Claire Cottrill’s third album sinks deeper into a soft-rock sound as her songwriting takes on an understated new confidence.

Charm

On the final track of her third album, Clairo finds herself at the pier, “playing out moments when there was a touch.” Just a touch: more intimate than pining from afar, sure, but not a kiss or even so much as an embrace. These kinds of experiences—when the memory of a tiny gesture captures the entirety of your attention—are hallmarks of Claire Cottrill’s best songwriting, like the flushed cheeks of “Bags” or the objectifying glances of “Blouse.” On Charm, she retains her attention to these fleeting touches, but pairs them with a lush, rich production, sinking deeper into a soft rock sound that is at once smoldering and whimsical.
Charm is not a dramatic shift in the manner of Clairo’s second album, 2021’s Sling. After she achieved viral fame as a teen on the strength of her sweetly lo-fi YouTube uploads, Clairo released Immunity, her impressive Rostam Batmanglij-produced debut. Then she took a left turn. She moved to upstate New York, teamed with producer Jack Antonoff, and holed up in the woods to make Sling. Where Immunity showed off Clairo’s kinship with bedroom pop darlings like Frankie Cosmos, Sling worshiped at the altar of Carole King—a pastoral, folky album that seemed entirely uninterested in chasing her past or reaching for new pop hits.
To make Charm, Clairo worked with another new producer, Leon Michels, known for his work in the El Michels Affair and as a member of the Dap-Kings. Together, they dug deeper into the ’70s palette Clairo developed on Sling and crafted arrangements dense with Wurlitzer, mellotron, piano, and organ. “Slow Dance” ends with fluttering flute and clarinet; “Terrapin” is filled with piano flourishes. If Antonoff’s production on Sling sometimes felt cool or atmospheric, Charm emits a palpable warmth. Plus, most of these songs groove. Clairo’s vocals remain, by and large, hushed, but thanks to the golden-hued production, her voice comes across more like a murmur in a crush’s ear than a sheepish mumble on a first date.
The intimate experiences that Clairo examines on Charm have to do, she’s said, with “fleeting moments … where I’ve been charming or have been charmed” and the fantasies such moments can produce. It’s a mood Charm’s sensual confidence and retro propulsion readily conjures: “You make me wanna/Go buy a new dress,” she sings on “Juna,” “You make me wanna/Slip off a new dress.” On “Sexy to Someone,” a cozy song about wanting to be wanted, Clairo’s feather-light voice sways atop playful production you could almost call funky. Even in more downcast moments—when Clairo sings of mourning a love while “all alone upstate,” or describes how she’ll “pull on the string/That binds me to memories of/The way I loved you”—the music never wallows.
Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns. One song towards the album’s end breaks away gently from the rest: “Echo,” a spacey highlight where psychedelic synths and Clairo’s droning delivery bring it closer to Broadcast than Carly Simon. It’s a strange tune about a love that “goes nowhere,” whose musical gestures enhance its lyrical ones. These are the quotidian details and the tiny imperfections that make Clairo’s music uniquely alluring. It’s a new kind of Clairo song, but it has what makes the best Clairo songs so unforgettable.


On a frenetic album that tests the limits of his trolling, JPEGMAFIA hints at the delicate balance of truth and fiction behind his confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk.

I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU

The exact moment that NBA player Dillon Brooks lost the mandate of heaven: After poking the bear of LeBron James in the 2023 playoffs, failing to live up to his own slanderous trash-talk while his aggressive style of play floundered on the court, Brooks unceremoniously hit free agency as the Memphis Grizzlies leaked that he wouldn’t be re-signed “under any circumstances.” Brooks’ story appears as an omen on “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” the opening track on JPEGMAFIA’s fifth studio album, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU. In the first lines, the 34-year-old Baltimore rapper—whose iconoclastic presence is forged on a confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk—likens himself to a worse version of Brooks as cymbals titter in the background. It’s an initiation to JPEG’s caustic humor laced with a smidge of accidental wisdom: You can play the role of the tireless provocateur as long as you continue to deliver.
On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, JPEG entrenches himself in the agitator role. The follow-up to his 2023 Danny Brown collaboration Scaring the Hoes is blanketed in frenetic energy, as if JPEG can’t decide where to aim first. At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album.
In a 2023 interview, JPEG said that he aspires to create music that “tears you out of yourself.” On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, it feels as though he’s tearing in 30 directions at once, incorporating a dizzying mix of genres seemingly at random. The imperfect marriage of a 2014 Future sample and a persistent whirring sound on “New Black History” registers as grating rather than electrifying; his chants and growls in “vulgar display of power” are eroded by a blistering rock backdrop. At other points his glitchy, staccato raps fit seamlessly with the production’s entropy: on “it’s dark and hell is hot,” a 170 bpm Brazilian funk production assisted by DJ RaMeMes, or over a staticky Jade sample on “I’ll Be Right There.” As it did on his 2018 release Veteran, JPEG’s ability to walk the line between distortion and discord permits the industrial chaos to feel somehow familiar—as if the only thing more jarring would be unified sound direction.
No matter the subject, JPEG’s raps never shy away from confrontation (he described the Drake disses on “New Black History” and “it’s dark and hell is hot” as “throwaway bars”). On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, he continues to hip fire with an air of superiority: “Fake-plug-talkin’ Tubi rappers/Got a machine behind ’em, and still they can’t fill up capacity with they raps,” he spits on “SIN MIEDO.” There’s room to take aim at white people who act Black and shit-talkers with their own skeletons in the closet, all while keeping pace with a fun Denzel Curry appearance. His pop culture references are simple and high-powered: Calling himself the “Black Michael Phelps” is objectively funny. The nonstop airing of grievances is entertaining, but eventually it can feel like JPEG’s off-the-cuff trolls are reaching critical mass. There’s wanton carelessness in using “African booty scratcher” as an insult while also claiming that he scares people “that ain’t got no Black friends.” He’ll go and liken himself to the IDF on the five-minute opus “Exmilitary,” then name the next track “JIHAD JOE,” not bothering to adjust for the contradictions between his personality and political commentary.
It would be less honest for JPEGMAFIA to shy away from those contradictions. His general state of defiance—molded by his honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force and his experiences with racism growing up in Alabama, filtered through his fluency in meme culture—informs the best aspects of his artistry. In trying to parse through the idea of being a Black man, a Black artist rapping to a predominantly white fanbase, in an online landscape full of censorship and disinformation, the line between performance and survival is razor-thin. Sometimes the shocking statement is a method of protecting one’s true self; other times it’s an actual window into the artist’s soul. “I’m so terminally online, goddamn, I gotta check myself,” he raps on “JIHAD JOE.” The musical highs of I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU lift JPEG above the potential pitfalls of this highwire act, but the cautionary tale of Dillon Brooks is never far from mind.


Soldiering on without one-time frontman Daniel Blumberg, Yuck continue to pay homage to '90s indie rock, but the most telling reference point may be their former selves.

Stranger Things

Like 2013’s Glow & Behold and any future albums this lineup of Yuck might go on to record, Stranger Things carries an implied asterisk. This isn’t the work of the same band that released a lovably frazzled, fondly remembered self-titled album in 2011. Since frontman Daniel Blumberg quit the group and guitarist Max Bloom took over as its leader, Yuck have carried on as a faded copy of themselves, retaining their devotion to '90s indie rock but losing the misfit energy that made revisiting sounds that have already been recycled many, many times before seem like a genuinely exciting proposition. Bloom and Blumberg’s voices are superficially similar enough that casual listeners might not even be able to pinpoint exactly what’s changed, but they’ll almost certainly notice the diminishing returns. The scrappy enthusiasm of Yuck’s debut has been replaced by bland, box-checking competence.
Given that a few of his songs on Stranger Things hint at the anxiety caused by the public pressure of filling in for his old bandmate, it feels mean-spirited to single Bloom out for particular criticism. But it’s hard not to. He’s the Doug Yule to Blumberg’s Lou Reed, a passable enough fill in for a song or two who lacks the charisma, personality, and way with words to carry an entire album on his own. And while his flat, cheerless vocals are the type of limitation that a more self-aware band might work around, the group’s self-produced third album counterintuitively plays them up, plastering them at the front of the mix. It’s a voice you can really grow to resent over 47 minutes, and Stranger Things locks you in such close quarters with it that when bassist Mariko Doi finally takes her lone lead vocal turn on "As I Walk Away," it feels like hard-earned relief.
Under Blumberg’s reign, Yuck muddled their influences together into a fluid pastiche—a little Pavement here, a little Yo La Tengo there, a big splash of Dinosaur Jr. on top of that—but Bloom tends toward more structured, predictable homages. "Cannonball" shares a name with a Breeders song but plays like a Superchunk song. There’s also a stab at an Elliott Smith song ("Like a Moth"), a Teenage Fanclub song ("Only Silence") and a Matthew Sweet song (the title track, which features the extremely '90s chorus "I hate myself," only none of the black humor that era’s songwriters used to cut that kind of sentiment with). The record ends with a pair of Built to Spill rips. "Down" is the more effective of the two, because Bloom nails Doug Martsch’s boyish innocence—it’s one of his best performances, even if like everything else on the album it feels secondhand. He sounds way out of his element, though, on the thundering, six-and-a-half minute "Yr Face," an attempt at "Broken Chairs"-style gravitas that runs in circles instead of building to something. Built to Spill could pull off that kind of song because they had big ideas to convey. Yuck do not.
So, rough album. Glow & Behold was no great shakes either, but at least that record compensated for Blumberg’s absence with richer instrumentation, and some smartly deployed shoegaze textures that helped conceal Bloom’s vocal deficiencies. Where that album felt like an expansion, albeit a minor one, Stranger Things feels like a retreat. The group recorded it themselves in an effort to reconjure the rawer, fuzzier sound of their debut, and for a band that’s trying to escape their own shadow, that’s probably the worst thing they could have done. Yuck have always invited comparisons to other bands, but these days, the one that flatters them the least is the comparison to themselves.


SZA’s long, ambitious, luxurious new album solidifies her position as a generational talent, an artist who translates her innermost feelings into indelible moments.

SOS

SZA has mastered the art of the inner monologue, transforming deeply personal observations into gilded songs that feel intimate, relatable, and untouchable, all at once. On her remarkable debut album, CTRL, she narrated these contradictions through warbled melodies that threw modern R&B and pop song structure out the window, letting her voice weave in, over, and through the beats, in a style that recalled the jazzy structure of Joni Mitchell and the technical prowess of Minnie Riperton.
Not having a traditional formula, it turned out, was a winning tack: CTRL was certified triple platinum this August, reflecting both its continued relevance and fans’ salivatory desperation for a follow-up five years later. Of course, she’s been busy in the time since, having dropped 16 singles or collabs—including the Oscar-nominated Black Panther track “All the Stars,” with Kendrick Lamar—an album’s worth of material unto itself, plus a small handful of wildly acidic videos like “Good Days” and “Shirt.” She had the summer of 2021 in a chokehold with the record-breaking cellophane candy that is “Kiss Me More,” with Doja Cat. She’s filming a movie. She dropped some Crocs. She taught herself to play musical bowls. Like, damn.
The cover of SOS depicts SZA, a former marine biology major, perched on a diving board surrounded by the deep blue ocean, her face pointed contemplatively at the sky. She was inspired by a 1997 photograph of Princess Diana on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht taken one week before her death and said she wanted to pay homage to the “isolation” it conveyed. On SOS, she feels like a superwoman who deserves the world one minute, and a depressive second-stringer sacrificing her well-being for garbage men the next. She counteracts the millennial Bad Bitch/Sad Girl dichotomy (tale as old as time) by filling in the vast emotional space between. The album opens with the Morse code distress call and a sample of the Gabriel Hardeman Delegation’s 1976 gospel exhortation “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest),” which lead her into a muscular opus of self-determination, singing in a rap cadence/breath-control flex about how she’s simply over the “fuckshit.” This opening title track sets up a kind of thesis for most of the album: that even amid self-doubt, she’s gloved up, in the ring, a heavyweight champ looking for the belt.
We already know SZA’s dedication to her work is indefatigable—amid public woes with her longtime record label TDE and her major-label partner RCA, she wrote hundreds of songs for what became SOS, so culling it to just 23 is, in context, an exercise in restraint. At the same time, SOS is a clear document of how extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, how she’s become an even more exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé about genre tropes. On SOS, she belts her face off on an instant classic “fuck you” number (“I Hate U”) alongside a savage rap track that recalls the glory days of physical mixtapes (“Smokin on my Ex Pack”) and, perhaps improbably, a country song with a pop-punk chorus about revenge sex (“F2F”). This can sometimes land in the mushy middle—“Ghost in the Machine,” her breathlessly anticipated collab with Phoebe Bridgers, finds them mirroring each others’ vocal timbres over glitch electronica complete with synthetic harps courtesy of frequent collaborators Rob Bisel and Carter Lang. And “Special,” a track about body dysmorphia, sounds like she was writing from a Swiftian persona, à la her loosie “Joni,” yet comes off a bit pat sandwiched between a compendium of songs where she richly depicts the same sentiment.
But, wow, woe to her trifling exes. On the bait-and-switch stalker lullaby “Kill Bill,” she lodges the chorus, “I might kill my ex/Not the best idea,” getting all her darkest thoughts on the page with a strolling electric bass holding her hand. “Blind” delivers “my pussy precedes me,” and, “You still talking ’bout babies/I’m still takin’ a Plan B,” on a soothing, string-laden ballad befitting a water sign. “Nobody Gets Me,” another tumultuous acoustic ballad that conjures “Fade Into You” transmitted through an AM radio in Nashville, proffers a carnal scenario: “You were balls deep/Now we beefin’/And we butt-naked at the MGM, so wasted, screamin’ ‘fuck that.’” She is a seriously funny songwriter, who also dignifies her specific visual place-setting (Vegas is particularly cursed) and raw expression of feelings by giving them space and melody.
While delivering these insights, SZA is at her most intimate, with a suite of mid-tempo songs that elevate the loping pace with her vocal and emotional dynamics. She places herself in the lineage of classic R&B, as on the open-heart ballad “Gone Girl,” a moving break-up song over a warm Rhodes piano that showcases the purity of her vocal range. “Too Late” draws sonically from mid-’80s Janet Jackson and wonders if the breakup was the wrong move, while “Far” negates that thought while surveying the aftermath: “I’m far cause I can’t trust nobody,” she practically weeps, compelling you right alongside her, rooting for her to pick herself up from the mess. And on “Snooze,” a Babyface-produced track so rooted in the classics that the outro fades out rather than ends, she memorializes the woozy feeling of being in love before sneaking in a pitch-shifted addendum: “How you threatening to leave and I’m the main one crying?”
Even amid her copious emotional toil, SZA still stands on her own terms. SOS ends with an Ol’ Dirty Bastard freestyle, which she pulled from old documentary footage shot by legendary R&B producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. The sample, which ended up in “Goin’ Down” on Return to the 36 Chambers, bookends her final missive on an album where she does what she does best while showcasing her stylistic versatility. “Give a fuck what you prefer,” she rap-sings over a grimy boom-bap. “I’m too profound to go back and forth/With no average dork.” Maturity looks good on her—who among us hasn’t scolded herself with a version of “damn bitch you so thirsty,” as she intones on the soundly quotable “Shirt”?  It’s that exact melange of confidence and pettiness that has engendered such passion for her music and persona. SZA’s talent is otherworldly, but you just might know someone a little like her, too. It might even be you.


Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington renamed their Darkside project Daftside to remix Daft Punk's Random Access Memories in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original deluxe self. It's an internet-redux model that sees virtue in ultra-low production values.

Daftside: Random Access Memories Memories

Random Access Memories Memories

For all the discussion around the backward-looking facade of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, there was one aspect most people could agree on: it felt expensive. There were echoes of a once-thriving industry in there, harking back to a time of money being endlessly funneled into lavish studio complexes, sometimes in aid of wild vanity projects. RAM added a whole other level of expenditure in service of the concept of retro. You can buy all the vintage amps and instruments you want, loot endless thrift stores to get just the right period ruffle on your shirt. But can you hire the guy who played drums on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall? In a sense it's a grand folly, an ill-fitting match for the way music is mostly consumed at this point in time. You're not likely to hear the nuances of Bob Ludwig's mastering job through tinny laptop speakers, crappy earbuds, low bitrate MP3s, and streaming YouTube clips.
Of course the sheer ambition of RAM is a large part of its appeal, a big group purposefully acting big to flesh out the music as they imagine it in their heads. Nicolas Jaar's Darkside project, here renamed Daftside, take all that aspiration and siphon out every drop of it from the original source. This album, really just a series of clips uploaded to Soundcloud, remixes RAM in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original self. It's an internet-redux model of Daft Punk's work, a scratchy counterpart that sees virtue in the kind of ultra-low production values and consumption models that RAM veers away from. The first half of Daftside's "Give Life Back to Music" is positively emaciated, its drums falling flat, its cymbal splashes resembling old Casio presets caked in cheap distortion. It's the kind of thing John "J.R." Robinson, Daft Punk’s ludicrously accomplished drummer on the original track, must have nightmares about.
It's difficult to judge exactly how long Jaar and his musical partner, Dave Harrington, spent on this work (probably not much, considering how quickly they turned it around). So the tweaking is minimal at times, with pitches shifted resolutely down and that crackly flimsiness recurring as a theme. There was already something of a sad-robot motif to some of RAM, and the downturned atmosphere here emphasizes it further. "Get Lucky" sounds positively bluesy at times, with Pharrell's vocal reduced to a drunken slur, making its central refrain sound more like a lost hope than a promise of good times ahead. It's indicative of this project's inclination for taking big moments and making them small, pushing them inward. Even RAM's centerpiece, the Paul Williams-fronted "Touch", is pulled out of its its wide open space, given a minimal techno makeover, then shunted to the penultimate slot in the running order.
Daftside's ability to find something else in this music doesn't just stretch to them reducing the mood to a set of internal post-club jams. At times they're looking for the direct inverse in mood, turning the gloomy "Game of Love" up in pace so it resembles a shuffling disco tune. For "Contact" they open with a gnarled take on the noise bursts at its close, placing it at the start of the tracklisting in a move that mirrors Oneohtrix Point Never's positioning of the similarly bracing wake-up call "Nil Admirari" on Returnal. Surprisingly, the material that seems more in Jaar's orbit-- the slow-build electronics of "Motherboard", the pulsing "Giorgio by Moroder"-- produce less satisfying results, with the former a mess of runaway electronics and the latter a tangle of empty loops. "Doin' It Right" is better, taking Panda Bear's escalating vocal and turning it into a wonderfully ugly set of belches.
Amusingly, for something that often deliberately drags so hard, Daftside simply brush over one of the RAM tracks that taps into that mood, turning the indifferent "Lose Yourself to Dance" into a two-second vocal passage then moving on. That sense of play, resembling Jaar and Harrington poking Daft Punk with a stick then gleefully running away, is partly what makes this a far greater work than standard remix albums. At times they're looking for nuances in the original, small threads they can pick up and take somewhere else. Elsewhere they're just having fun, acting on instincts, never over-awed by the material. Certainly there's an overall feel of taking all of Daft Punk's expansion and turning in a low-rent version of it, an Off-Off-Broadway version constructed in a cardboard pyramid patched together with tape and glue. Jaar's Space is Only Noise worked from a similar mix of nuttiness and constraint. Somehow, he found a way back there through a most unlikely route.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the groundbreaking 1989 debut album from hip-hop legends De La Soul.

3 Feet High and Rising

Their aim had simply been to make some space to raise their own voices. At that moment, in 1989, when hip-hop seemed surer of its destiny than at any time since, De La Soul gave us a glimpse into their coming-of-age, and let us listen to the sound of three (well, four) Americans working out how to hear each other and move forward together in a cruel world.
Consider that in the preceding 12 months, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Straight Outta Compton, Critical Beatdown, Lyte As a Rock, and In Full Gear had made a massive impact in hip-hop. All of these records commanded attention, wore their sizable ambitions on their jackets. But while their New School peers stood tall, offering righteousness (Public Enemy), rebellion (N.W.A.), street wisdom (MC Lyte), style-war futurism (Ultramagnetic MC’s) and crowd-pleasing showmanship (Stetsasonic) to hip-hop’s expanding audiences, De La Soul were the quiet kids lingering at the edge of the cipher, withdrawn and a little mysterious, conversing in coded language meant to distance themselves from all the big personalities jockeying for position around them.
They were largely known as a trio—Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Pasemaster Mase” Mason—a little left-field, a lot obsessed. As thoughtful and opinionated students of the culture, their wainscoted suburban rooms were strewn with rare dusty records plundered from their parents’ collections, and they financed their passions as janitors who came to their jobs rocking gold fronts. In 1987, the three young men enlisted a ringleader and mentor in Stetsasonic’s DJ Paul “Prince Paul” Huston, who could match their kookiness pound-for-pound. With his yuk-yuk scatology, technical skill, and bottomless trove of pop-cult records, Prince Paul stepped in like a madcap hybrid of Malcolm McLaren and George Martin.
All four of them had gone to Amityville Memorial High in the Black Belt of Long Island, between the white-fled city and the whites-mostly exurbs, the same socio- and psycho-geography that produced Public Enemy, Rakim, Biz Markie, and MF DOOM. They made music with an abiding trust in each other and an intense devotion to craft. Their process was: OK, we’ve made this beat, joke, metaphor, rhyme style, now how do we take it up another level?
3 Feet High and Rising emerged fully formed, offering a world as richly imagined as anything American pop has ever produced. Just as hip-hop was firmly establishing itself as the most avant of pop’s garde, the best of their peers—from smooth operator Big Daddy Kane to Blastmaster KRS-One to Living Colour’s Vernon Reid—showed up at their release party to salute their achievement. Even KRS, who had just dropped what would come to be recognized as one of the best albums in hip-hop history, said it couldn’t compare what De La Soul had just made. While huddled in Los Angeles to finish their own sample-heavy Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys reportedly listened to 3 Feet High, despaired, and briefly considered starting all over again.
What they all heard in it was an unprecedented assemblage of sound. Four years before, Marley Marl had accidentally unlocked the power of the sampler—a technology that allowed time to be captured and manipulated. The sampler vaulted hip-hop out of its inferiority complex. Now it too could meet the sonic ambitions of rock, funk, jazz, and soul. Like their peers, Prince Paul and De La Soul set about using it to build a world.
The album sounded like a hip-hop version of the novelist Dos Passos’ America, crowded with voices, rhythms, rhymes, and the wit, joy, and pain of becoming aware of one’s power to change the world. And De La Soul felt like the closest hip-hop equivalent to Parliament and Funkadelic: high-concept, hilariously genuine, generously human.
Along with their Native Tongues peers, they were as generative as sunshine, spawning fertile new scenes around the world, including LA’s True School, the Bay Area’s indie underground, Atlanta’s Dungeon Family, Detroit’s network of Dilla and his acolytes, and subsequent generations of self-identified indie rappers, including Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common. More broadly, 3 Feet High and Rising helped secure a new alignment of hardcore street heads with an emerging global audience of fans, the foundation of the soon-to-be-named “hip-hop nation.” Thirty years later, it remains one most influential records of the storied class of 1988-89.
But the narrative of the album is still framed by a tired contrast between the rise of N.W.A. and the West Coast gangsta rap and that of De La Soul and the Native Tongues’ ”completely unthreatening” “message of positivity.” De La never asked to be the saviors of hip-hop, much less to answer for all the supposed pathologies that critics wanted to put on Black masculinity and Black popular culture. Instead, De La Soul defined their outsiderness through a weird, wild, and wholly self-referential creativity. Their MC names were “Sounds Op” and “Yogurt” spelled backwards. Their album would be full of inside jokes, invented slang (“A phrase called talk” was their rhyme style, “Public Speaker” was a dope emcee, “Buddy” was a hot body, and “Strictly Dan Stuckie” meant “awesome”), and an odd mix of preoccupations ranging from TV to Aesop’s fables to Luden’s cough drops to, of course, sex. The culture wars were raging all around them, the central fact defining N.W.A.’s work. But De La’s world was small, insular, and, in many ways, refreshingly naïve.
While he was still in high school in 1984, Prince Paul had been recruited into the Brooklyn crew, Stetsasonic, to serve as their showcase DJ. Stet sold itself as the first hip-hop band, a live act with studio chops, even predating the Roots. But as the scene evolved away from Old School showpeople toward New School bedroom lyricists and producers, Stetsasonic changed its style. Their 1988 album In Full Gear offered one path forward for hip-hop: a slick, high-def sound. Paul had become a key member of the production team, but he felt under-credited, and he also knew that the New York sound was shifting toward dusty sampler aesthetics. (Polish and sheen would not return to the forefront until Dr. Dre’s 1992 debut The Chronic.) He felt creatively stifled.
At the same time, Posdnous, Trugoy, and Mase were putting together “Plug Tunin’,” a song that had evolved out of a live routine the crew rocked over the “Impeach the President” break. But then Pos pulled from his father’s collection a rare doo-wop record by the Invitations called “Written on the Wall.” (Later, Tommy Boy stirred a small frenzy among the nascent crate-digging community when it offered $500 to the first person who could identify the sample. The prize went unclaimed for a long while, firmly establishing De La Soul and Prince Paul as beat-diggers par excellence.)
In the Long Island tradition of leaving no record unturned, “Written on the Wall” was on the B-side. Printed on the flip were helpful instructions for radio DJs needing to know what to play: “Plug Side.” From this odd detail, De La Soul developed an album concept: They were transmitting their music live from Mars through microphones—Pos on Plug One, Trugoy on Plug Two. It was an audacious step away from both Old School party-rocking and New School realism. Their lyrics didn’t lean too heavily on Five-Percenter cosmology or Afrocentric ideology for conceptual depth. They were striving for their own new rap language.
Armed with this obscure 45, a cassette deck, and a lo-fi Casio RZ-1, the crew slowed the routine to a toddler crawl and recorded it. They rocked head-scratching metaphors (Plug One: “Dazed at the sight of a method/Dive beneath the depth of a never-ending verse”) and odd riddles (Plug Two: “Vocal in doubt is an uplift/And real is the answer that I answer with”) in neatly matched cadences. When Paul heard the hissy demo, he knew he had found kin. He took them to re-record “Plug Tunin’” at the hip-hop hotspot, Calliope Studios, and they were on their way. Tommy Boy signed them to an album contract soon after and De La Soul began building their sonic world on a shoestring budget of $25,000. Over a two-month period, they learned how to work the expensive studio gear as they made the record.
The Black suburban imagination of Long Island rappers offered a distinctive kind of street romance and horror. Public Enemy rapped about cruising the boulevards in muscle cars, their adrenaline amping up their politics of provocation. De La Soul’s second single, “Potholes In My Lawn,” was a battle rhyme refracted through the brutal status consciousness of the ‘burbs. De La played the family on the block coming into success, only to be met with the envious rage of the Joneses next door. Trugoy complained, “I don’t ask for a barbed wire fence, B, but my dwellin’ is swellin’.” Meanwhile, imitating wannabes lurked in the bushes. These rhyme-biting rappers took the form of vermin leaving unsightly craters all over the front yard. The crew repatched the potholes with daisies. Individuality trumped suburban conformity.
As De La Soul and Prince Paul moved deeper into recording, they developed a kind of one-upmanship, trying to shock each other by procuring deeper records to thicken a song’s gumbo. The tracks became dense with info, opened up to jarring risk and surprise. Their lyrical ambitions also multiplied, as the group sought new ways to retell timeless adolescent tales.
Built on a sample of ’60s bombshell Maggie Thrett’s “Soupy,” “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)” was interrupted by an energetic Liberace performance of “Chopsticks.” The hormonal frenzy and awkwardness of teen lust were summed up in the half-terrified, half-grateful cry Maseo let out after his first kiss: “And I hollered!” These were not suave girl-stealing Old School or New School lovermen. When Jenifa inevitably moved on, Pos dropped his head in shame: “Don’t flaunt that the candy’s good, unless you can get plenty.”
As buzz built in advance of the album’s release, the label gave the group’s image a full makeover. De La Soul already had style—the gold fronts had given way to funky fades, Afrocentric fabrics, and African medallions. But their new look was designed by the hip London and New York-based Grey Organisation, who heightened the crew’s difference from their peers by giving them neon palettes and flattening them into Keith Haring-like 2-D. In the words of designer Toby Mott, the Grey Organisation wanted to critique “the prevailing macho hip-hop visual codes which dominate to this day.”
But as Dave, who dropped his stage name “Trugoy” somewhere after the second album, recounted to Rob Kenner in the documentary De La Soul Is Not Dead, “I think, for me, it was just the photo shoots. I mean, every damn photo shoot you could bet there was a florist hanging around with flowers. And I mean, come on man, flowers? That’s not what it’s really about.” The Black suburban crew had set out to express their difference, but now they began to realize that their pop success was making them into something they were not. On their subsequent albums, the tension between the joy of release and the control over their image—especially as Black men—would lead them to make some of the most important records in American pop.
Late in the recording process, Tommy Boy label head Tom Silverman asked for a radio-friendly unit shifter. Maseo obliged by suggesting they sample Parliament’s 1979 hit single “(Not Just) Knee Deep” for “Me Myself and I.” Paul agreed and flipped the track into an irresistible crowd mover. Trugoy did the bulk of the lyric writing, working from the Jungle Brothers’ “Black is Black” rhyme pattern and responding to the now proliferating “hip-hop hippie” articles with a “let us live” message. He rapped,

Proud I’m proud of what I am
Poems I speak are Plug Two type
Please oh please let Plug Two be
Himself, not what you read or write
Write is wrong when hype is written
On the Soul, De La, that is
Style is surely our own thing
Not the false disguise of show-biz

Silverman once credited De La Soul as being the group that jumpstarted rap’s “third generation.” The first generation had taken rap from the parks to records, and the second had taken it from records to the arenas. The third reclaimed it for themselves—reinventing traditions and busily making new revolutions. They idolized the energy and accomplishments of the first, while trying to displace the second.
The video for “Me Myself and I” put the crew back in high school to be bullied by teachers and classmates who are gold-roped, troop-suited Old Schoolers. In the end, only De La Soul made it out of the classroom and into the waiting world. The song triumphed over an increasingly fragmented hip-hop map, propelling them out of certain obscurity. As hip-hop reached a new level of sales and visibility, “Me Myself and I” reached No. 1 on the R&B charts.
But success threatened the group. On their first national tour, the crew seemed to recoil from their audiences. They trudged through low-energy sets anticipating the inevitable conclusion, having to perform “Me Myself & I,” as if their biggest hit had been their biggest mistake. Even later, long after they had become one of hip-hop’s best live acts, they would still introduce the record by asking the crowd to chant, “Say, ‘We hate this song!’”
Worse were the physical threats. From coast to coast, antagonistic fans and managers tried to roll them, believing their allusions to peace, love, and daisies made them soft hippie marks. Word soon got out that De La Soul was knuckling up and taking down heads from Rhode Island to Cincinnati to Denver.
Dejected and besieged, they returned to New York to their management’s office one day and stared up at a whiteboard full of upcoming tour dates for all the acts, including their own. Trugoy decided he had had enough. Taking an eraser, he wiped off all their dates, and wrote instead: “De La Soul is Dead.” The guys laughed. Now they had something to look forward to—album two.
If Black complexity had been the meta-message lost in De La’s big crossover, abstraction, abjection, and humor were the winning trifecta of 3 Feet High and Rising. The skits and interludes poked fun at more of their obsessions—funky smells (“A Little Bit of Soap”), fashion trends (“Take It Off”), and porn flicks (“De la Orgee”). The funniest featured hip-hop party-starters veering off script (“Do As De La Does”). The game show skit might have been a transferral of rap’s meritocratic competition into something absurd—no one wins but the audience: Were you not entertained?
Four months after the album’s release, after the album had gone gold, lawyers for the Turtles filed a lawsuit against De La Soul for the use of four bars from their song, “You Showed Me.” Paul and the group had cleared 60 of the more than 200 samples on the record. But the Turtles sample, used on “Transmitting Live From Mars,” in which Paul scratched a French-language instruction record over the loop, was not. At the time, the one-minute song sounded like an amusing non-sequitur. Nearly thirty years later, the string loop sounds ominous and claustrophobic, a sonic analogue for the legal purgatory to which De La Soul’s back catalog has been consigned.
Although the group and the label eventually settled with the Turtles, Warner Brothers has not maintained physical formats for De La Soul’s back catalog, and has refused to make these albums—including 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, Buhloone Mindstate and Stakes Is High—available in digital and streaming formats. Label heads, who own Tommy Boy’s pre-2002 catalog in full, have apparently decided that the potential labor and expense of sample clearances are too much to bear. De La Soul have previously volunteered to do the labor of re-releasing the catalog, but Warner was not interested. They have been denied the right to profit from their work, and we have been denied the ability to listen to and share some of the most important records in our shared musical history.
It is true that many of the Black artists sampled by hip-hop producers have also been denied the profits of their work. It is also true that works by so-called minorities—whether the sampled or the sampling—suffer disproportionately from the land-grabbing, barbed-wire-fence-erecting, tons-of-guns-defending mentality that drives the growing corpus of intellectual property law. What is currently called copyright protection is also the wholesale locking away of people’s labor, legacy, and inheritance. The current structure of sampling law functions like—because it is—a process of cultural erasure, a glaring and expanding cultural injustice.
In 2011, 3 Feet High and Rising was added to the Library of Congress National Registry of Recordings. Even that honor prompted no action from Warner Brothers. So on Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul gave away digital files of their entire Warner catalog to their fans. That sharing has been the only official digital release of these records, which remain locked away in that null existence between copyright orphanhood and full viability.
Questlove told New York Times reporter Finn Cohen, “I mean, 3 Feet High and Rising is very much in danger of being the classic tree that fell in the forest that was once given high praise and now is just a stump.” We are left to ask: as history is made and remade, who can be heard in America?
On the album’s proper opener, “The Magic Number,” over a sample of the “Schoolhouse Rock” theme song and a chopped version of John Bonham’s huge drum break from “The Crunge,” Pos and Trugoy had rocked a virtuoso, rapid-fire manifesto full of mind-spinning wordplay. Pos positioned hip-hop as the new insurgency:

Parents let go cause there’s magic in the air
Criticizing rap shows you’re out of order
Stop look and listen to the phrase, Fred Astaires,
And don’t get offended while Mase do-si-do’s your daughter

Trugoy described his creative process:

Souls who flaunt styles gain praises by the pounds
Common are speakers who honor the scroll
Scrolls written daily creates a new sound
Listeners listen ‘cause this here is wisdom

By the end, Mase and Paul were scratching snippets at a fast and furious rate—Steinski, Syl Johnson, and Eddie Murphy all fly by before Johnny Cash suddenly drops in to give the album its title: “How high’s the water, mama? Three feet high and rising.” The line was taken from a reverb-drenched performance of “Five Feet High and Rising,” a blues in the grand tradition of Mississippi River flood songs.
De La Soul were making a point about the power of culture to mobilize people to action or immobilize them with fear. It was an idea they explored more explicitly on their fable, “Tread Water.” There were animals, squeaky organs, friendly humming—at the time, journalist Harry Allen called it the most African song he’d heard in hip-hop—but “Tread Water” also offered perhaps the most ambitious hope on the record, that De La’s music might help us all elevate our heads above the water. In this polar-cap-melting, politically disastrous age, the song feels prophetic.
Today’s debate over sampling is mostly mind-numbingly narrow, shaped largely by big-money concerns that are ahistorical, anti-cultural, and anti-creative. The current regime rewards the least creative class—lawyers and capitalists—while destroying cultural practices of passing on. Post-hip-hop intellectual property law rests on racialized ideas of originality, and preserves the vampire profits of publishing outfits like Bridgeport Music, that sue sampling producers while preventing artists like George Clinton from sharing their music with next-generation musicians, and large corporations like Warner Brothers that continue to disenfranchise Black genius.
By contrast, the processes of sampling and layering on 3 Feet High and Rising and other hip-hop classics of that era demonstrate the opposite: expansively, giddily democratic—Delacratic, even—values.
Pos’s production on “Eye Know” put Steely Dan into conversation with Otis Redding and the Mad Lads, his work on “Say No Go” Hall and Oates with the Detroit Emeralds. The musical chorus of “Potholes in My Lawn” pointed not only to Parliament’s 1970 debut Osmium, but to the African American roots of country and western music.
Together, the sampled sounds of the Jarmels, the Blackbyrds, the New Birth, and even white artists like Led Zeppelin, Bob Dorough, and Billy Joel, make a strong case that all of American pop is African-American pop, from which everyone has been borrowing. Sampling—De La Soul sampling Parliament, Obama sampling Lincoln, Melania sampling Michelle—is nothing less than the American pastime, the creative reuse of history amid the tension between erasure and emergence that is central to the struggle for the republic. No one can ever do it as big as De La Soul did.


The 28-year-old rapper’s latest album is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. It feels born of an internet wasteland.

Veteran

There’s a particularly absurd song called “Goin’ Down” on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut album that opens with the late rapper doing this sort of open-throated croaking kids do to annoy their parents. This sample of ODB’s disembodied voice looped over and over again provides the framework for “Real Nega,” from the experimental rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA’s new album, Veteran. The album’s title refers to both the time that the 28-year-old JPEG—born Barrington Hendricks—has put into his craft and his time in the U.S. Air Force. A four-year military bid took him around the world, but he also spent some time in the American south, which was clearly formative: He cites living in Alabama as foundational to his understanding of racism, and one of the covers for Veteran features JPEG’s own Louisiana driver’s license, evoking the mock food stamp card on the cover of Return to the 36 Chambers. ODB at his most formless would be an impossible model for most artists in any century. For JPEG, it’s just the starting point.
Veteran, his fourth solo record, is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. The record’s social commentary amounts to more than darts tossed at critical music outlets like Dead End Hip Hop and Pitchfork, rifles that get compared to Lena Dunham, and the scathing takedown, “Word on the street: You fucked Tomi Lahren.” There’s a sort of ideological rigor, an N.W.A.-ish promise that girds his provocations. Where MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E mixed their politics with language that stoked the post-Reagan moral panic, JPEG—fluent in internet-native irony and bad-faith arguments—wields those tactics to serious, sometimes disarmingly earnest ends. On the grim “Williamsburg,” he opens the song “selling art to these yuppies” and burrows down a rabbit hole of Phoenix Suns jerseys and expensive coffee. It makes gentrification sound cold and creaky, empty and industrial, which it is.
Entirely self-produced, Veteran is a remarkable exercise in sound and texture. At its best—“Baby I’m Bleeding,” “Rock N Roll Is Dead,” “Panic Emoji”—the production makes the frayed edges of each element part of the atmosphere, a mess of distortion that works percussively and melodically. JPEG gestures at broad, propulsive flows but parcels them out in fragments. He sings on “Thug Tears,” then raps in heavy staccato, smooths things over, and loops back to singing again, all in brief, energetic bursts. At other points, like on the semi-sober “Macaulay Culkin,” he has the droll bounce of mid-period Cam’ron, casually melting “Orange is the New Black” references down to a grim reality.  JPEG’s greatest trait is his ability to move from rap’s center toward its fringes by reimagining soul-sampling New York rap in a late-2010s internet wasteland.
Though he recently relocated to Los Angeles, JPEG had been living and making a name for himself in Baltimore since 2015. There’s a spate of exciting young rappers (Creek Boyz, Peso Da Mafia, Bandhunta Izzy) in Baltimore right now, many of whom have a potential to cross over to a national audience. But JPEG doesn’t fit comfortably in that generation, or really any generation. His production is more schizophrenic, his writing shifts tone and syntax too quickly. Yet, while it only borrows a few musical elements from Baltimore’s famous club music scene, that genre might be the best analogy for his music in terms of energy and pace: JPEG is very comfortable at breakneck tempos, and he manipulates voices or industrial sounds to make them part of a rhythmic spine. It makes for a breathless album, one that takes white-hot riffs and the most distasteful parts of our national politics, chops them up, and somehow scatters them perfectly into place.


The Great Pumpkin unveils his first official solo album, and it's a vaguely shoegaze LP with Corgan talking candidly to the mirror-- a recording for himself and interested fans.

The Future Embrace

In an alternate world, The Future Embrace could pass for an average shoegaze record with a few OK songs. Because really that's what we got here: Tracks like "Mina Loy (M.O.H.)" and "DIA" cough up all the proven pink noise progressions, hot drums pushed back in the mix, so-called lush layers of guitar distortion, an acceptable vocal melody, frothing overdrive, etc. Even the single "Walking Shade", however hookless and octave-bass trendy as electro-funk (think the Killers, then thank mixing boy Alan Moulder), still sounds enough like New Order at times that, hey, things are gonna be fine-- one less Out Hud song on the radio.
Unfortunately, Billy Corgan's changed a few lives in his time, which makes it difficult for some people (me, at least) to have any sense of the song's musical merits before their brains pavlov. For a time, Smashing Pumpkins were tops; in my neighborhood alone, dressing up for Halloween as the Asian Guy From Smashing Pumpkins was a politically acceptable if not publicly applauded costume choice. So was making your own ZERO shirt, and locking yourself in your locker, despite all your rage.
So there are, in fact, two ways The Future Embrace can, will, and possibly should be read. The first is, like I said, as just another shoegaze record with some/many lyrical missteps (a teaser: "On the ninth day God created SHAME!!!!!!!"). The second: Although Pumpkins fans enjoy explaining to their peers how, actually, Corgan recorded most of Siamese Dream himself, etc., The Future Embrace really is his first solo record. He's dropping the ruse of band co-operation, and, however much it's often untrue, asking us to read his songs to be at least partially autobiographically. Officially, Corgan no longer represents Smashing Pumpkins (or Zwan), just himself, and the solo run implies a certain interest in showing his true face to those who want to see it.
"All Things Change" has loveful guitars and flimsy drums and really nasally vocals. But for the Corganites this is The Artist justifying his return, explaining his motives for disbanding the Pumpkins, putting faith in pop music, and steeling himself in a way that, if we're buying into the song as a personal account, is kinda sorta affecting. The song's last line, "We can change the world," is cliche, sure, but so is "I love you" to your girlfriend, and "I can't believe I'm doing this" to yourself before the virgin line-- what matters more is Corgan's saying it.
So, forgive Corgan his infinite lyrical badness, but know that infinity's a lot to forgive. "You are love/ You are soul/ You are real to me" is bad, approaching the level of "Can I give my old heart TO YOU!!!!!!!", also a line from The Future Embrace. In fairness, I don't remember what I was thinking exactly when I first heard something like, "I torch my soul to show/ The world that I am pure," stuff like that. Anyway, while that line from "Rocket" seems intentionally poetic, The Future Embrace doesn't seem to aspire to the craft's inherently mediated affair. This is Corgan talking candidly to the mirror, a recording for himself and interested fans, but a big fuck-you to anyone who never cared in the first place. I can't reward that, but I think I get it: When we talk to ourselves about stuff, most of us don't think in necessarily poetic terms-- we just think what we feel. Granted, I've never said something like, "Every time I start reaching out to find you/ Loneliness abounds," but you get the point.
Tonally and compositionally, The Future Embrace is either samey or consistent depending on your mentality, but Corgan throws one undeniable curve with his cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody"-- thirds dropped and Robert Smith on backup vox to boot. Turns out it's not a straight cover; Corgan personalizes it in a spot. Perhaps underscoring the tension he's had in his own career-- a tension he seems to enjoy talking about-- Corgan doesn't sing, "And I'm blind, so very blind," as scripted, but instead asks himself, "Am I so blind, blind to believe?" Woof. For an answer, we might turn back to Corgan's cover of "Destination (Unknown)": "I know I'll leave when it's my time to go/ Till then I carry on with what I know." The swoons fight the groans.


The debut from the UK pop singer is a proficient study of her influences but can’t help but feel like there’s a lack of personality to the songs.

Vertigo

On 11 May 2021, a minor pop schism occurred. It was the first Brit awards in the pandemic, delayed a few months from the ceremony’s usual February date. That night, two young stars who made their names in lockdown had massive debuts: Olivia Rodrigo’s first-ever live performance, of “drivers license,” and the British pop songwriter Griff’s second ever, of the very Gotye-like “Black Hole.” Backstage, that year’s Global Icon winner Taylor Swift held court in her dressing room, inviting the two self-proclaimed Swifties to share chips and take goofy selfies.
Not two months later, it emerged that Swift had been awarded 50% of the writing credit for Rodrigo’s song “deja vu,” which had a faintly similar bridge to her song “Cruel Summer,” leading to an obvious distancing between the two. Meanwhile Swift has continued to shout out Griff and invited her to support a recent Eras date in London, praising her from the stage as “so creative on every single level.” What’s curious about the continued support, given the apparent reason for the estrangement of Swift and Rodrigo, is how profoundly indebted Griff’s debut album, Vertigo, is to Swift’s sound.
This year’s The Tortured Poets Department watered down the boom and sheen of Swift’s 2014 album 1989, which is further diluted by the eminently tasteful pop songs of Vertigo. The racing pulses never risk causing alarm. The bubbling synths would barely disturb the surface of any pond. The martial drums are more ceremonial than primed for battle. There’s a cavernous, momentous glow to the production that reminds me of how the 1989 portion of the Eras tour echoes around the stadium every night. The quieter songs, like “Into the Walls” and “Everlasting,” immediately evoke the tenderly plucked strings and twig-snap beats of Folklore and Evermore.
Obviously none of that suggests that Griff should be held liable for taking inspiration from a formative songwriting hero (she’s said her earliest musical memory is getting an iPod loaded with Fearless and playing it on repeat) or that creativity should be litigated that way. It’s just one aspect of how oddly derivative this long-gestating debut is. Tilt it this way and you hear the formal liturgies of London Grammar (soppy ballad “Astronaut,” piano courtesy of Chris Martin); that and the long tail of the excitement over 2010s Scandi pop that never really anointed any proper pop stars (the desperate, cathartic splash of the appealing “Miss Me Too” has Robyn in its DNA). Here’s a little MUNA (the gently punchy and ecstatic “Anything”); here’s quite a lot of the 1975 (the snapping “Hiding Alone,” the surprisingly loose dance breaks of “Cycles”).
Griff (born Sarah Griffiths) got her start by releasing music online and in 2019 quietly signed a deal with Warner in the midst of doing her final high school exams. She broke out in 2020 with “Good Stuff,” a piano ballad direct enough to connect during the pandemic when Instagram was the only way to perform for fans. When concerts became possible again, she supported Dua Lipa, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran, all but skipping mid-tier venues. That night at the Brits three years ago, she won the Rising Star award, the weight of the British music industry behind her. Griff has never failed to hit her marks professionally. Her songs—which she also co-produces, and always has—also come with a distinct air of competency.
Nothing is off; Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it, and for an album seemingly about being failed by a vanishing lover and named after the physical sensation that the world is lurching on its axis, it seems more focused on finding steadiness again than embodying those head-spinning feelings. Griff sings in a tone of rueful anguish about falling for what now appears to be an illusion; even the relatively riotous breakdown of the clattering, choral pop moment “Tears for Fun” processes her voice to mute the rage in it. The subtleties are very subtle: “Pillow in My Arms” is softly tweaky, Griff’s desperation blurred into a whirlwind; ominous serrated textures bite at the lonely “19th Hour,” where she sounds convincingly on her last nerve.
The frustratingly slick Vertigo speaks to two issues. First, how to translate pandemic pop stardom into the real thing—giving a promising, major-signed young artist the opportunity to work out her voice on her own terms, and adapt to a scale bigger than a phone screen but smaller than a stadium. And second, how entrenched the Scandinavian formalities of pop songwriting have become in the last 15 years. When the rigors of craft are well established, the artist’s personality becomes even more critical, and this summer’s reigning outlandish, cheeky, brash pop girls have illuminated and fed that hunger. For all that Griff has aced the industry’s rungs and garnered all the right plaudits, Vertigo can’t hope to compete with peers who have taken weirder routes to their breakout moments. Griff’s talents are so clear you suspect she could do this with her eyes closed; may she yet escape the industry tractor beam to take some shots in the dark.


Dylan Brady’s experimental pop troupe finds idiosyncratic takes on late-aughts pop, but gets bogged down by great gecspectations and its leader’s own overwhelming influence.

Cake Pop 2

Cake pops entered our collective consciousness around 2009, when 3OH!3 was ushering crunkcore onto the Billboard charts, the Annoying Orange was YouTube’s biggest meme celebrity, and Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” was the song of the summer. These relics double as tasting notes for Cake Pop 2, the second release from experimental pop troupe Cake Pop, a project of 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. Mid-to-late-aughts references are baked in (no pun) to the extended gecs universe, as are genre mashups, mood swings, inside jokes, simple pleasures, crushing angst, and the audacious production that makes it all make sense. Cake Pop 2 adapts the gec fundamentals to fit more conventional song structures and a new set of flavors, but the risks are calculated. They tone down most of the funny business (no “Stupid Horse” or Seinfeld bass) while still supplying levity (opening lyric: “Hella scared of bees”), delivering straightforward pop that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Brady formed Cake Pop in his hometown of St. Louis with local friends and collaborators including Aaron Cartier, Ravenna Golden, Lewis Grant, Pritty, Robel Ketema, Kevin Bedford, and Adam Newcomer. The group’s eponymous 2015 EP mixed playtime with explosives and xylophone scales, teasing the chiptuned sugar rushes and Monster Energy-sized caffeine crashes that Brady and Laura Les would later fine-tune with 100 gecs. By the time gecs released their 2019 debut 1000 gecs, Brady’s signature clank had resonated from hyperpop playlists to the mainstream. Now, he’s sharing Cake Pop with his expanded fanbase. But as Brady’s imprint on pop music deepens—with everyone from Linkin Park to Lizzo tapping him for production—his vision is spreading thin.
Cake Pop 2 is a collection of sketches, idiosyncratic takes on pop formulas: orchestral balladry, alt-rap, happy hardcore, Top 40, video game soundtracks. “Satin Bedsheets” calls to mind Young Money’s 2009 smash “Bed Rock” crossed with Tierra Whack and stadium EDM. “Ether” puts Sia-slash-Halsey-esque radio songs through a glitchy gecs filter. The twinkly, dancehall-inflected “Pombachu” interpolates the chorus from Ja Rule’s “Mesmerize,” while the horns on “Boom” throw us back to “Tik Tok”-era party-all-night pop.
At 20 minutes, the album doesn’t linger on any one idea, which can be both a strength and a weakness. Certain standouts leave you hungry: “Cake Happy” works as a short, bouncy duet, but Golden and Grant’s lovers’ dialogue is ripe for a plot twist and another key change. “Whistle” is such a robust, whimsical 72 seconds that you’re tempted to listen twice. At its best, Cake Pop 2 is like a cypher or a dance circle, where everyone gets a turn in the middle and nobody disappoints. The album teases some compelling concepts (“Candy Floss” stages Minecraft on Broadway) and highlights the talents of Cake Pop’s members (Cartier’s “Magic” flow, Ketema’s Auto-Tune reggae stylings), but doesn’t give the artists or their ideas enough room to flourish.
There’s been no shortage of music for gecs fans over the past two years: Since the release of 1000 gecs and its remix album, Brady has produced or co-produced songs for Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, 03 Greedo, Rebecca Black, Rico Nasty, and Pussy Riot, to name a few. By this point, we know what to expect from a Brady-helmed project, and Cake Pop 2 doesn’t challenge those assumptions. The album is a lively introduction to Cake Pop and its members, but as the sounds of Brady’s busy schedule leak in, there’s a sense that we’ve heard most of it before. Though the production flexes to fit the eccentricities of each song, the tailoring could have been closer. Still, for existing gecs fans, Cake Pop 2 is a welcome addition to the rotation. It goes down easy; the sugar makes you want to bounce off the walls. But a cake pop is not a meal.

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Like Beast Mode and Monster before it, Future's latest mixtape hints at the lingering effects from the rapper's soured relationship with Ciara. Where many songs on Beast Mode found Future trying to sort out the pain of estrangement in the embrace of other women, 56 Nights drowns in a potent drug concoction that influences its sound and lyrics.

56 Nights

Future has been on an underrated tear since last October, when his rage-fueled Monster mixtape was dramatically overshadowed by an ill-advised guest appearance on Mike WiLL Made It’s "Pussy Overrated" with Wiz Khalifa, which, in the context of his failed romance with R&B singer Ciara, seemed even more crass than it was foolish. The tape itself was vintage Future but also magnificently petty, and it went mostly underappreciated as a result. He continued his strong run with the Zaytoven-produced Beast Mode, which was an equally snappy but less petulant response to his emotional turmoil. After announcing plans earlier this month to keep the ball rolling with a sequel to 2011’s Dirty Sprite on Twitter, Future unexpectedly dropped 56 Nights, the latest in what feels like a sustained campaign.
The mixtape's title refers to the amount of time Future’s DJ, Esco, spent in a Dubai jail on a trip to the 2014 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It’s officially billed as a DJ Esco tape hosted by Future, the first since 2013’s No Sleep, but unlike that 23-track offering, featuring contributions from Shy Glizzy, Young Scooter and PeeWee Longway, 56 Nights is Future standing alone with no guests. When he raps "None of this money that matter; all of my niggas, they matter" on "Diamonds From Africa", it feels like an acknowledgement of his DJ’s ordeal.
Future still has other problems, too, and like Beast Mode and Monster before it, 56 Nights hints at the lingering effects from his soured relationship. Where many songs on Beast Mode found Future trying to sort out the pain of estrangement in the embrace of other women, 56 Nights drowns in a potent drug concoction that influences both its sound and his addled, prattling lyrics, which often give way to profound moments of clarity. Casual sex is often written off as tedious, only spurred on by copious drug use ("I didn’t wanna fuck the bitch/ This molly made me fuck her even though she average," on "March Madness"; "I pour up again and again/ I said I wasn’t gonna fuck with that bitch then I fucked her again," on "Never Gon Lose"). The overarching theme is reliance on drugs over women, a preference he spells out on "Purple Comin In": "Fuck a bitch on that shit, I don’t need her" versus "Fell in love with that drank and I need it." Future seems to have developed a codependency on pharmaceuticals, one that fills a void and levels his unease—on "Trap Niggas" he raps, "I’m drinking Activis, the only thing that relax me"—and this continuous state of inebriation allows Future to be remarkably open.
The bulk of the production on 56 Nights is handled by Southside with one song produced by Tarentino. Both are members of 808 Mafia, the in-house production team of Waka Flocka Flame’s Brick Squad Monopoly, and Future follows their unhinged, woozy lead, lining knocking 808s with frenetic flows that fumble into mumbling like on "No Compadre".  He occasionally offers brief bits of social commentary and self-reflection: On "March Madness" he sings "All these cops shooting niggas, tragic" and on "Trap Niggas", "I got a lower case T across my chest/ Your crack house doing numbers then you blessed/ You move your mama to a crib from the 'jects." The ideas arrive as garbled fragments that, when pieced together, tell his story, and 56 Nights is an unfiltered look at life through the eyes of a wasted Future.


Part biting satire, part cognitive behavioral therapy, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris’ collaboration is a hilarious, caustic, and gorgeous consideration of what it really means to be “fine” today.

Jean Grae / Quelle Chris: Everything’s Fine

Everything's Fine

At this point, the word “fine” can be shorthand for an earnest self-help maxim, a sarcastic weapon wielded to reflect the batshit nature of our current political discourse, and a defense mechanism used to shield against acknowledging tensions that lie just beneath the surface. We will usually claim to be fine when we’re not. Rappers Jean Grae and Quelle Chris are fascinated with the mechanics of actually being fine. Part biting satire, part cognitive behavioral therapy, their new collaborative album, Everything’s Fine, is a gorgeous consideration of how simply existing can beat the “fine” out of us.
Jean Grae and Quelle Chris have a considerable pedigree as soloists and collaborators. Since the early aughts, Grae has been a force on the indie rap circuit, building a sizable rap archive highlighted by her oft-leaked, constantly changing opus Jeanius with 9th Wonder. Chris first broke out with the 2013 mixtape Niggas is Men, and has since carved out space as a rapper and beatmaker on Mello Music Group. But Everything’s Fine is a great entry point to both their catalogs, an album that brings the best out of both MCs, as performers and producers. Over distorted soul and oddball funk beats, Grae and Chris create a mood that strikes a balance between their poles: Grae is technically precise, almost methodical, drilling through the skull with lacerating wordplay; Chris is looser, unbound, sometimes improvisational, pleasantly deadpan and wonky. Where Grae is layered, coiling in and out of complex schemes, Chris is blunt and almost brusque in presentation.
They use these extremes to map out the main question of why we’re so ineffectual these days—why everything’s just, you know, fine. Maybe it’s routine complacency, outright denial, or the unwillingness to unpack the everyday terrors of the world in our small talk. (When there’s a new reason to be angry pushed directly to your phone every few hours, it can be tough to come up with the bandwidth to process it all.) Grae and Chris never fault anyone for being tired, but they warn against the consequences of inaction. The album leans into the inherent ridiculousness of having to be OK amid our nation’s political farce, using skits, spoofs, and impressions to explore the balancing act of being mad online and all right IRL.
Tonally, Everything’s Fine follows a design that was first established by the duo’s pleasantly snarky That’s Not How You Do That trilogy from a few years ago, projects that were each tagged as “instructional albums for adults.” But Everything’s Fine is warmer and more sincere. Some songs feel like inside jokes traded among like-minded misanthropes as if you’re picking up in the middle of a private conversation. It’s just that Grae and Chris exposing their anxieties in the open, one quip at a time. The charms of this record involve the ways it navigates traumas with caustic humor, grace, and levity, without losing any of the gravitas. Somehow, optimism still sneaks through.
Adding to the many dynamics at play, several moments are like a surrealist musical written by comedian Hannibal Buress (who fittingly appears on the album as a rapper). There’s the eviscerating “My Contributions to This Scam,” which parodies everyone from fake-woke allies to Insta models-turned-rappers to white fans who listen to rap ironically or use it as a guise to say the N-word. After an opening from Grae and Chris, where a game-show intro becomes a stage for an existential crisis, the album pivots on interludes from comedians Nick Offerman, John Hodgman, and Michael Che, who offer that things are “fine,” with varying degrees of certainty.
One of the most thoughtful songs is a collage of spoken word digressions from former Das Racist hype man Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu. “It feels like it’s the worst time ever to be alive, ’cause the world is so fucked up, but it’s probably the best time ever to be alive for the most people on earth,” he says, calmly. Conflicting ideas get presented at the same time, each granted equal weight. These comics add color, and Chris and Grae’s sense of comedic timing is just as impeccable.
But the album is truly moving when it embraces urgency. The heartbreaking “Breakfast of Champions” is a dispatch on police killings. In their own ways, both Grae and Chris wrestle with the recurring misery of constantly seeing unarmed black people murdered in state-sanctioned violence and then watching the officers involved go free. “Saw somebody else got shot up, this time by some cops in Texas, or Virginia, can’t remember,” Chris intones; “Children called they mamas while they stared at they daddy’s entrails/C’mon, how much more evidence you want?” Grae pleads. But whenever things start to get too real, they crack another joke.
That’s the dizzying tone of Everything’s Fine, pulling and pushing you to the edge, constantly questioning the state of your emotions. On the chugging “Gold Purple Orange,” Chris punctures preconceived notions about everything from the alt-right to capitalism, his deflating, sarcastic delivery punching up each idea. “The Smoking Man” with Denmark Vessey takes on the faceless, all-powerful “They” (who “stopped Cosby from coppin’ these chicks” and killed your favorite MC), considering power and its corrupting influence, before summing up the entire record in a one-liner: “LOLs for the ELE” (that’s “extinction level event”).
There are ways to hear this album as both damning or redemptive, depending on the perspective. But it is never sanctimonious, and it is constantly breathtaking. Grae and Chris aren’t encouraged by the fire raging around them, but they soldier on, as we all must, finding a sort of black humor in the idiocy, the chaos, and the sheer absurdity of it all. Sometimes the only way to survive is to be “fine.” Sometimes all you can do to be fine is laugh.


The debut album from Los Angeles psych-rock project Wand is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves, what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates bandleader Cory Hanson's itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song.

Ganglion Reef

The insert that comes with Ganglion Reef, the debut album by Los Angeles’ Wand, is printed with the kind of map that might appear in the front of a fantasy novel, full of fanciful coastlines and tidal whorls. It seemingly depicts Ganglion Reef itself—an imaginary island that the members of Wand might just frequent from time to time, perhaps transported there by the same psychotropic substances that fuel their music. Travel, after all, is what Ganglion Reef is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves.
Frontman Cory Thomas Hanson is a mover himself. In addition to playing (usually fleetingly) with a wide array of fellow L.A. garage-rockers over the past few years, from together PANGEA to Meatbodies to Mikal Cronin, the singer/guitarist/keyboardist helms the electronic pop project WHITE. Hanson just can’t sit still, and accordingly what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates his itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song. “Clearer” stomps and throbs through a barrage of zap-gun bursts and bongo-punctuated, acid-flashback breakdowns; beneath it all, riffs the size of thunderbolts hurl the song through wormhole after wormhole. Hanson’s breathy, elfin voice glides overheard, but it’s only half as ethereal as his steam-calliope synths and creamy smears of distortion.
The albums most fantastic voyage is “Fire on the Mountain (I-II-III)”, an epic that manages to condense itself into a relatively compact five minutes. Unpacking it is effortless, but not without effect; Hanson’s high, glassy coo is light years away from Lee Landey’s infernally heavy bassline, and the gulf between them is a vacuum that yanks at sanity. The airlock is completely breached by the time the track hits its second movement, a spasm of Paleolithic proto-metal that wrestles with Hanson’s progressive-folk sprawl. It’s way too much to fit coherently into a single song, but coherence isn’t the endpoint. When an aural lightshow of intertwined synths and guitar solos lifts and soars like the Verve with a sci-fi fetish, it feels like infinity has cracked open.
Hanson’s fantasy bent is even more pronounced on “Strange Inertia (Ctrl Alt Death)”, a shakily scrawled love letter to other dimensions that expends every Crayola in the box, and “Flying Golem”, a surrealist lullaby that resembles "Adventure Time" fanfic set to singsong psychedelia. Fantasy gaming is referenced more explicitly on “Generator Larping”—but instead of coming across as a live-action role-playing session of World of Warcraft, it spends six minutes daydreaming the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” as rendered in a Neu!-like cascade of sine waves and pulses. There’s a faint krautrock undertow to Ganglion Reef, but it’s motorik for a sandy beach instead of the Autobahn.
Plenty of new psych-rock albums are content to fill the signifier checklist and then just sit there, but Ganglion Reef is as much a vehicle as a destination—and rather than wallowing in inner space, it’s a gateway to other worlds, not so much an escape as an intrepid exploration. It’s fun, sure, but it’s also thrillingly restless, at times almost desperate. “Run for your life,” Hanson chants on “Broken Candle”, an organ-toggled, kaleidoscopically melodic dreamscape that could be an evolutionary offshoot of the Zombies’ “Brief Candles”. It sounds like winsome nonsense, but it’s telling. Prowling and propulsive, Wand are musical sharks; if they stop swimming, they’ll die. No wonder Ganglion Reef is the liquid, liminal domain they made for themselves to dwell in.


The debut from the UK melodic hardcore band shows their passion for experimentation in a genre where that is desperately welcome.

The Language of Injury

Ithaca’s debut is an invitation for whiplash. The young, politically principled band vault between genres like they’re playing a game, and sonic homogeneity is lava. Conflicting elements butt up against one another as the band pits noise rock against post-rock, metalcore against doom, and expectations of what a metalcore band should sound like against the reality of what they’re doing.
A passion for experimentation underpins every move they make here, and the band’s origin story—that the members came together “out of a mutual love of metallic hardcore but despair at its lack of ambition”—checks out, manifesting in each unexpected note or unfamiliar pairing. A ghostly choir rising above ’90s screamo riffs? Sure. The title track’s marriage of noodly noise rock and stadium crust? You got it. A seamless hybrid of Oathbreaker and Poison the Well with a feminist, anti-Nazi bent? Ithaca’s on the case.
There’s been a good deal of hype around Ithaca already. They’ve landed in an angular, unexpected sweet spot in the UK’s metallic hardcore world, rubbing elbows with forward-thinking bands like Svalbard, Employed to Serve, and Venom Prison—with whom the band, which features members of Arab and Indian descent, share a drive to foster inclusivity and diversity within the extreme music scene. At the same time, they take huge chunks of inspiration from vintage ’90s screamo and noise rock, forcing a meeting of new and old that could have gone direly wrong but has instead found an eager audience. Overall, there's a real lushness to the music, punctuated by skronky jabs of dissonance that add a tense dynamism. It’s also very unpredictable, which is a nice thing for a metalcore band to be in 2019.
Buzz aside, the band’s true strength lies in their ability to employ a diversity of tactics both politically and musically to hammer their end-time message home. Opening track “New Covenant” is a battle cry, and couches its beatdown breakdowns within expanses of frantic picking, spacious post-rock, and vocal misery. “Impulse Crush” ramps up the urgency with squeals of discordant noise rock and crystal-clear tremolo picking, anchoring more triumphant moments like the mid-song break with chugga-chugga aggression. “Secret Space” continues in that vein, breaking through a surge of dizzying, technical guitar work and epic swells of grandiose melody with a heart-rending mid-song acoustic passage that sees versatile vocalist Djamila Azzouz push her voice to the brink. That voice is one of the band’s strongest assets, which makes it even more of a shame when the production occasionally allows it to get unintentionally buried under the sound and the fury (“Better Abuse,” for example, could have hit even harder had the vocals been brought to the fore).
For an album that barely breaks the 30-minute mark, The Language of Injury asks a lot. That progressive, boundary-pushing sensibility informs every moment of the release, which is less pit-ready than anthemic. Some songs, like “Youth Vs Wisdom,” show signs of straightforwardness, but Ithaca’s obsession with progression would never allow for something so boring. “Slow Negative Order” comes drenched in a brittle, shining atmosphere that highlights its lovely vocal harmonies; juxtaposed with Azzouz’s feral bark and juddering guitars, the melodicism ebbs and flows into the relentlessly pretty instrumental interlude “No Translation.”
This soft-to-loud, pretty-to-harsh tactic is a classic entry in the melodic metalcore playbook, and is one that the band pulls out multiple times on The Language of Injury, notably on the soaring “Gilt” and perhaps most effectively in the final salvo, “Better Abuse.” The song begins with a simple melodic riff suspended in waves of reverb, adds in a set of clean vocals dripping in almost gothic splendor, explodes into combative noise, and then ends the album in uncomfortable near-silence. Thankfully, Ithaca keep their listeners guessing until the absolute last second of this album.


Cam & China, twins from Inglewood and veterans of L.A.’s jerkin’ scene, are uniquely attuned to one another,  resulting in some of the year’s fiercest, most viscerally exciting rap music.

Cam & China

The rap duo is a delicate balance. OutKast staked itself on the player-and-the-poet duality; André and Antwan transcended because each one could animate either side of the split. When Phife Dawg passed away this year, the eulogies rightly pointed out that the five-foot assassin kept Q-Tip tethered to Queens, to Earth. But the duo doesn’t have to be a down-the-middle yin and yang (see: the Ying Yang Twins). Havoc and Prodigy made Mobb Deep great by offering slight variations on the same dead-eyed fatalism. More recently, the Clipse became critical darlings despite Pusha T and Malice trafficking in virtually identical cadences and points of view.
Cam & China, twins from Inglewood and veterans of L.A.’s jerkin’ scene, carry the Mobb/Clipse approach to its natural conclusion. Even among those who share DNA, they’re uniquely attuned to one another, and their minds are melding to make some of the year’s fiercest, most viscerally exciting rap music. Their debut EP is a reintroduction of sorts: At the end of the 2000s, Cam & China—then Cammy and Cece—accounted for two-fifths of the Pink Dollaz, one of jerk’s most exciting acts. The Dollaz were making slick, provocative songs like “I’m Tasty” and accruing fans rapidly. But the group dissolved as the style itself slowed.
Two summers ago, under the new monikers, Cam & China dropped “Do Dat,” a furious warning shot. It came out just a handful of months after YG’s My Krazy Life; where their former jerkin’ peer folded pieces of New Orleans and the Bay into his sound, “Do Dat” sounded as if it had been incubating and mutating strictly in Los Angeles County. And if Still Brazy* *synthesizes decades of West coast rap production, *Cam & China *strips jerkin’ for parts and refashions it into something bolder, heavier, and more menacing.
But first, some misdirection: opener “Extravagant” owes as much to Atlanta as it does to L.A., like if Playaz Circle slinked into 2016 with too much Gucci on. The huge, staccato hook is designed to rattle around in your car and your skull; vocals pan and bunch up and dart across the beat. It’s virtuosic.
The thematic center of the EP is the three-song run that starts with “In My Feelings.” It opens with “It’s about the power of the tongue” and unspools from there; it’s a song about sex that’s really about a slow-burning power struggle. As writers, Cam & China touch on an interesting divide, treating sex as a purely physical venture, but lingering on the more ephemeral parts of romance. So the verses on “Feelings” have you fucking on the floor and in the kitchen, but the airy hook gestures at the sort of mutual attraction that ends up being left unspoken.
A remix of “Run Up,” the duo’s massive local hit from last year, appears here with a new verse from Compton’s AD. It’s lean and kinetic as ever, and shows just how technically adept the twins got in their time out of the spotlight. The layered bridge tacked onto the end bends a Master P “Uuuuhhhhhhhhh!” into a pointed threat that whole high school classes could sing along to. But for all of Cam & China’s threats and sneers, the runaway highlight is the closer, “We Gon Make It,” which grapples with their career aspirations. It teeters between certainty and desperation, the way your ego probably does when you’re sketching out your own five-year plan. The difference is you could never rap this well.


Screaming Females' new Rose Mountain refines the guitar rock trio's grotesque side in order to form the group's most deliberate music yet.

Rose Mountain

Screaming Females' 2012 album, Ugly, was a brazen arrangement of squeals, wails, and howls. Their new Rose Mountain, like the title suggests, pretties up the guitar rock trio's grotesque side. Since Ugly, Screaming Females have reworked their songwriting process, poring over the nuts and bolts of each composition. Marissa Paternoster, the band's vocalist and guitarist, also spent months fighting off a nasty bout of mono, and chronicled the sterile boredom of doctor's offices in a slew of new songs. Rose Mountain might be Screaming Females' most deliberate music yet, but it lacks much of their former wildness.
What it's missing in ragged edges, the band's sixth studio album makes up for in force. Matt Bayles produced the record, and part of the change in mood comes from the strange way he slots Paternoster's guitar. He's more of a metal guy, having worked with Mastodon, Isis, and Russian Circles; in his hands, Screaming Females' frayed chords clump up into solid blocks. Rather than a backbone, King Mike's basslines feel more like walls enclosing the whole sound into a smaller space. At times, the songs sound choked by the professionalism of their own treatment.
Though her voice falls lower in the mix this time, Paternoster still pounds home powerhouses like "Empty Head", whose chorus packs a blunt and heavy punch. But she's dropped the sneer on the edge of her words. On Ugly's "Rotten Apple", she sings the line "I'm a rotten apple" six times at every chorus, and each one feels bound up in a new irony. Her singing remains skilled and idiosyncratic, but on Rose Mountain, she plays things straight. Even her lyrics lose some of their sense of play; on "Wishing Well", Paternoster imagines the titular change receptacle as a portal straight to hell, a clunky image compared to, say, Kim Deal's lean, evocative turn of phrase ("spitting in a wishing well") on "Cannonball".
Even when Rose Mountain addresses sickness directly, its tone keeps closer to the ennui of a waiting room thick with the smell of hand sanitizer than the stifled pain of a blood draw in the exam room. On "Ripe", Paternoster sings, "Peel the skin raw/ Pinch till the feeling's gone," while the instrumentation around her—the stifled distortion, the clipped drums—sounds more numbing than painful.
They're still young, but Screaming Females have carved out their own corner in this century's take on guitar rock. It's hard to fault them for going clean, but it's easy to miss the happy accidents they stumbled upon when they weren't so worried about keeping within the lines. For an album about how bodies can betray us with their chaos, Rose Mountain sounds remarkably groomed.


The 21-year-old Portland rapper isn’t doing anything all that new, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.

2 Alivë

Yeat is a white rapper in his early 20s from Portland who questionably wears turbans, uses umlauts in his song titles for no reason, and is trying super hard to make lingo like “luh” and “twizzy” happen. He hit the TikTok lottery last summer with one line on “Gët Busy”: “This song already was turnt, but here’s a bell,” followed by what sounds like a gong being hit with a sledgehammer. It was the catalyst in skyrocketing Yeat from toiling away in the underground to being signed by Zack Bia, a so-called “cool” influencer.
I know this all sounds incredibly corny but hear me out. Unlike the usual white rapper advertised as the next big thing, Yeat doesn’t feel like he was handpicked and molded by some deep-pocketed record label (see: The Kid Laroi). For a while, he experimented with his blurry AutoTuned-soaked delivery full of screwball melodic touches built off Young Thug and the YSL camp as a minor member of the now-disbanded SoundCloud collective Slayworld. Yes, his music often leaves me with the feeling of something I’ve heard done better before, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.
2 Alivë, the polished sequel to the first of three full-length projects he released last year, has that quality. It’s hard to highlight standout tracks, instead, it’s the moments that cut through the vibescape, like his Travis-like AutoTuned hoots on “Poppin.” Or when he whistles, burbles his lips, and pitches up his vocals like a digicore artist in the background of “On tha linë.” Or how he snarls on “Jump” over a beat where the drop hits like the finale of a firework show. Or the nearly two-minute blustering flow smack in the middle of “Rollin,” interrupted by a line that would make early 2000s Juelz Santana proud: “Osama Bin Laden my bro.”
I do wish the lyrics mattered more. It’s not to say that he needs to rap about something other than being zooted out of his mind, but the only lines that really stick are because I’m thinking why the hell did he just say that. (For example the absurdly dark: “Off the perc I can’t walk at all, paraplegic,” on “Doublë.”) Like during Future’s Monster to DS2 run, it wasn’t just that he was numbing himself with Percocets and molly, it was the way that the numbness fucked everything up in different ways. Or even Playboi Carti on “Teen X,” a song about being extremely faded, is set off by the exasperatedly delivered line, “I just broke up with my bitch.” Even in contrast to “I just broke up with my bitch,” Yeat’s lyrics are too vague.
But to harp on lyrics isn’t exactly the point of Yeat. Not everything needs to be spelled out anyway, sometimes words don’t do a feeling justice. 2 Alivë is about how big and loud it is, a production style that has been labeled “rage.” Though this production trend is retooled from 2010s Atlanta, whether that be the more eccentric instrumentals in the catalog of Mike WiLL Made-It, or the business-under-the-percussion you can find on some of Dun Deal or C4’s beats on 1017 Thug, or 2015 Metro Boomin and Southside, who were basically soundtracking a futuristic doomsday. Those beats are more exciting, but it’s interesting that Yeat’s idea of expanding is to work his way deeper into that sound instead of searching for influences outside of the genre. Yet it leads me to my feelings about 2 Alivë in general: It’s pretty good fun but the small details prevent it from being that time-stopping moment it wants to be.


Recorded over two years, the up-and-coming Berkeley rapper’s debut is artfully subtle. Few rappers can say so much with so little.

Koran Streets: You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album)

You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album)

The sweet, effortless musicality of Koran Streets' songs make them easy to enjoy. But his work rewards close listening because of how the 26-year-old Berkeley, Calif. rapper conveys intensity through the unique, subtle artfulness of his narrative style. There’s an internal logic, a 360-degree consistency to his work, the byproduct of an auteur who has marshaled all the tools at his disposal to convey his story in the most compelling possible fashion. It was an approach he pioneered on his U.Know.I.Got.It mixtape series and perfected on 2016’s underrecognized debut You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album), which was recorded over the course of two years. Newly released as a “Deluxe Edition” with new cover art and three appended bonus tracks, Koran Streets’ debut has a more refined, well-defined artistic vision than even the most celebrated contemporary hip-hop.
He was homeless as a child before his family settled in Berkeley. Early in his teenage years, he was badly burned in a “freak accident,” spent six months in a coma, and received multiple skin grafts. His mother, Ayodele Nzinga, was also the founder of a small Bay Area theater company, and he and his six siblings grew up acting. (Koran Streets has since appeared in critically acclaimed independent films Licks and Kicks.) His past and present were spilled across a run of underground mixtapes dating back several years, where he developed an ear for hip-hop’s seductive textural possibilities. On You.Know.I.Got.It, it’s Koran Streets’ distinct sound that makes each track feel of-a-piece. The beats build mainly on a thumping Bay Area template, but he distinguishes the album by opting for pillow-soft synthesizers polished to a sleek finish. An archetypal example is “Struggle,” which recognizes the potential for an infinite loop in the cool sigh of the intro to Cherrelle’s ’80s R&B song “Everything I Miss At Home.”
Atop these satiny canvases, he layers his choruses with a heavy dose of imprecise overdubs and his own “You know I got it” and “Streets!” audio drops. This verbal cacophony gives a rattle to the image, like watching the rearview mirror vibrate when the bass kicks. In this way, his rapping also serves as a center of gravity, so much so that the beats feel like they were laid against his verses rather than the other way around, the drums yoked to his vocals. The contrast between the soft-focus production and this echoing vocal cloud is magnetizing. Yet the cleverness of this approach, essential as it is to the album’s success, takes a subordinate role, drawing listeners in only to orient them around the visceral stories at the center of each song.
Few rappers say so much with so little; where others rely on ornamental tricks, piling syllables up like so many blankets in a humid summer season, Koran Streets’ lyrics have an austere directness which captivates because of his devotion first and foremost to the gesture—each line fits the idea like a hotel sheet. Attempting to capture the exact substance of this work is a slippery task; it’s not the lyrics, not flows, not vocals, moral, or “message.” Rather it’s the primacy and strength of the connective tissue between each of these more concrete qualities, the sense of coherence which bonds them to each other and allows each piece to reinforce the power of the others.
So far, Koran Streets hasn't had the kind of virality that mints “street rap” stars of today, and his lack of an experimental pedigree or explicit political focus keep him from appealing to the audience who like  “good hip-hop—not like that commercial stuff.” Instead, he embraces the grammar of hip-hop’s pathologized center, with song titles like “Struggle,” “Hard,” and “Ima Thug” and concepts that revolve around a street soldier stuck in the local drug game. He seems uninterested in pushing away from the genre’s tropes in part, Occam’s Razor suggests, because it still relates to his life. That he reinvigorates what some deem “clichés” is a credit to the narrative particulars of style and story, a deeply personal approach that relies on contrasting its quotidian setting with monumental emotions.
His ability to craft novel experiences from these commonplace tropes can be revelatory; witness newly-added bonus track “Real Money,” where Koran Streets dreams of a life in which he is making a lot more money. This is, of course, one of the most conventional hip-hop saws existent. Yet his proximity to poverty is conveyed in such palpable terms throughout the album (“So many households I done slept on the floor!”) that the emotional stakes have been dramatically heightened; when he pleads, “Just a little longer, let me please not open my eyes,” the effect is devastating. It’s not poverty-porn, it’s an anchor for a wide breadth of experiences that grants equal power to biting, comic lines like this one, moments earlier: “Attend the event, even if it’s weak, it’s the shit, cause a nigga rich.”
The way he pulls grand emotions from the linchpin of realism is epitomized on the album’s scene-setting centerpiece, the lushly-produced “Mama House.” The familiar, hyper-local setting is transformed into a world-sized stage. His lyrics have an elemental simplicity, directed towards straightforward stories which gain power in the contrast between his plainspoken poetics and their implied emotional content, the surging production, and the purposeful determination of his rap style:

In front of mama house selling till it’s all gone
In front of mama’s house hurtin’ cause my dog gone
In front the corner store trynna get rich homie
Don’t snitch homie, I’m just trynna find my niche homie

There’s no wordplay, no efforts at distancing through abstraction. Yet this austere style shouldn’t be confused with old romanticized clichés of “raw emotion,” where the artist’s expressiveness breaks against the strictures of technology or songcraft, letting the blues seep out through the flaws in his primitive approach. Koran Streets’ narrative style is one of purposeful economy, the effect of having stripped his style down to its most urgent pieces. This consistency is a product of experience, an inner artistic confidence that refused to be boxed in by the opportunities presented to him, and a vision which seeks to create a world that makes sense from the raw material of a difficult life.