Freddie feels like a pure and reckless purge from Gibbs, a collection that finds him at his wildest and most essential.

Freddie

The trailer for Freddie Gibbs’ latest tape felt beamed in from the half-lucid world of late ‘80s dead zone TV—the kind of commercial that roused you from the couch at 3 a.m. with Luther Vandross’ face superimposed on a sunset. “Are you ready… for Freddie?” Gibbs purred, rapturously stroking a keyboard as a toll-free number flashed. (I called and found myself taking a survey to win a Caribbean cruise.) Over his prolific past decade, the Gary, Indiana rapper’s made just about any style work for him, from Madlib’s weirdo breakbeats to MoMA PS1-core bangers. But Freddie, whose impeccably campy cover art nods to Teddy Pendergrass’ 1979 self-titled album, came straight out of left-field—was Gangsta Gibbs really about to go full quiet storm?
Well, no. And while that may disappoint those who’d envisioned a full album of “Slangin’ Rocks,” it’s hard to be mad: Freddie is the hardest Gibbs record in years, and the most fun he’s sounded...maybe ever? Back when he first emerged, Gibbs quickly earned a reputation as a gravely serious rapper in terms of skill and of subject matter; Eastside Gary served as a perfectly bleak backdrop for his sobering narratives. Writerly but straight-shooting, his gangsta revivalism earned its share of critical acclaim but at the expense of personal style. In the nearly 10 years since, Gibbs has gotten looser, more experimental, without sacrificing the graphic imagery or razor-sharp wordplay—and in a weird twist, it’s wound up taking him closer to the sounds of popular trap than ever. But Freddie is hardly a bid for crossover appeal: it’s a capsule collection of Gibbs at his wildest and most essential.
At 10 tracks, nine of them under three minutes, it’d be tempting to chalk up Freddie’s slightness to this year’s trend of short songs and micro-albums. But Gibbs was ahead of this curve with last year’s eight-track You Only Live 2wice. (“I want you to keep playin’ this shit back-to-back-to-back-to-back,” he said in an interview last year. “Short, concise projects is what you’re gonna get from here on out with me.”) I imagine part of that impulse comes from an urgency sparked by three months in an Austrian jail in 2016, for which he was ultimately acquitted; he wrote YOL2 in his cell. That album, a clear-eyed stock-taking of his post-jail surroundings, felt like a fist slowly unclenching. Freddie, a year later, is a triumphant counterpoint—a record that feels like pure, reckless release.
For that, Kenny Beats is due significant credit; the producer, who contributed to half of Freddie’s tracks, has had a hand in some of 2018 rap’s best releases, from Key!’s 777 album to Rico Nasty’s mosh-inducing “Smack a Bitch.” Here, his beats exist in a similar universe as the blown-out productions of Pi’erre Bourne or the trap-noir of Southside circa 56 Nights, but rawer and hollowed-out. On “Automatic,” Gibbs clears a path through bass as immersive as fog, and “Toe Tag” is the tape’s most sinister moment: “Fuck the club, I’m in the basement with the pack, bagging up,” he spits over a gunfire-laden, sing-song melody that had me subconsciously gritting my teeth. Kenny’s best work, and Freddie’s highlight, is “Death Row,” a brilliantly unsubtle “Boyz-n-the-Hood” homage with L.A.’s just-incarcerated cult hero 03 Greedo in the role of Eazy-E. Through all of it, Gibbs’ delivery feels more in-the-pocket than ever, rowdy and limber but never veering off-course.
Which isn’t to say that fans of Gibbs’ subdued side will come up empty-handed here: “Triple Threat” dips back into his smoky, soulful mode, its hook half-sung in that familiar Midwestern baritone. And while Freddie might be lighter on standout lines than usual, Gibbs saves the album’s lyrical gut-punch for its last track, “Diamonds 2”: “I can’t lie, still get high on prescriptions/Sometimes I go weeks without no sleep, I’m in the fifth dimension/I just caught a body, Luca Brasi, he sleep with the fishes/Fucked up part is when I go to sleep, I see this nigga image.” Those are four incredibly loaded bars, the kind of writing that reminds you that very few people are rapping on the level of Freddie Gibbs right now. And none of them while wearing a “Miami Vice” suit.


The avant-garde icon Scott Walker scored this film about a fictional 9-year-old dictator, and it's one of the best things Walker has done since the still-unsettling The Drift.

Scott Walker: The Childhood of a Leader OST

The Childhood of a Leader OST

To call Scott Walker’s orchestral score for Brady Corbet’s debut film The Childhood of a Leader “invasive” would be an understatement. At points, it makes the There Will Be Blood soundtrack look like A Charlie Brown Christmas. Walker is responsible for the ominous, bow-shredding string figures and obscene woodwind bleats, but the young American actor/director Corbet—a familiar face from Martha May Marcy Marlene, the Funny Games remake, or, perhaps, 24 — claims to have lobbied for the mix to be raised “5% louder” than the theatrical standard. This provides a glaring contrast to the movie’s largely-murmured dialogue, glacial pacing, and aggressively dim composition, which recalls the famous candlelit atmosphere of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon done on budget.
In other words, it turns out the ambitious 28-year-old filmmaker and 73-year-old avant-garde music luminary are a good pair. Corbet manages to take his film—a period piece examining the broken family life of Prescott, a fictional 9-year-old fascist dictator in the making—to the same dynamic extremes Scott Walker has favored in his music since his 1995 watershed Tilt. Often, Walker’s writing threatens to overpower the movie, building up near-absurd levels of tension at moments where there might otherwise be none: Prescott and his remote mother (Bérénice Bejo) walking woodenly to Mass, or pacing around their cavernous home in the French countryside.
But elsewhere, Walker follows the script sensitively, indicating his respect for the complexity of Corbet’s vision. Piercing, stratospheric tone clusters underscore Prescott’s most destructive episodes—the film is divided into “tantrums”—as if we’re hearing the ringing in his ears. Murky tidepools of manipulated strings surge as he dreams of the brutalist, pre-WWII future he will help define (“Dream Sequence”).
When that future eventually comes—in the film’s epilogue—Walker-trademarked, custom-made industrial percussion arrives (see also: The Drift's meat-slab paddywhacking, the saber-scraping and farting of 2013’s Bish Bosch, the virtuoso whip work on 2014’s Sunn O))) collaboration Soused), mimicking the mechanics of a propaganda-generating printing press. This kicks off an ambitious suite of music, one which manufactures the better part of the drama in the last ten minutes of the film, in which The Leader’s staff and public prepare for his arrival in a crowded city courtyard. Walker recapitulates all the major musical motifs from earlier in the film in distorted, vituperative snippets. Military drums stutter out of time; a slithering violin emulates an air-raid siren. It’s one of the best things Walker has released since The Drift**. Like the composers this music most closely recalls (Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti, Bernard Herrmann) Walker manages to play his fully-sized orchestra like one huge, terrifying instrument here.
The Childhood of a Leader is a clear high water mark for Walker in terms of instrumental writing, but it is also, in many ways, an apt extension of textural ideas Walker has explored on his past two albums—as well as in his previous scores for Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola X and dance piece And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? Leader highlights Walker at a late-career stage of both creative abundance (this is his third release in four years) and stasis. “I just work in my own sound world now,” Walker explained to The Quietus in 2014. “I’ve established a sound world and developed certain tropes and things that I understand.” After decades of painstaking experimentation, he seems content tinker around in the same haunted toolshed for the foreseeable future. But don’t call it career-twilight complacency: Judging from the depth of vision in *Leader’*s half-hour of music, there's plenty of exciting possibilities left for Walker’s musical lexicon, which continues to go unused by anyone but him.


Yoni Wolf and his band switch up their approach with bite-sized songs, a visual album, and an uncharacteristic focus on the past.

AOKOHIO

For all of the neuroses he’s examined on record over the years, Yoni Wolf has never seemed like one for nostalgia. During his two decades spent fronting cLOUDDEAD, Hymie’s Basement, and WHY?, Wolf could usually be found either over-analyzing the present moment or lost in some dark, near-future reverie. It’s surprising, then, that following a creative dry spell and a relocation to his native Cincinnati, Wolf has turned to his past for inspiration. The album art for AOKOHIO draws from home movies Wolf made with his older brother (and WHY? member) Josiah Wolf, and its lyrics make frequent mention of their family and early life. Given the younger Wolf’s Freudian fixations and how incisive he can be when voicing his internal monologue, you’d think all this rooting around in his childhood would turn up something interesting. And yet, the verbose rapper and singer has never sounded like he’s had less to say.
AOKOHIO, it turns out, is the product of creative malaise. “I wasn't feeling the idea of going back in and making another ten or twelve song album. It felt arduous,” Wolf said. “So I wanted to pare the process down and make it manageable.” Hence, an album with 19 songs spread across 33 minutes and six “movements,” each of which is being released independently and as part of this collection. Only five of these songs break the two-minute mark; the rest sound like fragments, field recordings, or some combination thereof (WHY? records have always included tracks like these, though they’ve usually served as bumpers). There’s also an accompanying visual album, made in partnership with—no joke—a director who randomly DM’d Wolf on Instagram. If all of this sounds like an effort to jump-start a stalled engine, it wouldn’t be the first time. But as with 2013’s fan-service exercise Golden Tickets, it feels like Wolf never commits to his own conceit—nearly all of the songs on AOKOHIO feel underdeveloped, if not unfinished.
Album opener “Apogee” is in many ways a typical WHY? song: Over gentle washes of guitar and piano and a dance beat, Wolf fires off a series of curious observations in a resigned sigh (“Standing in the mirror thinking, ‘I wish I was a chocolatier’/Fat but happy at the apogee of life”). But just as the song begins to hit its stride, it’s over. “Peel Free” attempts to locate the source of Wolf’s angst at the time of his birth, but amid the horns, chimes, and weighty piano chords, he comes up empty-handed (“I’ve been shaking off a shadow all my life,” he shrugs on the chorus, backed by a choir). On the surface, “Deleterio Motilis” sounds like it could have been left off of the band’s high-water mark Alopecia; it even opens with a signature Wolf move, a self-deprecating reflection on his treatment of women. But unlike WHY?’s best work, everything feels half-hearted, the punchlines and uncomfortable confessions lacking their usual bite.
Originally Yoni Wolf’s solo rap project, WHY? has been a bona fide indie rock band for close to 15 years now, one that’s more than capable of making elegant and affecting music. But even these talents go to waste on AOKOHIO. “Rock Candy” overplays the band’s signature glockenspiels, and the result sounds like a cat-food commercial. With its horns, choir vocals, and stargazing melodies, album closer “Bloom Wither Bloom (for Mom)” overshoots poignancy and lands in schmaltz. WHY? has never been a subtle band, but they’ve also never been this overwrought.
About halfway through the album, we hear a bit of something promising in “Mr. Fifths’ Plea.” It has all the hallmarks of a fan favorite: twinkling instrumentation, a title that references one of the band’s best-loved songs, a catchy chorus that doubles as a plea (“Someone would you save me from myself?/Someone would you help me be a healthy human being?”). And yet, we never really get to hear it. The song plays faintly underneath a recording of Wolf and his brother conversing with a taxi driver and cuts off at the 45-second mark. This attempt at self-sabotage might sound interesting on paper. But in practice, it’s emblematic of a larger trend in Wolf’s songwriting over the last decade: lots of experiments, few results.


The seminal label celebrates its 10th year with a new Total comp, featuring the Field, Reinhard Voigt, Ada, Gui Boratto, DJ Koze, and Justus Köhncke.

Total 10

Man, 10 years of Kompakt. It doesn't feel like long ago that I first discovered the label-- the way many others did, through its classic Total 3 compilation, which opened my rock-leaning ears to a new strain of dance music that I instantly fell for. Minimal techno! How had I been unaware of this? That was 2001, three years after Wolfgang Voigt founded the Cologne-based imprint, and since then it has, of course, grown substantially in size and cultural import, breaking artists like the Field and Gui Boratto and establishing itself as a one-stop shop for all things minimal via its physical storefront in Cologne and distribution house. But in 2009, one wonders where Kompakt stands artistically. This year, it released a very nice Ada mix, but it's been a few years since the label presented an exciting new artist, and its last truly essential LP was 2007's breakout From Here We Go Sublime by the Field. So, does Kompakt have the juice to go another decade?
Total 10, the label's latest collection of exclusive cuts and recent hits, provides a timely opportunity-- an anniversary edition of sorts-- for its makers to address that question. More so than previous installments, which have gradually dipped in quality over recent years (the last great Total comp being the sixth, in 2005) but still remained mostly enjoyable, this year's Total carries with the weight of increased expectations, and even the record sleeve's regal purple and gold coloring seems to suggest legacy, or at the very least continued relevance. So does it deliver? Well, that depends on which portion of the jam-packed, two-and-a-half hour house-and-techno cornucopia you're talking about.
Minimal techno lends itself to slow builds, long stretches where the beat repetition becomes a continuous throb, and Kompakt comps generally aren't known for their brevity. But Total 10 is a monster even by those terms, with an average track length of around seven minutes, and the best way to think about it is in two distinct parts-- Discs One and Two, conveniently. The first is easily the better of the pair, and it opens with a bang-- or, well, a serve. DJ Koze, one of the label's more underrated producers, kicks things off with "40 Love", a blippy Nintendo-style cut built from live tennis-match sounds (no, seriously)-- a forehand and its return, crowd gasps, and a Monica Seles-like grunt to boot. He uses the crisp pops and dramatic oohs and ahhs as pieces of his arrangement, and what should sound like a gimmick is simply fun and oddly compelling. The rest of disc one, heavier on undulating grooves than we're used to from the label, matches Koze's winner in quality and playfulness.
Previous Total collections have separated new and already-released tracks into dedicated discs for each, but this year Kompakt has wisely jumbled the two. It makes for a more balanced overall listen, even if most of the best songs reside on the first CD. Here, you've got Dirk Leyers' fantastic mix of Justus Köhncke's "(It's Gonna Be) Alright", an epic, minimal disco-funk piece replete with chopped-up vocal samples and whiny guitars that annihilates just about everything on the Juan MacLean's similar-sounding LP from earlier this year. There's "Lovestoned", a standout track from Ada's Adaptations mixtape, which provides probably the best example of her unique balance of texture, danceability, and smoothed-out sultriness. New jams favor deep-house wallop over glitch and restraint, and thumpers such as Thomas/Mayer's "Total 9" and Nicolas Stefan's "Closer" explore club-friendly possibilities with zany basslines, insistent snares, and ramped-up BPM.
If Total 10's first disc has you convinced of Kompakt's longevity and ability to reinvent itself outside of established microhouse norms, then the second will likely call that into question. It's here where the compilation starts to sag under the weight of its own bulk and relies too much on the type of repurposed tracks that ultimately did in the largely disappointing Kompakt 100 from 2004. Even those of us who pay very close attention to this type of thing almost need a legend to sort out its various tag-team contributors (Mayburg = Michael Mayer and Jörg Burger; It's a Fine Line = Ivan Smagghe and Tim Paris), and the remixes included don't improve upon their originals in most instances (case in point Thomas Fehlmann's take on the Field's "The More That I Do"). Add to that a few head scratchers such as Jürgen Paape's circus-y "Ofterschwang" and Pachanga Boys' utterly bizarre Mexican-pop closer "Fiesta Forever", and it begins to feel like a decidedly lopsided compilation.
But-- and this is a big but-- scattered among Total 10's generally lesser second-disc material are a few really great songs, the kind that save the album from becoming an unnecessary, why-do-I-need-another-Kompakt-comp kind of release. One of those is Matias Aguayo's "Walter Neff", which, come to think of it, is also the best track of the whole collection. With the finest hand claps-and-cowbell arrangement I've heard since the last LCD Soundsystem LP, it's ostensibly modern disco, but more than that it's a future-pop number as good or better than anything being done by YACHT, Neon Indian, or any other recent techno-savvy whizkids messing around with dance beats and pop sensibilities. The darn thing sounds so fresh and of-the-moment, and next to a dozen or so other similarly strong cuts here, it makes me think that, yeah, even 10 years in and literally thousands of minimal tracks later, Kompakt's still got plenty of gas left in the tank.


On his latest project, the German electronic musician blends piano, percussion, and dying equipment into his moody ambient-dub.

Tempus

Stefan Betke has hit higher highs and lower lows than most electronic artists. But what makes his output as Pole uneven is also what makes his career so exciting to follow: a fearlessness in applying his considerable skill as a producer in new, untested directions. “I like to have a concept in my work,” he explains, “but I do not like to expand it into an endless repetition of itself.” Lately, his focus has been the passing of time. The German musician recorded 2020’s Fading in response to his mother’s memory loss due to Alzheimer’s, and its elegiac tone mourns the lost past that dementia entails. Tempus, his latest album, shares the melancholic mood of Fading, extending that album’s musical palette with decaying percussion and piano that sound like artifacts of the past struggling to remain in the present.
Whereas Fading was full of punchy bass and crisp percussion, Betke’s dub effects on Tempus stretch components of the rhythm section into long tails of staticky ambience that pan across the sonic field. This backwards pull can make it difficult to determine where the momentum comes from in a song. The opener “Cenote” moves forward with a modest, repeating bass groove through spacious synth pads while a resonant, reverbed cowbell brightens the track like a streetlamp rhythmically flashing. “Grauer Sand” begins on more solid ground, with uptempo percussion hurrying underneath hints of melody that flash and sparkle in the upper registers. The meandering “Alp,” on the other hand, loses this momentum with a too-tentative bassline that seems unsure of its destination. Its atmosphere evokes a city at night, but across its six minutes, a suspicion arises that you’ve been going in circles through confusing backstreets.
From Pole’s inception with the broken Waldorf 4-Pole filter that gave his early releases a crackly lo-fi veneer, Betke has used the project to explore the limitations of technology. In “Stechmück,” he revives that spirit, choosing to keep a take in which his Minimoog was dying. Over growling bass and sharp drum blasts, a chaotic buzzing swirls like an out-of-control RC airplane. Its incongruity risks ruining the track but instead makes it the most memorable on the album. Just as his electronic keyboard dies, Betke reaches for an acoustic piano for Tempus’ last two tracks, an unusual move in the Pole oeuvre despite Betke being a trained pianist and jazz musician. The title track is the busiest here, but through a bluster of overlapping percussion and darting synths, the piano provides surprising emotional ballast. The bassy “Allermannsharnisch” is lifted by exploratory piano chords that lend it a jazzy feel before increasingly loud synth drones overtake the song. The last sound on the album is a somber piano chord fading out—a reminder of how much Betke has yet to explore.
For over 20 years, Betke has created electronic music ranging from ultra-minimalism to wide-screen maximalism. His early trilogy 1, 2, 3 introduced glitch to understated, fuzzy dub and inspired a legion of sound-alikes, while 2007’s Steingarten showcased a more dynamic take on bass music that remains the highlight of his career. Fitting for an album about the passage of time, Tempus looks to these past approaches, combining their moody atmosphere with the clean production and dense textures of his later work. It’s the sound of an artist drawing from his repertoire while demonstrating that he is still looking to the future.


The Philadelphia musician’s new album resembles the indelible emotional resonance of a dream, allowing his idiosyncrasies as a storyteller to shine.

Separation

It was Francis Lyons’ therapist who suggested his dreams might have something to say that he didn’t. Not unprecedented psychological phenomena, but a breakthrough in his musical project, Ylayali. After a blur of three albums in three years, as well as some heavy self-reflection, the well felt dry. So for his new album Separation, Lyons—a Philadelphia artist who plays drums in bands like 2nd Grade and Free Cake for Every Creature—suspends himself in a dream state. The entire album is laid out as an interaction with a character from this dream, a nameless man who acts as a spiritual guide of sorts, one that vacillates between the sinister and the paternal. It’s an exercise that works well for Lyons, allowing him to nudge the surrealism and experimentalism that marks his music into a more purposeful, potent framework.
The album begins in media res, a jarring choice that sets the mood for the rest of the project’s heady, winding odyssey, and Lyons’ larger goal of melding musical storytelling with his own private introspection. The saga opens with “Green Walls,” in a truck driving through cornfields, the man at the wheel and the narrator sitting shotgun. It’s as if our narrator is an abductee, suddenly waking up in unfamiliar surroundings. To orient himself, he focuses mostly on the view. On the next track, “Burnt Axiom,” the narrator’s attention turns to the nameless man. “Sorta has my father’s eyes,” he observes. “He knows my needs, he sees them all well before me.” Neither of these things are comforting; his gut is turning.
There is something distinctly oneiric about the music itself, in part due to Lyons’ unorthodox yet compelling sense of melody, which is one of the album’s highlights. The melodies here strike a balance between the cerebral and the playful, and for the most part, they don’t shift over the course of entire songs. Everything is built around repetition: Synths, basslines, and tambourine jangles are bedrocks for songs from start to finish. All of these maneuvers produce a feeling of hypnosis, trance, and an eerie sense that we’re moving but not going anywhere. Instruments—guitars, bass, drums, synths, sometimes violins and harps—are vivid and sharp, but vocals are distorted and buried, like they’re penetrating through layers of sleep. These choices are immersive and dynamic, and they allow the narrator’s fuzzy point of view to come into fuller focus.
There’s a narrative to this album the way there is one to a dream—it’s hazy and erratic, but it makes perfect sense while you’re in it. Lyons’ omission of concrete information builds its own meaningful internal world, grounded in the genuine poignancy of the music. On “Nobody Knows,” the man offers the narrator advice, though to us it’s unintelligible; on “Not Yer Spade,” he dips, having imparted the knowledge he needed to, and the narrator is left with the aftermath on “He Needs Me,” a gentle song featuring violin and harp, as the narrator reflects on being abandoned. We barely understand anything about the man or his relationship to the narrator at this point, and neither, it seems, does the narrator himself. But the whole album is about the process of learning a lesson, but not the lesson itself. This is what really makes a mark on a person, it suggests. It also removes any firm barrier between the narrator’s experience and the listener’s, leaving you with the feeling that the journey was your own, though you didn’t quite hit the end of it yet.
As the album progresses, Lyons’ lyrics unravel into opacity and absurdity; the earlier songs are more or less straightforward narrative, while the closer “Air” is just a list of disconnected phrases (“hot box, terranaut, knuckleball, twisting top”). Instead of a resolution, it offers gradual fragmentation, a twist in the album’s construction that again evokes the path of a dream. The looser the imagery becomes, the more affecting it is. There’s beauty in untethering to reality: The words resemble unmolded clay, or stems not yet ripe, their meaning still only potential.
The way Lyons sketches his characters, leaving their presence full of abstractions and contradictions that only heighten them, reveals him as an impressive storyteller. With this approach, his idiosyncratic voice as a lyricist and musician shines. Mostly, Separation succeeds in how it replicates the sensation of a dream; when it’s over, you feel affected for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. If Lyons is never done wrestling with his own subconscious, he’s at least conquered the creative challenge that he needed.


Look Mexico's Uniola is a caffeinated kind of indie rock that works to the rhythm of daily life, while their lyrics treat soul-searching as natural, inescapable part of living.

Uniola

Look Mexico covered Jimmy Eat World’s “A Praise Chorus” at last October’s Fest 14 and basically spoiled the entire plot of their LP *Uniola *with one lyric: “Are you gonna waste your time thinking how you’ve grown up or how you missed out?” In a word, absolutely. “My 20s were a stressful vacation, most expenses were deferred, costly lessons,” Matt Agrella sighs on “You’re Lucky You Didn’t Lose an Arm,” and yeah, call ‘em First World Problems, but they’re every bit as real as that student loan bill arriving every month, or the quarterly review for a job you barely want to keep.
This isn’t truly *heavy *stuff, just things that weigh on people. Agrella’s lyrics here are primarily focused on “marriage, kids and life in general,” also likely the top three reasons being in a band becomes impractical in your 30s.  It’s safe to assume that Look Mexico did not spend the past five years with a deadly serious and singular dedication to the making of *Uniola: *Obsessive tunnel vision is an ideal a(and a luxury) of legendary, *cool *artists and that’s not what Look Mexico are about: Prior to the stylized, gorgeous shot gracing *Uniola, *every Look Mexico cover could’ve passed for a Torche tour poster and every song title in their decade-deep discography is a line of Vin Diesel film dialogue. Agrella spends long stretches of *Uniola *having discussions with himself, in a voice that’s somehow more nasal than the one he uses to sing. Look Mexico could reasonably be described as “math-rock” if that term meant the literal class; in “Ok, Ok, I’ll Turn Down the Music,” there’s a TI-83 joke.
But whether Look Mexico come off as lyrically clever or instrumentally proficient, there’s never a sense that they’re trying to make a big deal about it. *Uniola *is playful, not clever—similarly, it’s not dance music, nor are Look Mexico a jam band, but they do have elements of both. From their earliest days, Look Mexico were an evolutionary spawn from a point where indie rock’s avatar had shifted from the collegiate slacker to a tightly wound, high-achiever who owns their awkwardness. It’s a caffeinated kind of indie rock that works to the rhythm of daily life, seatbelt-constrained air drumming, the tapping of fingers on a desk, feeling the effect of the first cup of coffee in your cubicle.
But Look Mexico have played enough basement and bar gigs to know what works in a small room of drunk people: while “Well, Kansas Ain’t What it Used to Be” constantly shifts tempos and flow, it’s centered by a feel-good riff that rivals anything on the new Diarrhea Planet album. “My Superman Seat-Grab Barrel Roll? I’m Still Working On It” grooves under Agrella’s buried soliloquy about discerning the true meaning of compassion before exploding into a forthright, cathartic call-and-response that could be a sequel to the Dismemberment Plan’s chest-beating “What Do You Want Me To Say.”
The lyrics are full of soul-searching, but not in a painful or self-excavating way. Agrella sees regret as a natural, inescapable part of living that can be the source of purposeful introspection rather than morbid reflection and self-pity. “You haven’t done all you wanted to/Now you think it’s abandoned you,” Agrella sings on “I Even Got This Scar to Match” before his bandmates shout away any self-doubt: “You are just the same!”  Thinking about how you’ve grown up or missed out *isn’t *necessarily time wasted.
As with Braid’s 2014 comeback *No Coast *and Mock Orange’s Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, Uniola is the work of a band that’s been around long enough to have some perspective. Look Mexico have returned to Tiny Engines eight years after their *Gasp Asp *7” served as the label’s inaugural release. It was only in 2014 when the Carolina imprint started to make a national impact with the releases from Dikembe, Beach Slang, Cayetana, Somos and the Hotelier’s classic Home, Like Noplace Is There**. Look Mexico have also frequently appeared at the Fest in nearby Gainesville, which has evolved from a local phenomenon to a definitive, renowned locus for divergent variants of popular punk rock that generally went ignored by mainstream media until recently.
Even with the increased visibility of their scene, Look Mexico know damn well they’ve dedicated themselves to a style of music that has made nobody rich and *definitely *hasn’t made anyone look cool. It’s easy to be dedicated to craft when it’s the only thing, but to paraphrase the longest title here (taken from the $2.6 million-grossing Find Me Guilty), *Uniola *is about recognizing where your loyalties lie under difficult circumstances. “Sometimes perseverance barely even makes a sound underground,” Agrella sings on “We Are Groot.” And that’s fine with Look Mexico, as long as someone is listening.


Recasting Y2K British alt-pop for a new generation, the South London singer-songwriter’s debut tackles heartbreak and loss with humor and conviction.

Rachel Chinouriri: What a Devastating Turn of Events

What a Devastating Turn of Events

Professional declutterer Marie Kondo operates by a simple principle: Every item in her home must “spark joy” when she holds it. If not, it’s on the chopping block. The Japanese term for this now-popular phrase is “tokimeku,” which also literally describes a fluttering heart. Zimbabwean-English artist Rachel Chinouriri dedicates a song to Kondo on her debut, What a Devastating Turn of Events, now released in a deluxe edition. “I’m getting rid of everything/Starting with you,” she declares, her husky voice barely breaching a whisper. Throughout the album, Chinouriri is taking inventory—chasing the tingly feeling that comes with upending the status quo.
“The kids are throwing up in the Garden,” she sings of regretful alcohol-filled nights in opener “Garden of Eden,” commencing the album’s theme of purging. The audible click of a cassette tape sets a nostalgic mood: With Sugababes and Lily Allen-inspired kiss-offs (“Never Need Me,” “It Is What It Is”) and thunderous production reminiscent of Coldplay (“The Hills,” “Cold Call”), Chinouriri reveals herself as a fan of the British pop and alternative artists of the noughties. Her neo-soul vocal modulations, internet-age references, and lyrics that center the experience of a dark-skinned woman—“I love myself/I love my skin”—separate her from predecessors. The 25-year-old musician developed a subdued singing style to pacify her family, who would periodically shush her during recording sessions. As grungy whirlpools of guitar threaten to drown her out on “The Hills” and “Cold Call,” she sounds like someone learning to yell for the first time in her life.
What a Devastating Turn of Events documents a distinctly Black working-class experience of British life. On the cover, Chinouriri and her guitar stand in front of a council estate row house draped in miniature St. George’s Cross flags. “Really easy for you to pick and choose a woman worthy of your flat in West Croydon with those roadman shoes,” she taunts someone from her South London hometown. With their fluting vocals and bird chirps, her songs could fit on the soundtrack of Michaela Coel’s sitcom Chewing Gum, about a 24-year-old British-Ghanaian woman trying to lose her virginity. Through humor, pop hooks, and scenes of emotional intimacy, both works juxtapose the vibrancy of life with the drab realities of public housing.
In her lyrics, Chinouriri tackles heavy themes of suicide, eating disorders, and depression without succumbing to internet brain rot. “Dumb Bitch Juice” may be a social media catchphrase, but Chinouriri’s bluesy tone of voice seems to emanate from an earlier era. “I’ll end up the one/Who pays all of the bills/While your family call me unstable,” she prophecizes, imagining herself giving up a bright future for the validation of a no-good man. She sings with a weariness like she’s lived this dynamic in a past life; more likely she’s simply witnessed it among an older generation. Deluding yourself into thinking you can turn a loser into a supportive partner happens to the best of us, as the accomplished BBC Radio 1 host Clara Amfo affirms in a closing radio drop.
“Never Need Me,” the lead single, is Chinouriri’s electric farewell to wastemen and to the version of herself who thirstily laps up their approval. When a former lover comes crawling back, she’s tempted but responds with a shrug: “If you can’t change, I doubt that I can help you.” She’s pettier on “It Is What It Is,” where her monotone delivery conveys pure annoyance: “I know you won’t text or anything, I know what you’re like/Hot and cold, hit and miss, up and down/And a bit of a prick, really.”
As lighthearted as the breakup tracks are, Chinouriri conveys just how dangerous patriarchal ideals can be. Title track “What a Devastating Turn of Events” recounts the depressive spiral and eventual suicide of Chinouriri’s cousin in Zimbabwe. After she discovers she is pregnant, her once-adoring boyfriend abandons her and their unborn child. “Out of wedlock which her family despise/But if she lost it, it would still be a crime,” Chinouriri narrates. The women in her extended family did not have the same choices that she enjoys, but Chinouriri recognizes that real, life-altering change requires even more: It means being willing to sacrifice communal approval. “No point in trying to prove yourself to them/Why question who you are from deep within?” she declares on “Garden of Eden.” With tears, feeling, and the occasional fit of vomiting, she salts the soil she once tended.
Anyone in need of help can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org to chat with someone online.


A new compilation looks back on the storied New York drag ensemble where ANOHNI got her start, placing the troupe in a lineage of queer artists who treated drag as a means of accessing selfhood.

Various Artists: Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants - Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992–1995

New York is always dying, pricing out longtime residents and shuttering beloved haunts. One recent casualty is the iconic Pyramid Club, an East Village night spot that hosted RuPaul, Madonna, and Lydia Lunch in the 1980s and early ’90s. A jumble of drag personalities, hardcore kids, graffiti artists, and gay locals, the Pyramid community was decimated by AIDS, and the 2022 closure of their common ground marks a definitive rift with the past, dispatching the memory of the hub’s late habitués to oblivion.
Even decades ago, the venue could function as a space for mourning, transforming the mood from debauched to lamentful over the course of a single evening. In 1992, elegiac auteur ANOHNI and kindred spirits Johanna Constantine and Psychotic Eve, all barely 20 at the time, formed Blacklips Performance Cult. Appearing at the Pyramid during the graveyard shift on Mondays, the troupe of 13 or so drag queens and fellow travelers wrote and performed short plays with irreverent names such as “The Swiss Family Donner Party” and “The Birth of Anne Frank.” The cast did all of its own make-up and costumes, relying on the genius of budding talents like future Michael Jackson and FKA twigs collaborator Kabuki Starshine. They used one microphone, to ragtag comedic effect, and straddled goth and drag cultures, reaching for both fabulous and macabre aesthetics. Troupe members vomited on the corpse of Jack the Ripper, pelted their audience with animal organs and tore a bloody fake fetus from the belly of cast member James F. Murphy. Then, they belted into song, and while the numbers could be as funny as the self-consciously inept acting, they were sometimes devastating and truthful, shot through with the inescapable horror of AIDS’ peak.
A new ANOHNI-curated compilation, Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants — Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992 - 1995, places Blacklips in a lineage of queer music, nightlife, and politics. Released in conjunction with a book of photographs, scripts, interviews, and essays, the 90-minute compilation coalesces around the group’s predecessors and some surprising documentation of their own songs, effectively showing how Blacklips laid the groundwork for ANOHNI’s subsequently skyward career. Original tracks by the cast—including an early version of ANOHNI’s “Rapture,” which would appear years later on her first record backed by the Johnsons—coexist with heartfelt covers of glam-rock forerunners such as Lou Reed. Vocal clips, which range from an interview excerpt with AIDS activist Vito Russo to a jokey advertisement for a Halloween show at the Limelight, play off selections from Blacklips DJ sets, chosen by Johanna Constantine. From the perspective of performance art, Blacklips seemed to arrive just after the peak of a polymathic Downtown scene that blurred drag, cabaret, theater, and activism. Musically, their capacity for earnestness separated them from precedent, imbuing their mourning with an openhearted, connective consonance that would become more common in the post-9/11 era.
Of course, the album sets us in a much earlier period—one of punk, camp, and the fury of ACT UP. The record’s generous sprawl encompasses a couple of tracks by late players in John Waters’ Dreamlander ensemble, Divine and Edith Massey. The latter charms her way through “Punks, Get Off the Grass,” one of the spirited, magnetic singles she released with her novelty band the Eggs. There are club-kid acts from the influential 1988 film Mondo New York, which inspired ANOHNI and Johanna Constantine—these include ubiquitous drag artist Joey Arias and queercore pioneers Dean and the Weenies, whose defiant, sax-laden “Fuck You” is one of the record’s hilarious highlights. Inimitable frontman Dean Johnson insults an unnamed nemesis: “I wish you’d choke on a fashion accessory,” and later, “You’d look cooler if you wore a Frigidaire.” Other tracks harness the era’s agitprop energy, among them Diamanda Galás’ virus dirge “Double-Barrel Prayer” and Vito Russo’s exhortation for gays to take political action without worrying about appeasing straight people. Many of the selections seem like intimate moments in ANOHNI’s own tale of self-realization: Russo, for example, was a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1990 while ANOHNI and Johanna Constantine were undergrads. Mere months before he died of AIDS, Russo encouraged ANOHNI to move to New York.
The tracks by troupe members are often doleful, thanks to a considered curatorial agenda. ANOHNI dispenses with Blacklips’ parodies of songs from movies, recognizing that ironic takes on Hollywood weren’t their most singular contributions to the world of drag performance. Instead, we have Ebony Jet’s “Satellite of Love” and Sissy Fit’s “Sister Morphine,” two haunting covers that draw out real desperation from the outlaw perspectives of their source material. ANOHNI’s originals highlight her mature style, ignoring the haphazard spoofs for which one can find video evidence online. Her wordless humming elevates the Johanna Constantine duet “The Yellowing Angel” into a near-religious paean to finger-fucking, while the brief “People Are Small” is a virtuosic display of her upper range. Organ-driven “Love Letters,” a 1961 Ketty Lester hit that ANOHNI performed under her drag name Fiona Blue, rises out of camp’s confines, leaving familiar terrain behind. Her singing reminds us of how Blacklips, at their most progressive, treated drag: not as something humorous, arch, or pop cultural, but instead sincere and introspective, a means of accessing selfhood.
The group’s final play, 13 Ways to Die, produced on March 13, 1995, pushed their interior melancholy outward, connecting it to the AIDS pandemic and a changing city and world. Androgyns and Deviants impressively captures elements of the evening, sequencing them into a short suite near the compilation’s end. We hear an introduction from Dr. Clark Render, whose comic monologues opened the troupe’s shows for years; a soundtrack of Minty’s dance cut “Useless Man,” which features commanding vocals from the sensational Leigh Bowery; and lastly “My Final Moments,” a poignant soliloquy by Kabuki Starshine. “Dear X,” Kabuki recites: “You understand it’s nothing personal against you/and I must apologize if you feel abandoned/but we’ve all got to go some time or another,/so it may as well be now.” After, the entire cast staged their own deaths, and as the companion book shows in a series of images, “RIP NYC” was scrawled on one character’s buttocks.
Back in 1995, the writing was on the wall. Later that year, ANOHNI brought a couple of her plays from the Pyramid to another East Village venue, PS122, where the vibe was a bit tamer and the programs started much earlier in the evening. But soon after, she began focusing on songwriting, and her comrades similarly dispersed into their own specialties, becoming make-up artists, DJs, and drag performers. The life of artists in New York, and the Downtown performance scene in particular, have only grown more imperiled in the years since. But Blacklips was the rare collective that understood exactly where they stood in relation to the history of their city and culture, and their pessimistic certitude rings as true today as ANOHNI’s searching, hopeful voice: This group of queer misfits was sure that they had arrived after everything and everyone was already dead.


On a 21-track double album recorded live in the studio, Wilco embrace a simple, buoyant approach that hearkens back to Jeff Tweedy’s earliest work.

Cruel Country

Cruel Country is an album title that cuts two ways, the “country” referring either to a nation or a musical genre. The duality is deliberate, as Wilco are grappling not only with America's tumultuous present but also the band’s fraught legacy with country music. Jeff Tweedy cut his teeth as part of Uncle Tupelo, the pioneering alt-country group that sowed the seeds for the Americana movement early in the 1990s. When he formed Wilco in the wake of Uncle Tupelo’s dissolution, Tweedy bristled when his new band was pigeonholed as “country-rock,” a designation that suited their 1995 debut A.M. Beginning with its sprawling successor Being There, he methodically pushed Wilco into uncharted territory, transforming their image from Americana troubadours into a restless, adventurous rock band.
Wilco’s thirst for experimentation was bound to lead them back to their beginning, which is precisely what happens with Cruel Country. In a letter accompanying the album’s release, Tweedy writes, “In the past, it was always valuable and liberating for us to steer clear of the ‘country’ moniker. It helped us grow and keep our minds open to inspiration from near and far.” But when Wilco reconvened after a pandemic-inspired hiatus, the sextet decided to shelve a collection of art-pop songs they started prior to the onset of COVID-19, and they were drawn instead to simple, direct material that sounded “country” in a way the group hadn’t since their formation.
Tweedy started writing some of the Cruel Country tunes during the sessions for Love Is the King, a 2020 solo album cut during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Where that record had the trademarks of being created in isolation—Tweedy largely worked alone, assisted by his drummer son Spencer and producer Tom Schick—Cruel Country is clearly and proudly the work of a band. All six members of Wilco recorded live in the studio for the first time in over a decade, letting their instruments bleed into each other as the rhythms breathe and sway. The song isn’t necessarily placed at the forefront so much as the group’s collective chemistry: After their prolonged absence, they sound happy, even relieved, to be creating a joyful noise once again.
As buoyant as the interaction fueling the music may be, Cruel Country isn’t a particularly raucous album. The tempos rarely break a sweat, the volume is restrained, and the spirit is hushed. The quiet nature is born of a shared space where every member of Wilco feels at ease. Cruel Country is a communal album, but it’s a small community: a group figuring out a path of deliverance from a bleak time. Tweedy spends a good portion of the album ruminating about a world gone wrong. He admits that, despite the stupidity and cruelty, he loves his country “like a little boy,” pondering the notion that “reality ruins everything,” while realizing that “I’ve been through hell on my way to hell,” a sentiment that conveys how he relies on his gut with his social commentary.
Darkness looms on the fringes of Cruel Country, yet the band’s warmth keeps the album from wallowing in gloom even when the proceedings are slow and quiet, which they often are. Wilco don’t traffic in the grit of honky tonk or the glitz of Nashville. They favor plaintive, rustic ballads, taking the occasional detour to savor the electrified twang of Bakersfield country, the hippest country sound of the mid-20th century. That propulsive train-track rhythm and chicken-picking is all over “Falling Apart (Right Now),” one of only a handful of songs to feature a guitar solo, played by Pat Sansone. The recessive role of guitarist Nels Cline on Cruel Country highlights how each song feels as if the band is drawing a collective breath. Occasionally, Wilco conjures a sense of majesty that feels like a rustic spin of their full-flight experimentations: “Many Worlds” gains cruising altitude halfway through its eight minutes, while the mini-suite “Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull” hums at hypnotizing low thrum, cascading to a jangling crescent before washing away again. Such consciously country cuts “Tired of Taking It Out on You” and “A Lifetime to Find,” provide a pulse and a bit of a backbone to Cruel Country, anchoring an album that otherwise amiably meanders through the weeds, taking time to explore every twist and turn.
Often the spare arrangements hearken back not just to the quietest moments on early Wilco records but to the stark settings of Anodyne, the last album by Uncle Tupelo, providing supporting evidence to Tweedy’s claim that he wrote these folk and country songs as a “comfort food to really just focus my writing within these narrow limitations.” Certainly, Cruel Country offers its share of comfort: Its unhurried nature is a big part of the reason it feels so warm and inviting, especially as it strolls at its own pace, divorced from the digitized rush of modern life. Occasionally, it can feel like an overindulgence of comfort food. There may be a gentle current flowing through its 21 songs, but the sheer abundance can also feel overwhelming. As lovely as they often are, the songs seem to drift and float, and Cruel Country plays less like a sculpted double album than a vividly detailed snapshot of a particular moment in time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review attributed the guitar solo in “Falling Apart (Right Now)” to Nels Cline. It was played by Pat Sansone.


Ever attuned to the nuances of grief, the Melbourne singer-songwriter tackles somber subjects with her typical gravity, but there’s a newfound lightness in her step.

Please Daddy

Sarah Mary Chadwick has spent a lot of time mulling heavy questions. In interviews over the past few years, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has discussed the immense pain of grief, the weight of religious symbology, the inner workings of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the ways that watching Friends makes her think of her own mortality. She approaches such subjects with good humor, but the thoughtful way she dwells on them shows the kind of thinker and songwriter she is, with a sparse, quiet way of tackling grand philosophical concerns. Alone, often accompanied by just a piano, she stares at the sky and demands answers from a higher power that may or may not be listening.
The Queen Who Stole the Sky, Chadwick’s 2019 album, embodied this style of songwriting more fully than any of her previous efforts. She was commissioned by the city to write for a 147-year-old pipe organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, and the resulting pieces were extraordinarily stark and piercing, even by her standards. Grappling with the respective deaths, in quick succession, of her father and a former partner, the songs are all weary sighs, the sound of a person flailing for a handhold in a slippery world. Because the music is composed of just her voice and the organ, every word she sings takes on a near-religious gravity. In interviews around that record, she worried that she might have trouble following it up. “After the organ record, I was flummoxed what I’d write about because I didn’t have access to grief for the first time in three years,” she told Bandcamp.
But Chadwick’s Please Daddy picks up pretty much exactly where its predecessor left off. The very first track is called “When Will Death Come,” and in its first verse, Chadwick admits that she’s back in the same rut she often dwells in: “I thought I was [past] this, but I’m losing it.” On the title track, she sings of the dissociative creep of anhedonia, describing how she feels “amputated from my personality.” Elsewhere, she wonders what life would be like if the sun ceased to shine, and if her tears never dried. It’s a record of immense emotional pain, full of the sort of stinging, bitter songs she’s been writing her whole career.
But part of what makes Please Daddy so moving is that you wouldn’t necessarily guess how heavy it is if you weren’t paying close attention to what she’s saying. The arrangements have the kind of swing that her music hasn’t made much room for before. Her songs are still pretty minimal and morose, but relative to the grayscale organ dirges of her last record, there are some positively vibrant moments. “If I Squint,” like a lot of her songs, is built around the sobbing rhythm of her languorous piano chords, but glimmering flute melodies and gilded horn flourishes color in the margins. Chadwick has even said that “When Will Death Come” was her attempt at capturing the louche self-indulgence of late-period Elvis Presley, which is telling of her approach. She doesn’t necessarily want these songs to feel like downers, even though they are.
That split between sound and spirit lends another layer to the forlorn songs she’s been singing her whole career. In the genteel melodies and floating arrangements, she suggests that it’s still possible to find meaning when you’re weighed down by these feelings. Grief, existential turmoil, and religious doubt may never leave you, but life always trudges on.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two tree planters ventured into the forest and emerged as a folk-pop duo. Inspired by ’70s radio and Jungian philosophy, their new album is a breezy meditation on spirit and belonging.

Any Light

Loving’s origin story sounds like a myth, or a joke—Jesse Henderson and David Parry walk into the woods separately (as tree planters in Western Canada) and a little while later, a folk-pop brotherhood emerges from the forest. Inspired by voice memos, poems, and James Hollis’ Jungian treatise The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, the songs on Any Light are breezy, mystical meditations on spirit and belonging—love songs that look inward, upward, and skyward in their pursuit of existential answers.
One part George Harrison and one part Kings of Convenience, Any Light is all looping acoustic guitar and plinking keys, an endless journey guided by warm melodies. “Medicine” is a less jocular take on Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin.’” “On My Way to Loving You” amplifies face-pressed-to-the-window wistfulness with Hammond organ. “When I first met you,/Time was measured/By the moon on your body,” Henderson sings on “Blue,” slide guitar wailing plaintively in the background. “No Mast” is as sweet as a candy heart, an ode to the illusion of permanence in love built on ’70s radio chord progressions and tambourine shaking like a fluttering pulse.
Often, the “you” in the album’s lyrics gestures at an unseen other, some entity that would offer completion or absolution, whether that’s a god or a lover. In “On My Way to You,” Henderson describes “following in your footsteps…/Trying just to be/Like a melody/You sing,” before stepping outside of love to watch it flow “like a river follows the landscape.” “Medicine,” loosely based on a friend’s experience with psychedelics, turns almost completely allegorical, its protagonist announcing a few seconds into the song: “I don’t want something already made,/I want to be the image not on display,/I want to be set free.” The song is just charming and self-aware enough to skirt the “hey man” variety of mushroom-induced revelation, but elsewhere, the musings are more grounded, easier to take seriously. The titular opening track is a tone-setting highlight that guides us like Virgil through this peripatetic folk journey. “I’ve been waiting so long,” Henderson sings in wonderment. “How I had it all wrong./Never have I seen you,/With open eyes,/With any light.” There’s that platitude about missing the forest for the trees, but Loving toggle between a bird’s-eye remove and an intimate closeness, from high above a river to a shaft of moonlight falling on a sleeping form.
Sonically, this balance sometimes lacks. There are few extremes; the record is one meandering slog through a wintry landscape, pleasant and Quaaluudy to the point of occasional somnambulance. Songs like “Gift” barely register, especially relative to the bright punch of “Any Light” or “Uncanny Valley.” “Ask Directions” begs for a build, a moment of heightened stakes, but languishes instead in contemplative lethargy.
In the Jungian interpretation, myths are part of our collective unconsciousness, both the thoughts we have and the way we think them. Rife with dream imagery, Any Light interrogates the gulf between the promise of love and its reality, the stories we tell ourselves about divinity and the way it humbles us the closer we get. Men journey into the woods for plenty of reasons, from self-discovery to solitude. When they’re lucky, they come out with a musical other, if not a magical one.


New York hip-hop godfather Pete Rock joins forces with Smoke DZA on an album of uptown cool and crisp soul.

Don't Smoke Rock

Don’t take your eyes off Pete Rock. The early-‘90s albums he produced with rapper CL Smooth still live in legend; recent reports suggest the New York duo are reuniting for their first new music since Nas dropped Illmatic. This pair, like their contemporaries A Tribe Called Quest, weren’t about to go back into the studio just because fans wanted them to. Rock may be the golden-age god whose snap-n-crack boom bap helped spawn J Dilla, Mark Ronson, and Kanye West, but take a look at the names that make up Rock’s recent client list—Torae, Grafh, Snyp Life—and it’s clear that he’s less interested in collecting checks than he is crowding his orbit with hard-nosed hip-hop.
On Don’t Smoke Rock—Rock’s first full-length collaboration since 2011’s Monumental with Smif-N-Wessun—his anointed partner is Smoke DZA. Their album plays like a wintertime drive through Harlem in a Bentley with black-tinted windows, and they swerve together with pure confidence. It especially suits DZA; a prolific working MC with blunted flow and to-the-point storytelling skills, he has struggled to distinguish himself in the crowded world of NYC street rap revivalists. Though he might not possess the crackling lyrical loops of Action Bronson, the bitter wordplay of Ka, or the flashy sheen of brothers Westside Gunn and Conway, the Harlemite’s throwback cadences are a solid foil for the uptown cool of Rock’s crisp soul samples and tough drums.
On “Wild 100s,” the producer takes the kind of double bass that Brian Wilson once harnessed in his pop symphonies, and he compresses them into a tense, energetic rap beat. “Hold the Drums” deletes all percussion; Rock instead fills the soundscapes with an angelic piano and voice sample on top of some skilled record scratches, as DZA wistfully nods to the past (“Mama had me rockin’ bucket hats when I was a year old”). His boasts can sound off-the-shelf (“Hop on a joint with me, it’s manslaughter,” he spits on “Wild 100s”), but his flow has charm and anchors Rock’s instrumentals. “Show Off” is the kind of New York anthem Jay Z sketched out on The Blueprint, and the peppy horns of “Dusk 2 Dusk” reimagines uptown as an off-the-billboard utopia.
The project is bolstered by some well-deployed guest spots, too. Cam’ron delivers one of his strongest verses in years on the drug tale “Moving Weight Pt. I,” a scene straight out of a David Simon TV drama. Spotting cops on the corner, Cam considers the possibility he may need to blast his way out of trouble. He feels for his pistol and rubs the bulletproof vest under his cardigan, pausing to deliver some tongue-twisting surrealism (“Bad bitches in the tub, tell ‘em they all luck-ay/Grab me a condom, gave her the rubber duck-ay”). Rick Ross seems an unlikely pick for Rock’s natty stylings, but his husky voice isn’t its usual wrecking ball on the opulent strings of “Black Superhero Car.” And while Jadakiss and Styles P have a spotty history on other people’s tracks, they’re effective on the bitter ballad “Milestone,” slipping into the role of two salty veterans sadly surveying the past.
This year, Tribe made an album that was grandiose, politically engaged, haunted by loss, and one of the year’s finest. But Pete Rock and Smoke DZA have forged something we still need, too: a great, modest New York rap album of concrete beats and blood-in-your-mouth bars. We await the reunion with CL Smooth with interest.


Collaging field recordings and instrumental scraps, Grouper and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma construct an elegatic tribute to the life and work of their late friend, filmmaker Paul Clipson.

Daughter

When Grouper’s Liz Harris performed at Krakow’s Unsound festival in 2014, sitting barefoot and cross-legged against a backdrop of visuals by the filmmaker Paul Clipson, the sound of the film projector was nearly as loud as her music. As wispy drones rose from her guitar pedals and abstracted shapes danced on screen, the steady rattle of the Super 8 auteur’s reels felt as much a part of the performance as his dreamlike imagery.
The whir of Clipson’s film projector returns, fleetingly, on Daughter, the second album from Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s duo Raum. A few minutes into the opening track, “Walk Together,” it rises from a watery pool of piano and voice and hovers, flickering, like a dragonfly. That telltale clatter of spinning gears can be charged with deep emotional resonance. It might summon memories of grade-school movie screenings, midnight Rocky Horror showings, or maybe, for someone younger, simply a sepia-tinged vision of the past—a sense memory of obsolete tech, a faint echo of a vanishing world. On Daughter, the sound speaks to a more particular loss: Clipson, a friend and frequent collaborator of both musicians, died in 2018. These recordings date from two years prior, when Harris and Cantu-Ledesma met up with the filmmaker for an audiovisual performance at Marfa Myths, Mexican Summer’s annual festival in the Texas art destination. It was the last time that all three were together.
Clipson’s absence hangs heavy over Daughter. The record is dedicated to him, and in a note accompanying the album, Harris describes it as an expression of grief. The week of the Marfa performance, Harris and Cantu-Ledesma went into the studio together, but to hear her tell it now, it was a period fraught with anxiety and personal upheaval. The building was haunted; ghosts kept Harris up at night. Some days were productive, but others were a total wash, and when they finished, they shelved the tapes. Over the years, Harris and Cantu-Ledesma tried to complete the music, but “a big piece of the record only made sense after sitting with the loss of Paul,” Harris writes. “The recordings took on a special resonance.”
The sound and shape of Daughter will be familiar to anyone who has heard Raum’s 2013 record Event of Your Leaving. Across seven long tracks, the two musicians sculpt loops of piano and guitar into broad, shimmering vistas crusted with distortion and occasionally punctuated by Harris’ high, plaintive voice. The piano’s sustain pedal remains pressed flat to the ground; the reverb is seemingly endless. It’s easy to hear how Raum, like Helado Negro when he recorded in Marfa, were influenced by the vastness of the sky and desert.
A powerful sense of place permeates the album, which is sequenced as an unbroken suite of interconnected songs. Birdsong and the cries of mourning doves are threaded subtly through long stretches; footfalls trudging through dry desert chaparral lend an unsteady rhythm to long portions of “Sunlight Crying” and “Revolving Door,” grounding the duo’s otherwise celestial tones firmly in the dust. Layering indistinct field recordings with instrumental scraps and bits of stray tape, the two musicians achieve a collage effect evocative of Clipson’s own work.
Shooting entirely on film, and typically editing in camera, Clipson wove all manner of objects and shapes—natural forms, architectural lines, blown-out bokeh, kaleidoscopic arrays of lights—into dreamlike assemblages that pushed beyond narrative and representation. His use of rhythm, color, texture, and abstraction achieved a quality akin to visual music, which is precisely what made his collaborations with artists like Harris and Cantu-Ledesma so satisfying; each drew new depths out of the other’s work, even when musician and filmmaker had no idea of what the other would be doing on stage.
“The films are a personal recording, like a diary or essay, rendering color, light, focus and shadow in many forms, in the hope of allowing for un-thought, unexpected elements to reveal themselves,” Clipson once said of his practice. You can feel that philosophy permeating the long closing track, “Passage.” It is the simplest of the album’s songs: Here, at last, there are no obvious field recordings, no snapshots of the Marfa landscape, just a ruminative piano figure and a hint of Harris’ wordless voice. The piano pattern loops round in long, sluggish circles; its rhythm suggests a rope slapping against a flagpole. It carries on for almost 23 minutes, reverb and distortion thickening almost imperceptibly. It is minimalist in the fashion of Arvo Pärt; it conveys the stillness of a statue lying at the bottom of a deep, clear lake. It is almost unbearably mournful: a few simple lines gently twined into an unmistakable expression of melancholy.


The eclectic new album from L.A. indie outfit Holy Shit is also the first musical offering from Semiotext(e), the publishing house run in part by I Love Dick author Chris Kraus.

Solid Rain

Solid Rain is the Los Angeles indie outfit Holy Shit’s first full-length release since Stranded at Two Harbors came out in 2006. At that point, the band was made up of Matt Fishbeck and Ariel Pink, and their songs were a dark-edged take on the sort of blown-out, acidic pop prevalent at the time. In the years since, Holy Shit—becoming more or less Fishbeck’s project—has included input and appearances from the likes of John Maus, Geneva Jacuzzi, Janet Kim, and Girls’ Christopher Owens. Yet in comparison to these indie-rock peers, the project’s output has been unpredictable and hard to track. It’s somehow erratic in its marketing and the rhythm of its releases, and aesthetically, Fishbeck’s music possesses an unraveled quality, its pop elements never quite cohering into the smooth vehicles Pink or Owens are known for.
In keeping with these idiosyncratic leanings, Solid Rain is the first musical release from Semiotext(e), the publishing house run by Sylvère Lotringer, filmmaker and I Love Dick author Chris Kraus, and Hedi El-Khoti, whose offerings tend toward critical theory and experimental fiction. Kraus took an interest in Los Angeles’ underground music scene in her 2011 essay collection Where Art Belongs, published by Semiotext(e), which opens with a piece charting the Echo Park alternative art space Tiny Creatures within the flux of a gentrifying city and its drifting art community. Fishbeck plays a key role in this history (at one point, he’s described by artist Jason Yates as the “Malcolm McLaren” of the scene), and for all its unevenness, his music seems to make more sense in the context of this unruly arts ecosystem than it does alongside its indie-rock peers. The city is, in a sense, both a setting for and an active antagonist in the vaguely-drawn scenes that comprise Solid Rain.
Where Fishbeck’s collaborations with Pink were obscured by a narcotic AM-radio fuzz, those textures have dissipated here, allowing the cinematics of his songwriting to come into focus. Solid Rain moves between styles, sometimes jarringly so, but in a sense that movement propels the record: a Vangelis-lite synthesizer interlude (“Takes Me by Surprise”), a syrupy noir ballad (“Who Am I”), or a brief, dramatic string piece (“String Thing”) fold in performative drama—and maybe wink at the ways we’ve learned to tell stories about our own lives from Hollywood.
But grounding Fishbeck’s stylistic play is a very real heaviness. In his lyrics, loss recurs as a series of relentless micro-narratives—not necessarily the loss of a single person or thing or place, but of a sense of self or way of being with others. “Every morning we’re infinite/And every night I’m a little blue,” he sings as a near-aside in “Who Am I,” writing a sinking sensation into daily routine. On the sparse track “Marriage Monologue,” in which a rounded xylophone-like melody plods atop a jazzy snare, he charts a dissociative relationship to relationships themselves: “Funny how it seems/like we just get cast in scenes/Who’s in charge?/Cause it just feels like I’m playing the part of me.” Fishbeck performs with a deadpan flatness; meanwhile, the music spreads out underneath, making its own ambivalent time.
Per Kraus’ account, the Tiny Creatures era was characterized by a frenetic, up-all-night-to-make-something creative energy; with age, and with an ever-mounting struggle to find space and resources, it makes sense that artists would find themselves worn out. The passive pacing of Solid Rain is one of its most quietly distinctive aspects. Rhythmically, songs occasionally achieve an agitated percussive shuffle, but more often are driven by the lilt of fingerpicked guitar. The album’s best moments roll in like storm clouds: the mournful acoustic ballad “I Wonder Why” follows a swell of strings, achieving intense emotional clarity through a mumbled, unfinished account of the generic malaise that can accompany change. “I wonder why the sun don’t shine like it used to on everyone I know,” goes its wrenching opening line.
Ultimately, however, Solid Rain’s cultural atmospherics don’t leave the listener situated anywhere particularly well-defined, and something about this makes it feel like an honest account. Fishbeck provides a rare example of contemporary indie music bluntly describing the present, rather than creating a well-packaged buffer against its harsher realities.


The 28-year-old producer André Bratten records in the same Oslo studio as Todd Terje, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm, but his new album Gode bears darker influences: Aphex Twin, Andy Stott. It is insular and experimental, and also his most ambitious work to date.

Gode

Some of Norway's best producers seem to compensate for the region's chilly climate by gravitating toward sunny sounds, from Todd Terje's escapist lounge-house to Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm's psychedelic nu-disco. This can't be said for 28-year-old producer André Bratten. Although he records in the same Oslo studio as Terje, Thomas, and Lindstrøm, Bratten's new album Gode is insular and experimental, from conception to execution. Gode is Bratten's second proper full-length record, following 2013's inventively titled Be a Man You Ant and this past summer's Math Ilium Ion EP. It's also the most ambitious work of his career, tackling social and historical injustices of the past—namely the serf-like arrangement between farmers and landowners in early 20th-century Norway.
Now, if you're thinking that a double LP about the pre-industrialized Norwegian agrarian economy isn't going to get club kids on the floor, you're right. But this time around that's not Bratten's goal. He wants to tell a story with specific historical context within electronic music, which is an inherently difficult task: A synth stab, field recording, or a programmed drum pattern, however well-conceived, doesn't translate to "meditation on the darker days of Norway’s past, before the country discovered its oil wealth," as Bratten has said.
But even if you'd never guess the album's larger themes without reading about it, it's clear from the music that he's attempting something more evocative and wide-ranging. Bratten's production can recall everything from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works to Andy Stott's murky experimentalism. He's cited Brian Eno as an influence, as well as 20th century classical musicians like Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi—known for creating music that plays off a single pitch that generates almost imperceptible microtonal oscillations. Bratten is resourceful at assembling whatever sounds or styles needed to fit the need of the moment: "Primordial Pit" uses mostly live instruments to create a sweeping, post-rock-like grandeur, while "Ins.", the album's shortest track, is a dissonant string arrangement that is as beautiful as it is unnerving.
For all this wandering, the most overtly pleasing songs on Gode are the ones that call back to Bratten's roots. "Space Between Left & Right" has a techno pitter-patter that a patient nightclub crowd could easily appreciate, while the album's title track evokes Boards of Canada at their prettiest. Another clear highlight is "Cascade of Events", which features the Norwegian pop singer Susanne Sundfør, who Bratten had previously remixed, her voice shrouded in an analog haze. Having a voice like Sundfør, who has had multiple number one albums in her home country, gives Bratten an anchor to chain his more experimental inclinations to; it'd be fascinating to hear Bratten paired with Sundfør for more than one track.
Given the intentions that Gode comes packed with, it's tempting to view its success in terms of that story. Does Gode accomplish Bratten's goal of creating a tribute to the farmers who never had the opportunity to make art because of their circumstances? Quite possibly! But like a museum plaque explaining abstract art to a layperson, background is only a tiny piece of a mostly visceral experience. What's easier to glean, and more universal, is that Bratten has made an expertly produced, emotionally honest record that defies genre and expectation. To understand that requires no homework.


Brooklyn’s Barrie Lindsay makes lush, dance-inflected indie pop whose unorthodox influences and imaginative twists shine brighter than the lyrics.

Barbara

Barrie Lindsay is a consummate producer in search of an ideological north star. In sound, the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based musician’s self-produced and self-recorded second album, Barbara, is lush and refreshingly unorthodox: harp and horn parts mingle with breakbeats, baroque synthwork, hazy vocal fragments, and warped, Alex G-style guitarwork. In a sea of avowedly traditionalist indie rock and barely veiled emo revival, it’s a refreshing palette cleanser. But as a whole, the record can feel vexingly incomplete, like a sumptuous oil painting whose foreground has been hastily sketched in. Lindsay’s sweet-but-vague lyricism rarely feels fueled by the same gonzo instinct that guides her deft production.
Barbara is Lindsay’s second album, but it might as well be her debut. Happy to Be Here, a 2019 album released under the same moniker, was actually the work of a five-piece band featuring Lindsay; the group disbanded in the time between that record’s release and the creation of this one. Though the project’s ethos remains the same—Barrie the band once said they aspired to make “a well-crafted pop song that’s a little bit fucked up”—Barbara clarifies the execution. Where the Jake Aron-co-produced Happy to Be Here was a collection of sync-friendly, ultimately forgettable indie pop, the most engaging moments on Barbara can be genuinely disorientating. On the best song, “Concrete,” mesmerizing, harpsichord-like synths arpeggiate and undulate as Lindsay sings about the “cowboy of the mind,” before the song hastily switches gears, eventually becoming a sleek, intriguingly austere dance track. The faintest hint of tabla surfaces here, Barrie’s multi-tracked vocal glides there—the whole thing feels mysterious and somehow out of time. “Basketball” takes a similar approach, allowing dubby vocals and an intermittent, footwork-like beat to float unmoored among an otherwise arid palette. Both songs deal with Lindsay taking control of her sense of self (“Come on, Barrie, do it right,” she sings on “Basketball”) and they’re the rare moments on Barbara where her lyricism is as vivid and impactful as the production itself.
For the most part, though, Lindsay’s songwriting on Barbara feels perfunctory. “Jersey” is all exposition (“I’m doing sprints on the lawn outside your place … Shouting ‘All magicians are liars’”) with a locus point that reveals nothing about its protagonist’s interiority: “I’m crying outside/I’m gonna crack the back step/Got some things on my mind.” Quippy one-liners that call out for revealing detail don’t arrive with the wit or sparkle that they probably should: “You keep on asking/My favorite song by the Doors/And I don’t care about Star Wars,” she sings on “Bully.” Lindsay writes simple lyrics and delivers them with a sweet, lilting cadence, qualities shared with songwriters like Helena Deland, Soccer Mommy, and Jay Som, but while those artists use the softness of their voices as a kind of comparative tool—Soccer Mommy and Deland each singing sweetly about abject nihilism—Lindsay’s lyricism rarely has an equivalent edge. Occasionally, the simplicity works. “Jenny” is a plainspoken, openhearted love song whose evocative scene-setting is counterbalanced by lyrics that articulate both the rush and the insecurity of new romance: “Jenny, I don’t know where to love from,” Lindsay sings. “Never had to hold myself true to someone.”
It’s hard not to hear Barbara’s sumptuous production and wish there were just a little more to cling on to. Although Lindsay’s musical approach seems to reference everyone from Robyn to Joanna Newsom to Daphni, her assured hand means the range rarely feels random. Her songwriting would benefit from similar clarity of vision. As it stands, Barbara feels like a meticulously carved treasure box to which one has lost the key—magnificent to behold, impossible to unlock.


The Berlin-based songwriter’s bleak and coruscating new album feels like a call to hold fast and love hard.

Not Fire

Not Fire is the first album from Berlin-based songwriter Dean Roberts in 12 years, and his comeback arrives during apocalyptic times. It’s not an album about someone who’s found hope or love despite everything; Roberts sounds exhausted, and his album is as ugly and as bleak as life often is. For those who’ve been in the pits and succumbed to self-destructive nihilism, Not Fire is a reminder of how hellish it all can be.
Sonically, Not Fire is murky and battered and melancholy. Guitars clang incessantly, drums lurch without vigor—there’s hardly a moment where one doesn’t feel placed in a barren wasteland, left to wander aimlessly. On “Say After Me,” a melange of noisy guitar strums and plucks constantly ring out without any impression of oncoming closure. In the song’s final passage, Roberts slides his pick down a guitar string, the resulting sound a thunderous roar, the final bellowing of bottled-up feelings. Not Fire can sound a lot like a pained desire for release, a wish to scream into the emptiness like Roberts does on the album cover.
Nothing here feels cathartic, however. If anything, every note just propagates uneasiness, something that’s fiercely evident on the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “Heron.” Reed instruments and wolf-like howls imbue the piece with anxious tension. Frightening as the music may sound, Roberts sings of acceptance (“There is no blistering sun ’cause the summer’s just gone”). The song’s final third is wordless, but you can still sense his mournful presence.
Even when the songs aren’t harrowing, Roberts’ weariness and irascibility are clear. On the bluesy folk song “Paul,” he speaks of the titular person as a thorn in his side—a burdensome figure who’s always there at the worst of times. He concludes with a confession: “I always run into you Paul/And say I’ll call/But I don’t want to.” This longing for solitude becomes an unwelcome reality on “Kids,” where he talks about the crumbling of a long-term relationship. “Would it have changed anything if we’d had kids?” he wonders. You can tell, from his wavering voice, that he doesn’t think so.
Throughout Not Fire, Roberts feels numb. A summation of his downward spiral appears on the title track. “It’s not fire; love is something else” he moans. His voice quivers amidst droning feedback and heaving drums, the song exuding the shut-in mystique of Jandek’s early works. As the song builds, Roberts never finds healing; he only sounds tormented, broken.
There is one hopeful song on Not Fire. With “My Diviner,” Roberts delivers anguished expressions of gratitude. The mythical figure of the title leads him to water in a period of drought, and proves to be a steady light in his life (“You’re not one to quit, that ain’t how you live”). The sweetness is a salve from the misery that looms over everything else. In a time when gods feel ever-absent, when futures seem increasingly dim, “My Diviner” serves as a thoughtful reminder: life’s shittiness is promised, but so is the nourishing comfort that comes when receiving persistent care. It sounds like a call to hold fast and love hard.


On their masterfully knotty fifth album, Vampire Weekend go on a self-mythological journey into old sounds, old haunts, and old cities to find something new within.

Only God Was Above Us

Ezra Koenig begins Only God Was Above Us speaking, it seems, to just one person. Against a blur of amplifier hum and a tentative guitar strum, he sounds thin and reedy, almost petulant, a little bit doomy. “‘Fuck the world,’” Koenig sings softly, “You said it quiet/No one could hear you/No one but me.”
This hushed distortion opens Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, where Koenig and his bandmates, Chrises Baio and Tomson, gaze longingly at the past to find more questions than answers. A chief concern is history, and where to fit within it, but, ultimately, Vampire Weekend itself is the focus of Only God Was Above Us. It is the band’s most overtly self-referential release, a collage of signature sounds and motifs dotted with allusions. It feels new and comfortable, regularly elegant and charming, calm and comforting, and, at times, foreboding. And just a bit worried.
This is to say that Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way. Take the two obvious callbacks on “Connect,” which recreates Tomson’s “Mansard Roof” drum fill and fits in keyboards that call to mind Contra’s runaway hit “Holiday.” The song is a lively reverie about lost days in New York, but slightly askew in its memories and mood. Koenig and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid capture the strangeness with a track that takes the signature Vampire Weekend sounds and twists them to be a little jazzy, sometimes a little electronic, a beat away from melting down entirely. The result is something like indie deja vu, the sense that we’ve heard this before but can’t at all place it.
Though the band members themselves have long lived in Los Angeles, New York still looms large for Vampire Weekend. Koenig, Baio, and Tomson all grew up in or around the city and, with ex-bandmate but current contributor Rostam Batmanglij, famously coalesced at Columbia University. Being away from New York, however, offers a new perspective: From a distance, the city appears as a decaying giant, inescapably beholden to its past and all the ghosts who’ve passed through. Simply by naming New Yorkers of old—the late Russian-born journalists Henry and Ludmilla Nikitina Shapiro, their daughter, Irina Shapiro Corten, the famed gallery owner Mary Boone, even a defunct tie shop—Koenig’s always-vibrant world of name-drops observes the strangeness of living in vast shadows.
Vampire Weekend previously portrayed New York at its bleakest on “Hudson,” a rotting dirge about the passage of time. The Modern Vampires of the City song now has a spiritual successor in “Gen-X Cops,” another rare minor-key entry that the band has been trying to make work since 2012. On “Hudson,” Koenig looked at place names and real estate listings and recognized the immense consequences of prior generations’ actions. On the upbeat yet dour “Gen-X Cops,” he reckons with the idea that he’s becoming the old guard now. “Each generation makes its own apology,” he sings, knowing it’s only an excuse for whatever trouble he’s destined to cause, the pearls he’s bound to clutch. The shift in perspective represents, perhaps, that of Koenig and his bandmates as they age: no longer youthful idealists critiquing the world around them, but resigned adults grappling with their places within it.
It may seem tedious to draw lines from the new songs back through the Vampire Weekend catalog, but that’s much of the point. Only God Was Above Us focuses often on legacy, history, and days of yore, and the songs are also meant to sound familiar: “Gen-X Cops” fills the role of the ska-influenced romp (“A-Punk,” “Cousins,” “Diane Young”); “Mary Boone” brings back the choral ambitions of “Ya Hey”; and “Prep-School Gangsters” shares the pensive, baroque stylings of “Taxi Cab,” to name a few. When Koenig sings, “You’ve never seen a starry night/You saint,” on “The Surfer,” it’s impossible not to think of the “Ya Hey” lines “Oh, You saint/America don’t love You.” Even the instant-classic refrain of “Classical”—“Untrue, unkind and unnatural”—might leave you singing: “Peter Gabriel too.”
As much as the album embraces the past, it’s also about how hard it is to really get your arms around it. The band’s first album was jubilant: young men in boat shoes encountering a world of privilege, enjoying its spoils with a crooked eye. On Contra, they were even more suspicious of the world of excess, wondering what it was all for. By Modern Vampires of the City, Koenig had moved on from mere materiality and wanted to get to the bottom of everything. And, after some time away from such heavy and heady questions, he returned as a proud Grateful Dead disciple, jamming about the Earth and love on Father of the Bride. Here, he asks, “Now is it strange I can’t connect?” He and his bandmates answer the question musically, suggesting that you can come close, but you can’t ever go back.
It helps that this band is so ripe for self-mythology; it’s long been impossible to discuss Vampire Weekend without “discussing Vampire Weekend,” and all the commentary on privilege, appropriation, and identity that’s come with it. Now, they’re the ones “discussing Vampire Weekend,” but on their own terms, making songs about history and who writes it (the cruelest among us), who determines class ascension (the people who lock the door as soon as they get the keys to the penthouse), and what happens when you’ve gotten everything you thought you wanted (you’re still pretty empty).
The one song on Only God Was Above Us with no true precedent is the foreboding, epic, eight-minute closer, “Hope.” It’s the band’s longest song, and it sounds almost nothing like anything else Vampire Weekend have recorded. Koenig’s “Hope” lyrics are wrathful—“The embassy’s abandoned now/The flag that flew is on the ground/The painting burned, the statue drowned,” goes one verse—but his gentle voice brings contrast, making the whole thing sound like a campfire melody. Tying the track together is the tender plea, “I hope you let it go.” From a younger band, it could sound naive, an abdication of duty. With age, it’s more like forgiveness.
The final song of Only God Was Above Us feels of a piece with the album’s opener, “Ice Cream Piano,” as they both deal in “I” and “you” and come off as conversations Koenig is having with himself. “We’re all the sons and daughters/Of vampires who drained the old world’s necks,” he sings, still searching for a peace that’s yet to come. The band’s name, of course, is not especially Draculian, just a nod to the title of a home movie that Koenig made one summer and repurposed for the quartet, another in-joke in a history full of them. Nevertheless, there is something poignant about invoking the bloodsuckers to examine who they have been. The past is what it is, in all its richness and stature; acknowledge it and discover something new within.


Woods founder Jeremy Earl and Americana veteran Glenn Donaldson team for an effortlessly warm debut that feels alive with a sense of mutual discovery.

Heaven and Holy

Even in the inchoate early days of Woods, the sweet coo of founder Jeremy Earl turned his most elliptical lines into ready hooks. But like the collectives Elephant 6 or Lambchop a decade earlier, the amorphous band around Earl treated songs like playhouses, spaces where they might try anything. Harmonies spilled out through a mess of tape hiss; guitar solos curled like question marks. This casual idiosyncrasy was charming, a timely counter to indie rock’s burgeoning professionalism. In the decade since, however, Woods co-founder Jarvis Taveniere has become an adroit producer, and Earl has built a homespun empire of like minds through Woodsist. The stakes now sound higher on Woods records, with textures and a tightness beyond their reach during their broke Brooklyn days.
That’s why, at least in part, Painted Shrines feel like a time machine. The debut from the duo of Earl and psychedelic Americana veteran Glenn Donaldson, Heaven and Holy recalls the casual thrills and relaxed esprit of those fetching early Woods albums. In 30 minutes, Painted Shrines sashay through a dozen modest but endearing tunes about love, hardship, hope, and the prelapsarian joy of sharing riffs with friends. Though this record has been in the works for at least three years, it is happily nonchalant, more concerned with a sense of warmth than perfection; that effortless allure makes Heaven and Holy addictive.
Donaldson spent his formative years flitting about Jewelled Antler, the boundless psychedelic collective he co-founded; his songs in the discursive duo Skygreen Leopards were some of the most winsome of what became billed as New Weird America. But in recent years, he’s made lush, considered power pop as The Reds, Pinks & Purples. He brings both mindsets to the seven songs Earl sings on Heaven and Holy, adding soft harmonies and sharp riffs while muddling the surface with distortion and labyrinthine guitar lines.
Indeed, the best tunes here find a comfortable spot on the line connecting the Byrds and the Go-Betweens, then burrow underground. Earl purrs on “Saturates the Eye,” an anthem for accepting a relationship’s inevitable hardships. The screeching guitars beneath the chorus, though, convince you he sings from experience. He and Donaldson warble together over a Mellotron during “Heaven and Holy,” a song about cosmic exasperation. Without the instrumental caterwaul that traces their voices, it would sound saccharine.
The other half of Heaven and Holy collects five miniature instrumentals, each clocking in around two minutes. Deliberately unfussy, each piece is an efficient expression of a single motif. Most every guitar line of “Soft Wasp” lingers long enough for the next one to catch up, so the hazy notes and hand-drum patter merge into a low, broad cloud. Named for Donaldson’s California studio, “The BZC” is a simple drum-and-guitar duo, Donaldson chasing an earworm through a basic beat. It’s like Chet Atkins, scoring a podcast on a budget rather than a vintage Hollywood blockbuster. And you can imagine Earl and Donaldson dancing around the room after tracking “Panoramic,” a lithe wonder. There are some extra layers here and overdubs there, but the prevailing sense is of being in the room alongside Painted Shrines, watching them indulge in mutual discovery.
Donaldson and Earl recorded these dozen little tunes during a week-long soiree in 2018. The sessions sat shelved. Woods began tracking their own refined Strange to Explain and backing David Berman for his tragic benediction as Purple Mountains; Donaldson began releasing his own solo power pop work. But the unexpected downtime of COVID-19 lockdowns afforded the pair a chance to finish these songs, passing files back and forth like pen pals renewing a relationship.
If there have been any silver linings to this last anxious year of canceled plans and premature deaths, that may be one. Due to financial exigency or mere idle time, many artists have picked up projects they may never have finished otherwise, from live albums offloaded for Bandcamp Fridays to side projects that had been sidelined. Even when these songs bend toward bittersweetness, Painted Shrines revel in this low-stakes atmosphere, where there’s no reason not to finish what you started. “It’s the fog that creeps on in in the early morning,” Earl sings during the opener’s surging hook. “The same fog that burns right off by the afternoon.” Given the circumstances, Heaven and Holy feels like a celebration of perseverance and friendship, or of delighting in the basics because that’s all you have on hand.

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A casual approach gives rise to some of the English electro-indie band’s best songs in years. But for anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell.

Metronomy Forever

Metronomy Forever would be a braggadocious title if the music weren’t so self-deprecating. The sixth studio album from Devonshire musician Joe Mount is a tangled and tongue-in-cheek meditation on legacy, ending on a sparse postscript titled “Ur Mixtape,” which functions as a sort of punchline. Speak-singing his way through the memory of a fumbled young romance, Mount describes running into his crush’s brother, years later. The brother, recognising Mount, enthusiastically tells him how much he cherished the mixtape that Mount made, a decade earlier, to impress his sister. It’s a wry ending to an album that grapples with the question of how you’d like to be remembered: Even if you dedicate your life to crafting a legacy—in Mount’s case, a successful career at the forefront of ’00s and ’10s British electro-indie—you can never really control other people’s memories.
The sardonic bait-and-switch characterises the mood of Metronomy Forever. Having co-written and co-produced Robyn’s cathartic 2018 record Honey, and moved to a house in the English countryside with space to build his own studio, Mount made this album alone, just for the heck of it. (The live band includes drummer Anna Prior, bassist Olugbenga Adelekan, and Oscar Cash and Michael Lovett on keys and guitars.) You can hear this lack of inhibition in the directionless psychedelia of the instrumental interludes, and in some wilfully shallow lyrics: “She’s like a dream/Salted caramel ice cream” is a hook as delicious, and as meaningless, as its subject matter.
With Mount content to simply get in his groove, the casual approach gives rise to some of Metronomy’s best songs in years. The dreamy surf guitars, funk bass, and taut drums of “Whitsand Bay” hark back to their 2011 hit “The Bay” in more ways than one. “Salted Caramel Ice Cream” is a dancefloor stomper drizzled with zany synth melodies, plus a hint of the güiro that made a playful appearance on “The Look.” On the daft yet lovable “Sex Emoji,” Mount duets with himself in a coy falsetto over blown-out electro-funk; meanwhile, dance interludes like the twilight creep of “Miracle Rooftop” provide moments of introspection alongside the bombast (and a heady reminder of his skills as a producer).
These retreads of Metronomy’s best bits are not all nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake—instead, subtle changes indicate an older, wiser band with new emotional maturity. On “Insecurity,” a song dripping in macho swagger, Mount sings about the harmfulness of masculine posturing. In front of the blindingly bright synths of lead single “Lately,” his plain, unadorned singing about the hard work of love has a real pathos.
For anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia for Metronomy, however, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell. As one instrumental interlude is titled, “Forever Is a Long Time”—and Metronomy Forever is a long album. At times, it’s difficult to determine whether the recycling is deliberate. “Wedding” kicks off the album with a grandiose, church organ sweep, but later, on the plodding “Wedding Bells,” Mount delivers a “gotcha!” by revealing that the titular bells are “not for me.” This at least seems like a choice, while his use of both “Insecurity” and “Insecure” as track titles scans as a rehash.
The decision to keep all these short, unfulfilled song ideas is either carefree or cynical, depending on your perspective. “Now, basically all music is ambient music, or can be. I think it gives musicians a load of freedom,” Mount told Dazed. “Drake records are, like, one hundred tracks long? And half of it’s awful—but it’s wicked.” Intentionally making musical wallpaper doesn’t sound like an exciting prospect, but Mount seems invigorated by abandoning the pursuit of the perfectly structured 10-track record. Perhaps it’s this liberation that allowed him to write a handful of brilliant new entries in the Metronomy catalog—comfortable in the knowledge that listeners who missed the band’s first wave are most likely to discover their work in fragments, regrouped and playlisted in the context-free world of streaming platforms. There, “The Bay” will slide timelessly into “Salted Caramel Ice Cream,” strutting on and on, forever.

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