The reissue of Julee Cruise’s second album, featuring David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, follows the singer on her dizzying dream-pop trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the same coin.

The Voice of Love

Julee Cruise may not have gotten famous exactly, but in the nearly three decades since her debut, she’s heard traces of herself in other female singers: “They sing like sexy baby girls,” she noted in a 2014 interview. Cruise didn’t always sing that way. Before meeting David Lynch through his go-to composer, Angelo Badalamenti, the Iowa-born singer had a big, belting musical theater voice; Badalamenti, who’d met Cruise on the set of a Greenwich Village production he’d written, doubted she could fit the bill when Lynch needed an airy, Elizabeth-Fraser-of-Cocteau-Twins kind of voice for Blue Velvet’s main theme. But Cruise surprised him, restraining her delivery by imagining she was the soloist in a boy’s choir. Lynch directed her to sing like an angel; later in their collaborative relationship, he advised her to sing as though she were on the brink of orgasm.
And so, alongside Lynch and Badalamenti, Cruise was creatively reborn, seeming to arrive Birth of Venus-style by an otherworldly spotlight onto a dark stage. Her first album, Floating Into the Night, arrived in 1989, with lyrics written by Lynch and arrangements by Badalamenti. But her breakthrough came the following year with the premiere of “Twin Peaks”; on stage at the Roadhouse near the end of the pilot episode, Cruise performed “Falling” and “The Nightingale,” two weightless, transportive dream pop songs from her debut album. In black leather with cherry-red lips and nails, she gave the impression of an angel who’d awoken on earth on the back of a stranger’s Harley Davidson. In the rare moments she opened her eyes, her gaze drifted longingly above the audience towards somewhere unreachable in the distance.
Cruise’s best-known songs appear on that first album; “Falling” even cracked the Billboard charts, a rarity for a song from a television soundtrack. Its follow-up, 1993’s The Voice of Love, never quite achieved the same cult status. But its 25-year anniversary reissue via Sacred Bones makes a case for the album as, if not as vital as her debut, a captivating chapter in her beguiling and sometimes confusing catalog. (Cruise’s subsequent albums—2002’s The Art of Being a Girl and 2011’s My Secret Life—depart from Badalamenti’s jukebox noir to venture into some of the strangest trip-hop I have ever heard.) Floating Into the Night dealt mostly with love’s power to stun, sending Cruise down a rabbit hole of desire. The Voice of Love follows this dizzying trajectory, where love and loss are flip sides of the coin—in Cruise’s world, it is love’s fleeting nature that gives it meaning.
The Voice of Love is filled with these sorts of doomed Cinderella moments, where romantic connections burn brightly for a night and then fade into memories. “This Is Our Night,” with its loping reggae guitar chords, is one of the least-expected diversions in Cruise’s early career: picture a David Lynch interpretation of “The Tide Is High” and you’re halfway there. But where the title suggests a triumphant love story, Cruise wonders in her haunted falsetto: “When all my days are wanting you/When all your days are wanting me/Why can’t it ever be?” Love is a space to drift through, a prelude to mourning. On “Until the End of the World,” a sedated, droning take on ’50s rock with dramatic, lurching drums, it’s not the love itself that is made to last, Cruise sings, but the lingering dream of it.
There are moments of levity, too. On the narcotic doo-wop of “Movin’ in on You,” Cruise’s deliriously overdubbed vocals warn a love interest that she’s going to steal him from his current girlfriend, and “Kool Kat Walk” is a hilariously weird cat-and-mouse game between Cruise, two women named Betsy and Susan, and a mysterious character called Kool Kat who appears to be fucking everyone involved. But for the most part, the mood is dark and disorienting: “She Would Die For Love,” which samples the main theme of “Twin Peaks”’ prequel film Fire Walk With Me, features Cruise singing as if lost in the deep woods. “Up in Flames” turns the tiptoeing-down-the-stairs jazz of Badalamenti’s “Freshly Squeezed” into haunted drone, with distant police sirens and quick sprays of gunfire. It’s a bit of a queasy listen, but it suits the mood: “I feel for you, baby, like a bomb,” Cruise whimpers. “Now my love’s gone up in flames.”
The Voice of Love’s most transcendent moment is something of a spiritual follow-up to “Mysteries of Love,” the Blue Velvet theme that first brought Cruise and Lynch and Badalamenti together. But where that song was lit by the clarifying glow of love, “Questions in a World of Blue” deals with its aftermath: “How can love die? Was it me? Was it you?” Cruise pleads to someone who isn’t there. Badalamenti’s arrangement feels unbearably weightless in contrast, a funeral song that drifts towards heaven. Cruise performs the song, eyes closed, during Fire Walk With Me, illuminated in the dark Roadhouse by an unearthly blue light. As Laura Palmer—whose days we know are numbered, as she herself knows—witnesses the scene, she begins to sob, as though she’s just heard a voice from another world.


The San Diego artist incorporates a grungy alt-rock influence into his grinding industrial music, revealing a tuneful, human side to his work.

Krüller

Though his riffy, theatrical drone music is admired by many noise and experimental music fans, Tristan Shone, aka Author & Punisher, is by all rights a metal act. His songs grind with industry and groan with doom; he chestily shrieks while torturing raw signals until they sound like an electric guitar’s night terrors. The addition of actual guitars to Stone’s abstract electronics on his latest album, Krüller,  should only strengthen the metal vibe. But friends, as Shone’s fellow teen of the 1990s, I know an alt-rock record when I hear one, and this toweringly tuneful, neurologically thrilling, and, once in a while, just slightly corny music sounds as much like Alice in Chains as it does Godflesh, Throbbing Gristle, or even Nine Inch Nails.
Shone hardly ever discusses his influences, though. The interview time usually runs out while he’s still trying to describe how his music works. At root, he uses the same instruments as other electronic musicians: MIDI signals, frequency oscillators, Ableton Live. But, drawing on a professional and academic background in mechanical engineering and sculpture, he designs and builds his own unique controllers, which he calls drone and dub machines and which look a bit like heavy-duty metal torture devices.  (His first commercial line of bespoke audio gear appears with Krüller.)
Many of Shone’s machines are wearable, encumbering his limbs or hindering his efforts in some way, such as a pair of motorized throttles that, when pushed, can push back against him. With masks and trachea microphones capturing his desperate vocalizations, he portrays the plight of the individual against overwhelming forces. It makes for unforgettable stagecraft, like a noise drama in which a man struggling to become a cyborg plays a cyborg struggling to remain a man. But it’s also inextricable from the recorded music and how it gets such rough hands on abstractions like resistance, struggle, exhaustion, and transcendence.
Tuneful vocals and traditional structures have always lurked in Shone’s music, moments of order ruffling the chaos of heavy textures and combustive dynamics. They started to grow pronounced on 2018’s Beastland, and they come to a head on Krüller. The first and best song, “Drone Carrying Dread,” has a rather deceptive title, being an eight-minute anthem of slow, tattered joy. Shone winds a silver staircase of guitar sustain around endlessly rising columns of gleaming shoegaze. It sounds at first like My Bloody Valentine but soon intensifies with violently pounding snares and multi-tracked vocals that switch from a sneer to a growl in the span of a leapt octave. A fine old grunge device, it occurs frequently on a record that seems to take the exact moment when Layne Staley bites into the chorus of “Would?” as its guiding light.
It’s true that doom and grunge have the same roots in Black Sabbath, and the ’90s rock connection might seem overstated when you’re listening to something like “Incinerator,” an industrial sludge furnace with metal screams and countless detours, but even that song admits a perfectly Stone Temple Pilots bit of wasted pastoralia. (It starts just before 5:00, if you’re curious.) And did I mention that the rhythm section of Tool shows up on the marauding “Centurion,” which perhaps sounds a little too late-’90s, a hair too close to a nu-metal Chad Kroeger, for total comfort? That’s the dangerous allure of this big-lunged, palate-pinching style of singing; there’s a fine line between Eddie Vedder and the legions of anodyne imitators.
One the best songs, “Maiden Star,” shares a more vulnerable, natural vocal timbre with “Drone Carrying Dread.” The overriding aggression of the rhythm relaxes into more graceful drapes and swags, with shades of Sunny Day Real Estate, yet the tempo is whipped around by unseen rotors. It’s an example of the uncanny effects Shone’s interface wreaks upon his music, which is also perceptible in the embalmed soul of “Glorybox” and the infernal EDM of “Blacksmith.” If Krüller is warmed by a nostalgic human past, it also bears the chill of a posthuman future where the machines grind on without us, an intimation that seeps from his music like a corrosive fluid and lends these songs a bitter, heroic weight.

Buy: Rough Trade


This is a relatively low-key offering, compared to the prolific synth musician’s psychedelic standards, but it still abounds with a wealth of crunchy textures and trippy atmospheres.

M. Geddes Gengras: Expressed, I Noticed Silence

Expressed, I Noticed Silence

A whiff of incense, if not something skunkier, seems to emanate from every piece of music M. Geddes Gengras makes. The prolific synth artist came up as a collaborator of acts like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, and Robedoor, then spent 11 years amassing a vast solo discography that touches on everything from heady dub to shimmering drone. After spending a good chunk of his career living in Los Angeles, he recently relocated to the upstate town of Hudson, New York. The comparatively low-key vibes of Gengras’ new home are palpable on his latest album, Expressed, I Noticed Silence, but Gengras’ music still abounds with a wealth of crunchy textures and trippy atmospheres.
A tie-dyed sensibility consistently attaches itself to Gengras’ sound, but the colors of his metaphorical splotches change considerably with each record. If the hues of 2020’s Time Makes Nothing Happen seemed to be applied in murky purple and green ink, Expressed, I Noticed Silence’s palette is much crisper. As a whole, the album dwells in the space between blissed-out new age and an especially celestial strain of krautrock. On opener “Discovered Endstate Always,” Gengras embraces a few simple chords, peppering in some soggy pseudo-woodwinds and electric-guitar flourishes to keep things diverse. “The Harmony and Also I Became Square Movement” features minimal fluorescent leads that peek out from behind overcast yet angelic pads. Meanwhile, on “Give as Proportion,” FM synth melodies and pristine arpeggios are underlined by phased-out washes of sound and subtle, bendy string work.
The list of instrumental tones Gengras has employed over the course of his career is robust and not without its share of oddities, from dissonant modular synthesizers to warbled samples of bagpipes. His brother Cyrus (who has played with Jessica Pratt, Kevin Morby, and Amen Dunes) contributes guitar and bass, but otherwise, the inventory of gear used to bring this one to life is surprisingly concise: just a Moog Sub Phatty, Elektron drum machine, and a few modular gizmos. You can hear the effect of Gengras’ tightly contained rig in the music’s stripped-back qualities. It’s especially apparent on chilly closer “Deadly, Holy, Rough,” which is carried by eerie clacking noises and the esoteric twinkle of cascading metal. The album’s arrangements are more compact than many of those on previous records, but he still managed to keep things otherworldly when laying the album to tape.
Gengras’ cuts tend to be pretty long—Light Pipe, from 2018, stretches its 10 tracks across nearly two and a half hours—which makes Expressed, I Noticed Silence’s brevity unusual. The most drawn-out piece, “A Rhythmic Stillness as Root Had I,” barely exceeds the seven-minute mark. The fact that someone could comfortably digest the entirety of this 38-minute release in a single sitting is a welcome change of pace, and one that keeps this among his most approachable records. Expressed, I Noticed Silence might not be Gengras’ most puzzling or formidable album. But these polished soundscapes make a good place to start exploring the treasures in his daunting catalog.


The South Carolina vocalist and producer presents an attainable vision of R&B on his latest EP, an unpretentious suite of pure bedroom music greater than the sum of its vibes.

Love Suite

For years, R&B was the most aspirational of American music. Unlike the ardent family men of ‘70s and ‘80s soul, the leading male voices of ‘90s and ‘00s R&B were at once doting monogamists and incorrigible philanderers, forever vacillating between intimate ballads and sheepish apologies. In their lusty accounts, sex was a feat of Olympian athleticism; even the d-listers had abs like Jaheim and hairlines like Ginuwine. By 2012, the proliferation of home recording equipment and Frank Ocean’s more unassuming sound had helped lower the barriers to entry, but where Ocean’s music brimmed with piercing details, his chill-’n-B descendants modeled ambivalent restraint. Sure, every The-Dream album sounded like a penthouse with a waterbed on a rotating platform, but at least he went for it—Leven Kali and dvsn mostly sound like they have better things to do.
On his latest EP Love Suite, the South Carolina vocalist and producer Contour aims to split the difference with unpretentious R&B that’s greater than the sum of its vibes. On past outings, the Charleston native has tinkered with everything from claustrophobic psych-pop to instrumental hip-hop, but Love Suite is pure bedroom music built around spare instrumentation and single-tracked vocal melodies. Contour’s keyboard synths provide a jazzy sparkle, but the EP’s warmth lies in its juxtaposition of lively stand-up basslines with programmed drum patterns. On “Pour,” the upbeat bass and chopped vocal sample make for a Brown Sugar-flavored looseness, and “Song for Me” features a bright vocal layered over a murky rhythm arrangement. The percussion lends structure without any of the 808’s domineering heft—it all goes down pretty smooth.
Contour sings with a throaty inflection somewhere in the neighborhood of Khalid and Ty Dolla $ign, and his coolly poetic lyrics are written for Love Suite’s audience of one. On the highlight “Labor Of,” he poses some big-picture questions (“Will the labor of love save us? Or will the current of hearts take us?”), but Blue November’s well-placed rap verse maintains the song’s relaxed aplomb. In a few instances, soupy vocal effects reduce Contour’s voice to just another instrument in the mix, and his performance isn’t animated enough to seize back the spotlight. Although the EP is well-sequenced, its moments of confession and conflict are few and fleeting.
Part of the reason is that the songs themselves lack trajectory, Contour prioritizing roomy grooves over verse-hook-bridge framework. Love Suite’s songs range from one to five minutes in length, but the effect is largely the same—the tracks quickly establish static moods without any climaxes or comedowns to speak of. Still, the moods are intricate and richly evoked, and although Contour’s reserved deportment can make his ballads somewhat enigmatic, it also ensures that they never lapse into bitterness. On the penultimate song “Outmyface,” the jittery drum pattern and pulsing keys are matched by the vocal’s heavy reverb, and the disconsolate opening verse builds toward a dramatic string interlude. Even at its most laidback, Love Suite’s sparks are dizzying, its shadows suggestive of tantalizing possibility, and Contour’s vision of love feels, well, attainable.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Already an all-time-great shit talker, the Detroit rapper reaffirms his reputation as a fun-loving rapper who repurposes familiar topics in new forms.

Bartier Bounty

Sada Baby will pull his gun and get ignorant, and he will fuck the party up with his dance moves. He gyrates exuberantly in every music video he’s ever done, and even if he’s never bearing firearms in them, his bars at least suggest there’s always one within reach. The Detroit rapper has an affinity for bringing flair to his strong-arm tactics with absurd turns of phrase. “I will do a Harlem Shake with the Draco,” he raps in the waning moments of his thrilling new mixtape, Bartier Bounty. “I will shoot the investigator/Get the case closed.” By that point, he’s left a rampaged city in his wake.
Sada Baby is already an all-time-great shit talker, a charming scoundrel who makes the most debased jeers seem delightful, channeling a Bay Area bounce through Cash Money-era flamboyance. Bartier Bounty doubles down on fun-loving gangsta shit, at times problematic but perpetually irresistible. In the tape’s thumpers, accented by key-laced beats that are quintessential Detroit, he browbeats every single person that steps into his orbit. It’s substantial bully rap.
At just under an hour, Bartier Bounty is nearly seamless. There are 20 songs, though many are a single verse bookended by hooks. Still, Sada has a way of making one verse feel like an event. He seems under the thrall of his own mythology and entirely facetious at the same time. He raps about his .40 making someone do the Carlton Dance in a voice that is equal parts cartoonish and menacing, intentionally obscuring his exact mix of glibness and outrage. “Got my smart nigga with me, he aware of all apps/Pull up to a nigga crib fuckin’ with the Google Maps,” he quips on “Lunch Room,” casting an iPhone-using wingman as some black-hatted hacker in “CSI:Cyber.” The scenarios he presents and the ways he presents them become caricature.
Sada turns references about off-brand NBA players like DeMar DeRozan, Lonzo Ball, and Lauri Markkanen into gun punches. He’s masterful at flipping obscure similes into wisecracks (“Big brick of white look like Brock Lesnar/Got tester sliding everywhere ’cause I’m off-tether”), but he’s even better at presenting well-worn rap ideas in new forms. Doing Percocet and Actavis, wielding semi-auto pistols, and pinning the locations of crosstown rivals for future bad intentions: These are things you can hear in any Future song or Quavo verse, but Sada is constantly rearranging the context to euphoric ends. His sequences are simple but vivid: “FN turn the bar into a block party,” or “Got that chopper with the straps, look like I’m parachutin’.”
Keeping a relentless pace through Bartier Bounty, Sada slingshots through verses like the boys of SOB X RBE but syntactically follows Rakim’s grid philosophy, measuring each phrase perfectly to fit inside a given meter. His performances imply a measure of control that makes his writing that much more emphatic. The versatility is dizzying: His howled chants damn near jump out of the mix on “Mutombo,” yet he coos like a bare-chested R&B bad boy for “Aunty Melody.” He raps “Unkle Drew” with a gruff murmur that’s like an angry whisper: “Control the stage so good they comparin’ me to Elvis/But I ain’t like that nigga ’cause that nigga ain’t never sell shit,” he snarls with such insistence it seems plausible. Elvis, a hip-thrusting icon in his own right, was, of course, a great seller. But as with the rest of Bartier Bounty, it’s telling that Sada Baby can even make the joke, let alone sell it. In his songs, on his terms, on his turf, even a King can barely measure up against this gusto.


The rap zeitgeist has mostly left Makonnen behind, but his first major-label release in years shows a taste of the pop star he could still become.

M3

For a glorious moment in 2014, every other week seemed to bring a new viral hip-hop hit. It began with Bobby Shmurda, ended with Denzel Curry’s “Ultimate,” and O.T. Genasis and OG Maco happened somewhere in between. The songs themselves didn’t matter as much as the fact that everyone knew them, and everyone knew them because of the beloved six-second video app Vine (RIP).
Time hasn’t been kind to “Watch Me” or “Hit the Quan,” but if a one-hit wonder is remembered from this strange blip in time, let it be “Tuesday,” iLoveMakonnen’s anthem for service workers, freelance writers, and anybody else who hustles outside the confines of the normal 9-5. As hits go, it was unlikely, woozy and full of empty spaces, but it made perfect sense at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, when you and your friends were the last ones left in the club.
Makonnen was often associated with the “New Atlanta” of the mid-’00s, a wave of innovation that included everyone from Migos and Young Thug to EarthGang. Most of these artists had nothing in common with each other save for their city, but they became ambassadors for their hometown's cultural riches to the rest of the world. Atlanta is currently the fourth fastest-growing city in the country, with 600,000 new residents in the last decade, but Makonnen hasn’t quite benefited from his city’s gold rush; once the club goes up, it must come down. M3 is something of a reintroduction for Makonnen, who has not released a full-length project on a major label since 2016’s Drink More Water 6.
There’s a reason for that, one that goes beyond the normal label troubles that tend to plague rappers who seemingly emerge from nowhere. After he came out as gay on Twitter in early 2017, many of Makonnen’s previous collaborators went quiet; some, like Migos, were a little too vocal. In the lead-up to M3, Makonnen has said he feels unsupported by the hip-hop community at large due to his sexuality, even calling out Gucci Mane, the new EP’s lone guest, for not sufficiently promoting the record. At best, the industry hasn’t known what to do with Makonnen; at worst, it has actively hindered his career. It’s telling that fellow ATLien Young Thug has been celebrated for queering his wardrobe, while Makonnen has been shut out for actually being queer.
But Makonnen hasn’t been entirely absent. In the past year, he’s released two tracks with Lil Peep, “Sunlight on Your Skin” and “I’ve Been Waiting,” the latter of which features Fall Out Boy and is Makonnen’s first charting single since “Tuesday.” “I’ve Been Waiting” is perhaps the most conventional pop song of Makonnen’s career—I heard it playing a few weeks ago in a Best Buy while I considered buying AirPods—but it’s not representative of M3. “Liquid Supply Daily,” a chilled-out, guitar-driven love song, is the only other glimpse we get of this family-friendly version of Makonnen.
Elsewhere on the EP, he reverts to his more rap-intensive side, which was never his strongest. The only appearance from former comrade Drake is in the form of Tay Keith’s producer tag, which hangs uneasily over the EP’s worst track, “Money Fiend.” The song’s primary subject—flipping, selling, stacking, repeat—is one that Makonnen has put a distinctive twist on in the past. He even manages it elsewhere on this EP, like on “Shoot Shoot,” when he calls his AK-47 “cute” and compares it to a puppy sitting on his lap. But on “Money Fiend,” it feels tired and trite. Maybe it’s just Lil Peep’s influence rubbing off, but the best lines on M3 are about emotional anguish and getting fucked up to forget, like the mournfully turnt “Drunk on Saturday.” He is still a vital and strange voice, if only someone would make more room for it.
Makonnen helped reignite his city’s creative identity like few others and showed outsider artists a path to the mainstream. As repayment, he’s been left behind in the dust of condos and co-working spaces, exploited by the industry around him, and rejected by a genre that has much more work to do when it comes to sexuality and masculinity. M3 is somewhere between Straw-Ber-Rita dreams and champagne reality, but there’s a taste of the pop star Makonnen could be if the culture would only catch up to him.


The interplay between Kaito U.K. vocalist Nikki Colk and her three bandmates-- who collectively tease out hyper, occasionally erratic ...

Band Red

The interplay between Kaito U.K. vocalist Nikki Colk and her three bandmates-- who collectively tease out hyper, occasionally erratic backbeats and loads of weird, crashing melodies-- is always playfully confrontational. Colk's nonsensical lyrics are more about their visceral, phonetic sounds than any potential narratives, and that kind of terse, internal tension can be both frustrating and exhilarating all at once. To amp up the semantic agitation, Colk's mumbled delivery is also been padded by a mess of extraneous yelps and growls that, while adding texture to her band's art-punk noisescapes, usually have little-to-no affiliation with the words she's hollering.
The result is Kaito U.K.'s sophomore effort, Band Red, a record full of disorientating (but mostly thrilling) bursts: Colk barks and warbles, each of her high-strung, shrieky proclamations practically indiscernible from Dave Lake's pinched guitar zaps. It's perpetually unclear as to whether the proper reaction is to patent a new, kicky dance move or to twitch and grimace, but that question's inherent to Kaito's game, and it's a big part of what makes this record so much fun to yap along with.
Opener "Enemyline" is full of energetic guitar jabbing and unintelligible vocals, Colt and Lake's joint poking augmented by what sounds like a layer of mixed-down screams; the song flip-flops between quiet and loud (as post-Pixies bands are prone to do), but even "Enemyline"'s sparser bits are heavy with the threat of total implosion. When Kaito U.K. slip away from their blustery noisemaking, like on the excellent, organ-filled "Nothin' New", they prove themselves capable of rolling out the kinds of foggy, wide-eyed laments that can sit perfectly alongside big punk blasts. Still, the band is at its best when indulging adrenaline: "A.S.A. to Accuracy" is the record's most aggressive track, with two vague, fuzzy guitar lines fighting for supremacy, blood splattering the amps.
What ultimately saves Band Red from been-there tedium (check the ground already covered by Liliput, Erase Errata, even Deerhoof) is Kaito U.K.'s instinctual bend toward sticky melodies-- their tendency to temper their noise with surprisingly sugary pop hooks and wormy choruses is what keeps these songs from becoming pretentious or tiresome. So even if jumpy, fitful art-punk isn't particularly groundbreaking right now, Kaito U.K. are still playing the shiny pop card with previously unseen flair-- no matter how delightfully splintered Band Red can seem, there are always solid tunes lurking beneath the spits and flutters.


The debut solo LP from Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts finds him singing more intimately about love in quieter, more rustic settings. In its own peculiar way, it speaks to our current condition.

Thawing Dawn

On the cover of his debut solo album, Parquet Courts singer/guitarist Andrew Savage can be seen lounging on a bed, acoustic guitar in hand, bathed in sepia tone. Beside him is an open book—Modern Moral Philosophy—that’s nobody’s idea of a light read, and a dirty ashtray that suggests many hours spent trying to channel its ideas into song. At first glance, you could mistake it for a photo of pre-fame Bob Dylan from 1961, an intimate snapshot of a genius at work in the cozy, shabby-chic environs of an aged New York City apartment. If you asked a computer program to generate a photo for a solo singer/songwriter album, it would probably spit out something like this.
But if Thawing Dawn’s exterior presentation seems obvious compared to Parquet Courts’ gallery of cryptic collages, it proves to be no less obfuscating. As is the case with so many of his songs, nothing is ever really what it appears to be on the surface. With Parquet Courts, Savage has mastered the art of both oblique songs that prove deeply resonant, and songs that are so literal, they’re confounding. Certainly, Thawing Dawn finds Savage singing more openly and intimately about love and relationships in quieter, more rustic settings, his main band’s frantic post-punk pulse massaged into gentle piano rolls and gorgeous pedal-steel sweeps. (The smart money pegs his favorite Pavement song as “Father to a Sister of Thought.”) But it is at once the most traditional-sounding and sonically anarchic recording Savage has attempted, one that counters its countrypolitan serenades with meditative tone poems and dissonant sound-scraping. That acoustic guitar he’s holding on the cover? It’s nothing more than a photo prop.
Savage is the sort of songwriter who insulates himself from the chaos and indignities of the outside world by retreating into the comfort of his own neuroses. On Parquet Courts’ previous album, Human Performance, he wrote a song about the actual murder of two policemen in his Brooklyn neighborhood; he and co-songwriter Austin Brown also sung about the soul-crushing futility of household cleaning as if it were a Kafkaesque psychodrama. Thawing Dawn is likewise a deeply personal album that nonetheless absorbs the tremors of an unsettled, divided America—fitting for a record made by a Red State exile who lives in New York. A cavalry of Savage’s music-scene buds from Brooklyn and London (members of Woods, EZTV, Ultimate Painting, and the current iteration of Psychic TV) are charged with recreating the sounds of the South from a ruminative distance.
Savage even goes so far as to set the scene with a historical flashback that reverberates into the present. “Buffalo Calf Road” is a Southern-rock retelling of Custer’s Last Stand that reorients the narrative around Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior credited by her nation with striking the blow that knocked the U.S. army commander off his horse. But while the song is rife with period detail, the themes cataloged within—capitalist greed, resource exploitation, the displacement of Indigenous people—could very well be dispatches from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. And when the song’s heroic chorus recounts Custer’s fatal fall, it feels like a clarion call for the toppling of patriarchy. Call it the “Uncast Shadow of a Northern Myth.”
But from this widescreen, Oscar-worthy vantage, Thawing Dawn zeroes in on the minutiae and malcontent of modern life. There’s the bleary, bloodshot-visioned misfit of “Eyeballs” who’s afraid of losing his (presumably California-bound) girlfriend to “juicing” and “jogging,” or the downcast narrator of “Indian Style” who’s sending apologies by text message. On these winsome turns, Savage’s drawl works within a limited range of sing-speak, but it’s far from a blunt, deadpan instrument—it quavers with both charming self-deprecation and genuine ache. And the calmer he gets, the more heartfelt he sounds: the ambient electrical-storm crackle of the eerily still “Wild, Wild, Wild Horses” only makes his plainspoken declarations of devotion sound more resolute, like someone standing their ground in a windswept open field even as the flickers of lightning in the distance creep perilously closer.
In moments like these, Thawing Dawn, in its own peculiar way, speaks soundly to our current condition—that, in the face of all the unrelenting awfulness playing out in our newsfeeds on a daily basis (and the paralyzing sense of helplessness it engenders), all you can do is hold onto your loved ones a little tighter. Or, of course, there’s always drinking. On the epic “Ladies From Houston,” Savage slowly sashays through a series of party conversations with Leonard Cohen elegance, before talk eventually turns to a certain “televised demon” and “the sadness I feel when he pollutes the screen.” He opts to drown his despair in a discarded half-empty beer can “so it doesn’t get wasted.”
But Thawing Dawn doesn’t always navigate the world with such humility and grace: the bluesy grind “What Do I Do” alternates between existential koans and cathartic blasts of spark-shooting guitar squall, however, the song has already hammered its point three minutes into its eight-minute lurch. And the closing title track is less the album’s grand finale than its battle royale, with Savage’s mind bouncing between sentiments both personal (“I need you wildly as the blue jay needs a tune it can sing into the afternoon”) and political (“Most religion is as far from faith/As the sun is from the shadows it shapes”). Shifting abruptly between a downhome Harvest groove, solitary electric-folk serenades, a loopy piano-pounded reprise of “Eyeballs,” and a Wurlitzer-powered riff on “House of the Rising Sun,” the song is a would-be honky-prog Abbey Road suite, albeit with adjoining screws left purposely loose.
But just as the Beatles did on “The End,” Savage leaves us with a peaceful closing meta commentary: “Of all the pieces I’ve combined/Still the cruelest mixture yet/Is the softness of the thawing dawn and the hardness of regret.” Accordingly, in its wobbly balance of tender introspection and topical exposition, Thawing Dawn is a handy guide for keeping your cool as the world degenerates into a hot mess.


In the Pitchfork tradition of groundbreaking review styles, I present you with the Always- Right Critomatic album review. Simply scroll ...

Come On Die Young

In the Pitchfork tradition of groundbreaking review styles, I present you with the Always- Right Critomatic album review. Simply scroll to the review you want to read-- the opinion that you, the infallible reader, wants to hear-- and proceed. We here in the Pitchfork labs are always striving towards innovations for the future.
Pro-Mogwai:
You slip on your headphones... Guitar chords twist down from lavender skies in slithering fibers and attach to your goose- bumped skin. With each upward strum from the plaintive second album from Mogwai, these delicate cables tug you heavenward-- they're soft tugs, paced and patient. As you ascend further into the clouds you can make out the ground below you. The Scottish Highlands, God's golf course, bubbles in pillowy hills. Green grass hills filled with warm fat, feathers, and the carefully dug tunnels of fairies and elves roll to the sea, where they suddenly drop off in marble cliffs, wet from the spray of slapping waves. A storm is brewing in the distance. Thunder rumbles. Mogwai's music is weather. Its landscape, stunning in its simplicity and reduncancy. Come On Die Young develops in one long movement, a sparse symphony of indie. You can follow its pattern like a weatherman charts flows from high pressure to low pressure.
Unlike Mogwai's last album, which constantly shifted from loud loud to quiet quiet, Come On Die Young builds tension over eight and a half songs before erupting in the white noise of "Ex-Cowboy," "Chocky" and "Christmas Steps," the latter being the only respite from restraint for the riffheads. But it's the album's title track, carrying the record's only vocal, sung in soft sighs, that pulls apart your heart like string cheese, muscle fiber by muscle fiber.
Like a bottle of fine wine, Mogwai is not intended to be ingested on every humdrum day you live. It's not to be played as you drive to the Target to pick up some plastic adhesive hooks. Keep Come On Die Young on a cedar rack in a damp basement. Reserve it for thunderstorms and candlelight. Its open spaces and moments of silence are meant to be filled with raindrops and whispers of awe.
Con-Mogwai:
Fo'ckin bollocks! Where's the rock? Listening to Mogwai's Come On Die Young excites as much as toasting white bread with a magnifying glass in the sun on a partially- cloudy day. Here's the thing, if Mogwai weren't from the UK, no one would give a rat's arse about them.
I call this phenomenon the "3 Colours Red Effect," which states that any British band that plays a style of music that is completely overdone in America, but not particularly in the UK, they will achieve success in their native land. Would 3 Colours Red's brand of polished grunge sell any more than a new Gruntruck or Paw record? Call up Sony and find out. Likewise, would Mogwai's brand of third generation post- Slint instrumentals raise anyone's attention outside of those few Chicago college kids who still listen to Spiderland religiously? In the UK, Mogwai open for the Manic Street Preachers (who are amazingly big in the UK) and headline festivals. If they were from Urbana, Illinois they'd be on Quarterstick Records at best, opening for June of 44 at the Blind Pig.
Come On Die Young's most exciting track, "Christmas Steps," sounds like an unfinished Sweep the Leg Johnny song (i.e., minus the vocals, sax, more complex tempo changes, etc.), which, while pretty decent, is not enough to get you a spot opening for Everclear in the States. This is not to say that fame is an essential element to good music. I'm just pointing out that Mogwai could perhaps be the most over- hyped indie rock band in the world. There are much better bands doing the same thing from the back of vans across the US.
Young Team, Mogwai's last record, painted in bolder strokes. Feedback and riffs burst unexpectedly from beautiful melodies. I found myself hunching over the boombox waiting for Come On Die Young to develop. Then my back got sore. For an instrumental album, the playing is not mathy or complex enough to evoke interest. I mean, have you ever been to Scotland? It's constantly cloudy. Decaying industrial towns pop up in rusty clusters over barren hills. The locals drink to make their livers pop. It's not surprising Mogwai comes from this environment of incessant gloom and fog, where there's not much to do but fondly recall history and sulk.
Poorly Written, Ambiguous Indie Zine Review:
Mogwai are an instrumental band from Glasgow, Scotland. They play quiet indie rock. If you like Slint and its spin- offs, check them out.


Australia-born, Iceland-based producer creates one of the most menacing-- and rewarding-- ambient records of the past year.

By the Throat

Maybe it's By the Throat, the savagery-suggesting name of the fourth LP by Australia-born, Iceland-based producer Ben Frost, that gives the album its menacing reputation. Perhaps it's the three wolves stalking its cover, the threatening title appropriately scrawled above in a slanted, action-film font. Or it could simply be the music, which doles out new anxieties with each turn: The harsh noise and dissonant strings lashing above and around the beat of "Peter Venkman Pt. I". Or, on "Leo Needs a New Pair of Shoes", where howling wolves surround and overtake the rustle of a gentle chamber ensemble. Wolves again harmonize against the screech of a violin on "The Carpathians". From aggressive visage to animal vocals, By the Throat is, as another reviewer said, "dread-inducing music."
No equivocation necessary, By the Throat is a sinister album, full of moments that rattle cores with sound (play it loud) and sound effects (beware those wolves). But Frost's work is more than a hall of terrors: These vivid instrumentals, which seem menacing at first, also feel somehow triumphant when heard again-- new details becoming more crucial. By the Throat might frighten on the first listen, and it might shock by the 12th. But, somewhere in between, Frost-- both a compelling new musical dramaturge and arranger-- might just show you the silver lining of all these fears.
Blending musique concrète samples with exorbitant electronic production and the guest work of string quartet Amiina and composer Nico Muhly, Frost pulls ideas from sources far and wide-- his instrumental work bears traces of radio rock, heavy metal, rap. The closing triptych moves between metal, dark-wave, hip-hop, and harsh-noise influences, cycling them all through a bustle-and-collapse template that has as much to do with Aphex Twin as it does experimental composer Anton Webern. So, if "Through the Glass of the Roof" first sounds like a busted jungle track, it sounds more like black metal deliverance by the time "Through the Roof of Your Mouth" begins. That midsection, in turn, suggests Cluster, Radiohead, and Merzbow. And when it collapses into a sheet of harsh noise, Frost restores the bassline for the finale, "Through the Mouth of Your Eye". He isolates the bass, slows it down and eventually lets it drift away under cover of a few shrieking string parts, again deflecting the question of what matters most.
Nowhere is the push and pull between muted triumph and tempered menace more apparent than on "Peter Venkman Pts. I and II", named for Bill Murray's Ghostbusters character. During "Pt. I", a chorus of horns and voices rise and fall through that razing static, moving in uneven arcs through broken rhythms. In "Pt. II", though, the voices grow and overcome the noise. The horns stretch out like steady winds, sometimes foreboding and low; loops of dulcimers, banjos, and bells float over the long tones, battling through wolf growls and bass throbs to float, at last, above the horns. Frost leaves it to the audience to pick favorites and winners.
Listeners often relegate instrumental music into a series of intrinsic, reductive modifiers-- a drone is meditative, you know, and harsh noise is just mean. Post-rock is cinematic and sweeping, while finger-picked acoustic guitar music is nostalgic and ruminative. Unfairly, pop songs alone get the privilege of simultaneous juxtaposition. That is, Elliott Smith and Brian Wilson can sing heartbreaking words above bright, shining music, and we laud its bittersweet complexity. But when's the last time you heard someone argue for ecstatic noise (consider Fuck Buttons) or busy drones (see Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail)? Probably never. By the Throat demands those kinds of complex distinctions, though. Its radiance is a dark one, and its most sinister moments lead to deliberate calm.


Laura Mvula is a classically trained vocalist with an orchestral pop style all her own. Her second album is filled with her rich and moving voice and is laden with sonic surprises.

The Dreaming Room

Laura Mvula, the soul singer from Birmingham, England, doesn’t really sound like anyone but herself. She’s often compared to other neo-soul artists, both those who shared her classical training, like Amy Winehouse, and those who don’t, like Jill Scott. The shoe that fits best doesn’t quite fit anyone: Mvula shares considerable DNA with Nina Simone, most obviously in her unyielding charisma, her musical virtuosity, and her profoundly central blackness. Mvula’s voice also shares some of Simone’s rawness, as well as its facility juxtaposing vulnerability and strength. She can sound supernaturally powerful, as on the wailed hook from “Green Garden,” off her first album, 2013’s Sing to the Moon; at other times she softens into nursery melodies, sung over a twinkle. And she recalls Simone’s era most, perhaps, in her epigrammatic lyrics: “Round the mountain all God’s children run,” she repeats, in “Overcome,” a song from her spectacular new album, The Dreaming Room, lyrics that indirectly reference Maya Angelou over the unmistakable funk guitar of Nile Rodgers.
But Mvula’s sound doesn’t scan retro or referential. Rather, it feels visionary, and somewhat out of time. The Dreaming Room is a consolidation of Mvula’s dramatic instincts, her ability to burnish alienation and longing and bravery into set pieces saturated with coolly psychedelic soul. She’s a mannered artist with a degree in composition, and she favors careful and narrative orchestral accompaniment—she released a live version of Sing to the Moon, backed up by Metropole Orkest, and the London Symphony Orchestra provides backing on this album—that’s arranged more minimally and efficiently than its occasionally staggering effect would suggest. On The Dreaming Room, she and producer Troy Miller frame her voice with a slate of odd instruments; upright bass, vibraphone, strings, a jazzy celeste, all faithfully recorded—on “Show Me Love,” memorably, you can hear the pedals on her piano.
Mvula’s reach is pop, but her form is classical. She expresses broad sentiments through abstract constructions; her melodies evolve at a clip, communicating directly but rarely giving you a hook you could repeat back. The result is most recognizable as theater, an impression heightened by the way Mvula hides in plain sight as a character, singing stage-play lines like “I will always remember/Our memories and journeys/And carry them always in my heart.” The penultimate song is actual theater: Mvula impersonates her grandmother to reconstruct a phone call between them—inspired, as she told Annie Mac, by skits on Kanye West albums, which she became acquainted with only recently. The skits felt “as important as the music,” she said. On “Nan,” both she and her grandmother are weary: as Nan, Mvula says, “Write a song I can lift me spirits, write a song I can jig me foot.”
Mvula maintains some character distance for most of the album. When she does flip to her most personal, the changes are subtle, but the difference is arresting. In “Show Me Love,” one of the best tracks, she comes in on a single note and a swung, sustained phrase: “Oh God I need to belong to someone I miss the breath and the kiss I miss to wonder the future with somebody oh god show me love.” She keeps going, cycling the lines back like she’s chanting in front of an altar, letting her voice scratch and tug. Throughout the song, she changes characters by adjusting her vocal delivery: you can hear her singing about herself, to herself, then as herself, moving through time. Mvula has recently talked about panic attacks that surrounded the breakup of her marriage: the song transposes that story into something beautiful, swelling to a chorus that booms with timpani and strings.
The Dreaming Room, as a whole, replicates this sequence: uncertainty, a fugue, transcendence. Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies. It begins with a question of worth, then an exhortation to strength, then a plea for help; the fourth song is encouragement, the fifth exhaustion, the sixth attraction, the seventh a desperate and divine love, the ninth a goodbye. The album zooms out, ending heavily and happily: there’s “People,” a soothsaying song about black resilience, then “Phenomenal Woman,” a loving collective flex. It’s a pat narrative, made nearly invisible by many abrupt switches and strange moments. Ideas glimmer and then disappear; floods of major and minor emotions brush up against each other, in conflict and in concert. Memories return, too: her last album’s title track is reprised on “Renaissance Moon,” and the funk of the album-opener bubbles through halfway on “Let Me Fall,” and then again at the end. There are many resolutions in the story, and none of them final.
The result is an album that feels much longer than the 36 minutes it takes up end to end. As with a stage play, *The Dreaming Room *requires a rigorous type of attention. It pays dividends, and yet Mvula’s artistry doesn’t require this particular type of staging to show through. In 2013, SOHN and Shlohmo remixed “Green Garden” and “She,” respectively—isolating and iterating single phrases to immensely suggestive effect. Any one of the many melodic ideas in any of these restlessly blooming songs could serve as the foundation for another song, and a magnificent one. But then again, why prune a garden when it’s so formidably beautiful as-is?


Rhye is the project of singer/producer Mike Milosh and producer Robin Hannibal. Together, they make ethereal R&B focusing on world-tilting romantic experience, with gorgeous minimal production that leaves little space between the listener and the songs.

Woman

Rhye's short history is marked by serendipity and mystery. A couple of years ago, after being tapped by Hannibal's Copenhagen-based electronic group Quadron, producer/vocalist Mike Milosh flew to Denmark to work with the group and they hit it off. Eventually, Quadron producer Robin Hannibal moved to L.A. in pursuit of a woman, and Milosh coincidentally relocated there as well, and started his own serious relationship (which has since evolved into a marriage) before they reconnected musically.
From what Milosh has said, Rhye's primary goal is to pay tribute to this type of world-tilting romantic experience, but so far the pair have delivered their interpretations of this very personal phenomenon from behind a veil of secrecy. They released their first single, "Open", anonymously, and promoted it in a deliberately opaque fashion, like a YouTube video of Milosh serenading his wife with a solo piano rendition of the song, shot in a way where you can barely make him out in silhouette. Even after revealing their identities, the pair refuse to say where the group's name comes from or what it means, and their full names don't appear anywhere in the liner notes to their debut album, Woman.
Even without a face to attach it to, Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements-- each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts. Beats, basslines, and Milosh's voice are at the center of nearly all of them; although a majority of the tracks boast arrangements for horns and strings, most of these are so subtle that you might not even realize they're there until you read the liner notes afterward. The lean production leaves little space between the listener and the songs, and they feel almost touchably close.
And then of course there's Milosh's voice itself, a gorgeous and graceful countertenor that many listeners have mistaken for a woman's, especially in the days before the group unmasked themselves. He's a subtle performer, but also canny. The restraint that the pair shows in their arrangements also carries over to his singing, which rarely rises above the volume of a conversation. It's gentle, soothing, and easy to get lost in.
That voice has drawn a number of comparisons to Sade, and the music behind it only underlines those similarities. Woman offers few sounds or ways of deploying them that wouldn't be familiar to an R&B fan in the 90s, especially if they were into the British wing of the genre that at the time was focused on making gently bumping, slightly jazzy bedroom music.
And although Milosh is an outspoken critic of what he considers a trend of crass sexualization in pop music, the album still embraces the physical aspects of the romantic experience it intends to glorify. Its sensual aspects may share the same sense of self-control (it's sexy without being overtly sexual, erotic but not lascivious). As well-mannered as its carnal side may be, Woman is bound to become fodder for a tasteful boudoir soundtrack, something to be slotted next to the xx, another band Rhye's been frequently compared to.
The satin-sheets sensuality and Milosh's vocals are impressive enough that they could save an otherwise unremarkable album, but the pair are also gifted songwriters who seem even stronger as a pair than as they did separately. Woman has only one bad song on it, though it should be noted that it's seriously bad: "One of Those Summer Days" is boring and hook-free, and it not only dives face-first into the kind of sickly cloying sentimentality that they studiously avoid on the rest of the songs, but does so to the accompaniment of a drippy smooth-jazz alto sax solo.
But a good number of the remaining songs come breathtakingly close to their own kind of perfection, at least close enough that it's hard to imagine how anyone could improve them. "Open" may be so derivative of Sade that you may as well call it an homage, but considering that the closest point of comparison would be Sade's "By Your Side"-- one of the few truly perfect songs in pop history-- that's hardly a complaint. And I'd be surprised if Justin Timberlake and the members of Phoenix aren't holding their new singles up to the lithe, clean-lined modern disco sound of "The Fall" and frowning at the results.
Music about happy, successful relationships is always a tougher sell than music about romance gone bad, for the same reason that tragedies are more compelling than stories where everything works out fine for everyone. Bad fortune is naturally fascinating and contentment isn't, and unless you're in a happy, successful relationship you don't want to hear about someone else's. But Woman somehow gets to break those rules, in large part because the music itself is so easy to fall in love with.

Republic / Innovative Leisure / Loma Vista


Slutever’s Rachel Gagliardi revs up big, glittery power-pop hooks for an album devoted to getting out of your own head and staying young at heart.

Forgot About Me

In 2013, Rachel Gagliardi felt something inside her shift. While the Slutever drummer and guitarist still believed in her bratpunk band’s motto—friends first, bands second—she was craving some creative self-discovery. Gagliardi made a pact with Michelle Zauner, then playing in Little Big League, to pursue song-a-day solo projects, publishing them to a joint Tumblr account alongside gifs of TV’s stifled women letting off steam: Marceline, Betty Draper, Chibi Moon. Zauner’s turn toward indie rock spawned Japanese Breakfast; Gagliardi’s power-pop songs birthed Pouty. While Zauner’s new band took off, Gagliardi held hers close to the chest, riding out Slutever and joining members of Hole and Vivian Girls in the grunge-pop group Upset.
A decade later, Pouty’s debut studio album has finally arrived. When Gagliardi poked her head out as Pouty with 2016’s Take Me to Honey Island and 2017’s Saint Mary of the Moods EPs, she embraced spacious, fuzzy pop songs akin to early Best Coast with a rough edge. On Forgot About Me, she’s laser-focused on glossy pop-rock, leaning into big production and bigger hooks with the confidence of someone who’s tried on enough pants to shop without hitting the dressing room. Instead of playing every instrument herself like before, Gagliardi calls the shots as bandleader, directing longtime collaborators including guitarist Evan Bernard, bassist Cat Park, and drummer Jarret Nathan. The wick of solo projects is determination—to prove your ideas are worthy, to uncover hidden parts of yourself—and Gagliardi proudly watches it burn. “Denial is a heavy drug,” she sings, as if addressing her bandlocked younger self.
Much of Forgot About Me is devoted to the teen girl aesthetic, and not simply because Gagliardi has ribbons in her hair or charms on her jewelry. She sings about astrological stereotypes, all-consuming infatuation, and crying in cafes. Her sugary voice is indulgent, but she’s quick to dissolve it in the noise-pop absinthe of songs like “Kill a Feeling.” Even her one-liners could’ve been sponsored by gel pens: “Life is no way to treat the living,” “I’m warning you right now that sometimes I’m insane.” Album opener “Salty” is a splash pool of power chords, cymbal crashes, and Wurlitzer with a delightfully catchy chorus. “I bet you almost forgot about me,” Gagliardi sings, before following up with a smirk: “I’m not embarrassed.”
Gagliardi is now 34, but Pouty recognize that rock’s teen girl aesthetic has no real expiration date. Olivia Rodrigo was 18 when she plastered her face with butterfly stickers, but Slutever were 23 when they doodled on a composition notebook and Courtney Love immortalized the crying beauty queen look at 30. Whether walking the hallways of Rookie or holding her baby daughter in a Pouty music video, Gagliardi is a trusted source because her themes are universal. More than a fashion trend, the teen girl aesthetic celebrates pursuing creativity, dreaming freely, and seizing your independence. It’s trading friendship bracelets inside football stadiums regardless of age or gender. It is, as Pouty posits on “The Big Stage,” staying young at heart, even when your newborn is a living measuring stick for your own age: “Now I’m allowing myself to dream/What if you stopped standing in your own way?”
As confident as she is with the language of youthful self-expression, Gagliardi uses Pouty to question age stereotypes anyway. There’s no arrested development or prolonged immaturity in her approach. With sharp power-pop melodies and radiant production, Forgot About Me draws a line between Pouty and that dog., even trying on the alt-rock fangs of Anna Waronker’s Yellowjackets theme during its scuzzier songs. “The way you look makes me feel sick/Because I realize I’m getting older, too,” Gagliardi croons over upright bass on album closer “Underwear.” The loungey atmosphere implies that isn’t an indictment; it’s just a fact.


This lost mixtape, which has been sitting around since 2009, features Lil Wayne rapping at his effortless peak and T-Pain straining to keep up.

T-Wayne

The extremely recent past can be disorienting. Often, it’s the photo of you from six months ago that feels distant and strange, not the one from six years ago. So it is with T-Wayne, a newly unearthed collaboration between Lil Wayne and T-Pain. T-Pain shared it last week in a fit of spontaneity, eight songs that he said had been sitting around since 2009. Released into the wild in 2017, they feel less like a “lost mixtape” than like an outdated tweet in the drafts folder, one you send out by accident after five or six drinks.
By 2009, Lil Wayne had already stormed the gates of the English language and basically negotiated the terms of its complete and total surrender. The concessions he extracted were shocking: It was agreed that “dwarf” and “barf” could rhyme; that “when I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins” was a feasible thing to say in a gangsta rap song, and that it was safe, even advantageous, for rappers to call themselves “pussy monsters.” He had gone on to sell a million copies in a week of this kind of stuff with 2008’s Tha Carter III, and in 2009, rap was basically a field he had terraformed to look like the inside of his mind.
T-Pain, meanwhile, was having a rougher go. Somehow, despite having ushered AutoTune into mainstream rap; despite having partially inspired 808s & Heartbreak, he had been singled out—by Jay Z, no less—as the one guy who wasn’t allowed to use it. It’s the kind of slight that makes it hard to know how to move forward, and T-Pain’s standing never quite recovered. No matter that he produced nearly every note of his debut record Rappa Ternt Sanga, and that he was an auteur in his own right. Clowned once by Jay Z, he was now a clown forever.
He needed Wayne at the time, then, and clung to his affiliation with zeal. You can hear this clammy energy coursing through the eight songs he’s given us from these sessions. T-Pain, it should be noted, has been a convincing rapper before: His coiled and tense performance on the intro to Rappa Ternt Sanga evokes Dungeon Family-era Cee Lo. But on T-Wayne, he says innumerable terrible and regrettable things, all with disturbing pride: “They call me MC Boom Box/Cuz when I grab a bitch I just boom box,” he bellows on “Oh Yeah,” and there is nowhere to hide from the clang the line makes upon landing. Just a few moments later, he promises to “bring the dick storm,” which seems like a reason to board up doors and tape down windows.
T-Pain’s verses are basically extended Neil Hamburger rap routines. He promises to leave a woman’s “belly button glistening” on “Listen to Me,” an image so unappealing it’s almost impressive. “Her head game sick like cancer” from “Breathe” turns two different played-out cliches into a singular car crash. On “Snap Ya Fangas,” he relaxes a little, doing the sort of thing he does best: weightless, bright-toned love songs. Wayne raps briefly, but it feels like T-Pain’s world, the place he doesn’t have to strain to prove himself.
Wayne, meanwhile, isn’t straining in any way, shape, or form: He is yawning almost audibly on these tracks. But this was during the blessed interval where Wayne’s on-record yawns were indelible, and even in these just-passing-through appearances, there are revelations. On the Oompa-Loompa sampling “Listen To Me,” he finds a spot just left of the beat to slip-side his flow, elevating a goofy song into giddy territory. This is the guy, we’re reminded, that ripped up verses into the little streaming bits of confetti, ones that are still falling around us in the shape of new guys like Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty. He doesn’t have too much else to say here, but even for a few unheard verses, we can thank T-Pain’s restlessness.


On a collaborative EP with the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, the former TikTok phenom devotes herself to the ambiance of late-’90s guitar-pop.

Our Extended Play EP

Like a Marvel origins film, beabadoobee’s 2020 debut Fake It Flowers moved its protagonist from Point A to Point B—in the London-based songwriter’s case, from TikTok phenom to album-rock revivalist—with a few genuinely thrilling moments along the way. And where many would-be star vehicles cede authorship in pursuit of big singles, Fake It Flowers was a cohesive statement, even if it established beabadoobee as a revival act. The crunchy rhythm guitar on “Charlie Brown,” the rubbery drumming on “Care,” and the dizzying open tunings of “Dye It Red” called back to a specific post-grunge window spanning 1993 through 1996; working with producer Pete Robertson, bea was Juliana Hatfield in a pair of Fila Disruptors, Glen Phillips espied through a filmy VSCO filter. It’s not a dig to say it was style over substance, because on Fake It Flowers, the style was the substance.
Unable to tour on their debuts, a number of beabadoobee’s class-of-2020 peers have already announced follow-up EPs, bolstering catalogs for 2021 festival dates. The winking title suggests a digressive escapade, but Our Extended Play feels like a minor landmark for bea as well as for the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, the project’s producers and co-writers. It’s a smart move for both parties: arena-rock gods of the 2010s find fresh context for their euphoric pop in beabadoobee, herself an eager student of MTV-era hits. Like its predecessor, Our Extended Play is a conscientious period piece, alighting on late-’90s guitar-pop. It’s slightly more British-sounding, a lot more jangly; for better or worse, any one of these songs would be at home in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.
The rapturous single “Last Day on Earth” sets the tone. The three-chord jangle bears strong whiffs of “There She Goes,” “She’s So High,” and “All You Wanted”; like those songs, it finds a hook within 60 seconds and never looks back. The lyrics (“I want to get fucked up at home/Be naked alone/And turn up my phone/’Cause this song I wrote is just so fuckin’ sick”) are proudly inane—to say nothing of the wordless chorus, which sounds like a reference track left intact for its sugary simplicity, an acknowledgement that overthinking it would kill the buzz. It leans so far into the aesthetic that it’s practically a parody, zooming past Halloween and landing on Scream.
Where Soccer Mommy and Snail Mail’s submersion in the sound of the late ’90s often contrasts with their delicate songwriting, beabadoobee is fully devoted to ambiance: the mid-August haze is the focus. Our Extended Play’s sparkly production complements bea’s blissed-out abstraction, particularly after Fake It Flowers’s more somber tone. It also redeems some of the EP’s goofier miscues. Healy’s delirious call-and-response bridge on “He Gets Me So High” is tonally inconsistent with bea’s earnest verses yet lends a trajectory to the buoyant arrangement; “Cologne” is so coy and syrupy that it could be a long-lost B-side to “Lovefool.” On occasion the music feels market-tested, straddling a few too many demographics at once—chords and vibes still take precedence over ideas. beabadoobee has all the time in the world to hone her writing chops, if she wants to. But for right now, it’s summer and everybody’s wearing giant jeans again.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The albums and EPs Nika Roza Danilova issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such a young artist. Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots.

Conatus

Nika Roza Danilova began her Zola Jesus project with a formidable arsenal already in place. She had a richly gothic perspective honed by a rural upbringing and studies in philosophy, a background in opera conjoined with a taste for industrial music, and a scarred-yet-commanding voice. The albums and EPs she issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such a young artist, but Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots. Most traces of obscuring murk have burned away, so that every pock and ridge in the rugged, elemental music stands out distinctly. It's new wave mounted on a geological scale, where Danilova's solipsistic spirit-- "I was able to communicate this universe that is my prison," she said of "Vessel"-- assumes epic proportions. Her bouts of nihilism feel nervier and more bracing in the unforgiving light of sonic clarity. The closer she gets, the more enigmatic she's revealed to be.
Conatus is mainly built from thundering toms, majestically revolving synthesizers, and warm courses of classical stringed instruments. "I kept having these primal images," she said of the music, "just quite strange landscapes and shapes I couldn't shake." That may sound like a meaningless gloss, but on "Swords", the minute-long opening track, you can hear exactly what she means. Concussive drums and scrolling mechanical textures vividly evoke a terrain. Whatever biosphere you choose to project on it (I get desert), Danilova's voice remains fixed on a faraway horizon, receding as you approach. When she bursts into the foreground on "Avalanche" and stays there for the remainder of the album, the impression of impassable distance lingers. This is partly because of the authority of Danilova's voice, and partly because the music gives nothing away, thrumming along with power that shades into ambivalence toward the shifting emotional register of the singing. The results are dramatic but never melodramatic, as Danilova maps the dimensions of her self-imprisonment with resolve.
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova's childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it's stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference.
She has said that she struggled with the psychological pressures of opera singing. You could regard her early run of Zola Jesus recordings as a direct reaction against intricate formality and classical perfection: an eruptive loosening of strictures and simultaneous retreat into shadow. Though some may miss the rough and raw approach of her last two EPs, it's refreshing and exciting to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery. There's a newfound sense of purpose, as if, having tested her abilities, Danilova now understands exactly what she's doing.


In spite of a few obligatory major label maneuvers, the Memphis rapper’s debut mixtape preserves her charisma with a rush of shit-talking and warning shots.

Before the Gloss Up

In 2021, Memphis rappers Aleza, Glorilla, K Carbon, Slimeroni, and Gloss Up dropped a string of Hitkidd-produced posse cuts that were sparks for the already thriving local rap circuit. They were addictive and electric, like trying to hang with that one tight-knit crew of women who have so many inside jokes and references that they might as well speak their own language—you know, an authentic shit-talking Southern clique that also happens to be one of the coldest rap crews out right now. In reality, it isn’t quite as organic as that (as individuals, they’re still trying to figure it out), but the chemistry is real. The one who has got it down for sure is Glorilla, who dropped two of the great rap singles of last year with “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and “Tomorrow.” Fellow Memphis rap darling Gloss Up is almost there as well. Unlike Glorilla’s mean-mugging gut-punches, Gloss has a Young Dolph-inspired way of laughing in the face of problems. “Wanna be an opp so bad, damn hoe get out the way,” she raps on last year’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” shooing away a potential rival like a gnat. (In the video, she even says this with her baby on her hip.) Gloss hands out dismissive tongue-lashings with a sweetly Southern smile on her face; this naturally unbothered attitude is what boosts her new mixtape Before the Gloss Up above the formulaic beats of a major label debut.
When it comes to molding new rap stars, the Atlanta-based imprint Quality Control, who signed Gloss Up last year, has got it down to a science. In Joe Coscarelli’s 2022 book Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story, the label’s co-founder Coach K talks about the process of star-making tactically, sometimes uncomfortably so. Prior to Before the Gloss Up, her freewheeling sensibility made it seem as if her songs were recorded on a whim, on days when she was in the mood to break a few spirits. That isn’t lost here, but the behind-the-scenes factors are apparent. From the obligatory piano-driven motivation rap outro that appears on mixtapes from every region to a sanitized version of the increasingly popular Detroit sound on “From Cross the Way,” record executives were clearly ticking boxes.
But label constraints don’t drown out her charisma. Even when certain songs are familiar, they don’t coast on it. For example, Babyface Ray’s “Sincerely Face” seemingly inspired “Lemon Peppa,” but the breezy sound becomes Gloss’ own with a flood of disrespectful takedowns. When they leave her mouth, they come across as feel-good barbs: “Yeah that’s my nigga, I still put him in the friend zone.” The ride-or-die anthem “Hold Me Down” feels like it would have fit on Peezy’s Only Built 4 Diamond Links; her booming voice has a warm edge, perfect for a little sentimentality. She even manages to do the impossible, elevating the generic Moneybagg Yo-core of “Revenge” with forceful and inspired jawing. The second time she snaps “Smackin’ bitches ’bout that nigga” in a pitch-shifted twist, it’s like the thought just makes her day.
Before the Gloss Up hits a stride when Quality Control’s involvement is muted; not cocincidentally, that’s when her troop and Hitkidd are in the orbit. On “Mad 304,” the Memphis producer’s roaring instrumental inspires Gloss Up to bring out a short burst of Gangsta Boo and La Chat-style smack talk. Aleza, K Carbon, and Slimeroni join Gloss in stomping on a couple playthings’ feelings on “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe.” And on “Bestfrenn,” Gloss and Glorilla throw warning shots at all grannies, cousins, and aunties with slick tongues. “Bestfrenn” is an ode to their friendship, one wild enough that the bank robbing (and ribbing) friends of the classic 1996 crime film Set It Off can probably relate. Despite some major label interference, at least Before the Gloss Up hangs onto the most important thing: Gloss Up talking shit with her friends.


The Alaska psych-pop group have embraced modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast, while trying to write an album that speaks to the times. But their attempts at topicality are clumsy.

Woodstock

“Can you say Sellout The Man?” griped one fan in a YouTube review of Portugal. The Man’s latest album, one of a handful compiled for posterity by the band themselves in a supercut of their own bad reviews. It’s a criticism the band had clearly braced for. Months before Woodstock’s release, they pre-butted that attack with shirts reading, in all caps, “I Liked Portugal. The Man Before They Sold Out.” Even without that caps-locked heads up, the band’s embrace of modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. The Alaska psych-pop group had been telegraphing their commercial ambitions for years, first by signing to Atlantic for 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud and then by partnering with Danger Mouse on 2013’s streamlined Evil Friends. Those aren’t things bands do when they’re hoping to stay under the radar.
Evil Friends was too little distinguished from any other album with Danger Mouse on it to move the needle much. With Woodstock, however, Portugal. The Man have finally made good on whatever latent commercial potential Atlantic saw in them. The band topped the alternative charts this summer with the single “Feel It Still,” a shimmying throwback built from borrowed pieces of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” with more than a little inspiration from Pharrell’s “Happy,” and that peppy breakout track is no fluke. Recorded with an expanded cast of studio hands including familiar faces like John Hill, one of Santigold’s ace producers, and Danger Mouse—who returns for three tracks, one of which features a Gorillaz-style cameo from Fat Lip of the Pharcyde—Woodstock is sharper, catchier, and craftier than its predecessor. If it’s a shameless sellout record, it’s an effective one.
Still, for fans who enjoyed the band’s messier edges, Woodstock’s origins make it hard not to fantasize about the album that might have been. In a significant departure for a band that fired off their first eight albums at a one-a-year clip without overthinking them, they spent years working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D on a sprawling, nearly completed record titled Gloomin + Doomin before scrapping it for this one. The inspiration for their course correction, frontman John Gourley has explained repeatedly, was a speed-it-up pep talk from his father and the discovery of his dad’s old Woodstock ticket stub, which he says triggered the band’s desire to make a more charged record that spoke to the times.
Maybe the album would have hung together better if he’d never found that stub, because it’s in the band’s often clumsy attempts at topicality that the record stumbles. There’s always been a disconnect between how Portugal. The Man seem to view themselves—as a fearless, boundary-defying psych band—and how the outside world sees them, as a kind of cute indie act that doesn’t usually demand very much of listeners. The disconnect between those perceptions has never been greater than when Woodstock strives for importance. “Number One” opens the album with an actual recording from the festival—and, uncomfortably, not just any recording, but Richie Havens’ impassioned riff on “Freedom.” Blues artist Son Little sings an interpolation of the chorus, which defuses a little of the queasiness of a white band appropriating a spiritual, but stripped of its context those pained words become just another slogan, one of many the band recites with little tact or consideration. Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.
That empty sloganeering weighs down even the album’s breeziest songs. Closer “Noise Pollution” is the only Mike D production that made Woodstock’s final cut, and between its nutty space-funk beat and spirited guest vocals from fellow honorary Handsome Boy Modeling School graduate Mary Elizabeth Winstead, it’s an animated homage to the post-genre bohemia of Grand Royal’s glory days. But Gourley pastes together his chorus almost entirely from bumper sticker catchphrases: “I know my rights, je t’aime Paris/Live or die like c’est la vie/With my fist in the air, Je suis Charlie/Can’t ya see I’m feeling magnifique?” That he glides past a reference to the Charlie Hebdo massacre and follows it with a line about feeling great shows how little he’s sweating the details with his righteous dissident act. “I’m a rebel just for kicks now,” Gourley sings on “Feel It Still.” He’s got the kicks part down, the rebellion part less so.


The latest disappointing mixtape from one of the year’s most exciting rappers proves that the best way to encounter him is his YouTube channel.

Crack Dreams

The loudmouthed, unhinged Rxk Nephew has been one of the most exciting rappers of the last year. He layers his colorful dope dealing fantasies (with recurring characters and hijinks) and conspiracy theories over beats that pull from Atlanta trap, Detroit funk rap, the L.A. beat scene, house, trance, and plugg (occasionally he ditches the instrumental altogether). Sometimes he’s screaming, other times he’s calm; sometimes he’s rambling, other times he’s extremely coherent; sometimes he’s motivated in the booth (or whatever broom closet he raps in), other times he sounds like he’s being forced to record against his will.
Yet because all this boundless energy has yet to be translated into a worthwhile mixtape, the best way to engage with the Rochester, New York rapper is by stumbling into a track on his YouTube channel, which is usually updated multiple times every week. There, you’ll find tracks like “Early Age Death,” which sounds being underground rave with a bunch of zombies, or “American Tterroristt,” which features theories that belong in a sketchy Reddit thread: “Explain to me why the fuck Benjamin Franklin stood his ass up on the roof/How he discover somethin’ out the sky/If that’s the case, T-Rex discovered it.” Even after one listen, these unexpected moments are often stuck in my mind the next day, but his mixtapes remain less notable because of their fairly uniform production. Both Listen Here Are You Here to Hear Me’s soul samples and Slitherman Activated’s strobe light club music surround his unpredictable lines with a bland regularity.
Likewise Nephew’s new mixtape Crack Dreams, which as of this writing already has a sequel, places tales of crack dealing more detailed than an episode of Snowfall mostly over funk beats equally indebted to contemporary Detroit rap and the heyday of No Limit and Cash Money.  It’s akin to his best friend, turned mortal enemy, turned best friend again Rx Papi’s four-track EP Dope Deals and Record Sales, but it’s not as memorable, and on this tape a good chunk of the songs meld together. Songs like “Top Fire” and “Nephew Shiesty” contain the type of ominous piano riff often found on Detroit rapper Icewear Vezzo’s mixtapes, and they would be nearly indistinguishable if “Nephew Shiesty” didn’t include his finest Homer Simpson impersonation. Other records are built upon Beats by the Pound-influenced thick basslines, and though some work out (like the exasperated tone setting intro “Shooting Star”), Nephew goes through the motions on a handful of the others (like “52 Fourth St” and “Overbite Overnights”).
If this was Nephew’s YouTube channel, you could skip right by those misfires and never think about them again, but on a full project where every song matters, these disappointments linger. Still, the mixtape has fun highlights. On “31 Peck Street,” he robs someone in their neighborhood for their PPP loan, continues an ongoing obsession with his business car of choice (the Honda Accord), and sells work to someone who resembles Ed Sheeran. It’s just another day in the life of Nephew. The sing-song-like “Auto From Rocket Power” unexpectedly channels a No Limit mixtape deep cut, and “Suede Type Beat” puts his dope pushing chaos to the type of smooth West Coast beat that wouldn’t be out of place on a Shoreline Mafia record. Unfortunately, these peaks only further the urge to abandon the mixtape and go back to his YouTube page; he’s probably uploaded something better there already.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The biggest tragedy concerning Joanna Newsom's brave, marvelous new album, *Ys*, would be if everyone sat there listening to it like bored middle-school kids at an amateur Shakespeare production. Newsom's copious, knotty verse is far removed from that of the old poet, but its effect on the crowd is similar: Yes, it's hard to follow without the lyric sheet, it takes a few passes to catch the nuances, and all that drama can seem like something of a history lesson. *Ys*\-- pronounced "ees" or if you prefer, "yeesh"-- is free of the jolts and heads-up hooks we expect from pop

Ys

The biggest tragedy concerning Joanna Newsom's brave, marvelous new album, Ys, would be if everyone sat there listening to it like bored middle-school kids at an amateur Shakespeare production. Newsom's copious, knotty verse is far removed from that of the old poet, but its effect on the crowd is similar: Yes, it's hard to follow without the lyric sheet, it takes a few passes to catch the nuances, and all that drama can seem like something of a history lesson. Ys-- pronounced "ees" or if you prefer, "yeesh"-- is free of the jolts and heads-up hooks we expect from pop music. But while it's sure to suffer accusations of empty self-indulgence from some, many will find the contrary truer: Ys offers an endless wealth of substance, teeming with dense, well-mapped beauty.
Take one example: "Monkey and Bear". The song's title characters escape from the farm where they've lived safely all their lives, before one deviously cons the other into performing for frightened children in order to make a living. Listen to the greed the monkey conveys in degrading, insulting, and controlling the bear, and the tight grip he keeps on her dignity so as not to lose her-- which, of course, by the end, he does. Not bad for what starts out like a nursery rhyme.
Newsom has said that all five of the songs on this 55-minute album tell true stories. But to find them, you'll wade through lines and lines of fantastic allegories and arcane references. Early listeners have latched onto the folky-druid overtones as an excuse to dismiss the record. But nobody's going to reject a record this bold just because Newsom uses the word "thee" on occasion, or because she appears in promotional photos wearing a wolf pelt ass-up on her head. What we really can't handle is escapism. We instinctively balk at artists who hunker down in their own worlds-- especially when they force us to guess what they're thinking.
For someone who's been pegged as an "outsider artist," Newsom chose a presentation that's defiantly decorous. Van Dyke Parks' orchestration is polite, never intruding on her performance. And her voice, though less shrieky and childlike than on The Milk-Eyed Mender, is still a tough read. The way she creaks, wavers, and punches the lyrics is expressive but never in an obvious way; rather than just illuminating the lyrics, she's almost sticking another code on top of them.
But for all the exquisite melodies, arrangements, and production work, Newsom's lyrics make the performance. She crafts elaborate images but drives them with strong actions, and even the densest tangents keep pulling you along. An image like this one, from "Emily"--
"I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever,
in a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror"
-- is beautiful in its own right, but it's also full of movement. Every line of the record conveys some want or desire. This is easy to hear on "Only Skin", the most modern (and Kate Bush-like) cut, where she describes "being a woman"-- feeling fear, carrying candy like a mother, sharing her lover-- with language as vivid as she uses for a cloudy sky. Her eloquence starts to feel so natural that when she sings a line as blunt as, "Stay with me for a while/ That's an awfully real gun"-- it sticks out like a rend in fabric. And the centerpiece, "Sawdust and Diamonds", comes closest to a full release: While the strings take a smoke break, she performs an exhilarating rhapsody where striking verbs-- "cleft," "shook," "buckle," "crash"-- support sweeping allusions to death, love, and fear. Her heart's racing, and she doesn't stop it.
This isn't a great album because she owns a dog-eared encyclopedia, or because it stands above the cheap rewards or superficial freakiness we expected from her. It's great because Newsom confronts a mountain of conflicting feelings, and sifts through them for every nuance. It's intricate and crammed with information, but it's never bookish, and she never sits back in a spell and lets her heart flutter: She swoops into the sky and races across the ground, names every plant and every desire, and never feels less than real. The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.


The rapper’s third album is an invitation into his domestic sphere in all of its messiness, controversies, and communal joy.

Luv 4 Rent

An echo of the poet Warsan Shire’s warning runs through Smino’s latest album: “You can’t make homes out of human beings, someone should have already told you that.” Written at a time when the 31-year-old discovered that all the love he gave out was not making its way back to him, Luv 4 Rent is a meditation on the mind maze of romantic, platonic, self, and familial intimacy. Across two studio albums, Smino has mastered sultry falsettos, funkafied productions, and clever wordplay. His third album is an invitation into his domestic sphere in all of its messiness, controversies, and communal joy. It’s not particularly diaristic, but more of a scrapbook of mementos collected as he looks for and hides from love.
Coming from a long line of musical church folk—his grandfather played bass for Muddy Waters—the former Sunday service drummer is on his “bluesy shit” on Luv 4 Rent. Gospel was Smino’s entry point into music but the voices of Busta Rhymes, Lil Wayne, Stevie Wonder, and Aaliyah coming from the rooms of different family members diversified his palette as a youngster. These early influences pop up in Smino’s limber voice which can sound like many different people on one track, sometimes adopting the percussive cadences and contemplative delivery of André 3000 (“Pudgy”), hazy caramel vocals of George Clinton (“Settle Down”), and the rap-singing croons of Nelly (“Lee & Lovie”). On “90 Proof,” he tipsily confesses as a one-man choir over a Bola Johnson & His Easy Life Top Beats sample: “Not too great at relationships, at least I tryyyyyy.”
Smino’s playboy aloofness is central to his appeal, but at certain moments the album is best enjoyed when you’re bobbing your head without listening to the actual content of the lyrics. They can be humorously random (“Up in the woods, I feel like Clinton”) but also eyeroll-worthy (“Eat her with a spoon/Call her Reese”) and maybe offensive (“The people come greet me, my eyes on Konnichiwa”). He pulls together T.I.-level unnecessary vocab gymnastics to seemingly remind us that he’s a worthy MC (“get it?” he asks us in “Matinee”). On uncharacteristically somber tracks like “Louphoria” and “Modennaminute,” his seduction often reads as a thinly veiled attempt at human connection, especially on an outro skit when he tries to seduce a Kroger clerk after spending three minutes reminiscing on the mistakes he made with a past lover.
Moments of vulnerability are almost swept under his rapid-fire punchlines. There’s a tension of wanting a woman to hold him down, while grappling with the fleeting nature of romance and realizing that a human is not something that you can or should own. Still, he’s self-interrogative on this album: “Don’t blame yourself for all the shit you see me do/I’m gettin’ used to bein’ loved, girl, the right way.” Revealing his discomfort with this level of emotional availability, lines like this one slip out in his slurred speech. In the music video for “90 Proof,” Smino grimaces after downing a shot of alcohol after his partner begs him for transparency. Alcohol and marijuana are his vices and his muses.
In his “entrepenigga” era, on “Blu Billy” he compares the sometimes ruthless and selfish hustling he witnessed on the streets of Missouri as a young kid to what he feels he has to do to elevate himself in the industry and provide for his family. When he announced the upcoming release of his third studio album on the Bear Witness, Take Action 3 live stream, he spoke to the late comedian Teddy Ray about the unsustainability of putting everyone else’s needs before his own: “You go get the plate last and you like, ‘Damn, I’m hungrier than a bitch.” It’s not entirely clear if he’s critiquing systems of wealth inequality or going a bit JAY-Z to get a slice of the pie, perhaps the blurred lines are intentional: “Capitalistic, read through the lipstick/Shit that they make up/Make us forget shit,” he muses over a muted looping bassline.
Having spent the past couple of years featuring on other people’s albums, here he helms an all-star cast of collaborations. Smino’s ability to riff with many artists while allowing them to shine—a skill he finely tuned in his time spent as a member of various musical collectives early in his career—made stars like Lil Uzi hop on a track in a moment’s notice. Fellow Zero Fatigue crew member Ravyn Lenae lends her ethereal vocals on “Settle Down” and New Orleans singer Lucky Daye heightens the devastation on the surprisingly generic but reflective “Modennaminute.” Though these artists each maintain their distinct sound, they are Sminofied — even rappers like J. Cole can’t help but to sing. Out of all the rap features, Doechii’s stands out (“And you need her like Jolie” she raps, making it sound like she’s saying “Angelina”) and makes the bounce-inflected “Pro Freak” her own—assisted by Fatman Scoop’s horn-like ad-libs—with her double-time braggadocious flows.
As much as this Luv 4 Rent is introspective, it’s also a home video and a love letter to community—his hometown, St. Louis, and his Black musical collaborators and predecessors: “I’m the son of trees and moons and martyrs, authors.” Before the pandemic, Smino was working on an LP with the intention of appealing to a wider audience but decided to scrap that idea and look inward. His cousin opens the album singing a gospel-like ode to St. Louis through pitched-up vocals reminiscent of a Frank Ocean interlude and voicemails from Smino’s uncles and cousins showing him love and admiration are sprinkled across the album. Concert-like call and responses and a plethora of samples—an unconventional move for Smino—enhance the homespun communal feel of the album. Luv 4 Rent is a collection of sobering realizations amid porch-top ciphers, humid Midwestern summer block parties, Sunday after-service family gatherings, and late-night Backwoods-sponsored hookups—not fully fleshed out or universal but lively, raw, and a bit hectic.


It’s a blast to remember how versatile Superchunk are on their newly-reissued 1990 debut. It features all the embryonic styles of their power-pop-punk at once, with awkward, utterly alive exuberance.

Superchunk

Merge Records has endured by staying the same. Founded in 1989 in Chapel Hill, N.C., by Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, the label always stuck to a simple philosophy: they signed bands they liked and tried not to spend unrealistic amounts of money. And sure, eventually, it helped that they happened to like Arcade Fire (whose debut Merge released in 2004). This strategy worked in the early 1990s, helping McCaughan and Ballance resist the major-label feeding frenzy set off by Nirvana, which felled so many of their peers. And it works in 2017, when an old-school label rooted in evenhanded curation has an undeniable appeal, both for listeners who grew up with indie music before the internet—when musical diets relied more heavily on competent stewards with broad but clearly defined tastes—and for many young bands whom Superchunk inspired, such as Merge signee Waxahatchee. Especially if you lived in Chapel Hill or an outpost-y town like it, it’s hard to overstate how important Superchunk was in indie rock’s self-reliant creation myth.
In a way, Superchunk has also weathered the past 28 years as a band by staying the same. After driving one industry sea change, they waited out the next, and stayed put in North Carolina issuing other people’s records. A nine-year gap preceded 2010’s Majesty Shredding, but then Superchunk reemerged fully formed into the digital era and never desperately reinvented itself. They never squandered goodwill on an aughties electro-pop reinvention. They’ve issued a new, age-shaded variation on their signature power-pop-punk every year or two. Given this long and steady arc, it’s easy to think of Superchunk in terms of workmanlike consistency. So it’s a blast to remember how versatile they are, hearing all their embryonic styles at once on their exuberant, awkward, and utterly alive 1990 debut LP, now being reissued on vinyl by Merge.
Even if your Superchunk knowledge goes as far back as 1995’s Here’s Where the Strings Come in, when they started becoming a long-hauling pop-rock band in earnest, you might not be prepared for the debut. If Merge and Superchunk populated a new cosmos, then Superchunk, recorded at Duck-Kee Studios in Raleigh and released on Matador in 1990, is the Big Bang. In one explosive half-hour, it trots out most of the styles and moods that Superchunk would then spend decades diligently exploring. The reissue’s supplement, Clambakes Vol. 9: Other Music From Unshowered Grumblers—Live in NYC 1990, a live set recorded at CBGB four days after the original album’s release, is for deep fans and archivists only—the sound and playing aren’t great. But the remastered original disc is only enriched by, not reliant on, historical context. In and of itself, it rips.
The one-two knockout of opening tracks “Sick to Move” and “My Noise” sets the poles of melodic hardcore and melodic noise-rock. The former, with SST Records-style sludge up to its buckling knees, starts with an electrifying cri de coeur: “Finger on my pulse/I’ve got my finger in the socket/Why build a cradle/If you don’t plan to rock it?” (That’s surely a sly reference to Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill’s testing ground for the new, weird rock.) The latter, chugging at a comfortable tempo and breaking down into lazy Pavement-like squiggles, is also contiguous with the shambolic post-rock of Slint. The lyrics anatomize the self-conscious jadedness then fashionable in Chapel Hill music circles—“It’s my life/It is my voice/It is stupid/It is my noise”—as well as the bursts of desperate conviction, with a ragged surge on the word “noise.”
“Swinging” introduces Superchunk’s pop-punk side, all basic bounce and elastic tempo, while “Slow” is a lofting, detuned dream-pop classic in which the band forgets it’s disaffected and exults in the sound. “Half a Life” could pass for Jawbreaker, a reminder of how much sonic crossover Superchunk at first had with West Coast emo-core bands, whose passionate ideology is thought of as so separate from indie rock’s slacker affectations. Of course, the flipside of a band exploring its capacities is a band still figuring out what it’s good at. The tuneless singing style of “Binding” would ultimately be better left to Archers of Loaf’s Eric Bachmann, whose gruff resonance carried it better than McCaughan’s high, thin sneer. Still, the licky little lead is the kind of perfect detail that distinguishes Superchunk from so many peers and followers.
Superchunk’s early influences were the classic rock of their childhoods, the all-ages punk shows of their teens, and the weird mishmash they were discovering on college radio. They entered music when the central North Carolina hype was just glimmering into being, when you might catch a writeup of a local band in SPIN, Rolling Stone, or even Entertainment Weekly. “It gave people around here some kind of pride in the ability of these small cities to produce a lot of great music,” McCaughan has said. Ballance had just learned to play bass when Superchunk coalesced from house party pick-up bands with names like Quit Shovin’. “I was basically having panic attacks up there,” she recalls. “I would have tunnel vision and feel like I was hyperventilating.”
Merge, with typical caution, warmed up by putting out seven-inch singles before venturing into LPs, which is why the band’s first three albums came out on Matador. But Superchunk did self-release their first official single, “Slack Motherfucker,” which anchors the debut LP, with original drummer Chuck Garrison and original guitarist Jack McCook (later replaced by the enduring roster of Jon Wurster and Jim Wilbur). “Slack Motherfucker” is a perfect time capsule of how it felt to be young and annoyingly comfortable in a sleepy college town before the internet. The riff is both urgent and plodding, almost stagnant, even as it blows up in your face. McCaughan sings in the persona of a budding workaholic who’s tired of seeing the same people everywhere, bored, smoking in bars, and looking at bands.
The alarm is sounded again on the ultra-snotty “Down the Hall”: “I don’t see anyone/Tying you down/There are no chains/So what’s keeping you around?” This tension between a tendency to stay and an anxiousness to move has guided Superchunk well through the past quarter-century. Here at the beginning, they had no sense that they were going to change the scope of what was possible for indie bands, no ambition to. It seems they just wanted to do more than the people lolling around them—do something. They were a kicky little college band that tried to strike a slack pose but accidentally played like their lives depended on it, which, in a meaningful way, turned out to be true. In 2017, Superchunk is inevitably an artifact, a voyager from another time. But the raw, frustrated energy of comfortable kids in uncomfortable skins, marooned after punk and before broadband, is undimmed.