Finally, after a protracted and often chaotic rollout, the new Kanye West album is here. The Life of Pablo is the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. But a madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and the new record has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography.

The Life of Pablo

Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo’s namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of “which one?” set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye’s Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history.
The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It’s probably his first full-length that won’t activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He’s changed the genre’s DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. “See, I invented Kanye, it wasn’t any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes,” he raps wryly on “I Love Kanye.” The message seems clear: He’s through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He’s content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.
Kanye’s second child, Saint, was born in early December, and there’s something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. “Ultralight Beam” opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: “This is a God dream,” goes the refrain. But everything about the album’s presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.
Thankfully, he’s bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, he is better than everyone, and he throws all of his best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. He picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don’t care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz Kanye if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener “Ultralight Beam,” and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both “Otis” and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. On the other hand, “Fade” pits Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard’s “Mystery of Love” and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth’s “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them.
This moment is also a reminder of Kanye’s audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—his best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn’t dare touch them, from "Gold Digger" to “Blood on the Leaves” and beyond. He doesn’t just sample these songs, he climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the “Otis” video. On "Famous," he does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone’s “Do What You Gotta Do” with Rihanna, who sings the song's hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam,” which gets flipped so it sits atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel’s Canon, and it’s the most joyful two minutes of music on the album.
“Waves,” a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper’s insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might’ve wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of “We Major,” and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. “Waves” is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration “No More Parties in LA” is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting Kanye permission to use his popular slang term “wavy.” Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo itself. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, he seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.
“Father Stretch My Hands” tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T. L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It’s the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led West to make 75 near-identical mix downs of “Stronger,” and in the song’s lyrics, Kanye admits that the same workaholism that made his father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On “FML,” he name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents (“name me one genius who ain’t crazy,” Kanye demands on “Feedback”) and it’s possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration.
The album’s most humane moments come when he reaches for his family: “I just want to wake up with you in my eyes,” he pleads at the end of “Father Stretch My Hands.” On “FML,” a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, he sings to Kim, “They don’t want to see me love you.” “Real Friends” reprises his “Welcome to Heartbreak” role as the unhappy outsider at his own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures “before it’s back to business”; it’s maybe the saddest he’s ever sounded on record.
Tuning into the humanity in Kanye’s music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of assholery on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti made to purposefully reignite the most racially-charged rivalry in 21st-century pop. But there’s lots more where that came from, sneaking in behind the headline: “If I fuck this model/And she just bleached her asshole/And I get bleach on my T-shirt/I’ma feel like an asshole” is maybe the most unforgivably stupid thing Kanye West has ever rapped. And on the bonus track “30 Hours,” he takes a moment to sneer, “My ex said she gave me the best years of her life/I saw a recent picture of her, I guess she was right.”
At moments like this, you sense the airlessness of super-celebrity closing in around him. Even when he was being loathsome, Kanye’s behavior always felt rooted in something messy and relatable. During the wild scrum of The Life of Pablo’s press cycle—when he tweeted “I own your child!!” at Wiz Khalifa in response to a minor misunderstanding, or his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” tweet, for instance—there was a prevailing sense that Kanye had entered such a consequence-free zone that we can never truly relate to him anymore. Once upon a time, he was The Asshole Incarnate, the self-described “douchebag” that we couldn’t look away from. But there are moments here where he just sounds like another asshole.
And yet, as it always does in Kanye’s essentially crowd-pleasing, deeply Christian music, the light wins out over the darkness. A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes. “It was my idea to have an open relationship, now a nigga mad,” he jokes on “30 Hours,” sending up his own masculine fragility. “I need every bad bitch up in Equinox/I need to know right now if you a freak or not,” he jokes on “Highlights.”
And with The Life of Pablo, this humor isn’t just in the verses, it’s in the rollout, too. Somewhere between the record’s several title changes, it started to feel like Kanye had decided to turn his troubled-blockbuster-syndrome into performance art. “We still don’t have a title,” Kim Kardashian tweeted, days before the announced rollout. The day after he rented out Madison Square Garden so he could plug in his laptop, it was suddenly unclear, again, if the album was coming out at all; the mess was so profound that a tweet noting “young thug claimed on periscope that it’s coming out after snl tomorrow” suddenly seemed like solid intel. Chaos reigned, and as the twists and turns mounted, it was hard to keep from laughing helplessly.
Around this point, the joke became clear: This whole thing—album cycles, first-week sales, release dates, the album-as-statement, the album itself—is ridiculous. The only other recent marquee star to allow something this messy to bear their name was Rihanna, whose Anti was released into the world last month in a similarly slipshod manner. Both stars are jewels in the late-period Roc-A-Fella dynasty, their careers forged in the dying embers of the old-school music industry where promotional campaigns were telegraphed months in advance, where singles and video rollouts were executed with airstrike precision, where release dates loomed like skyscrapers. In the ensuing industry free fall, Kanye and Rihanna have weathered every absurdity imaginable—platinum plaques handed out by Samsung, biometric suitcases carrying leakproof records, artist-owned streaming services that put up their records for a few minutes by accident. Watching the sea of confusion and despair on news feeds and timelines, you can almost hear them chuckling: None of this matters, because none of it is real.
If there was a larger message behind all this impulsive last-second lurching and heaving, that was it. “We on an ultralight beam/This is a God dream” reads like an affirmation that we live in a world touched by divinity—but it could also mean the universe is a trick of the light, and we’re nothing but a figment in a higher being’s imagination. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is safe from revision, and nothing lasts: In one last rug pull, Kanye claimed that the “Pablo” of the title was neither Escobar nor Picasso, but St. Paul of Tarsus (“Pablo” in Spanish). The claim slots neatly with his assertion that The Life of Pablo is a “gospel album,” and on “Wolves,” he offers a resonant, lonely image: Kim and Kanye as Mary and Joseph, alone in the manger and surrounded by the void. “Cover Nori in lamb’s wool/We surrounded by/The fuckin’ wolves,” he raps. If Pablo is indeed St. Paul, Kanye might have a passage on his mind from 1 Corinthians 13:2: “If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
CORRECTION: The original version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from “Highlights" as a reference to writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy; it has since been removed.


After the more introspective tone of 2010’s Personal Life, Desperate Ground superficially evokes the Portland trio’s incendiary earlier work, speaking the same vocabulary as 2006’s high watermark, The Body, The Blood, The Machine.

Desperate Ground

Though the Thermals have often been described as a "political" punk rock band over the past decade, their latest album comes from an anti-apolitical standpoint, a less strident and specific version of protest music that reads more like common decency: not so much forged by considered opinions and intense debate as it is a natural byproduct of being sufficiently intelligent, informed, and idealistic. If you posted something on Facebook that admonished gun violence, war, or an impingement on civil rights, Desperate Ground would “like” it without leaving a comment. But it ultimately rings hollow here, as the Thermals still are trying to sound like insurrectionists while leaning so heavy on boilerplate sloganeering you’d think they were the ones running for public office.
After the more introspective tone of 2010’s Personal Life, Desperate Ground superficially evokes the Portland trio’s incendiary earlier work, speaking the same vocabulary as 2006’s high watermark, The Body, The Blood, The Machine-- so much that at the outset it feels like a return to form more than a retreat. In fact, opener “Born To Kill” could just be The Body’s supernatural sermon “I Might Need You to Kill” told from a different perspective. The Thermals were never much for variety or innovation anyway, and the 10 servings of zippy pop-punk here are of nearly uniform length, tempo, topic, and structure. Even the relative curveballs amidst the missionary strumming of four-chord progressions-- like Hutch Harris straining for a high note in the chorus, just exceeding his range-- seem to pop up in nearly the exact same place.
This classicist template is hard to fuck up, and the Thermals typically have good taste behind the boards: they might well be the only band who will ever be sympathetically produced by members of both Death Cab for Cutie and Fugazi, so the shift from John Congleton’s immaculate naturalism to 90s revivalist John Agnello (Male Bonding, Sonic Youth) should be a cinch. Yet Desperate Ground feels overproduced: The guitars are rendered toothless, in particular, the gutted distortion of “You Will Find Me”, which sounds ripped from a thrice-dubbed cassette.
Harris remains a distinctive and effective singer-- his nasal bray can cut through just about any kind of sonic clutter-- and Desperate Ground never drags, the hooks as facile and forgettable as you might expect from songs with titles such as “You Will Be Free”, “You Will Find Me”, and “Our Love Survives”. Let a latter-day Mark Hoppus or Jim Adkins get a crack at these melodies and you’d have a perfectly enjoyable and gooey low-stakes pop-punk record.
But Desperate Ground is a record that really wants to convey having something to say and Harris has run out of ways to say that something. Not long after “Born To Kill” sets the tone, Desperate Ground feels less like a sequel to The Body than a series of sequels to itself-- on “The Sunset”, Harris sings an executioner’s song, his remorse haunting him like his own shadow. On “Faces Stay With Me”, the same thing happens, only with faces instead of shadows. By the time “I Go Alone” situates itself between Whitesnake and Green Day, they’ve lost even the basic righteousness of sloganeering and you start to hear it as Thermals magnetic poetry with “blood,” “kill,” “war,” “road,” “sunset,” and “shadows” all popping up with alarming frequency. You could probably guess 75% of the lyrics from “The Sword By My Side” without even hearing it, and yes, they’re using a weapon as a metaphor for another weapon.
In a way, the stultifying generality of Desperate Ground does lend it a perspective, though it’s the all-too-common affliction of seeing the same wars drag on and the same talking heads making the same points on the news and feeling utterly helpless. Perhaps the pileup of clichés and the numbed production is supposed to give Desperate Ground a meta context, that the endless body count has rendered Harris completely desensitized. But that’s a generous reading for an album that begins and ends with guns-blazin' mission statements with plenty in between, so it’s more likely Desperate Ground is a failure to respond to the horror rather than an intention to reflect it.


What a Time to Be Alive was allegedly born out of an impromptu, six-day recording session between Drake and Future, and the mixed results won't surprise anyone who has already noted the decided lack of chemistry between the two. There's been a Drake feature on every Future album, but none of them are particularly riveting, and on What a Time it's clearer than ever that they have difficulty sharing the same space.

What a Time to Be Alive

Superstar team-ups almost always seem better in theory. History suggests they are nearly twice as likely to produce a resounding dud as a working piece of art, and yet the prospect never ceases to excite us. When rumors began to swirl weeks ago that Drake and Future might be releasing a joint project, the Internet went into a frenzy. Watch the Throne parallels were drawn, fake cover art circulated, and a website countdown appeared as if to wish it into existence.
What a Time to Be Alive materialized on Sunday*,* and the mixed results won't surprise anyone who has already noted the decided lack of chemistry between these two. There's been a Drake feature on every Future album, but none of them are particularly riveting, and on What a Time it's clearer than ever that they have difficulty sharing the same space. Many tracks are just Future songs with Drake verses tagged on (Future gets almost double the airtime), and Drake often sounds out of his element. When Future gets rolling on songs like "Digital Dash" and "Live From the Gutter", Drake is a bystander. The tape was allegedly born out of an impromptu, six-day recording session, and too many moments on it feel like they were thrown together in that time span. Drake probably shouldn’t be on a song called "I’m the Plug", for example, and the hook on "Big Rings" is terribly bland and awkward. This wasn't created with the care or the dutiful curation we've come to expect from both artists when solo.
But that spontaneity is kind of the point of What a Time to Be Alive. Unlike Watch the Throne, which was presented as a grand statement album from self-coronated heads of rap royalty, What a Time is a tag-on release, a one-off that intentionally exists in the shadows of its 2015 predecessors as a bonus disc. Designating it a tape seemingly alleviates the pressure to curate. Meanwhile, Drake’s cushy Apple deal allows him to disseminate it for retail via iTunes and premiere it exclusively on his OVO Sound show on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Radio. It’s a low risk, high reward proposition.
Both artists offer slightly watered-down versions of themselves: Drake offers snarky responses to his recent ghostwriting allegations ("I might take Quentin to Follies," "The pen is working if you niggas need some ghostlines," etc.) and Future mentions internal struggles ("When you say you love a nigga do you really mean it?/ When I was sleepin' on the floor you shoulda seen how they treat me/ I pour the Actavis and pop pills so I can fight the demons," "I watched my broad give up on me like I'm average"). It’s an odd juxtaposition, especially with Drake returning to the stiff, pinched "yes, I wrote these, can’t you tell?" style of his circa-2010 hashtag rap bars, with some truly dire results ("You remind me of a quarterback/ That shit is all in the past", from "Digital Dash", needed a vigorous "no" from someone in the room).
Even with Drake’s lazy punchlines, though, both he and Future are still great rap artists in their primes, and sometimes they figure things out just based on sheer talent. What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production, and Drake throws Future the perfect alley-oop on "Scholarship" over his muffled synths. "Jumpman" is a certifiable banger. "Diamonds Dancing" is the first great Drake-Future collab that clicks on all cylinders. Of course, the brightest moments for both rappers come at the end of WATTBA when they are each allowed to work on their own and make music in their respective comfort zones—first Future on "Jersey", then Drake on the 40-produced "30 for 30 Freestyle", which showcases some of his best rapping in recent memory. It’s a disjointed but fitting end for a working relationship that’s still a work in progress.


The Opium affiliate’s new album is a creative breakthrough, flipping the script on Atlanta rap production and funneling his hedonistic tendencies into joyously unholy music.

A Great Chaos

“Fuck,” Ken Carson mutters on “Jennifer’s Body,” as KP Beatz and Lucian’s cybernetic beat starts, stops, starts, stops, like a heaving spacecraft that just needs a good kick. (He said it’s a Green Day reference.) Strange, gleeful moments like this signal his considered approach to curating his new album, A Great Chaos, designed with restless attention to damage—on loop, it could soundtrack a never-ending moshpit. The beats are some of the hardest Ken’s ever rapped on, but A Great Chaos transcends via its details—in the folds of its rich, Atlantan production, in Ken’s vastly expanded arsenal of vocal stunts and inflections—fleshing out the world of an artist who previously hinted at this promise in fits and starts.
Ken Carson is a lot of things: Playboi Carti protégé turned star in his own right, excellent beat selector, style and swag influence to lots of young people. Somehow, still, the last thing I’d call him is “a good rapper.” Infusing Future and Thug’s straight-line flows and restless chants—and almost none of their personality or writing—with the artificial cool of a Mentos, he tends to lapse into wallpaper rage rap, the kind his young fans will pay money to see live because Carti hasn’t dropped in almost three years. They can barely explain what they like about his music.
Well, something shifted on A Great Chaos. Within the churn of these outrageous beats, Ken sounds alive, funneling his hedonistic tendencies into joyously unholy music. Just a couple minutes shorter than his last album, the limp X (which sounds even more lifeless now), Chaos feels brisker due to its more calculated sequencing. As in the past, production is handled collaboratively by a familiar cadre of artists: Dutch producers Starboy and Outtatown, Working on Dying’s F1LTHY, Lucian, Ssor.t, Lukrative of the collective Neilaworld, to name a few. Refreshingly, instead of copy-pasting rage beats or trying to chase after an abstract notion of punk, this album achieves some of its most monstrous moments by flipping the script on Atlanta rap for a new generation. Check the tumbling keys and organ glissando on the epic “Me N My Kup,” or how the descending, Lex Luger-esque snare roll on “Singapore” introduces an icy duet with Opium labelmate Destroy Lonely. That transitions into the thrillingly blown-out “Lose It” (which asks, What if Ken Carson dropped a late-2000s Gucci Mane tape?) and then into the bludgeoning “Hardcore,” where Ken pulls a WIZRD-era Future, repeating the same four words so that their shape and texture is pulled apart and reconfigured like clay.
Like Carti’s marble-mouthed verse on UTOPIA standout “FEIN,” Ken opts for a radically blunt approach, both in the delivery and the vocals-up-front mix. He sounds totally fried in the best way over Clif Shayne and Lucian’s rolling beat for “Pots” (imagine a swarm of those robot spiders from Spy Kids 2). On “Succubus,” which cranks up its heaviest bass frequencies into a blinding fog, he numbly croaks and croons through a bender while obsessing about an ex. He still sometimes reverts to uninspired clunkers and basic, Opium-core angst. (How many times do we need to hear about an “emo bitch” who “slit her wrists”?) And don’t get me started on this unforgivable get it? moment in “Vampire Hour”: “Everywhere I go, I keep a letter after J/Don’t let that shit go over your head, I keep a K.”
But cloaked in this album’s alluring packaging, a lot more of this strange, “bad” writing works because of how amped up everything is. Sometimes, he’ll do Wayne-like free association to land on future fan art: On the squelching “Nightcore 2,” he says he’s fly, then asks you to look up in the sky: “It’s not a plane, it’s not a bird/It’s X-Man, bitch, fuck what you heard!” It’s so dumb that you can’t help but crack a smile.
At a Brooklyn listening party for A Great Chaos last week, Ken moped around stage, lost in his own music, while a crowd of mostly high schoolers thrashed around and belted songs that had already leaked. At one point, he brought out Destroy Lonely; at another, his boss Playboi Carti, white diamonds embedded in his face like a Hindu god. Phones were whipped out, but Carti didn’t say a word, quickly retreating stage left to his posse and ceding attention back to Ken. It was no “Dre passing the torch to Kendrick” moment—they’re too cool for that—but the exhilarating music, experienced in unison by the Opium crew, indicated this was a coronation.
Rap since Whole Lotta Red, and since Yeat’s breakthrough records, has gotten brasher, bolder, more fiery. But Ken’s sound is now its own branch from that tree. The buzzing rapper OsamaSon, for example, seems to take influence from Ken’s sweltering production, meted-out flows, and flattened cadence. If Red is the Rosetta Stone for Rage 1.0, vast and colorful and dynamic, then A Great Chaos may well be the next crucial LP in this wave, capturing its own mind-numbing senselessness. It argues that maybe the doubters were just listening to Ken the wrong way. As for his longtime fans: This is the future those Rick-obsessed Opium disciples deserve: Something genuinely cool, risky, and relentless.


Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your ...

Billy Bragg / Wilco: Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II

Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II

Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your hat to your heart and sing our national anthem. You're standing-- okay, probably not-- to salute an American folk hero: Woody Guthrie. Indisputably one of our best singer/songwriters ever, Guthrie was the voice for those who didn't have one: the abandoned poor and the hard-working middle class, the despondent and the dreamers. In fact, Woody Guthrie is so historically important that the Smithsonian currently has an exhibit about him, named after his most famous song, the anti-"God Bless America" number, "This Land Is Your Land".
But as the existence of such an exhibit would suggest, Guthrie is a cultural icon only to older generations or the well-informed. The exhibit's video presentation shows how desperately the curators are trying to expose a new generation to his work. The video opens with Billy Bragg praising Guthrie as a "lyrical poet" who brought a personal edge to his socio-political songs. Then comes Billy Bragg & Wilco's version of "California Stars", culled from the first Mermaid Avenue album. Throughout the video, we also hear from Bono, Ani DiFranco, Corey Harris, Bob Dylan, and The Bruce (as in Springsteen). Of the twelve songs on the video soundtrack, only four are actually performed by Guthrie, including a repeat of "This Land Is Your Land".
This attempt to contemporize Woody Guthrie began in the spring of 1995 when his daughter, Nora, approached British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg with over 2,000 sets of lyrics her father never put to music before dying of Huntington's Disease in 1967. She asked Bragg, a politically charged musician himself, if he would like to choose a handful of songs and put them to music. Naturally, Bragg accepted the honor, asking Wilco's Jeff Tweedy to collaborate with him (Tweedy's background in the alt-folk/country/rock group Uncle Tupelo made him a perfect candidate). The result was 1998's rightfully critically acclaimed Mermaid Avenue, named after Guthrie's street on Coney Island.
Between the two of them, Billy Bragg and Wilco had twelve songs left over from the Mermaid Avenue sessions. So now, in 2000, they've decided to issue a second volume, only three songs of which were recorded since the original sessions. Perhaps this explains why the sound isn't much different this time around, and why the songs aren't on par with the previous album. Volume II is like an unnecessary b-sides compilation, and for the most part, there's a reason why these songs didn't make the cut the first time around.
Since Guthrie's lyrics are just as exceptional on this album, ranging from the romantic to the playful to the political, one must look solely at the music for comparison. Unfortunately, nothing on this album is as beautiful as "California Stars", as saddening as "At My Window Sad and Lonely", or as touching as "Another Man's Done Gone." In some cases, the songs on Volume II are the embarrassing cousins of songs from the first album. As an album opener, "Airline to Heaven" gets the foot stomping just as well as "Walt Whitman's Niece", but you can't sing along to it. And in the battle of songs about cultural icons, the plodding "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again" makes "Ingrid Bergman" seem much more pleasant than it really is. What's more, the weak moments here are even less passable than they were on volume one.
Nonetheless, the album does have its high points. Driven by an unvaried, chantey organ straight off Dylan's Time Out of Mind, "Hot Rod Hotel" is a haunting auto-biographical song about Guthrie's dreary jobs as a youth. On "My Flying Saucer" and "Secret of the Sea", Bragg and Wilco use lofty, wandering guitar notes to capture the fantasy in Guthrie's lyrics. On "All You Fascists", Bragg is accompanied by a driving guitar and raucous harmonica. When he belts out, "I'm gonna tell all you fascists you may be surprised/ The people in this world are getting organized/ You're bound to lose," he does so with an intensity that befits the lyrics. And on the final track, "Someday Some Morning Sometime", Tweedy's vocals are perfectly paced with Guthrie's lyricism.
If it weren't for the first album, I might really enjoy Volume II, but as it is, I'm corrupted by the greater artistic success of its predecessor.


The debut from the young East London rapper is a unique coming-of-age story that shapes the best of grime, Afrobeat, dancehall, and early ’00s hip-hop into a vibrant, wholly unique sound.

Common Sense

If you’re a rap fan, at some point this year, someone is going to recommend that you listen to J Hus, a 21-year-old from East London who raps with a gravity beyond his years. His music is boldly personal, and he’s a technically precise, adaptive vocalist. He can hit complicated patterns, pack color into his writing, and harmonize more effectively than artists with decades of experience. Enthusiastic coverage of J Hus has leaned heavily on his ability to blend a variety of musical styles—Afrobeat, dancehall, W. Bush-era hip-hop, tinges of grime—into a coherent, singular vision. His debut album, Common Sense folds all these influences into a world that is specific and engrossing. But there’s more than that: J Hus’ debut serves as a unique coming-of-age story, one that should resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.
J Hus was born Momodou Jallow in London to a mother who had emigrated from Gambia in her 20s. When he was a child, Hus (for “hustle”) accompanied her to parties where he was introduced to music from Africa. (Jae5, the producer responsible for crafting and expanding J Hus’ sound, spent three years in his parents’ native Ghana, making for another important connection to the continent’s pop music.) The Afrobeat threads run through Common Sense, alongside grime’s menace (see “Clartin”), contemplative pianos (“Who You Are”), or the sheen of turn-of-the-century Roc-A-Fella (the title track). The shifting musical styles underscore Hus’ own versatility; he flits from a lilting sing-song to something more gruff and guttural easily and without hesitation.
The production on Common Sense also pulls from a wide swath of source material, but J Hus himself is firmly rooted in hip-hop. J Hus has cited 50 Cent as a major influence, and on “Good Luck Chale” he channels mid-period Cam’Ron. Passages like “Who You Are”’s, “My pockets ain’t fat, they’re just big-boned/I sweet-talk my chicks on the flip phone/She wanna send me nudes, but ain’t no WhatsApp on a brick phone” would fit right in on a breakout mixtape from a New Yorker. The booming “Goodies” even recalls Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” the common denominator between the two artists being their comfort trafficking in Jamaican rhythms.
As J Hus’ popularity exploded in London over the past two years, he also became a target for enemies both in and out of police uniforms. Early last year, he served five months in prison on a weapons charge; in the summer of 2015, he was stabbed multiple times and rushed to the hospital. From his bed, he posted a jarring photo to his Instagram, flashing what appears to be a gang sign while a doctor tends to an open wound on his leg. London police have banned J Hus from playing headlining show in the city, a fate familiar to rappers worldwide. Despite these roadblocks, he’s become one of the most promising rising stars in UK music.
His album is alive with this tension between the larger-than-life, invulnerable character he sometimes embodies on wax and a thoughtful, sensitive adolescent. The elastic bounce of “Bouff Daddy” might as well be the theme for a superhero but “Closed Doors” hears J Hus, over a vintage trumpet line, deliver the kind of earnest, eager declarations everyone makes when they’re 18: “I’ma give it to you all, give you everything/And even take you where you never been.” “Like Your Style” is soaked in Ciroc, but he’s pouring it in wine glasses while he entertains girls from the local university. In many ways, this is an album about someone on the brink: of adulthood, of death, of fame and fortune.
And so the musical diversity on Common Sense feels less like a formal exercise or a crash course in curatorial tastemaking, and more like the hyperactive, omnivorous brain of a 20-something who has a WiFi connection and a flat in one of the world’s biggest cities. What it reveals is someone of talent, ambition, and enough wit and self-awareness to keep that ambition grounded in reality. It’s an excellent debut from an artist on the cusp.


The Atlanta rapper’s third record is both wildly innovative and strikingly consistent. It’s hard, melodic, experimental, and unlike anything else happening in mainstream rap.

Whole Lotta Red

Whole Lotta Red functions like a pressure cooker. Playboi Carti takes an endless supply of bright and serrated beats and packs them together, end on end, so that the album seems to careen wildly toward an unknown destination. Those beats are then populated by the 24-year-old’s most outré, expressive vocals yet, a string of barks, ad-libbed shards, and crooned melodies that compound the mania. The effect is to make Whole Lotta Red’s predecessor, 2018’s already intense Die Lit, sound nearly staid by comparison––and Carti’s slightly cloudy, self-titled debut from 2017 seem positively tranquilized.
Despite his youth and his brisk release schedule, Carti’s cultish fanbase would have you believe that the periods between his records are long droughts, ones that can only be weathered with frenzied detective work. It is easy to find hours-long playlists of unreleased Carti songs, some ripped in 15-second increments from Instagram stories, others leaked by hangers-on or purchased from enterprising hackers. For an artist who already has an audience’s attention, snippets and half-finished leaks can be more effective than singles: Our brains correct for the compression of sound by imagining the fullest possible mix, and hearing the most interesting parts of a song—the bridge that everyone in the studio agrees is the best part, the opening four-bar run that justifies the track’s existence—suggests a more exciting finished product than the one that, in all likelihood, exists.
Whole Lotta Red transposes that thrill of hearing an inspired work-in-progress and builds it out into a fully realized style. There is no imposed formality of structure or delivery that could stiffen Carti or bleed the life out of the demos; instead, there is “New Tank,” which seems to have a half-dozen chorus ideas that are dispensed in a single long take. Verses disintegrate into Gregorian chants; “D-R-A-C-O” is spelled out repeatedly as if Carti’s trying to win the world’s most heavily armed spelling bee; the middle of the absolutely skull-rattling “Stop Breathing” is built around a single, constant ad-lib sound. Even when songs do conform to more traditional arrangements, they arrive at them in unexpected ways. “Beno!” opens with an aside about Carti buying his sister a Jeep, a cute and specific image in step with the beat, which sounds like an iPhone ringing in heaven. It’s only halfway through the song that it becomes clear that aside—one of the least-produced vocal stretches on the album—will be repurposed and repeated as a chorus. At its best, Whole Lotta Red sounds like Carti’s voice memos have been laid over the most punishing production he could find.
One of the signature elements of Carti’s style has been his so-called “baby voice,” a softer touch in a higher register. He has not completely excised it from Whole Lotta Red, but the album’s most arresting moments come when Carti is rasping, evidently on the verge of losing his breath. (WLR smartly opens with one of its most propulsive songs, where Carti’s voice sounds as if it’s already been strained by an hour-long performance.) Most impressive is the way Carti has merged his delivery with his pared-down writing style, like when he gets stuck on the line “When I go to sleep, I dream about murder,” delivered over and over in a threatening stage whisper.
For an album with such an extensive list of producers and co-producers—there are 24 beats, and only two from longtime collaborator Pi’erre Bourne—WLR maintains a strikingly consistent palette of mostly electronic sounds. But those sounds are deployed in dizzyingly varied ways, from the white-hot punkish tracks near the beginning to the evolutions of early-2010s molly rap that pop up toward its end. (Sometimes there are literal echoes: KP Beatz and Jonah Abraham’s “No Sl33p,” which comes immediately after Juberlee and Roark Bailey’s “Slay3r,” might as well have been built around a hummed recollection of “Slay3r.”) There is sinister Atlanta rap scaffolding—Richie Souf’s “JumpOutTheHouse” sounds like something an agitated Gucci Mane might have jumped on in 2008—but also a refreshing sense of humor, and a looseness that allows the zaniest idea to occasionally win. On “Vamp Anthem,” when KP and Jasper Harris—I’m not sure how to say this—chop up Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” you can practically see Carti laying the vocals in a black cape and those plastic Halloween fangs.
The core element of Whole Lotta Red is its hyperkinetic pacing, especially in its extended opening run. With the three-song set of “New N3on,” “Control,” and “Punk Monk,” the album transitions from its buzzsaw front half to the more exultant back, but also introduces minor problems of bloat and pacing: Each of these three songs has a better-executed analogue elsewhere on the tracklist, though “Monk” is redeemed in part by the industry intrigue it airs. And the trio of guest appearances (a phoned-in Future verse on “Teen X,” stock Kid Cudi on the texturally interesting but too-long “M3tamorphosis,” and executive producer Kanye West’s verse on “Go2DaMoon”) should all have been left on a hard drive somewhere. These are quibbles, mostly, but they add up—less for being outright failures on their own terms, and more for derailing the momentum that Carti otherwise so carefully creates.
It’s one thing for a 24-song, hour-long album that had become an object of such intense speculation to deliver on its promise. That it does so while maintaining an aura of mystery around its creator is doubly impressive. In some ways, Carti’s public persona betrays his fixation on high fashion: the rapper as couture, something you can’t simply walk into a department store and see, touch, own. His work, or at least traces of it, seems ever-present, but the man himself is a bit of a ghost. By contrast, the songs on Whole Lotta Red are urgent, immediate. While they seldom trade in anything like autobiography, they cut close to the bone all the same.

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UK producer Stuart Howard's Brainfeeder debut offers sparkling pop deconstructed with avant-garde abandon.

When You're Gone EP

Brainfeeder kingpin Flying Lotus has a talent for stargazing. The label's ranks include jazz fusionists (Thundercat, Austin Peralta), psych-rap futurists (Samiyam, Teebs), and the endearingly inscrutable (Matthewdavid) existing together in dazzling constellation. But when Baths signed to Anticon, Brainfeeder lost their experimental pop artist, the kind of producer who could marry head-swiveling beats to ghostly vocals.
Consider that niche filled. Lapalux, aka Stuart Howard, makes a similar type of sparkling deconstructed pop. He fits the Brainfeeder aesthetic perfectly, as he likes to envision his songs as aural paintings-- a visual tie-in obviously appealing to a synaesthete like FlyLo. Lapalux's snares first started snapping on his remix of Thundercat's "For Love I Come". Suddenly, a relatively straightforward love song turned fuzzy and discombobulated, as if the track had been put on small wheels and spun around a room until it was too dizzy to keep its parts in order.
The Essex native's aesthetic has advanced on the When You're Gone EP. The tracks sound like amniotic imaginings of more accessible songs: all parts present but re-arranged with avant-garde abandon. The structure of "102 Hours of Introductions" is practically non-existent on first listen: gliding with faint keys and a wispy voice, as though Howard's setting up the listener for a massive drop. Instead, the beat is disarmingly light, softly swathed in a vocal that repeats ad infinitum: "I've been waiting so long. Give your love to me, baby."
For a label that's made its name on galvanizing the spare parts of hip-hop, soldering them into novel formations, and blasting that formation into the stratosphere, When You're Gone is surprisingly needy. But that's the point of Brainfeeder: Expectations are expected to be upended. Lapalux's specialty is fusing the label's sense of meticulous beatcraft to tease out the meanings behind the sampled lyrics. "Moments" begins with a lyricist languidly confessing: "I keep moments of you trapped in film." As the song unfurls, the singer's utterings become swamped in sonic ooze, mirroring the song's theme. The effect is jarring, and at the song's conclusion, he cuts through the sentimentality, warping the moment that the singer once deeply treasured.
But it's not all dark. The best songs, the bewitching single "Gutter Glitter" and stuttering disco workout "Yellow 90's", are lithe and light. The former starts with an elliptical loop but quickly skitters into a James Blake-like R&B track-- a voice hovering above buzzing bass and fluttering synths. Howard acts as a conductor here, demanding that specific sections express themselves with more volume. "Yellow 90's" seems the most traditionally ordered and even veers toward danceable. Yet once you're locked in the groove, the chair is removed and the song unravels. However, the song stays afloat, ending on a patch of gorgeous haze and a delirious lingering confusion.
Howard's Brainfeeder debut shatters expectations, offering an always shifting balance of alien and familiar. It's not perfect. The closer, "Face Down, Eyes Shut", tries so hard to be enigmatic that it dissolves into nothing. But more often, When You're Gone reveals a stunning beauty within its small moments.


Based loosely on Ovid’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth, the Icelandic composer’s latest work reveals the grandeur of his music outside of scoring films.

Orphée

Orphée, the latest album by the Icelandic composer and filmmaker Jóhann Jóhannsson is billed as his first studio album in six years since the somber and excellent The Miners’ Hymns**. But during that time Jóhannsson has released eight records—three of which were scores to major films (including Sicario & The Theory of Everything) and the rest music for smaller film projects, one of which Jóhannsson directed himself. But with even The Miners’ Hymns itself serving as a score to a film, the particular criteria for which Jóhannsson deems a record to be a “studio album” as opposed to a “film score” is somewhat unclear. What is clear is that after years of albums on 4AD and small post-classical labels such as Fat Cat’s 130701, in moving to Deutsche Grammophon—the oldest and most significant classical music label left standing—Jóhannsson wants Orphée to be seen as a work of music propped up by nothing but itself and its own deserved grandeur.
Loosely themed around Ovid's version of the Orpheus myth, Orphée’s grandeur is made clear within seconds. Using only a few repeated parts of piano, violin, and some crackling sound treatments, opener “Flight from the City” takes off. It feels like film music in a way that most of Orphée does not; you could easily imagine it playing over credits, or an opening scene, or in a mid-film montage. But the palette, tone, and structure of Orphée vary greatly and much of it embraces a compositional approach akin to ’90s chamber experimentalists the Rachel’s and others in the post-classical mold on 130701 or Erased Tapes. “A Song for Europa” features more of those crackling sound treatments as well as a recurring spectral vocal sample, while the stately “A Deal With Chaos” or “The Radiant City” would be at home on the Rachel’s Music for Egon Schiele.
Apart from “Flight from the City,” the most unforgettable tracks on Orphée are where Jóhannsson adds more experimental textures, particularly in the penultimate diptych of “Good Morning, Midnight” and “Good Night, Day.” In a way, these two tracks play out the climax of the Orpheus myth: The former begins with dreamy slow-waltz strings and burbling sound effects that connote the gait of a person heading toward destiny unknown, before giving way to a close-mic'd solo piano piece that sounds like the ruminative thoughts of man by way of Satie-style impressionism. The latter, “Good Night, Day,” begins with repeated string warnings that plays as a realization of chased dreams lost, with a cello melody serving as an elegiac narrative counterpoint. On each, the blend of early 20th-century modalities and experimental recording approaches make them archetypal post-classical tracks.
Boldest of all is Orphée’s a capella closer “Orphic Hymn,” which features a breathtaking choral vocal performance by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices of text from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. Sung vocals are rarely found in Jóhannsson’s work, but the angelic arrangement makes you wish that he had found more opportunities to integrate vocals into the rest of the record. “Orphic Hymn” also brings Jóhannsson back full circle to British post-classical elder statesman Michael Nyman. The piece strongly recalls the longing of “Miserere” from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, a great example of how Nyman’s scores work as independent music woven into a film rather than applied to the surface of scenes.
It’s exciting to hear the freedom of Jóhannsson’s compositions in autonomous music, and with Orphée he’s reasserted himself as not a just an elegiac film score guy. As good as his cinema work has been, the act of telling someone else’s story puts limits on both an artist’s freedom to work and the impact of how they might be received, and Jóhannsson likely isn’t looking to become known as “the Next Thomas Newman.” The voice he uses on Orphée says otherwise, and provides a clear blast attestation that Jóhannsson is among the brightest lights of any member of the loosely grouped post-classical genre.


On her fifth album, Swift loses her naïveté. It’s her full turn into pop, a savvy move from a superstar thrust into the spotlight.

1989

If there’s one thing Taylor Swift wants you to know about her, it is that she once felt deeply uncool. Even as a superstar with best-selling albums, stadium tours, and high-profile friends, she said in 2014 that she had never felt “edgy, cool, or sexy.” Her first four albums hinge on that feeling, full of vivid, sprawling documents of failed romances that left her gasping for air, wondering how to be someone her lovers would miss. She was almost always the one who was in pain, the outsider, the underdog.
That changed with 1989. Its predecessor, Red, was the pinnacle of diaristic specificity, an album that blew up the tiny intimate details of her romances into public eulogies. The media surrounding that album critiqued Swift as clingy, boy-obsessed, and vindictive. 1989 is in part Swift’s response to the negative, often sexist, press she’d received. On the album, Swift loses her naïveté, dons a sense of unfazed nonchalance, and learns to navigate a world that underappreciated her lyricism and shamed her for dating too many men. She has said that she would work in marketing if she didn’t work in music but, really, she has already been doing both simultaneously and spectacularly.
For those who might openly cry while listening to Red, the first listen of 1989 stings of indifference. The album, named after the year she was born, treats heartbreak as if observing a painting on a wall, rather than a feeling she desperately needs to articulate. Grandiose memories of 2 a.m. fights and dancing in refrigerator light are replaced with glossy odes to big cities and weekend flings. Where liner notes of previous albums offered hyper-specific hints about each song’s subject, these tell the story of a generic on-again off-again romance. At the time, Swift temporarily disavowed dating to instead celebrate the power of female friendship and flaunt her celebrity “girl squad” with extravagant Fourth of July parties and a different guest appearance every night of her tour. Yet 1989 is the album that feels least like spending quality time with your best friends.
Still, there’s an allure to 1989’s escapism. Now the dramas of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Fearless’ “Love Story”) or 1945 Americana (Red’s “Starlight”) come with lower stakes; her new fantasy world allows for broken hearts to be stored away safely in a drawer. The polished, propulsive synth-pop of album highlight “Style” showcases it best, with lyrics that celebrate a lustful relationship between people whose most revealing traits are that they would look good together on a movie poster. Is it about a real experience, or is it fiction? “Blank Space” weaponizes Swift’s newfound romantic skepticism: In the accompanying music video, an aristocratic romance deteriorates catastrophically, poisoned by her jealousy and need to control her partner. On Speak Now’s “Dear John,” she’d lamented being added to a lover’s “long list of traitors who don’t understand.” Here, she proudly flaunts her own “long list of ex-lovers” who think she’s crazy, adding the sound of a clicking pen to heighten the gleeful melodrama. She looks at the camera almost as much as she does her lover, warning us that she knows what we think of her and she doesn’t care.
Though Swift’s interest in pop was evident on songs like Red’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and Speak Now’s “Better Than Revenge,” 1989 was the first time an entire Swift album could exist as party music without slow-burning heartache. These were still love songs, so Swift’s familiar themes peak through—dismissal of doubters, pleas to remember a romance favorably after it ends, and heavy use of one of her favorite words, “forever.” Still, the glitzy sound and ethos provided an entry point for new listeners and a chance for old ones to come up for air, to recognize that everything doesn’t always have to be so serious. It can be just as freeing to shrug in the face of heartache as it is to spell out exactly why and how you were hurt.
“New Romantics,” a surging, euphoric song from the deluxe version of the album that was released as a final single, does this particularly well. Swift’s voice is processed and couched in thrilling yelps and sighs, crunchy synth, and galloping drums. After a certain amount of pain, sometimes your best defense is to channel the burning energy of your big hopes and desires into a night of uninhibited hedonism.
On Speak Now’s “Mean,” Swift told a critic that one day she would be “living in a big ol’ city,” while he’d never be anything but a washed-up hater. On 1989’s opener “Welcome to New York,” she makes good on that promise. She was already famous when she wrote “Mean,” of course, but now she sounded like she was “big enough so you can’t hit me.” The big ol’ city was imaginary; but on 1989, Swift writes and inhabits a fully-realized fantasy of self-reliance, confidence, and ensuing pleasure. Her music was no longer just a diary entry. You can almost hear her winking on every track.


On his latest, “Uptown Funk” vocalist and animatronic sequined suit Bruno Mars compresses all of his various personae into one: The retro song-and-dance man who happens to be really, really horny.

24K Magic

It’s good to remember the improbable things in life. For example: “Uptown Funk” vocalist and animatronic sequined suit Bruno Mars once sang the words “loungin’ on the couch just chillin’ in my Snuggie.” Every part of it is retroactively bizarre: the idea that Mars, the hardest-working embodiment of the “hardest-working man in showbiz” cliche, once attached himself to something called “The Lazy Song”; that he once aligned himself with flash-in-the-pan acoustic bros like Travie McCoy; or, more broadly, that he used to make pop in the 2010s that sounded like the 2010s. Much has been made of Mars’ childhood stint as an Elvis impersonator, with reason. The same talent that allowed a squeaky 4-year-old to channel, uncannily, the King’s gruff bark and distant whiff of scandal is the talent that allows Mars to inhabit whatever he wants. He’s as convincing a cheeky horndog (early hits with his production group the Smeezingtons include Flo Rida’s cheesy-sleazy hit “Right Round” and Mike Posner’s dubiously conceived “Bow Chicka Wow Wow”) as he is a worshipful loverman (the chaste stretch from “Nothin’ on You” through “Grenade”); he's as eager an omnivorous music fan (the Unorthodox Jukebox era remade Billy Joel and the Police as faithfully as any R&B or funk referents) as the comparatively laser-focused revivalist of 24K Magic.
Also improbable: that “Uptown Funk,” still inescapable at weddings and stadiums near you, still has life in it, let alone an album’s worth. The title track to 24K Magic is all but an explicit retread: YSL swapped out for designer minks, Chucks for Inglewood’s finest shoes, corny “dragon wanna retire, man” line for corny line about red getting the blues, “Oops Upside Your Head” biting swapped out for only slightly less lawsuit-prone Zapp voiceover vocoders. What it lacks in a hook it makes up for (almost) with vibe, and more importantly, earnestness.
24K Magic, the album, sticks to the same well-trod path. It often comes off as a one-man recreation of Mark Ronson’s similarly retro-fetishist Uptown Special—Ronson himself was tapped early on as a potential collaborator—with one key difference: all roles here are filled by Mars. Aside from a couple guest production jobs by former collaborators Jeff Bhasker and Emile Haynie, the album is largely produced by Shampoo Press & Curl—a mildly reorganized incarnation of the Smeezingtons. And as Mars boasted in pre-album press, there are no features. The idea is that he needs no features. He’s become practically all things to all people—he has enough session-wonk credibility to appeal to the Grammy-voting industry types who’ve adopted Mars as a standard-bearer for Real Musicianship; he has enough pop and R&B cred to keep the radio listeners around; enough showmanship to pull off a Super Bowl halftime performance while barely into his career; enough wedding-reception goofiness to ingratiate himself to anyone left over.
The line between lovingly recreating the music of the past and cynically 3D-printing it for easy profit is fine and much fretted-over, sometimes at book length. And indeed, 24K Magic aims to recreate a time and a vibe much of its personnel weren’t even around for. (Said producer and Mars collaborator Brody Brown of a side project that sounds suspiciously 24K Magic-adjacent: “It’s going to make you feel like 1985—even though I wasn’t born until 1989.”) But in a self-conscious Vegas-revival way, 24K Magic pulls it off. It helps that it compresses all Mars’ personae into one. Go back to Smeezingtons cowrite “Fuck You” and you’ll find a blueprint: a retro-obsessed guy who makes songs your great-uncle recognizes, that also happens to be really, really horny. It helps that the album is barely over 30 minutes and meticulously sequenced, and it also helps that Mars is a notorious perfectionist (in a Rolling Stone interview earlier this year, he bragged about the dozens of versions of these tracks that got scrapped because the vibe wasn't right; routine studio business, to be sure, but Mars evidently takes it more seriously than most).
It helps that the past couple years have gradually whetted pop audiences’ appetite for sounds that might have once been considered too chintzy for top 40. “Perm” may be yet another attempt to revive James Brown, but while it isn’t quite as convincing as Mystikal’s would-be resurrection on Uptown Special, it does gives us the deliberate anachronism of a James Brown song with the line “forget your Instagram and your Twitter.” “That’s What I Like” is a song about opulence that sounds it—it’s sort of like what The 20/20 Experience thought it was—while “Versace on the Floor” and “Too Good to Say Goodbye” are as faithful recreations of mid-’90s R&B as you’ll find outside the decade, from the roller-rink synths of the former to the latter’s slow-dance power balladry (albeit one that, if it actually came out then, would mostly recall Luther doing “Superstar”).
But most of all, it helps that Mars is a consummate performer; this kind of showmanship is  much more convincing, and coherent, from one showman than from one dilettante producer. If “Uptown Funk” was the theme-park version of one sliver of funk, 24K Magic is the rest of the park: rebuilt shinier and glitzier and safer, every element engineered to please more than the real thing, and with a hell of a tour guide. It’s not history, not even historical fiction, but harmless fun.


The Australian electronic-music producer and streaming behemoth signals a shift in his approach with a surprise mixtape featuring appearances from JPEGMAFIA and SOPHIE.

Hi This Is Flume

In a “visualizer” accompanying his career-high mixtape Hi This Is Flume, the Australian electronic producer drives a car decorated in kaleidoscopic metal panels, like something that the pastel-obsessed pop artist Bridget Riley might create for MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.” When the vehicle needs refueling, he cracks open a can of La Croix and dumps it into the gas tank. The appearance of the mildly flavored, urbanite-favored seltzer here is clearly meant to be at least partly tongue in cheek. But there’s something fitting about it, too: Of course Flume would drink La Croix.
Despite his work with inventive artists like Vince Staples and Lorde (and a Grammy to his name), Harley Streten’s music as Flume has often felt like bait for audiences who have moved on from the soft-focus EDM of the influential YouTube channel Majestic Casual but still prefer to keep their listening lite. His mega-popular pillowy bangers are engineered for broad appeal, often possessing the “soft, emo-y, cutesy” simplicity that one streaming-first producer, speaking anonymously to Liz Pelly in The Baffler, recognized as playlisting catnip.
Hi This Is Flume is set up to self-consciously dismantle the view of Streten as making music optimized for the algorithm. The mixtape’s title has a pointed sense of re-introduction, like the pop superstar who indicates, with a self-titled album years into an established career, that she is pushing the reset button. One song, the bright, chime-strewn “Ecdysis,” is even named after the process of a snake shedding its epidermis. (Streten’s previous full-length was titled Skin, geddit?) Underscoring this message is Hi This Is Flume’s opening title track, a spoken-word novelty which parodies streaming platform commercials. “Tap the artwork to listen and save to your own music collection,” Streten says with satirical faux-buoyancy. Then he screams.
Hi This Is Flume is, both philosophically and sonically, an inflection point. Seventeen cohesive tracks nudge the needle on Streten’s sound, with frequent jump cuts from dismantled clubby beats to pogo-inducing drops and thick bass, while generally keeping his gifts for emotive melodies in the foreground. The bulk of the mixtape’s tracks circle the two-minute mark, giving the sense of a sketched roadmap to a new outlook (Streten has already promised “more music to come”). “Dreamtime,” a vortex of white noise with feathery vocal effects, could soundtrack a Coachella documentary filmed by David Lynch, while the synths of “Jewel” take on an uncanny vocaloid quality, a little like the melodic manipulations of Battles’ “Atlas.” At other times, a certain scrappiness would be welcome: less airtight momentum, more negative space. “Wormhole,” for all its Call of Duty lock-and-load effects, never quite feels sinister, and the siren-like textures of “Daze 22.00” aren’t as trippy as the title promises. Hi This Is Flume’s fragment-like moments might take on more dynamic and emotive tension if Streten allowed himself more complex arrangements, or track lengths with more room to maneuver.
In her review of Flume’s Skin, Stacey Anderson noted a “mathematical quality” in the way Streten treated the vocals of his guest singers, most of them women. Happily, Hi This Is Flume snuffs out that habit, adopting a more sparing and even-handed approach to collaboration. Just four songs feature guest vocalists, and one of those is a remix. The SOPHIE co-production “Voices” is a Gregorian-chant-led melodrama, reminiscent in part of Fatima Al Qadiri’s experiments with religious music, with a yearning Kučka hook that’s shredded and slapped with latex. SOPHIE’s idiosyncratic style seems to have had a more holistic effect on Hi This Is Flume, too—and not just in Flume and San Francisco producer Eprom’s superfluously amped-up “Is It Cold in the Water?” remix. The stepped-on balloon squeaks and soda-can hiss of “Amber” also call to mind SOPHIE’s earliest music, offering further evidence of Streten’s ear turning toward pop’s relative fringes.
Speaking to Zane Lowe last year, Streten detailed his technique when working with rappers, one that involved overhauling the beat after they lay down their verses “so the whole piece of music fits the vocal like a glove.” He hasn’t always made good on that, given previous disjointed tracks with Vic Mensa and Pusha T. Refreshingly, Hi This Is Flume’s two collaborations in this vein, both highlights, flow much more naturally. “High Beams,” a co-production with Perth-born HWLS, pairs Slowthai’s livestreamed-from-hell punchlines with thudding bass and jostling clusters of synths. And the hydraulic bounce of “How to Build a Relationship” ricochets from menacing low end to ray-gun zaps around JPEGMAFIA’s riotous quotables.
Many artists have an anecdote that they are forced to regurgitate in every interview. For Streten, it’s the story of how he started making music after downloading a “gimmicky,” loop-based music program from a giveaway in a Nutri-Grain cereal box. “The whole concept of how music was laid out in layers [...] but came out as one piece of music was really intriguing for me,” he has said. The most vivid takeaway from Hi This Is Flume is how he breaks apart his now-familiar sound, zooming in on the different layers and looking at them in new ways. He has taken his music a long way from the safety of the cereal box. It will be fascinating to see how far he is willing to push it.


The long-awaited debut from this hotly tipped South London rapper fails to meet its astronomical expectations but shows glimmers of real brilliance.

No Panic No Pain

A week before Flohio’s debut mixtape was due for release, the south London rapper was having second thoughts about the title. Unveiled, as it was originally to be known, didn’t feel right. No Panic No Pain, a lyric from the title track, was a better fit, Flohio said, for “a challenging time like this where I feel a little vulnerable.” There’s little sign of this vulnerability on the retitled tape: its 10 mostly brief tracks are cool and aloof, and the sound is more concrete façade than open-armed embrace. Opener “FLOFLO!” begins with Flohio, real name Funmi Ohiosumah, making awkward apologies over the phone for not being more emotionally available—before withdrawing abruptly into her own stresses: “All I know is madness,” she raps tensely, trailing off.
Flohio’s journey to this point has been one studded with acclaim. She first turned heads four years ago with a bouncy homage to her hood in “SE16”; fashion mag Dazed named her in its zeitgeisty Dazed100 list a year later. A steady drip of arresting singles led to 2018’s four-track Wild Yout EP and saw her lumped in with a loose grouping of alt-rappers that included the likes of Denzel Curry, slowthai, and Kojey Radical. She covered magazines and was picked out by supermodel Naomi Campbell as one of “10 Rising Female Stars Reimagining Our Future” for a piece of Vogue brandvertorial. The BBC named her in its influential ‘Sound of...’ list for 2019. The belated arrival and pressure of outsize expectations on this debut full-length release might explain Flohio’s last-minute jitters. The result doesn’t quite live up to the hype (it’s difficult to imagine what could), but still offers moments that confirm why everyone has been so excited about this 28-year-old rapper.
If you haven’t been to Flohio’s backyard of Bermondsey in south London—with its brick-built factories, warehouses, and disused wharves—then listening to No Panic No Pain is a good way to visit. The beats tend towards distorted kicks, metallic snares, and industrial synths. Flohio’s go-to flow is one that’s clipped and staccato, all straight edges. It’s a sometimes exhausting pairing that contracts and flattens song structures. “Booby Traps” feels stiff and fails to generate much forward momentum from a chanted call to arms; “Flash” gets halfway to a catchy chorus before shrinking back into verses that are difficult to decipher. Touches of US rap gloss offer some relief: on the Take a Daytrip-produced “Unveiled,” Flohio adds a silky sheen to her snippy flow that, contrasted with the natural grit in her voice, sounds vivid and bright. In the past she’s identified Lil Wayne as an influence, and this comes through as a playful lilt in her voice over the flexy swing of “Sweet Flaws”; on “Stuck In A Dance,” she elongates rounded vowels and floats from kick to snapping rimshot with gripping effect. These are real glimmers of brilliance; but No Panic No Pain would be more memorable if it had more of them.
Beyond that, it’s hard to identify exactly what’s missing. The appearance of a picked guitar on “Medicine” draws Flohio into sensitive introspection and a looser flow that adds some balance to the mixtape’s otherwise relentless pummel. The melancholy of “Roundtown” (with its chorus of “I’ve been around town, for a second going ham now/See me rolling tryna get my balance right”) puts the brakes on somewhat, but still struggles under its oppressive delivery. Despite its short runtime, No Panic No Pain can sometimes feel like an endurance test, more marathon wall than victory lap. People tend to encounter panic and pain—unpleasant though they are—when the body needs them most. They’re best experienced in small doses. Sadly, it’s hard not to feel the same way about this mixtape.

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Though it has perhaps slipped in estimation since its initial issue, the 1967 release that defined the LP format still packs surprises.

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Finally free of touring, the Beatles next sought to be free of themselves, hitting on the rather daft concept of recording as an alias band. The idea held for all of two songs, one coda, and one album sleeve, but was retained as the central organizing and marketing feature of the band’s 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hailed on its release as proof that popular music could be as rich an artistic pursuit as more high-minded media such as jazz and classical, the record’s reputation and sense of ambition ushered in the album era. Its influence was so pervasive and so instructional regarding the way music is crafted and sold to the public that this is still the predominant means of organizing, distributing, and promoting new music four decades later, well after the decline of physical media.
The concept, of course, is that the record was to be recorded by the titular fictional band, a washed-up rock’n’roll group on the comeback trail. (This was actually the second concept earmarked for the Beatles’ next LP; the original, a record of songs about Liverpool, was abandoned when its first two tracks were needed for the group’s next single, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane.”) Probably for the best, little of the fictional-band vision for the record made it through; what did last from that conceit are a few tangential ideas—a satirical bent on popular entertainment and a curiosity with nostalgia and the past.
The record opens with a phony live performance by the Lonely Hearts Band, a sort of Vegas act—the sort of thing that, in 1963, people thought the almost certainly soon-to-be-passé Beatles would be doing themselves in 1967. Instead, the Beatles had completed their shattering of the rules of light entertainment, even halting their own live performances, which they’d never again do together for a paid audience.
Even as they mocked this old version of a performing band, ironically Sgt. Pepper’s and its ambitions helped to codify the rock band as artists rather than popular entertainers. In the hands of their followers, the notion of a pop group as a compact, independent entity, responsible for writing, arranging, and performing its own material would be manifested in the opposite way—rather than holing up in the studio and focusing on records, bands were meant to prove in the flesh they could “bring it” live. Notions of authenticity and transparency would become valued over studio output. (To be fair, upstart bands had to gig in order to get attention and a reputation, while the Beatles, of course, could write, break, and rewrite their own rules; they had the luxury and freedom to take advantage of a changing entertainment world and could experiment with different, emerging models of how to function as a rock band in much the same way that Trent Reznor or Radiohead can today.)
The freedom from live performance didn’t necessitate that Beatles songs now sounded practiced or rehearsed, and indeed they weren’t. Instead, they were studio creations assembled in sections and pieces. As the band splintered, this practice would spill over into releasing song sketches on the White Album and inspire, in part through necessity, the lengthy song cycle at the close of Abbey Road. On Sgt. Pepper’s, the most rewarding manifestation of this shift was the record’s most forward-looking piece, “A Day in the Life.” Complex in construction and epic in feel, “A Day in the Life” nevertheless seems enveloping and breezy to listeners. Indeed, the sustained, closing ringing chord of the song comes a mere 4:20 into the track.
“A Day”’s only best-in-show competitor was McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home.” (As on Revolver, the peaks here were a mold-breaking closer and classically inspired story-song.) “A Day in the Life” has only grown in estimation, rightfully becoming one of the most acclaimed Beatles tracks. “She’s Leaving Home,” by contrast, has slid from view—perhaps too maudlin to work on classic rock radio and too MOR for hipster embrace, it was nevertheless the other headline track on Sgt. Pepper’s when it was released. The story of a runaway teen, it misses as a defiant generational statement in part because it's actually sympathetic to the parents in the song. In the second verse, McCartney defies expectations by not following the young girl on her adventure but keeping the track set in the home as her parents wake to find her goodbye letter.
In the end, we learn “She” left home for “fun”—a rather churlish reason, and when paired with McCartney’s simplistic sentiments in “When I’m 64” (the aging couple there will be happy to “scrimp and save”), the young girl seems more selfish than trapped. In fact, for a group whose every move was a generational wedge, and for such a modern record, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s is oddly conservative in places: “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” takes inspiration from a Victorian-era carnival; “When I’m 64” is a music-hall parody that fantasizes about what it would be like to be the Beatles’ grandparents’ age; “Fixing a Hole” has a rather mundane domestic setting; the fantasy girl in “Lovely Rita” is a cop.
Lyrically, it's an atypical way to usher in the Summer of Love, but musically, the record is wildly inventive, built on double-tracking, tape effects, and studio technology. The dream-like haze of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the fairground, sawdust feel of “Mr. Kite,” and the cavalcade of sound effects at the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” were the most demonstrative sounds on the record, but otherwise benign passages were also steeped in innovation, whether recording from the inside of a brass instrument or plugging instruments directly into the sound board instead of capturing them through mics.
Almost everything done on Sgt. Pepper’s turned out to be new and forward-thinking, from the iconic record sleeve to the totemic ending to “A Day in the Life.” There are very few moments in pop music history in which you can mark a clear before and after, in which almost everything changed. In the UK, it’s arguably happened only five times, and on just four instances in the U.S. (Thriller here; acid house and punk there, and Elvis everywhere, of course); in both nations, the Beatles launched two of those moments.
In retrospect, it almost seems like this time the band itself was taken aback by its own accomplishments, not only shying from directly living up to Revolver via the smoke and mirrors of the Lonely Hearts Club Band but then never again throwing themselves into their work as a collective unit. Sgt. Pepper’s, possibly as a corrective to the hushed tones with which it’s been received for decades, has slipped in estimation behind a few of the band’s other records, but it’s easy to hear how it achieved that reputation in the first place. Even if John, Paul, George, and Ringo would arguably go on to best a handful of its moments, the amazing stretch of music created in 1966-67 was the peak of the Beatles as a working band.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


The songs on Florence and the Machine's third LP aren't just about heartbreak, they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines.

Florence and the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else. Accordingly, her band's third studio album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is one long Ophelia mad scene, a breakup record from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone.
She makes a pretty good case for that, to be fair. "What was it that I said?/ I can't help but pull the earth around me to make my bed," she cries in "Ship to Wreck", which goes from sleeping pills to great white sharks in its first two lines. Welch has quoted producer Markus Dravs as telling her that she's "not allowed to write any more songs about water," although she appears to have dodged that dictum at every opportunity.
These aren't just songs about heartbreak; they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. "Delilah", for instance, concerns the epic psychic carnage involved in waiting for a phone call from a boyfriend, and yes, that's Delilah as in Samson. (Several songs later, she's "thrashing on the line," this time as a fish.) Over the course of the album, she also invokes (or casts herself as) Persephone, Lot's wife, the Virgin Mary, Daphne, Jonah, and St. Jude—both the saint and the European storm, alluded to in both senses in two different songs. Over "Queen of Peace"'s stomps and choir and horns, she imagines herself "dissolving like the setting sun/ Like a boat into oblivion/' CAUSE YOU'RE DRIVING ME AWAAAAAAY!" (See? Aquatic lyrics again.)
It takes an alarming seriousness of purpose to pull this stuff off—the campy playfulness of Florence and the Machine's 2009 debut single "Kiss With a Fist" wouldn't do. The obvious presence lurking near Welch's current songwriting is Adele, whose "Rolling in the Deep" she has to wish she'd thought of first, but the other source of inspiration floating nearby is PJ Harvey, specifically the PJ Harvey of To Bring You My Love. (As with Harvey, there's a lot of gender-flipping in Welch's lyrics: "Mother" would be very obviously a gospel song if it were called "Father".) Welch's voice trembles and groans until she hauls herself up to the parts of her songs that she can belt out with desperate, bleating vibrato. And the arrangements on How Big are this big: lush and ornate, tinkering with their details every few seconds, cresting and crashing and cresting and cresting some more. The title track's orchestral coda is worthy of Trevor Horn's wildest fantasies.
What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines, leaping deftly across her registers. (There are going to be a lot of disappointed karaoke singers signing up for "What Kind of Man" or "Delilah", then discovering that their range is nowhere near Welch's.) This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas—the band is among the headliners at this year's Bonnaroo, Roskilde, Lollapalooza and Governors Ball—and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.


Kieran Hebden’s pursuit of new sounds has found him digging into his own catalog. New Energy is a wide-ranging album that connects the warmth of his early work to his latest club experiments.

New Energy

Nearing 20 years as an ambassador between indie rock and dance music, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has winnowed down the parts that clutter up music-making itself: He declines most interviews and still trots out the same publicity photo that accompanied his 2003 breakout Rounds. But after 2009’s sumptuous There Is Love in You, he took the reins himself, releasing a flurry of albums, experiments, collaborations, and singles on his own, and now keeps up a healthy social network presence on Twitter, Snapchat, and Soundcloud. With his legacy as one of the 21st-century’s finest electronic musicians all but assured, Hebden has become more of a populist, making few distinctions between working with Burial or Skrillex, Terror Danjah or Rihanna.
His restless forward momentum and pursuit of new sounds make every Four Tet album distinct from its predecessor. But with Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You.
”Alap” opens the album gently with plucked strings, alluding to its definition in Indian classical music as “prologue to the formal expression” of a raga. But as those glissading strings carry on into “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” Hebden yokes it to a beat that very closely recalls Rounds’ centerpiece, “Unspoken.” The opening third of New Energy hews to that album’s sensibilities, highlighting wistful and evocative melodies with breaks crunching beneath them. But despite Hebden’s look back, the strummed strings are more nimble here and the textures are more detailed.
Tempos notch upwards on early standout “Lush,” the gamelan-like tones and double-time shaker providing the velocity as Hebden strikes a balance between new age chill and dance-floor quickener. That mixture of extremes makes “You Are Loved” another clear highlight. The luminous drones at the start are folded into the sort of dusty break that defined so many early records on Stones Throw. But as Hebden dashes in an array of squiggles and blats, the track changes shape again into something heady and electronic, spacy and gravity-free. At times, his attention to textures comes at the cost of exploring new terrain. The wordless female voices and saxophones swirling around “Scientists” add new sonic wrinkles but don’t punch through into a revelatory new space.
New Energy’s back half toggles between the type of club tracks that have become his forte (“SW9 9SL”) and interludes that give a breather before the next workout (“10 Midi”). It’s a shame that “10 Midi” lasts just under a minute and a half, as its interplay between metallophone, piano, and bowed cello creates a neo-classical restraint that remains one of the few places Hebden hasn’t explored. Same goes for the pure ambient waves of “Gentle Soul,” which flows into anthemic closer “Planet.” With its mix of carillon overtones, flickering strings, minced voices, and hiccuping garage thump, it suggests the very place where Steve Reich’s studied minimalism might meet adventurous bass music.
The heart of the album occurs a few moments prior on “Daughter,” which again recalls Rounds. The tock of snare and bass drum, a vocal loop that just slips beyond comprehension, a dreamlike melody twinkling in the middle of it all—it hooks you while at the same time escapes your grasp. Four years ago, Hebden spoke about why his album Rounds remained a touchstone for all the music that came after: “I really connected with the idea that I needed to make something more personal, something real that counted. I started to give the songs titles that were a little more personal to me.” It’s hard to think of something more evocative than a father naming a piece of music for his daughter, a relationship that—no matter the passage of time—requires one to always remain present, giving, and open to something new.


Titus' sophomore record, a sprawling concept album loosely about the U.S. Civil War, is packed with anthems and brimming with energy and ambition.

The Monitor

Modern indie rock generally treats emotion as something that should be guarded or disguised. The Monitor does not subscribe to this viewpoint. On their second album, New Jersey's Titus Andronicus split the emotional atom with anthemic chants, rousing sing-alongs, celebrations of binge drinking, marathon song titles, broken-hearted duets, punked-up Irish jigs, and classic rock lyric-stealing. And through it all, they take subtlety out on the town, pour a fifth of whiskey down its throat, write insults on its face in permanent marker, and abandon it in the woods.
Loosely based on the U.S. Civil War, The Monitor may be one of the most absurd album concepts ever, invoking the battle that caused Abraham Lincoln to claim, "I am now the most miserable man living," to illustrate the sound and fury of suburban Jersey life in a shattered economy. In the annals of using historical metaphors for emotional communication, it's up there with Jeff Mangum empathizing with Anne Frank. But it all turns out so ridiculously fun-- with Ken Burns-style readings of speeches from Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, daguerreotype cover art, and song titles all participating in the reenactment-- that it never even begins to approach the pretentiousness these elements might suggest.
In the end, the Civil War is just a recurring theme, and one that's more personal than political. For stadium-rock inspiration, Titus Andronicus look no further than their home-state hero, paraphrasing Bruce Springsteen in the first song and name-checking him in the last. And while the central muse is obvious, there's a full menu of influences on display. There's the Hold Steady in its mythology of intoxication, the Pogues in its cathartic singalong gutter-punk, and Conor Oberst's Desaparacidos in its brazen earnestness. There's also the fatalistic fuck-all of early Replacements and the brutalist thrashing of east-coast hardcore in its violent instrumentation and apocalyptic worldview.
Somehow that laundry-list of inspirations all manage to make an appearance in the first two minutes of leadoff track "A More Perfect Union". After an opening half that's equal parts slop and ambition, the album turns a corner on "A Pot in Which to Piss" and settles into a reliable pattern, each song building from frontman Patrick Stickles' self-described "piss and moan" to a punk-rock fury, and finally to an instrumental call-to-arms. The repeated structure feeds the album's narrative arc and provides some much-needed breathers, until the record's big finale. At 14 minutes, "The Battle of Hampton Roads" adds a couple of extra X's to the already XL project: Oscillating even more wildly between the album's twin poles of suicidal ideation and vengeance fantasies, Stickles builds to his frothiest moment, spilling it all out in a verse that rivals Neutral Milk Hotel's "Oh Comely" for uncomfortable honesty. And in the end there's a bagpipe solo.
"The enemy is everywhere," Stickles keeps reminding us over the course of the record. It's difficult to tell what that enemy is, as Stickles' target moves from social anxiety to pure boredom to the symbolic frat-brahs of "Hampton Roads". But as the casualties pile up and the battle hymns keep egging on the troops, it becomes clear that the opponent isn't nearly as important as the fight itself. Catharsis is Stickles' fuel, and The Monitor is a 65-minute endorsement of angst and opposition as the best way to present that combustible sorrow: Light it with footlights, throw a giant shadow against the back wall, and rock the fuck out of it.


The California singer and producer’s whimsical alt-pop bounces between disco beats and reggae grooves, 1960s soul and 1990s indie folk.

Big Ideas

Remi Wolf begins Big Ideas with “Cinderella,” a Soul Train-inspired disco-funk number about her everyday mood swings. Bursting with jazzy horns, triangle dings, and chirpy whistles, it’s the feel-good chromatic commotion we’ve come to expect from the Palo Alto artist. The opening track and lead single is saturated with her signature brainworms (“Cinderella making babies on the company’s dime”), but Wolf finds space for the first of many existential questions she poses on her second album: “Is there something wrong with the way I am designed?”
Following in the footsteps of her 2021 debut, Juno, “Cinderella” leverages danceable beats and one-liners to mask an undercurrent of vulnerability. The rest of Big Ideas scales back the gimmickry but maintains the infectious energy, mixing Wolf’s DayGlo disco pop with detours into ’60s soul, ’90s indie folk, and psych-y prog rock. “Wave” ebbs and flows between a reggae-ish groove and emo-rock eruptions. On the surface, it comes across as a moody love song, but the Flaming Lips-inspired chorus plunges into Wolf’s anxious mindset. The heart of Big Ideas comes to light in the outro, where she verbalizes her greatest fear: “If I get too fucked up, if I get drunk all night, will you still love me?” The question could be meant for a loved one, an old flame, or even herself: Nothing cuts deeper than self-disappointment.
Wolf peppers her songwriting with confessions and anecdotes, like the taste of someone she kissed at Chicago’s Empty Bottle on Halloween (“Cherries & Cream”). She’s refreshingly frank on subjects like sexuality, mental health, and sobriety. “Alone in Miami” recounts a hazy Art Basel week in Miami, cluttered with crypto bros, cocaine, and Cubano sandwiches. In “Toro,” Wolf lets her freak flag fly, spinning unflattering images like “I’m drooling like a rabid dog” into sexy come-ons. It’s no “Eating my ass like the human centipede” (from “Quiet on Set”), but it still hits.
“Motorcycle” stands out as a soulful ballad that elevates a mundane premise to the stuff of fantasy. Wolf cosplays as a modern housewife who yearns for secret escapades on her Harley. “I love my motorcycle/It gets me around this funny town,” she sings, syrupy vocals floating over slow, bluesy guitar, “Pass the chaos by in this great big world/Where no one knows what they’re talking about.” Torn between the comfort of stability and the thrill of escape, Wolf ends the song on a poignantly unresolved note.
Big Ideas plays like an eclectic compilation of scattered thoughts from her journal. Songs grapple with big questions but offer few answers: “Are you fearful? Do you regret?” she seemingly asks a paramour at one moment. Even “Toro” carries a tinge of melancholy, hinting at the imminent end of a euphoric night. But weaker moments can feel like half-baked ramblings (“The thing about the chase is it plagues the human race”) mistaken for storytelling. “Frog Rock” and “Pitiful”—which sounds like the Teletubbies’ version of “Buy You a Drank”—come off as lightweight goofs.
If Juno was a hallucinogenic wonderland that painted the self-declared “Sexy Villain” as a comic figure, Big Ideas works to humanize Wolf’s music without sacrificing its theatricality. Closing disco fever dream “Slay Bitch,” allegedly a bonus track, is the pick-me-up to counteract all the album’s nerves and insecurities. Wolf sounds like she’s commanding you to vogue through your own dress-up montage, somersaulting through the melody with the whimsical attitude of a young Cyndi Lauper. She’s a little bit scattered, and she sounds right at home.


The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank, the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur. Like Albarn's recent solo work, it explores the distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation.

The Magic Whip

Early in the jarring opening pages of science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury’s 1953 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, the author appears to catch a glimmer of the actual future. Protagonist Guy Montag comes home from work to find his wife limp and dying of an overdose on sleeping pills. Montag calls for assistance and hangs back helplessly as paramedics revive her, thinking to himself, "There are too many of us. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone." Could Bradbury have foreseen the quiet anomie of faces bathed in smartphone light, shuttling through overcrowded cities, alone together in only tangential acknowledgement of one other’s humanity? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Singer-songwriter Damon Albarn invokes Bradbury’s sentiment on "There Are Too Many of Us", the emotional centerpiece of The Magic Whip, the reunion album from his reconstituted flagship Blur, as he muses about an Australian hostage crisis he once spectated on television from a hotel room above it. "For a moment I was dislocated by terror on the loop elsewhere," he admits in verse two—not horrified, just momentarily "dislocated"—as if to call into question our dwindling concern for people in places outside our cubicles of convenience. Technology has made our world smaller, but it hasn’t made us less isolated. Ease of access doesn’t equal closeness.
The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank, the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur. In 2013, a lucky twist of fate netted the group some downtime between festival dates in South China and Indonesia, and Blur holed up in a Hong Kong studio to workshop new material. Anyone who’s waited a decade and a half for Albarn and his songwriting foil to resume tussling over bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree’s lithe low end will find a lot to enjoy; something special happens when these four get in a room, and you can still hear some of it happening here.
The distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation is the running theme here. "New World Towers" gazes at the web of neon signs overhead in awe of their glow, "Go Out" details nights alone at the bar and defeated late-night self-love. On "Thought I Was a Spaceman" Albarn recasts a longing for the comforting familiarity of London as a space-wrecked astronaut’s homesickness. The Magic Whip was conceived as Albarn wrapped work on his 2014 solo album Everyday Robots, and it’s tempting to see its disaffected tourism as a sister to Robots’ shattered workaday ennui back home.
Sensibilities from Albarn’s extracurricular projects frequently bleed into the frame, especially the Gorillaz, which shows both in dubby, beat-oriented cuts like "New World Towers" and in the lyrics’ pervasive sense of Englishness-in-exile. "Thought I Was a Spaceman" could easily serve as a prequel to Demon Days’ post-apocalyptic opener "Last Living Souls" in sound and story, and "Ghost Ship" wouldn’t look out of place anchored off the shores of Plastic Beach. At times the sonic tug-of-war feels like Albarn clawing at the restrictions of a framework his ideas have outgrown.
In the moments when The Magic Whip is most interested in sounding like a Blur album, it is perhaps too interested. There’s a nod to nearly every epoch, from the synth-accented Parklife alt-rockisms of "I Broadcast" to the busy Great Escape pop of "Lonesome Street", the Blur-ish guitar squall of "Go Out" and the winding 13-influenced electro-psych of "Spaceman". Whip functions as a career travelogue in that sense; one wonders whether the decision to have Street, the band’s Britpop-era producer, helm the sessions hasn’t aroused a certain sense of nostalgia. Restless innovators deserve a cycle back through the worlds they’ve crafted here and there (see: the last decade worth of Prince and Beck) but it’s disorienting for a band as keenly interested in artistic recombination as Blur.
Sometimes the album veers into sleepy territory: The ambient washes and close mic’d, reverb-drenched strumming of "Spaceman" are welcome flourishes, as is the cluttered keyboard-and-acoustic bounce of "Ice Cream Man", but both are better showcases for production than song structure. There’s also sluggish, saccharine adult contemporary on "My Terracotta Heart" and closer "Mirrorball", though, momentum-killers in a back end that sometimes lags where it should lift. The tempo only picks up on "Lonesome Street", "Go Out", and "I Broadcast"; the rest of the album bobs calmly adrift. It suits the album’s geographical fixation on Hong Kong, Indonesia, and especially the beaches and waters in between, but not the band’s own sweet spot.
All these frustrations fall away when the quartet locks into its signature jangly strut, as it does on the late album highlight "Ong Ong", a chugging rocker outfitted with a chorus of lilting la-la’s. Its sunny soul is infectious, as Albarn, who once lamented he had "no distance left to run," professes a love no measure of forbidding space could quell. Coxon’s in the wings playing hokey luau guitar, zeroing in on Damon’s seafaring yearning and playing it up for yaks until he storms center stage as the song draws to a noisy close. Blur’s always been puckish in spirit, its greatest gift the identification and gleeful subversion of listener expectations, and in moments like these it re-emerges, untarnished by the passage of time.