Wilco’s 11th album is direct and spacious, centering on the beauty of quiet revelation.

Ode to Joy

At the end of his 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy noted a shift in his approach to songwriting. Where he once imagined singing only to himself, “pretending no one else is listening,” the personal excavation of the book opened him to the idea of speaking to listeners, imparting exactly what he’d “like to say directly to someone.” That desire for clarity informed his very good recent solo albums, last year’s WARM and this year’s WARMER. Where he once telegraphed emotional truths through murky poetry like a Midwestern John Ashbery, now he was addressing mortality, depression, and malaise head-on. The approach has carried over to Wilco’s 11th studio album, Ode to Joy, a spacious record in both lyrics and sound.
Wilco albums have often centered on fears and limitations, but on Ode to Joy, even when Tweedy reflects on the holding patterns that keep us making the same mistakes, there is actual happiness woven into these songs—evidence of the “poetry and magic” Tweedy extols on “Hold Me Anyway.” He’s not sidestepping the fraught tone of the national moment—addressing nationalism, never-ending wars, and the lies we tell ourselves to get by—but he populates the album with surprise flashes of brightness, too. These are love songs about possibilities and the way our vision may be limited by our vantage point. What might a shift in position reveal?
Over the course of the last decade, it could be a little hard to tell whether a Wilco record was cruising or coasting. Throughout their catalog, there’s outliers and left-turns, of course: They pushed against roots-rock complacency by embracing violently experimental pop, veered into kosmische musik and distorted meta-commentary. By contrast, Ode to Joy attempts to strip everything down to the bare essentials with a hushed template similar to 2016’s Schmilco. Wilco’s six-piece lineup, in place since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, has been capable of fireworks, but the focus here is on space. Glenn Kotche—one of rock’s most creative drummers—lays off the cymbals, focusing on bass drum, snare, toms, and rattling percussion. Even when combatively rocking, like on the buzzy “Everyone Hides” and the shuffling “Love Is Everywhere (Beware),” Kotche makes room for skittering keys by Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone and Tweedy’s mellow croon and strained falsetto.
Likewise, guitarist Nels Cline lays back in the cut. His jolts of noise have provided reliable spectacle since joining the band following 2004’s A Ghost Is Born (on which Tweedy himself hinted at Cline’s distinctive style), but he’s reserved on Ode to Joy, which makes the few moments he does step out—the apocalyptic solo on “We Were Lucky” and the fuzzed-out glam leads of “Hold Me Anyway”—gleam all the more. The rest of the cast—Sansone, Jorgensen, and bassist John Stirratt, the sole remaining founding Wilco member aside from Tweedy—offers up similarly textured performances. Tweedy matches the band’s volume, resisting the catharsis of giant rock moves in favor of subdued intensity. “I have a quiet amplifier/Silence seems to be more true/Every guitar is denied/I’ve tried in my way to love you,” he sings on “Quiet Amplifier.”
In “Before Us,” Tweedy documents hearing a doorbell resonate in the body of his acoustic guitar, leaned up against the wall. That’s the way these songs work—they thrive in negative space. Wilco’s earlier records, Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Ghost Is Born, were artfully packed, stuffed with extra noise and elliptical messages, reflections of their creator’s worry he’d be misunderstood. Like Tweedy’s solo albums, Ode to Joy’s beguiling folk songs are direct and generous, quiet sounds coming from a big room. “Everyone hides,” Tweedy sings, his signature falsetto in place. But not always, only some of the time. A new perspective doesn’t always require blowing everything up—sometimes it just requires a curious tilt of the head.

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After a five-year wait and a series of interim EPs, math-metal freaks The Dillinger Escape Plan finally release their second album-- their first with vocalist Greg Puciato.

Miss Machine

The Dillinger Escape Plan is about as close to a household name as a mathcore band is likely to get. Their debut full-length, Calculating Infinity, launched them to a level of prestige previously unknown to purveyors of their brand of speed metal, and its impact on the hardcore and rock communities ensured the somewhat astounding longevity of their name recognition. Musical dexterity has always been the band's primary selling point, but the contributions of their original vocalist, Dmitri Minakakis, often seem underappreciated. Minakakis' passionate, incendiary delivery provided tangible pathos to the band's awe-inspiring but detached musicianship.
The band diverted attention from Minakakis' 2001 departure with an ingenious sleight of hand: While The Dillinger Escape Plan searched for a new lead vocalist, they filled their temporary vacancy with Mike Patton, whose stellar vocal contributions to their previous release, 2002's Irony Is a Dead Scene EP, suggested a bright if purely hypothetical future for the band. But this consummate metal wet dream was ultimately short-lived: Patton promptly left his special guest spot in the DEP roster, and the band fell back on Greg Puciato, whose promising demos won him a permanent spot as leading vocalist.
Common Sense dictated that Puciato's role in the band would be something of a stopgap position; it would seem that a new and relatively unknown vocalist wouldn't exceed the legacies of his predecessors, but also wouldn't significantly hinder the sound the band has honed for so many years. But five years after their last LP, Puciato is still on board. Miss Machine's first few tracks are business as usual for DEP: "Panasonic Youth" and "Sunshine the Werewolf"-- though not as punishing as most of the band's earlier material-- serve as an adequate bridge between their seminal debut and the brooding atmosphere of their work with Patton. Ben Weinman and Brian Benoit's frantically spiraling guitar figures and Chris Pennie's double-bass drum marathons give way to bristling, low-key breakdowns, and the band always manages to retain their brutal hardcore crunch within complex, fluid time signatures. Puciato lacks both Minakakis' immediacy and Patton's oily charm, but he manages to evoke both vocalists on the album's strongest tracks.
However, DEP is still struggling to re-establish a unified and compelling sound, and their newfound penchant for melodic exploration seems out of place amid the album's most inspired thrash moments. "Phone Home" revels in sluggish, overbearing doom metal and spoils the album's bristling momentum, and "Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants" is timid and repetitive, unimaginatively juxtaposing menacingly hushed verses with a phoned-in shrieking chorus. Puciato's Patton-indebted metal crooning comes across as awkward and seems incompatible with the album's aggressive drive. On the perplexing "Unretrofied", the band shamelessly apes second-shelf Faith No More, leaning toward melodic pop and away from the band's trademark sound.
Though Miss Machine displays DEP in top musical form, the band seems to have lost its confidence and direction. The album is alternately pensive and playful, and this fundamental musical split in their approach-- exemplified by Puciato's decided lack of a distinctive voice-- prevents their new material from reaching anything near the heights of their previous work. A few missteps are to be expected after years of internal change, but Miss Machine's confusing musical tangents and general aimlessness show The Dillinger Escape Plan straining to find their footing in the very scene they helped to define.


Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important (if not his best) album, and one of the most essential works in rap history.

Death Certificate

Ice Cube left N.W.A. in late 1989 over a royalty dispute, a fairly mundane conclusion to his tenure as the intellectual force and chief lyricist for the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous Group” after only one proper album. Cube’s lyrics for “Fuck the Police” had triggered an F.B.I. response earlier that same year, but Cube was still living at home with his parents when Straight Outta Compton was rocketing toward platinum status. He was 20 years old, and he’d just turned down a $75,000 check because he didn’t trust Eazy-E and Jerry Heller, who ran the group’s label, Ruthless Records. Two years later, with the release of Death Certificate, he’d be the biggest and most controversial rapper in the world.
During the two years between Cube’s split in late 1989 and the release of Death Certificate, his sprawling, imperfect magnum opus in late 1991, rap music grew up in a hurry, experiencing its pop and punk moments simultaneously. Crossover acts like L.L. Cool J, M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kid ‘N Play, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and Digital Underground took rap to the top of the charts and into the heart of suburban multiplexes, while southern California gangsta rap continued to proliferate in N.W.A.’s wake via Above the Law, Compton’s Most Wanted and Cypress Hill. On the East Coast, Public Enemy’s Black Nationalist oratory and incisive media critiques, which inspired Straight Outta Compton, continued on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet. The Geto Boys took their nightmarish vision of Houston’s Fifth Ward to the Hot 100 singles chart while Miami’s 2 Live Crew emerged as unlikely First Amendment pioneers, and regional rap scenes took shape around the country.
As rap continued to evolve and mutate during this two-year period, forces both internal and external worked to validate it as a cultural and economic power. By 1991, the quickly industrializing genre had spawned its own house organ, as The Source—the first magazine to cover rap in its fans’ vernacular, and a central node linking the disparate nationwide phenomenon together—was bringing in seven-figure ad revenues after moving to New York City from Boston in 1990. In March 1991, rap was legitimized in a different(and perhaps more significant) way: Billboard unveiled a radical (and long-overdue) change to its chart methodology. Instead of relying on self-reported sales numbers from retailers—which ignored many independent and “urban” outlets—the new SoundScan system used actual bar code data to determine sales. The impact for rap was felt immediately: N.W.A.’s independently-distributed Efil4zaggin debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200 chart behind Paula Abdul’s Spellbound, before climbing to the top spot in its second week. Six months later, Death Certificate, on which Priority spent $18,000 in marketing and which enjoyed no Top 40 airplay, outsold Hammer’s fourth album Too Legit to Quit (which Capitol spent a million dollars promoting) in both LPs’ first weeks in stores. Gangsta rap had won.
Death Certificate is not Cube’s best album. May 1990’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted is tighter, and the peaks of 1992’s The Predator, released after the Rodney King verdict-inspired L.A. rebellion, are higher. But Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important album, and one of the most essential works in rap history. Released a few months after Cube’s star turn as the dead-eyed Doughboy in the summer 1991 release Boyz in the Hood, and preceded by the irresistible first single “Steady Mobbin,” Death Certificate was anticipated like few rap albums had ever been. It had been six months since the King tape showed the LAPD gang-assaulting a black motorist, and their trial wouldn’t start for another six. A million copies of Death Certificate were shipped, and it was certified platinum two months after it hit stores. In the shadow of the King video, and with tensions higher than ever between south LA’s black citizens and the police, expectations were high for Cube, who at the time co-owned rap’s creative and political mantle with Chuck D. With Death Certificate, Cube met them head on.
In a nod toward the vinyl format that was rapidly obsolescing in 1991, Cube split the album into the “Death Side” (“a mirror image of where we are today”) and the “Life Side” (“a vision of where we need to go”). Other rap albums had toyed with the “concept” idea—De La Soul’s 1989 LP 3 Feet High and Rising was a big influence on Cube for AMW, skits and all. Yet due to its status, Death Certificate established a permanent lane for conceptual works in rap music, which Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. would capitalize on with their own death-fixated concept albums a few years later.
Death Certificate’s sides serve as an organizing mechanism for Cube’s two primary subject areas. The “Death Side” is Cube as crass hood storyteller, relating oft-hilarious tales about the VD clinic, stopping at your mom’s house to take a shit, haranguing a girl’s dad about her most intimate activities, even a trip to St. Louis that wound up in a jail stay. “Look Who’s Burnin’” and “Steady Mobbin’” show Cube’s unparalleled skill at lighthearted, detail-rich, slice-of-South Central-life songs—they predict not only the melancholic “It Was a Good Day,” but 1995 film Friday, Cube’s loving, hilarious ode to a single day in his neighborhood. And yes, some of these songs are stomach-churning—“Givin’ Up the Nappy Dugout” wavers between slut-shaming and sexual assault—but the “Death Side” concept is designed to allow Cube a performative “out.” This isn’t autobiography, it argues, but a reflection of the worst impulses of his community (personal mileage, as always, may vary).
The “Life Side,” conversely, is Cube as op-ed columnist, a racially isolationist embodiment of the album’s cover image of Cube standing next to a corpse tagged as “Uncle Sam,” with all the metaphorical subtlety of a political cartoonist. Interracial dating, moving to the suburbs, selling drugs, gangbanging: all of these are noxious activities that are preventing the black race (okay, black men) from reaching its potential. This side, significantly more controversial than the first, was an outgrowth of Cube’s fortuitous 1990 run-in with Chuck D. in the Def Jam lobby. After splitting with N.W.A. and learning that Ruthless wouldn’t let Dre produce his first solo album, Cube headed east, to track down 3rd Bass’ producer. After running into D., Cube took a feature slot on Public Enemy’s 1990 single “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and an east/west creative partnership was established.
D. and the Bomb Squad would exert a huge influence on Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. “Public Enemy taught me how to put a record together as far as knowing what song should come after what song and the feel of a record,” Cube later recalled. “Chuck D is a master at that. How it’s sequenced as a whole is just as important as each individual record.” AMW was a huge step forward for West Coast rap, with Cube further shaping the “nigga” and “gangsta” archetypes he’d started with N.W.A. while creating something close to a full conceptual work complete with skits, samples from the actual America’s Most Wanted television show, and an overall consistency that the shallow-past-the-singles Straight Outta Compton lacked.
Cube’s other P.E.-inspired transformation was happening at the content level, as he turned N.W.A.’s shock-rap into a new hybrid form: part gangsta nihilism and part post-Black Power militarism, inspired by P.E.’s deep connections with the Nation of Islam and its controversial figurehead Louis Farrakhan. The differences between P.E. and Cube are instructive: if “Fight the Power” pioneered a form of post-Black Power cultural politics informed by a desire for a cultural movement, then AMW proper opener “The Nigga You Love To Hate” (and its sequel, Death Certificate opener ‘The Wrong Nigga to Fuck With”) is driven by Cube’s sui generis self-interest. Where Chuck D. was an outspoken diplomat, Cube was a righteous mercenary in the KRS-One mold, aiming as much at suburban pieties—hey kids, check out “Gangsta’s Fairytale”!—as his perceived enemies.
After eight years under Ronald Reagan’s oppressive social and economic policies, which were particularly devastating to black communities, it made sense for a politicized South Central rapper to shun the idea of community mobilization and carve out a cultural politics of the self. The already privileged succeeded wildly, while historically marginalized populations like those in Compton and South Central L.A. deteriorated. Reagan’s Draconian “war on drugs” devastated inner cities for generations. First Lady Nancy urged kids to “Just Say No,” placing the onus to wipe out the crack epidemic not on the state but the individual. This same bootstraps ideal did away with civil rights organizing in exchange for self-entrepreneurship in a putatively free market, and it was from this landscape that Cube’s new identity was born. Jeff Chang explained it best in Cant Stop, Won’t Stop: “If Nation of Millions had signaled the end of the civil rights era, Death Certificate’s primary impulse was to dance on the grave.”
On Death Certificate, Cube expanded AMW’s lone-gunman individualism into a fierce, convoluted political manifesto. It’s not just about Cube alone anymore, but the future of young black men. “Niggaz are in a state of emergency” are the first seven words on the album. “I want to see my brothers and sisters on a higher economical level and treating themselves with more respect,” Cube told the L.A. Times in 1991. “The American Dream is not for Blacks. Blacks who (still believe in that dream) are kidding themselves…What I try to do is tell the kids the truth…the brutal, harsh truth—pulling no punches—about what's out there in the world.” Cube’s truth-telling was rooted in his recently forged relationship to the Nation of Islam, a movement that had recenty brought back to prominence by the outspoken Farrakhan. The NOI had done much good for Black communities over time by preaching a gospel of self-reliance and racial separatism. Both notions permeate Death Certificate’s politics, and, it should be noted, experienced their renaissance during that same individualistic, increasingly identity-factionalized 1980s.
On the album’s CD tray image, Cube is pictured reading the NOI newspaper The Final Call, while strategically positioned between his recently assembled Lench Mob crew on the left and Nation representatives standing at attention on the right. It’s tough to know how much Cube’s NOI affiliation was rooted in ideological purity or performative opportunism—on “Steady Mobbin’”, he wonders if the better come-up is to “start sellin’ bean pies” or bootleg “You Can’t Touch This” t-shirts—though he’d obviously taken Farrakhan’s recommendation to use his fame to spread the word. In 1991, the devout Muslim and Watts-bred rapper Kam and Nation spokesperson Khalid Abdul Muhammad shaved off Cube’s “toxic” Jheri curl, and both appear on the album.
It’s easy to draw a direct line between NOI teachings (including a discredited, Cube-endorsed book that alleges Jewish people dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade) and Cube’s anti-Semitic remarks on “No Vaseline,” Cube’s response to N.W.A.’s diss-track diptych “Message to B.A.” and “Real Niggaz” (the latter of which was repurposed from the 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP). “No Vaseline” doesn’t fit with the rest of Death Certificate at all—it’s like Cube left the stage and confronted N.W.A. in an alley behind the venue, bringing his mic. Although the violence was symbolic, “No Vaseline” remains a hateful song, Cube using homophobia and anti-Semitism as crude weaponry for his macho language battle. The track led the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call for a nationwide boycott of Death Certificate because Cube recommends dispensing with the “devil” Heller by putting “a bullet in his temple.” Island Records, which distributed the album in Europe, removed “Vaseline” (and “Black Korea”) from copies there. In his review of “Death Certificate,” the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called Cube a “sex bigot” and compared “Vaseline” to Axl Rose’s xenophobic lyrics on “One in a Million.”
The “Vaseline” controversy fed headlines for months, and for Cube’s millions of fans, its real-life soap-opera thrill only fed into the song’s problematic appeal. Like with so much art that is virtuosic and problematic in equal measure, many took perverse joy listening to Cube eradicate precarious communicative boundaries that help maintain civil discourse. Especially for the teenage boys who comprised Cube’s core audience at the time, “No Vaseline” was its own rap Wrestlemania headline bout: a triumphal act of face-saving in an easy-to-replicate cadence over a sample of Brick’s 1976 disco-funk hit “Dazz.” Cube flipped Ren’s “too much cargo” line from “Real Niggaz” and called him out for driving a B-210, and even turned Eazy-E’s subversive attendance at a Presidential dinner into an act of kowtowing to white authority. Even the song’s title (and theme) was intertextual: It was pulled from LL Cool J’s “To Da Break of Dawn” from the previous year, on which he eviscerates three foes: Kool Moe Dee, MC Hammer, and Ice-T. Cube outdid L there: he took out five enemies in one song.  Until Jay-Z’s 2001 Nas-dismantling “Takeover,” “No Vaseline” was rap’s peak diss track: a non-stop series of consecutively landed, clever punchlines. N.W.A. would break up before getting a chance to respond.
“No Vaseline”s flawlessly executed “dozens” routine was one thing. The inflammatory 47-second track “Black Korea,” on which Cube rails against—and obliquely threatens—Korean-American shop owners, was another. The community relationship between Korean-American merchants (who had run liquor stores and convenience shops in black parts of Los Angeles for years) was already tense, but it was inflamed by the 1991 shooting of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by South Central liquor store owner Soon Ja Du, captured on surveillance video only two weeks after the King footage was released. On “Korea,” Cube alternately suggests a boycott (for which there was precedent) and arson for non-compliant storeowners, characterized as “Oriental, one-penny countin’ motherfuckers” and “chop-suey ass.”
The broader context of this issue is best characterized by Chang: Korean-American storeowners were overworked and often terrorized by local gang members; in 1986, Chang notes, the Black-Korean Alliance was formed after four Korean merchants were killed in a single month. Black citizens, on the other hand, were tired of local merchants who wouldn’t hire black workers, who didn’t give back to local communities, and who assumed that any black-skinned person entering their stores had criminal intent.
“Black Korea” was not a nuanced song, but Cube wasn’t a politician or a diplomat. He’s “the nigga you love to hate,” and “the wrong nigga to fuck with.” To many critics, however, Death Certificate was merely “the rankest sort of racism and hatemongering,” as Billboard argued in a rare editorial condemning the album. At The Source, editor James Bernard replied to Billboard in a manner befitting his publication’s mindset and audience: the industry magazine was “too dainty and thin-skinned to hear the anger and rage and frustration that many people are forced to deal with every day.” This was the official line from Cube’s camp as well. When Christgau asked for comment, Cube’s publicist Leyla Turkkan framed Death Certificate as “an honest expression of black rage.” Bernard went further (and broader) in a review for Entertainment Weekly: “I’m not arrogant enough to wag my finger at someone for stridency or incorrect language when many of his friends are dead and many of the rest are either in prison or standing on the corner surrounded by burned-out buildings and dying dreams,” he wrote. “These people don’t get to write magazine articles, don’t get elected to political office, and don’t get appointed to the Supreme Court.”
As 2Pac would two years later with Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., Cube exploited the mainstream exposure he was receiving as an opportunity to more powerfully broadcast his narrowly intended address. “The truth is I don't care what the white community thinks about the record,” Cube told the LA Times. “I'm talking directly to my Black brothers and sisters. I speak in a language we talk in the streets. Other people can listen too—they might learn something—but I'm talking to the black kids who need somebody to talk sense—honest sense—to them.” This raises a crucial question that we still deal with today: whites bought Death Certificate—an album aimed toward black communities—in the millions. How was a white kid in the Midwest suburbs supposed to assume a subject position as the addressee of a song like “Us,” a song that examines the failures of young black men to take ownership of their own futures, and not rely on government intervention? The answer: we couldn’t. Instead, we eavesdropped.
Indeed, one of the most profound cultural shifts occasioned by the rise of gangsta rap, and pioneered by Ice Cube on Death Certificate, is the phenomenon of mass-cultural “listening in.” An album that sells millions of copies is designed to function as a communicative channel from one young black man to an audience of other black men. Chang called Death Certificate “the most impassioned attempt to speak to the young guns of South Central since Bunchy Carter had left the Slausons for the Panthers.” On one hand, of course, this perspective permits Cube a tautological “out”—“I’m not talking to you so you’re not my audience”—that is logically disproven by the fact that he’s releasing the album to a mass audience. On the other hand, understanding the intended audience of a work is absolutely crucial to empathizing with its message.
And there were messages: Amid Cube’s fiercest isolationist tendencies, Death Certificate exposes structural failings in a way that no rapper had yet attempted with this degree of clarity. Non-Black listeners may have bought the album for the illicit thrills of “Steady Mobbin’,” “Look Who’s Burnin’” or “No Vaseline,” but those with open ears could learn a lot from “Alive on Arrival.” Dramatically concluding the album’s “Life” side, penultimate track “Arrival” is a grim, detail-rich narrative of a drug-related shooting victim (“looked down, and my sweatshirt’s red at the bottom”) who dies while waiting for treatment at South Central’s MLK Community Hospital after being harassed by the LAPD. Cube’s description of his waiting room horror makes for one of the album’s most richly ironic lines: “One hour done passed/Done watched two episodes of MASH”. Much of the public attention paid to Death Certificate was devoted to Cube’s lashing out at anyone who stands in his way, but on “Arrival,” he talks about “an overworked physician” who didn’t have the time to give his character more than a band-aid and IV. “Why, oh why, can’t I get help?” Cube pleads as the song concludes. “’Cause I’m Black, I gots to go for self.”
Then there’s “A Bird in the Hand,” Cube’s single greatest solo work (with respect to “Who’s the Mack,” “Dead Homiez” and “It Was a Good Day”), and one of the signal moments not only for gangsta rap, but rap history. For just over two minutes, Cube perfectly combines the hardhead, oft-comical street narratives of the Death Side with the fiercely opinionated Life Side tracks. As rhetoric, it’s powerful: the day-to-day life of a young black man in Bush Sr.’s America was pinned in on all sides, with no logical action for economic survival, let alone success, that didn’t involve drug dealing. The trade-offs are expressed with sharp detail—“Always knew that I would clock G’s/But ‘Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order please?”—and pragmatism: “So now you got a pep talk/But sorry, this is our only room to walk.”
This is saying nothing about the track itself, which is magisterial: Cube’s production crew the Boogiemen (DJ Pooh, Bobcat, and Rashad) interrupt the album’s George Clinton fixation to flip Jimmue Haskell’s paranormal string break from the final third of B.B. King’s 1970 slave-trade opus “Chains and Things” over a razor-sliced drum knock from the first seconds of the Five Stairsteps’ “Don’t Change Your Love.” Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 flip of those drums and Cube’s “fresh outta school” opening line in the MC Eiht-featuring “m.A.A.d City”—a work deeply inspired by Cube’s early ’90s albums—made for a spine-tingling moment of cross-generational gangsta-rap continuity.
Lamar himself inducted Cube and the rest of N.W.A. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2016, largely because of the Cube-penned “Fuck the Police” and “Straight Outta Compton.” That’s just one metric of his reputation, however. To many 2016 teenagers—the age group who loves Lamar and would’ve bought Death Certificate in 1991—N.W.A. is classic rap, canonized in a 2015 biopic, Cube’s solo career is most likely boiled down to “It Was a Good Day,” and he’s more widely known as the star of Friday and the Barbershop movies, if not the angry Captain Dickson in 21 Jump Street. The proto-reality “true-crime” moment of the late 80s and early 90s that spawned Cube’s approach toward rap storytelling has itself morphed into a celebreality TV entertainment juggernaut (see: Kanye, Drake, the Game), while smartphone footage of police killing Black citizens has become a macabre reality of daily online life, mortifying millions but spurring little actual change.
Polls show that the country is more racially divided than at any time since the Rodney King verdict, six months after Ice Cube tossed Death Certificate like a Molotov cocktail into the nation’s heated debate about race and rights. In 2016, the death rate for black Americans, according to the CDC, is roughly 50% higher than for whites. Much about American culture—who may speak publicly, who may be defended—has changed for the better since late 1991, rendering much of Death Certificate’s sexism, homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism antiquated. At the same time, however, the rest of the album—a Black artist forcefully arguing for Black unity and freedom in the face of looming, state-sanctioned mortality—remains as sadly as relevant as ever.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the onetime Nation of Islam spokesperson featured on Death Certificate.


Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album sounds like it’s solely designed to generate clicks as a new generation of rap fans continues to be exploited for their streams.

Faith

Pop Smoke’s co-managers Steven Victor and Rico Beats, along with the corner office executives at Republic Records, are hopeful that they can upload Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album, Faith, to streaming platforms so that everyone will mindlessly slip it into their rotations and playlists for the rest of the year. They’ll desperately try to placate skeptical fans: This album will keep Pop’s legacy alive! Hey, the intro includes a spiritual speech from his mother! It all feels like an attempt to manipulate us into believing that an argument against Faith is an argument against the wishes of his fans and family—so that the powers-that-be can sit back and line their pockets with the bucks they leeched from Pop Smoke’s legacy.
It’s not to say that making a profit wasn’t a goal of Pop Smoke’s music or that money-making isn’t one of the inherent purposes of posthumous albums, but it should also seek to preserve the spirit of the artist’s music. Faith is unconcerned with anything outside of financial gain. The album is filled with unfinished records, demos, and reference tracks that were sliced together and completed with features only selected to juice streaming numbers. Whoever devised this Frankenstein creation doesn’t seem to get the appeal of Pop Smoke. Meet the Woo, his debut mixtape, was packed with tracks that felt designed to soundtrack a couple of blocks in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and managed to trickle far outside of those borders because of his smooth yet intense personality, the sharp drill production, and that one of a kind growling, deep voice.
Faith leans into a direction that was experimented with on Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, which is to make music for everywhere. But so often, music made for everywhere sounds like it belongs nowhere. Take the Neptunes-produced “Merci Beaucoup,” featuring one of the strongest Pop verses on the album. “Catch a op and I’m takin’ his jewelry, catch a op and I’m takin’ his jewelry/I said, ‘Don’t get it twisted, just ’cause I smile a lot, that don’t mean I’m with the foolery,’” he raps. Too bad the sweet-sounding beat doesn’t fit the sinister mood of Pop’s raps, it sounds like a mashup you might accidentally play on YouTube. Similarly, the hokey Swizz Beatz instrumental on “8-Ball” makes Pop, one of the most energetic and dynamic rap voices to come out in years, come across dull.
But beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad records on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions. I feel dirty listening to the “So Sick”-sampling “Woo Baby” with Chris Brown, which was so obviously made to fill the radio airwaves with white noise. The Kanye and Pusha-T-assisted “Tell the Vision” has the energy of a college paper struggling to hit the word count. “Look, Tyler got the album of the year… for now/But Pop about to drop/I see the platinum in the clouds,” raps Pusha, and I’m sure the record label didn’t even care what it sounded like; it’s just there, like a handful of the album’s features, to fill space and generate clicks.
The most confusing record is “Demeanor” with Dua Lipa, where a short Pop verse and rough hook are laid over the type of bubbly production that could backdrop an episode of Gossip Girl. It doesn’t work and feels out of line with Pop’s music—he never had to sacrifice his drill sound or intensity to make a hit. But again, the shepherds of this album couldn’t care less about the quality. If this album was actually about Pop Smoke’s legacy, like his managers and label would like us to believe, there would be a larger emphasis on paying tribute to those drill roots. One of the more interesting elements of Meet the Woo Vol. 2 was how Pop expanded and built on the foundation laid by drill. The only signs of that on the project are through the brash “Brush Em” with fine fellow Canarsie rapper Rah Swish and the hectic “30” with Bizzy Banks.
Aside from those brief moments, the only good that comes out of Faith is a reassurance that artists cannot be replaced. Though it’s hard to be optimistic, there’s a long history of shameless, money-hungry posthumous albums; and now, after a tragic couple of years in rap, a new generation of fans is being terrorized and exploited for their streams. Where will we draw the ethical line? How far are we from the days where it’s commonplace for labels to put on hologram live shows and pay some tech company to recreate a voice? Faith is a bleak reflection of the reality that nothing is off-limits if it will help record labels pocket a few more dollars.

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Just like it says on the box: The Pearl Jam frontman strums and sings simple love songs. Chan Marshall of Cat Power guests.

Ukulele Songs

If you include the soundtrack album he recorded for Into the Wild, Ukulele Songs is only Eddie Vedder's second solo album. Considering the size and devotion of his cult, coupled with Pearl Jam's "No, you really shouldn't have" over-generosity when it comes to releases, it's remarkable he hasn't put out five by now. This makes Ukulele Songs even more of a curiosity: As its title makes clear, the album consists of 16 tracks of Vedder pawing the tiny, four-stringed Hawaiian instrument and warbling love songs. That's it. In a way, it's as clear-cut a proposition as you're going to get these days. You either instantly know you need 35 minutes of this in your life or are already backing slowly away.
The songs themselves date back, in some cases, 10 years or more-- presumably from around the same time Vedder wrote "Soon Forget", the two-minute ukulele ditty from Binaural. The rest of the songs occupy that same headspace. They are casual, sweet, and disarmingly unaffected, and you can practically smell the campus green wafting off them. That Vedder is putting Ukulele Songs out during this Big Blowout Year of Pearl Jam (Documentary! Festival! Reissue! Tour!) makes it seem even less of a solo project and more like a a souvenir for longtime Pearl Jam fans. It works best that way.
Indeed, in small doses, Ukulele Songs is lovely. Vedder has always been affecting when he's lovelorn, and here he's more or less curled up in a ball of bewildered hurt. "As I move myself out of your sight/ I'll be sleeping by myself tonight," he croons on "Sleeping By Myself". The album's best moments-- "Sleeping By Myself", "Without You", "Longing to Belong"-- tap the same quietly wounded melancholy as Paul McCartney's 1971 proto-indie pop masterpiece Ram.
Alas, 34 minutes is a perilously long time for most to to spend alone with just Eddie Vedder, a ukulele, and his feelings for company. Vedder's precious side has never been his best one (see: No Code's "Sometimes"), and Ukulele Songs is so determinedly twee and relentlessly self-effacing that it can feel like watching a grown man attempting to morph into a baby koala before your eyes. By itself, hearing Chan Marshall playing Bernadette Peters to Vedder's Steve Martin for the duet "Tonight You Belong to Me" is winning and funny; in the context of a full ukulele album, it is slightly cloying. Vedder has said he wants this record to inspire people to pick up the instrument and sing with their friends, an old-fashioned sentiment impossible not to be charmed by. Like a lot of Vedder's experiments, the spirit is easier to admire than the final product. The ukulele might be a great campfire instrument, but sometimes what works best at the campfire should stay there.


In 1984, a teenaged sibling duo in Birmingham, England recorded their unique, Urdu-language take on synth pop. The first release from the Discostan label celebrates a lost classic of new wave.

Nermin Niazi / Feisal Mosleh: Disco Se Aagay

Disco Se Aagay

Los Angeles artist Arshia Fatima Haq was thumbing through racks of dusty vinyl at New York’s A-1 Records a few years ago when a title caught her eye: Disco Se Aagay, or “Beyond Disco” in Haq’s native Urdu. Peering out from the sleeve was a teenage girl with bouffant ’80s hair, a white dinner jacket, and a Mona Lisa smile. The album was billed as “a step further in the field of disco music”; the musicians were identified in the credits as a brother and sister, Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh, from Birmingham, England. Nermin, the singer and lyricist, was “still a school-girl,” according to the sleeve notes. Feisal, a college student, had composed and produced the music, writing some of the songs at just 17. The copyright was dated 1984; there were synthesizers. Naturally, Haq took the record home.
Since 2011, Haq, who was born in Hyderabad, India, had been developing a project called Discostan: a “diasporic discotheque” and radio show dedicated to the stories and sounds of the South and West Asian and North African (SWANA) region. She wanted to upend official narratives of nationhood, to decolonize popular music and the avant-garde alike. Exploring the idea of “home” from a diasporic perspective, her project was critical but also celebratory, designed to facilitate what she has called the “radical embodiment of marginalized people on the dancefloor.” As Haq listened to Disco Se Aagay, she was “blown away” by hearing a new-wave band singing in her mother tongue, she recently told Bandcamp Daily. She realized that the record spinning on her turntable was a physical manifestation of Discostan. Before long, she and her creative partner, Jeremy Loudenback, tracked down Niazi and Mosleh, now middle aged, to discuss a reissue.
The liner notes of Discostan Records 001 fill in the gaps of Nermin and Feisal’s story. They come from a musical family: Their grandfather had been the director of Radio India before Partition; their mother, Nahid Niazi, was a famous playback singer; their father, Moslehuddin, was a renowned film composer. The kids were born in Pakistan but grew up in Birmingham, England, where the family wound up after civil war erupted in their homeland in 1971. As a young teen, Nermin was enamored of the British synth pop that ruled the airwaves; Feisal liked to tinker on his father’s Casio and Yamaha keyboards. They ended up signing to Oriental Star Agencies, the Birmingham label that would popularize qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the West. The summer that they were 14 and 19, respectively, they went into Birmingham’s Zella Studios to record a batch of songs that fused synth pop, electro-funk, Western classical chord structures, and Hindustani vocal scales.
Disco Se Aagay’s nine songs (and two remixes) are immediately identifiable as products of their era. They’re propelled by spring-loaded drum machines and rubbery basslines, and fleshed out in the vivid tones of the top-of-the-line synths like the Roland Juno-60 and Yamaha DX7: synthetic brass stabs, harpsichord-like glissandi, and bright splashes of glassy color. You can hear echoes of early Depeche Mode in Mosleh’s staccato counterpoints and New Order in his insistent drum programming; many of his rhythms are steeped in the punchy syncopations of Latin freestyle artists like Shannon and Connie. The opulent timbres and chord progressions often recall contemporaries like ABC, the Human League, Howard Jones, and other acts pursuing a particularly baroque take on new wave. Despite the songs’ studio sophistication—speaking to Bandcamp Daily, the two musicians recalled multi-tracking Niazi’s voice, then panning the layers to suggest a whirlpool of sound—the results lack the polish of their big-budget peers’ output. During an instrumental passage in “Nazneen,” the chords and bassline occasionally clash, as though two mismatched snippets of tape had inadvertently been spliced alongside one another. But the slightly muddled sonics—and the duo’s autodidactic instincts—are a big part of the album’s charm. As often as new wave celebrated artifice, this music feels unusually sincere.
What especially distinguishes these songs as something out of the ordinary is Niazi’s singing. She has a slight, breathy voice, but what she lacks in power she makes up for in agility and sheer expressiveness. Whereas white British synth pop tended toward either perky major or brooding minor keys, Niazi’s slippery, melismatic phrases, based on Hindustani scales, make room for more ambiguous emotions. At any moment, a giddy melody might turn downcast. On “Chala Hai Akela,” she sounds almost uncannily like Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser; the song’s acoustic guitar and hissing shakers even anticipate the glistening palette that Cocteau Twins would adopt later in the decade.
It’s clear that Niazi and Mosleh weren’t just imitating the synth pop of the day; their musical backgrounds enabled their own original take on it. In place of Western pop’s verse/chorus structures, Niazi’s lyrics employ intricate repetitions—sometimes line by line, sometimes breaking apart individual words into a dizzying stream of syllables. In “Nainan,” her refrain of “Nainan na na na na/Woh nainan na na na na” translates as something like, “Eyes-eye-eye-eye ey-eye/Those eyes-eye-eye-eye ey-eye.” Even for listeners who don’t understand the lyrics, there’s no mistaking the surfeit of emotion, a feeling so powerful it can barely be expressed. And while Niazi sometimes sings of glowing fireflies, glittering stars, and flowers blooming in her heart, her songwriting also betrays a wisdom beyond her years.
In song after song, Niazi dwells on distance: the ache of faraway lovers, the longing to be reunited, the soul mates who wonder, “What is our destination and when will we actually meet?” In “Sari Sari Raat,” she sings of two lovers too scared to share their feelings: “I didn’t say a word/You also stayed silent/And just like that, we lost the moment/You walked away without hearing me.” Even her brightest melodies sometimes contain dark recriminations: “You’re a liar and you hide/Pretending to be something else,” she sings on “Dekha Jab Se Dekha”; “Don’t come near me/What do you think this is?”
British new wave is typically framed as a story of the democratization of pop music—of floppy-haired kids poking away at second-hand synthesizers in their bedrooms, neophytes inventing a crude new musical language. As the Human League’s Phil Oakey joked, “We laughed at the other bands learning three chords—we used one finger.” Still, despite these democratic pretenses, the history of new wave has hardly been inclusive; the kids in its telling are almost invariably white. Disco Se Aagay challenges that assumed homogeneity. Along with other recent reissues from the Subcontinent and its diaspora, like Charanjit Singh’s prescient 1983 album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat and Rupa’s Disco Jazz, a crate-diggers’ holy grail that became a YouTube hit, Disco Se Aagay offers an important correction to the historical record. It is a reminder that some of pop culture’s most interesting artifacts emerge far from the floodlights of Top of the Pops (though Niazi and Mosleh did get to perform on the BBC’s Asian Magazine); it is a reminder of the diversity inherent to British culture, despite what the St. George’s flag-waving Brexiteers would like to believe. Above all, it is a reminder—and a joyful one—of the dualities experienced by people like Niazi and Mosleh, who grew up straddling two cultures. As Haq would say, decades later, of her fictional Republic of Discostan, “Sound is the one thing that crosses borders…. Music is the bridge between these places, and a way of creating an imaginary homeland.”

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On his new album, The Good Fight, rapper/producer Oddisee eschews mainstream attention and creative limitations. It's technically hip-hop, but it goes in all sorts of musical directions.

The Good Fight

Oddisee’s music has taken many forms over the years: On his early compilations—101, Foot in the Door and Mental Liberation—Odd was the scrappy upstart, his distinct D.C. drawl and heavy drums carrying a unique "golden-era" hip-hop tinge. As leader of the Diamond District with rappers yU and Uptown XO, Odd is the mature figurehead: The group’s 2009 debut, In the Ruff, is a widely heralded classic in D.C.’s underground rap circles. In 2011, Oddisee released what’s probably his most lauded project to date, Rock Creek Park, a mostly instrumental album dedicated to his own bike rides through the sprawling D.C. landscape. By 2012’s Odd Renditions, you got a sense that he wanted greater visibility: He spit rhymes on Bon Iver samples and flipped Marvin Gaye into a danceable rap tune.
Though in recent years, Oddisee’s tone has grown more acerbic. On his 2013 mixtape, Tangible Dream, Odd wagged the finger at fake friends and naysayers. He reserves some vitriol for The Good Fight, his sophomore album, though he sounds remarkably comfortable throughout its 12 tracks. He does more singing ("First Choice", "Meant It When I Said It") and flirts with different time signatures ("Counter-Clockwise"). "That’s Love" recalls spacious funk, and on "Fight Delays", he brags a little more than usual: "They tell me I ain’t buzzin’, well, last year I made well over a hunnid stacks." That sort of straight-ahead statement is rare for Oddisee, who’s largely kept silent about his financial gains, though in 2010 he moved to Brooklyn from the D.C. area to further monetize his career.
The Good Fight is technically a hip-hop record, but the vibe here is decidedly eclectic, building upon the kaleidoscopic method he’s employed for 13 years. If Odd’s debut album addressed the uncertainty he felt about his artistic trek, The Good Fight proclaims the success of said path. He references a "working" plan that eschews mainstream attention and the fame that comes with it, choosing instead to be the low-key jetsetter culling inspiration from his global travels. As a result, The Good Fight exudes a sense of artistic freedom not heard on Oddisee’s previous releases. The music feels distinctly international and unhindered, far removed from the straight-ahead boom-bap he used to make. He’s always created on his own terms, but The Good Fight feels like a hearty "fuck you" to prevailing groupthink and the industry’s creative limitations.
Still, it’s clear Odd has grown tired of the false starts. On "Want Something Done", he complains about the phone meetings. He bemoans superficial demands and his own struggles to be heard. "Glorifying music that’s abusive and a threat to us," Odd quips, "and if you got a message in your records, you collecting dust." That’s become a common theme for him, in particular, on 2012’s "That Real", where the rapper contemplated his vision and the widespread anonymity felt by underground rappers. He revisits the notion on Good Fight standout "What They’ll Say", but the message quickly floats by: "I know that my intentions go unnoticed, a part of me wants attention." That’s long been Oddisee’s dilemma: On the surface, you’d think he doesn’t care about making it, yet there’s a part of him that values mainstream acceptance. The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from.


After drawing from IDM, krautrock, and sunshine pop, Dan Snaith's project sets its sights on dark and intricate dance music, with dazzling results.

Swim

In his decade-long career, Caribou's Dan Snaith has fluidly moved between genres like folktronica, shoegaze, krautrock, and 1960s sunshine pop, assimilating their most familiar traits until they're practically in his DNA. His albums have felt warm, loose, and ecstatic (especially 2003's still-career-best Up in Flames), despite Snaith's behind-the-boards meticulousness.
Snaith's latest, Swim, is even heavier on the precise sonic detail, and it's all the more impressive for it. Made with help from kindred spirits including Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, and Born Ruffians' Luke Lalonde, it was borne out of a desire to create "dance music that sounds like it's made out of water." Swim is darker both in tone and spirit than its predecessor, 2007's day-glo Andorra, swapping expansive drum-circle arrangements and ebullience for chilly rhythms and a bummed-out disposition. Easy entrance points here are scarcer than on any of Snaith's previous full-lengths-- as with 2005's kraut-centric The Milk of Human Kindness, repeat listens are key.
The record kicks off with its most accessible moment, "Odessa". Seasick bass, snatches of flute and guitar, and Snaith's mannered patter combine to give the song a pop-centric lean. But the song's easy appeal makes it easy to miss important details, like the ghosted acid-house bleat and lyrics about a break-up ("Taking the kids/ Driving away/ Turning 'round the life she let him siphon away") that establish Swim's bleary-eyed atmosphere. Lyrically, Snaith seems preoccupied with relationship-related indecision and ennui-- a noticeable departure from Andorra's moony-eyed devotionals. On the LP's other highlight, "Kaili", Snaith muses on a couple ruefully growing old together. Elsewhere, divorce and crumbling relationships permeate "Found Out" (whose female protagonist suffers hopelessness as "she knows she'll be there on her own") and empty-nest song "Hannibal".
Lonely feelings abound, as Snaith employs textures and compositional tricks from minimal techno, house, and disco to convey this distant melancholia. The harshly juxtaposed interplay of beats on "Found Out" make for punch-drunk club music, "Leave House" unfolds with LCD Soundsystem's dance-rock know-how, and the warning horns of "Hannibal" give way to a sequined breakdown deserving of any side-long disco edit. Unlike many artists who attempt to dive headlong into the genre, Snaith demonstrates a deep understanding of dance music-- not just how it works, but why, right down to its most pleasurable idiosyncratic tics.
This historian's grasp, combined with the way Snaith's soft, out-of-phase vocals seem to hover over his productions, inevitably brings to mind Arthur Russell. But while Russell's spirit is indeed felt throughout Swim, Snaith's sonic heart still belongs to hash-laced psych, from the drone and Gong-worthy chimes that run through "Bowls" to the vocal chants that break up "Sun"'s tech-house throb. Proof that, despite his chameleonic tendencies, Dan Snaith retains his singular identity as an artist-- and Swim is a reminder that even at his most challenging, the man's compositional capabilities can dazzle.


Held up by two good-to-great songs, the lightweight EP is Coldplay’s first release in years that feels more like a clearing of the throat than a new, distinct statement.

Kaleidoscope

Coldplay are nearing the end of a restless decade, one that found them cycling through a handful of disparate creative approaches without ever losing much of their commercial momentum. The albums they made under Brian Eno’s warped wing (2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends... and, three years later, the underrated Mylo Xyloto) pushed their sound to its breaking point with detours into shoegaze, R&B, and chirping electro-pop. 2014’s morose Ghost Stories—a 40-minute shrug made in the wake of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling”—was an obvious outlier the moment it landed on virtual store shelves. And when Martin got his groove back the very next year with A Head Full of Dreams, he didn’t stop at soliciting production from Norwegian pop mercenaries Stargate or a feature from Beyoncé—he joined hands with the emo-EDM doofuses in the Chainsmokers and tag-teamed the listening public with the insipid “Something Just Like This.” Naturally, it became one of the biggest hits of Coldplay’s career.
Kaleidoscope, the band’s new EP, is their first release in years that feels more like a clearing of the throat than a new, distinct statement. The obvious analogue in the Coldplay discography is the Viva La Vida companion EP Prospekt’s March, but there are some key differences separating the two minor efforts. Prospekt’s March was a clear product of the writing and recording that resulted in Viva La Vida; it was released during the same year, and featured several instances of remixed or revised material that appeared on the parent album first. Kaleidoscope is coming out more than 18 months after A Head Full of Dreams, and it largely lacks that album’s blinding sheen and radiant optimism. It’s more of a grab-bag than a coherent release: one-off collaborations and ill-fitting outtakes share space with songs that unexpectedly revisit the sound and spirit of Coldplay’s creative peak.
There’s a version of “Something Just Like This” on here, though maybe not the one you’d expect. Kaleidoscope avoids the studio version for the “Tokyo Remix,” a live take from the band’s mammoth (and ongoing) tour that’s all but indistinguishable from the original in terms of intensity and instrumentation. Lesser Coldplay material can sometimes find redemption through thousands of voices singing in unison, but “Something Just Like This” is the sound of Martin at his smarmiest. A stadium full of eager fans can’t save it. Big Sean feature “Miracles (Someone Special)” fares better, if only because he and Martin are kindred spirits: charming, good-natured presences incapable of resisting their worst lyrical impulses.
Kaleidoscope’s existence is ultimately justified by the two songs that reach into the band’s past. They reunite with Eno and producer Markus Dravs on “A L I E N S,” an earnest take on the European migrant crisis complicated by a jittery 5/4 rhythm. Martin’s never going to grade out as an above-average writer, but he strings together an opening verse that’s unexpectedly moving in its depiction of a family fleeing for its life. (They rush to take a few pictures on the way out so “history has some to know.”) The result is a song that would’ve fit in nicely alongside the mild experiments that made Viva La Vida so refreshing.
The patient, expansive “All I Can Think About Is You” is even better, built on a premise that’s classic Coldplay: a love-drunk Martin stumbles through a world that’s crumbling around him, unable to shake the object of his affection for more than a second. He feels guilty about it, until all of a sudden he doesn’t: the skies part, the band starts rolling, and we’re treated to a stadium-scraping piano melody that’s as gorgeous as anything this side of “Clocks.” This is what Coldplay can do: a vague, familiar sentiment is rendered transcendent through the power of sheer beauty.
Of course, there are plenty of listeners for whom phrases like “classic Coldplay” mean little. The band occupies a rarefied cultural space at this point in their career: they’re popular enough to play the Super Bowl halftime show and uncool enough that no one seemed excited by the prospect. The defensiveness with which Martin used to field questions about the band’s haters has been replaced with a sort of bemused acceptance: “We’re gonna do our thing,” he told Rolling Stone  last year. “If you like it, wonderful, and if you don’t, I really don’t mind. There’s so many other things you can do. You can have a PlayStation!” Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best.


Wussy's sixth LP is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor, 2014's tentatively anthemic Attica!. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, music that is cozy enough to hibernate under.

Forever Sounds

Wussy’s unlikely genesis occurred in 2001, when young singer Lisa Walker was scouted by 42-year-old Chuck Cleaver, the heavily bearded Ass Ponys frontman, who would, in later years, quit his day job as a stonemason to sell antiques. Cleaver and Walker, who also dated, wrote sharply about suburban malaise and domestic grievances, with a knack for unsentimental intimacy redolent of Rilo Kiley and Secaucus-era Wrens. A breakthrough of sorts came in 2012 with Buckeye, a career-spanning compilation blending spry country, poppy postpunk, wintry emo, and shabby folk-pop. A fan base grew in their native Ohio without threatening to break the levees, but 2014’s tentatively anthemic Attica! cast a wider net.
While hardly a volte-face, Forever Sounds, the quintet's sixth LP, is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, swirly chords met by solos that send the narrator tumbling into the abyss. Despite the vast scale, there remains something resolutely midwestern in the delivery: Where dream-pop vocals tend to glide along with the music, Cleaver’s voice is small yet oratory, as if he has a fascinating story to tell but is startled by the volume of his microphone. Walker taps into a similar feeling–of ennui and passion constantly thwarting each other–but dials down the gravity further. On opener "Dropping Houses," she sounds eerily subdued, ready to disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Forever Sounds, then, is the work of a band less interested in telling stories than smothering themselves in obscurity and noise. "Donny’s Death Scene," with its prominent pedal steel and *Big Lebowski-*referencing story, concerns mundane personal failures being reconciled on an epic scale. Walker’s lyrics ("Donny’s fading in the bright, bowling alley lights," goes the chorus) give Steve Buscemi’s meek character the sendoff John Goodman couldn’t, but like much of the album, the abiding themes are as much a product of the music as the words.
It’s just as well, because the discernible lyrics, particularly Cleaver’s, are knottier than usual, and sometimes overwritten. Usually adept at incisive couplets, Cleaver seems preoccupied with sounding poetic on Forever Sounds, to mixed results: "Who robbed the wishing well?/ Looks like there’s nothing coming true," from "Better Days," is several degrees too precious. And on the psychedelically inclined "Sidewalk Sale," he observes his muse "sucking on a chili dog/ Out in the desert where the heat is hot," which is maybe a little heavy on the exposition, desert-wise.
Thanks to its stately pace and generous decorative effects, the music is cozy enough to hibernate under. The words, while sometimes clumsy, can also be disarmingly poignant: On "Hello, I’m a Ghost," Cleaver laments an ex-lover who’s "undressed 700 more times and I’ve missed every one"; Walker sings, sweetly, "It’s not your failed endeavour/ That lights up your name forever" on "Majestic-12." Where Walker sings more naturally, with easier tones, Cleaver's shy, young-old voice is a reassuring presence beneath the music’s astral blanket. That they both sound overwhelmed by Forever Sounds’ vast scale is in fact the record’s saving grace; as ever, Wussy’s proximity to ordinariness is precisely what makes them lovable.
Correction: The original version of this review incorrectly stated Lisa Walker’s age when Wussy was formed.


With Semper Femina, Laura Marling uses a broad study of femininity to explore complex relationships between women. The album is filled with beautiful observations on the psychology of friendship.

Semper Femina

Laura Marling has used conversations surrounding her sixth album, Semper Femina, to disavow music of “innocent creativity”—the kind that’s “not pointed, not political,” she says. It’s an intuitive concept that sounds relatively novel coming from this folk songwriter. In the late 2000s, Marling emerged from London’s Communion scene, a coterie of authenticity fetishists who wore wounded hearts on tweed-jacket sleeves. Marling was herself embroiled in “innocent creativity,” but she released masterpieces of the form. Her identity evolved from romantic pragmatist to underdog sage to mystic troubadour; her voice became distant and supercilious, baring just enough soul to reassure you one was there. Radical honesty is now common among young songwriters, but Marling can harbor guilt, fear, arrogance, deceit, or triumph in a bottomless deadpan. It’s easy to invest in her evasion.
Semper Femina—Latin for “Always a woman,” and taken from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid—is no revolutionary screed. But the album’s characters, who are all given female pronouns, tiptoe outside Marling’s world of heartbreak and personal redemption. There are signs of a broader project at play. With lyrics about “warning signs” that we’re conditioned to “ignore diligently,” “Next Time” appears to preach a maternal fondness for Mother Earth: “I can no longer close my eyes/While the world around me dies/At the hands/Of folks/Like me,” she trills. While her composure hasn’t wavered since 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, there’s something new in songs like “Next Time” and “Don’t Pass Me By.” Both remind me, in their reserve and understated melancholy, of mid-career Elliott Smith—a chaotic and vulnerable individual anchored by a preternatural understanding of melody, using compassion to navigate horror.
As Semper Femina’s questions deepen, answers rarely materialize. The gorgeous “Always This Way” mourns a friendship cut short in unexplained circumstances. As sorrow triggers a bout of soul-searching, Marling confesses, “Twenty-five years and nothing to show for it/Nothing of any weight.” Over pastoral guitar twirls, the narrator soothes herself with a mantra, though not a satisfying one: “At least I can say/That my debts have been paid.” The conciliation feels a little flimsy. A songwriter as meticulous as Marling doesn’t need to innovate, but she’s most intriguing on songs like “Soothing,” when her cryptic lyrics snowball without scrambling for narrative closure.
“Soothing” is also the record’s only really ambitious composition. Interlocked basslines quarrel under Marling’s magisterial tones. Its image of a “creepy conjurer” whose “hands are in the door” hangs elegantly unresolved. She sings her sendoff—“I banish you with love”—through luscious minor notes that, instead of sugarcoating the rejection, transfigure it. Banishment becomes liberation, a generous act. The philosophy develops on “Wild Fire”: “There no sweeter deed may be,” she sings, “Than to love something enough/To want to help it get free.” As is Marling’s trademark, the line blossoms as both a revelation—the narrator takes pleasure in her wisdom—and a reprimand to a clingy partner, someone unsuited to her passionate independence.
Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women. The full Virgil quote—“A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing”—could seem patronizing, but Marling quotes it fondly on “Nouel.” She is tirelessly nuanced, and the result is an album filled with beautiful, searching observations on the psychology of friendship and occasionally romance. “I think your mama’s kinda sad/And your papa’s kinda mean,” she sneers on “Wild Fire.” “I can take that all away/You can stop playing it out on me.” Marling proposes here that love is a defense against our parents’ pathologies—yet she acknowledges that the traits we inherit are stubborn, determined to sneak in and mangle beauty. It’s a fitting parallel to how Marling wrestles with, and masters, her ever more malleable folk idiom.


The second album from the UK duo is future-pop at its best: kaleidoscopic production and incisive lyrics that swirl into marvelous, breathtaking songs.

I’m All Ears

In Let’s Eat Grandma’s vision of utopia, some days you might look like an alien; others, you wake up invisible. In a recent interview, the British duo—Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, both 19 and friends since kindergarten—wrestled with the limits of gender as identity. Life would make more sense, they suggested, if physical appearances warped constantly to represent one’s inner self. Rather than be a body, said Walton, “I wanna be a concept.” If you’ve existed as a teenager, you can probably relate; now imagine releasing an album of self-described “experimental sludge pop” as a pair of 16-year-olds dressed like haunted twin dolls. The response was predictable: adult critics shocked that teenage girls could make music at all, let alone music this trippy.
That resistance to easy interpretation extends all the way to the name itself—which, granted, doesn’t exactly gesture towards virtuosity on first glance. “It’s a punctuation joke,” Hollingworth explained—an Eats, Shoots & Leaves type deal where one misplaced comma turns a dinner invite (“Let’s eat, Grandma!”) into a horror movie. But beyond an inside joke, the shape-shifting name embodies LEG’s creative ethos, slyly expanding on conventional notions of how music made by girls “should” sound. Their second album takes matters a step further. I’m All Ears doesn’t just defy demographic stereotypes—it sounds like nothing else in pop right now.
I, Gemini, the duo’s 2016 debut, felt childlike in the sense that it was quite literally written by children; back then, Walton and Hollingworth’s helium-pitch voices gave the impression of cartoon mice, even as they sang about dead cats and radioactive mushrooms. Mileage may have varied depending on one’s tolerance for freak-folk or dadaist poetry, but clearly this wasn’t amateur hour. Guiding LEG’s voracious instrumental experiments (glockenspiels, recorders, motherfucking KAZOOS) was a sense of total control. If anything, I, Gemini’s everything-at-once psychedelia spoke directly to the feeling of being a young teenager—a kaleidoscope of unknowns, as terrifying as it is cool.
Two years later, I’m All Ears delivers on its predecessor’s promise, and though its songs are coated with newfound gloss, they’re just as much of a trip. That much was clear from the first single, “Hot Pink”—a sighing, snarling pop banger, co-produced by SOPHIE alongside the Horrors’ Faris Badwan, that weaponizes the femininity that’s been leveled against the duo. “I’m just an object of disdain to you,” they sing jointly, their voices sickly sweet. “I’m only 17, I don’t know what you mean.” For a SOPHIE production, it’s relatively subdued, until the chorus shatters into sounds of breaking glass and failing machinery as the duo’s delivery bristles. “HOT PINK! Is it mine, is it?” they yelp, flipping the hue of drug-store lipstick and Barbie convertibles into a battle cry. The coexistence of hard and soft isn’t a study in contrasts but in synthesis, merging the two modes until you can’t tell where hard ends and soft begins.
That song’s final chorus is interrupted by a phone call, the first of many moments on I’m All Ears where technology casts an uncanny glow. Pizzicato strings re-imagine a ringtone on the “Missed Call (1)” interlude, and “It’s Not Just Me”—a gently glitched-out synth-pop number, and the album’s second SOPHIE/Badwan production—includes a profoundly Gen Z farewell: “I don’t wanna say goodbye/I guess I’ll see you when the screen is vibrating.” Translating our virtual lives into compelling art is a challenge that often leaves me cold; how do you convey the humanity of a conversation carried out in text bubbles without sounding corny? But I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018. In that sense, the album’s pop synthetics aren’t such a drastic departure from LEG’s previous work; they heighten the surreal feeling of paradigm-shifting emotional experiences that transpire on a screen in your hand.
But despite the boldness of the production—uninhibited but never excessive, veering from Goblin-esque prog to pristine dance-pop to sludgy psych, sometimes in the same track—the album’s most mind-bending moments happen in Walton and Hollingworth’s writing. “Falling Into Me,” an ecstatic, street-lit roller-disco epic, opens with some of the most evocative lyrics I’ve heard all year: “I paved the backstreets with the mist of my brain/I crossed the gap between the platform and train.” (Amid all the headiness, three simple words later in the chorus—“You/Me/This”—are just as effective in describing the headrush of new romance.) And over the sullen guitar chords of “Cool & Collected,” LEG articulate the anxiety of feeling like a charmless nerd in front of your crush better than I’ve ever heard: “I still blur in the haze that you cut straight through.”
Rather than get lost in these insecurities, LEG uses them as fuel, embracing uncertainty as a psychedelic experience in its own right. And where “Cool & Collected” wallows, album closer “Donnie Darko” practically levitates. Listless midsummer psych-pop climaxes into strobing, cerebral ’80s disco for the home stretch of the 11-plus minute suite; we are left with Walton and Hollingworth lying on the tile of their bathroom floor, heads spinning, drunk with emotion. I imagine the scene illuminated just like the video for “Hot Pink,” where phone screens and secret rooms beam with an irresistible glow, feminine and sinister and ultimately unresolved—the girls disappear into a bright pink room, and that’s the last we see.
All of this reminds me that before it became known as the official shade of prescribed femininity, hot pink meant provocation. “Shocking pink” was introduced to the fashion world in the 1930s as the signature color of surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with Salvador Dalí and, as a child, buried flower seeds in her nose and ears in an attempt to grow a garden on her face. Her designs were as weird as they were womanly, and shocking pink was no exception: “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving,” she once lovingly described it. You could say the same thing of Let’s Eat Grandma, whose bold, tender music at once captures teenage girlhood and transcends it entirely. I can’t imagine what they’ll do next.


On his latest as Egyptrixx, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out what makes it tick.

Pure, Beyond Reproach

It must not be easy being one of David Psutka’s reverb units. He pushes them hard, stretching their sustain settings to extreme lengths and running heavy material through them constantly: The clang of struck sheet metal, the crash of broken windows, the dissonant peal of heavy bells. His reverb is so glassy and expansive it feels like the main attraction, not the supplementary effect. Most musicians apply reverb the way a photographer might subtly retouch an image, using it to add a sense of depth to a given sound. But in Psutka’s hands, it comes across more like one of Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures—an eerie, distended facsimile immobilized under a spotlight, a frozen echo deep in the uncanny valley.
Where Psutka’s first two records hewed to the jagged blueprint proposed by his Night Slugs peers, his recent work has been getting more and more abstract, downplaying club music’s beats in favor of an all-encompassing throb. On his latest album as Egyptrixx, his main alias, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out just what makes it tick. It is a heaving mass of ringing copper and seasick frequencies. Not only is it free of anything you might classify as a melody; even its basslines are reduced to an ominous rumble, and its glancing riffs feel as accidental as wind chimes.
It’s a long way away from the prickly, technoid pulse of tunes like “A/B Til Infinity” or “Bible Eyes,” which variously explored John Carpenter synths and the loping beats of UK funky. But it makes for a logical next step from his last album as Egyptrixx, 2015’s doomy Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), and it comes even closer in spirit to a record that he released last year under his Ceramic TL alias, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border. That album, a mostly ambient exploration of held bell tones and granular delay, had the bitter reek of an electrical fire, and this record replicates those noxious atmospheres and reintroduces beats: thudding kick drums, zippering hi-hats, and the incessant din of battered metal. His scrap-heap percussion often has more in common with Einstürzende Neubauten than it does club music peers like Bok Bok or Jam City.
Despite the heaviness, the bell tones’ broad, spectral sweep infuses the music with a rich, burnished glow, and the presence of vocoders and chiming FM synths only adds to the luminous air. The album opens with the sound of running water, and that sound recurs throughout the record, bubbling up like a hot spring and offering a soothing counterpoint to the omnipresent violence. The mood is jarring and gentle all at once, battering the listener with car-crash frequencies and then offering sweeter sounds as a kind of balm. It’s a disorienting listen: His arrangements are as murky as a flooded catacombs, and the way that arpeggiated bell tones and other motifs recur in nearly identical forms across the album, it can be easy to feel marooned amidst its swirl, and the claustrophobic sameness of his sound design verges on the suffocating.
Presumably this is all part of the point. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s burgeoning quantities of plastic flotsam and jetsam, Psutka describes the album’s aesthetic as “pacific litter clank; chill torrents and artificial triumphalism.” He’s definitely nailed the vibe: The music drifts in a great, heaving mass, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it’s beautiful and monstrous all at once. It really does sound like a ton of plastic shifting its weight around: Dumping a tub of my kid’s Legos on the floor, I was immediately struck by the sonic similarity to Egyptrixx’s palette. There’s simply too much of it, though. What feels bracingly alien for the first five or six tracks turns into a hard slog by the tenth; it would have been far effective to shut things down after “Plastic Pebble [beat],” a climactic mixture of grime synths, trap hi-hats, and the dissonant clang of EVOL-era Sonic Youth. That was a problem on Psutka’s last couple of albums, too; his concepts are stronger than his editing skills. Still, taken in moderate doses, it’s a strangely moving portrait of ecological collapse translated into sound.


The Norwegian artist presents her most unified mind-body work to date, melody-filled art-pop that deals with the nature of self and the freedom of the unconscious.

Classic Objects

Let’s begin with the song “American Coffee,” a drink about which Jenny Hval has some thoughts. She presents herself nearly naked on the song as she surfs through details about her life. She begins before her own birth, empathizing with her frightened pregnant mother and sharing a memorable cinema experience. It’s a stunning piece of music to hear from Hval. Naturally, the Norwegian interdisciplinary artist who’s defined her music with questions about gender, sex, bodies, and power, bucks the standards of glimmery pop-ballad confessionals, singing airily about her UTI and the bloody urine she observes in a movie theater toilet.
Hval’s work is often informed by her bodily preoccupations: the self-care theses of Apocalypse, girl, the sanguinary sensibility of Blood Bitch. Her frank disposition in discussing the messy and painful realities of physical existence neutralizes their unique discomforts. Hval takes a new angle on Classic Objects, her most unified mind-body work to date. She makes a Möbius strip of having a deep understanding of herself: paradoxically, that finely tuned self-awareness can make deviations from that baseline feel all the more destabilizing, whether that’s pinpointing a urinary tract infection or identifying a sense of alienation from mainstream culture.
In an accompanying statement for Classic Objects, Hval explained that the album came out of wondering “what ‘just me’ could mean.” After releasing Menneskekollektivet under the Lost Girls moniker with Håvard Volden last year, she found her life upended and eerily still with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Feeling plain made me want to write something really straightforward,” she continued. To that end, Classic Objects is direct and personal in a way that Hval’s work has rarely been, even as she evades confessional tropes. The album is soft and loose throughout, never spiking with dissonance. The pops and snaps of hands on drum heads give the songs a distinctly fleshy feel. It’s as if Hval is handling herself with a gentle touch as she interrogates who she is and who she seems to be.
Hval works through her introspection openly, and the desert imagery that appears in and around Classic Objects fits the warping feeling of determining a sense of self: everything seems wide open, but how close are you to where you think you want to be? Building from the free-flowing hymn that opens “American Coffee,” Hval wonders what kind of person she’d be if she hadn’t gotten a fine arts degree. She probes deeper into her personal growth, asking, “Who is she who faces her fears?” The burst of percussion and melody that redirects the song is celebratory and relaxed, with Hval considering the other Hvals she could’ve been and letting them pass without regret.
She plunges further into the divide between seeming and being on “Jupiter” and the album’s title track. On the former, she squares herself against the beige concrete corners of the Prada Marfa art installation in the West Texas desert. “I am an ‘abandoned project,’” she sings. The line recalls Lydia Davis’ singular “Tropical Storm,” with Hval offering a lightly funny reminder of the constant upkeep and occasional chaos of the corporeal form. But it also brings to mind the premise that Joan Jacob Brumberg presented in her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which examines the historical arc of pervasive messaging to girls about physical self-improvement. Hval further ponders material differences in “Classic Objects,” wondering whether the items in her hands are art or stuff, and how to kiss passive gold and marble.
Within the confines of her humanity, Hval settles into the contradictory realities of her existence—among them, being a proud feminist and independent artistic woman who decided to marry a man. She recoils at being subjected to the “industrial-happiness complex,” as she puts it. “‘It’s just for contractual reasons,’ I explained,” she sings on “Year of Love,” with black jeans offered as another signifier of efforts to defang the proceedings. The song’s jumpy organ melody feels like a feverish calliope, as if the carousel of “The Circle Game” had somehow gone a little lopsided.
Hval’s perspective gradually expands outward across the record, shifting from small personal details to bigger-picture observations. The heady “Year of Sky” spins from the appeal of finding oneself back to losing it again, where time and place are temporary anchors to an infinite expanse, and Hval ponders the afterlife in “Cemetery of Splendour,” with a plodding, earthy bass tone that cedes to a long tail of a woodsy field recording. She takes inventory of her environment in a voice of breathy wonder—leaves, birds, cigarettes, gum! gum! gum!—illustrating her exterior world with lovely and ugly things alike.
From the harp-dappled lilt of “Freedom,” where she wonders about institutional promises, Hval builds toward the stormy, piano-driven finale of “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned.” She basks in the notion that an interior world is the only space where absolute unbridled freedom exists—even songs are subject to copyrights, as she sings. She frames dreaming as “the plan without the plan,” a carnival of unconsciousness. It’s here that the being and the seeming collapse into nothing, where it’s possible to be free of the world and all its impositions. Absolute freedom, Hval suggests, lies in the willful abandon of opening up to the wild possibilities of the interior. In the great conflicting unknown, pleasant surprises, profound revelations, and life-changing love abound.


Once again, Adele transforms her heartbreak into a searching, graceful, and incredibly moving album. But the complexity of her emotions and the nuanced production make this her most ambitious work to date.

30

Early in the press cycle for her fourth LP, Adele referred to 30 as her most personal album yet—a high bar for someone whose wrenching second album taught the entire world how to cry and compelled Julia Roberts to publicly threaten Adele’s next boyfriend. You could say Big Feelings, backed up with the full weight of her expressive mezzo-soprano, made the London-born singer-songwriter one of the most universally admired pop stars on the planet. These include (but are not limited to): giving your heart away and having it played to the beat, resigning yourself to someone who reminds you of an ex, fearing that love will elude you forever or that it’s somehow trapped in the past, crystallized in amber. It’s hard to imagine something more personal than the empathy bombs that Adele typically drops, but she did not lie about 30.
Here, she’s telling a more unexpected story about love: What it means to inflict that pain on your family, to rebuild yourself from scratch, and—big exhale—to try to love again. The task necessitated a more nuanced writing style and looser structures to some of the songs, resulting in Adele’s most ambitious album to date. The way the 33-year-old interacts with storied traditions feels more in sync with contemporary pop, R&B, and hip-hop, as though she’s taking cues from newer visionaries like Jazmine Sullivan and Frank Ocean as much as her diva elders. She worked with producer Inflo, of London collective SAULT and Little Simz acclaim, on three songs that bring a real warmth and soulfulness to the record’s final third. And her vocals are more playful: Motown-style background vox are modulated to a chirp on “Cry Your Heart Out” and “Love Is a Game,” in a kind of remix of her usual retro homage.
Adele, like other hermetic superstars, dislikes celebrity but makes no effort to conceal the fact that her life inspired her art. Without much context or arc, the polished songs on 2015’s 25 didn’t land in quite the same way as the overwhelming hits of 21. (Though Adele, like Jennifer Coolidge, did wonderful things to redefine greetings.) On 30, Adele makes her story legible—it’s about “divorce, babe, divorce,” going through your Saturn Return, all the things of Nancy Meyers movies but happening 20 years earlier—and shows that it’s complicated and undeniably her own.
The stage is set by the twinkling Fender Rhodes chords that open “Strangers by Nature,” a collaboration with film composer and producer Ludwig Göransson. Inspired by the songs of Judy Garland and the 1992 Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn dark comedy Death Becomes Her, Adele mourns her past relationships in a manner so dramatic and forlorn, it’s practically camp—complete with Disney strings and an opening line worthy of a Smiths song (“I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart”). Then comes “Easy on Me,” the grounding piano ballad whose swooping eee’s underscore once again that our most expressive singers can make magic from a single syllable. The song represents the first of many times on 30 that Adele will ask for grace—from herself, the lord, and her young son Angelo.
Adele has said she prompted the end of her marriage to Simon Konecki because she wasn’t happy, and her guilt and hope to be understood by Angelo yields some of the record’s richest material. Inspired by the voice notes on Tyler, the Creator and Skepta’s albums, “My Little Love” includes private recordings of tender bedtime conversations between Adele and Angelo as they adjusted to the divorce. It is an uncomfortable choice to make a quiet storm record telling her son’s story, but it shows a brilliant new shade of melancholy for an artist with an already robust palette. (“Do you feel the way my past aches?” she coos, breaking your heart.) One of five songs on 30 that sprawls past the six-minute mark, “My Little Love” is a staggering journey—tucked at the end is Adele’s version of rock bottom, a raw voice note where she admits that, for the first time in years, she feels really and truly lonely. It is hard to hear her like this: someone who is easily able to tap into a super-human well of emotion plainly admitting that she’s broken, sweat-pantsed, and terrified.
After a strong start taking stock and making amends, Adele dips into a more sultry side with two shorter pop tracks about dating again. The first, a Greg Kurstin collab called “Oh My God,” fits in somewhere between Ed Sheeran and Florence Welch, but the whistle-tone runs that punctuate the chorus, plus those “lord let me’s” towards the end, show how Adele’s vocal tics can do a lot to characterize a song. Unfortunately, little can help “Can I Get It,” an out-of-place appearance from pop pros Max Martin and Shellback that retreads corny ’10s pop trends (cue the whistling). Adele has talked about how the song’s titular chorus is in reference to a relationship, not just hooking up, but it’s also bound to be misunderstood. Which is fine! Lots of big pop songs are. On an album so close to feeling like a holistic statement, this just comes across like the single inserted with pop (and maybe even country) radio in mind.
This middle part of 30 is set back on course by “I Drink Wine,” an Elton John-style barroom singalong with strong gospel undertones and an introspective voice memo at the end. Adele serves take-me-to-church chardonnay realness from the jump, opening the song with a verse about her childhood as a means of perspective on how she got away from herself. She knows the lifelong work of ego-death, even on a divorce record: “I hope I learn to get over myself,” she belts in the chorus, a hint of grit in her low notes. Though the lyrics abound with clichés—“can’t fight fire with fire,” “the road less traveled,” “they say to play hard, you work hard”—it is, on the whole, generous and grounded. If this is what soundtracks the 2032 remake of 27 Dresses, I won’t be mad.
As she moves into the final third of the record, past the Ella-meets-Ariana jazz interlude “All Night Parking,” Adele’s humility extends to her kiss-offs. This only makes them land harder and more deliciously, like being roasted in a few expertly articulated words (“I know it’s hard but it’s not,” goes one). She dresses down a lover for not showing up enough on the slowly unfurling neo-soul of “Woman Like Me,” the best of her tracks with Inflo, and ends up revealing more about her own priorities: “Complacency is the worst trait to have, are you crazy?” starts the chorus. Her voice is low and assured, with a hint of disappointment. The expectations and boundaries that Adele sets for others over the course of 30 feel hard-won.
As much as the prayer-like “Hold On” seems intended as 30’s emotional climax, that honor belongs to “To Be Loved,” with a vocal performance that will go down in Adele lore, right next to 25’s “All I Ask.” She has said she won’t perform it live and only sang it front to back a few times, including a video recording where the power of her voice distorts the audio. The subject matter is too devastating to revisit: the sparse piano ballad, a co-write with Tobias Jesso Jr., is sung to an adult Angelo as an explanation for why her marriage didn’t work. Consider it a kind of companion track to “My Little Love,” a zoom-out, flash-forward moment in the narrative. Adele is at first dignified, then desperate to convey the high stakes of love, and the performance is a marvel of control and phrasing that draws comparisons to the greats like Whitney and Aretha. This is what Adele does best: creates a world of feeling out of little more than her voice and then takes you to the brink. She is wise enough to offer a pillow-soft comedown with closing track “Love Is a Game,” but the damage is done.
In “To Be Loved,” Adele offers the listener a thesis statement for her music: “To be loved and love at the highest count/Means to lose all the things I can’t live without.” Oftentimes she has made us feel the carnage of that risk or captured the yearning side of romance for maximum effect, but 30 shows what happens when you willingly walk off the cliff and live to tell about it. This requires patience, honesty, therapy, constantly taking two steps forward and one step back. Knowing what you want is largely gleaned through finding out what you don’t want. Life is messy and not always built for three-minute pop songs with perfect hooks. Adele was always more complicated than that, and now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Irish singer and composer’s second album of intimate, experimental folk is at its best when it is quiet and tempered.

Birthmarks

Hillary Woods made this record, her second, while she was pregnant. She recorded it between her home in Galway, Ireland and in the home of her producer—the Norwegian noisenik Lasse Marhaug—who has frequently collaborated with Woods’ labelmate Jenny Hval. Noise-folk of this kind is supposed to be more illusory than your traditional pop album, filling in the gaps between each sound so that it becomes its own Rorschach test. Unfortunately, Birthmarks seldom gives you the incentive to find yourself within the record. The conviction of its creators scarcely connects with the convictions of its perceiver.
Woods’ previous album, Colt, which she self-produced, indicated that she was a musician with a visual artist’s approach—a patch-worker constructing layer upon layer. Her piano was her underpainting, which she built upon with synths, the occasional grain of microsounds, and foreboding drones. With the help of Marhaug, Birthmarks augments these sound-art elements, giving it a heavier noise-to-music ratio than its predecessor.
Birthmarks becomes a minimalist-maximalist mishmash of field recordings, microsounds, maximalist drones without ever coming into focus. The elements are used too liberally and haphazardly, to the point where the album becomes an indecipherable well of sound that’s hard to unscramble. “The Mouth” begins in what sounds like a lonely, long-abandoned bunker, ready to be filled with sound, but it swiftly becomes overembellished with screaming gray noise, whooping saxophone, cinematic strings, horrific, body-convulsing beats (the kind that Zola Jesus used to exhilarating effect on Okovi). While it may have brought Woods “back into her body” while creating it, its overstimulation has the opposite effect.
Birthmarks is at its best when its effects are more tempered. “Lay Bare” reaches for the sublime, as Woods’ voice—somewhere between Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan—abides by the same pitch and cadence as the gorgeous, delirious strings—it just stops short of being overwatered by beauty. By the song’s end, the music is converted back into noise, as a long, unaccompanied drone plays. These smaller moments make visible Woods’ internal and external environments. There could be more of them, as they help to make sense of the album’s more bombastic parts.
The acoustic, musical, often beautiful elements of the album—Woods’ voice, repetitive sliding guitar riffs, occasional piano, frequent strings—could potentially signify and give meaning to its nonmusical elements. The core of Woods’ artistry is found in these quiet moments. “I am afraid it’s growing inside of me,” she sings on “Orange Tree,” “My body knows it can’t make it out.” Her voice becomes submerged; her body supposedly oppressed. If Birthmarks is Woods’ restless attempt at self-birth, her true emergence feels yet to come.

Buy: Rough Trade
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