Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a punk classic, a paragon of songwriting about the pain and joy of love.

Singles Going Steady

The late Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks once told NME: “Before we do a song, I make sure that song is going to stand the test of time.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, especially in 1978. Punk had sprung into the global consciousness a year earlier thanks largely to the release of the Sex Pistols’ debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, and was already being declared obsolete, a failed revolution whose initial shock had immediately faded into tame self-parody. As quick as punk emerged, a throng of bands started drifting away from the rock’n’roll punch of punk toward a broader post-punk sound. The original movement seemed happy to be a fleeting thing, a bomb that went off leaving nothing but shrapnel.
Yet Buzzcocks forged ahead with a classic punk sound. In 1978 alone, the Manchester band released their first two studio albums, Another Music in a Different Kitchen and Love Bites, and while each bore traces of experimentation, they owed much more to punk mainstays Ramones than to the protracted krautrock of Can. By 1979, groups that had been directly inspired by Buzzcocks—including Joy Division and the Fall—were already releasing some of the most important post-punk records of all time. Buzzcocks’ fellow punk pioneers in the Clash and the Jam were expanding the vocabulary of punk without losing the movement’s edge. Buzzcocks responded to some of these towering post-punk statements not with one of their own, but with a humble collection of singles.
Singles Going Steady, which begins with the band’s first eight singles, came out in 1979 in the U.S.; it wasn’t released in Buzzcocks’ native UK until 1981, as the band was on the verge of a breakup. It didn’t make the charts in either place, but that two-year gap is telling. As the punk ’70s segued into the post-punk ’80s, it was clear that Buzzcocks inspired little confidence about their staying power. Compilation albums, especially back then, often had the uncanny ability to signal the end of a band’s relevance, if not their lifespan. The fact that Buzzcocks released an anthology of singles a mere two years into their recording career made Singles Going Steady—despite the cheery wordplay of its title—seem less like a triumph and more like a tombstone. There was a ring of finality to it, a sense of chips being cashed in. If Shelley wanted to make timeless music and go down in history, he was going about it in the worst way possible.
But history wasn’t counting on Shelley’s songs themselves. From the start, Buzzcocks had no desire to be a typical punk band. With nimbleness and pluck, they pivoted from the sardonic snarl of their debut EP Spiral Scratch—their only studio recording with Howard Devoto, another defector from punk to post-punk, as their lead singer—to their first single, 1977’s “Orgasm Addict.” The song was co-written by Shelley and Devoto but sung by Shelley in his new role as frontman. The contrast was striking. Instead of Devoto’s Spiral Scratch sneer, which felt studied and imitative, “Orgasm Addict” sported Shelley’s chirpy hiccup, a boyish and bracing new sound in punk.
Buzzcocks were the antidote to what was coined then as “punkismo”—four men who projected a new, more nuanced image of punk masculinity, even as Shelley extolled the compulsive joys of masturbation. In fact, it was because Shelley was singing such a juvenile anthem to jacking off that Buzzcocks felt so instantly fresh. What appeared to be yet another willfully offensive punk rant was in effect a stark admission of vulnerability. The song’s underlying message is subtle yet undeniable: Solitude can be turned on its side and harnessed as a liberating sexual energy. Buzzcocks had pioneered punk independence with the self-released Spiral Scratch, but “Orgasm Addict” was a different kind of DIY.
Shelley was born Peter McNeish in 1955, the son of working-class parents in Lancashire who made their living in the cotton mills and coal mines the industrial city was known for. With the nerdy audacity of a precocious blue-collar kid, he took his stage name from his favorite Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Romanticism was not the hippest thing to reference in the iconoclastic British punk scene in the ’70s, nor was literature in any form. But as his fellow punks were assuming visceral or satirical pseudonyms like Strummer, Rotten, and Palmolive, Shelley reached back into his schoolbooks for a name that would later signify his soft and beating heart.
Singles Going Steady is festooned with love songs rendered urgent and rough by the thrust and distortion of punk. Shelley and company understood what few of their peers did: With love songs in the AOR arena growing increasingly cheesy throughout the ’70s, punk demanded a new rawness and credibility if it dared to address love. You can’t spell “romance” without “Ramone,” and it’s no accident that their music owes plenty to their New York counterparts. Buzzcocks, however, jettisoned Ramones’ biker image and campy horror for boy-next-door charm and the everyday concerns of the forlorn. “I won’t be nasty,” Shelley remarked to Melody Maker in 1978. “We’re just four nice lads, the kind of people you could take home to your parents.” Singles Going Steady didn’t weaponize punk with the goal of toppling the dominance of silly love songs in the ’70s; the album is as much Wings as it is Ramones, as sympathetic to Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” as it is to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Buzzcocks mastered that tension at the heart of the love song—the opposing forces of attraction and repulsion, of devotion and betrayal, the thin line between love and hate, for others and for oneself. Singles Going Steady stands as one of the most endearing, intimate, and impeccably crafted batch of earworms in either the love-song or punk-rock realm. After shedding the exhilarating brattiness of “Orgasm Addict,” Singles unleashes “What Do I Get?,” a plea for companionship that’s so free of pretense, it makes “Anarchy in the UK” sound as overblown as “Hotel California.”
“I just want a lover like any other/What do I get?/I only want a friend who will stay to the end/What do I get?” Shelley laments, his voice a dribble of honey over guitars that quiver and churn like a stomach full of butterflies. “I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” and “Promises” follow suit, expanding Shelley’s cosmology of anguish. Unrequited longing, severed ties, knock-kneed bashfulness, rash declarations of euphoric infatuation: Shelley delivers it all with jaunty melodies and deceptively complex chord progressions on par with the Beatles and the Kinks. And with “Harmony in My Head,” Shelley’s fellow guitarist and songwriting partner Steve Diggle makes his lone lead-vocal contribution to the record, lending a gruff warmth that serves as a counterpoint to Shelley’s choirboy voice.
The album’s latter half, which gathers the B-sides of these eight singles, is more diverse. From the hilariously bitter “Oh Shit!” to the celebration of punk for punk’s sake, “Noise Annoys,” Singles documents a band at play. Even the love songs, “Just Lust” and “Lipstick,” are lighter in tone—although the latter veers into heavy shadows as its lyrics skim Shelley’s increasingly philosophical take on romance: “When you miss me/In your dreams does my lover have your face?” Together, they’re no less tuneful or indelible than their A-side counterparts. Shelley refused to see punk as an insurrection against pop. It was simply a more efficient delivery system.
Love songs were Shelley’s own brand of post-punk, every bit as radical as PiL’s dissonant dub or Gang of Four’s abrasive funk. As he once told Melody Maker, “People have been saying things like, ‘Punk songs aren’t meant to be about love.’ I didn’t say that, so why should I abide by it?” Not that Buzzcocks were averse to dipping into some easily recognizable post-punk on Singles: “Why Can’t I Touch It?” is an atmospheric sprawl, six and a half minutes of dreamy yearning that evolves into a jagged interplay of riffs between Diggle and Shelley, a punk jam session comparable to the far more celebrated dual-guitar alchemy of their contemporaries Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television.
The peak of Singles Going Steady—and of Buzzcocks’ legacy—is the hit British single “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?).” Paraphrasing a Marlon Brando line from the musical Guys and Dolls, the droll title belies the song’s power. Guitars seethe and beats clench. Shelley sings like a man whose entire existence hangs by a single frayed nerve: “I can’t see much of a future/Unless we find out what’s to blame/What a shame,” he sings without a trace of hope, a lover cast adrift on the cruel winds of indifference. He picks mercilessly at his psychic scabs, his vulnerability as a songwriter is practically agonizing—even as it serves as a perverse source of strength.
“I actually do feel unguarded, and you see it as a joke. It isn’t me who should feel bad,” he said in 1978, in response to a perceived backlash against his sensitive-boy persona. “Ever Fallen in Love” is the apotheosis of that persona. It’s a tribute not only to the notion that punk can be a thoughtful expression of naked feeling, but to Buzzcocks’ idiosyncratic embrace of the finer points of classic pop songcraft. Shelley wasn’t only drawing from the likes of the Beatles, whose cover art for Let It Be is deliberately mirrored on Singles Going Steady; he was, by his own admission, just as envious of the music of the Supremes and Dusty Springfield.
That Diana Ross and Springfield are both icons of the LGBTQ community is not incidental. Shelley was British punk’s first openly bisexual star. He wrote “Love You More” about a woman he dated in 1975; he wrote “Ever Fallen in Love” about Francis Cookson, a man he lived with later in the ’70s while they played together in the side project the Tiller Boys. The clarity of Shelley’s sexual orientation was reflected, paradoxically, in the vagueness of his lyrics. His deft use of pronouns and perspectives made Buzzcocks songs almost entirely indeterminate when it came to the gender of the narrator—or the person at the other end. “I tried to be as gender neutral as possible in writing songs, because for me I could use the same song for either sex,” he once explained. He embraced the fluid sexuality and identity explored previously in a more fantastical fashion by his heroes Ray Davies, Lou Reed, and David Bowie. But Shelley applied that approach to achingly confessional songs that confronted the realities of love with both tenderness and heaviness.
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1820 poem, “To a Skylark.” Inspired by the sight of the bird while strolling with his wife through the Italian countryside, the troubled Romantic writer spiraled into an epiphany—the understanding that pain and joy are inseparable, perhaps even co-dependent. It’s an evergreen idea, in which Pete Shelley found the immortality he sought. Pop-punk and indie rock from then on out—from the Smiths to Green Day to Radiohead to Fucked Up—would not sound remotely the same without Buzzcocks. And Singles Going Steady remains a painful, joyous record, one that makes the lungs quicken and the ribs vibrate with the exquisite heartbreak of it—the sweetest, saddest songs ever skylarked by a punk.


Chastity Belt's second album is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them.

Time to Go Home

In Sheila Heti’s 2012 highly autobiographical novel How Should a Person Be?, an artist named Margaux tells main character Sheila about a male painter she's struck up a correspondence with, exchanging tips over email. They seemed to be equals exchanging wisdom, Margaux says, except suddenly she realized they weren’t; she was starting to become more like him. "He’s just another man who wants to teach me something," Margaux says dismissively.
A variation of this same line appears in the chorus of Chastity Belt’s "Drone", the opening track on their second album Time to Go Home. It’s a song about the illusion of freedom and respect within a relationship, its context vague but the sentiment arguably universal. "I never expect much from anyone," Julia Shapiro sings. "So I’m never disappointed and I never have to trust."
The past few years have borne witness to a tidal wave of young, female fuck-ups in pop culture. The women who get too drunk on the dance floor, who date men who are bad for them, who don’t have their shit together and are unapologetic about it, are everywhere, from "Girls" to Frances Ha to How Should A Person Be? And Chastity Belt, who preached the joys of fucking boys on the dancefloor and shouted "Pussy Weed Beer" on their last album No Regerts, may as well claim this title too.
But there’s a sadness to Time to Go Home beneath the drunken mayhem, one that leads to serious self-reflection and earnest inquiries about being a functioning human. Where the band once crooned jokingly about healthy punk lifestyles, pretentious tattoos and nip-slips, now they chew away at existential questions. Throughout the record they work through the hurt they’ve accrued, Shapiro singing over twangy electric lines about the lies she’s fed herself, her desire to just skip out on her own thoughts sometimes, and how she envies anyone who just feels alright. "What is real?" guitarist Lydia Lund sings on the gorgeous track "Lydia" before answering herself: "It’s what you feel." Even a song like "Cool Slut", a proud endorsement of sleeping around that would have felt fun and confident on their previous record, feels laden with a layer of doubt here.
Chastity Belt haven't traded their raucous party-girl ways for slow-paced sob stories; "Why Try" and "Trapped" are both shimmy-worthy surf rock jams and "The Thing" is a certified head-banger, a screaming ode to the John Carpenter horror flick of the same name. But you can hear them peering down upon their worries with a drearier set of beer goggles than before. Time to Go Home is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them. And with every hit they seem to take to the heart and head, Chastity Belt proves that sometimes the best response is a big shrug of indifference.


The Texas rapper’s latest album sounds so damn good that the emptiness of it all is an afterthought.

Life of a DON

Don Toliver graduated cum laude from the Travis Scott school of how to make nothing sound like something. The moodiness makes you feel like Don is about to embark on a journey of self-discovery like early Kid Cudi, go on a drunken voicemail rant like “Marvin’s Room”-era Drake, or throw in a splash of spitefulness like post-Honest Future, but that never happens. The Houston rapper and singer’s music is relatively conflict-free, and when things do go wrong, he seems largely  unfazed. Sometimes, it’s heartbreak, though he just moves onto the next Instagram model without so much as a shrug. Other times, after a long night of partying, he sulks in his loneliness—at least until he remembers that he has a stacked bank account, luxury goods falling from the sky, radio hits, and a cozy spot as second-in-command to one of the world’s biggest rappers.
As expected, Don Toliver’s latest album Life of a DON is hollow. His life is a blur, blah blah blah. Fame is not all it’s cracked up to be, but also it’s really cool, blah blah blah. (If you care about deeper thoughts on this subject, go listen to any Kanye album before Ye.) But miraculously, the emptiness of it all is an afterthought—it sounds so damn good that who even cares if Don Toliver is an emotionless robot or not (he is). The hooks are catchy and slick. The beats are lush and radiant. And he has this distinctly piercing voice, with a wide range of melodies that could make an extremely basic line jotted down on a dinner napkin sound heartfelt.
If you were to write out the chorus of “Way Bigger,” you might reasonably conclude that it was constructed by the Cactus Jack marketing team (there’s even a subtle callback to Don’s hit song “Lemonade”). But the glistening instrumental and brooding melodies wash away that overwhelming corporate sheen. The same could be said for “What You Need,” which isn’t groundbreaking or that original, yet it’s so easy to get hooked, especially with a couple of drops of booze in your system. The Metro Boomin-produced “Company Pt 2” is a highlight as well, even if it sounds like the type of hazy, melancholy instrumental that comes so easy to the beatmaker that at this point, he could have walked an intern through it without having to press a single button himself. These three records are Don Toliver’s sweet spot, smooth and downbeat; half-assed lyrics aside, they come across intimate enough that they could have been made in a bedroom, not a multi-million-dollar studio.
Whenever the songs are stripped down and his writing has to do more work, it’s noticeably vague and impersonal. Take the R&B ballad “Double Standards,” where it’s hard to believe Don has ever been in a real relationship. Similarly, the Kali Uchis-assisted “Drugs N Hella Melodies” has these dull, meandering musings, saved only by the twinkling instrumental.
Thankfully, this doesn’t happen often on Life of a DON. Given the maximalist approach passed down from Travis, there’s usually an exciting wrinkle in Don’s songs to latch onto, whether it’s the way he fuses with Baby Keem on “OUTERSPACE” over sci-fi movie beeps and boops or the messy falsetto he hits on “2AM” that sounds like it was laid down after taking too many shots at the club. The flashy beat switch-ups, unnecessary Mike Dean-style outros, and flexible vocal arrangements do a good job of camouflaging the mechanical nature of it all. It may be transparently a product of the music industry machine, but it’s a ton of fun anyway.

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Featuring collaborations with Skrillex and Jamie xx, the West Coast transplant’s debut album flips the chamber-folk cello of her debut EP into a contemporary, decidedly Los Angeles hybrid sound.

Blood

What does a cello sound like? Deep, melancholy resonance: a violin that’s listened to Joy Division on repeat, perhaps; a pale childhood free of grass stains. But ask Kelsey Lu what her cello sounds like, and a whole new world unfurls. Her instrument of choice echoes “a really old wise tree that’s planted in the bottom of the ocean,” she’s explained, with “sea life living within it, specifically sea angels.” It’s a beatific, Laurel Canyon answer as serves this West Coast transplant’s gentle romanticism, not to mention her poetic generosity. (Sea angels, despite their seraphic name, look like a deepwater cross between fireflies and Slimer.)
Rest assured, though, Lu’s cello is on dry land, and firmly planted in L.A. (This following a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a stint in New York, where she recorded her spectral 2016 debut EP, Church.) The spirit of Southern California, and Lu’s subtle experiments with its musical tropes, form the sly engine of Blood, her first full-length album; with an ear still to the elegantly eerie avant-classical compositions of her past, and the chamber-folk philosophizing that anointed Church, she goes more volubly, more unmistakably Los Angeles with the record. There are delicate, deft pizzicato runs on her strings, still, but they precede a genial pop anthem co-produced by Skrillex that begs for montage placement on the next 90210 reboot. A dewy, two-part baroque-folk suite bookends a brassy, spangled disco anthem with Arthur Russell-style string flares. Above all, there is a sense of abundance, of florality; plush orchestrations rush into the spaces where her EP once shunned other instrumentation, preferring instead to let her cello reverberate with sharp-eyed reticence.
Lu’s well-rooted composure anchors these many directions, and her technical flexibility abets them. (Not for nothing has she shared stages and songs with artists as diverse as Solange, King Krule, Florence and the Machine, and Oneohtrix Point Never.) But where Church seemed to prod theological identity—it was even recorded in a house of worship, with the echo in the pews as pontifical backing—Blood has almost as many moments of curious travelogue as it does introspection. “You've even forgotten all about your heartbreak/Something's getting washed off with waves,” she sings somberly in “Atlantic”—and despite her sharp, almost atonal yelps to “jump!” into these waters, her icy cello seems to predict a sinister end. Fingerpicked folk guitar whips through “Pushin Against the Wind,” a gloomy folk requiem with hints of R&B that seems to exist as a conduit for Lu’s stunning vocals, at turns clear, aching, and incanting; it’s a moment of emotional whiplash from this straight into “Due West,” the ambling Skrillex collaboration that celebrates mournful California malaise by conjuring its name repeatedly, rolling and gently lilting like a seaside stretch of highway. It’s a glossy, diligent pop track with every instrument tastefully soaring and Lu’s roaming soul set in amber. It fades immediately and ephemerally in the warm Pacific air. So does her strangely faithful take on 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” a careful beat-by-beat imitation of that Virgin Suicides soundtrack staple—a creative plane away from her previous brazen pop covers. (See: her take on Joni Mitchell’s “River” with Sampha, as architecturally deconstructed as an entree on “Top Chef.”)
Elsewhere, and more beguilingly, Lu tries her hand at another classic California songwriting device: the ode to the hot rod. But here, she subverts it. “Foreign Car”—one of the most eccentric and lush tracks here, and co-produced by Jamie xx —isn’t so much a Beach Boys-style motor sonnet as it is a careful lament for a man in bad straits. “Metal, metal, metal, metal/Pedal to the metal, make you work,” Lu chants flatly in the chorus, with all the drag-racing vivacity of Lana Del Rey on Ambien; when this cedes to deeper words—”Boy, no other loves you/Like no other loves me”—the banal words in the refrain suddenly feel clearer in their intent. It’s a masculine pastime and energy distilled and turned elemental, the priapism of cars and performance sports reconfigured in femininity.
If there is one bulwark of Blood as a pop experiment unlike Church, it is surely the Studio 54 fever dream of “Poor Fake.” Opening with a courtly, half-minute violin preamble, the song snaps suddenly into whimsical disco, Lu’s keening falsetto fluttering around a Moroder-worthy beat. Her cello leaps in duet with her voice; with those string groans commanding central space, it not so much nods as tips over in full curtsy to Arthur Russell and his World of Echo. It’s also the most clearly delighted Lu has ever sounded in her music, not least in a histrionically silly, spoken interlude about a well-appointed art scam. The song’s zany high energy gives Lu somewhere to rise, so her most thoughtful moment, the closing title track, lands with even heavier empathy: “History has taught us hope/Hope is the answer,” she sings with throaty, operatic grandiosity over brooding violins and fluttering xylophonic pulses. It’s halfway to a sermon, and one worth hearing.


Pond Scum collects a few old John Peel sessions and shapes them into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. It's not a redundant release, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Will Oldham's prodigious catalog.

Pond Scum

When Will Oldham first recorded the song "(I Was Drunk at the Pulpit)" more than 20 years ago, he was going by the name Palace Brothers. The song, from his 1993 album There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, was a meditation on faith and fallibility. With its dense imagery and antiquated language, it gave the impression of an actor treading the footboards, performing the role of an old-time singer, staging a spiritual reckoning.
Around the same time, Oldham recorded a very different version of "Pulpit" for a Peel Session, and it shows just how malleable his songs are. This performance, which opens his new odds-and-ends comp Pond Scum, is slow and deliberate. An acoustic and an electric guitar noodle solemnly. And Oldham’s voice is deeper and less distant; he pushes it up to the front of the song to let the listener relish the richness and texture that age has bestowed on him. Oldham isn’t an actor anymore, but a sinner experiencing a spiritual crisis in real time.
"(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is a potent opener to Pond Scum, which collects a few old Peel Sessions into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. As these two versions of the song prove, it’s not a redundancy, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Oldham’s prodigious catalog. Oldham favors retrospectives that tweak the very idea of retrospectives: Greatest Palace Music, from 2004, featured his Bonnie "Prince" Billy alias covering songs by his Palace persona, and he followed it up eight years later with an EP of self-covers called Now Here’s My Plan. Even as they condense and summarize his catalog, these releases are his most esoteric, rewarding, and engaging in the context of his career, when a listener can grasp the various allusions Oldham is making to himself.
Pond Scum falls squarely into that category, and may therefore be a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.
Despite its innate humanism ("The world is within you, without is of mud"), "(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is the only real brimstone moment on Pond Scum. Other songs are much more generous, some even celebratory: "Death to Everyone" testifies that our days are sweeter for being numbered, and Oldham’s band sound like they’re not wasting a single moment. "When Thy Song Flows Through Me" is lovely in its simplicity, a thank-you note to a higher power that has blessed Oldham with the ability to make music.
Perhaps the big draw here is Oldham’s cover of "The Cross," the most spiritually explicit song by Prince. As it appears toward the end of his 1988 double album Sign 'O' the Times, the song sounds like a slightly perverse altar call, teetering between the sacred and the secular. "We all have our problems, some big, some are small," he sings. "Soon all of our problems will be taken by the Cross." But Oldham undersells the sentiment, hinting that what sounds like a consoling promise might actually be a threat of end times reckoning.
As many people do when talking about God, Oldham occasionally lets language get away from him, and the project, with its strengths and weaknesses, illustrates an interesting tendency in Oldham’s songwriting. He’s not especially well known for writing about spirituality, but that may be due to the fact that he often presents God in negative terms: Oldham sees a darkness and describes it in detail, which implies a light that he either cannot or will not see.
Correction (1/25/16 4:06 p.m.):  This review previously incorrectly attributed the lyrics of "Jolly Five (64)" and "Jolly One (2/15)" to Will Oldham. They were originally written by Rabindranath Tagore in his collection of poems, Gitanjali*.*


The synth compositions of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami are deep and romantic, uniquely designed to pull you into them.

Acquiesce

Meditation and improvisation are very different practices, but the sprawling synth music of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami makes that difference nearly imperceptible. The key to doing either successfully is often mindfulness; a focus on the self, an awareness of breath, and the ability to completely give yourself to the moment. Chami proved this in Good Willsmith, her trio with Max Allison and Doug Kaplan, where the commitment to improvisation extended to entire albums of heroically psychedelic single-takes. Allison and Kaplan’s colorful avant-garde label Hausu Mountain provided a launch point for Chami’s solo project TALSounds, where her classically-trained voice flowed calmly through synths, tape-delays, and loop pedals. While early releases were uncut recordings, Chami employed subtle editing on 2018’s Love Sick before going further on her new album Acquiesce, making songs out of longer improvisations and applying vocal overdubs. But don’t mistake the title or enhanced production for any sort of compromise: Acquiesce is the most fully-realized TALsounds album to date.
Acquiesce is TALsounds at their most turbulent, where the additional production emphasizes the rawest and most tender moments. The first track on Acquiesce is an instrumental appropriately titled “Opening,” not for describing a starting point, but implying an action that runs naturally throughout the album. On previous albums, Chami’s voice and synths would often form a dense unified sound, but on “Soar” they take their own trajectories. The soft arpeggios rushing under melismatic vocals compliment each other, but it’s just as engaging when they’re at odds. “Dynasty” begins with silvery synth lines and Chami’s voice in an upper opera register, until an elastic, glitchy synth interrupts and the song unspools into a delirious collage of looping vocals. But rather than disrupting the project’s zen atmosphere, this dynamic enhances it, as if we’re hearing her work through the tension and release in real time. “Dynasty” is reoriented by the fuzzy, heartrending organ instrumental “Conveyor,” the album’s shortest and most breathlessly beautiful track.
Acquiesce always goes deeper rather than bigger. TALsounds has always been an inwardly focused project by nature, but these songs feel uniquely designed to pull you into them. The album grows darker in its second half, but there’s a warmth and safety there just like the dimly lit shot of the bedside table on its cover. The faintly atonal synths streaking through “Else” and “Instance” create a dead-of-night intimacy but Chami, like Grouper’s Liz Harris, has an innate ability to light these moments with her voice like a will-o’-the-wisp. It resolves on the penultimate “Muted Decision,” where she tunes a lone-synth to uncannily mimic a muted-trumpet. It’s a moment akin to stumbling through your home in the dark, only to have your eyes adjust and recognize the people and things you love most.
Chami has described making this album during a period of new love, a time of happiness, but also of questioning that happiness when she found herself recording less. For a project defined by its constant and improvisational process, not to mention one that doubles as meditative practice, it’s an understandable anxiety. But the true brilliance of the album is how she channels those life tensions through that same creative process. As its final track “No Restoring” glimmers into view, Acquiesce reveals itself in hindsight as the now-engaged musician’s most romantic album. It’s easy to confuse acquiescence for a sort of defeat, but TALsounds frames it more as an acceptance of life’s endless change. We are all constantly improvising with what life throws at us, but the meditative majesty of Acquiesce suggests that with a different perspective, we can let it flow straight through us.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit dead prez’s debut, an iconoclastic rap record built around the politics of liberation.

Let's Get Free

To be woke is not the same as to stay woke. The gap between adjective and verb contains worlds. Before it was co-opted and reframed to signal a certain kind of performative righteousness, wokeness meant honoring an instinct for preservation. Keeping one eye open to the realities of life in a patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society, for some, has meant the difference between life and death. The phrase is often attributed to Erykah Badu, whose 2008 song “Master Teacher (I Stay Woke)” holds one of its earliest mainstream uses. But I’ve been hearing it, in different variations, for way longer.
Few people embodied the concept more acutely than M-1 and stic.man, a pair of MCs who met as students at a Florida HBCU in the early ’90s, and found some success later as the duo dead prez. Let’s Get Free, their 2000 debut, is one of the most radical rap releases in history. On “Hip Hop,” the mosh pit rumbler that remains the group’s best-known song, having served as the walk-on music for Dave Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show, stic.man raps, “Still a nigga like me don’t playa hate, I just stay awake.”
While the song’s chanted hook and lines from its fiery verses are often misinterpreted as an endorsement of hip-hop purism, it is more than a judgment on the state of commercial rap at the time. Hip-hop was only a few years off from reaching its status as a billion-dollar industry, and labels were taking expensive bets on all kinds of artists. Puff was flexing furs, artists like Nas and Mobb Deep were experimenting with glossier sounds, and a crew of rappers from New Orleans had everyone calling their jewelry “bling.” On the East Coast, in pockets of Brooklyn and Philadelphia, a neo-conscious subgenre was thriving, with artists like the Roots, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli being positioned as ideologically and aesthetically in opposition to their more commercially successful peers. dead prez were often lumped into this loosely political movement, having come out of the tutelage of Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar.
Despite their affiliations, dead prez were singular. Over a warped, wobbly bassline written by stic, “Hip Hop” offers a reading of the capitalist functions of the music industry, its reliance on the exploitation of black people, and the dangers of internalizing the values perpetuated by those structures. A potent warning: “These record labels slang our tapes like dope/You can be next in line and signed and still be writing rhymes and broke.” (Ironically, a remix of the song was produced by dead prez acolyte turned preeminent capitalist Kanye West.)
Existing at the turn of the millennium, stic and M-1 sat squarely between the Rodney King riots and the election of Barack Obama, events that would come to define America in radically different ways. Halfway between the carefreeness of the ’90s and the apathy of the aughts, dead prez saw through the false promises of a crooked empire at its height. The music industry is just one of many targets of Let’s Get Free, a statement of political consciousness so specific and carefully articulated that it’s a wonder to think it received major distribution, and charted on the Billboard Hot 100.
The album is dense with words. They tackle public education, the prison system, the police state, media complicity, economic inequity, and more, making historical connections between the oppression of the enslaved and the oppression of the black poor. They identified threats that seemed paranoid then, but from the vantage point of 2019, were deeply prescient: surveillance, food injustice, the fear of false-flag operations. Even when staying woke veers into conspiracy theory (“I don’t believe Bob Marley died from cancer,” goes one line in the hook of “Propaganda”), it is clearly the byproduct of a rightful mistrust in authority.
Lyrics and audio collages from films and speeches are built around layers of soundscapes. The uptempo, Afrotech-y club on songs like “I’m a African” reflect stic’s Tallahassee upbringing and the time the pair spent developing their sound as college students in Florida. But the album was also shaped by the stretches of time the pair spent in Brooklyn, bridging the warm-weather energy of South Florida with the more conventional drums-and-orchestration of the East Coast. One song, “Animal In Man,” is a retelling of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, an allegory for class struggle narrativized in rhyme. The track closes with an extended, cinematic instrumental outro, all strings, guitar, and drums. It sounds ridiculous in theory, but on record translates as a moment of galvanizing storytelling.
Notably, Let’s Get Free wasn’t built around the aesthetics of consciousness—like some of their incense-lighting, kufi-wearing peers in the late-’90s “conscious-rap” boom, one of the most prominent of whom would go on to sell raps advertising Microsoft's artificial intelligence program—but around the politics of liberation. The best rap has often served as a cultural and political diagnosis. But dead prez didn’t simply observe and analyze, they offered a solution: revolution.
They wanted to burn it all down, and then rebuild in a more generous, cooperative, self-sufficient mode. “We live in a society that tells us exploitation and getting over on people is the highest form of civilization as opposed to cooperation and sharing,” said stic in a 2000 Billboard interview. As student organizers and members of the pan-African National Democratic Uhuru Movement, they lived what they rapped. Their approaches were informed by the political action groups and fundamental hopefulness of Eastern spiritualism. But they also follow a rich history of black socialism in the U.S. For decades after emancipation, when black people were free in theory but excluded from economic activity in practice, cooperatives sprung up to fill the gaps in needs and services.
As a teen experiencing a personal awakening through music, I found in Let’s Get Free a blueprint for thinking about the world. This required an emphasis on personal health; a revolution needs strong bodies. Years before Gwyneth Paltrow made veganism and high-intensity workouts facets of an aspirational lifestyle, stic.man and M-1 were tossing apples into crowds and doing push-ups on stage. “Music was a way to do what I couldn’t do with a leaflet in my neighborhood,” M-1 said in an interview celebrating the album’s 15th-year anniversary. They were onto something; one academic study credited Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s public embrace of a plant-based diet as pushing veganism into the mainstream. stic and M-1 are continuing this philosophy; their work spans nutrition, fitness, and mindfulness.
There is a tendency in today’s world to forget that nothing is new. There are no new ideas, no new problems. “I wish our album was obsolete. Unfortunately, it’s still relevant in the present,” stic.man said in a recent interview. As global inequality and anti-corruption activism reach a peak and people in countries like Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, and Iraq take to the streets to advocate on behalf of themselves and their communities, the message of Let’s Get Free remains especially potent: Their system is not working for us.


Grafts is the latest release from Montreal composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, whose work exists somewhere between computer music and Erik Satie.

Grafts

Montreal-based composer Kara-Lis Coverdale’s output exists somewhere between computer music and the understated acoustic melancholy of Erik Satie. Trained as a classical pianist, Coverdale began incorporating electronics into her practice while studying music in Ontario, and has since worked with artists including Tim Hecker and LXV. Her music is process-minded but accessible, too, with a habit of remaining understated as it transports the listener to sometimes-dramatic interior landscapes.
Though she’s put out a handful of EPs, Grafts feels like a continuation of Coverdale’s 2014 cassette A 480. The five tracks on A 480 were built from a limited library of vocal samples, which were processed and looped into modal compositions—cool, melodic, and structurally simple, but occasionally plunging into extended contemplative passages. Even at its most immersive, that release seemed notable for its boundaries: each track discrete, possessing its own architecture. While nodding back to A 480’s icy samples, the three sections that make up Grafts take a more fluid shape, bleeding into one another to form an arc.
The keyboard phrase that opens the release establishes a sober calm, warmed by a border of machine fuzz. It gently stutters as it loops, a base for the wandering free associations of a harpsichord-like sound. Gradually, the piece thickens; the keyboards establish a more insistent pace as other melodic elements wander in and out. Among these are futuristic glitches and shimmers that aren’t far off from the sounds favored by musicians who use computer music to think through digital realities. But Coverdale approaches such elements with an assimilative touch. There’s no novelty in her application of technology, and in particular no sense of detachment about her compositions, however chilled their aesthetics.
Indeed, Grafts’ second phase has an aching quality, a rippling sample holding ground while faraway piano chords produce a sort of celestial drama. Coverdale’s music is sometimes described as ambient or drone, but this narrative dynamism suggests otherwise; her sound feels indebted more to an older generation of minimalist composers. Still, the final and longest phase is restful, lingering unhurried on a mellifluous passage. Opening up rather than illustrating as it cycles, it ambivalently taps into internal space.
Coverdale has worked as an organist at a handful of churches, including a recent stint at St. John Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Montreal. Her electronics contain shades of the devotional. Some passages—particularly in the first two parts of Grafts—nod to the sweeping tendencies of church music, while others hold space for a more atemporal and vaguely new age-y meditation. With Grafts, Coverdale seems to propose a decidedly agnostic vision of what devotional electronics could mean in our contemporary moment, folding a natural awareness of technology’s forms into music that feels insistently about being present.


On their fourth LP, the Hamilton, Ontario garage punks step up with a more ambitious and accessible sound without sanding down their raw edges.

People

People, the fourth album by TV Freaks, is dedicated to This Ain’t Hollywood, a recently shuttered venue in the band’s hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Named after the 1982 album by local first-wave punk legends the Forgotten Rebels, This Ain’t Hollywood was everything you could want in a scuzzy rock’n’roll dive: Seventies B movies showing on a bank of old TV sets behind the bar, piss-stenched bathrooms covered in Sharpie and band stickers, and a psychedelic Johnny Cash painting gazing upon the room like some all-seeing eye. Since forming in 2010, TV Freaks have effectively served as This Aint’s unofficial house band, brandishing a manic style of Stooges-spiked hardcore that embodied both the gritty edge and welcoming, misfit-clubhouse vibe of the space. But while the sight of venues closing has become all too common in the COVID era, the writing was on the wall for This Ain’t Hollywood long before the pandemic hit. The building was initially put up for sale in 2018, a circumstance that speaks to another invisible force affecting urban music scenes: the market-driven transformation of once grungy corners into prime real estate.
People is TV Freaks’ first proper album in five years, and while it was made well before This Ain’t Hollywood announced its closure this past spring, it’s a fitting—and necessary—progression for a band that can’t go home again. On the surface, People doesn’t appear to be a concerted effort to break overground; it was recorded live off the floor by frontman Dave O’Connor at a home studio in a single weekend. (Like 2015’s Bad Luck Charms, it was mastered by Aussie DIY demigod Mikey Young, of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control). But while the opening “Destined for Stardom” seems to mock the very idea of swinging for the fences, the song’s sudden transformation from a staccato stomp to a dance-punk sprint suggests that if TV Freaks aren’t about to conform, they’re at least willing to contort.
Growing up within garage punk is often a fool’s errand that requires bands to adopt the very qualities—sing-along melodies, classic-rock conventions, modern production touches—that are antithetical to the genre’s primal essence. But on People, TV Freaks pull off the uncommon trick of making themselves more accessible without sounding any less irascible. In the past, O’Connor often had to bark himself hoarse in order to be heard above guitarist TJ Charlton’s in-the-red riffs, Vivenne Bell Bright’s pugilistic basslines, and drummer Nathan Burger’s double-timed gallop, but the repressed flamboyance and trembling distress in his voice belied his imposing aggression. He has explored those qualities more freely in the new-wave goth-soul serenades of his solo alias, Sweet Dave, but on People, TV Freaks take full advantage of his violent-to-vulnerable range.
You can hear the band broaden its horizons even in a two-minute blitz like “Souvenir,” where O’Connor alternates between stoned ’60s-garage melodies and bugged-out, David Byrne-like convulsions. But the results are all the more impressive when he uses his voice to invest the band’s righteous racket with a greater emotional depth and heightened sense of drama. Where “Space” begins as an unsubtle homage to Spacemen 3’s psych-punk rave-up “Revolution,” the song is ultimately less a call for war than a cry for help, capping its panicked chorus with a warning—“This is my last resort”—that, intentional Papa Roach quote or not, sounds like an ominous dispatch from a point of no return. The references are even more overt on “Heart of Gold”—not a cover of the Neil Young classic, but fueled by a similar quest for purity in a world where everything’s “just a different shade of beige.” As its bass-throttled, post-punky urgency gives way to an extended blur of overlapping melodies, the song is elevated from trashy to transcendent.
None of this is to suggest that TV Freaks have lost their absurdist sense of humor; it just manifests itself in more abstract, meta fashion. Coming from another band, the opening line of “Saturday Night”—“You want to party on a Saturday night/It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be alright”—might seem like the height of rock cliche. But when O’Connor adopts his finest goth monotone atop a churning “She’s Lost Control” rhythm, you’re thrust into some bizarro-world parallel universe where Joy Division are playing weekend keggers. The tension between TV Freaks’ irreverent and insolent sides hits its fever pitch on “Capital Eye,” a motorik Neu!-wave ripper that reaffirms O’Connor’s eternal outsider status as he declares, “I can’t/Stare at/Anything/Beautiful too long.” But he delivers those words via the album’s most infectious shout-it-out-loud hook—and even as Chartlon launches into a spastic solo, O’Connor continues to repeat the mantra as if locked in a trance. Maybe he’s just marvelling at his band’s newly realized potential: When faced with the rare garage-rock album that’s as tense and tuneful as People, it’s easy to be mesmerized.

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The alt-pop trio’s stripped-down EP plays almost like a series of demos, abandoning anything that gets in the way of singer Kelly Zutrau’s hushed melodies.

Pink Room EP

One moment Kelly Zutrau’s standing tall, shoulders back and chin high, and the next she’s supine on the floor, unsure if she’ll ever stand again. The 34-year-old lead singer of the alt-pop trio Wet writes hopeful songs about heartbreak and loneliness, positioning despair as an enduring yet fleeting precursor to purpose. “I’m always interested in multiple feelings at once,” Zutrau said in a recent interview. “Not just a happy song, but happy and sad and guilty—those can all be true.” On their new EP, Pink Room, Wet forgo their trusted brand of synth-pop and make their most stripped-down songs yet, often leaving Zutrau alone with a guitar while she searches for reclamation. “I know these things, they come and go,” she repeats on “There’s a Light.” It sounds like she’s singing a hymn, a lilting brightness that inflects even her saddest lines.
Optimism-tinged anguish is a familiar theme for Wet. Their first two albums, 2016’s Don’t You and 2018’s Still Run, were breakup records that bluntly described the process of letting go of someone without succumbing to helplessness. Both bounced between dispassionate R&B and flat synth-pop, the music more theoretically interesting than emotionally affecting. For the first few years of their career, the band’s most compelling songs were remixes. Producers like Branchez and Jim-E Stack flipped the trio’s downtempo work into danceable pop, a welcome revelation for a group struggling to nail a cogent identity. On last year’s Letter Blue, their first project since exiting their deal with Columbia, Wet worked with producer Buddy Ross and Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear to shake up their once safe sound. The album’s best song is “Larabar,” a stunning piano ballad that sounds like it’s being played through a faulty tape deck. The song proved that the group had great work in them, or at least the ability to make something simple feel seismic.
Like “Larabar,” Pink Room abandons anything that gets in the way of Zutrau’s hushed melodies. The lo-fi EP plays like a series of demos—one song, “Blades of Grass,” actually is a Letter Blue demo—with thin acoustic guitars, subtle synth pads, and the occasional swell of strings the only support for Zutrau’s vocals. There’s a breezy, almost lullaby-like quality to her delivery and rhythms that leads to some moving moments. “Tell Me Why” evokes the sensation of a found recording as Zutrau sings of carving out independence in a failing relationship. On “Turn the Lights Down Low,” she uses a delicate falsetto to describe fears of being alone and the power to be gained by acknowledging them: “Maybe I could be tall/Maybe I could go gently/For the rest of this road/I’ll ride half empty.” Here, the bare-bones production and gentle melodies suits Zutrau’s writing, a synthesis the EP fails to sustain.
Pink Room falters with repetitiveness. Across the project, the guitars employ the same sleepy strumming patterns and Zutrau recycles cadences and images. “Tell Me Why” and “There’s a Light” open with nearly identical chords; the slight deviations in texture and tone read as variants of the same idea. What really prevents the EP from hitting the heights that “Larabar” promised, though, is the pedantic arrangements. These songs rarely surprise or enliven, seldom reaching a climax or expanding upon their initial concept. When Zutrau says that she wants to “stand up tall, but I am laying down empty as a hall,” you can almost feel her trying to break free of the project’s self-imposed constraints, only to hit her head on the ceiling.


On her debut album, Fletcher aims to champion vulnerability in queer love. Instead, she delivers generic, one-dimensional pop anthems that never fully articulate her experience of love and heartbreak.

Girl of My Dreams

Cari Fletcher first heard Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” as her mom drove her to middle school. “That was the moment I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I like girls,’” she told GLAAD about 15 years later. She took online quizzes with titles like “Am I gay?” and googled—a lot. Fletcher eventually came out as queer, and sought to center that experience in her twinkling, fizzy pop. Her songs are dense with unfiltered disclosures. In 2020, she released a seven-song EP called The S(ex) Tapes about the demolition of a relationship; her ex-girlfriend shot the music videos. A year later, Fletcher returned to Katy Perry with “girls girls girls,” a one-off single built around a glossy interpolation of the “I Kissed a Girl” chorus. The song underwhelms: It’s stuffed with clichés about hanging onto the moment and a girl who “looks like a masterpiece.” But just before she launches into the chorus, Fletcher coos, “Go tell your mom it’s not a phase.” It’s a fleeting pulse of affirmation, a wink to queer women who’ve had their identities dismissed.
There’s an easy appeal to an artist who dangles this many confessions; intimacy is a shortcut to affection. Fletcher focuses so much of her music on asserting how vulnerable she is, but every attempt to express that vulnerability comes off as vague and nonspecific. On Girl of My Dreams, her full-length debut, she once again hides behind concerted confessions. The record traces a breakup and the resulting path to a Lizzo-ified concept of self-love. The titular “girl of my dreams” turns out to be Fletcher herself. She hurls the phrase “I love you, bitch” at herself in the mirror. Elsewhere, she assigns clunky labels to her emotions without interrogating or even fully articulating them. “Existential crisis mode,” she wails over flitting drums on “Conversations,” grasping at linguistic shortcuts to carry the weight of her internal monologue. “Get myself in situations/Different people, different places,” she sing-shouts on “Serial Heartbreaker,” a Paramore-indebted track built on catchy, twitching synths.
There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them. “Birthday Girl” strains to carry the conceit about sharing a birthday with an ex. “Becky’s So Hot,” a single engineered for virality and shock value with a video starring Bella Thorne, becomes a flimsy caricature about lusting after an ex’s new girlfriend: “She flame emoji, wow,” Fletcher yowls over a melodramatic guitar.
She litters the album with awkward traces of Internet-speak, shouting “fuck you to the bad vibes” on “For Cari” and describing herself as “singing the sad girl songs” on the title track. Fletcher alternates between trite similes—green eyes the color of a forest, feelings that surge like a tidal wave, heartbreak that hits like a missile—and gushing admissions about how hot, tormented, or devious her love interest is. Even the propulsive thump of “Sting,” the best song on the album, sags when tenderness curdles into melodrama: Fletcher turns from prodding at the pain of a failed relationship to wailing about diamond rings. The New Jersey-raised artist is a songwriter who feels deeply, who is so intent on conveying the intensity of her emotions that she skips over any sense of stakes. The women at the center of these songs are flat, blank spaces: The only concrete image she provides is a Taylor Swift shirt crumpled on an ex’s floor.
Fletcher makes songs so queer women can see themselves in her, slotting our aches and anxieties into her skittering pop. On “Her Body Is Bible,” she sings about the sanctity of a desire so clear it empties you out. Pop has braided the sacred and the profane for so long that it barely registers as subversive, but when Fletcher hurls “amens” over a climbing beat, or when she flounders to describe what she’s feeling and all she can come up with is heaven, she shakes you into paying attention. Every so often, there’s a comfort in her generalizations. But to find it, you'll have to wade through the treacly platitudes, frenzied drum patterns, and wince-inducing lyrics. Only then will Girl of My Dreams deliver something close to salient.


From a lineage that includes Edith Piaf and PJ Harvey-- and with celeb fans like Brian Eno and Nick Cave-- this goth-pop singer makes her debut.

Anna Calvi

Anna Calvi recently listed classical composer Claude Debussy, filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, and Flamenco music as influences on her self-titled debut album. While none of these signifiers seem to directly shape her music, Calvi's record feels like it has much in common with cinema and literature. She uses sonic textures to evoke feelings-- from spaghetti-western guitars to her lung-busting take on gothic melodrama. Musically she's indebted to a lineage of female songwriters from Edith Piaf and Patti Smith to PJ Harvey.
The latter comparison is bolstered by the appearance of longtime Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis on production duties. His rangy, atmospheric handling of the music is one of the record's standout qualities. While the sound is suitably bombastic, Ellis also takes care to open up enough emptiness in the mix to allow Calvi's twisting guitar to snake with menace. On the strongest moments, such as "No More Words", Calvi pushes herself into darker territory, as Ellis allows cavernous space to open up, her voice and guitar sounding as if they are being played into a black hole. It's also one of the softest songs on the record, crafting a coiled feeling when Calvi's voice quietens to a whisper, hanging like a thread but never snapping. The restraint has an edge to it that feels provocative.
Still there are moments where Calvi ratchets up the drama too readily, and sometimes hams it up-- see "I'll Be Your Man", which comes across as campy. More often than not, however, Calvi gets the balance right: "Suzanne and I" feels grand as it lurches from bare guitars underpinned by pounding drums into a skeletal breakdown. The delicacy of its second half-- ghostly, yearning singing and spacey fingerpicking-- makes for a bigger payoff when the drums kick back in and her guitar doubles the vocal lines, giving the ending a truly anthemic quality.
On much of the record Calvi explores the pained romanticism of goth with references to the devil, darkness, and unrequited love. These passing allusions are reduced into something elemental on "Desire", with its impassioned wail against loneliness, as Calvi sings, "You don't have to be lost"; it's a rare moment of togetherness and empathy on an album where Calvi can sometimes seem cold. She dresses up in the same outer strength as Piaf often did, but without the same sense of underlying vulnerability.
Calvi's outstanding vocal tone and arrangements carry the emotional punches, while her lyrics can occasionally take a backseat role. She never allows herself to sound truly exposed, and this adds to a sense that, for all its perceived boldness and big climaxes, the record never seems unhinged or fragile. It can sometimes feel more like a series of controlled demolitions than something from the gut. But once you accept these shortcomings and give yourself over to Calvi's wall of theater, there are plenty of excellent moments to lose yourself in.


The latest offering from A$AP Mob is really just an A$AP Rocky showcase, but per the title of the tape, he sounds more comfortable than ever, as do his compatriots. It’s natural and confident.

Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends-

A$AP Mob’s proper debut album begins with a two-and-a-half-minute skit that takes place in a New York bodega. Pushing lead single “Yamborghini High” over seven minutes, it’s the kind of move that could easily be frustrating. Instead, it’s pretty funny: It’s a group of men trying to out-cozy each other, arguing about who has the most comfortable outfit. A$AP Rocky arrives with tall tales of a ridiculous getup that he boasts was inspired by global warming. It feels natural, which is a welcomed evolution for Rocky, aka That Pretty Motherfucker, who has for the longest time been far more concerned with designer credibility than wearability. The skit is a signal for what’s to come—an infectious sense of camaraderie and a marked return to A$AP’s core sound and strengths.
In practice, Cozy Tapes is an A$AP Rocky album, as he appears on all but three songs. (For comparison, Ferg is on only two tracks, and Ant is at second-most with just four features.) Whether intentionally or not, the rest of the Mob readily acknowledge that it’s Rocky’s show. In one skit, they’re convinced to go somewhere only after verifying Rocky won’t join them. In another (there are a lot of skits here), someone’s pursuing a woman, and his greatest attribute is his association with Rocky and the perks that come with it. Taking the record for what it is, Cozy Tapes is Rocky’s most cohesive project since his debut.
Beyond being the face of the group, Rocky proves that he remains, by far, the most talented rapper in the Mob—including Ferg. Each track on Cozy Tapes finds him successfully using a new flow: “Crazy Brazy” is an impressive display of agility; “Money Man” is all measured and melodic repetition; and “London Town” is his best, with bars that spill over and build on themselves. It’s the first time since LIVE.LOVE.A$AP where Rocky’s pure rapping ability is the focal point. He’s long been lauded as an expert stylist and curator, but that too often has been a distraction from his skill. Though the highs of LONG.LIVE.A$AP are very high (“Goldie,” “Long Live A$AP,” “1Train”), the entire album is bogged down by an obsession with high-profile collaborators and manufactured swagger, like an oversized Rick Owens outfit. Rocky, for his part, never rapped about much more than material goods, but that aspiration felt important when he was doing so over beats that he could command and felt specific to him—not overpriced ones that would go to the highest bidder. Cozy Tapes has a very modest roster of producers, which allows him to set the tone and vibe. None of these songs would stand out on their own (à la “Wild for the Night”) if not for Rocky and the Mob’s efforts on top of them.
No matter how much Rocky excels, Cozy Tapes is still billed as an A$AP Mob album. As such, it is eons beyond Lord$ Never Worry, their debut mixtape, which is nothing more than a bloated victory lap that feels laughable four years later. On Lord$, there was a concerted effort to showcase the lesser known members of the collective, hoping to turn them from secret weapons into superstars. The tape succeeded in shining a light on Ferg, but no one else has popped off as intended.  Instead of trying to showcase individuals, Cozy Tapes has a great cohesion, with Ant, Nast, and Twelvyy playing bit roles. The exception is “Nasty’s World,” a track very much set up to be Nast’s “Method Man.” He’s a capable rapper, but that’s not enough, especially when younger rappers (like Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and MadeinTYO—all showcased here) are succeeding and amassing followings with more experimental styles. Further, Nast sounds better on the subsequent track, “Money Man,” where he apes Rocky’s flow.
Cozy Tapes’ emphasis on Rocky brings into question why it was ever turned into a group effort. Even the guests—most notably Tyler, the Creator, Wiz Khalifa, Skepta, and BJ the Chicago Kid—highlight Rocky, rather than upstage him. The most obvious answer is that the album is a tribute to the late Mob co-founder A$AP Yams, who would have wanted to see all of his friends excel. Yams was the architect of the A$AP sound, which has always been defined more by coolness than sonic markers: When Rocky made the big-budget shift from LIVE.LOVE to LONG.LIVE, a forward-thinking attitude remained consistent. Yams posthumously executive produced Rocky’s AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, but that record felt more like what Yams would’ve wanted Rocky to make (that is, follow his heart) than what he, himself, would produce (a detritus-free swag rap album). Despite admirable verses, Cozy Tapes proves that A$AP Mob does not need to be Wu-Tang or Odd Future to succeed as a collective. It’s acceptable to have a star and a backup, with a few talented MCs to round things out and play straightman to the others’ flashy ways.
Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends- is a very good hip-hop record even if it arrives at a time where the A$AP Mob are not at the center of the hip-hop zeitgeist. Rocky consistently entertains without delivering any one-liners, and the album is sequenced to mask some of the lesser members’ weaknesses. Cozy Tapes stays true to its name. The Mob grew immensely and then lost its spiritual guide, just as it needed someone to give them direction. In Yams’ memory, they turned inward looked at what they did best. It may not be the most ostentatious effort. But it is comfortable.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


Chicago folk legend is honored by Conor Oberst, Bon Iver, Drive-By Truckers, Lambchop, and more.

Various Artists: Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine

A veteran of the Chicago folk scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, John Prine ought to be more difficult to cover. He writes for his own voice, an instrument with a uniquely warm wryness and a limited range, which means his melodies are homey and modest, as if he's making them up on the spot. More crucially, his songs-- crammed with stray details and wonderfully skewed insights-- are strongly tied to his part huckster, part good ol' boy personality. Prine's a songwriter's songwriter, which means that the very traits that ought to make him hard to cover only make covering him an attractive notion. Many have pulled it off, too: George Strait, 10,000 Maniacs, Fairport Convention, and Johnny Cash.
Even so, an album of Prine covers is a dodgy proposition. It's bound to be erratic; tribute albums are by nature inconsistent, and the particulars of Prine's songwriting make it likely that just as many people will stagger as will step lively. By focusing on several insightful interpretations and by spotlighting some of Prine's lesser-known tracks, however, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows actually has some surprisingly high highs and some lows that are as forgivable as they are inevitable. No one covers "Sam Stone", thankfully, nor "Hello in There", "Paradise", or his biggest single, "Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard". Of course, someone's going to tackle "Angel From Montgomery", an aching, oft-covered tune that is one of Prine's most popular. Old Crow Medicine Show make it sound pretty rote, with singer Ketch Secor even mimicking Prine's distinctive cadence. They sound a bit overwhelmed.
For the most part, these are fan choices, revealing the less-explored depths of the tributee's catalog and reveling in the often contradictory aspects of his songwriting. Few of the artists, however, can actually capture that hardened ambiguity, that sense of laughing while crying. Recasting one of Prine's more boisterous songs as a quiet solo folk rumination, Josh Ritter savors the details of "Mexican Home", singing "Take the fan from the window/ Prop the door back with a broom" like he wished he'd written that line. But he sounds overserious, which makes the composition seem a bit stuff. Likewise, Sara Watkins has a perfectly lovely voice for the melody of "The Late John Garfield Blues", but she misses the song's gruff self-deprecation. Even though Prine wrote it in his mid-twenties, it's a song for and by a middle-age man.
But others strike a finer balance. Abandoning the ethereal folk of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon invests "Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)" with an earthy gravity, packing in a novel's worth of detail in just four minutes. On "Spanish Pipedream", the Avett Brothers have a blast realizing that hippie escapism is both futile and fun, and it's been years since Conor Oberst has sounded as volatile and energetic as he does on "Wedding Day in Funeralville". The Drive-By Truckers' turn "Daddy's Little Pumpkin" into a bluesy stomp, and Mike Cooley sings it like he wrote it for Jerry Lee Lewis' lascivious leer. But the best moment may be Lambchop's "Six O'Clock News", a lesser-known track from Prine's 1971 debut. Singing in a clipped cadence, Kurt Wagner finds the ideal balance for the whimsical ("'God bless this kitchen,' said the knick-knack shelf") and the grisly ("the whole town saw Jimmy on the six o'clock news/ His brains were on the sidewalk and blood was on his shoes"). It's a dark song, barely leavened by its glimpses of humor, but that's Prine's secret: heartache demands humor, and vice versa.


Featuring guest spots from Twin Shadow and members of Yeasayer and Nomo, Mars finds Brooklyn-based, Sudanese-born multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Gallab working with Sudanese pop, Krautrock, 70s funk, free jazz, and global indie.

Mars

Biography can be overstated when evaluating an artist's work, but Ahmed Gallab's story is key to understanding his music. The Sudanese son of two college professors, he moved to the United States with his family at the age of five to escape the country's fomenting political violence of the late 1980s. The family moved around a bit, and Gallab eventually settled in Columbus, Ohio, when he was 18, where he fell in with the city's hardcore punk music community. He later found work as a session musician of some demand, drumming and serving as a multi-instrumentalist for Yeasayer, Caribou, Of Montreal, Born Ruffians, and Eleanor Friedberger. Eventually, as these things often go, he made his way to Brooklyn, where Sinkane started taking shape as his primary creative outlet.
Mars is Gallab's second full-length as Sinkane, and it sounds like the work of a nomadic professors' kid with equally strong ties to a DIY scene as well as his east African roots, whose creativity flourished on the road with indie vets and in the self-styled cosmopolitan home of 21st-century indie music. Mars is both refined and easygoing, if not a bit aloof at times. It works in multiple musical registers simultaneously and smartly-- the syncopated rhythms and breezy guitar figures of Sudanese pop, krautrock, early-70s funk, free jazz, Fader-friendly global indie-- while maintaining a clear authorial voice (largely coming from Gallab's playing multiple instruments on each song).
There's a loose concept at play on the record: Mars is Gallab's metaphor for a musical space in which anyone can exist, regardless of background. Though the temptation to refer to the rich tradition of Afro-futurism arises when a guy born in Sudan references interstellar reaches, the connection to Sun Ra, Parliament, or André 3000 is tentative at best. The record's politics are as abstract as the cover photo, and the album's mood thermostat doesn't move much from the "chill" position. There aren't a whole lot of lyrical specifics, but an abundance of references to the red planet seems less meant to signify escape (as in the Reverend A.W. Nix's pioneering "White Flyer to Heaven" sermon), or a sign of plain weirdness (as in Lil' Wayne's use): For Gallab, it's more along the lines of a summertime rooftop party, where your affable host greets you without rising from his deck chair.
With few exceptions, Gallab makes sure Mars' invitees are clearly identified. The album opens with the squawking funk of "Runnin'", on which his thin falsetto and encouraging words directly channel Blaxploitation-era Curtis Mayfield. "Love Sick" is about as blatant a reappropriation of "Spoon"'s vampiric funk riff as I've ever heard, and "Jeeper Creeper" vamps for five minutes around the core idea of Yeasayer's "2080" (it helps that the band's bassist plays on the song). "Making Time", which rides a new age synth pad that could have been drawn from All Hour Cymbals into the pocket of a deep Afro-funk groove, is the album's most successful synthesis. He plays all instruments on the song, save for a "Dirty Diana"-style guitar solo, courtesy of Twin Shadow's George Lewis, Jr. Yet instead of flaunting it, Gallab buries it in the mix, allowing it to serve as more of a textural element than a spotlit celebrity showcase. This is perhaps the clearest example of Gallabs gifts: using his friends smartly, playing down virtuosity, lest it detract from the overall vibe.


Despite trending toward pop in recent years, the globetrotting producer turns to European and African rappers to help him find new inspiration—or at least try.

Europa EP

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: On Diplo’s latest release, the mega-producer and self-anointed ubiquitous random white dude collaborates with a globe-spanning array of artists, offering his own approach on a variety of sounds that have yet to take commercial hold stateside. Yes, Europa—his fourth proper EP this decade—represents familiar territory for the 40-year-old musical omnivore; it’s an approach he famously showcased in 2004 on the Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 mixtape with M.I.A. Now, 15 years since that boombox-blasting collage of worldly rhythms, flashy pop samples, and teases of M.I.A.’s then-unreleased Arular, the remainder of Diplo’s career has itself shaped Volume 2—a crossroads of savvy tastes and production that pushes those interests toward the mainstream. No, Diplo didn’t invent cultural appropriation, but it’s hard to think of a modern white producer who’s more successfully monetized non-white sounds. He’s at it again.
That legacy notwithstanding, Europa—a 16-minute trifle featuring collaborations with on-the-rise British rapper Octavian, French spitter Niska, Algeria’s Soolking, and others—still feels like a sudden left turn. For Diplo, trend-spotting has always been a form of aesthetic survival, a way to maintain just the right amount of market ubiquity in an industry where it’s become increasingly difficult to achieve and keep big-deal visibility. It’s how he boogie-boarded his way from the low tide of bloghouse and firmly into the crass cash-cow sounds of EDM.
In recent years, he’s safely slipped through the door of EDM’s crumbling facade to take a more generalist role as pop’s behind-the-scenes whiz-kidult, with contributions to albums by Poppy, Bad Bunny, and MHD, as well as work with frequent friend MØ, Ellie Goulding, Swae Lee, and French Montana. But his last culturally impactful moment, via contributions to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, was nearly three years ago. His career is arguably in another transitional phase, similar to the fallow period that predated 2013’s rough-and-tumble Revolution, a release that firmly established him as one of EDM’s most famous bass-faces.
Through this lens, Europa ostensibly represents a seasoned DJ hitting the stacks to dig for some new sound that’ll liven up a set. But on these six tracks, the thrill of discovering something fresh and vibrant is nowhere to be found. This is becoming a trend for work issued under Diplo’s own name. Despite appearances from off-kilter, on-trend rappers like Lil Xan and Trippie Redd, last year’s California effectively buffed the jagged textures and unpolished surfaces of “SoundCloud rap” into something too smooth. Diplo’s work with Sia and on-the-rise pop guy Labrinth as LSD, collected on last year’s Mountains, likewise lacked any sonic eccentricities that would suggest a robust personality.
“New Shapes,” Europa’s Octavian-laced lead track, is the biggest whiff of this bunch, failing to capitalize on the rapper’s fascinating, hybridized approach of tough-talking grime motifs and queasy melodies. Paired with an ethereal synth and lightly carbonated drum patterns, Octavian comes across as exceedingly polite, even deferent. The remainder of Europa fares a little better, at least: Soolking flutters prettily and flows atop the piping trap of “Oh Maria,” while the always just-pleasing-enough “dolphin” sound that famously rippled across Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now” punctuates the rubbery Niska collaboration, “Boom Bye Bye.”
These are musical tricks and moods that Diplo can practically conjure in his sleep, which isn’t a good thing. After a half-decade churning out sour, aggressive EDM-fest staples that constantly walked the line between hedonistically pleasing and just plain grating, Diplo is on an anti-streak that mirrors the musical miserabilia currently clogging the pop charts, peddling a drab sound that fails to stand out. The flatlining pop on Europa makes one yearn for the ruder, bolder sounds of Diplo’s past—a time in which his ubiquitousness, regardless of how you felt about it, was reliant on something other than the ability to simply fade into pop’s increasingly congruous background.


The pop star’s fourth LP is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. Her impressionistic tale of lost love and aimless youth is electrifying but inconsistent.

C,XOXO

Much of the excitement in mainstream pop these days falls left of center. Chappell Roan took us all to theater camp; Charli XCX painted the club green with Brat. It’s only too easy to view Camila Cabello’s recent reboot as the work of a music establishment clumsily shifting gears to follow in their wake. The outsized response sparked by C,XOXO’s lead single “I Luv It” was split between excitement over a radical new musical direction and eye-rolling over what initially seemed like one of the most cynical pop rebrands in recent memory (at least until we figure out what is going on with Katy Perry).
It’s too bad, because if there was ever an artist more primed for casting off an old self and giving into some effortless partying, Cabello would be the woman. Until now, her music has been incredibly dutiful, whether owing to the demands of a career in Fifth Harmony or the loving reverence for her musical heritage that shaped her three prior solo albums. Though it bears her signature, C,XOXO is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. It’s a bridge away from girl-group polish and Latin-inflected pop and toward a more dreamy and reckless club sound. It is not a full pivot to hyperpop, as “I Luv It” suggested, but more like a stab at the wistful, complex, dancefloor introversion practiced by the likes of Lorde, Kelela, Troye Sivan, Frank Ocean, and Rosalía. It’s an evolution that squares nicely with Cabello’s stated ambition to be thought of not simply as a performer but as a writer, the author of a more complex and explicitly adult narrative than she’s told before.
C,XOXO is a broadly sketched tale of returning home to Miami and gaining perspective on broken love and aimless youth. It’s heavy on vibes, evoking the 305 primarily through features, some voice memos, and a toothless Spring Breakers aesthetic that’s notably neither trashy nor violent. Yet the musical landscape that Cabello’s producers El Guincho and Jasper Harris conjure is incredibly vivid, wielding warm synths and babbling samples as slinky launch pads for scorching riffs on Afrobeat and reggaeton. Halfway through the fantastic “Dade County Dreaming”—which doubles as a likely swan song for City Girls—JT’s ass-shaking chant is gradually subsumed by an absolutely tidal piano churn as their swagger gives way to a dreamy instrumental vastness. It’s as if Cabello is accessing a new mental horizon in real time.
What horizon is that? If the production has personality to spare, the same cannot always be said of the persona Cabello adopts here. This Camila often feels clumsy, half-drawn, at odds with the assuredness of the music. Even as she professes on “Chanel No. 5” to being “a cute girl with a sick mind,” much of the record bears little evidence of perverse or spontaneous thought. Cabello’s lyrics can be so associative they’re nonsensical. Daisy-chained signifiers like “Cigarette, candy necklace on my hips, butterfly that’s on my wrist” add up to little beyond PG-13 edginess.
C,XOXO does powerfully evoke the kind of album Cabello aspires to: A MOTOMAMI, Blonde, or Something to Give Each Other, the kind of record that reveals itself through collage, expertly weaving in loose strands that telegraph the artist’s taste and sensibility. Apart from a few wonderfully insane moments like the Gucci Mane sample on “I Luv It” or the downcast Pitbull rework of “B.O.A.T.,” Cabello’s choices more often feel either random or convenient. When she gives an unexpected shout-out to Haruki Murakami on “Chanel No. 5,” it feels like posturing. It doesn’t help that it’s made to slot into such a basic, and vaguely orientalist, rhyme scheme: “Fold for me like origami/Magic and real like Murakami/Red chipped nails, I’m wabi-sabi.”
Her features are a mixed bag in the same way. Her sultry, steely-eyed vocals on “Dade County Dreaming” make for a cool compliment to JT and Yung Miami’s staccato flows; her voice maps sweetly onto PinkPantheress’ effervescent production on the too-short “pink xoxo.” But there’s little chemistry with Playboi Carti, who’s left muttering to himself on the frenetic, overblown “I Luv It,” and Cabello’s coyness is mismatched against Lil Nas X’s full-throated horniness on “He Knows.” That her Drake duet, “Hot Uptown,” arrives on the back of his bruising defeat to Kendrick Lamar is a miracle of bad timing, because it’s excellent: a should-be hit that plays brilliantly to their respective strengths as a songwriter and a fuckboy.
Cabello is so eager to go searching for new sounds you occasionally wonder if she ought to be crediting other artists for the raw material she’s working with. Even though she’s decidedly Lana-endorsed, “June Gloom” cribs a little too much from the singer’s laconic flow for comfort; ditto Amaarae on “He Knows,” which fits a little too neatly into her sweaty, eclectic vision of Afrobeat. It still feels almost psychedelic how in-your-face the Charli XCX rip is on “I Luv It,” especially in light of the album’s title.
Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before. Her best songs on C,XOXO capture an acute emotional drift with a compelling honesty. “B.O.A.T.” is gorgeous, a song that pines for the final word in a breakup that she’ll never get to utter. Cabello tracks her roiling emotions in real time as her voice leaps from Auto-Tuned lament to piercing anger, while a subtle sample of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room” needles its way through, half-mocking, half-longing. It’s sad, sophisticated, and utterly singular—a proof of concept in a room full of prototypes.


After a stretch of dark, searching records, the former Hüsker Dü and Sugar leader uses the familiar power trio configuration to find a little peace.

Sunshine Rock

Bob Mould gives away the game with the title of Sunshine Rock, his 13th solo album: After several years in darkness, he’s ready for the light. Darkness is a comfortable place for Mould, who has spent his career picking at scabs and exorcising demons. But he had extra reasons for gloom earlier this decade, when his parents died in quick succession. On the subsequent Beauty & Ruin and Patch the Sky, Mould turned inward, meditating on mortality and loss. “I went through a dark period,” he admitted in a 2016 interview with Fact circa Patch the Sky. “I felt very isolated. I took six months away from the excitement of life to sit and contemplate the meaning of the rest of my life, and here it is.”
Sunshine Rock isn’t a ruminative album. Instead, it’s the place where Mould expresses his design for the rest of his life. For creative and personal reasons, Mould distanced himself from the past after Patch the Sky, decamping from San Francisco to Berlin, where he chose to rebuild his life with an eye toward optimism. He made a conscious decision to try happiness, the resolution at the core of Sunshine Rock in both attitude and sound. Using the great ball of fire in the sky as his lyrical lodestar, Mould has written an album that pulsates with positivity, even during occasional moments of melancholy.
Though bursting with primary colors, Sunshine Rock doesn’t qualify as a pure pop album, even when Mould excavates the fuzz-drenched “Send Me a Postcard,” a continental hit of organ-laced effervescence in the late ’60s for the psychedelic Dutch quartet Shocking Blue. Such tinny AM-pop artifacts may provide Mould with some measure of inspiration, but he’s not attempting to craft bubblegum hooks or even revive the candied rush of Sugar, the 1990s alt-rock outfit that represents his last flirtation with an actual modern rock hit. Instead, Mould works with familiar elements, shaping them so they seem brighter than they did in the recent past.
He returns with the peerless rhythm section of Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy, which has supported him since his 2012 Merge debut, Silver Age. (This is also the live rhythm section of that label’s long-standing flagship band, Superchunk.) A few quieter moments pepper the explosions of noise, and even the roaring guitars are occasionally dressed with keyboards or strings, accents that help the record sparkle. Still, despite these accoutrements, Sunshine Rock is recognizably the work of a power trio, the format that has been Mould’s strength since the days of Hüsker Dü.
On Hüsker Dü’s final album, 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories, Mould admonished his audience: “These are your important years/You’d better make them last,” a sentiment sung with youthful conviction. On Sunshine Rock, Mould asks, “What do we cherish in the final years?,” lacing the question with quiet urgency. Some of what he cherishes is evident through his lyrics, rife with romantic images of afternoons in the park, missed connections, and small victories.
But what really resonates is the music itself, or how Mould continually finds new variations on a formula he’s mined for nearly 40 years. For a while, Mould rejected this volcanic blend of melody, passion, and volume, but over the last decade, he’s reckoned with his past both through book and song, accepting his flaws and strengths. As he’s facing 60, he’s at peace with who he is, but he still writes and plays with the vigor of somebody restless inside. That tension between conception and execution makes all the good energy of Sunshine Rock feel hard-earned and genuine; scars and all, it’s the sound of somebody who has weathered battles and worked to survive.


The alt-country songwriter’s sixth album sits at the eye of the storm, matching a softer, more measured sound with a wryly humorous look at existential turmoil.

Lydia Loveless: Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again

Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again

Is Lydia Loveless, who made their name writing infectious country-rock songs with a death wish—songs about setting an ex’s lawn on fire and getting shot down in a lovers’ spat—mellowing out? “I’m getting older and my jets are starting to cool,” they sing amid squalls of reverb on Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again, their sixth full-length album. But then, with something between a wink and a sigh, they add, “If I ever get sober it’s really over for you fools.” It is part confession, part boast, part wish, delivered in a croon that holds their vocal power in reserve. Loveless’ earlier albums made deft use of sudden reversals: a flash of vulnerability followed by a sucker punch. Here and throughout their latest and best album, they spend more time in the ambiguous middle.
Some of Loveless’ most aggressive music over the past several years has arrived in deceptively shiny packages. On songs like “Heaven” and “Wringer” from their previous two albums, they threw their voice like a hand grenade, thundering lines like “Paradise is only for the weak, man” over twinkling synths and hi-hat pulses. The pessimism roiling beneath these songs transformed their brightness into a deadly coldness: less disco lights than the glint of a scalpel. Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again paints with a softer palette. Loveless largely sings not from the aftermath but in medias res. In “Toothache,” they feel a low-grade disaster coming on and beg their lover to just “pry it loose,” as a chorus of sugary whoo-hoo-hoos hints at the relief that might follow. The middle of a slowly unfolding crisis can also be eerily calm. “I’ve been looking for a way out,” they confess on the standout “Ghost,” which starts off as one of the most resigned-sounding revenge songs in recent memory, before inverting resignation into relief: “Think that I’ll find it now that I’m stuck in time.”
It can be hard to tell the difference between such eye-of-the-hurricane calm and total psychic shutdown. On “Runaway,” over a woozy Mellotron pad, Loveless alternates between cataloging death-drive urges and sketching fragments of scene: “Dissociating down at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar.” Only a cascading Wurlitzer line, accompanied by a shift into Loveless’ supernaturally resonant upper register, cuts through the murk. There is a stubborn will to transcendence in these songs: a desire to leave the dissociative slough of the eternal middle. But the will-they-won’t-they friction between self-destruction and self-preservation generates its own kind of pleasure. “I want the rush of knowing that I did the right thing for once,” Loveless declares on the power-pop confection “Do the Right Thing,” a song about resolving not to make a confession of love. In “Poor Boy,” a call and response between competing desires—“I wanna get in his head/Don’t wanna fuck with his head”—gathers a giddy energy that carries the song out over waves of pitch-bent synths.
“Sex and Money,” maybe Loveless’s best song yet, inhabits a different sort of middle. It is an anthem of desperate ambition, set to a rim-knocking groove, that captures the accumulating frustrations of a mid-list rock’n’roll act. But if it is an anthem, it is a self-defeating one, lingering on the simultaneous ridiculousness and necessity of the hustle it chronicles. “I know I’m not saving the world, but I gotta live in it,” Loveless drawls, “so I might as well splurge on 200 cotton T-shirts with my face on the front.” In the almost painfully catchy chorus that follows, Loveless pulls off a genuine magic trick: They make the bare act of survival, irradiated with the vital but embarrassing desire for something more, feel like enough, at least for now.


The southern rapper’s latest project captures him the same way he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable.

K.R.I.T. IZ HERE

Big K.R.I.T. has never had much interest in beef or drama, but early on his new record, he drops what could be interpreted as a jab at one of the famous headliners he’s shared shows with over the years. “You on the radio,” he raps, “They came to see me ’cause I did it without a hit.” It’s a brag, of course, but it’s a bit of a self-own, too. Even after nearly a decade on the industry’s radar, K.R.I.T. still doesn’t have anything even close to a hit, and it’s increasingly hard to imagine he ever will. He’s still working at more or less the same ceiling he was nearly a decade ago when his 2010 breakout mixtape K.R.I.T Wuz Here made him a critical favorite and a potential next-big-thing that never quite was.
That’s not to minimize what he has accomplished. Unlike Donnis or Charles Hamilton and the blog-rap era’s other flash-in-the-pans, K.R.I.T. was able to parlay his talent into a sustainable recording career. Has a following, and longevity isn’t anything to scoff at. And yet there’s a sense that he’s underperformed. After 10 full-lengths, K.R.I.T. is beginning to look like rap’s answer to Ty Segall: consistently good, rarely stop-the-presses great. Even when his projects impress on first listen, they can’t help but bleed together in the big picture.
And so K.R.I.T.’s latest project K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable. The album is ostensibly a sequel to his 2010 breakout project, and the title’s nod to the past only underscores how little his core sound has changed since then. He’s still making music seeped in UGK worship, all soulful Southern country grooves, subwoofer-Shiatsuing bass, and Pimp C snarl. There’s literally a song called “Learned From Texas,” about all the moves he learned from DJ Screw and UGK, as if anybody who’s listened to more than 10 minutes of K.R.I.T.’s music could have possibly overlooked Houston’s influence on him.
But unlike 2017’s 4Eva Is a Mighty Long Time, where K.R.I.T. barely even bothered acknowledging current trends, on K.R.I.T. Iz Here he tries branching out a bit, too. “I Been Waitin,” with its posh, nervy production, borrows liberally from Travis Scott’s art-house trap. Opener “K.R.I.T. Here” taps the jazzy joy of Chance the Rapper and Donnie Trumpet. The Rico Love feature “Obvious” rides the same wave of wistful Caribbean music as Drake’s “Controlla,” while the strip-club fantasia “Blue Flame Ballet” mirrors the freak-soul of Childish Gambino’s “Awaken, My Love!” There are shades of Migos in the triplet flows of the clubby trap cut “I Made,” and elements of Frank Ocean in the wistful closing stretch twofer of “High Beams” and “Life in the Sun.”
All those songs are perfectly fine, because K.R.I.T. is almost incapable of making a song that’s anything less than perfectly fine. And yet maybe K.R.I.T. Iz Here might have been better off if K.R.I.T. had availed himself of a few swings and misses. On “Addiction,” a shameless and otherwise only so-so knockoff of Kanye West and Lil Pump’s “I Love It,” K.R.I.T. is joined by Lil Wayne, who drops one of those unexpectedly great verses that, even this far past his peak, he still delivers regularly enough that we should almost start expecting them. It’s funny and surprising, blasé yet vital. Wayne’s career, in many ways, has been the antithesis of K.R.I.T.’s. He’s hit higher heights than K.R.I.T. by a mile, yet he’s also face planted in ways it’s impossible to imagine K.R.I.T. would ever allow himself. Neither rapper’s approach is intrinsically right or wrong. But one sure is a lot more exciting.


The Texas band Dead to a Dying World's second album is a hybrid of doom, black metal, and crust punk, buttressed by baroque classical flourishes and focused on the state of the world and its rather grim prospects. Its six extended pieces commingle melodrama and momentum, horror and hope, pulling the listener along like a tight-wire suspense flick.

Litany

For a moment, you think that the onslaught is over, that after eight minutes of dramatic strings and overdriven guitars, punishing drums and punished vocals, the big Texas metal band Dead to a Dying World will at last offer a respite. After all, they’ve already detailed environmental degradation, screaming lines about nature’s revolt and grand-finale floods as rhythm and riff crack and lash against one another. But when Dead to a Dying World at last pull back during "Beneath the Loam", one of four quarter-hour marvels on their second album, Litany, it is only to regroup and instantly return with twice the speed and twice the fury. "Brittle embers flicker inside," screams Heidi Moore, pushing her voice so hard above the sudden black metal melee that she takes full stops between every word. "Where blasting suns once raged." It’s a shocking and gripping moment, a jolt applied with unapologetic force and impeccable timing amid what was already a mighty furor.
That sort of escalation is exactly what Dead to a Dying World do so well throughout Litany, a vivid hybrid of doom, black metal, and crust punk, buttressed by baroque classical flourishes. Dead to a Dying World’s 2011 debut pursued a similar mix, with doom lunges and black metal surges woven together with string sections and riffs that expanded or contracted based upon the context. The idea, though, often outstripped the execution, so that the transitions between those parts felt threadbare and rushed, the rookie mistakes of an audacious new seven-piece ensemble. Four years later, however, Dead to a Dying World show no such signs of folly. These six deliberate pieces commingle melodrama and momentum, horror and hope, pulling the listener along like some tight-wire suspense flick.
To an extent, that’s what it is: Litany deals with the state of the world and its rather grim prospects, delivered in moribund language that suggests we are, as a species, poised at the precipice of our end. The music animates that message, with sweeping arrangements and chiming guitars, washes of distortion and marches of drums shaping a battle between anxiety about our future and hope for it, between infinite pessimism and purposeful optimism. Though the tools are different, Dead to a Dying World suggest the same frisson as the Arcade Fire in their salad days and the same emotional ambiguity as Explosions in the Sky. There is no single style to Litany, just as there are no easy answers about the worries Dead to a Dying World address.
For an album that lasts for more than an hour, though, it is at least an easy, alluring listen, largely because so much effort and thought seem to have gone into building it. During 17-minute opener "The Hunt Eternal", for instance, Dead to a Dying World volley between invigorating, aggressive black metal passages and stately, alluring doom. They drift into a pensive and patient midsection, where the spectral voice of Sabbath Assembly’s Jamie Myers-Waits hangs like foreboding fog. When at last they reach the end, they funnel all of it together, with the harshness pushing against the heaviness and buoyed from below by viola. Each moment feels bigger and more powerful than the last, so that these epics never overstay their welcome and linger into tedium. The song establishes the rubric for the rest of Litany, a seesaw of dynamics built around a world of apocalyptic images and faint whispers of renewal.
Just before the album’s final minute, Dead to a Dying World collapse, exhaustedly, from Litany's blitz, the beat marching along in halftime. His voice fighting above surviving sheets of guitar, Mike Yeager fights to pose one final question: "Do we choose to follow, or can we break away?" At times, Litany may feel overwrought, too emotionally loaded and compositionally ostentatious for its own good. But here, at the end, you understand that Dead to a Dying World aren’t being maudlin just for kicks, that they’re not howling about "a bloodless pillar" and "ochre hands" and intoning lines about the end of days without cause.
No, these are real-world worries, written in the extreme patois of heavy metal and cast with the mild panic of environmentalists, climate scientists, and even civil rights activists. Litany reminds me of Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption, in which he wonders if emergency can force humanity into grand action, or the glaciologist Jason Box, who proclaimed that we might be, as he infamously put it, "f’d." Dead to a Dying World’s roots in punk and metal afford these concerns urgency, while their sophisticated sounds lend it magnetism. When Litany ends, not only do I want to hear it again but I also want to follow its lead, to make some change for the better on behalf of the music—to, as Yeager puts it, "break away." Litany paints frightening if not altogether-unfamiliar scenes and asks pressing questions of both them and us, bound to music meant to mirror the complexity and precariousness of the world at large.