This quick follow-up to last year's False Idols bears Tricky's birth name, suggesting something confessional; it's also been talked up as a departure for the veteran singer/producer, suggesting a more club-oriented sound. However, there’s not much on Adrian Thaws that distinguishes it from the direction Tricky has been heading over the past 15 years.

Adrian Thaws

Tricky albums are rarely what they seem on the surface. The decision to use his birth name as the title of this record suggests something confessional after years of cloudy rumination, hinting at a genuine departure. Tricky even refers to it as his "least introspective" work. The reality is somewhat different, with a familiar world-weariness setting in, varying genre tropes getting applied then discarded, and a handful of guests coloring songs in around the edges. Ultimately, this is another Tricky album that drags the diminished expectations of anyone who’s heard Maxinquaye behind it, making a once-great work feel ever more like a millstone. At least he doesn’t appear tortured by his past—this is a quick follow up to last year’s False Idols, implying that Tricky is in a fertile period, happy to be making music, out on his own imprint, and free of any label woes. He’s in a strange bubble now, wandering through a world where he’s lost to all but the most devoted of followers.
At least Tricky inspires loyalty in those he works with, including singer Francesca Belmonte, who returns to the fold to appear on a handful of Adrian Thaws tracks. Belmonte’s contributions, and those of promising London-based artist Tirzah (on "Sun Down" and a cover of Janet Kay’s "Silly Games") edge a little too close to work Tricky has undertaken elsewhere, occasionally replicating the half-spoken/half-sung cadence of former collaborator Martina Topley-Bird. It’s clear that Tricky's post-Maxinquaye work has largely been about about firming up his province, which consists of a tiny sphere of sound resolutely his own. This album, like many of his other works, has been talked up in terms of departure, of a more club-oriented sound, although that’s largely an untruth, constructed as a hook to prick waning interests; there’s not much doubt where you are when immersed in the baked-out beats and lugubrious atmosphere of the Nneka-featuring "Keep Me In Your Shake".
For someone who was once so forward-thinking, there’s a touch of the retro blues to Adrian Thaws. "Gangster Chronicles" is built on a beat so old it mirrors the George Semper lift Cypress Hill took for "Insane in the Brain", although Tricky at least delivers a surprise when he samples the vocal passage that Massive Attack’s "Unfinished Sympathy" is centered around (from John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Planetary Citizen"). The latter is a moment of amusement, perhaps born out of a beef with his old colleagues. Whatever the intent, it at least brightens up the turgid slog through the middle of this record, which features an aimless limp through sloshed, bluesy crooning ("I Had a Dream") and a misguided attempt at filtering the Middle Eastern conflict through the lens of a love story ("My Palestine Girl"). The latter is an unfortunate demonstration of the paucity of lyrical thought in this phase of Tricky’s career (“She’s close to God, I dribble like a dog”).
There’s not much on Adrian Thaws that distinguishes it from the direction Tricky has been heading over the past 15 years. This is a continuation of a mood he began etching out in song long ago, which he’s apparently either unwilling or unable to get away from, making it both the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to him. It’s a curious place to be, trapped in an airless corner of his psyche, full of suggestive thoughts that could be pried open and interpreted in infinite ways. Sometimes it’s more direct than that; on "Why Don’t You", Tricky settles on asinine rock riffing and a lyric that completes the title with: “...go and get fucked.” It’s the sound of his world emptying out, where all nuance is nullified in favor of white-knuckle Audioslave riffing. Tricky’s played with rock before, of course, but "Why Don’t You" and the "Silly Games" cover that follows it are a nadir in terms of the inspiration he’s seeking. His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.


After branching off from Virginia folk act Pelt, banjo player Nathan Bowles has made a name for himself by tapping into mesmerizing possibilities of Appalachian-influenced drone. His new album, the sonically diverse Nansemond, is his best yet.

Nansemond

Beneath the simple, familiar melodies of traditional Appalachian music lies an elemental undercurrent. It’s easy—and fun—to stomp your feet to old-timey tunes, but when their circling figures are repeated at length, the catchy gradually becomes the hypnotic. Many musicians have recognized this potential and mined it brilliantly—think of John Fahey matching country-blues fingerpicking to Indian ragas, or the twangy held-tones of Henry Flynt’s "avant-garde hillbilly" style.
Early in their now 21-year career, Virginia band Pelt similarly gravitated toward the mesmerizing possibilities of Applachian-influenced drone. In 2006, they added banjo player Nathan Bowles, presumably because he shared that sensibility. That common approach subsequently shone through on his 2012 solo debut A Bottle, A Buckeye, and it’s even brighter on his follow-up, Nansemond. Its seven tracks aren’t all extended loops; a few are more succint songs with vocals, and there’s sonic variety everywhere. But the core of the album is a fascination with entrancing repetition.
In the best instances, Bowles sounds like he could play forever without boring himself or anyone listening. He attacks his strings boldly and sharply, yet he continually adds small variations and minute adjustments, viewing each iteration of a chord or phrase from a slightly different angle. This subtly-evolving consistency creates an intriguing blend of comfort and tension. You can settle your ears into Bowles’ grooves, or you can lean to the edge of your seat wondering what little shift will come next. Often, you can do both at the same time.
Bowles places his longest explorations at the beginning and end of Nansemond, and they serve as the album’s high points. "Sleepy Lake Bike Club" opens with a low, echoing tone and some deliberate chords, before launching into six minutes of energetic plucks and strums. Even though he hews to a form, Bowles intuitively feels his way around those melodic paces rather than dryly executing them. At the other end of Nansemond, "Golden Floaters/Hog Jank" is patient and halting in a way that puts you in the passenger seat next to Bowles, while the spry chords of "Sleepy Lake Tire Swing" escalate into a passage played so fast it feels maniacally possessed.
In between, Bowles offers a gruffly crooned ditty, a fiddle-heavy hoedown, and a folk piece that morphs into a rock journey with searing electric guitar from Charalambides’ Tom Carter. All of those strands are united by Bowles’ dedication to repetition, as well as his knack for making everything intensely percussive even when no drums are present. (Bowles was a drummer before he joined the more-traditional-sounding Pelt side project Black Twig Pickers, who convinced him to take up banjo.)
Bowles titled Nansemond after a near-extinct Indian tribe; he grew up next to a river in Virginia that adopted their name. The word represents lots of complex history, and one could surely make parallels between that textured legacy and the many nuances in Bowles’ music. But it’s also fitting to just think of this record as a musical river—a flowing body of work that’s dependably solid and rippling with variation. For Bowles, the rich potential of simple traditions is as crucial as the water that fills a stream.


On her second official LP, the rapper experiments with electronic textures and proves she’s nowhere close to exhausting the potential of her Southern rap roots.

Sleep Paralysis

Put bbymutha’s catalog on shuffle and get shrewd lessons on lousy lovers, tips for freaky sexcapades, and uplifting quotes for your mirror Post-its. In 2017, the video for her song “Rules” catapulted her to underground fame right from its breathless opening line: “You can’t give your pussy to a nigga who not used to getting pussy ’cause that pussy gon’ be everybody business.” Her unsparing candor resonated, earning her a cosign from Björk and a tour opening for Earl Sweatshirt. But for bbymutha, the way some of her early music was received felt at odds with what she intended. Speaking on “Rules” in a recent interview, she decried it as a “bad memory,” reflecting, as have other artists before her, on the paradox of Black pain being received as party music: “People really want you to turn up to your trauma with them.”
On her latest album, sleep paralysis, she insists on setting the terms of the turn up. Much has changed since she made “Rules.” She’s moved up from her grandma’s crumbling house in Chattanooga to her own place in Atlanta. And for the first time she’s released a record with the backing of a label, the New York-based indie outfit True Panther. sleep paralysis is a freewheeling and exuberant ride through grimy electronic music and dark, bass-heavy Southern rap—and it’s some of the most fun music she’s made to date.
She wrote the album in London, in between tour stops, and half the tracks echo sounds heard on British dancefloors, from skittering drum’n’bass to spooky dancehall. The oozing bassline and driving breakbeats of “Piss!” are busy enough to stand alone as an instrumental. But rather than get swallowed by the production (co-helmed by East London rapper and singer LYAM), bbymutha slides into the pockets of the beat, using her voice more like an instrument. It’s a weird and exciting start that gets weirder with the industrial booty bass of “head x shoulders.” Over buoyant 808s coated in the kind of instrumental debris that recalls the best of M.I.A., bbymutha, who turned a slight into her stage name, continues her mission of reappropriation by puffing up her chest to say she’s “proud to be a bastard.” The standout of her UK sojourn is “Lines,” a big-beat banger that uses a cocaine metaphor (“He wanna cut me like the lines on the dresser”) to confront a lover who’s not walking the walk.
But on the chaotic “Tony Hawk,” bbymutha’s own words get lost and her voice feels too much like an ornament in the production. So it’s refreshing to hear her get back to familiar territory in the album’s second half, where her lyrics shine and her growth as a rapper is clear. Mutant Academy’s resident producer Foisey channels Project Pat on “ghostface,” a menacing highlight that bleeds with passion as bbymutha rails against her opps, threatening to jump them with her kids. “final girl” plays with pacing and internal rhymes (“I watch bitches giggle, be tickled by my misfortune/I pull up and give abortions, might dabble in some extortion”) over a trap beat from the netherworld. On “Mutha Massacre” she taps into Tennessee horrorcore, painting a disturbingly vivid image of dragging a dead man by his genitalia. As fun as it is to hear her flex different styles, she hasn’t exhausted the potential of her Southern rap roots.
Vulnerability can be empowering but it can also be exploited; it’s tempting to believe that keeping things in is the only safe choice. On closing track “go!,” bbymutha rejects that defensive posture, choosing to open up about romantic attachment that slips into possessiveness and neediness. This music draws on a different kind of vulnerability: Where “Rules” was founded in the regret of a failed relationship, “go!” channels in the reckless abandon of a happy one. Bbymutha may not be able to control how her art is received, but she’s still willing to take the risk of disclosure. This time, she shows us that good, honest music doesn’t have to come from bad memories; there’s gold to be mined from happy ones too.


The Brooklyn group’s second album frames heavy questions in lovely, deceptively serene psych rock.

Living Theatre

Over half a century ago, the French theorist and actor Antonin Artaud wrote a book called The Theatre and Its Double. The book posited that great theater is a form of exorcism, and the stage is a space where spectators directly confront their fears and desires. This way of thinking about performance became the basis for an influential experimental-theater movement born in the streets of mid-century downtown New York called the Living Theatre, which also happens to be the title of the equally heady sophomore album from a Brooklyn-based group called Olden Yolk.
It’s hard to pull off a record with roots in an 81-year-old piece of critical theory and not leave listeners feeling like they’ve been bopped over the head with a cast-iron pan. Olden Yolk have big ideas and big dreams about what type of art they want to make, and for the most part, they execute in such a way that feels both strangely soothing and impossibly lovely. But that’s how all great psych rock should function: you get bamboozled by the apparent textural niceties and then get blindsided by the depth of the lyrics.
The opening song, “240D,” is a particularly compelling example of how this brand of trickery operates. The track lights up in sensual soft focus; resonant keys meander in and out of the frame, co-bandleaders Shane Butler and Caity Shaffer share vocal harmonies, and the percussion moves like stop-motion video of a flower wiggling its way out of the dirt at the beginning of spring. Just as you begin to get cozy within the song’s roomy atmospherics, the previously concealed lyrics become clear. “240D” is at its core a song about watching someone die and then living with the panic and trauma that follows. “You can’t deny what’s in your head/and your pleasant thoughts/can’t wake the dead,” Butler sings with the placidity of a cloudless sky.
On “Castor & Pollux,” Olden Yolk lean furthest into their psych proclivities. The sonics here narrowly dodge a very specific kind of tacky 1960s sensibility: Vintage synths speckle the song’s horizon in paisley and gold, while a combination of strings and flute delicately arpeggiate atop what feels like a pile of velvet. “Violent Days,” on the other hand, shows the band at its most aqueous. A warm bath of electronics boils over from beneath the song’s surface; meanwhile, jazz-inflected percussion and guitar pull you under by surprise.
Then there is “Cotton & Cane,” a song that sounds as if, say, a Jeff Tweedy or David Berman disciple defected to the teachings of Procol Harum. Deceptively pleasurable in early listens, the song is about the complicated death of Butler’s father. Like Artaud and the thespians of the Living Theatre years ago, Butler very publicly summons the dead in his song. His seance comes in the form of blinding white light, gas-station lighters, and unrelenting streams. It’s a vivid and terrifying series of images, which might be part of what makes this record such a mesmeric listen. Death blooms up from the bottom of a nearby abyss on Living Theatre, and it feels about as serene as you’d fear.


Tim Kasher's latest record as the Good Life is another pseudo-concept record on which the Cursive leader examines fleeting fictional moments and crafts big stories, from varying narrational perspectives.

Help Wanted Nights

Tim Kasher's 2004 record as the Good Life, Album of the Year, begins with a dive-bar meeting: "The first time that I met her, I was throwing up in the ladies' room stall. She asked me if I needed anything. I said, 'I think I spilled my drink.'" The year of the record's title, and its toll on one particular relationship, was AotY's narrative frame; its 12 tracks flipped by like a time-lapse calendar, from April to April. Gimmicky? Sure. But it worked, by playing to Kasher's interpretive strengths: magnifying the heartrending minutae of romantic relationships, and rendering them gracefully and with a sense of humor.
Compare AotY's opening to that of Kasher's latest Good Life excursion, Help Wanted Nights: "Things are good/ We should take a Polaroid/ A memento, before the moment's destroyed." The preservationist similarities show that Kasher's still interested in examining fleeting, fictional moments and crafting big stories from varying narrational perspectives. But this time, he's trying to capture a world of others' lives in vignette form, fostered by a screenplay he's written that gives the album its title and inspiration. Last April, Kasher told Pitchfork that the film documents "roughly a week in a bar in a small town where a stranger's car breaks down... he fraternizes with the regulars, getting too wrapped up in their sordid lives."
Two consecutive concept albums dealing with boozers and their second homes isn't anything new for Hold Steady fans, but Kasher's mode of storytelling diverges from Craig Finn's in at least one way: He's less concerned with creating character archetypes that allow listeners to fill in the gaps with their own experiences than he is in playing with language. Or, as Kasher himself said, "I tried to focus less on narrative and more on those big ideas."
In keeping with another well-established narrative, Kasher's finished screenplay took him from Omaha to Los Angeles, and Help Wanted Nights often trades in the countrypolitan indie-folk toward which Kasher's pal Conor also moved, especially on the slick, brushed-drum amble of "Picket Fence", "Your Share of Men", and "Playing Dumb". Elsewhere, the sleek, echoing guitars and spacious arrangements lend the record a shimmering lilt not too dissimilar from Rilo Kiley's sole Saddle Creek spin The Execution of All Things. "Keely Aimee", in particular, breezes past with brisk guitars and a gently funky pulse augmenting Kasher's cautious optimism: "Keely, I love your suffering/ Like gravity loves a stumbling drunk."
An authentic move toward country also means that lyrical puns and extended metaphors dealing with love gone wrong are in full bloom. Help's title is explained in "A Little Bit More", when Kasher inquires: "You flipped the sign in your window/ But baby, are you really closed?". During "Share" he offers the solicitation, "You're a fool for the wounded/ I'm a man in need of bandages/ So wrap me up and take me home," and on "You Don't Feel Like Home to Me", he indulges in melancholy: "He sees her face/ In the highway signs/ In the traffic lights/ And she's turning red."
Often referred to as Kasher's side project, and initiated as a dumping ground for his non-Cursive material, The Good Life has taken on an independent existence as an outlet for his more ambitious ideas. Help Wanted Nights finally finds him challenging himself again, imposing constraints and seeing how well he can work within them.


Eleven years after Music for Insomnia, Stevens and his stepfather reunite on a collection of warm, improvisatory synth-wave epics; intimate and unvarnished, they double as a testament to the power of found family.

Aporia

Is there a class of family member more roundly despised than the stepparent? “Parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct,” wrote Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, yet stepparents are seen as “interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters.” Many a fairy tale hinges on the machinations of a wicked stepmother. A long-running horror franchise is called simply The Stepfather, title in red on the posters, oozing blood. To be a stepparent is a thankless task freighted with centuries of cultural baggage; it takes a special sort of person.
To hear Sufjan Stevens tell it, Lowell Brams—his stepfather, immortalized in 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—is just such a person. As a very young child, Stevens spent summers in the Oregon home his mother, Carrie, shared with Brams, who proved a steady, soothing presence in a childhood of unremitting tumult. Years later, grieving the loss of his mother, Stevens recalled those summers as a “season of hope.” Brams recognized Stevens’ nascent talent, and he fed it—gave the boy mixtapes, introduced him to Bob Dylan, bought him his first keyboard and 4-track recorder. In 1999, when Stevens recorded his first album, Brams founded a record label to put it out. Now, with Brams retiring from the label, he and Stevens release Aporia, a synth-wave epic testifying to the love they’ve shared.
Culled from jam sessions recorded over the past decade, this is a looser record than we’re used to from Stevens. These songs have an improvisatory feel that has been refined and polished, though not to a digital shine. The mood throughout is warm and familiar, like something from a half-remembered childhood Sunday morning, blocky gray video-game remote in hand. He credits Brams, with his “great ear and great instincts,” for capturing choice moments from their raw collaboration, like the warm wind that closes “The Red Desert” or the solemn strings that dart across “Determined Outcome.” Brams, for his part, has been bashful in promoting the record, saying, “It’s unusual to have someone with little or no talent collaborating with someone who’s got truckloads like Sufjan.” Stevens, though, has always cut a unique figure as a rock star, prioritizing his privacy and his personal relationships while pursuing offbeat, unshowy opportunities. He never capitalized on his moment of Oscars glory; he continues, instead, to make meaningful music with the people who’ve loved him longest.
Though Aporia’s air is one of freewheeling collaboration, with many an old friend making an appearance—check those swooping Cat Martino vocal lines on “What It Takes” and “Conciliation”—there is a careful architecture to the record, a structure not unlike that of a science fiction soundtrack. The calm yoga-retreat swell of opening track “Ousia” builds quickly to a palpable sense of quest, in the electronic pulse of “Afterworld Alliance,” and danger, rippling high and insecure beneath the foreboding bass synth of “Conciliation.” The closest analogue would be a John Carpenter score, or perhaps one of the sprawling, crowd-sourced Homestuck soundtracks. Brams and Stevens were smart to seek out a unifying thread in the instruments of Dave Smith, the pioneering synthesizer designer. Smith’s Tempest drums and Prophet synths lend a warm, analog consistency to songs with an otherwise diverse palette—fairy-tale lightness in “Glorious You,” saw-toothed grit in “Matronymic.”
Though Stevens is famously versatile—he played nearly two dozen instruments on Illinois, including four types of recorder—he once aspired to become an author, even earning an MFA in fiction from the New School, and his storytelling remains among the most compelling aspects of his work. This is to say that there is a sense of something lost when he’s not writing lyrics; hardly a fair critique, I know, of an almost entirely instrumental record. The titles, at least, serve as guides for the listener to create a story of their own making. They call on Greek philosophy (“The Lydian Ring,” “Agathon”), unsung composers (“For Raymond Scott”), and SAT vocabulary (“Ataraxia,” “Misology,” “Palinodes”), planting flickering neon signs for listeners curious enough to venture down Wikipedia rabbit holes. When Stevens does sing two verses’ worth of real, human words, nearly half an hour in, on “The Runaround,” the effect is almost shocking, a sharp tug back to the realm of language.
The past several years have been a time of great upheaval in Stevens’ life. He has weathered tremendous personal tragedy and undergone a very public recovery. He has ascended to a level of stardom both stratospheric (the Oscars, Coachella) and cultic (the young queer people who have gone out and tattooed wasps on their arms) while embracing spontaneity and close connection. There is something profoundly lovely about seeing Stevens safe in such a strange, adventurous effort, supported by Brams and the rest of his found family.

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Behind their overt shoegaze and grunge revivalism, the Houston rock band finds careful guitar melodies, sensitive vocal deliveries, and earnest earworms.

12th House Rock

They may only have a debut under their belt, but the sepia-toned sludge rockers in Narrow Head have perfected the disaffected pull quote. “I don’t even think I like shoegaze,” frontman Jacob Duarte told the Dallas Observer in July. “I need aggressiveness.” As any passing observer of the grunge genre wars knows, the surest way to pin a label to your band is to vehemently deny affiliation. But even without the half-hearted attempts to reject categorization, the Houston group is practically built from ’90s pastiche—it’s in the bleached hair, the Smashing Pumpkins T-shirts, the passing references to Hum. At first blush, it can seem like Narrow Head are providing a paint-by-numbers guide to their references for the uninitiated; your appreciation of their music will likely correlate with your tolerance for faux film grain and song titles like “Emmadazey.” But the band’s Run for Cover debut, 12th House Rock, manages to surpass the trappings of a Chapterhouse cover record, cobbling impressive hooks and earnest earworms out of Creation Records nostalgia.
Narrow Head manifests the listless ennui of those bygone Brits in a different tenor; where Ride and Slowdive reached for glassy delay and shimmering cymbal hits, guitarist William Menjivar traffics in dense, scorched-earth reverb. The title track opens with a chord progression so heavily processed that it becomes almost indistinguishable from the wailing feedback; “Hard to Swallow” matches that pugnacity with blunt blasts from drummer Carson Wilcox. The screeching, echoing amplifier gain exudes a thick layer of grime that lingers throughout the record, forming a pointed introduction to the slow-burning rhythms of “Crankcase” and a cleanse between the circuitous hypnotism of “Yer’ Song” and the twinkling counter-melodies of “Ponderosa Sun Club.” More than anything, the sounds of plugging in and warming up are an anti-status symbol, a gesture to the band’s slouching nihilism. Despite the album’s brighter moments, like the triumphant guitar solos that open “Stuttering Stanley,” a pervasive darkness seeps through.
Then there’s Duarte’s voice, a wispy whine that bends and molds to the record’s variously downtrodden moods, revealing a surprising range. His opening words on the bridge of “Yer’ Song” are stretched and slowed to a leaden pace, as if tracked underwater. But elsewhere, as on the meandering “Nodding Off” and the comparatively sparse “Wastrel,” his voice can take on an unexpectedly romantic tenor, reaching for gentle, whispered falsettos. Despite the band’s best efforts to affect a sense of disinterested malaise, his default mode—a pitched, nasally resonance—betrays a forthright and vulnerable emotional core. Carried by Duarte’s moody, elongated vowels, tossed-off lyrical cynicism is reinvigorated. It’s one thing to shrug off the meaningless of everyday existence and adopt an outcast mentality; Narrow Head lean into that pessimism with purpose. “Wake me up when you leave,” he sings flatly on “Hard to Swallow,” a line that might otherwise come across as huffy teenage exasperation if not matched with the anxious, shredded screams of its bridge, which imply a despair deeper than passing tedium.
Behind the overt shoegaze and grunge revivalism of 12th House Rock, Narrow Head find a balance of form and function. For every predictably dense riff over lyrics about getting high, there’s a carefully constructed guitar melody, a particularly sensitive vocal delivery, a bright and buoyant bassline. “Evangeline Dream,” the album’s gently warbling closer, exemplifies these reinventions on a classic form. Written about Duarte’s late sister, the song builds layers of guitar noodling and muted drums, its progressions resolving naturally in a minor key evocative of Chris Bell’s melancholic melodies. Duarte’s breathy croon reflects his lyrical fantasies—“Evangeline, she’s a dream/I’m always dreaming so she’s never alone,” he sings, his voice winsome and starry-eyed. It’s a heartfelt moment of earnestness that puts the preceding disillusionment in stark relief. Peeling back the surface-level nostalgia, 12th House Rock, captures a wistfulness that surpasses mere mimicry.

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On their first LP following another bout of lineup changes, this Gothenburg band pushes against shoegaze confinement with songs meant to feel good.

Westkust

Sweden’s Westkust have always existed at the brink of annihilation. Almost immediately after forming a decade ago, they endured a series of tumultuous lineup changes before solidifying in 2011 as a five-piece, including two members of fellow Gothenburg rockers Makthaverskan. Together, they released the Junk EP, a grunge-tinged surf-rock record, and their fuzzy, post-punk-laced debut LP, Last Forever. But just as that record earned international attention, Westkust faded into the background. Both Makthaverskan members departed, leaving the rest of the band to struggle to finish Westkust, the record they started in 2016.
In an almost tragic comedy of errors, Westkust’s release also coincides with the dissolution of the label that was the heartbeat of Gothenburg’s indie community, Luxury. Born of this Sisyphean struggle, Westkust is a testament to resilience built from years of restraint and frustration. It bursts with brightness, even in its haziest moments.
With their first full-length, Westkust were cast as shoegaze revivalists, due more to broad signifiers like co-ed vocalists and gauzy reverb than to the actual songs. The tunes, after all, featured propulsive basslines, sky-high chord progressions, and drumming patterns that owed more to the Ramones than Ride. On Westkust, the band aims to break out of this premature categorization. “Swebeach” opens the record with a massive guitar riff that cuts through the air like a garage-rock fire alarm before crashing headlong into the punk rhythm that anchors the song. The guitar returns to add a brief, shiny solo, but the speedy tendencies of the drum and bass win out, immediately dispatching those shoegaze notions.
These songs feel self-contained. When a particularly feedback-heavy note does take hold, it soon gives way to a neat pop structure—melodies find their resolution, and songs often end by mirroring their beginning. Even textures borrowed from shoegaze, like the twinkling guitars and tambourine hits of “Rush,” cohabitate with echoing post-punk basslines and uptempo beats. Westkust play with such palpable enthusiasm that they manage to evoke the adolescent excitement of musical discovery.
This feeling owes in large part to singer Julia Bjernelind, whose voice melts into the songs while guiding their melodies. On previous records, where Gustav Andersson shared vocal duties, their songs were split between his brash, off-kilter speak-singing and Bjernelind’s honeyed crooning. But here, she uses her voice as yet another layer, stretching out to harmonize with the instruments rather than fight them. On “Adore,” a sunny pop track, her inflection shifts to match the reverb-washed guitar: “You know that I’ve been told/You’re kissed by the sun,” she sings. Without Andersson to fight against the melody, these tracks go down easy. “We wanted to make songs that just feel good to listen to,” Bjernelind has confirmed.
At times, Westkust feels so good it threatens to dissolve into the background. “Daylight,” which starts with a strumming pattern reminiscent of Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me,” establishes a slow, swirling rhythm and, unlike the rest of the record, stays the path. Add in Bjernelind’s lilting, downtrodden vocal, and the song becomes hypnotically dull and familiar. But the warmth of a kick drum shakes off the fog on “Cotton Skies.” As soon as Westkust faded, they’ve returned in full ebullience.


This lost Prefab Sprout album, previously issued as a Paddy McAloon solo LP, finds the singer receding into a vivid dream world unlike anything in his catalog.

I Trawl the Megahertz

Deterioration inspires all of Prefab Sprout’s major works. The English pop group’s breakthrough single, the shimmery 1984 ballad “When Love Breaks Down,” was about weakening ties and how “absence makes the heart lose weight.” A few years later, with “The King of Rock and Roll,” they paired whimsical fanfare from super-producer Thomas Dolby with the withering reflections of a one-hit wonder coming to terms with his obsolescence. It remains their biggest hit in their native United Kingdom.
As the band rose to minor fame throughout the ’80s, frontman Paddy McAloon receded from the spotlight. He was always ambivalent about his public image, and now his health was starting to fail him as well. In interviews, he’s spoken about struggles with Meniere's disease, tinnitus, shingles, eczema, and temporary blindness stemming from retina detachment—an affliction most commonly associated with boxers, or anybody who’s been regularly, repeatedly punched in the face.
The surgery was successful, but it forced McAloon, then in his forties, to find new ways to do his job. In recovery, he was unable to sit upright or lean forward, and so he spent much of his time supine. Unable to read or look at screens, he turned to audiobooks and radio broadcasts for inspiration. Disjointed sentences stuck in his head—“I’m 49 and divorced,” “Your daddy loves you very much; he just doesn’t want to live with us anymore”—and they started forming a loose narrative. Soon, he began hearing a sad, gorgeous melody accompanying it: flugelhorns, clarinets, cellos. When he was fully recovered, he brought the idea to life as a 22-minute spoken word and orchestral piece called “I Trawl the Megahertz” narrated by an American stockbroker named Yvonne Connors.
The way Paddy McAloon operates as an artist belies logic. Following the chronology of his career and separating the facts from mythology quickly becomes impossible. Entire albums get scrapped; old songs find their way onto new projects; stories seem too good to be true. If he had never released I Trawl the Megahertz, it might have been one of these legends: a work unlike anything else in his catalog that denies all of his strengths yet feels almost autobiographical. Newly remastered and reissued as a Prefab Sprout album—it was previously released as a McAloon solo LP in 2003 and largely ignored by both critics and the public—it now stands as one of the peaks of his strange, brilliant career.
The album consists of two movements: the title track and an eight-part, mostly instrumental accompaniment that depicts a businessman escaping to the forest. It features McAloon’s voice in just one track, and his words are important. “I am lost,” he sings softly, longing to abandon the obligations associated with his career (which McAloon soon did) and grow a long, silver beard (which he also did). From a songwriter who always aspired to be a craftsman more than a heart-on-his-sleeve confessionalist, the words sound newly vulnerable. But as personal as it may seem, the decision to release Megahertz as a solo project was less artistic than commercial, as McAloon worried how fans might respond to this sweeping collection of long-form compositions.
Megahertz doesn’t just stand apart in McAloon’s discography; it has few pop music analogs. Instead, it feels more of a piece with the dreamy, ambitious films from the era like Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As with those works, the music finds power in merging the ordinary—medical procedures, traffic, bureaucracy—with the extraordinary. Its opening words forecast a hazy origin story, followed by poetic reflections on love, trauma, and aging. “In a chamber of my heart sits an accountant,” Connors narrates, over what sounds like the closing score to some kind of cosmic Western. “He is frowning and waving red paper at me.”
As the orchestra swells, the narrative loops back and disintegrates. At one point, Connors intones, “Forgive me, I am sleepwalking,” and the music seems to dream along with her. McAloon says he chose Connors to recite his words because he wanted to make an album from which he could escape, led by a voice wholly distinct from his own. He recorded Connors’ vocals in a hotel room in London to get a feel for the material. When they attempted to replicate it in a studio, the magic had vanished. In the end, they returned to that initial tape, editing out the air conditioner buzz between words and making McAloon’s most labor-intensive project—string arrangements, horn charts, recurring motifs—also a kind of happy accident.
An album that aims to reflect the fragmented, mysterious way we process memory, Megahertz also forecasts how McAloon would evade nostalgia and evolve in the 21st century. Since its initial release, he’s only put out two albums—one, a previously shelved collection about the healing power of music, and another, a contractually obligated set of more traditional Sprout songs. His health problems have all but assured that he’ll never perform live again, and his public appearances have been rare. Along the way, Megahertz has lost none of its mystical power. At one point, McAloon reminds us of the real world that lies beyond our fantasies and pop songs. “Trains are late, doctors are breaking bad news,” Connors sighs. “But I am living in a lullaby.” I Trawl the Megahertz is its own kind of dream, where time slows down and the world ahead seems magnificent and new.


Channeling krautrock’s philosophical legacy along with its repetitive grooves, the Baltimore duo’s second album aims for nothing less than political and personal liberation.

Towards the Shadow

The German groups of the early ’70s that came to be called krautrock formed in an era of political instability. They sought to transcend capitalism’s everyday oppression, and their country’s fascist past, in expansive sounds aimed at personal and political emancipation. The Baltimore duo Wume—a reference to Wümme, the hometown of the German group Faust—draw heavily on that legacy. Their blissfully mechanistic, repetitive music is an impressive amalgamation of the array of sounds pioneered by a number of trailblazing German groups.
On their new album Towards the Shadow they also explicitly embrace krautrock’s philosophical and political heritage. Though their debut, Maintain, was largely instrumental, here drummer and vocalist April Camlin sings on almost every song, alternating between dreamlike imagery and sloganeering to engage complex ideas about power and oppression.
“Welcome your shadow. Repression serves no one, and limits our freedom,” Camlin sings on “Shadow,” in one of the most dramatic examples of this opposition. Her singing anchors the band’s complex, polyrhythmic groove, and the power of her vocals is heightened by their sudden appearance halfway through the song, after a lengthy exposition that builds tension through increasingly layered synth patterns. The duo employs a similar tactic on “Pool of Light,” which centers on pointillistic player piano and manic, backbeat-heavy drums. Four minutes into the piece, after the piano cycles through variations that recall Steve Reich, Camlin recites, “I’m losing my shadow, shaking my shadow/I’m wearing my shadow.” The unexpected arrival of her voice makes it all the more potent.
Perhaps not since Fugazi or Stereolab has a band addressed the failings of capitalism and its effects on the human psyche in such direct terms: “The hierarchy of value is a construct put in place to check you,” Camlin sings on album closer “GenSeq,” her words doubled up and delayed over pulsing, low synthesizer tones. “What do you value? What do you prioritize?” The lyrics of “Functionary” are a recitation of a portion of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, published in 1955, which seeks to connect Marxist and Freudian theory. Given the contemporary cultural crisis, these ideas are as relevant as ever—a point driven home by the bluntness of Wume’s lyrics.
Towards the Shadow is at its best when the music reflects the subject matter’s balance of heady complexity and emotional urgency.  The majority of the songs are written in odd time signatures, but the effect is largely thrilling rather than obtuse. Synthesist and keyboard player Albert Schatz is a master of skewed melody, injecting each song with intricate, subtle details that seem not only natural but engrossing. On the instrumental “Ravel” he takes simple melodic fragments and twists them into different shapes, providing several layers of counterpoint for each iteration. Camlin’s drumming is ecstatic but precise, arriving at a midpoint between Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger.
Camlin typically delivers her lyrics in a chant-like monotone, and when the music becomes too minimal, it can sound one-dimensional. The seven-minute “Functionary,” the album’s longest track, especially falls prey to this, as Schatz’s synths fail to enliven the highly academic text. The most engaging moments on Towards the Shadow edge closest to pop, such as the gauzy synth melody on “It’s Okay” and the Eno-esque vocals of “Shadow.” It’s one thing to theorize liberation. But at their best, in their most ecstatic passages, Wume come close to bringing it to life.


The experimental musician continues their path of dematerialization on a mostly placid set characterized by warm synths, steady tremolo pulses, and an air of unease.

Neo Seven

Neo Gibson invented a world and proceeded to flood it. In their antediluvian phase—around 2015, when they swapped the early alias Neo Petal for 7038634357, their phone number—they infused techno and hardstyle with the breaking-glass samples and cinematic effects of the era’s experimental club music. By 2019’s stormy Swallow, the drums had vanished, but trance’s outline remained visible beneath waves of distorted arpeggios. Fast forward to 2021’s murky, sonar-pinging Permanest: Its nine turbid tracks might as well have been recorded inside a diving bell sunk deep in the seafloor. It’s as if the broad sweep of the discography was meant to play out like Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic.
Taken together, Gibson’s dozen or so releases form a continuum. Little by little, from record to record, their music’s structure has undergone a gradual process of dematerialization—beats dissolved, synths turned to liquid, edges melted into a muted ambient slurry. Across this long arc, Gibson has seemed to ask: How much pressure can you apply to a sound without rendering it unrecognizable? How much damage can you pile on without destroying the beauty of a thing?
Their latest release, and first for Blank Forms Editions, the publishing arm of the New York arts nonprofit, is a particularly placid—well, mostly placid—snapshot from deep in the octopus’ garden. Neo Seven is consistent in mood with last year’s Oval-esque Electric, which paired gently glitching sinewave etudes with sweetly robotic singing. But here, those slightly chilly computer tones have been replaced by warm synths with a steady tremolo pulse.
Like its predecessor, Neo Seven is less a collection of songs than a theme and variations. Virtually every track utilizes the same set of chords and the same synth patch—a soft and wheezy sound that might be an ’80s Casio’s idea of a flute, with varying degrees of digital abrasion applied. In the opening “Winded” and “Everytime,” the synths are topped by a faint corona of distortion—an almost crinkly sound, suggesting the muffled high end on a lossy MP3. “Acolyte” is shrill and garbled, with all the bass filtered out and the treble frequencies foaming with static. “Square Heart,” in contrast, leaves just a faint dusting of dirt, playing up the uncanny smoothness of the digitally processed voice singing dulcet cybernetic lullabies.
Beneath the seeming stasis of the music, sneaky metamorphoses are afoot, though you need to pay close attention to pick up on them: The differences between tracks, and the developments within them, are so minute as to be almost unnoticeable. “Winded” begins with an undulating gust of wind that gradually takes on tone color, like a darkened countryside soaking up the dawn. In “Overbraid,” trance gates take the place of the previous tracks’ rhythmic tremolo, perforating held chords with tiny silences. In “Square Heart,” sub-bass pulses cut against the bobbing rhythm, creating an unsettling counterpoint whose effects are more intuited than perceived. That subtle air of unease is central to this music: Like Burial, Gibson makes music that feels simple on the surface—wistfully nostalgic, with imagistic titles and childlike themes—yet harbors more ambiguous emotions in its hidden depths. (Gibson’s self-presentation, often appearing with spoons stuck to their face like some surreal form of chain mail, doesn’t reveal much.)
Sometimes the unease isn’t subtle at all. Halfway through the opening track, just as you’ve made peace with the idea that no major developments are in store, Gibson thrusts a new sound into the mix. It’s bolder, thick and resonant, like a titanium bow scraping across a ship’s hull. The chord fades to silence, and then, bam: It returns as a massively overdriven blast of digital distortion, a blackened juggernaut of Ben Frost proportions—grinding, serrated, throwing sparks. The leap in decibels is enough to send you lunging for the volume control. The same trick happens again in the closing “Perfect Night,” where a placid chord explodes into ear-splitting noise. The din continues until the very end, when Gibson’s lonely robot voice rises from the depths once more—a goodnight kiss, a benediction. These shifts don’t so much break the mood as intensify it, opening new dimensions for hard-to-define feelings to take shape.


On the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s fourth album, spare acoustic arrangements make deceptively simple containers for songs charged with memory and mysticism.

Seance

There are times when Maxine Funke’s songs feel so light, it seems as if a heavy sigh could blow them away. But hold that breath, and her curious, knotty guitar quickly takes hold. Bring them on a walk, and the songs take on a kaleidoscopic quality as the shifting improvisations of birds, neighbors, bugs, and traffic peek through her murmured melodies.
On Seance, Funke’s fourth album, the New Zealand singer-songwriter charges her songs with the energy of open air just before a heavy thunderstorm. She accompanies herself on the guitar and makes use of a synthetic rhythm once, laying a sparse looping beat as the foundation to the meander of “Moody Relish.” There is a constant sense that something is about to happen, and to that end, Funke’s taut songs are anticlimactic. That tension, however, translates to a rare escape to a safe outpost for reflection on a vast plane of uncertainty, where recollections are richly bittersweet.
Much of Seance feels dedicated to making quiet spaces for memory. In “Homage,” she follows a spiraling route, lobbing questions about who could replace a departed lover—then asking who would ask the same of her absence. “Anzac Day,” meanwhile, nods to a holiday commemorating war casualties in Australia and New Zealand. But Funke takes a different approach by asking to remember conscientious objectors, honoring the courage of following through on a moral conviction despite the potential for ostracization and shame.
Concrete memories can be resurrecting forces, but so, too, can the abstractions of everyday details. As Funke recalls a breakup via tea trays and slammed doors on “Quiet Shore,” her short, rippling guitar part inches along with the fuzz and single-mindedness of a caterpillar. It turns hypnotic as Funke uses her acoustic guitar to amble over stray notes and fleeting passages.
Funke renders her scenes briefly, with the thin saturation of watercolor paints. On “Fairy Baby,” she illustrates a crepuscular beach horizon in a gliding lilt. She invokes the wine-dark sea, a Homeric characterization defined not by color, but by depth: “mysterious, hypnotic, dangerous,” as Mary Norris described in her 2019 book Greek to Me. Mysticism glimmers between Funke’s strokes, as in “Lucky Penny,” or in “Fairy Baby”’s mention of haruspication: divination through the entrails of animal sacrifices.
Funke saves her best for last with “Goodbye,” where she clarifies the difference between shyness and justified reservation—in a sense, remembering herself. “I’m not shrinking,” she insists, “It’s just you’re looking down at me from such a lofty height.” Instead, she’s immersed in her world, taking in portraiture by day and history books by night. But even assured introverts yearn for the tenderness of feeling understood on their own terms: “I like to be noticed/I wish to be seen,” Funke sings, a simple admission that can sometimes feel impossible to articulate.
Seance is Funke’s shortest record by a wide margin, but its slighter stature plays to all of its strengths. It slips away all too quickly, like so many memories.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The original studio version of goth’s transcendent standard finally gets reissued alongside three songs that show just how quickly the band progressed.

The Bela Session

Everyone knows “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” For decades, it has been a staple of dorm-room posters and knockoff T-shirts and Halloween mixtapes. It has been covered by Massive Attack, Sepultura, and even Chvrches. It is a metonym for goth. But the “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that has become canonical is not the original “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The best-known version—the one enshrined in the 1985 singles anthology, Bauhaus 1979-1983—comes from 1982’s Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape, a compendium of early live performances. For the 1998 greatest-hits collection Crackle, Beggars Banquet stitched together the “Tomb Raider Version” from outtakes and live recordings. The band never approved it and refers to it instead as the “Frankenstein version.”
Bauhaus recorded their first version on January 26, 1979, in their first studio session, and released it that August on London’s Small Wonder records in an initial pressing of 5,000. It’s been out of print for years, though a scratchy vinyl rip did hit YouTube in 2009. Its re-release now on Los Angeles’ Leaving Records, in anticipation of the band’s 40th anniversary, marks its first official vinyl reissue. Leaving, a Stones Throw affiliate, normally puts out foggy-headed beat music, spiritual jazz, and starry-eyed new-age cassettes; it’s hardly a place you’d expect to find the dark princes of death rock. But the backstory here is remarkably simple: Leaving’s owner, Matthew McQueen, aka Matthewdavid, is a longtime Bauhaus fan married to the producer Diva Dompé, the oldest daughter of Bauhaus’ Kevin Haskins.
While “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is Bauhaus’ most iconic song, it is also something of an outlier in their catalog. Nearly ten minutes long and often as wispy as cobwebs, it’s a world away from the surging, serrated post-punk of their 1980 debut, In the Flat Field. Its lean, skeletal form sounds even less like the increasingly opulent art-rock mutations of their later albums. The original version reinforces its uniqueness. The arrangement is similar to that of the Press the Eject version, but everything here feels more vivid. The drums are crisper, the dub delay more pronounced, the vacuum of empty space around everything more absolute. Freed from the murk of the live recording, the Jamaican influence behind the song’s springy drumbeat leaps to the fore. The clanging guitar suggests that Bauhaus were probably listening to the same reggae records as the Slits when they recorded their debut, Cut, the same year.
The dub influence is even more pronounced on “Harry,” a punky reggae tune later released on the B-side of the 1982 EP, Kick in the Eye. Like the other songs on this reissue, all recorded during that inaugural session, it’s largely a curio. “Bite My Hip” is a chugging, unceremonious blueprint for the 1983 single “Lagartija Nick.” “Boys,” later re-recorded for the B-side of the original “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” single, shows the band’s fondness for Brian Eno’s early solo albums in the dry room treatment and queasy vocal tone. The previously unreleased “Some Faces” might as well be the work of a pub-rock band. While it’s nice to have these songs available, they serve largely as reminders of how far Bauhaus soon traveled from their origins—and how distinct “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” still sounds.
What is it that makes “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” so enduring? There’s its dead-simple descending bassline; the too-bright guitars, flashing like mica and then rainbows; Peter Murphy's imagistic doggerel and bark-at-the-moon howl. And then there’s its subject, a B-movie actor made famous by his role in 1931’s Dracula but already dead for 22 years when Bauhaus set foot in the studio. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” isn’t really about Lugosi, but it wouldn’t have been the same without him, either. Invoking the actor’s name as synonymous with his roles, the song inherits his B-movie legacy and even the tabloid spectacle of his death. Lugosi was famously buried in a Dracula cape against his wishes; Bauhaus assumed that moth-eaten mantle.
Yet “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” transcends its tawdry, tongue-in-cheek iconography—never mind lines like “The virginal brides file past his tomb/Strewn with time’s dead flowers/Bereft in deathly bloom.” With a climax so stormy that Edward Bulwer-Lytton himself would have approved, the song inches right up to the border of camp and gazes longingly at the other side. It’s a remarkable feat that only adds to the song’s singular qualities. After all these years, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” sounds unlike anything else. One night in January 1979, Bauhaus ventured into the bat cave and came out with a unicorn.


The Austin band’s druggy, wall-of-sound escapism put them on the map, but their first album in six years sounds more confident without it.

Pure X

The unsubtle party drug nod, which now scans as very 10 years ago, was never the point. As Pure X guitarist/vocalist Nate Grace told Dummy in 2013, “Pleasure, ecstasy, purity—those ideas are directly related to the act of making music.” And, in the same interview, “You can’t experience pleasure without feeling pain, you cannot know ecstasy without knowing despair.” Pure X, the Austin band’s first album since 2014’s Angel, still jives with Grace’s earlier concept, in which ecstasy isn’t so much the result of listening to the music as a distant, unattainable goal or state of being. But in the six years since Angel, Grace, bassist/vocalist Jesse Jenkins V, drummer Austin Youngblood, and multi-instrumentalist Matty Tommy Davidson have further clarified their sound, creating the brightest and tightest bummer jams of their career.
Album opener “Middle America” sets the scene: “Send help, I’m stranded in Middle America,” sings Grace from a Bible Belt hell they can’t escape. “Send help, I’m losing sense of who I am.” The rest of the record wrestles with finding meaning in a turbulent world, in a country where happiness—let alone ecstasy—is hard to come by. The lyrics offer flashes of beauty between the crush of the everyday. “All the neon skies are going grey,” Jenkins sings on “Fantasy.” “My people work so hard and work so long/Break and fall and disappear.” These are tunes for our times, but also seem built for age-old pursuits: nursing sweaty beers, driving through the Texas desert, diving into a swimming hole.
Pure X arrives in a landscape at once parallel and vastly different from the climate of the band’s soporific first singles. Back in 2009, the recession had wildly altered the prospects of many young people. Careers were put on hold, replaced by Tecate-and-pot-filled warehouses and a DIY sensibility that lived as much on the internet as it did in clubs or practice spaces. “The first time we got on Pitchfork, I think they linked to my MySpace,” Grace told The Austin Chronicle. Much of Pure X is reminiscent of the working-class indie rock of the ’90s, when shit jobs and encroaching suburbia represented an existential threat to bands like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Economic uncertainty pokes out between otherwise metaphorical lyrics about relationships and personal growth. “I can’t afford the future/I don’t know my past,” sings Grace on “Making History.” “We’ve been working for nothing for so long.”
Though these slice-of-life musings are sometimes dire, a feeling of patience and acceptance permeates Pure X’s 12 tracks. “I forgive myself for how I hurt myself,” goes one line in “Hollywood.” As with much of the band’s output, the music was recorded live—this time at Good Danny’s Studio in Lockhart, Texas—and carries with it a polished immediacy. Earlier in their career, Pure X had a tendency to muddy Grace and Jenkins’ voices, creating the impression they were singing from inside a hollow or behind a veil. But on Pure X, their deliveries ring clear, timbres unadulterated by fuzz or distortion. The album’s guitars, too, are more pristine, tinged with Americana or imbued with a psychedelic shimmer. Pure X’s druggy, wall-of-sound escapism put them on the map in their early days, but they sound more confident without it.
On previous records, the band sometimes used synths to fill gaps between instruments, lending their sound density and heaviness. They’ve been gradually cleaning up their approach since 2013’s Crawling Up the Stairs, but on Pure X, they do more than wipe away the cobwebs; they take a Dyson to them. Bass, drums, and guitar give these songs a sparer, more intentional character. Across the album, hints of ’60s folk and lustrous ’70s rock are easy to spot. “How Good Does It Get” has a surf-rock shimmer—“How deep does love go?” wonders Grace—while “Grieving Song” matches elegiac lyrics with doleful guitars, a zombie doing the Zombies.
After Angel, it was unclear if Pure X would stay together. The band members had migrated across the region, even started families. Pure X focuses less on that period of upheaval and more on the feeling of moving past it, wisened and ready for what’s next. Eleven years into their career, the smoke has cleared, leaving that age-old enemy of youth: perspective. But chasing pure ecstasy remains a lifelong pursuit of pyrrhic victory. “I can dream,” sings Davidson on the album closer. “I can dream.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new “definitive” reissue series begins with the bedroom artist’s earliest Haunted Graffiti records, which now sound more prescient and ghostly than ever.

Ariel Pink: Underground / Loverboy / Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2

There is a case to be made that Ariel Pink’s earliest music has always been a bit haunted. The whole wad of funhouse pop—pulled from crackly master tapes and spawned into reissues of reissues of reissues—keeps floating wraith-like towards listeners, two decades later. It’s how Pink himself described it in a Tiny Mix Tapes interview in 2006:

“Once something is captured, it carries an objective power that lives outside of time and reality. It can be manipulated [...] like a person without a body that it can call its own. The world of sound has no visible territory or domain that it can claim. It offers its own spirit to the world for the sake of play and wonderment.”

Pink’s idea of what would happen to his music mirrors an idea that writers Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds were calling “hauntology” the same year. Each considered Pink’s music as the zeitgeisty sound of “time collapsing on itself”—the clearest sign that culture had crossed into an era where nothing could die. Or if by some chance it were to die, as they wrote, it would inevitably come back as a reissued collection.
This isn’t to say a new and expansive reissue effort by Mexican Summer under the name “Ariel Archives” is a cynical cultural ploy. Rather, it just feels procedural in this phase of Pink’s two-decade career, not to mention one that feels cobbled together by aggrandized marketing language. Consider also that the musician’s entire career has been a retrospective project, vis a vis his managing and administering the vast musical trove he compiled in a blur of recording between 1999 and 2004. But these are “definitive” releases, the Brooklyn-based label notes, paired with expanded tracklistings, new art by Pink, remastered, and featuring thoughtful essays by Hedi El Kholti, the co-editor of publishing imprint Semiotext(e). The whole collection spans the six albums Pink recorded with his imaginary band Haunted Graffiti, plus three volumes of rarities. It’s the closest thing to a final destination for a catalog that has spent the better part of two decades in various states of disarray, sliding across our musical consciousness, across trends, and attitudes like a discarded CD-R on a trashed car floor.
Split into four reissue cycles, the Ariel Archives begins with an odd trio: 1999’s Underground, 2002’s Loverboy, and the collection Odditties Sodomies Vol 2. The musical distance covered by just these three albums mirrors the varied locales in Los Angeles where Pink conceived them—an ashram in South Central, a ranch house in Val Verde where Graham Nash and a Grateful Dead percussionist once recorded, and his CalArts dorm room from which Underground first emerged.
Pink says he simply took the sounds in his head and directly injected them into cassette machines of dubious quality, and Underground is the most spontaneous sounding of Pink’s early albums. It’s the one Haunted Graffiti album from this time with the least sense of itself, confined to the same handful of open guitar chords, an idea of sunbleached guitar anthems, and an idea of teenage ennui. “I stole a car so we could run away/Slow down I gotta hear you stay,” Pink sings in “Underground,” a lean guitar and mouth-drums combo that wanders over a melody like a stoned night drive.
More than just fetish material for Pink completists, the reissues are most notable because Pink’s equally demonized, glorified, and debated lo-fidelity has been officially tampered with. The original master tapes were made available to credible engineers with good intentions. Unlike the flawed Paw Tracks reissues, the squashed mono mixes of both Loverboy and Underground have been cracked open into a wide stereo field. While a thin layer of tape hiss still hangs above each record like freeway smog, the depths unlocked by the remaster clear space for us to participate in Pink’s original fantasy more than ever. The tumbling AM-radio confections “My Molly” and “Doggone (Shegone)” can be imagined, faintly at least, as actual AM-radio hits, lost soft-rock artifacts recovered on a Saturday morning drive pouring out from a busted rear speaker.
Loverboy and Underground’s newfound fidelity muddies the bigger picture of Pink’s legacy. Specifically, the idea that his work as Haunted Graffiti was a mere prelude to studio budgets, the dismal sonics of these albums an arbitrary choice, a condition of some broke musician recording in a squat. Instead, the precision remastering bolsters the minority opinion of what Fisher described as “anamorphic sonic objects.” The anamorphic being the idea of sounds working on the periphery of comprehension, combining into something radically different. In this view, Pink’s aesthetic wasn’t a fuzzy approximation of some “Porcelain Heaven” as Pitchfork writer Mike Powell wrote in 2006, but a visionary style unto itself. An intentional musical vernacular existing, in the end, as a gauzy, unified whole.
In this context, given the clarity of the reissues, Loverboy is a futurist pop cycle. From the spectral, pulsing organs on “Ghosts” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” to the shuffling mouth drums on “She’s My Girl,” Pink’s bedroom feels palatial, some hyper-baroque synth chamber hovering between this dimension and the next. It’s all very “time out of joint” as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his original concept of “hauntology.”
But don’t let the seriousness of that concept jam you up. Both Loverboy and Odditties sound like they exist simply for the sake of play and wonderment, the latter showcasing Pink’s ability to toggle between styles (Britpop, new wave) and impersonation (be it Kate Bush whispers of “The World is Yours” or the eyes-closed Morrissey delivery in Pink’s cover of “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”). Instead of the usual line about Pink defacing the ideal of pop music, he’s actually defacing himself, either through the puffed up embellishment, of “Didn’t it Click” (“Ladies and gentlemen/The master of ceremonies, Ariel Pink!”) or the emasculated self-deprecation in the chorus of “Loverboy” written with John Maus. (“I love you like a dog or snake or a mouse or a bird/That's why they call me loverboy.”)
All the talk of Pink’s musical “nostalgia” feels a bit propped up now—maybe it was ours all along? This haunted question was answered straightforwardly as far back as 2001 when Pink covered R. Stevie Moore’s “Hobbies Galore.” It’s the anthem of his complicated fiefdom, a tribute to the idea of himself, signs of a persona seen in the third-person, and an homage to his mentor.
“Gee it’s great to be home/Hobbies galore/Don’t you engage in a craft/Don’t you like it alone/Locked behind doors,” Pink sings, sounding a bit like he’s nodding out on the strength of his own stuff. Who would blame him? The dark ages had just counted off a deathly tune—9/11, Bush, black sites, suicidal markets—and Pink was the one who could harmonize over it, as long as he was left alone, locked behind his many doors.

Buy: Rough Trade (Underground) (Loverboy) (Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2)
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After an arresting opener, the singer-songwriter’s second album wanders into a fog of existential angst and you-had-to-be-there anecdotes.

Honey

Growing up means realizing that sometimes you’re just a filler episode in someone else’s love story. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it: “I hope you marry the girl from your hometown/And I’ll fucking kill her, and I’ll fucking freak out,” Samia yowls on the lead single and opening song of her new album, Honey. With the insight of an omnipresent narrator and the charm of a comically disaffected protagonist, the Los Angeles-born, New York-raised singer-songwriter exorcizes her demons on her darkest and most cinematic song to date. A24 even let Lucas Hedges out of their basement to star in the music video.
Not really a murderous revenge fantasy, “Kill Her Freak Out” is the cry of a wounded animal, cornered and clawing at potential predators. The uncomfortably long 24-second organ solo at the intro signals impending doom, and if you didn’t already have a pit in your stomach, Samia emerges in a sort of dissociative daze to announce someone’s pregnancy. Whose? Oh, just the love of her life. Nothing puts a nail in the coffin of youth quite like stalking the crush or partner that defined your earlier years and finding a wedding registry. But the tragedy of “Kill Her Freak Out” is less the hypothetical manslaughter than Samia’s inability to maintain its momentum for the duration of 11 songs.
With references to 2010s pop hits and Williamsburg concert venues, Honey is Marnie from Girls’ indie-rock album. Two songs in, you’ll wonder if you slept-walked into L Train Vintage. Straddling the unhinged-cool dichotomy, Samia uses the potent pathos of confessionalism (“I’ve never felt so unworthy of loving”) to distract from shaky metaphors and imagery: “Kissing you would be kissing on the USA.” It’s reminiscent of those TikTok slideshows with quotes about girlhood, mother-daughter relationships, and unrequited love set to “Scott Street.”
You might’ve discovered Samia through the suggested-artists algorithm on a streaming app. Embracing comparisons to melancholic “sad girls,” she puts on her Phoebe Bridgers Doc Martens (the deep Californian drawl in every “time” on “Charm You”) and Adrianne Lenker cowboy hat (the lyrics on “Pink Balloon” that recall “anything”), but her gestures toward intimacy land without emotional weight. The guttural scream at the end of “Breathing Song” is one of the rare moments when Samia’s delivery matches the vague devastation of her lyrics. Opening lines like “Your mom keeps threatening suicide on holidays” and “Screaming ‘Porn kills love’/Outside your window with the Adventists” might as well be items on a grocery list.
Samia told The Forty-Five she was inspired by Waking Life and Everything Everywhere All at Once, films that “zoom all the way out on these huge concepts and then all the way back in at these tiny little personal relationships.” In real life, worrying whether your friend’s parents like you can be just as anxiety-inducing as looming climate disaster. But the record’s rapid tone shifts are whiplash-inducing and Samia’s quick-fire anecdotes are just way too specific to ascend from name-drops into narratives. It’s a never-ending case of “you had to be there”: Who are Chris and David, and what do they have to do with anything? They’re individual portraits in search of their photomosaic.
Referencing worship music, “Jesus, take the wheel,” and the big guy himself, Samia half-commits to a God-fearing country album. Nashville has been her adopted home for the past couple years and everyone knows that when you get to Tennessee, they strap you down and program a twang into your vocal cords. OK, the accent is a bit exaggerated at times, but it complements the record’s religious and patriotic themes. Residing in the hyphenated space between her Lebanese and American heritage, Samia explores this tension via love interests who fill her with self-doubt and trigger an identity crisis (“I’d be so afraid of what your daddy’d say/I could fetishize you for the whole damn day”). This element is easy to miss on a casual listen, but it does add a satirical tinge to songs like “Charm You,” where she sings about the thrill of visiting that white suburban institution, the outdoor mall.
When Honey shines, it’s in the same way as Samia’s debut, 2020’s The Baby: by highlighting her rich and versatile voice. “Mad at Me” makes a case for her pop pivot. Like Ariana Grande and Lorde, she’s able to manipulate an upbeat synth-pop palette to unsettling effect. On this pleading-eye emoji of a track, she sounds like a child performing a choreographed song and dance to get the attention of a parent who is giving her the silent treatment. That’s when her anguish is most potent. The way she modulates her voice on the chorus of “Amelia”—an electronic tribute to Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, in whose studio Honey was recorded—almost makes up for the Little Mermaid soundtrack quality of the instrumental.
When the late Toni Morrison taught a creative writing course at Princeton, she required her students to write from perspectives wholly foreign to their own, reasoning that their ability to “relate to themselves as strangers” would result in dynamic stories. Samia pitches Honey as a graduation from the egocentric stage of artistry by tackling themes of nihilism and generational legacy: “Are you scared to die?/The trick is don’t arrive/You can see it in your daughter’s eyes/That’s the purpose and the prize.” Society might make you feel old for being in your late 20s, especially as a woman, but at 26, Samia is not yet ready to write her “deathbed record.” She’s better at romanticizing the mundane, like when she compares a cobweb to a constellation and professes her desire to “be a mermaid.” The album’s more pleasing songs, like “Charm You” and “Honey,” are campfire ditties with rich, inviting harmonies. These brief moments of levity suggest that, in the face of existential dread, maybe it is more rewarding to sing with the people you love than about them.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s masterwork from 1986, a hermetic and wondrous new age album that contains worlds beyond worlds.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Keyboard Fantasies

Keyboard Fantasies

Just off of U.S. Highway 37 in Sylvania, Ohio, lies a small, butter-colored hamlet of retirees. Its name, “Sunset Village,” suggests that you or your loved ones will enjoy a warm, bucolic, well-reckoned end, should you choose to settle there. Like all retirement centers, Sunset Village comes with a lot of practical provisions: The age for admittance is strictly greater than 55, the majority of properties are for rent, rather than purchase (for obvious reasons), and, based on your need and price point, staff can cater a menu of care options under heartbreaking titles like “memory support.” What comes free and without caveat, however, is the tacit understanding among its people that colonies like these will very likely serve as their last earthly stop before deboarding this mortal coil.
Not unlike all-inclusive resorts or monasteries, senior communities are among the most meaningful attempts we’ve got in the sustained pursuit of pinning and freezing time. These are societies interested in life existential, not life chronological. They acknowledge the end at their outset, make peace with the idea of transience, and build entire ecosystems designed to strip life of its formal trappings. Seeing them from this angle might clarify why the often-used, flourishy euphemism “active living community” can feel so bizarre and science-fictional—it throws into relief what sort of living the rest of us do in the meantime.
In a satisfying and totally arbitrary coincidence, there exists another sunset village at the end of an equally strange and otherworldly cassette released in 1986. Like the album that houses it—and very much like the Ohioan villa of the same name—“Sunset Village” (side B, final track) also happens to be an arcadian resting place that holds the question of time, and its movement, at its center. The song is fundamentally just a short poem paired alongside a simple synthesized piano melody—not very far from something you would use to hush a baby. Each time I find myself replaying it, I’m freshly amazed by how accurately it manages to recreate the wooziness so inherent to bliss, heartache, or finality, how it definitely holds some spiritual dominion with the fish of the sea and birds of the air, and, with just 11 words, how it teaches the intricate idea that wisdom is just another word for knowing what to accept. It will also bring your pulse rate down to about 40.
The artist responsible is Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a man endowed with such rare fortune that he remained more or less a non-entity to the music-curious public until the age of 72 when a particularly influential record collector from Japan sent him a life-altering email asking for any remaining physical copies of his early music. Deep into a peaceful, years-long toil in the Canadian hinterlands with his wife, Copeland was suddenly faced with the task of living his way out of a placid, relatively private existence, and into one in which documentarians tour his home like a museum and take seriously his thoughts on the intersection between science and the divine.
Newfangled global interest for Copeland, as you might imagine, is unimaginable. Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of any life, the fate of late-bloomed fame holds unique surprises. Watching artists like these confront contemporary milestones of success, like good streaming metrics or outpourings of online support, seems to give them an expression permanently set to stupefied. The sizeable hill of praise that’s been furnished onto him across the last two years—mostly from a growing sect of left-field record collectors, a gaggle of celebrities, and those lucky enough to have been gifted URLs to his music by wise friends or lovers—carries a uniformly grateful, even devotional air of protectiveness. “Mostly, I’m eating my Wheaties and all my vitamins so I can perhaps live long enough to finish what it is I’m supposed to be doing here,” he admitted during a lecture two springtimes ago in Montréal.
Chalk Copeland’s recent boom up to the inscrutable forces of destiny that slowly pull upon a person over the course of their life. Chalk it up to the easy digestibility, maternal swaddle, and mental asylum so inherent to the sort of music that we now call new age. Chalk it in no small part up to Copeland’s own journey of self-discovery as a transgender man that now aligns neatly with the triumphant contemporary attitude toward publicly articulating one’s complicated identity. Regardless of what exactly set off the recent Copeland rumble, his is a coming-of-age story probably most due to his dreamy, boundless frontierism that sees no encroachment, no fear, and no distinction between anything resembling a beginning or an end. In some ways, it’s a story of inevitability. It may be because his life seems to be governed by, and has always been governed by, a sunset village from the outset.
Despite an especially twisty and sometimes glum biography, Copeland appears as serene and composed as a friendly monk. In lieu of robes, his daily uniform includes a button-down shirt, a pair of puffy, pleated chinos, and a scrub of chin fuzz the tint of a long-boiled egg. As seen and heard in the groundswell of videos and interviews with him across the last two years, as well as in harder-to-find footage from more than two decades ago, his voice leaves his mouth with a pleasant moisture—like he is somehow always on the end of a spoon of peanut butter—and is elastic, as prone to characters and impressions as a puppeteer’s. Age and circumstance have made his tone slightly darker, richer, and honeyed the cooler vibrato he had in his 20s, but the thermostat of his manner seems to have always been set to warm.
“Father was a brilliant European classical player,” gargles Copeland at the top of his 2019 biopic, also titled Keyboard Fantasies, throwing his head back on a chair and treating the word like mouthwash. Since “cradlehood” (his own charming term), Copeland seems to have been equipped with the twin gifts of promise and idiosyncrasy. His mother, Georgie Willis, who was a formidable pianist and an even more formidable academic, bears the honor of being the first Black woman to complete a graduate program at Penn State University. The pathetic pace of American integration in the 1940s, however, meant that though she could legally attend classes, she was denied the right to live on campus. Fate would install a generous Quaker woman in Mrs. Copeland’s path, who she would go on to live with—thereby allowing her to continue attending Penn State—but the very friendly neighbor would also go on to spiritually move Georgie with the pacific doctrines and credos of Quakerism. It’s why the Copelands joined a Quaker congregation in Philadelphia shortly thereafter, and why Glenn found himself reared in the safety of a community that gave him the clearance to exist in an alternate, sheltered dimension distinct from the more fraught realities that stained so much of Black childhood in late Jim Crow-era America.
Georgie held hope that, upon entering a large and foreign city away from the security of their Quaker eden, her child would be seen by the public as both normal and non-threatening. Copeland immediately torpedoed this idea upon entering McGill University in Montréal by becoming the ultimate disaster: He wore his hair afroed, entered into a same-sex relationship, and was introverted to a degree of hermitude. It also probably didn’t help that he was studying European classical music with a penchant for a particular German style called lieder, which sounds a little bit like opera sung by loud, sad angels. To be out, Black, bizarre, and 17 in 1961 was an open invitation to get one’s ass kicked not only literally, but legally: It would be eight more years until Canadian Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau would decriminalize consenting homosexual partnerships (34 years before every state in America would do the same).
“At one point,” Copeland says, with the comfortable, breezy tone of someone who has a high capacity for empathy and a near non-existent one for resentment, “my family ganged up on me and forced me into a car and took me to a physician who was going to have me interred in a hospital.” The plan was to give Copeland the then-fashionable electroconvulsive therapy in an attempt to zap the gay out of his head and heart. Others might have treated this episode like a hostage situation, a mortal betrayal, or both, but Copeland, in a flush of grace toward himself and his family, quietly rose from the bed, gathered his stuff, and jogged out the front door before anyone could notice.
Once Copeland returned to Montréal, he got serious about getting serious with music, and decided he had had enough of McGill. He dropped his classes and descended upon Toronto, settling luckily alongside a manager and league of total strangers who, he was delighted to figure out in studio sessions later on, made up a small league of Canadian jazz heavyweights. Alongside men like bassist Dough Bush, electric guitarist Don Thompson, drummer Terry Clark, and principal guitarist Lenny Breau, Copeland committed his first noodlings to permanence.
Though the two albums he made in the early ’70s were commercial catastrophes, his eponymous 1970 work is a piece that leaves me fundamentally confused by its exclusion from most modern canons. The folk is freaky. The riffs are seraphic. With all the leider residue in his arias and tremolos, these albums feel like songbooks of spirituals for the unspiritual. There have been obvious parallels made to Joni Mitchell in the music’s blueness and timbre—especially in how Copeland warbles like god has just asked him a difficult favor—but a more fitting comparison would be to Judee Sill, an artist who shares with him an alloy of Christian folklore, Bach-indebted chord progressions, and a sense of servitude to a quiet, inarticulable secret. “By and large, the early music was looking at death, love and the difficulty of love,” he once indifferently summed, though I would argue that a track like “Untitled (Make the Answer Yes),” is the sort of song that one could sensibly choose to be buried to.
Blindness toward negativity, unfounded optimism, and curious guilelessness are traits not often blent in the same adult in 2020, but at the center of this Venn diagram lives the broad idea of being “childlike.” Copeland is definitely childlike—strange, virtuous, glib, and peaceful—in myriad and impressive ways. The documentary devotes one longish scene to his ritual of enjoying a cup of apple juice before each performance, and it seems, per the frequency of its use in nearly every one of his interviews, that his favorite word is “magic.”
It only seems natural that Copeland would have had a career as a sort of jester with a synthesizer on a few children’s television shows while between albums. Young Canadians in 1973 might recognize him costumed in polyester alongside straw-haired, rosy-cheeked, anemic little puppets on Mr. Dressup, a show analogous to (and in fact hosted by the understudy of) the American Mister Rogers. But his work on Dressup meant that he was somewhat in the public eye—and at the time, he performed and lived as female “Beverly,” which made it doubly difficult to reconcile the unplaceable and unsolvable dissatisfaction he carried around. “How would you do that?” he asked of a journalist in 2005. “Walk in one day as Beverly Glenn-Copeland and come back two weeks later as a changed being? I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.”
It’s not that Copeland didn’t understand that his body was at odds with his brain at that point, but it wasn’t until 15 years after his initial work on Dressup that he found the language and the wherewithal necessary to give expression to an idea he knew was true since infancy. He was laying on the sand, reading a book, “and I just kind of sat up and went, ‘I am transgender.’ And I had never put those words to it.” In 2002, long departed from Dressup and armed with the fortitude to answer his private riddle, Copeland publicly transitioned to male.
The author Andrea Long Chu—a writer, who, in the past few years, has become exceedingly good at substantiating the quandaries of trans personhood for mainstream audiences—puts the amorphous feeling of dysphoria into lucidity by calling the lifelong sensation a “vague but maddening sense that something is off about the world.” In other words, gender incongruence is a slippery yearning, a “hunger without appetite,” a strange, evanescent idea of an achievable but permanently just-out-of-reach reality. It should make a lot of sense that the successful juncture between what seemed like fact, and what seemed like fantasy, would form the central thrust of Copeland’s masterwork, Keyboard Fantasies.
In 1983, he traveled to a small cabin in a sleepy village three hours north of Toronto. Ordained by his manager to go off and write something good, he bought and hauled along an Atari computer and two synthesizers—the Roland TR-707 and the Yamaha DX7—eagerly awaiting the prospect of holing up, shoveling snow, and playing with his new machines. Copeland views computers with appropriate humility (“I would walk around and go, ohhh, because I couldn’t do anything with them,” he once said) but feels tantalized, paralyzed by the alternate realities unlockable within them.
It’s difficult to overstate how aggressively synthesizers in the ’80s were marketed as portholes to the future—ad copy for incoming makes and models would spend paragraphs positioning them as “Products of the Space Age,” alongside taglines like “Science Fiction? No: Science Fact!” Deep inside the machines were near-to-life versions of the instruments Copeland had studied and honored for so long, but at a supernatural slant. “There were sounds that were acoustic, sounds that only a computer could make, and sounds that could come from a violin,” he explained, but only “if you used a lot of imagination, or squinted your ears.” To Copeland, his machines represented the impossible made perfectly possible. When he first laid eyes on an Atari, he says, “it was like, ‘Oh, so this is the beginning.’”
If we emerged from the primordial soup with keytars in hand, Keyboard Fantasies is what our tribal lullabies would sound like. After weeks of sleepless tinkering with his toys, the album was born as a sextet of chuggy, spare, somnambulant pieces built by some of the most basic preset tones from the DX7. The DX7 offers a unique, and, at the time, enthrallingly new alphabet of programmable sounds—so much so that the instrument would go on to feature in most conceivable pop in the ’80s, from the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack to work by Whitney Houston—but here, the galactic, plummy, and utterly standard “electric piano” setting was put to work across Fantasies’ six tracks, each of which sound like ancient, foundational plainsongs from a dimension not far off from our own.
Keyboard Fantasies seems to pureé wisps of cultural sounds into a new Pangea. “Ever New,” the opener, has vibratos as operatic as a lovesick Persian ode, lyrics as if from a self-help pamphlet found in a Bolinas co-op, and pentatonic scales with ascending intervals as spare as Japanese Shōmyō folk. “Winter Astral”—a totally voiceless Rothko of a song—reminds me of Buddhist breathwork in the intervals between Copeland’s lingering pressure on the keyboard. “Old Melody,” a piece that carries the joke of its sheer existence as false indigenous music in its title, is as lucid dream-inducing as alien cradlesong. Like a project under the long-celebrated and well-documented “Fourth World” music umbrella described by frequent Eno collaborator Jon Hassell, Fantasies is filled with “unknown and imaginary regions,” each one helmed by its peaceful and sole inhabitant, Glenn.
It’s curious that Copeland has been referred to as an “outsider” artist in recent reviews and breathless press releases. On the one hand, it does seem like a natural, knee-jerk description: the characterization of some art as “outsider” is a term usually ladled onto work that’s seen as unknowing of its own power, either through the artist’s lack of formal training, or a by the nature of its unpretentious existence outside of hoary art-historical canons. More often, however, it’s a title given to those who work in isolation, who have no profit motive, or, in many cases, are marginalized out the gate by their own identities (poor, Black, queer, et cetera). Though Copeland has said that Fantasies carries the “innocence that was part of [his] experience at the time,” there is nothing untrained or undisciplined about it. Classically educated and formally fluent, I suspect it is more a shorthand used because we lack the language to identify something that seems like it accidentally dropped onto Earth.
“Sunset Village,” the album’s denouement, is so extraterrestrial, it might single-handedly explain the confusion. The ballad is less a song as it is a viewpoint—a lot like the vertiginous sensation you might feel when looking out of an airplane window onto a quilt of land thousands of feet below. Strangely comforting, sidereal, and on the thin tightrope between alienating and familiar, it’s the strongest unconscious paean to Copeland’s fascination with science fiction. He’s spoken about finding particular calm in the works of David Brin and Isaac Asimov, but not exactly in the mass-market editions interested in slime apocalyptos or glowing squids from Saturn. Instead, Copeland prefers a notion of sci-fi that’s treated more as a defined, earthbound school of thought—one Asimov would clarify in a preface to Octavia Butler’s short story collection, Speech Sounds, the same year Copeland created Keyboard Fantasies. “Science fiction,” Asimov wrote, “is committed neither to marvels nor to disasters. It deals with possible situations.” For as strange and faraway they sound, “Sunset Village” and Keyboard Fantasies writ large present a quiet desire not exactly for escape from this world, but to imagined likelihoods on the most alien planet of all—this one.
The idea of elderhood is of enormous significance to Copeland. He mentions it frequently in the documentary, and it crops up reliably across interviews. On several occasions, he salutes “the elders” of the community in Huntsville, Ontario—where his snowy studio was housed—that "took care of [him]” in the hours of his most vigorous synthesizer mania. The second-most affecting scene of his documentary comes during what looks like a casual Q&A, when a young devotee takes a microphone and thanks Copeland for the honor to share the floor with—gesturing toward Glenn—“our trans elder.” “Ahhh,” intones Copeland, nodding softly, visibly experiencing some sort of apotheosis. “Mmmm.” He takes a beat that feels like a decade. “You think in ways that it’s taken years for me to come to,” he says. “It’s about knowing things I don’t know.”
At the far end of several generational gaps to his fanbase, Copeland is aware that there is much more he is unaware about, but there are at least a few things that come with surety. In the documentary’s most unforgettable sequence, Copeland sits peacefully in a metal chair and sobs. It’s moving for a number of reasons, but largely because it seems cruel to have Copeland cry on camera. “I’ve figured out what I’m supposed to do,” he says. “I’m supposed to support these young people.” It firms an idea he once directed to a room full of wide-eyed, hungover fans in an interview released earlier the same year. “Do not fail to give your hearts. Do not fail,” he intoned, nodding toward the crowd. “I’m going to be watching you all from another dimension.”
That exact image happens to live on the album art for Keyboard Fantasies. On it, there’s a photo of a stained glass window in wedges of lemon, blue, and plum, framing a silhouette that looks a lot like the back of Copeland’s head facing out onto a shore. It’s too perfect—if nothing else, sight and solace have always been Copeland’s anima. In a life steered by the trying-on of new and strange vantage points, the cover works like a skylight to the clarity of his vision: one unburdened by any system, any path, any idea beyond inhabiting himself most accurately.

Stare at that window long enough and you can start to imagine everything—the sea, the sky, the sand, even Copeland—in a state of total suspension, deepened by the light of a sun that seems like it takes forever to set. He has never really needed much to grant him fullness. We’re so obviously the ones that do.

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The singer-songwriter’s third album is her strongest yet, the sound of a wise, clear-eyed, melodious prodigy coming into her own voice.

Don’t Forget Me

Eight years ago when a viral video thrust Maggie Rogers into the spotlight, she quickly went from NYU music student to public figure, garnering the type of cult following where the lines between artist and therapist start to blur. Since then, she has made efforts to slow things down. “I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform,” she told The New Yorker, explaining her decision to enroll in Harvard Divinity School in 2022. “I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training.” If strangers were going to look to her for guidance, her thinking went, then the best she could do would be to rise to the occasion.
Her new album, Don’t Forget Me, released on the cusp of her earning her postgraduate degree, captures a self-assured songwriter and producer reflecting on her past experiences with clear eyes. Like Sheryl Crow and the Laurel Canyon scene before her, she’s not so much a prophet on the mount as she is a traveler sharing the lessons she’s learned in nearly 30 years of life. “Time moves slow/Until one day you wake up and you realize/That what you see is what you know,” she remarks on “All the Same,” deftly employing the second person. It’s comforting in the same way some of Joni Mitchell’s writing on Hejira is comforting: By acknowledging that she doesn’t have all the answers, Rogers ends up sounding wise beyond her years.
Rogers wrote and recorded Don’t Forget Me over a whirlwind five days with producer Ian Fitchuk, whose cosmic country style blends commercial Nashville songwriting with elements of disco, psychedelic rock, and Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac. Some of Don’t Forget Me is reminiscent of Fitchuk’s past work—lead single “So Sick of Dreaming” especially sounds like a cut off Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour—but Rogers carries her own smattering of influences that add nuance to his now-familiar sound. Several elements, like the expansive, effects-laden backdrop on “It Was Coming All Along” and looping drums on “If Now Was Then,” are an uncanny throwback to the Y2K pop-rock that Rogers likely grew up on: your Michelle Branches, your Natalie Imbruglias, your Sixpence None the Richers. Just like those artists’ anthemic singles, Don’t Forget Me keeps Rogers’ voice front and center, swelling to complement her on each chorus. It’s a welcome change from past albums, where the songwriting could sometimes feel like window dressing to Rogers’ more ornate compositions.
Reflective of its recording process, Don’t Forget Me sets a zippy, dare I say groovy, pace. Rogers often sounds like she’s outrunning the ghost of an old flame, whether she’s breathlessly describing a moment of lust on “Drunk” or trying to dance away her demons on “Never Going Home.” Still, there’s a playfulness in how she handles these stories of heartbreak. “The Kill” is a churning spin on the push-pull dynamic of a doomed pairing where Rogers employs the classic songwriter trick of flipping the pronouns in the second chorus. And over the delightfully wobbly bassline of “On & On & On,” she delivers a forceful hook that’s guaranteed to be heard at the beach this summer.
Rogers is an accomplished singer, though not a belter in the traditional sense; while other singers might inflect the climax of a song with raw power, Rogers strains with emotion. The piano ballad “I Still Do” benefits from that delicacy, as does the acoustic track “All the Same,” which sounds like her take on the intimate, red-blooded folk of Zach Bryan. On the title track, she imitates the soaring vocals of country singers like Martina McBride and Carrie Underwood. If that honeyed, inspirational mode might be most readily associated with first dances at weddings, Rogers employs it as an act of desperation, laying out the absolute floor of what she wants in a relationship: “Take my money, wreck my Sundays/Love me till your next somebody/Oh, but promise me that when it’s time to leave/Don’t forget me.”
Even as her voice breaks towards the end, there’s a warmth to her newfound confidence. It’s a far cry from “Alaska,” the undergraduate demo track that took the words out of Pharrell’s mouth, where she recalled her first exposure to the Berlin club scene as a banjo-playing folk singer. That song juxtaposed her wide-eyed narration with electronic blips and bloops, like a baby deer stumbling into its first rave. Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.