixes and rarities.

Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral [Deluxe Edition]

The Downward Spiral [Deluxe Edition]

You may have noticed that we here at Pitchfork HQ occasionally get excited about what we perceive to be the next new sound, be it in the form of an individual band or an entire newfangled genre. I myself am not above such occasional ballyhoo, most recently biting the hook hard on recently fashionable hyphenated mergers of electronics and rock, be it dance-punk or lap-pop or lance-ponk. I was completely convinced (and still am, to some extent) that guitars and computers were on the verge of ending their long, heated standoff, and that they would start making the hip new music of the future.
Well, among the many public services of the reissue is to remind us that there is usually nothing new under the musical sun, and so now, here's a 10th anniversary edition of The Downward Spiral to remind me that The Postal Service are just NIN in a better mood. When the album was first released, I wasn't concerned with any technological achievements Trent Reznor may have been conjuring-- I was too distracted by his concepts of fucking like animals, god being dead (and no one caring), and I am a big man yesIam. Sure, NIN might have provided a perfect dose of loud guitars and screaming to score my melodramatic years, but what most drew me to collect Halos was the atmosphere: fake snuff film videos, drummer microphone injuries, the Sharon Tate murder house, and lyrical self-mutilation that made Cobain sound like Vedder.
Now that I'm old, boring, and presumably less susceptible to the trappings of angst, it's possible to peel back that surface layer of fishnet and makeup and take a peek at the music underneath. And surprisingly, for music built on what I'm sure was cutting edge audio technology of the early 90s, The Downward Spiral sounds only the slightest bit aged, and not too far flung from the aggro-beats that still rule alt-rock formats. I'd even go so far as to affix Reznor with the cliché label "ahead of his time," despite the decade's worth of Wax Trax! 12-inches that surely influenced him. Still, even with all that precedent, Reznor must've done something to usher industrial music into the mainstream.
My best guess is that Nine Inch Nails hit upon just the right amount of dance music content to gloss up his dire tunes without scaring off the homophobes. Reznor's dance leanings are constantly bubbling just under the surface of The Downward Spiral, and it nearly goes without saying that the breakout hit, "Closer", leaned a bit more obviously in that direction than most of the rest of the album. Easily the record's sexiest song and slinkiest beat, its disco thump still sounds markedly current. Meanwhile, "Heresy", for all its Nietzsche-inspired deicide, is a couple clicks of the distortion dial away from being a Depeche Mode song. And don't forget, "March of the Pigs" beat "Firestarter" to the digital hardcore punch by three years.
The B-side-filled second disc of this reissue assists this hindsight. Reznor was always fond of emphasizing clubby rhythms rather than tortured screams on his many, many self-remixes. I've always preferred "Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)" from the excellent Further Down the Spiral EP to the album version. The remix replaced the original's jazzy sparseness with a graveyard of broken breakbeats. "Closer to God" and "All the Pigs, All Lined Up" confirm two of my above appraisals of Downward Spiral album tracks. And for fuck's sake, there's even a cover of Soft Cell's "Memorabilia" to balance out the much-too-easy goth karaoke of "Dead Souls", the set's other homage.
Of course, The Downward Spiral wasn't just opening my early-teen eyes to the wonders of blasphemy and extended remixes, but also to the joy of the concept album-- in coordination with Melon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, 1994/5 was a bumper crop for thematic excess. Reznor might've gone off the art-rock deep end with The Fragile, an album I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever, but The Downward Spiral still holds together, aided by a few musical reprises and its monochromatic lyrical content. Reznor had his album dynamics down pat at the time, chasing the brutal Gaspar Noe rape of "Big Man with a Gun" with "A Warm Place", the closest thing a teenager got to Eno in that era. Even the much-overrated "Hurt", which I didn't even like in the hands of a dying country singer, is a suitable post-storm calm.
That Reznor's chainsaw guitars haven't dulled after a decade of Stabbing Filter Manson knockoffs is gratifying, and that they still cut glass-- remastering or no-- is a credit to his production skills. With the benefit of Dolby 5.1 and SACD somethingorother, I'm sure the scream typhoons of "The Becoming" and the sedimentary synth layers of "Eraser" sound delightful on stereos I can't afford; (Best Buy wouldn't let me blast "Ruiner" in the demo room.) But even in obsolete stereophonic, the peekaboo drums of "Piggy" and the oscillating broken piano of "Closer" still impress.
Which is why it's a shame Reznor has largely been in seclusion since The Fragile shattered on impact. Since then, he's only emerged to restart old feuds and produce a terrible Zach de la Rocha single. Even if his songwriting talents flamed out after The Downward Spiral's extreme catharsis (how do you out-dread "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel?"), why has he been so selfish with his talents behind the board? While NIN remains in limbo, watered-down versions pollute the airwaves, hysterical critics forget that electronics and rock have met before, and only the occasional anniversary reissue reminds them that a Pennsylvania goth with a bad haircut was on to something underneath all the provocation.


On his second album, the viral rap star makes some of the most charming music of his still-young career.

The Sailor

Like many viral rap stars, Rich Brian initially treated his music like just another bullet point in a personal-brand sales pitch. The outlines of that pitch are well-known by now: Young Chinese-Indonesian teen Brian Imanuel learns English on YouTube, dubs himself Rich Chigga, goes viral with a song called “Dat $tick” on which he throws around the n-word with startling nonchalance, rhyming about scenarios with which he almost certainly has no firsthand experience (e.g. shooting cops) while wearing a large fanny pack. As a listener, your choices are to write him off as a troll or enjoy his competent, syrupy flow while trying not to dwell on the problematic specifics. If you’re really being honest, unpacking it all gives you a headache.
But that was three years ago. In the short time since Brian arrived as a polo-clad edgelord, he’s traded shock value for an actual career. Now 19, Brian is no longer Chigga, no longer courting controversy for clicks. His interviews reveal a hungry young man with a worldly perspective: “My goal is to go mainstream—partially because I really want to pave the way for Asian kids to be themselves,” he has said. His label, 88Rising, has become an undeniable part of the global pop landscape, with Brian as its biggest star and de facto ambassador. On his first album, Amen, he fashioned himself as a bridge between a new Asian underground and mainstream hip-hop, exploring his unusual place in the culture with occasionally deft observations. Mostly, though, he rhymed about the internet and partying. “Catch me chillin’ with Offset in a luau,” he rapped on “Attention,” an oddly plausible scenario.
The Sailor, Rich Brian’s second album in two years, is another bid to distance himself from his teenage output. By and large, it is a successful one: The Sailor is often charming, featuring some of the best music of his young career. Brian’s obsessions—life away from home, his search for emotional connection and sex—pop up all over the record, often as absurdist juxtapositions. “Bad energy, man, where my palo santo at?/Told her ‘Don't fuck me,’ ’cause this shit get sentimental fast,” he raps on the title track. (It should probably be noted here, though it may go without saying, that Brian has spent much of the last few years in Los Angeles.)
Brian’s flow is remarkably malleable, his production choices doubly so. He pulls off a Migos-indebted staccato on “Confetti.” On the family-and-friends anthem “Kids,” he channels Drake with the memorable boast: “You big in your city, I’m the king of a continent.” On “Yellow,” he references his backstory with a flex made for the times: “I did it all without no citizenship/To show the whole world you just got to imagine.”
While he used to gravitate toward trap, he now pulls in boom-bap drums, emo-rap choruses, even Spanish guitar and psych rock. His songs have become more melodic and bittersweet, losing the hard edge he never sounded particularly comfortable with in the first place. On “Drive Safe,” for instance, he invokes Kid Cudi, while “No Worries” glows with Frank Ocean moods like orange paint on a BMW M3. His most heartfelt tracks toe the line between confessional and saccharine. “Shouts out to the ones doin’ things/Everyone was afraid or unable to do, man/The world needs more of you,” he raps on “Curious.”
There are two moments on The Sailor that point to where Brian still might go. The first is RZA’s feature on “Rapapapa,” which is more motivational speech than verse: “Rich Brian was born to be rich with talents and balance/And the ability to face life challenges,” the Wu general intones awkwardly. “Represent your artistic intelligence/Your genetic pigment, your culture, your power.” It’s a goofy knighting of sorts, one wrapped up in the Wu-Tang’s complicated and storied relationship with Asian art. The second is the outro of “The Sailor,” in which Brian is confronted by a “mysterious young girl” en route to the corner store for passion fruit iced tea. She asks him a series of “whoa, dude” questions about life and death, the last of which is “What is a life if a moment can end in the blink of an eye?” Like all things Rich Brian, it falls between laugh-out-loud ridiculous and oddly sweet. But his career is getting harder and harder to dismiss.


The Stereolab frontwoman's latest solo LP renders her old band's political focus into a sort of fashionable socialism, for a breezy, pretty record that occasionally bows beneath overpowering and obvious political theories.

Silencio

On Stereolab's 1994 single "Ping Pong", 60s French lounge music and Farfisa organ lent a retro patina to singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier's Marxist commentary on capitalist boom/bust cycles, which she rendered with a thick layer of irony. "You see the recovery always comes 'round again/ There's nothing to worry for things will look after themselves," cooed the woman born in Paris in May 1968, playing tongue-in-cheek about capitalism's invisible hand. Six years later, when pets.com was put down by the dot-com bubble's burst, things looked bad. They got even worse eight years after that, when Wall Street's credit-default swaps turned American suburbs into ghettos. Nero fiddles, Rome burns, and all most are left to do is murmur "dum dum dum dee dum dum dee-da-dee-da-dee," like Sadier at the end of "Ping Pong", waiting for the next volley to come over the net.
Marx's theory was proven right by our most recent financial crisis, so it's not too much of a shock that Sadier's second solo album for Drag City, Silencio, would mark a return to pop punditry after the more personal and straightforward pop of 2010's overlooked LP The Trip. Don't expect the Occupy campers to wheel out the Moogs just yet, though: The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa. Robert Christgau once described Stereolab as "Marxist background music," and Sadier's lyrics have always treated politics as another set of cultural symbols to work into fanciful new shapes.
Particularly in a year when the internet blew up at burgeoning lefty Megan Draper chirping "Zou Bisou Bisou" to Don during the "Mad Men" season premiere, Silencio feels as timelessly hip as a pair of Wayfarers or an Eames chair. The album matches Sadier's husky alto with lush synths, pretty melodies, and the occasional presence of a café-infused Latin-style acoustic strum that suggests a Wes Anderson-directed make-out scene. As always, Sadier works best when asking generic Big Questions that tip over into the surreal or absurd: picking the brain of her friend Sue the mathematician (in "Find Me the Pulse of the Universe") or eating jambon crudité and wondering about the gap between perception and reality (in "Moi Sans Zach"), both presented with the breeziness of Jobim or early Gainsbourg. The chicken-scratch mod-funk of "Fragment pour le future de l'homme" is a surprise highlight, nodding back toward Stereolab's pureéd guitars while lyrics promise a brighter future for a generation caught spinning its Vespa wheels.
That doesn't make those moments when the political theories overpower the songs themselves any easier to overlook, though. This wasn't a problem with the likes of Stereolab's "Ping Pong" or "The Noise of Carpet", both of which offered the choice of tuning out the message for the catchy tunes, or intellectually merging and deconstructing the two components instead of reading Derrida for the next day's critical theory seminar. But on Silencio, a song like "There Is a Price for Freedom (And it Isn't Security)" is a mouthful, the sort of slogan you'd expect to see on a leaflet foisted upon you on a college campus. The production strives for the sort of fauxchestral grandeur that Super Furry Animals perfected on their own politically themed concept albums Rings Around the World and Phantom Power, but can't push past a groaner like "Follower of conformity/ Happy to identify with a reflection in merchandise." I'll spare you detailed quotes from "Ausculatation to the Nation", but just know that while the composition is fine enough, the lyrics are transcribed word for word from a caller's rant to a French political talk show. With this as a contrast point, it's best that the album ends with a Sadier spoken-word monologue, recorded in an old French church, during which she expounds on the resonant qualities of silence before letting the recorder pick up the tone of the cavernous, otherwise empty room.


The sludgy death-metal group draws inspiration from the story of the satanist Sean Sellers on their roaring latest LP.

Preyer

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowd of workers and their families who had gathered to hear speeches from a handful of prominent anarchists and labor organizers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The police, who had arrived moments before to bark out a dispersal order, opened fire; seven of their number were killed in the fracas, and multiple civilians were left injured or dead. As one of most infamous dates in American history, May 4, 1886 has also become a cultural touchstone for many of those on the left, from book publishers to breweries to metal bands. To the latter example, it’s etched into Orion Peter’s knuckles, and is thus on full display whenever the rangy, pierced-up vocalist takes the stage as part of D.C death doom outfit Ilsa.
Ilsa is often dropped into the sludge metal camp, and while those doom elements are certainly apparent in their tempo and songwriting, when it comes down to brass tacks, they’re simply one of the best death metal bands going. Their band’s new full-length, Preyer, leans into that trademark bludgeoning rumble. While their approach may be muddied by their allegiance to punk rock, in tone, in tenor, and in lethal potential, Preyer could just as well have come crawling out of Stockholm in the mid-1990s than the D.C. suburbs in 2020. On top of that, the band’s queer, anti-racist, antifascist politics are as front-and-center as Peter’s tattoos—though the finer points of their lyrics are often obscured behind his guttural roar and the band’s three-guitarist attack.
Ilsa may be an excellent death metal band, but they are far from typical; garden-variety lyrics about blood, guts, and virgin sacrifices are of no interest here. Rather, one of the album’s standout tracks, “Lady Diamond,” is a beastly reimagining of a medieval ballad—and it’s not even the strangest lyrical turn in this eleven-track compendium of complaints against Christian theocracy. Album opener “Epigraph” announces itself with a monologue from murderer and satanist Sean Sellers, who claimed that demonic possession fueled the 1986 killing of his parents and later converted to Christianity prior to his 1999 execution by the state. According to the band, Sellers’ story was a useful avatar for the “exploitative intersection of religious, media, and state authority,” and provided something of a guiding light for the album’s conception.
But despite Ilsa’s deep love for B-movie horror, Preyer is not merely focused on death. Rather, it fixes a gimlet eye directly on the arcane evils of heaven and hell, howling mockery at the cross and the prayerful predators that it has shielded through the centuries. In the album’s most explicitly political and anti-religious song, “Shibboleth”—a triumph of grimy, down-tuned d-beat—Peters rails against the “puritanic scum” and exhorts his own followers, “Raise the Devil’s black flag high! Anti-Christofascism!”
Elsewhere, Ilsa takes aim at mass media as a lever of control on the tectonically shifting “The Square Column,” and pays special attention to religious fanaticism, the sins of the church, and blasphemous ritual (as on the exemplary bruiser “Widdershins”). For someone like me, who was both raised Catholic and got into death metal at a rather tender age, Preyer often cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. The lurching title track is a bitter condemnation of Catholic complicity, and comes with a warning: “Pedophile protectors/Reproduce repression/Shame on you/Hell is real/Still to come/In this life.”
Preyer is due out on November 20th. Nine days (and 133 years) before, on November 11, 1887, four of those Haymarket martyrs—Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer—had swung from the gallows after a sham trial. Over a century later, the country remains in the grip of right-wing hegemony, and Ilsa’s latest effort offers both a razor-sharp critique of power and a distortion-drenched cry of rebellion. As Spies cried out before he died, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Preyer may be an outlier in the often uninspiring American death metal landscape, but its message—and its music—make for a powerful weapon nonetheless.

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