The driving force of Madonna’s debut remains its palpable physicality, born out of New York dance clubs, a new pop mandate to move your body in ways both public and private.

Madonna

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Sire Records founder Seymour Stein was lying in a hospital bed the first time he heard Madonna. It was 1982, and the man who’d signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders had one of his usual heart infections. Listening to his Walkman, Stein perked up when he heard a bass-heavy demo of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” He called the DJ who’d given him the tape, Mark Kamins of New York’s anti-Studio 54 utopia Danceteria, and asked to meet Madonna, a Danceteria regular and waitress. Hours later, the 24-year-old dancer-turned-musician from Bay City, Mich. was in that hospital room, hoping Stein was well enough to draw up a contract.
Stein did sign her, and the following year put out Madonna, a cool and cohesive debut that helped resituate electronic dance-pop at Top 40’s apex with hits like “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline.” But the suits at Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire a few years earlier, didn’t quite know what to do with the former punk who was writing and performing muscular R&B for the club. Their early inclination was to work her at black radio stations, favoring a cartoonish urban collage for the “Everybody” cover instead of Madonna’s already perfected thousand-yard stare. Listeners weren’t sure what to make of the singer cooing those pleading vocals on the rising dance hit, but it wouldn’t be long before Madonna did something about that too.
At Madonna’s convincing, the label let her shoot a chintzy performance video for “Everybody,” followed by a more polished video for her striking second single “Burning Up.” In it, she tugs at a thick chain looped around her neck and rolls around in the street while singing lines like, “I’m not the others, I’d do anything/I’m not the same, I have no shame,” her panting underscored by Hi-NRG beats and raunchy rock guitar solos. A man drives towards Madonna, but at the end, it’s her behind the wheel—the first great wink to her signature subversion of power through sex. Though her 1984 MTV Music Video Awards performance is now considered erotic lore on the level of Elvis’ censored hips, that writhing set to “Like a Virgin” would have had little context without the slow, sensual burn of Madonna throughout ’83 and ’84. It was a record that seemed quirky but innocuous enough based on the feel-good wiggle of its initial crossover hit, “Holiday,” but the driving force of Madonna remains its palpable physicality—a mandate to move your body, in ways both public and private.
Part of what gives Madonna such affecting rhythm is its use of electronic instruments that sounded like the future then and typify the ’80s sound now—instruments like the LinnDrum and the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. Disco had brought dance music to pop’s forefront, where producers like Giorgio Moroder traded its saccharine strings for robotic instrumentation, but by the early ’80s, the genre had cooled off. People still danced to synthesizers, but their positioning was crucial—both within culture and musical compositions. The Human League and Soft Cell scored two of 1982’s biggest and most synthetic smashes, but back then the gulf between punk-derived new wave and bygone disco seemed wider than it ever really was. Disco and disco-adjacent stars like Donna Summer and Michael Jackson still were programming their hits, but the overall focus was back on a full-band sound. There’s no shortage of organic instruments on Madonna’s debut—“Borderline” wouldn’t be the same without the piano’s melodic underscoring, standout album cut “Physical Attraction” without its funky little guitar line—but the slinky digital grooves often take center stage. Through this, Madonna is able to achieve an almost aggressive twinkling that still feels fresh: the effervescent fizz at the start of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut to the Feeling” seems cribbed straight from “Lucky Star.”
Madonna vaguely criticized her debut’s sonic palette while promoting its follow-up, 1984’s Like a Virgin, but its focus is part of what makes the album so memorable, so of a time and place. She would soon become known for ritual pop star metamorphosis, but with a clearly defined musical backdrop, Madonna was able to let shine her biggest asset: herself. The way Madonna’s early collaborators talk about her—even the ones who take issue with her, like Reggie Lucas, who wrote “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction” and produced the bulk of the album—often revolves around her decisiveness, her style, the undeniability of her star quality. Some of these songs, like the self-penned workout “Think of Me,” aren’t all that special, but Madonna telling a lover to appreciate before she vacates is so self-assured, the message carries over to the listener. And when the material’s even better, like on “Borderline,” the passionate performance takes it over the top.
Maybe the New York cool kids rolled their eyes at the Midwest transplant after she blew up, but she had effectively bottled their attitude and open-mindedness and sold it to the MTV generation (sleeve of bangles and crucifix earrings not included). Innocent as it may look now, compared to the banned bondage videos and butt-naked books that followed, Madonna was a sexy, forward-thinking record that took pop in a new direction. Its success showed that, with the right diva at the helm, music similar to disco could find a place in the white mainstream—a call to the dance floor answered by everyone from Kylie to Robyn to Gaga to Madonna herself. After venturing out into various genre experiments and film projects, when Madonna needs a hit, the longtime queen of the Dance Songs chart often returns to the club. This approach doesn’t always work, as her last three records have shown, but you can’t fault her for trying to get back to that place where heavenly bodies shine for a night.


On their debut collaboration, the acclaimed harpist and the Espers singer pull long songs and meditative moods taut by creating unexpected tangles.

Meg Baird / Mary Lattimore: Ghost Forests

Ghost Forests

Listen for the twangs. The little disruptions on Ghost Forests, the collaborative debut from Meg Baird of Espers and Heron Oblivion and the harpist Mary Lattimore, offer a key into its soul. On the surface, the album is gorgeous, soothing, delicate; you could soak in a bathtub while it plays. But beneath that placid surface, little explosions and rustlings abound. Electric guitar mutters cloud the arrangements, while Lattimore treats her harp strings like nerve endings, sometimes making you wince at their bright snap. The more time you spend with Ghost Forests, the more these unsettling touches come into focus. They give the album weight, so it doesn’t drift into the ether. This is ambient folk, shot through with ambient anxiety.
Lattimore has never let the harp’s reputation as a “celestial” instrument, the one played by the angels on your dentist’s wallpaper, get in her way. In her hands, the harp doesn’t float down from some numinous hereafter free from death, suffering, or finger calluses. Her percussive playing offers constant reminders that a harp player is wrestling with a collection of wood and strings the size of a compact car. Baird, meanwhile, strums her guitar hard. On “Damaged Sunset,” she hits the strings like someone driving nails into a porch deck. On “Between Two Worlds,” she adds bullfrog blurts of keyboard around a ringing drone. Such textures keep Ghost Forests mesmerizing, even taut, as these songs unfurl into eight minutes of single-chord pieces. Mind-wandering is inevitable, and often part of the point, in music this loose and expansive, but, during Ghost Forests, you somehow remain magnetized.
Ghost Forests is split between longer, mostly wordless explorations like “Between Two Worlds” and more songlike pieces like “In Cedars,” where Baird’s sighing vocals point the music toward dream-pop. On “Painter of Tygers,” little icicles of synth streak quietly in the background before the arrangement darkens into a cloud of distortion. It passes as quickly as it arrives, like watching a patch of rough weather move across the sky.
Years ago, Baird and Lattimore belonged to a loose and highly collaborative group of experimental and folk musicians around Philadelphia. But only after moving to California separately did they work together in a formal, dedicated sense. On Ghost Forests, you can feel their sensibilities probing each other’s, seeking counterintuitive ways to fit together. They are especially attuned to one other in the moments when the music verges on free improvisation, when the song structures dissolve so that the pair can range more widely and freely. The wordless stretches are so steely, so beguiling, that they almost overshadow the pieces with vocals. The sung moments are beautiful, particularly “In Cedars,” but it is a more conventional beauty, the beauty of Japanese water fountains sitting in corner spas.
The most obvious choices Lattimore and Baird make tend to fall the flattest: The six-track album ends with a long-flowing reworking of the traditional child ballad, “Fair Annie.” Like many such songs, the song has plenty of dark notes—a lord orders a woman who has borne him seven children to clean herself up and appear more like a “maiden” for his newly arriving wife. But Baird and Lattimore play it pretty straight. Their version is only nice, and all the little tensions the pair have been developing drain away during these eight minutes. The two are friends, and given the steady clip of their respective release schedules, it seems likely they will work together again. Maybe next time, they push past these edges, into the wilderness of twangs and blurts beckoning just beyond Ghost Forests.


Featuring members of the recently disbanded Ought, the post-punk trio makes its debut with skeletal songs of modern anxiety and isolation.

Deep in View

The name Cola partly stands for “Cost of Living Adjustment,” an ironically dry source of inspiration for a rock band. But in the context of former Ought frontman Tim Darcy’s latest project, the economic term speaks to an artistic outlook as well. Joined by fellow ex-Ought bassist Ben Stidworthy and drummer Evan Cartwright (U.S. Girls, The Weather Station), the trio’s debut album addresses modern anxieties wrought by technology in a world on the brink, bringing their imagistic worldview to the present. Cola’s sleek sound fits in with the melodic side of contemporary post-punk, with sharper hooks and more succinct songwriting than the members’ past work. What remains is Darcy's charismatic spoken-sung drawl, picking up right where his last band left off.
Before announcing their split in 2021, Ought refined their approach to contemplative, cathartic art-rock across three albums. On the quartet’s emotionally raw 2014 debut, Darcy’s voice strained like a young David Byrne searching for something to believe in. By 2015’s Sun Coming Down, their songs grew longer and their lyrics more repetitive, with the snarled delivery of Mark E. Smith. Darcy tried out a Roy Orbison quiver on his 2017 solo album, and on Ought’s final LP, he was accompanied by a 70-person choir. No such embellishments appear on Deep in View, as the three musicians strip their songs to skeletal essentials.
In that sense, Cola has a few things in common with the Smile, the Radiohead side project featuring Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Both bands formed in the shadow of their members’ better known projects and emerged with a familiar, streamlined sound. “So Excited” was the first song that Darcy, Stidworthy, and Cartwright wrote together in late 2019, its choruses ringing with the disaffected catchiness of the Strokes. After the pandemic hit, their in-person recordings were replaced by file trading over Google Drive, though it’s impossible to tell the difference. Sandwiching the meat of the song between off-kilter instrumental passages, “Fulton Park” touches on feelings of disconnection. As its choruses fall apart, Darcy sings about being “pulled over for imitating landscapes,” an imaginary world he escaped to during his loneliest moments in lockdown.
Darcy’s lyrics have always been concerned with human connection, but these songs were written from a more reclusive perspective than Ought’s grandiose epics. “Mint” describes his solitary experiences making tea, dusting his record shelves, and pacing the halls. It feels like both a cry for help and an admission of self-sabotage when he sings “I’d call someone/I don’t call anyone.” On “Water Table” Darcy sounds just as alone, becoming one with technology while he stops worrying about going extinct. Cartwright’s caveman drum beat, without the use of cymbals, leaves a lot of space for the lyrics, as do his martial snare rolls on “Gossamer,” propelling one of the album’s most evocative lines: “I feel abrasions like a seawall feels the rain.”
It’s interesting to hear the multiple demos of “Degree,” which Cola have released alongside the album version. The twinkly guitar riffs that made it to the final cut are undeniably pleasant, but I found myself wishing they would have kept some of the droning organs, echoing drum machines, and sputtering breakbeats that appeared in earlier renditions. The uniformity of the album’s first nine songs becomes clear by the time they reach closer “Landers,” switching out their minimalist rock arrangement for moody pianos and soft drum brushes. Cola haven’t reinvented the wheel, but these subtle experiments suggest they still have boundaries to push.


Pop singer Ari Leff advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive.

~how i’m feeling~

Bebe Rexha is “Sad.” Olivia O’Brien wants to be “Sad Together.” Chelsea Cutler is “Sad Tonight.” All of Snakehips and Tinashe’s friends are wasted; all of Tate McRae’s friends are fake; all the kids Jeremy Zucker knows are depressed. The 25-year-old pop singer Lauv—who’s written for Charli XCX and toured with Ed Sheeran—is already well-versed in this very bummed, very online state of a generation. His debut album, ~how i’m feeling~, is a wholly sincere look at angst in the age of social media. “We’re never alone, but always depressed, yeah,” he laments on the closer “Modern Loneliness.”
Pop’s pivot to melancholy attests to a certain progress: People on the internet—teenagers especially—are more willing than ever to open up about mental health. Yet the language that’s meted out to talk about it, to really talk about it, is still so limited that what looks like relief often serves to slot our emotions into familiar and digestible templates. (“im like ~~~anxiettyyyy, and then never see a therapist,” a friend joked recently.) The conspicuous text-message stylization of ~how i’m feeling~ makes the tension clear. In contemporary lexicon, bracketing your message in tildes is a form of hedging, of preemptively undercutting the seriousness of what you’re about to say; all-lowercase lettering is another method of shrinking things down. But Lauv wants to cut out the posturing. “We live in a world where a lot of people are afraid of really expressing themselves,” he’s said. “I want you to hear my music and feel, ‘I can be honest and vulnerable with the people around me.’”
One obstacle to expressing yourself is working up the courage to do so; another is figuring out, on your own terms, who that self really is. As a public figure, Lauv advocates powerfully for being forthright about your feelings, but his album’s whopping 21-song tracklist is underwhelming and repetitive. Lauv calls it “diverse, emotional, and lit,” but ~how i’m feeling~ is mostly temperate, EDM-lite affairs jumbled with piano ballads and Sheeran-style nice-guy folk, plus one blatant bid for a Latin-pop hit (the Sofía Reyes-assisted “El Tejano”). Much of the emotional substance is laid out in the titles: feelings are hard (“Feelings”), I’m lonely as fuck (“fuck, i’m lonely”), I’m so tired of love songs (“i’m so tired”). These are Tumblr posts adapted as studio hits.
When Lauv leaps into a pained falsetto on ballads like “Julia” and “Sad Forever,” you feel the pang of his isolation. But his few moments of existential elegance are undermined by tonally mismatched production. “I wonder what it feels like to be more than I am,” he quavers on “Drugs & the Internet,” before a jarring drop turns the song into a schoolyard stomp. Elsewhere, serious themes are almost completely obscured by mild, Spotify-friendly vibes. “fuck, i’m lonely” features on the soundtrack of the teen-suicide drama 13 Reasons Why, but with its staticky, air-fried finger snaps and tropical ambiance, the Anne-Marie duet is more fit for a flirty island romp.
More often than not, Lauv’s attempts to be all-inclusive dilute his message. When he says “we’re never alone, but always depressed,” “depressed” could encompass everything from one-time alienation at a party to life-threatening imbalances in brain chemistry. “I’m lonely just like you,” he repeats on the moody, stadium-ready “Lonely Eyes.” The girl to whom Lauv confesses this fact is so curiously blank that she has few features apart from her “lonely eyes” and her proclivity for expensive vacations. Other characters are even more laughably one-dimensional: “Billy” is a juvenile redemption story about a misfit who grew up in poverty, then “woke up in a Tesla at 23.” (Billy is also the name of Lauv’s dog.)
On social media, as in pop music, it’s become increasingly fashionable to display one’s authentic, imperfect self. But the rush to “get real” hasn’t really removed the filter on our expression, only altered its tint. Likewise, the six “Little Lauvs” on the album cover, each wearing a different color of the rainbow, supposedly represent divergent facets of the artist’s personality, a bit like the dueling emotions of Pixar’s Inside Out. As with so much of ~how i’m feeling~, the concept seems simultaneously over- and under-developed: There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike.


Perfectly timed to herald modern rock radio's sea-change shift from grunge's roar to emo's wail, this double platinum release enjoys a 10th anniversary reissue with the addition of six B-sides.

Foo Fighters: The Colour and the Shape [10th Anniversary Special Edition]

The Colour and the Shape was the Foo Fighters' second album, but it's the first to receive the commemorative 10th anniversary treatment. That's not to suggest the album is superior to Dave Grohl's 1995 Foos debut (it's not), but its double-platinum sales did mark the band's permanent transformation from humble hobby project into the grunge Wings: i.e., a band that could never claim the same cultural impact as its antecedent, but that can at least get played just as much on KROQ. And that was to be expected-- The Colour and the Shape's 1997 release was perfectly timed to herald modern rock radio's shift from grunge's roar to emo's wail.
More so than the Foo Fighters' debut-- a homemade, self-recorded collection of demos Grohl had accumulated while manning Nirvana's drum stool-- The Colour and the Shape presented a true picture of the kind of group Grohl wanted to be in, had he not been sidetracked by the job of drumming for the biggest American rock band of the early 1990s. But despite Grohl's dream-team assembly-- Pixies producer Gil Norton, Germs guitarist Pat Smear, Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel, and former Alanis Morrissette drummer Taylor Hawkins (who joined after the album's recording)-- that band would turn out to be much more formulaically mall-punk than the Foos' torn 'n' frayed debut suggested.
On that first album, Grohl displayed a remarkable deftness for balancing melody and menace-- even as the rocket-launcher riffs of "This Is a Call" and "I'll Stick Around" shot into the red, he never lost his cool. On The Colour and the Shape, the noise/pop relationship feels more forced, like Grohl's trying too hard to grind down his sweet tooth into a fang, dressing up virtually every song in a chrome-plated guitar gilding that boosts the volume and fidelity, but ultimately dulls the impact. Maybe he's overcompensating for being a softie at heart: the gentlest turns are either presented as brief teasers (the 84-second opener "Doll"), are appended with portentous, power-ballad choruses ("February Stars"), or are muted into a blur ("Walking After You", which reappeared in improved, revised form on The X-Files movie soundtrack). Or just contrast the first album's standout single "Big Me" with The Colour's "Up in Arms", two melodically similar songs in vastly different packaging: Where the former is content to coast as a simple, gentle jangle, the latter resorts to a soft/loud about-face that feels like nudge-wink schtick.
Listening to the album a decade later, it's clear the singles were singles for a reason: "Monkey Wrench" romps like a typical Grant Hart Hüsker Dü number but is given a massive kick by Grohl's climactic, hoarse-throated third verse, and "My Hero" strikes the uncharted middle ground between sensitive-guy vulnerability and Super Bowl pre-game show soundtrack. And then, of course, there's the song that's kept me from unloading this disc at the used-record store: "Everlong", one the most affecting, passionate rock songs of the 1990s-- Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" recast as Weezer's "Say It Ain't So". (And yet, not even this pensive ode to blossoming romance is immune from the Foos' jokester tendencies-- thanks to its horror-spoof video, every time I hear this song I picture Taylor Hawkins in a Goldilocks outfit.)
The six B-sides tacked onto this anniversary edition-- four of them covers-- would seemingly serve as little more than excuse for the Foos to goof off, but in effect they lend the '97 Foos more, well, color and shape. On the album proper, Grohl shrieks that he doesn't get "enough space," but the robo-punk redux of Vanity 6's "Drive Me Wild" and the dub-metal prowl through Gary Numan's "Down in the Park" give the Foos room to explore the outer edges of their pop-punk parameters. Even the song most susceptible to the vagaries of kitsch, Gerry Rafferty's smooth-rock standard "Baker Street", is played with a straight face, and proves an ideal complement to Grohl's voice (though it also proves you shouldn't send a guitar to do a sax's job). The final bonus cut is the caterwauling, feedback-screeched title track, which was left off the original tracklist yet provides the only real evidence on this whole album that one of the Foo Fighters used to be in The Germs.
Then again, this album was always about severing ties to the past, with Grohl's post-relationship purging ("I was always caged and now I'm freeeee!") doubling as a metaphor for his promotion from drummer to camera-ready frontman. At the time of The Colour and the Shape's release, many interpreted "My Hero" as a requiem for Kurt Cobain. But if there's a conversation going on between Grohl and his fallen friend here, it's in the arena-sized chorus of "Hey, Johnny Park", when he wonders, "Am I selling you out?" As the subsequent 10-year string of radio hits has shown, it's a question Grohl would never have to ask again.


The subversive indie hip-hop outfit Dälek return from a hiatus with a revamped lineup and a newfound confidence and profundity.

Asphalt for Eden

Given hip hop's longevity, global reach, and power as a paradigm-changing social force, it's still relatively rare when rap artists make a splash with a coherent, actionable left-wing message. Of course, Public Enemy and KRS-One gave audiences a new vocabulary for questioning the power structure, which the majority of hip-hop acts rail against in some form or another anyway. Today, we can point to several contemporary acts—The Coup, Immortal Technique, Killer Mike, etc.—whose rhetoric follows the same path, but none can claim to be as musically subversive as Dälek, an outfit that almost two decades ago fulfilled hip-hop's potential to exist in an alt/underground/experimental universe while staying true to its roots.
Dälek (a play on the word "dialect") parlayed atypical hip-hop inspirations—My Bloody Valentine, The Velvet Underground, etc.—into sumptuous billows of noise. Groundbreaking albums like 2002's From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, 2005's Absence, 2007's Abandoned Language, and 2009's Gutter Tactics combined the brutalistic drive of industrial music, the density and grain of heavy guitar music, the painterly textures of ambient music, and the thumping backbeat groove of classic hip-hop. And while it makes sense that the band landed on Mike Patton's Ipecac label and on stages with the likes of the Melvins, Tool, and Godflesh, it bears repeating what an ongoing accomplishment it has been for Dälek to break down barriers while keeping both feet planted firmly in hip-hop.
On Asphalt for Eden, Dälek returns with a revamped lineup after going on hiatus in 2010 upon the departure of co-founding producer Oktopus (Alap Momin). That the new incarnation—frontman/bandleader MC Dälek (Will Brooks), longtime Dälek guitarist-turned-producer Mike Manteca, and DJ rEk (Rudy Chicata), the group's original DJ back in '95-'96—manages to craft yet another hybrid of hip-hop with outside elements isn't especially surprising. It isn't even necessarily all that surprising that Dälek 2.0 goes a long way towards reinventing its sound while still retaining its essence. But no matter how used to this group's agility we've become, it doesn't make the step forward it takes on this new material any less impressive.
Not unlike Gutter Tactics, the backbeat on Asphalt for Eden is far less monolithic and bass-heavy, often sounding like a beat filtered through a haze of static, hip-hop as a remnant of a civilization long expired several light years away. This time, though, Manteca and Brooks (who also produces) dial back the blast-furnace intensity of that familiar Dälek wall of sound and opt instead for more delicate layers that verge on minimalist ambient electronica. But make no mistake: nothing is actually missing here. In fact, the stripped-down composition of the music arguably gives it more power than Dälek's previous work. Manteca and Brooks weave together layers of sounds that they atomize into overlapping clouds of fine mist. And because they leave so much space in their arrangements, the new material reveals Dälek's ear for harmony in ways we might have felt but hadn't necessarily heard before, because the older albums packed such a strong punch in the gut.
As usual, Brooks addresses the encroaching forces of human control—big business, globalization, totalitarianism, post-colonial American hegemony, war, etc. This time, though, rather than make didactic statements, he focuses on the internal angst of the individual coming to terms with and trying to navigate an increasingly dehumanizing landscape. And in another fresh twist on previous work, the sounds on Asphalt for Eden have an almost playful tone that dithers between ominous and optimistic. An Aldous Huxley spoken-word sample over a spectral ambient throb on "Masked Laughter (Nothing's Left)," for example, recalls Orbital's plea to collective human awakening on their 2012 album Wonky.
Filled as it is with so many gorgeous colors, Asphalt for Eden could have underscored actor Rutger Hauer's iconic "Tears in rain" monologue at the end of Blade Runner. In fact, the music becomes all the more moving when it directly contrasts Brooks' chilling shards of imagery. The dulcet electronic ripples of "Masked Laughter," for example, conclude with a repeating loop of the word "terrorism." If there were a manga based on dystopian sweatshop-induced urban poverty and that, in turn, were turned into an anime film, you couldn't do better than Asphalt for Eden for a soundtrack.
Brooks spent five years away from Dälek fronting the comparatively traditional rap group iconAclass (and doing remixes for the likes of Black Heart Procession, Zombi, Palms, Broken Flowers, etc) but he takes a huge leap on his return to Dälek, which sounds not only revived here but permanently altered not unlike a friend who comes home after years abroad—or even from a traumatic experience like, say, prison. In other words, the profundity here comes across in the most restrained gestures.
Though Brooks opts for a more oblique lyrical approach on these new songs, the modern horrors that populate Dälek's previous albums are never too far off, and the foreboding sense of the world going to hell in a handbasket hovers over your shoulder the entire time. The song "Guaranteed Struggle," for example, contains a sample of Brooks delivering a disconnected verse fragment about "fuck[ing] around and watch[ing] the whole world crumblin'"*—*basically, the story of our lives for anyone who can afford to spend leisure time on music or entertainment in 2016. But the more ambiguous emotional notes in the album's sonic makeup at times parallel the more subtle blossoming of consciousness also unfolding on the world stage. Dälek took hip-hop into new stylistic realms before. This time, although Brooks and company may not have specifically intended as much, on Asphalt for Eden, hip hop ascends into the noosphere.


With 2012’s colossal The Seer, Swans released a record that seemed designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. Michael Gira seems aware that anticipation for a new Swans album has never been greater, so he’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that is every bit The Seer’s equal.

To Be Kind

Swans were hardly the first 1980s underground-rock fixtures to resurface in the new millennium, and they’re not the only ones who've resisted the nostalgic trappings of reunion tours to make a respectable showing as a rebooted recording act. But they are the rare band of their vintage who seem less concerned with living up to or building upon a past legacy than establishing a completely different one. In retrospect, the 14 years that elapsed between 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind and 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were less a break-up-induced hiatus than a gestation period. The bigger, brawnier Swans that Michael Gira has assembled in its wake (complete with a strapping, bare-chested gong-smasher named Thor) are beholden neither to the primordial, industrialized sludge of the band’s infamous ’80s catalogue nor the post-goth serenity of their ’90s work. Instead, they’ve perfected a new means of transforming grostequerie into grandeur and vice versa.
With 2012’s astonishingly colossal The Seer, Swans pulled off the unlikeliest of coups: A record that, over its six sides and two-hour-plus running time, was seemingly designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet, amazingly, expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. (This summer, Swans are even playing the odd free festival date in outdoor public squares, which could conceivably earn them a few new fans in the grandparents-and-strollers demographic.) But while Swans have always been the last band to pander to audience expectations, Gira nonetheless seems aware that anticipation for a new Swans album has arguably never been greater. And so he’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that, in structure and scale, is every bit The Seer’s equal, yet possessed by a peculiar energy and spirit that proves all the more alluring in its dark majesty.
The relationship between the two albums can essentially be gauged by their respective album covers. Though there’s a similarity in composition, To Be Kind’s artwork trades *The Seer’*s dark shadows for a bright mustard tone, and the central feral-dog figure for cute baby faces (as rendered in a series of six by L.A. painter Bob Biggs), suggesting a more approachable ethos at play. But as any new parent can tell you, an infant is as volatile and destructive a creature as the wildest of field animals and, likewise, the John Congleton-produced To Be Kind boasts a more focused attack—with a preminum on taut, throbbing grooves and blackened blues—that initially tricks you into thinking it's more accessible than its predecessor. (Hey, there's even a song named in honour of Kirsten Dunst.) Yet it’s ultimately accessible in the same way a prison gate is accessible—getting in is relatively easy; getting out unscathed is an entirely different story. Upon hearing the introductory Cajun-funk strut of “A Little God in My Hands”, I initially worried that Swans were crossing over into the sort of campy, Southern-fried creepiness you’d hear on the soundtrack to an episode of "True Blood". But after that destabilizing blast of brass and synapse-frying synth beam appears out of nowhere at the 90 second mark, “A Little God in My Hands” carries on as if infected by a virus; it tries to keep its cool, but the once-sprightly rhythmic bounce is now ridden with a nervous tension, while the encroaching chorus of dead-eyed female voices transform the song into a mutant-zombie version of its former self. On To Be Kind, this is what constitutes a lead single.
Close observers of Swans will notice that seven of the 10 songs here were previewed in some form on last year’s limited-edition concert album/demos collection Not Here/Not Now (whose sales funded the new album’s production). But most have since been subjected to dramatic embellishment or rearrangement. Not Here/Not Now’s tense, acoustic-strummed closing sketch “Screen Shot” has been recast as To Be Kind’s louche, slow-boiling “Yoo Doo Right”-styled opener and, in the process, illuminates the great contradiction at the core of the 21st-century Swans sound: as their sonic vocabulary has grown more elaborate and texturally detailed, Gira’s sense of melody has turned all the more minimalist and mantric. Thirty years ago on the deadpan dirge, “Job”, Gira sang from the perspective of the world’s most bored axe murderer (“Cut off the arms/ Cut off the legs/ Cut off the head/ Get rid of the body”) as a metaphor for soul-destroying, day-to-day workplace drudgery; on “Screen Shot,” he more eagerly sings of a different sort of dismemberment  (“No touch/ No loss/ No hands/ No sin”), of purging urges—and the body parts used to indulge them—as way to achieve a state of spiritual purity.
The ensuing songs on To Be Kind present variations on this theme—of unleashing an outsized sound to find an inner peace, and reclaiming one's innocence by way of insolence. But, of course, this being a Swans record, salvation never comes easy. When, amid the “Dirt”-covered funereal march of “I’m Just a Little Boy” Gira pleads, “I need loooooooooooove,” he’s answered by a Greek chorus of devious, derisive laughter. (Of all the terrible, humiliating experiences detailed in Swans songs over the years, that moment just might count as the cruelest.) And if the 34-minute centerpiece “Bring the Sun”/“Toussaint L’Ouverture” initially summons our planet’s primary life-source with all the trance-inducing elation and desperation of a remote-island pagan sect praying to their gods for a bountiful harvest, its more sinister second act—wherein Gira maniacally howls the name of the titular 18th-century Haitian revolutionary while drowning in a swamp of dub spewage—transforms the track into an after-hours seance gone wrong.
As it plays out, To Be Kind starts to resemble a cult procession unto itself, a mesmerizing spectacle of an omnipotent band whose sound continues to expand in scope and ranks swell in size. Much like The Seer, To Be Kind sees a formidable and evermore prominent coterie of female vocalists—from the insurgent Cold Specks to reigning freak-scene queen St. Vincent to avant-rock veteran Little Annie—falling under Swans’ sway. And rather than provide a calming counterpoint to Gira’s stentorian croon, their voices ultimately serve the album’s hypnotic force. From the teeth-gnashing ferocity of “Oxygen” to the calamitous, battering-rammed climax of “She Loves Us!”, To Be Kind adheres to a policy of transcendence by any means necessary, even if it means repeatedly bashing you in the face with a mallet until you’re seeing stars and colors.
On the hymn-like title-track closer, Gira solemnly repeats the words “to be kind” as both an aspirational self-help slogan and a tacit acknowledgement that, given all the diabolically orchestrated malevolence we’ve been subjected to over the preceding 112 minutes, he hasn’t always done the best job of heeding his own advice. But as the song violently erupts into one final, sustained surge of tectonic-plate-shifting discord, the moment proves to be as affirming as it is unsettling. “People always consider us to be very dour and depressing, but fuck that shit,” Gira told Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy in 2012. “The goal is ecstasy.” And what makes To Be Kind so compelling is how that goal seems both fully realized yet forever out of reach at the same time.


A player in Shabaka Hutchings’ Sons of Kemet and a key figure in London’s vital jazz scene, Cross brings new energy to the tuba, an instrument long neglected in jazz and hits offshoots.

Fyah

At a certain point in a Sons of Kemet live show, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings and his dueling drummers will drop out, leaving room for tuba player Theon Cross to step up and solo. It’s always a heady moment: Cross’ solo can veer from Dixieland to the room-rattling frequencies of modern bass music in the span of a single breath. Cross also makes plenty of detours through free jazz, dub, hip-hop, soca, grime, and other sounds from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Such versatility has made him a catalyst on the bustling London jazz scene for years now, and his low-end skills power some of its biggest breakout acts: Hutchings, drummer Moses Boyd, saxophonist Nubya Garcia, the Ezra Collective.
With Fyah, Cross steps out on his own as a leader, with Boyd and Garcia on board as a trio for most of the set. The album also features guest turns from Cross’ brother Nathaniel on trombone, Wayne Francis on tenor saxophone, and Artie Zaitz on electric guitar. Whether the band tackles boisterous uptempo beats or more languid meditations, Cross and his horn rumble through Fyah’s eight pieces like an underground train, connecting and deepening the sense of interplay between participants.
The trio crackles to life on “Activate,” where Cross’ prowess is by turns rhythmic and melodic, stomping and ratcheting up the rollicking song’s tension. His tuba grapples with Boyd and his tricky measures while also shadowing Garcia’s crystalline, high-flying lines, the three pushing and urging one another along throughout the Carnival-flavored stepper.
Cross can thrill even on songs with less frenetic tempos. “Letting Go” marries silky rare groove to foghorn frequencies, while for the bubbling movement of “The Offerings,” the trio slinks amid background party chatter, inconspicuous even as they’re cooking. “CIYA,” a soul-jazz tune with bedroom eyes, is the smoothest of the set, Zaitz’s liquid guitar lines harking back to steamy ballads like Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love.”
“Panda Village” is a dancefloor filler along the lines of Boyd’s Four Tet and Floating Points-mixed single “Rye Lane Shuffle.” Blending the rough with the sleek, the tricky groove is mixed with synthesized woodwinds and vinyl backspins reminiscent of pirate radio. “Radiation” boasts a spittle-flecked tone that turns the ground to gelatin as Cross’ tuba drops a full fathom deeper than any dubstep wobble. The full ensemble number “Candace of Meroe” moves like a throwback to 1970s Afro-funk, full of Zaitz’s chicken-scratch guitar and Cross’ quicksilver thrum.
While the tuba was a staple of early-20th-century New Orleans jazz ensembles, it wound up neglected along with other Dixieland instrumentation like the banjo and cornet, losing its place in the music over the following decades. “People always underestimate the tuba,” Cross said recently. “People aren’t familiar with it.” But the unfamiliarity that comes from neglect also permits a greater freedom now. That element of surprise comes through on Fyah: Roving at will across other genres, Cross is able to wholly remake the horn in his own image.


Katie Crutchfield’s fourth album features sharp, gorgeous songwriting. The polished production and urgent performances ensure her fiery exorcisms about the end of a relationship are deeply felt.

Out in the Storm

Through her work as Waxahatchee, Katie Crutchfield has become a master of blending introversion and extroversion, communicating emotional subtleties with music that sounds best shouted in unison by adoring crowds. Out in the Storm, her fourth album, feels like the culmination of that inverse relationship. Detailing the trajectory of an increasingly destructive long-term relationship, Crutchfield writes with first-person directness and an occasionally jarring self-reflexivity. “Everyone will hear me complain,” she sings near the beginning of the album, half-worry and half-demand. “Everyone will pity my pain.” Co-produced by John Agnello, Out in the Storm is also the most polished Waxahatchee record to date, coupling some of Crutchfield’s sharpest writing with her most powerful and distinctive work as a bandleader.
The last Waxahatchee album, 2015’s sweeping Ivy Tripp, was a meditation on in-between states. More than one song began with an elongation of the word “maybe,” as if to suggest that any of these thoughts could be retracted. Out in the Storm feels like a reckoning with those out-of-body experiences. In “8 Ball,” a twangy rocker that’s among the finest Crutchfield has ever written, she winds through a series of metaphors to assess the roles in a relationship. In its opening verse, she drawls out a sentence—“You let me take my own damn car to Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.”—with the kind of drawn-out hyper-specificity you employ for maximum impact in a fight. These are the stakes of Out in the Storm, an album whose peaks feel like climatic exchanges between people with a natural ability to hurt one another.
Out in the Storm is propelled by singular obsessions, a challenge that forces Crutchfield to find new ways of approaching the same situation. Often, she’s actively trying to escape herself. She recalls falling in love “through childish eyes” in the slow, haunting “Fade,” studying her own deterioration as she withers away in a dead-end relationship. In the shimmering “Sparks Fly,” she flees to Berlin and sees herself through her sister’s eyes: full of hope and charisma, “a live wire, electrified.” Halfway through the record, this seems like a happy ending, but its brief moment of escape—staying up all night, drinking, dreading your return home—reminds you that sparks flying can often lead to greater destruction.
Crutchfield’s road-tested band, who’ve settled into a lean, aerodynamic sound, complement the emotional extremes in her writing. In “Sparks Fly,” a pattering drumbeat recalls the negative space in Neil Young’s “Peace of Mind,” giving the song a weightless momentum. Elsewhere, the hazy atmosphere of Ivy Tripp is transported to the more earthbound material, with stately keyboards from her twin sister Allison Crutchfield in “Recite Remorse” and Katie Harkin’s smokey guitar riffs throughout “A Little More.” The band is equally adept at mirroring Crutchfield’s urgency, as in “Never Been Wrong,” a charging anthem with lyrics pinpointed on one character trait. “The margin’s gigantic, am I happy or manic,” Crutchfield asks desperately, before raging against the loneliness of knowing a person better than anyone else: “I will unravel when no one sees what I see.”
Crutchfield has a knack for addressing the way minor frustrations can snowball into deeper troubles over the course of a relationship, seamlessly zooming in and out to assess the damage. She explores how it can fuck up your sense of self, your sense of trust, even your sense of time. “You went back in time today, expecting me to do the same,” she sings in the vicious “No Question,” which culminates with a stark realization that she repeats like a mantra: “It never ends.” “Silver” glides with a breezy modern rock sheen, but its lyrics are haunted by visions of destruction. In hushed, layered harmonies, Crutchfield sings about transformation with a poetic dream logic, expressed through imagistic verse that takes inspiration from Robert Pollard’s songwriting in Guided by Voices.
Robert Pollard feels like a fitting analog to Crutchfield at this point in her career. Both artists seem to have a limitless well of side projects (and band names); both write at an unrelenting pace; and both successfully ditched their “lo-fi” signifiers through records that cleaned up their sound without sacrificing their characteristic sprawl. While lacking the close mic’d intimacy of her early work, Out in the Storm is equally immersive, with songs that play like fiery exorcisms. It proves that Crutchfield’s music can retain its honesty while aiming at larger audiences, gaining its power from the raw, relentless energy that’s always fueled her best songs. Without seeking easy answers, she’s able to find peace in the explosion.


Sampling a worn vinyl copy of Debussy’s La Mer, the Chicago musician creates short, impressionistic pieces that fuse ambient, drone, and noise; they’re easy to get lost in.

After Dark

Though John Daniel’s music rarely sounds unfinished, you could call it a work in progress. Over the past eight years, the Ohio-born, Chicago-based artist has appeared on over 50 releases under the name Forest Management, creating ambient sounds and droning textures that constantly move forward. Daniel’s advancements sometimes take the form of big, dramatic arcs, but more often they come in small steps, carefully thought out and patiently executed.
There’s almost nothing but small steps on After Dark, a double album of short, focused pieces whose shifts are so subtle they can be hard to catch at first. No two tracks are very different from each other in the way they develop or even in the way they sound. Daniel avoids obvious, sweeping moves, instead offering simple loops whose evolutions require close attention. The cumulative effect can feel subconscious: you know you’ve gone somewhere by the end of a given track without being sure exactly how you got there.
The simplicity of After Dark is due in part to Daniel’s self-imposed limits. Every sound came from one source: a used vinyl copy of French composer Claude Debussy’s 1905 orchestral work La Mer (French for “The Sea”). Daniel recorded both sides on his computer—which caught both the music and the pops and hisses from the aging wax—then applied edits and effects to gradually carve out songs. Latching onto short figures that he could loop, Daniel crafted impressionistic pieces more about mood than structure. He explains, “I was drawn to how Debussy chose feeling over thinking in music—an almost avant-garde thought at the time.”
Daniel was also drawn to Debussy’s fascination with the sea. After Dark has a watery ebb and flow: Some tracks feel caught up in the waves of previous songs, while others undercut them and start new ripples in the process. Initial forays like the sandy opener “Seventh Time’s a Charm” and the oscillating “A Smell So Sweet” feature tactile sounds in sharp focus, but that clarity melts in the murkier pools of the howling, cavernous “Magnolia” and the dark drift of “Fake Rose and 24 Karat.” Later, “The Grand Lobby” evokes a church organ on the ocean’s floor, but it seems to return to a sunny surface in the busy, rhythmic “Walk Along Broadway.” As he navigates these movements, Daniel embeds each track with textures that are easy to get lost in.
In fact, tracing the patterns that run through After Dark sells Daniel’s work a bit short. Whatever shapes you might hear in the album’s sequencing, each track remains a self-contained statement, filled with complex layers and purposeful motion. On that scale, this is the most accomplished Forest Management album so far. Daniel has found a spot between ambient, drone, and noise to call his own, fusing the qualities of all three without diluting any of them. It still sounds like he’s on the move, probing for ideas, and on After Dark, his patient advancements add up to a big step forward.


In the last year, indie rock lifer Fred Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but *Changer *isn’t about that. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch.

Changer

Fred Thomas will never create his masterpiece, and it’s better that way. An indie-rock lifer with too many aliases to count, he has been creating imperfect, emotional music so consistently that any record that felt like a capstone on a particular phase of his career would ruin his whole appeal. This is messy music that bleeds from releases to release. Epiphanies shift and deepen with each record, aging in time with Thomas.
Changer, his latest release under his own name, is the result of a series of upheavals. In the last year, Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but Changer isn’t really about that—not explicitly anyway. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch. In the world that Thomas writes about, personal reckonings gradually morph into—it’s trite, but let’s just get it out there—genuine joy at the places that life can take us. If there’s any unifying theme, it’s rhetorical questions like, Am I becoming who I’m supposed to be? Am I doing it at the appropriate pace? And also: what’s the appropriate pace?
There’s no real answer here, and Thomas knows that. Instead, he finds comfort in his uncertainty. On “Misremembered” he half-sings in a blunt voice that sounds frustrated and warm at the same time, “When the controlled burn that you call your 20s is finally extinguished, you know you still need someplace to go.” It feels like a mission statement.
Albums about growing up and growing older tend to appeal to people in the same demographic as the songwriter. At their best, they can become iconic markers of age—records that tell us who we are by foregoing specificity in favor of surface emotion. A good pop song can tap into the half-lidded boredom of youth or the optimism of being 20 and ready for the future. Thomas, who writes songs as short stories, imperfect and without resolution, will likely never write music like this.
Instead, he rejects the comfort of being 30-plus by writing his way through specific memories of sloppy house shows and shitty scene encounters. On “Open Letter to Forever” he sings, “Like, I remember standing out in front of the Northern, after another 15-paid gig, getting harassed by Olympia street punks (the worst!) for looking like a hipster. I wanted to be like, ‘Man I’m probably a couple years younger than your father. And I’ve traded any chance at stability for this community of people who, like, know what Black Flag is or whatever.’” His lyrics are so strong that the actual music can sometimes feel like an afterthought. When is this guy going to write a book?
There are points, though, where the instrumentation does more than just bolster Thomas’ vivid writing. “Oval Beach” is a warm electronic instrumental that sounds like Boards of Canada making dream pop, and “Echolocation” layers crashing cymbals on top of a burbling loop that gives way to a wistful cascade of horns. Here, Thomas flexes a different writing muscle and emerges as a bandleader more than a master of autobiography.
But Thomas knows what he’s good at. Closing track “Mallwalkers” is a career-best track that grapples with the value of nostalgia while attacking cynicism head on. In it, Thomas is working at a cell phone kiosk at the mall, feeling disconnected from his friends, watching them “dance around, feeling weird about fucking each other” wondering “Do I even need to be here? And why does this hurt?” Soon, he’s identifying with the seniors that walk through the mall for exercise, while “dreaming of a simple suspended eternity, where you’re stoned in your basement, playing games, hanging out with your dogs.”
At the end of “Mallwalkers” he sings, “All the lonely lights on these frozen cars, every broken-wrist handstand in some best friend’s yard, and every ugly part of everything that people keep telling you you are...They aren’t yours. They’re just wrong.” Imagine hearing that exactly when you needed to. Thomas’ music is one long effort to reach across the void and connect. He’ll never reach everyone, but with every album he gets a little closer.


Sleigh Bells' brash, hyperactive sophomore album is plenty loud. This time around, though, the duo emphasize the delicate elements of their sound in service of dynamic and ecstatic pop tunes.

Reign of Terror

Sleigh Bells arrived fully formed with blunt rock riffs, crunk beats, and airy, feminine vocals. Their debut, Treats, may be the first record to fetishize the negative consequences of the Loudness War, with guitarist and producer Derek E. Miller pushing an already bombastic sound to absurd extremes by deliberately narrowing the music's dynamic range to the point of clipping even at moderate volumes. Treats owes its greatness to its simple, direct hooks, but the band's overly hot recordings were also thrilling in that they tapped into our positive associations with cranking stereos up to the maximum volume because we loved what we were hearing.
Sleigh Bells' second album, Reign of Terror, is plenty loud, but it doesn't rely on this volume trick. Instead, the duo emphasizes the delicate elements of their sound that mostly got crowded out in the midrange of Treats' speaker-melting din. Alexis Krauss, the former teen-pop singer turned punk-rock badass, is foregrounded throughout the record, and her roots in Clinton-era bubblegum are more fully integrated with Miller's heavy riffing. The beats are less indebted to hip-hop this time around and the guitar parts have gone full-on metal, alternating between elemental AC/DC-like hooks and late-80s harmonics.
Reign of Terror is a brash, hyperactive set of songs, but Miller and Krauss' synthesis of disparate strands is exceptionally graceful, with traditionally macho and girly sounds flowing together seamlessly in dynamic, often ecstatic pop tunes. They refine their take on girl-group pop and cheerleader chants on "Leader of the Pack" and "Crush", and set shoegazer swooning to machine-gun drum fills on "Born to Lose". More impressively, Krauss' melodies somersault over Miller's waves of alt-rock buzz guitar and colorful keyboards on "Comeback Kid", and they fully commit to the gentle, sentimental melodies of "End of the Line" without compromising their noisy aesthetic. "You Lost Me", one of three consecutive songs that lean hard on metal harmonics at the end of the set, is straight-up gorgeous, with layers of clean notes, slow-motion drones, and breathy coos building to a headbanging catharsis.
Sleigh Bells pull off this more sophisticated and nuanced approach without calling attention to their improved craft or maturity. They remain obsessed with overwhelming their audience with excitement and pleasure, and their heaviest moments on Reign of Terror eclipse those on Treats. "Demons", the record's fist-pumping centerpiece, is an adrenaline rush sustained over three minutes, with Krauss affecting her most sinister tone above an overpowering riff straight out of the (original) "Beavis and Butt-Head" series. Miller has mastered the big dumb riff, but his arrangements are full of subtle touches that embellish and reinforce the bludgeoning attack of his chords. All through Reign of Terror, he and Krauss hit upon an ideal balance of texture and simplicity, expanding on their basic formula without losing any of their direct, unfussy charm.
The band makes such incredibly physical music that the lyrics would seem to be beside the point, but it's notable that so many songs on both records are fixated on winning and losing. This isn't a surprise, really-- given the triumphant sound of this music, what else would you want to sing over it? Krauss often sings from the perspective of a supportive confidant, offering a sweet pep talk on "Comeback Kid", or empathizing with a friend's suicidal thoughts on "Born to Lose". She spends a good chunk of Reign of Terror dwelling on the aftermath of violence and tragedy, seeking out ways of coping, moving on, and thriving despite the chaos. Themes of suicide pop up throughout the album, climaxing with "You Lost Me", which seems to be at least partly inspired by a pair of Nevada teens who attempted suicide while listening to Judas Priest in 1985. (One survived and their parents famously sued the band.) Krauss avoids moralizing on the subject, opting instead to project understanding and concern. In a small way, her approach is refreshing and subversive-- this sort of aggressive, over-the-top rock is traditionally a vehicle for narcissism, but she invests this music with kind-hearted concern for others.


Various Artists: Wake Up You!: The Rise & Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972-1977

When the African vinyl-digging trend peaked five or six years ago, there was a rush, mostly among American and European collectors, to press and publish retrospective compilations. From the mid/late-‘00s onward, there was a feverish proliferation of digitized vinyl on mp3-sharing blogs, many of which featured music from West Africa. One of those blogs was the popular Comb and Razor, run by Uchenna Ikonne, who’s since become the main man behind a number of Nigeria-focused projects for labels like Soundway, Luaka Bop, and Now-Again. Since the early 2010s, what some have called the “Scramble for African Vinyl” has slowed down a bit, if in part because various collectors have rendered certain vinyl-rich areas comparatively “dry.” So it says something about Now-Again that they took the better part of a decade to properly license, credit, and release what is now Wake Up You!: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1977.
Where other Nigerian vinyl compilations have focused on various permutations of rock, funk, soul, and disco, Wake Up You! specifically covers the short-lived but influential period of Nigerian rock in the country’s post-Civil War era (after 1970). On 34 tracks across two volumes and two accompanying books, the compilation documents some of the musical, socioeconomic, and political trends that shaped Nigerian Afrorock.
The majority of both Vol. 1 and *Vol. 2 *feature music from the height of Nigerian rock in the early ‘70s, before the scene started to decline. The decade saw Nigeria experiencing a petroleum-fueled post-war economic boom, which ushered in a renewed sense of optimism that proved a huge boon to the growth of the country’s music industry. And yet, as the government sought to rebuild the nation, leftover wartime trauma and unresolved tensions got swept under the rug. So it's very possible that the sense of discomfort and melancholy that had never really gotten addressed then ended up bubbling over into rock, particularly in the East, which had borne the brunt of the war as the former secessionist Republic of Biafra. The compilation reflects that reality, featuring mostly Eastern rock bands.
Despite regional differences, there was a collective desire, especially among youth, to have some kind of contemporary music they could claim as their own that was “distinctly African." This was one of the reasons why James Brown’s soul music, with its pro-Black messaging and funky rhythms that meshed well with pre-existing West African musical traditions, had exploded in popularity during the region’s independence era. His influence continued into the next decade and beyond, as evidenced throughout Wake Up You! For instance, on *Vol. 1, *The Hygrades’ 1971 B-side “Keep on Moving" directly references "Cold Sweat" and has the cathartic screams to match. This desire for a homegrown music was also what helped make Fela’s self-branded Afrobeat so popular, which would soon eclipse Afrorock, even though the two weren’t initially that different. The stylistic similarities between the two are clear in their shared highlife percussion rhythms and off-kilter organ work. This can be heard across Vol. 1—on The Hygrades’ “In the Jungle (Instrumental),” The Funkees’ “Baby I Need You,” OFO the Black Company’s “Beautiful Daddy,” and many more.
On Vol. 1 opener “Never Never Let Me Down” (1973), the little-known Formulars Dance Band deliver a touching number filled with nostalgic doo-wop harmonies and lyrics steeped in heartache: “Just one thing you do not know, girl,” the lead singer croons. “And that is I need you/And one more thing you do not know, girl/And that is I love you.” By contrast, War-Head Constriction’s record "Graceful Bird" (1973) ramps up into a heavy metal track with long, snarling guitar solos and piles of distortion. According to Ikonne’s liner notes, War-Head Constriction also often played with a later iteration of the band Waves, whose psychedelic “Wake Up You” (featured on Vol. 2) b/w “Mother” (on Vol. 1) is the comp’s namesake. Vol. 1’s closing track, P.R.O.’s 1976 “Tell Me,” in turn references dub by way of delay effects, hinting at the fact that towards the end of the decade, a several schoolboy and college rock bands—including teen sensations Ofege—started shifting their heavy rock sound towards "dub and militant rockers-style reggae." But even then, with the exception of Afrobeat and with the advent of disco, the public wanted something smoother and glossier, and Nigerian rock slipped more or less into darkness (related: Funkees’ cover of War’s “Slipping into Darkness” on Vol. 2).
In that way, Vol. 1 comes to a logical close. The album itself is very loosely chronological, though it doesn’t follow the arc of the accompanying book, which is an important part of the compilation. V**ol. 1 sags a bit towards the middle of its 18 tracks, but it picks up again later on—perhaps not unlike the trajectory of Nigerian rock over the decades. Many of the narrative threads present on Vol. 1  are also those that run through Vol. 2, and certain bigger bands, such as The Hykkers, The Hygrades, and The Funkees, appear on both volumes. However, where Vol. 1 is generally more exuberant and brighter, Vol. 2 is more melancholy, reflecting some of the darker realities of the time.
Much of Vol. 2 expresses a desire for freedom and a resistance to the social and political dis-ease of post-war Nigeria. On “Life in Cannan,” Ceejebs lament the state of what could have been their promised land. Over nimble jazz keys and thick bass, lead vocalist Eyo “Crosbee” Hogan gathers his listeners around him, intoning, “Come around, people of this world/let’s get together and pray/Evil things are happening every day/Many rich are getting poor/The poor ones are dying away.” Echoing that sense of despair is The Identicals’ nearly-apocalyptic “Who Made the World,” on which they demand answers to questions they know they’ll never get, howling, “Who made the world? Who made the land? Who made the moon?” Even the love songs here ride on a sort of desperation bordering on futility: on opening number “Come Back,” band leader Theodore Nemy’s voice cracks time and time again as he begs for his “baby” to “come back.” An organ drones beneath him, sympathetic (figuratively and musically) to Nemy’s grievances.
Perhaps most clearly exemplifying the intersection of Afrorock and the politics of the time on *Vol. 2 *is the band Action 13, who appear on *Vol. 1 *as their later iteration, Aktion. On Vol. 2, their song “Set Me Free” could easily be interpreted as a protest against the band’s prison-like relationship to their then-patrons, the Nigerian military’s 13th Brigade. Many brigades of the time used bands to entertain their soldiers, boost morale, and reassure citizens, via music, that all was well. Initially, their patronage was helpful in providing a number of Eastern musicians with a living. But Action 13, like many other bands with brigade numbers affixed to their names, eventually grew frustrated, and many tried to break free to make a name for themselves independent of the military. These outside pressures, as well as labels’ jostling to sign artists with varying degrees of success, often augmented bands’ internal instabilities as well. There was a ton of back-and-forth between bands. For instance, on Vol. 2, we see Tony Grey, (former?) keyboardist of the Magnificent Zenians (Vol. 1) leading his own band, The Black 7; certain members of Afrorock pioneer Joni Haastrup’s Monomono appear here backing one Shadow Abraham; juju icon King Sunny Ade makes a surprise appearance producing The Believers’ “Life Will Move.” Trying to make sense of the bands’ relationships to each other, to regional trends, to labels, and to military involvement is like trying to make sense of a messy maze of crossed paths, dead-ends, and false starts.
But in that sense, Wake Up You!**: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1977 does a thorough job of conveying the angst and mutability of Nigeria’s protean post-war period. This was music that helped people, young people especially, to sort through their own identities in the wake of war, even if it was to define what they weren't. On Vol. 1, in the chorus of their track “Scram Out,” from their 1977 album Be Nice To The People, young schoolboy rockers Question Mark sing, "I want to feel free, I want to feel happy!" Which at the end of the day, through all its ups and downs, was what the movement was about.


The AACM composer pays tribute to the cultural history of a monumental work of public infrastructure in a set of elegiac pieces for trumpet and piano.

Wadada Leo Smith / Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens

Central Park sits like a monster’s footprint in the middle of Manhattan, girdled with towers, lush and verdant but hard to mistake for the wilderness. Such an imposing work of infrastructure appeals to Wadada Leo Smith. The great AACM trumpeter and composer’s releases since 2012’s Ten Freedom Summers encompass an alternative map of America, lovingly sketching in its Great Lakes and National Parks while honoring its civil rights leaders, artistic geniuses, and the millions displaced and killed in its creation. Smith composed six of the seven pieces on Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens, and he’s joined by pianist and AACM cohort Amina Claudine Myers, who completed the sessions with no prior rehearsal. Smith describes Central Park as his favorite park in the world, but from the first minor-key piano notes on “Conservatory Gardens,” it’s clear that Mosaics is about more than bucolic landscapes.
The tone is stately and almost elegiac throughout, as if a grand, seismic, and vaguely frightening event is taking place on a glacial timescale. Myers broods in the lower octaves, providing the bedrock through which Smith’s horn cuts like a river through the landscape—or like a path through a garden, or like the park itself through Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons. It’s a delight when her hands dance freely into the higher registers, as in the last minute of her splendid solo piano piece “When Was,” but she and Smith largely proceed at a deliberate pace. It could work as ambient music if Smith’s sharp tone did not so thoroughly dominate the mix; its first appearance on “Conservatory Gardens” after more than a minute of insinuating piano intervals from Myers comes as an abrupt shock on an initial listen.
Mosaics is as interested in the park’s human history as its natural beauty. One of the longest and most beautiful pieces on the relatively short record is “Albert Ayler, a meditation in light,” in which the spirit of the late free-jazz icon apparently inspired the loosest and most convivial interplay between the two. “Imagine, a mosaic for John Lennon” is (thankfully) not a rendition of “Imagine” but an extension of the album’s air of twinkling mystery. The spot near Central Park where Lennon died is a popular site of pilgrimage for Beatles fans; the album’s somber tone suggests an awareness of the millions of lives and deaths that make up New York’s past, the sheer density of human history one can feel in every square inch of the city.
In its exploration of a relatively small part of NYC as a microcosm of its complexities, Smith and Myers’ album is spiritual kin to Loren Connors’ stunning solo guitar albums Hell’s Kitchen Park and 9th Avenue, which channeled the vanishing Irish-American history of the gentrifying Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Like those albums, Mosaics is short, just 36 minutes, more than a quarter of them occupied by “Conservatory Gardens.” But it doesn’t feel small, even when compared to Smith’s almost improbably ambitious epics like the four-and-a-half-hour Pulitzer nominee Ten Freedom Summers. Its borders seem to extend beyond its confines, as if there’s a theoretical piece for every meadow and lake in Central Park and this is just a small leakage from a vast parallel universe rendered through music.


The L.A. rapper grapples with uncertainty and depression over warm, creamy, lo-fi beats.

LIL BIG MAN

Like the title suggests, LIL BIG MAN is a coming-of-age story. Maxo is young enough to dream like a kid, but old enough to be aware he won’t be able to for long. One day, the L.A.-based rapper fantasizes about helping his family living comfortably and wearing a big-ass chain, the next he’s praying for the bare minimum: “23 hope I live to see 24.” As he reflects on the lessons that have helped him grow, he also pauses to feel the pressure of trying to leave his mark before his clock runs out.
The creamy vocal samples and muddy drums come from a team of lo-fi rap’s finest—lastnamedavid, Vik, Swarvy, and Roper Williams—and they make every verse seem like it takes place in a dream. Some might compare Maxo’s sound to the baritone Earl Sweatshirt or the abstract MIKE, but he resembles neither. His voice is soothing like watching a wide-open Steph Curry three-pointer on loop, and his lyrics are straightforward, leaving few lines up to interpretation.
Like anyone in their early 20s, Maxo is often wracked with fear. Few things weigh on him more than the prospect of wasting his remaining days—“My clock been ticking, I'm just tryna get myself right,” he asserts on “Time.” Even a warm Swarvy instrumental on “Strongside” doesn’t prevent Maxo from shrinking into his shell: “Covers on my head, guess I’m scared of the future,” he confesses.
But at his best, Maxo’s dread is balanced with a glimmer of hope, like on the EP standout “In My Penny’s.” His optimism, when it peeks through, is refreshing for how hard-earned it feels: “Even last place see the finish line,” he tells himself. On “Crown Heights” Maxo stares his depression in its face, accepting that he will live with it while balancing acceptance with positivity (“But I’m just countin’ my blessing, all that I have for you”).
Through LIL BIG MAN’s brief runtime, Maxo never finds the answer he’s looking for, but his search is winning on its own. Within 30 minutes, he hits upon a tangle of vivid feelings—uncertainty, anxiety, hope, depression, pain, love. “Maybe I be thinking too much, I don’t know,” he shrugs on “Crown Heights.” Above all, LIL BIG MAN captures this sensation: Nothing defines being 23 like knowing that you don’t know shit.


Following reissues of Mother Earth’s Plantasia and other cult classics, a new anthology of the Moog pioneer’s work revolves around his groundbreaking soundtrack to the 1969 moon landing.

Mort Garson: Journey to the Moon and Beyond

Journey to the Moon and Beyond

Before he was a paradigm-shifting synth pioneer, Mort Garson was a composer. Born in Canada to Russian Jewish refugees, Garson took up the piano at 11 and practiced obsessively during his teen years. He went on to study at Juilliard, and upon graduating, he began working as an arranger and session pianist. By the early 1960s—his career briefly interrupted by military service in World War II—he had worked with pop singers like Cliff Richard, Brenda Lee, and Bobby Darin. In 1963 he notched a No. 1 hit, composing and arranging “Our Day Will Come,” a languid, bossa-nova-inspired R&B single with a vibey Hammond organ solo snaking through the bridge. The song’s success sent him to Los Angeles, where Garson became a pop-music powerhouse. His music has been performed by a remarkable array of artists: the Sandpipers, James Brown, Mel Tormé, Cher.
A 1967 meeting with Robert Moog changed everything. Moog was demonstrating his newly designed modular synthesizer at L.A.’s Audio Engineering Society Convention. Garson, keen to get weirder with his arrangements, was immediately taken with the gargantuan electronic instrument and bought one of the first Moog systems ever made. Initially, he used it for sound design in jingles and television advertisements, but the deeper he got with the Moog, the more he realized its seemingly endless musical possibilities. He first integrated it into the full-band rock’n’roll arrangements of The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, eventually abandoning all other instruments to compose solely with his synthesizer.
To synth nerds, Garson today is best known for his 1976 LP Mother’s Earth’s Plantasia, an album that was meant to nurture the growth of houseplants. Given away with every purchase at Melrose Avenue plant store Mother Earth, Plantasia became a psychedelic cult classic. Sacred Bones reissued the record in 2019, introducing Garson’s whimsical electronics to a whole new generation of listeners. In 2020, the label reissued more of Garson’s landmark ’70s output, including Black Mass, his foray into occult-informed electronics under the name Lucifer, and Music From Patch Cord Productions, an archival compilation that featured alternative takes of some Plantasia cuts. Sacred Bones continues its reissue campaign with the joyous Journey to the Moon and Beyond. The compilation plunges further into Garson’s enormous archive but emphasizes his mind-bending skill as a composer and arranger over his work as a synthesist.
That’s not to say the record is devoid of his signature bleeps and bloops—Journey is teeming with swollen sine-wave bass and filter growls. There are moments, like the twinkling waltz of “Love Is a Garden,” that share Plantasia’s sun-baked warmth. “Three TV IDs” has a bit of the acid-casualty paranoia found across Black Mass. But recordings that don’t prominently feature the Moog expand our understanding of the composer’s range, giving further context to Garson’s zany innovations.
“See the Cheetah” is a paisley-patterned mod jam recorded in 1967 by the Big Game Hunters, a band that may or may not have existed outside the studio. Though the two-minute tune has very minimal synth work, the winking playfulness of the arrangement feels like trademark Mort Garson. It’s the kind of bouncy, lite-jazz library psych that Trish Keenan and James Cargill would mine in Broadcast’s early material, full of splashy cymbals, overactive flute, and nonsense lyrics.
“Black Eye (Main Theme),” excerpted from the soundtrack Garson composed for the 1974 Blaxploitation flick of the same name, is more serious in tone. Garson takes a page from Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly playbook, combining funk bass and a constant clip-clop of woodblock percussion, punctuating the groove with a quarter-note snare. The guitar sounds thick and syrupy, as if he’s running it through the filter on his Moog before running it out to an amp. Once the baritone sax doubles the guitar line, the melody sounds like it’s melting, giving the entire composition a trippy glow.
The centerpiece is “Moon Journey,” a six-minute synthesizer symphony commissioned by CBS to soundtrack the 1969 moon landing. The piece goes through several movements, all of which make extensive use of the synthesizer’s noise circuit. It starts with detuned arpeggios and percussive filter envelopes, adds uneasy drones, then morphs into a carnival funhouse soundtrack kissed with the stuttering delay Garson would employ throughout the rest of his career. He doubles down on the wackiness, jumping into a section that sounds like the “Western shuffle” preset of an old drum machine that’s been thrown down a flight of stairs. Finally, it resolves into a major-key waltz, dissolving like late afternoon sunlight on a pond. It’s classic Garson, at once awe-inspiring, slightly menacing, and beautifully tranquil—all feelings probably shared by those who watched the Apollo 11 broadcast.
That mix of joy and apprehension confirms “Moon Journey” as the compilation’s emotional anchor: Mort Garson turned 45 on the day of the Moon landing, spending his birthday processing the fact that 650 million people were hearing his music accompany Neil Armstrong’s giant step for humankind. It’s a staggeringly complex work; early Moog synths were monophonic, meaning only one sound could be played at a time. Recording such a dense, layered composition was a painstaking process of tuning, overdubbing, and re-tuning, so creating such a complicated mosaic of sound—for such a historic event—was as much an undertaking as it was an honor.
Garson kept writing and recording every day until his death in 2008. His vault of recordings is reportedly massive; some of the pieces included here couldn’t be traced to a particular project or period of his career. Journey is a carefully curated sampling of Garson’s talents as a composer, arranger, synthesist, and sound designer. It adds to his mystique as a channeler of otherworldly frequencies, a grinning virtuoso tapping into the beyond one patch cable at a time.


On his second solo album, fueled by unspecified personal misfortune, the former Sandwell District member finds emotional resonance in the interface between techno and post-punk.

Silent Servant: Shadows of Death and Desire

Shadows of Death and Desire

Ever since Mudd Club DJ Johnny Dynell played Ian Dury, the Flying Lizards, and the Slits as a cheeky response to the 1970s’ anti-disco backlash—the guitar music still “had a basic beat, and the basic beat was disco”—dance music and post-punk have only become more comfortable bedfellows. Same goes for techno and other members of the drum-machine music family, from electronic body music to industrial. Such connections have been explored in recent years by crate-digging producers with a yen for abrasive electronics, including Minimal Wave founder Veronica Vasicka, Berlin’s Phase Fatale, Dominick Fernow as Vatican Shadow, and Los Angeles-based producer and graphic designer Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant. On Shadows of Death and Desire, his second album for Fernow’s Hospital Productions, Mendez skillfully renders the inherent conflict between melodic emotion and cold, mechanical brutality.
A scene elder of sorts, Mendez was raised in 1980s Los Angeles on a well-rounded diet of the Smiths, DTLA warehouse parties, and KROQ. Slightly later in life, he imprinted upon Adrian Sherwood, German new wave, Belgian label R&S’ flagship compilation In Order to Dance, and hearing A Certain Ratio on a vaguely remembered New York City dancefloor. Since then, Mendez has synthesized a distinctive sound that can be found across his many projects. Most probably know him as a member of now-defunct but influential label and collective Sandwell District, featuring techno luminaries Regis, Function, and to a lesser extent James Ruskin and Peter Sutton. Mendez has put out moody and romantic synth music with ex-wife Camella Lobo as Tropic of Cancer and conducted bleak post-punk experiments with Regis as Sandra Electronics. In a nod to his day job as an art director, he has also defined one of the most striking visual aesthetics in techno, for both Sandwell and his retired imprint Jealous God.
Silent Servant’s debut full-length, Negative Fascination, arrived nearly a year after the dissolution of Sandwell District in 2011. “Stasis is death,” their final statement concluded—words to live by for Mendez. For his first LP he charted away from Sandwell District’s expansive, nuanced take on minimal techno, and Shadows of Death and Desire has an even more existential bent: Mendez somewhat cryptically announced that the release is “a product of a significant life change that wasn’t a benefit.” Yet, with seven tracks clocking in at just under half an hour, Mendez doesn’t waste any time dwelling on the past. Where Negative Fascination eased in listeners with a largely beatless, even cinematic introduction, its follow-up cultivates a sense of uneasy gloom from the get-go. Squealing feedback crystallizes into a queasy three-chord churn on album opener “Illusion,” giving way to the slicing kick and house-of-mirrors vocal delay on “Harm in Hand.”
The rest of Shadows of Death and Desire alternates between relentlessly dark propulsion and moments of ambient reprieve. “Damage” comes from the same clanking torture chamber as EBM pioneers Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant,” pulling taut nerves and tendons that are then allowed to relax as relatively calming—if still ominous—strings float through “Loss Response.” Then it’s off to the races again with the tensely sequenced “24 Hours,” given subtle texture with serrated six-string manipulation in the background. Shadows of Death and Desire ends by powering down through “Glass Veil” into “Optimistic Decay,” its closing track and something of a mission statement for Silent Servant’s vibe. Lobo makes an appearance as the album’s lone guest, adding a haunting aura with indiscernible vocals that recall her main collaboration with Mendez and offset the gnarled guitar squall. This particular back-and-forth between tracks toward the end of the record is especially reminiscent of the unpredictable eddies of calm and rage that could accompany the kind of life-altering event that Mendez has hinted at.
Such emotional resonance is where Silent Servant’s album excels. Where other post-punk-informed techno might value bone-dry wit or referential in-jokes, Mendez isn’t afraid to imbue his music with the kind of heaviness that has staying power, not unlike his childhood influences Robert Smith and Kevin Shields. If Silent Servant sets the bar for the intersection of dance and doom, Shadows of Death and Desire gives an even more promising indication of where it’s headed.


The Italian-born, London-based EBM auteur thaws out his industrial chill and embraces optimism, celebrating the fragility and strangeness of human experience with uncommon earnestness.

How to Leave Your Body

In 2017, Alessio Natalizia made an interesting claim about the brusque, intelligent dance music he was making as Not Waving: “We live in such a fucked-up world, so it’s important to make some optimistic music once in a while,” he said. “I think it’s our job as an artist to give options, to give possibilities, and a different way of doing things. And I think hope is one of those options.”
Fans could’ve been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Natalizia’s music at that point in time was imposing and brutalist, more reflective of a “fucked-up world” than any avenue out. The key song from Good Luck, the album he was then promoting, was a team-up with Québécoise nihilist Marie Davidson, whose own brand of coldwave doubles as anti-club manifesto. “Hope” seemed at best like a far-off prospect, at worst a cruel joke.
A few years and a few records later, the truth of Natalizia’s statement is coming into view. On How to Leave Your Body—roughly his 10th record, including collaborations with Romance and Mark Lanegan under his Dark Mark moniker—Natalizia triumphantly and effusively embraces optimism, thawing out his trademark industrial chill underneath a hard-earned sunrise. Less an EBM album than a showcase of the best textures contemporary experimental pop has to offer, How to Leave Your Body offers a counterweight to modern doomsaying, choosing instead to celebrate the fragility and strangeness of the human experience with uncommon earnestness.
One early highlight, and the song that most embodies the album’s ethos, is another collaboration with Davidson. “Hold On” acts as an inversion of 2017’s “Where Are We”: Where once Davidson decried the “sick world we live in,” now she hangs back, an omniscient narrator extolling the power and importance of friendship, or perhaps simply recalling fond memories. “Teenagers walk hand-in-hand, smiling in the daylight,” she says quietly, with none of her trademark smirk. “Someone rents a car and they drive; they laugh as they all jump in, getting closer and closer to each other.” Portentous piano chords and ravey synth stabs build as she speaks; the scene feels cinematic, a surprising turn toward narrative that foreshadows the album’s thoughtful, sanguine bent. As the song crests, Davidson breaks into a rare sung chorus: “Every now and then I feel a fire in my heart/I hold on to the feeling trying not to fall apart.”
The rest of the record is charged with this earnest, nostalgic warmth—even its song titles, including “You Are Always Younger Than the Future” and “My Best Is Good Enough,” look like a catalog of affirmations. “My Sway,” a collaboration with HTRK’s Jonnine, is lyric poetry as clattering, organic dembow, an appeal to a lover to see eye-to-eye that builds to a crescendo that, if not hopeful, is at least resolute and empowered in its finality: “It could only be this way/I see in a different light/Your morning, my night.” Natalizia even pulls Lanegan from under his perpetual dark cloud on “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2,” a meditation on grief underscored by droning, atonal strings. “Daylight is going, it is coming,” Lanegan repeats, a gentle mantra for recognizing the inevitability of death, but also of life.
If How to Leave Your Body were made up exclusively of metaphysical meditations it might have dragged, but Natalizia has always been a skilful craftsman of albums. Serene songs like “My Sway” and “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2” balance the slivers of industrial house and techno that arise elsewhere, while the stuttering synth grooves of “Define Normal” and the haunted echoes of Spivak collaboration “Never Ready” make the return to more subdued, pop-oriented tracks feel like a refreshing step out of the club into fresh air and sunlight. The whole of How to Leave Your Body feels like a step towards something brighter, kinder, better. It makes hope seem not just like a possibility, but something tangible, accessible—something so physical and so real that, if you wanted it, all you’d need to do was to reach out and grab it.

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The rapper and visual artist’s debut compilation is an intimate opus of lo-fi sampledelia, a 50-song catalog of memories, half-thoughts, and moments of discovery.

Ultimate Love Songs Collection

At a June event commemorating Anysia Kym’s Truest, DORIS rasped breathily over his own floor-rumbling tracks: a curious spectacle, considering that his “floor-rumbling tracks” are woozy bedroom ballads, less Mike Dean than Dean Blunt. Take “Usher,” the airy one-off single he dropped via MIKE’s 10k label three years ago. A languid Enchantment loop longs for “Gloria, my Gloria” while DORIS dawdles through the mix, chirping about weed—listen closely and you can hear him choking on the smoke. It’s beautiful in an unpolished way, like early Ariel Pink or R. Stevie Moore sending heartfelt prayers through hissing mics. Now picture him onstage, swaddled in feedback, speaker rattles, and the bitcrush of his own cranked-up backing track, no longer whispering but screaming through songs that lend themselves to silent weeping. Raw passion permeates even his breeziest, most distant dreamscapes. “Real and straight up,” he said in a recent interview: “That’s what I want to be, 100 percent of the time.”
DORIS is Frank Dorrey, a Jersey-raised multi-hyphenate who first came to public attention as a visual artist whose uncanny portraits have adorned album sleeves and limited-edition skate decks. His few press appearances portray him as a cerebral recluse, happier to speak from a SoundCloud account than a soapbox. The statements he made from said SoundCloud account were surreal—fleeting fever dreams that rode the same psychedelic highs as his eerie, amorphous Picsart prints. He chose the name DORIS partly as an homage to Earl Sweatshirt: an artsy young introvert resonating with the mastermind behind I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside.
Dorrey is still somewhat shy, but he’s stepping out more often. (Pitchfork caught up with him earlier this year at the opening of a joint art exhibition with Brayan Ramales.) He’s also gotten far more comfortable in his own voice—comfortable enough to drop a sprawling 50-track opus without stumbling across the same idea twice. Last month, he independently released Ultimate Love Songs Collection, a glut of lo-fi demos largely ripped from his SoundCloud. It scans a lot like other ambitious hard drive clean-outs, à la Roaches 2012-2019 or Sent From My Telephone, but manages to remain intimate—and wildly fun—where the “longform idea dump” genre so runs aground. Ultimate Love Songs Collection doesn’t feel low-effort or self-aggrandizing—it shares the cathartic release of singing in the shower. “I’m just riding on the beat, I just like the way it sounds,” a giddy DORIS admits on “Baby reign,” audibly lost in the sauce. Unlike much of underground rap’s young vanguard, he isn’t cosplaying his influences so much as performing simple passions: his own company, the songs he’s stoked on, and the weed he’s smoking while trying to loop his favorite parts. Deep as it sits within his universe, the music is familiar enough to nestle comfortably within ours.
Here’s the scene: DORIS hunched over a laptop long after midnight, tangled in wires from a mic, a charger, a pair of headphones, and a Focusrite. The only light source is his screen, and if he doesn’t close all those YouTube-to-MP3 tabs, it might just go out. Ultimate Love Songs Collection has the drowsy fuck-it affect of a savant on his last sip of Celsius. Dorrey’s phlegmy whisper bridges the gap between Whole Lotta Red’s rage-rasp and The Unseen’s quirky up-pitch, like an imaginary friend with something stuck in their throat. His appetite for samples expands on the air of red-eyed curiosity, revisiting traces of soul music heard through parents’ crackly radios, alt-rock earworms playing from cracked iPhones, and young-adult angst drowned out by airy hypnagogic pop. One second, he’s chipmunk-squeaking over the Cardigans’ “Lovefool”; the next, he’s coughing out congested romance epics, regaling weed over melodies more famous for regaling girls from Ipanema. All the while, he’s endearingly candid, like a kid who got one of those T-Pain mics for Christmas—bedroom or studio, he just wants to say the first thing that comes to mind.
What makes Ultimate Love Songs Collection so rewarding, even relatable, is the way it wears this bare, ragtag enthusiasm on its sleeves—stripping away pretense so all that’s left is a snapshot of the moment DORIS decided he fucked with a certain song. Today’s underground hip-hop is less interested in consistency than radical, relentless knob-pushing: dialing up the echo, amplifying the distortion, kindling flames of anarchy and fetching gasoline. DORIS shares his contemporaries’ knack for frenzied creation, but he also doesn’t move like there’s anything especially shocking or marketable behind his madness. No occult poses, no indie sleaze revival, no punk aesthetic rehashed for a new generation: He just wants to wail his own love songs over the ones stuck in head.


The proudly suburban Ontario band’s first album uses styles as different as indie pop, shoegaze, and post-hardcore to dramatize frontman Brandon Williams’ journey from despair to rage to resilience.

Death Lust

Brandon Williams, the lead singer and songwriter of Chastity, hails from Whitby, Ontario, part of the chain of suburbs that extends out from the eastern edge of Toronto. Like many suburbs, it’s a mishmash of affluent commuter communities sprouting with McMansions and older housing developments populated by working-class folk employed at the regional power plants and factories that serve the big city. And like many suburbs, it’s the sort of place where lacking a car is tantamount to living under house arrest, and where recreation for bored teenagers inevitably leads to some degree of criminal activity. When you’re a young misfit in a cultural desert, the usual knee-jerk reaction is to get the fuck out of town as soon as you can scrounge up the rent and decamp to the nearest urban center. But Williams has never harbored the desire to live downtown—and that lack of interest in cities isn't just because they've become so expensive. His natural response to suburban life isn’t to escape it, but to improve it.
There is, of course, no shortage of music that explores the dissociative effects of the suburbs, and how the postwar shift toward sprawl and big-box strip malls can breed problems—isolation, depression, cultural homogeneity—as severe as the inner-city ills that suburbanites sought to escape. But few artists have made their suburban upbringings as central to their musical identity as Williams. It forms the backdrop of several videos he’s released over the past few years—vibrant, visceral documents of wayward youth skateboarding through empty streets, pool-hopping, and partaking in scheduled street fights for a crowd of bloodthirsty classmates. It’s also the impetus behind his DIY promotional efforts, which include hosting shows in an old barn on the outskirts of Whitby and donating the proceeds to local mental-health support agencies. And it’s the geographic analog for a debut album that feels at once both expansive and suffocating.
Chastity’s early singles and EPs showcased an artist with the versatility to work in dramatically different modes, from brittle bedroom indie pop to stormy shoegaze to raging post-hardcore. These are the sort of oppositional styles that, 20 years ago, would have relegated followers to different high-school cafeteria tables. But the beauty of Death Lust lies in how Williams makes them all sound like part of the same continuum of disaffection, and how he approaches each mode with a pop songwriter’s ear for concision. Chastity's debut full-length is a brief album, with 10 songs clocking in at 31 minutes total, but the terrain it covers is vast. This is a record that begins with an intimate string-swept ballad and ends with a throat-shredding, circle-pit sermon—and yet, like a frog swimming in an increasingly hot pot of water, you barely notice the slide between those two poles.
More than just a showcase for Chastity’s musical fluidity, Death Lust charts Williams’ emotional journey from despair to rage to resilience. Even the length and positioning of his song titles reinforce the theme: Flip over to the album's back cover, and you’ll find an aerial photograph of a subdivision, overlaid with the album’s tracklist to form a cross. At first glance, the layout seems to equate the suburbs to a graveyard. But after listening to record, the cross invites a medical interpretation, hovering above a place where disenfranchised kids are in desperate need of community support.
Mental health has always been a recurring theme in Williams’ music, and Death Lust presents an unflinching glimpse into the mind of someone so tormented by anxiety and loss that they can only feel pleasure in fantasizing about ending it all. On the quivering opener, “Come,” Williams isn’t just eulogizing a departed friend, he’s making plans to join them on the other side. And amid the dreamy jangle of “Heaven Hell Anywhere Else,” he imagines just how he’d do it: “What would it feel like to fall/From the school, 60 feet tall,” he sings in a heavenly sigh, letting the song’s crystalline chorus serve as the safety net that brings him gently back down to earth. “Anoxia,” however, offers no such salve, its adrenalized punk thrust expressing an even more unsparing death wish: “Bury me between the guilty and filthy/Then hang me from the tallest tree in Whitby.”
Williams isn’t simply wallowing in his pain, however; he approaches it like a boxer working an inside game, getting up close as a means to better analyze and attack it. For all its sorrowful subject matter, Death Lust is an often rousing rock record that answers Williams’ disarming admissions with muscular displays of fortitude. “Suffer” and “Scary” erupt into monstrous grungegaze grooves that suggest the Smashing Pumpkins if they’d signed to Dischord and spent the ’90s playing basement shows. And even when Williams’ hardcore roots start to show on the album’s second side, the gnashed-teeth aggression functions as an all-out assault on his demons. Closing track “Chains” is a queasy exercise in churning Albini-core that climaxes with Williams’ most ferocious performance, but also his most sanguine sentiment: “Don’t waste your pain on hate,” he barks in its cathartic chorus, “Start your life outside the chains!” It’s not exactly a declaration of victory—trauma is like that horror-movie villain who can be warded off for a spell but never stays dead. But on an album whose most tranquil songs often reveal Williams’ most upsetting confessions, it’s only fitting that he finally achieves a moment of inner peace through a scream.