The new 18-year-old New York rapper carves a unique path of searing lyricism through back-alley soul-sampling beats. He examines his youth with an ancient coolness and preternatural technique.

May God Bless Your Hustle

The rapper MIKE, a self-described “bulky black body” from the Bronx, is a prodigious wordsmith with a booming voice and a silver tongue. In the span of a single track, he may contemplate life and death, responsibility and ambition, the state of the world and the state of his wallet. He pushes and pulls his words with a preternatural sense of rhythm. His new album, May God Bless Your Hustle, is a collection of observations, thoughts, and confessions about simply existing and trying to exist simply at the age of 18. With back-alley, soul-sampling beats and with lyrics so solid they could gather moss, MIKE arrives with a unique and fresh voice that provides a shock to the whole rap system. Rare is there someone so young who is as in control as he is vulnerable.
Hustle arrives after years of refinement. His earliest project, Belgium Butter, dates back to 2014, when he was still too wordy and out of synch. Importantly, the tape revealed his backward-leaning ear and a taste for jagged production in the vein of MF DOOM and J Dilla. Since then, the beats—provided largely by members of his sLUms crew—have gotten sparser and better, as have his bars. MIKE is a deliberate lyricist, using juxtaposition to render the ordinary remarkable. On “Pigeonfeet,” he raps, “Watch his jaw get broken like a vase when it’s dropped,” and on “Hunger,” he comes up with, “I’m off the wall like a wet sticker.” It’s as if MIKE exists in a world where the line, “Making sure my man wallet’s straight like a collar when you iron that,” from Earl Sweatshirt’s “Grief,” is canon. Like Earl, MIKE’s flow is gluey and extraordinary. But even when MIKE discards the rhyme or varies his speed, there’s a consistent rhythm that conveys the song forward, exemplified on “10k,” where he spends the bulk with the same rhyme before shifting into a new scheme and rare double-time bars. There is no languishing in the beat and every transition is without seams or effort.
Beyond his phrasing skills, MIKE makes his words stick. For every passage of double-time flow, there’s a moment of clarity. On “Hunger” alone, his lyrics pop with color, like the brilliant opener—“Hunger make you eat your words instead”—and a moment of repose after a scattered day: “I reach home and hit the mattress quick.” His technical proficiency both highlights and obscures his various pains and transgressions. In a recent interview, he talked about how he and his mother have been separated for years due to government paperwork. On the opening “Somebody Please,” he spends just one line acknowledging the situation, later scattering references throughout Hustle. His steady delivery masks the difficulty, suggesting that there’s a well of emotions that isn’t communicated or that he may not be ready to divulge everything on a record. That absence is strong, like a portrait where the subject is moved by something the viewer cannot see. Hustle’s instrumentals only heighten the melancholy, as the splintered samples evoke more nameless ghosts. Sixpress and MIKE, who handle the majority of the production, add minimal flourishes, allowing the lifted melodies and MIKE’s voice to carry the songs. The techniques recall the ancient cool of RZA in his prime.
Depression is a constant theme throughout Hustle that MIKE treats with maturity. He sees it as a lingering condition, not a singular obstacle. “Depression isn’t just a phase/It’s hard to dub the L when it’s all up in your face,” he states plainly on “Pigeonfeet.” He later admits, “I fucking hate my guts/Don’t got the guts to do shit,” but uses that as motivation to work harder at his craft—an ethos he sets from the start, opening the album with the declaration, “Bust my ass!”
Much is made of the new generation of rappers, who may or may not be ruining hip-hop, depending who you ask. Lil Yachty, a year MIKE’s senior, is as much a style icon and motivator as he is a rapper. Even newer entrants—namely those of the SoundCloud generation, led by the odious XXXTentacion—are reckless on the mic and in concert, better at stirring emotion than honing a craft. MIKE, who appears to be unconcerned with image or popularity, bucks the narrative. He paints in fine strokes, the quiet kid working it out on the page compared to extroverted melodrama of Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Llif3.” His brilliance is in the details and the patience he displays as an MC who is as technical as he is stylish. In a world of noise, MIKE’s quietude is magnetic.


Although the spotlight has shifted from Balearic pop in recent times, London duo the Idjut Boys are unlikely to care, having been trekking that breezy coast for nearly two decades. Astonishingly, this is their debut album, a warm, comforting collection with a wriggling focus.

Cellar Door

The recent resurgence in Balearic pop music is a contender for the most innocuous trend redux of 2012. Forthcoming efforts from mainstays like Mungolian Jetset, Woolfy vs. Projections, and Windsurf exhibit an enthusiasm for the sound even though the spotlight has turned elsewhere. Newcomers Poolside prove that outsiders haven't lost interest, even if their debut album mostly just remind us of the halcyon days of 2007-08 when both Air France and Studio were going concerns. The Idjut Boys were content to let that last wave of attention pass them by, popping up mostly on remixes and some EPs, but they're the OGs of this very particular game, clocking 12"s as far back as 1993.
The duo-- Londoners Daniel Tyler and Conrad McDonnell-- would rightly bristle at being lumped in with any kind of movement, because when you've been making music for 18 or 19 years, you're likely to have made enough of it differently, even if just to you, that such label tags will seem extra silly. They've crafted a career of dance music that has steadfastly avoided the prevailing dance paradigms-- house, techno-- of their day. For the last half-decade or so they've hovered around the Smalltown Supersound galaxy in an uncle-shaped saucer, steering artists like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and Mungolian via remixes and collaborations. They specialize in lightweight bodyrock, not explicitly beachy but breezy enough to serve as a proxy.
Cellar Door is, shockingly, their first artist album, a 38-minute tart that wisely avoids the temptation to sum or define their career. (Though might I humbly request a collection of 12"s/remixes, friends?) Instead, it's a idly stitched collection of funk, disco, and pop so unassuming that its lack of coherence feels like a virtue. Eight-song records feel like they should have a center, something to talk and build around, but Cellar Door's keeps shifting, like light moving on the floor as the day progresses. The first single, "One for Kenny", is the album's most danceable track, candy disco that moves at the same pace as a comforting lava lamp. Halfway through it eases (there are no sharp movements on Cellar Door) into a gorgeous, jazzy piano line. It feels like someone draped a warm blanket over the track.
Two long vocal ballads-- "Shine" and the "The Way I Like It", both featuring Sally Rodgers-- are well-formed and tender. The latter, in particular, details an appreciative lust, thankful and tense until its beautiful, windswept second half. "Going Down" and "Love Hunter" employ ringing acoustic guitars, harmonic complexity coloring standard rhythms. "Le Wasuk"'s proggy, diffuse raggae is the only true misstep, and the Idjut Boys redeem themselves with sunset-beautiful "Jazz Axe", two minutes of honeyed electric guitar to close the album.
Churls will indict Cellar Door for a lack of coherence, but the Idjut Boys have built a career on a lack of coherence. Dance versions of these tracks are reportedly forthcoming, and they'll probably be great. Cellar Door, though, is a frozen moment, a triumph and an oddity. Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.


The Sea and Cake vocalist returns with his second album of solo electronic music in five years, and it has many things in common with the last one. Once again, the predominant theme is the emotional possibilities of the modular synthesizer.

The Republic

Sam Prekop’s work is nothing if not subtle. His first band, Shrimp Boat, could be all over the place, but after settling in with the Sea and Cake in 1994, his distinguished careers in music, painting, and photography have been unified in theme and overall aesthetic. He’s never been worried about repeating himself. The Sea and Cake made a few outstanding albums and a few more good ones; as a singer and guitarist, Prekop made two fine full-lengths that were different from his work in the Sea and Cake, but not markedly so. And now he’s returned with his second album of solo electronic music in five years, and it has many things in common with the last one.
Once again, the predominant theme is the emotional possibilities of the modular synthesis. Unlike, say, Oneohtrix Point Never, Prekop’s electronic music never feels like commentary, and unlike Arp the influences are more open-ended. Many of these tracks sound like they could have been made in 1975 or 1985. Simple, clean tones bubble along, tracing melodies that evoke a wide-eyed kind of retrofuturism, redolent of an era when we hoped that technology could save humanity from itself. But even that marker seems slippery. The first nine all bear the title "The Republic" and were assembled as part of an art installation, but titles (later ones include "Ghost" and "Invisible") are meaningless. This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.
Importantly, as with Old Punch Card, it asks such questions but doesn’t offer any particular answers. The Republic would make a lousy film soundtrack because the music is defined by its ambiguity. Some might hear mystery in this music, some might hear something chill and late-night ambient, some might hear a bright and sunny affirmation, but Prekop’s relationship to sound can’t be summed up so neatly. As with his song lyrics, his electronic music is built for in-between spaces that are experienced very differently depending on the listener’s perspective.
Only in a few places does The Republic move outside its strict analog synth palette. "The Republic 9" incorporates what sound like samples of a harp, and "Weather Vane" briefly features a thudding 4/4 kick, but even that surprising turn is quickly subsumed back into the album’s more open-ended drift. Extremes of any kind have no place here. Even the tag "music" doesn’t always seem accurate. Passages from the installation make you wonder if you’re listening to an extremely quiet drone or just the sound of something being plugged in. The analog equipment hisses and crackles but these artifacts are no less important than the tunes. If the album has a broader idea to hang itself on, that's it—after listening, you start to notice what your room sounds like.


The British singer’s crisply rendered, competently hooky second album promises a more personal self-portrait, but she ends up disappearing into vague songwriting and anodyne dance-pop production.

Therapy

Anne-Marie was getting bored of her own music. The British pop singer told the BBC that she dreaded playing her biggest song, “Rockabye,” on tour, having soured on the slinky, trop-house collaboration with Clean Bandit and Sean Paul. It was the track that anchored her first album, 2018’s Speak Your Mind, which was filled with bland, thrashing electro-pop numbers and known best for the Ed Sheeran co–written “2002,” which zigzags between interpolating early 2000s chart-toppers over earnest, chugging guitar. Right after she released the record, she started to work on the next one—an angrier album, she’s said, built on vitriol towards an ex. But then a father came up to her after a show and said that his daughter looked up to the singer. “I couldn't deal with this little girl listening to all this angry music I'd been making," she told Music Week. “My role and who I want to be is someone who lifts people up and makes people feel good.” She scrapped the album and wrote an entirely new one titled Therapy, determined to uplift.
The resulting project is dimmed down and diluted. Anne-Marie builds her songs around vague suggestions of ideas—heartbreak and resilience, self-knowledge and easy love—crooned over slithering club beats and awash in schmaltzy synths. The album’s sleekest songs retread her previous hits. Little Mix joins, and often drowns out, Anne-Marie on “Kiss My (Uh Oh),” a fluffy, flimsy interpolation of the 2003 track “Never Leave You (Uh Ooh, Uh Ooh)” that doesn’t add much to the original. Sheeran shows up again as a co-writer, this time with Max Martin, for the well-intentioned but grating “Beautiful,” a cliche-clogged ode to rejecting beauty standards that ends with a chorus of chirping children’s voices. None of these songs stray beyond palatable. They are crisply produced and welded to competent hooks, and you can picture yourself blithing nodding along to most of them in a club or car or mall. But the only glimpses we get of Anne-Marie herself come in stock images: chewed nails and crappy credit, Sunday mornings in white t-shirts, singing along to Drake on summer nights. Even on a song called “Who I Am,” we learn patchy, surface details—“I like crying too much,” she hums, before launching into a diatribe about “fake friends.”
The album’s throng of features swarm to fill in this vacuum. Former One Direction member Niall Horan rasps about remembering a lover on “Our Song,” with the melodrama of a movie trailer. The British rapper MoStack overpowers the beats on “Way Too Long,” barreling over the melody with a flailing rap that rhymes Adele with the singer Mabel. A number of DJs show up, pumping skittering drum patterns and fluorescent drops into their respective tracks; one of the rare distinctive production choices comes from the UK dance outfit Rudimental, Anne-Marie’s frequent collaborator. They hurl snaps and cymbals and frenetic bleats of trumpet onto a track called “Unloveable,” dragging and distorting Anne-Marie’s vocals into a drone—“Could anybody love meeeee?” she pleads over the churning beats, wringing any last drop of vulnerability into the overpowering bass.
There’s a trace of what could have been a gripping album buried in all this glitz. The title track fumbles at a mature, moving message—that relationships can end without blame or fault, that therapy can be more critical than intimacy. Strip away the shellacked synths and whooshing bass, and “Better Not Together” becomes a tender meditation: “Neither of us wanna be alone,” she wails, “We're losing grip but we can't let go.” Lines like this dissolve into the soundscape, blending into the glut of electro-pop artists—Zara Larsson, Ava Max, Ellie Goulding, Bebe Rexha—that Anne-Marie imitates. Two albums in, it’s not clear what distinguishes Anne-Marie’s music. If even she’s bored of her own songs, you have to wonder, where does that leave us?

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The Scottish quintet’s 10th album, and first in six years, is full of quiet revelations. The hushed production and contented lyrics make for their warmest and subtlest effort to date.

Here

When Teenage Fanclub broke in 1991 with their third album Bandwagonesque, they were a band deeply of their time. The Scottish quintet was at once noisy enough to stand among trendsetters like Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, and melodic enough to fit seamlessly on post-“Alex Chilton,” Chilton-indebted college radio. The band’s zeitgeist-capturing breakthrough actually posed a threat to Nirvana come list-making season. In the wake of their banner year, however, Teenage Fanclub carved a quieter path, with each album feeling slightly less bold and more introverted. That’s not to say they retreated. As Teenage Fanclub’s heavier, gutsier proclivities subsided, they focused on becoming an even more sustainable machine, tightening up their songwriting and honing in their trademark three-part harmonies between vocalists Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley.
As the years have passed and the band's output has slowed, Teenage Fanclub’s music has evolved like a long and stable love affair, propelled by intimacy, comfort, and shared admiration. In “I’m in Love,” the opening track on Here, Teenage Fanclub’s first album in six years, Blake actually makes the comparison himself. “I like your trajectory,” he sings, “I’m in love with you, love.” The lyric could be addressing a person or just the feeling itself: a tribute to an emotion. Sunny and deceptively complex, “I’m in Love” serves as a fitting introduction to Here, the band’s subtlest, warmest release to date and also one of their strongest.
With their hushed production and contented lyrics, the 12 tracks on Here play like a series of quiet revelations, the kind of thoughts you have in moments of clarity, surrounded by people you love. The album’s best songs communicate that state of bliss with immediately gratifying melodies and effortless wisdom. The Love-penned “Thin Air” embraces the mystery of life with an energetic, Bad Reputation-era Thin Lizzy buzz. Equally euphoric is “The Darkest Part of the Night,” a sweet, autumnal exercise in classic pop songwriting, bobbing from hook to hook like the horses on a merry-go-round.
Even if Here, the band’s 10th album, finds Teenage Fanclub comfortable with their identity and largely uninterested in testing its boundaries, they still find some room for experimentation. McGinley’s contributions, particularly “Steady State,” and Love's quietly triumphant “I Have Nothing More to Say,” are the most serpentine, psychedelic tracks the band have ever recorded. And on “The First Sight,” the album’s dizzying highlight, they spin the well-trodden ’90s loud-quiet-loud dynamic into the aural equivalent of leaving a dim apartment and feeling the sun on your face. The song reaches pure ecstasy by the time it concludes with one of the album’s many fuzzy, impeccable guitar solos.
The greatest moments on Here come when Teenage Fanclub use their music to uplift, as in the cascading horns in “The First Sight” or the glimmering strings in “The Darkest Part of the Night.” They’re slightly less successful when they try to convey these feelings with their words. The deeply literal choruses of “Hold On” and “Live in the Moment” land with a healthy dose of cheese, an aspect of pop music that Teenage Fanclub have always gracefully skirted around. But, to paraphrase Norm Macdonald, it’s not sentimental if you really mean it. And judging by how many tracks on Here make reference to the simple joy of being alive, Teenage Fanclub sound like a band grateful for the time they have and entirely present within it.


After the all-R&B, mostly-WTF? direction of Ghostdini, Ghostface returns to hardcore rap with this all-star-boosted record.

Apollo Kids

Anyone surprised by the all-R&B, mostly-WTF? direction of Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City should be studying Ghostface's art: ever since signing to Def Jam and temporarily dropping the "Killah," it's been like watching the aftermath of Weezer's Pinkerton flop over and over again. Though we got some undeniably great music in the process, it felt somewhat ancillary to "Tush", "Back Like That", the "Back Like That" remix, bummed out interviews, and hiring Diddy's production team for Big Doe Rehab-- all pretty clear actions of someone who takes his poor commercial fortunes very personally and isn't trying to be anyone's idea of a cult act. Of course, none of it worked in the slightest, so even if it was a giant fuck-you to his hardcore contingent, Ghostdini was at least understandable as the culmination of years worth of frustration from someone who felt like he ran out of crossover options. Or, as Ghostface said in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, "I'm hanging this shit up if this shit don't work."
On its face, Apollo Kids is a weirdly deflated concession from both parties: Twelve spartanly named tracks, barely over 40 minutes of music, a ton of guests hailing from Ghost's inner circle, a rehashed album title, and a near total lack of promotion: If Ghostface didn't have a Twitter account, there's a good chance we wouldn't be aware of this thing's existence. But isn't that what we were all clamoring for after the desperate shilling of Ghostdini? At the outset, it would sure seem so. Apollo Kids plays out something like a lower-stakes version of The Pretty Toney Album, no RZA but plenty of that record's time-honored breakbeats, blaxploitatied guitars, and swallowed-whole soul samples.
It's the kind of stuff that his harried intensity always sounds viscerally powerful over, even if the rhymes aren't prime material. He doesn't throw his darts sideways anymore, but without sort of bullshit clutter, he's still an incredibly ostentatious lyricist, just one that's easier to parse. The record's opening trio is evidence enough of that: on "Purified Thoughts", Killah Priest and GZA add their typical ballast-heavy musings on metaphysics and crack sales to Ghost's boasting of feeding children in Benin and "Africans chantin' me on like Coachella." When matched up with a more comparable style, Busta Rhymes helps turn "Superstar" into an Olympic-level track meet of fast-rap, while Ghost and Cappadonna appropriately spaz out for "Black Tequila". And while "Handcuffin' Them Hoes [ft. Jim Jones]" is possibly the least promising run of words ever to grace a Ghostface tracklist, there's still an illicit glee in how lines like, "And I ain't even gotta be dipped/ I pull out my pocket two sloppy joe mitts this thick!" counter the problem that some of his most locked-in performances as of late come at the expense of tactful gender relations.
While the music and the personnel are all comfort food for Ghostface, Apollo Kids still leaves something of a strange aftertaste. The basically arbitrary sequencing never allows too much momentum to build, and the lack of any sort of organizational principle makes it come off seeming more slapped-together by Def Jam interns than an Event release befitting Ghost's rep. But the larger issue is that Apollo Kids feels like a record that's good because it never dares to be great. Even on Ghostface's more uneven LPs, there are always reasons to think of Ghostface as a victim of his own prolificacy rather than someone who can no longer make a legit claim as one of the greatest rappers ever-- "Alex (Stolen Script)", "Maxine", "White Linen Affair", to name a few. That "2getha Baby" and "How You Like Me Baby" didn't spark much buzz in advance shouldn't be a surprise, as they feature the kind of clock-punching rhymes ("She look like she get it from her mama/ That's right Michelle I'm Obama") that Ghostface is supposed to be an alternative to. Those are two of the three songs on Apollo Kids that are solo joints (the other being "Starkology", which is so minimal it's barely there), and the most troubling aspect is that Apollo Kids makes a strong claim as Ghost's best LP since Fishscale, and he's hardly on it.
You'll never have to question whether foot soldiers like Shawn Wiggs, Trife Da God, and Sheek Louch are going to try and bring whatever constitutes their A-games, but Ghostface should never get outshined by the likes of Joell Ortiz when it comes to criminology. "In Tha Park" also is somewhat underwhelming for a song that features two of the best voices in hip-hop on the same track for the first time; yet whereas Black Thought's invocation of fights at the Spectrum and out-of-town ice skaters feels steeped in personal history, Ghost's hip-hop origin story comes off like he's told it dozens of times.
It's hard not to feel conflicted about Apollo Kids. Unlike Ghostface records that presumably get unfairly judged by the standards of his best work, it's tempting to overrate it due a general relief that he didn't try to make Ghostdini again. And even if the initial buzz of simply getting a new LP wears off pretty quickly here, it's not to the point where "no Ghostface" is better than "new Ghostface." But as with the aforementioned Weezer, Ghostface's weakest output is coming at a point when he's releasing more than ever, and differentiating correlation and causation just gets harder and harder: I realize the days of spiced-out Calvin Coolers are long gone, but it's also been enough time since the relatively earthbound Fishscale that I'm not certain the remedy is just slowing the fuck down.


Across 25 torturous minutes, the Toronto rapper doesn’t make a single lasting impression as a performer, storyteller, or craftsman. He’ll do well on OVO.

4Milli

Like all OVO Sound signees, Baka Not Nice’s role within Drake’s fiefdom is defined by how Drake sees him. Since his introduction on “From Time” from Nothing Was the Same, Baka has been styled as the label’s resident goon, a no-nonsense bruiser who puts loyalty and integrity above all. In Drake’s eyes, Baka represents Toronto’s unsung underbelly, a land of accents, culture, and danger. Before Drake could go global, he had to establish his pull over a global city, and Baka, his former bodyguard, was his man on the ground.
As a rapper, Baka embraces the role Drake has laid out for him to a fault. On 4Milli, he raps with a joyful gracelessness, forgoing wit or emotion and opting for menace. He lives to pull cards and check posers, to hurl insults and to flex. His sole interests are intimidation and keeping it real; rapping comes second.  This emphasis on power and reputation sets Baka apart from the Drake-lite crooners that fill OVO’s roster (dvsn, Majid Jordan, PARTYNEXTDOOR, etc.), and he clearly enjoys all the chest-puffing—but his goon raps are largely bland and unmemorable. Baka Not Nice actually does live up to his name: His music is literally without style or flourish.
Rap has a rich history of straight shooters, but Baka’s straight talk is so unimaginative it’s taxing. When he uses humor to color his insults, he’s so unsubtle he sounds like a parody of a bully. “I’mma catch you niggas when I choose to/Sliding down your block just to shoot you/Like doot-do, do-do-doot-do,” he sings on “Money in the Bank.” On “Cream of the Crop” he growls into the mic while detailing a hook-up...because he’s sooo beasty in bed. When he tells stories, he somehow omits characters, setting, and plot. His vignette of a drug deal on “Dope Game” is so sparse and lifeless, it’s nearly a koan: “Told him to meet me in person/He met me in person, he froze.”
This limited skill set is most constrained when Baka alludes to his time in prison. His rap sheet includes armed robbery and assault and he was once detained and held in custody for 10 months for assault and human trafficking (the charges were later dropped). These bids and the circumstances around them are frequently evoked across 4Milli, yet they never have context or weight. On “Live Up to My Name,” for instance, Baka says that he began a sentence on the day Men in Black was released (July 2, 1997) and left when “Timberlake was bringing sexy back” (~July 18, 2006). It’s a jarring and clever way to render how much of a time-warp incarceration can be, but Baka goes no further. The before, the after, and the jail time itself dissolve into the generic boast that follows: “Facts, nigga, facts.”
Baka ends 4Milli by accosting hangers-on that weren’t with him before his come-up. “Where the fuck were you when the judge gave me 13 years, nine months? Where the fuck were you, when my pops was in the courtroom, in shock? Where were you when I was down below? Yo, I got convicted of something I ain’t even fucking do, my nigga,” he rants on the outro of “Gimme That Work.” These questions are rhetorical, but 4Milli is so placeless, impersonal, and disjointed that even hypothetically, it’d be hard to muster either answers or concern. Across 25 torturous minutes, Baka doesn’t make a single lasting impression as a performer, storyteller, or craftsman. He’ll do well on OVO.


To shed the stigma of “Friday,” Rebecca Black reinvents herself as a desperate hyperpop star.

Let Her Burn

Can a debut album be a comeback? I wish I could say that Let Her Burn is a scintillating and surprisingly poignant send-up of Rebecca Black’s image and history as a self-created subject of internet scorn, but sadly it is one of the most joyless and interminably dull pop records of the past few years—and confirmation that “Friday” is still the most interesting piece of music she’s ever made.
You can understand why Black felt the spotlight calling her back at this particular moment. We’re in the midst of an era when even the most commercially unsuccessful singer can rebrand as an alternative pop star and find a home on any number of gym playlists. Black is playing the game well: She relaunched her career in 2021 with an amusing, if somewhat thin, hyperpop remix of “Friday” produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and featuring Big Freedia, Dorian Electra, and the brotronica duo 3OH!3. A press release is stamped with identitarian bona fides (“queer-celebrated,” Mexican-American, “iconic queer creator,” and so on) and her new look is very much in vogue, leaning on Julia Fox-ish bodysuits, exaggerated makeup and jewelry, and Cronenberg-lite music videos. Watching the video for “Crumbs,” a breathier, less exciting retread of Tove Lo’s “Disco Tits,” you can practically hear the two-word brainstorm: It’s camp!
Sadly it is not. Let Her Burn is a desperate, bald-faced attempt to pull together whichever cultural signifiers seem likely to resonate with online fanbases. The entire album operates like this: “Destroy Me” is a cursory nod to emo-meets-d’n’b, à la Willow; “Doe Eyed” plays like Ariana Grande’s “just like magic” redone in the style of Charli XCX’s “claws”; multiple tracks deploy the kind of scraping, metallic synths that SOPHIE popularized and which Sam Smith and Kim Petras are busy running into the ground. All of this is paired with extraordinarily earnest but totally anonymous breakup lyrics—“I can’t erase you,” “My misery, it loves your company,” “There’s nothing you could do to make me love you less.”
In a sense, the triteness makes Let Her Burn an interesting cultural document. It’s proof that, in less than four years, hyperpop has gone from being a fun, hotly contested new microgenre to being a hacky shortcut into the zeitgeist. That’s the danger of building a scene with a deeply ironic sense of humor: It becomes nearly impossible to decide whether something is all part of the joke or simply capitalizing on an easily replicable sound. At some point, you have to ask yourself why you wouldn’t slap on a Rebecca Black album just for fun.
But Let Her Burn is so, so dry. Largely produced and written with MØ collaborator Stint and Micah Jasper, who worked on Slayyyter’s Troubled Paradise, Let Her Burn is bereft of the subversive and chaotic DIY energy that made hyperpop a destabilizing force. Black mostly sings in a breathy, affected deadpan that suggests heavy, anonymizing digital pitch-correction. It skirts the edges of being robotic and mostly ends up uncanny.
In 2011, Black fell victim to one of the earliest, and most intensely brain-numbing, cycles of internet discourse. First, of course, there was “Friday,” which was intensely mocked; then, there was the consideration that, perhaps, it was unfair to mock her; then, much later, came Black’s stint as an anti-bullying advocate. All the while, there were additional singles and TV appearances and splashy video cameos where you couldn’t tell if she was in on, or the butt of, the joke. She is a case study for the way that the internet exploits the young, innocent, and unself-aware. One could argue that, by releasing Let Her Burn—which carries the same clean, calculated “darkness” of classic I’m bad now 2000s pop records like Miley Cyrus’ Can’t Be Tamed—Black is reclaiming her image, seeking to exist in public on her own terms. Compared to, say, the TLC reality show hamster wheel or the Cameo ecosystem, hyperpop seems like a slightly less exploitative way for a D-list celeb to get another shot in the public eye. But far from an entryway into fertile new creative territory, Let Her Burn comes across as a means to a rebrand. It’s undeniable that Black has been through a lot, which makes it all the more bizarre that Let Her Burn, intellectually, musically, and spiritually, contains so little.
There are flashes of a slightly more interesting album. On “Destroy Me,” Black airs insecurities—“Don’t wanna be a loser/I wonder if I dye my hair/Will they think that I’m cooler?”—with an unadorned frankness that makes you wonder, a little, about who she is beyond a singer who had a minor YouTube hit with “Friday” and then, a little while later, a minor Billboard hit with follow-up “Saturday.” “Sick to My Stomach,” one of a couple of more traditional, ’80s-inflected songs on the album, will satiate anyone holding out for The Loneliest Time Side B, as will “Look at You”—although “Everybody’s got that somebody that fucks you up” is the kind of clunker not even Carly Rae Jepsen would touch.
Black, at least, seems to have a shred of self-awareness about the whole thing. On Let Her Burn’s final track, “Performer,” she sings about struggling to open up: “Every time I try to be more vulnerable/It’s like I hit a wall/Can’t go any further.” It is ostensibly not meant to be taken literally, but after an album on which she struggles to convincingly muster the anarchic spark of hyperpop or the wounded pathos of a classic breakup record, it might as well be true.


The British punk band Johnny Foreigner’s songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes.

Mono No Aware

The anime series FLCL, like a lot of anime before it, depicts a young boy fighting robots. What distinguishes the series is that the robots emanate from an abyss in the boy’s brain. When they emerge, they resemble cubist knots of trash, mechanical blocks congealed into a kind of sinister animated matter.
When I listen to the music of British punk band Johnny Foreigner, I’m reminded of those robots, in both design and velocity. Johnny Foreigner songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. The opening seconds of their 2014 record You Can Do Better, in which snare rolls are processed and multiplied until they resemble explosions in a hollow cylinder, sound like distant cousins of Blink-182’s “Feeling This.” They’ve covered American Football’s “Never Meant,” but their version transfers the expansive atmosphere of the original into their own, narrower gravity, the distinct guitar phrases shivering in anxious proximity to each other.
Mono No Aware, their fifth album, which coincides with their ten-year anniversary as a band, is their most elastic and adventurous record since 2011’s Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, in which unstable punk songs degenerated into piano ballads which then degenerated further into sound collages and spoken word. Mono No Aware isn’t as varied, but its structures have a tendency to digress, evaporate, and recombine, as if one is driving through a radically shrunken landscape. It radiates a feeling of seasickness, the guitars and drums lurching from extreme gravity into total freefall. These transitions aren’t completely seamless; you can hear the stitching. When “If You Can’t Be Honest, Be Awesome” lifts off into the remote and aerial region of an American Football song, you can feel the dissonance and tension of the transition.
Johnny Foreigner songs tend to be about geography, and how it combines with memory to produce something like three-dimensional feelings. Mono No Aware is specifically devoted to coastlines and to oceans. “I have walked into every ocean going,” guitarist Alexei Berrow sings in “Undevastator,” “holding hope out for future us/Hoping holding out was enough.” Later, on “The Worst of Us,” bassist Kelly Parker sings, “The streets shrink and the skyline blocks the sun/Whole weeks where I never see daylight/I’ve been dreaming of the ocean.” There’s a severe clarity to Johnny Foreigner lyrics, as if written under the sort of bitterness and honesty only accessed after approximately three drinks. “When your entourage froze/I’d never seen you so exposed/And I’ve seen you with no clothes,” Berrow sings in “The X and the O.” Even their meanest lyrics are haunted by ghosts, though, which often manifest in a form of delayed melancholy—a kind of hangover. A lyric in “Our Lifestyles Incandescent”—“We end up under the covers/but couldn’t be further from each other”—is capable of folding the entire Johnny Foreigner universe into itself.
Their songs also talk to each other—“Undevastator” is a sequel to You Can Do Better’s “Devastator,” and the lyric “I guess New Street couldn’t take it/But I can” in “Cliffjumper” ties back to a song on Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, forming a series of arterial connections that resemble lines the way memories rhythmically link to each other in the brain. Memories are themselves temporal hangovers; as one accesses them, one also accesses what could’ve been, drawing reality through the distortions of regret and nostalgia. The best Johnny Foreigner songs, several of which are included on Mono No Aware, depict this process holistically; you hear someone sifting through their failures and their fantasies, their past and present mistakes swarming into each other.


A strikingly intimate and affecting debut full-length from Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas.

Learning

The promotional materials for Perfume Genius' Learning show the project's sole member, 26-year-old Seattle resident Mike Hadreas, shirtless and with a black eye. It's as evocative an image as the Strokes wearing leather jackets and Velvet Underground t-shirts or Animal Collective wearing tribal masks. The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble. The production value is lo-fi, although not in a staticky, antagonistic way. Instead, the crude recording adds intimacy, to the point where you can hear Hadreas' feet on the pedals of the piano that plays a central role in many of his songs. This music sounds personal.
On paper, Perfume Genius would seem to cater to a small niche, but Hadreas has an innate gift for melody that ups the accessibility considerably. Many of these understated songs turn out to be surprisingly persistent earworms, with tunes that are refreshingly uncluttered. The song structures of cuts like "Learning", "Mr. Peterson", and "Write to Your Brother" mostly sticking to short melodic sequences that slowly work their way into your headspace. This simplicity puts greater focus on Hadreas' lyrics, and they deserve the attention. He's tackling emotionally fraught topics here-- the struggle to gain acceptance from loved ones, suicide, molestation, substance abuse, and questionable relationships with figures of authority, to name a few. "Write to Your Brother" addresses a person named Mary to act upon the titular command, reminding her to tell him, "Mom treats you like a lover/ That you have to hide all the mouthwash from her." "Mr. Peterson", the album's most heartbreakingly direct cut, concerns a teenager's sexual relationship with a teacher, ending with a grisly death.
Hadreas has a knack for detail that recalls Sufjan Stevens' more intimate and non-big-tent moments, and he knows how to tell a story. One comes away [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| from "When" remembering "the line of the trees/ Above the end of the street," as a mother steps into her yard "holding her daughter." It's the small things that stand out: the Joy Division mixtape in "Mr. Peterson", the pressed flower concealed within a letter in "Write to Your Brother", the paycheck held by the about-to-vanish titular subject in "Perry". These songs touch on a range of emotions, but the fine details make them hit harder.
For all its fragile moments and depictions of emotional instability, Learning is an unbelievably warm-sounding record. That warmth especially emanates during the album's more textural moments, like the pulsing synth dirge "No Problem" or the impressionistic ambient smears of "Gay Angels". On the latter cut, Hadreas comes closest to achieving transcendence, as near-wordless cries tangle and moan around drones and low-mixed rumbles of thunder. However upward he hits, though, Hadreas remains down to earth, whispering harshly at the track's end, "It's okay/ It's okay." In another artist's hands, this might come off as melodramatic playacting. Hadreas turns it into one of the album's most affecting songs, as this talented new artist uses those two words to evoke Learning's ultimate mindset: Today is terrible, but tomorrow can bring anything.


The New York rapper’s promising debut showcases a 21-year-old who’s still finding his own lane between sensitivity and swagger.

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: The Bigger Artist

The Bigger Artist

Last year, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie performed three sold out shows at Madison Square Garden without a debut album. He wasn’t the headliner, but when Drake asks you to perform an opening set in your hometown, you do it. His debut mixtape, 2016’s Artist, catapulted the 21-year-old from a Bronx striver with “My Shit” to a XXL Freshman with two platinum tracks. His sound mixes melody and grit; transforming his most vulnerable moments into catchy sing-a-longs. Channeling his Uptown charisma and tapping into the du jour sound he adopted during a brief stint in Florida, the result is galvanizing New York’s rap scene. On his debut album The Bigger Artist, he alternates between his rap persona, Boogie, and who he is underneath the fame, the man born Artist Dubose.
He shows contrition on opener “No Promises,” paying respect to a fan who was killed at his concert in Louisville: “Savannah just wanted to see me perform and got hit over stupid shit/I woke up and saw the shit right on my phone, they don’t know who the shooter is.” He peppers guilt through the beginning of the track as he reflects on his life choices and its affect on the people around him. “I treated them bad, I wouldn’t be mad if I was to get treated the same way/So treat me the same way,” he raps. This initial volley of introspection clears the lane for Dubose to explore his fraught relationships on The Bigger Artist, while freeing him to tap into the swagger cemented in Boogie’s music.
One thing about Boogie is that he loves the piano to an extreme degree. It floats over more than half of The Bigger Artist’s 15 tracks, carving out a sound that has become his signature. Fingers run across the keys at the beginning of “Money Sprung,” a flute-infused love song to big bills. It gives his songs a sense of melodrama that falls somewhere between pure gothic sadness and a Pure Moods compilation. But his voice feels at home over piano loops, bouncing around as it does on “Say A’,” a cryptically cheerful song about how fame has altered his encounters with police. Although his affinity for the keyboard is clear, Boogie’s prized instrument is his voice, flipping and distorting melodies. Here, he not only tests the dexterity of his original flow, but reinvents ones from yesteryear.
A large part of his claim to fame was his ability to dig into his soured relationships with women, like the Drake effect, but without the ribbed turtleneck. Buried in this album are cadences of jaded love songs, most notably Lauryn Hill’s “Ex Factor” and Maroon 5’s “This Love.” But, it’s when producers Myster Whyte and Tracksterz interpolate Robin Thicke’s “Teach U a Lesson” that you see how well Boogie can reinvent the wheel. Grabbing Trey Songz for background vocals, “Bad Girl” is his interpretation of a love song, raucous and raunchy, and totally his own.
The Bigger Artist is a peek at Boogie’s potential, but there are moments that feel like déjà vu, both for Boogie and for the state of rap itself. The production on “Undefeated” sounds almost identical to Drake’s “Energy,” and closer “Beast Mode,” screams like a faulty tribute to Future—cramming as many “Freak Hoe” and “Diamond Dancing” references as can fit into four minutes. When his sound doesn’t outright mimic Drake or Future, Boogie sounds slightly ahead of the curve, testing the bounds of melody at every turn.


Neil Young: On the Beach / American Stars 'n' Bars / Hawks & Doves / Re-ac-tor

There are few musical artists who need the old canonization speech less than Neil Young. With his reputation preserved amongst us youngsters as the Godfather of Grunge (apparently based on little more than a predilection towards flannel), he's already known by all as the hip great-uncle amidst the Woodstock era's senile grandparents. Still, attention must be paid to the most impressive feat of Young's career: an all-but-perfect streak of very good-to-excellent albums that spanned an incredible, and unparalleled, eleven years. To put it another way, from 1969-1979, Neil Young was rock's Joe Dimaggio.
Which makes it especially cruel that, for years afterward, Neil's eccentric skepticism about the auditory worth of the compact disc format kept many of those albums out-of-print. So it's somewhat ironic that now, in the dying days of the digital disc, Reprise Records has finally convinced their stubborn client to allow for patching up most of these holes, rescuing four albums from obscurity and bootleggers. Fancy remastering, fancy packaging: who cares? I can finally retire four crackly vinyls to wall-decoration duty.
The most criminal omission by a long shot was On the Beach, the 1974 disc that represented Young's last ramp-up before his masterpiece, Tonight's the Night. Recorded with help from The Band's crack rhythm section and colorful multi-instrumentalist hick Rusty Kershaw, On the Beach is one of the few from Young's catalog that doesn't land easily on either his country or hard-rock piles. Three song titles with the word "blues" give you an idea of the mood, but hardly prepare you for the bleak anger of "Revolution Blues" or "For the Turnstiles", post-apocalyptic visions as eerie as any of 28 Days Later's scenic pans. The real engine of the album's brilliance, though, is the trio of slow, long, lonely hotel room folk songs that closes out the album, peaking with Neil's "Desolation Row", "Ambulance Blues." To hear them is to know that Jason Molina goes to bed each night caressing a copy of this record.
The stark tone of On the Beach was only carried over to one track from 1977's American Stars 'n' Bars, the creepily lo-fi "Will to Love". What fills the remainder of the album is a sort of buffet-style Neil Young, offering up choice leftovers from various failed projects of the era. The peak, of course, is "Like a Hurricane", perhaps one of the finest examples of Neil's willfully untechnical guit-hartic playing style, a chord progression that induces string-popping frenzy in his live shows to this day. But also making appearances are Skynyrd Neil, slashing country-rock lines through "Bite the Bullet" and Farm Aid favorite "Homegrown", and Sensitive Poet Neil, revisiting Harvest seasoning with "Hey Babe" and "Star of Bethlehem".
Unfortunately, reclaiming that Harvest mood is what chokes the majority of Hawks & Doves, notable for being the dashed-off post-Rust Never Sleeps album that breaks his streak of excellence, and not much more. Other than faux-traditionals "The Old Homestead" and "Captain Kennedy", this 1980 release captures an uncharacteristically tentative Neil, clearly unsure of whether to develop quirky singalongs like "Lost in Space" or plastic soul like "Staying Power" (an early harbinger of his recent unbecoming Motown romanticism). Young can't even seem to stay on task thematically here, sequencing the patronizing "Union Man" before "Comin' Apart at Every Nail"'s fanfare for the working man. Consider that the title track is brimful of pro-American nationalism from the Canadian-born songwriter, and you've got a good idea of just how confusing an effort Hawks & Doves can be.
But confusion was to be the name of the game for Young in the 1980s, a period celebrated for his principled resistance to record company pigeon-holing, but very, very rarely actually listened to. The fourth reissue in this batch, Re-ac-tor, doesn't quite fall into the gimmick trap that so much of his second full decade's work did, but the effort is still held back by an unhealthy fascination with using guitars as sound effect generators: machine guns in "Shots", backfiring cars in "Motor City", train engines in "Southern Pacific". Quality of songwriting and fierce playing by Crazy Horse manage to redeem the album, however: "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze" and "Shots" rank as two of his most underrated barnstormers.
To own all four reissues, then, is to witness a couple snapshots of the man mid-streak, and a couple from the immediate aftermath, as he began to slouch towards genre experimentation and respectably above-mediocre twilight. However, all but the most devout Neilologists should forgo the latter two; it'd leave enough money to track down a bootleg copy of Time Fades Away, now the only neglected step-child of Young's peak period (and despite what you may have heard from Neil himself, one of his best). Although we'd love to see that record in print, too, us superior folk would no longer have anything to lord over the peons. Sorry, Col. Molina, your secret recipe is out.


The Austin native Jess Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence. Her debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive.

Native State

“Maybe I am just the devil’s girl,” Austin native Jess Williamson sang in one of her early songs, each word croaked like something drifted up from the underworld. Williamson’s particular strain of folk is at once earthy and gothic, often seeming haunted by some invisible, vaguely tortured presence—a guitar creaks like an old staircase; the occasional pedal steel lick blows by like a sudden, inexplicable draft. Her songs are loosely structured and rarely have what you’d call verses and choruses; she prefers instead to let them unfurl into strange and twisted shapes. Sometimes she sounds like Angel Olsen or Joanna Newsom, but more often she sounds like a coyote—lonesome and half-rabid, howling into the sparse landscapes of her songs and then pausing, as if she’s waiting for an echo.
Williamson’s debut full-length Native State is only seven songs long, but it unfolds at an unhurried pace that makes it feel expansive. She wrote it shortly after leaving New York City for her hometown of Austin (she describes that change as a “period of turning inward and spending a good deal of time alone”), and, fittingly, these songs luxuriate in slow rhythms, compositional elbow room, and moments of quiet introspection. The stirring, macabre opener “Blood Song” begins as though it’s being sung by a sleepwalker (“Who can say what’s really real when there’s a veil between what you kinda see and what you kinda feel”), but it gathers force and vividness as the song moves on. Like Williamson’s most powerful songs, “Blood Song” gives you the impression that you are watching someone weaving on a loom in reverse: as time goes on patterns unravel, solid ground disappears, and by the end the the very bones of the thing lay exposed.
There’s never a shortage of the kind of music Williamson makes. Every generation has its own crop of banjo-wielding mystics singing about astrology, medicine wheels, and long-haired ladies, and—blame so-called hipster culture’s antique shop fetishism, or maybe just the commercial viability of Marcus Mumford—that lane feels particularly crowded right now. But that makes it that much more impressive that Native State stands out among this ever-refreshing crowd. Williamson is particularly good at braiding together nostalgia for the past with a gimlet-eyed (and often bitingly self-aware) view of the present moment. (There’s humor here, occasionally, so subtle and cutting that you might miss it: “I thought I saw something real in Barcelona, in Brooklyn/ But I’ve learned the power now of manic delusions.”) She paints scenes of “moon-bathing ladies” and measures time by Saturn’s orbit, but then chases these lines with expressions of such plainspoken clarity that they almost knock you off your feet: “Here I am at 25 and I can’t sign a lease,” she admits in the last song. “Mostly I’ve survived off people being nice to me.”
Native State is often quite dark, so the last two songs—aside from “Blood Song”, perhaps the best she’s released yet—pop up like the first shocks of green in springtime. “You Can Have Heaven on Earth” is a warm, banjo-driven ode to nature (“Try as we must to touch what surrounds us/ All of us thinking what we can’t photograph, we can sing”), but all of the themes of the album really come together in the short, sprightly closer “Seventh Song”. It’s a song about finding a balance between solitude and codependence, between barrelling forward and standing still. Native State is a document of a restless spirit, a wanderer continually searching for the landscape that will best match the thoughts—and the songs—that rattle inside her. But she never romanticizes her wanderlust: She realizes that the very drive that moves her forward could easily result in a lifetime of dissatisfaction. The wisdom of “Seventh Song”, then, is how to find peace in stillness—even if it’s only temporary. You can almost hear the hum of the highway beckoning in the background, but in the album’s final line, she’s found the thrill of its opposite: “Do you know how holy it is/ Just to sit quietly with someone?”


Finally full of purpose, rapper Jonwayne navigates his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices?

Rap Album Two

In 2014, Los Angeles rapper/producer Jonwayne had a crisis of faith. His suddenly-realized rap dreams were the impetus for his own implosion. A battle with alcoholism waged in part because of a crippling fear of flying, and the harshness of his lifestyle threatened to ruin him. He canceled his shows, parted ways with his label Stones Throw, and retreated from the rap scene. The next year, he released an EP called Jonwayne is Retired. “When I’m grieving I stay up writing these masterpieces,” he rapped. His second full-length rap album seems to prove that assertion. It’s an introspective journal that uses self-critique as a lens through which to examine the fragility of rap celebrity on any scale. It considers what it means to be a rapper and it considers the cost. Rap Album Two deconstructs Jonwayne to build him back up.
Jonwayne has always been a master craftsman and talented technician, but in the past, his raps didn’t really have any function. It was rapping for the sake of it. He had plenty of knotty, syllable-twisting wordplay pivoting on slant rhymes and internal schemes, but much of the content was filler. His full-length debut as a lyricist, Rap Album One, was bogged down by his inability to get out of his own head, rattling off series after series of pointless puzzlers and long-winded (albeit fun) workarounds for rap cliches aiming to show how clever he was. Instilled with purpose, Rap Album Two weighs every sentence carefully. He isn’t interested in constructing complex lyrical miracle word exhibitions. He's too busy wondering if rap is even worth it.
Much of Rap Album Two is about rap as both an instrument of destruction and a vehicle for redemption. It finds Jonwayne navigating his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? His writing, which was once so heady, is now sobering. He’s rapping more deliberately, and the bars all mean more, carrying bigger burdens but bringing bigger rewards. There’s literally a song called “These Words Are Everything.” Songs like the existentialist daydream “Human Condition” and the punching “City Lights” explore the consequences of addiction, especially when pursuing a rap career (“There's a price to it youngin’/You most likely don’t invite the kind of vices we brung in/Be it poison of the body or the kind you can’t see ‘cause it's creeping up behind”). The album uses a beatpack with snappy, slow-rolling drums, minor piano chords, soul hymnals, and sunless tones to depict an ongoing recalibration, as Jonwayne finds his way back to rap.
On “LIVE from the Fuck You,” one of the album’s keenest moments, a stranger approaches the rapper in public asking for an impromptu concert for a girl he’s with (“She says she knows who you are, I think she's a big fan”) before tagging on a dismissal: “She says you rap and I’m not really seeing it, dog.” Jonwayne finally indulges his request for on-the-spot raps with a verse dismantling the “fan” and his actions: “So here’s a little story bout the way I make it hurt/The way I make you learn how not to approach a man who’s suffering for his work like a monkey in the circus.” The observations aren’t exactly revelatory but they are cleverly articulated, and the sharpness with which they’re delivered makes them potent. The most telling moment on Rap Album Two is “The Single,” a chest-beating song he botches several times before scrapping. The title of the song and his inability to complete it best exemplify the album’s primary lesson: the pursuit of stardom can be punishing, both on mind and body.
Rap Album Two is easily the most fulfilling project Jonwayne has ever made loaded with the most thoughtful writing of his career. It isn’t just the gravity of subjects, it’s the carefulness with which he’s willing to examine them. Every candid, incredibly personal line contains some form of catharsis. Alcoholism drove him into isolation and loneliness only led to further self-sabotage. But this record is a triumph over that. These raps don’t just exist for posterity; they, too, are a part of the healing process. As Jonwayne rethinks his “order of operations,” he becomes closer to whole.


The long-delayed album captures Wayne how we want to remember him: openhearted, word-drunk, and exhilarated by the possibilities of his own voice.

Tha Carter V

We can only imagine what Tha Carter V might have sounded like in 2014 when Lil Wayne first announced it was finished. We’ll never know how many Trinidad James features that shelved draft of the album might have included, or what kind of play on “Blurred Lines” Wayne might have made, or which words he might have rhymed with Gotye. That album probably wouldn’t have been very good, and it almost certainly wouldn’t have been as rewarding or revealing as the belated final product that a humbled Wayne presented on his 36th birthday, after the four most trying years of his career.
Lil Wayne was already mired in a brutal slump when the bottom fell out. Overexposed and uninspired, he’d become so resigned to his dwindling relevance after years of repeating the same jokes that he’d even stopped calling himself the greatest rapper alive. Then, for reasons that still aren’t completely clear, his mentor and father figure, Birdman, turned on him, refusing to release the album and all but holding his career hostage amid bitter contractual disputes. The two reconciled this year, but the hurt and betrayal are harrowingly documented on 2015’s Sorry 4 the Wait II, the most impassioned of Wayne’s otherwise lifeless 2010s mixtapes.
Despite the toll those wilderness years took on him, it may have been for the best that Tha Carter V was delayed so long. It’s hard to imagine the rapper who’d released the dreadful I Am Not a Human Being II just a few months prior could have crafted an album this tactful and heartfelt. There’s a degree of quality control on Carter V that nobody could have expected from a 2018 Lil Wayne record, let alone a nearly 90-minute one.
Wayne is no longer the lunatic trailblazer of his ’00s mixtape run, a rapper who in a just a couple bars could summon a purplish reality where fish flew through the skies and pigeons swam in the ocean. It’s hard for that kind of Christopher Robin imagination to survive this deep into adulthood. But more than any release since 2009’s No Ceilings, Carter V captures Wayne how we want to remember him: openhearted, word-drunk, and exhilarated by the possibilities of his own voice. He dials back his most obnoxious tics: the overbearing Auto-Tune; the incessant dick jokes; that awful, forced cackle that grated exponentially more with every tired crack. And even his lamer quips pay off in unexpected, sometimes emotional ways. “Blunt big, big as Mama June off the diet plan/Smokin’ science lab/I should have a tattoo that say, ‘I’m not like my dad,’” he raps over a nervy Zaytoven beat on “Problems.”
Some of these tracks date back years, while others were reportedly finished just weeks ago. That could be a recipe for whiplash, but most of this material is woven together so seamlessly that its provenance is never a distraction. Nicki Minaj gives the most radiant R&B performance of her career on “Dark Side of the Moon,” and Kendrick Lamar brings Nicolas Cage–levels of insanity to his “Stan”-inspired spotlight turn on “Mona Lisa,” breaking out a dozen different voices as he dramatizes the breakdown of jealous boyfriend driven to the edge by his partner’s obsession with Weezy. Neither Wayne nor Kendrick let the song’s high concept get in the way of unbridled, ferocious rapping. On the more of-the-moment end of the spectrum, there’s “Don’t Cry,” an XXXTentacion feature that kicks off the album on a misleading, miserablist note, and “Let It Fly,” an undistinguished foray into Travis Scott’s boutique trap.
But unlike 2011’s relentlessly trend-chasing Tha Carter IV, on Carter V, Wayne finally gives himself permission to fall behind the times. The record is never more electric than when Wayne engages with his past, victoriously returning to lanes he’s conquered instead of fixating on all the newer ones he’ll never own. He reunites with Mannie Fresh on the riotously fun throwback “Start This Shit Off Right,” accompanied by Young Money’s resident lovable goofball Mack Maine and a heavenly hook from the queen of radio’s yesteryear, Ashanti. Swizz Beatz gets in on the nostalgia, too, adrenalizing his club jam “Uproar” with a hyped-up flip of G. Dep’s “Special Delivery.”
For as much as it’s been retooled over the last four years, one thing has remained the same since Tha Carter V was first announced: Its cover, a photo of a young Wayne with his mother, Jacida. She looms protectively over the entire album, tearfully narrating its opening track and filling in Wayne’s biography in interludes. She’s not the only woman in his life who plays a prominent role. His eldest daughter, Reginae, capably sells a bittersweet hook on “Famous,” and his ex-fiancée, Nivea graces, his redemption tale “Dope New Gospel.”
Their presence foreshadows the uncommonly personal tone of the album’s final stretch, especially the closer, “Let It All Work Out.” It shines new light on one of the tentpoles of Lil Wayne’s backstory: the self-inflicted gunshot wound he survived at age 12, which he’d always maintained was an accident. Now, he confirms, it wasn’t. “Too much was on my conscience to be smart about it/Too torn apart about it, I aim where my heart was pounding,” he raps. It’s a powerful reveal, one he in effect waited years to share until he had found the right happy ending to frame it around, and it closes the record on a breath-stopping note. The most surprising takeaway from Tha Carter V, it turns out, isn’t that Wayne still has music this vital in him. It’s that after all these years, there’s still more to learn about him.


Capping off his breakout year, the D.C. rapper offers a deft album of soft synths and languid trap that further carves out his identity.

Quiet Storm

All the way through 2017, Shy Glizzy’s voice has been at the center of an unexpected Washington, D.C. rap hit. GoldLink’s “Crew” snowballed into a smash as the months warmed, and it’s Glizzy’s verse that cuts the song in half, interrupting an otherwise sinewy and droning R&B jam with a jumpy giddiness. The eager opening of his verse—“Hey! Nice to meet/I’m Young Jefe, who you be?”—is the type you brace for all along, the obvious “this is my favorite part” of one of the year’s happiest surprises. Of course, it wasn’t an introduction so much as a mainstream moment of arrival. Glizzy has been at or near the center of D.C. hip-hop since at least 2014, and “Crew” felt more like lending a hand than climbing a social ladder. But where GoldLink burrowed into D.C. music tradition for a statement album that blipped his city back into the mainstream hip-hop consciousness, Glizzy channels the pervasive sounds of Atlanta trap for his own contemporary D.C. soundtrack.
Glizzy’s latest mixtape, Quiet Storm, is an ambitious 18 songs, but he’s successfully designed it to glide by. Almost every beat is in a softly-synthed, languid trap style, and Glizzy is rarely as jumpy as he appears on “Crew.” Instead, he hosts the project as the center of attention, a pop artist with a full arsenal of graceful melody to match the tone. Go-to Atlanta producers like TM88, Goose, and Yung Lan dot the landscape with tracks that sound smooth but not slick, and often take shape out of minor key atmospherics. Glizzy uses the same sounds to channel opulent romance (“Blow a Bag”) and morbid existentialism (“Take Me Away”), sometimes on the same song. “Get Away” is a versatile escapist anthem: crime chase and sentimental runaway at once.
Glizzy has also rekindled his surefire working relationship with the Atlanta producer Zaytoven, whose keyboard twinkles on “One Day” might echo some of his previous productions (see Future’s “Peacoat”), but remain vital enough to appear on both this album and the producer’s own recent solo outing. For all the Atlanta stars Zaytoven’s beats have canvassed, Glizzy might treat them the best. He slips into the first verse with droning couplets and jumps out of the second to yelp out his bona fides. For the chorus, he churns hope into a mantra, promising and reminding himself of the purpose of his grind: “All my niggas gon’ ball one day.”
Besides the smartly streamlined curation of beats, Quiet Storm also folds in carefully doled out features: Trey Songz carries a swaggering hook on “Dope Boy Magic” and Dave East punches into “Get It Again” with a relentless string of brags. As the de facto leader and concentrated star power of the D.C. crew Glizzy Gang, Shy shares space with 3 Glizzy and 30 Glizzy on “Haters Anthem” for a track that greets envy with biting inspirationalism. But there’s a sour side here too. In September, 30 Glizzy was shot and killed in Baltimore, and his brief appearance on the Quiet Storm tracklist prefaces a heartfelt tribute at the end of the album. That closer, “Take Me Away,” is dangerously morose, edging into depressive suicidal thoughts as Glizzy caps off each chorus line with an open invitation for death. Glizzy sounds both like an open-wound and depressed shut-in here. “It’s a war started outside, don’t wanna talk about it,” he yelps. For all the giddiness Glizzy carries onto many of his songs, he’s never been more endearing than this, wallowing in justifiable street survivalism. More than ever, he sounds like the open heart of his city.


Prolific Bay Area band offers its latest album of jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody.

Grey-Eyed Girls

The Fresh & Onlys formed just last year in San Francisco, but they already boast more music to their name than most bands manage in twice that time. Over the course of a flurry of 7"s, a limited-edition cassette, and two full-length albums-- last spring's self-titled and now Grey-Eyed Girls-- you can hear the sound of a young band busily honing in on what they're good at. In case you weren't tipped off by their almost distractingly evocative band name (should we be thinking of the Only Ones, or the Young Fresh Fellows?), the Fresh & Onlys traffic in jangly garage-pop, balancing psych-rock swagger with generous dollops of sweetly cockeyed melody. Their recordings are lovingly caked with crud, and their jams sometimes veer perilously close to derailing completely*,* which might seem to lump them in with other San Francisco psych revivalists like Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps. But the Fresh & Onlys are set apart by an endearingly fussy devotion to songcraft and an understated and unfakeable weirdness. Their self-titled record was fairly straightforward but satisfying garage rock; Grey-Eyed Girls is stranger and more interesting, toning down the swagger and finding a sweet spot somewhere in between uptempo brashness and the quirky vulnerability of Beat Happening.
If the Fresh & Onlys come off as more winsome than your average Nuggets fetishists, part of that might have something to do with their diffident rhythm section, which ensures that they wobble more often than they rock. "What's His Shadow Still Doing Here" is a classic piece of Buddy Holly yearning that drags and nearly trips over its own feet, gaining in poignancy and charm whatever it loses in a steady backbeat. "No Second Guessing", meanwhile, comes off like a handmade valentine straight from Calvin Johnson: "Be strong, be wise/ Don't ever question your place in my life," Tim Cohen warbles in his unsteady baritone. "Dude's Got a Tender Heart", for its part, is a bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold tale that echoes the Crystals' "He's a Rebel" over a tin-can approximation of girl-group pop: "You wouldn't know if you looked at him/ But dude's got a tender heart."
There are a handful of killer straight-ahead rave-ups as well: The spectacularly catchy "I'm Gonna Be Your Elevator" bops along on its "I'm gonna lift you up/ I'm gonna bring you down" chorus chant, while "D.Y." supplies the Yardbirds-style barn-burner. But the most intriguing numbers branch out into more wigged-out territory, like the B-movie paranoia of "Invisible Forces" or "Clowns (Took My Baby Away)", the title of which requires no further elucidation. These little weirdo touches help distinguish the Fresh & Onlys from their San Francisco brethren*,* and throughout Grey-Eyed Girls, their possibly unhealthy familiarity with garage-rock arcana is balanced out by a keen songwriter's eye, and their obsession with the past is elevated by genuine affection and love.


Boris' affinity for every variety of psychedelia has been unending, so it's no surprise they finally went and named a record *Smile*. They do so after a run of releases that's included hard noise freakouts (*Sun Baked Snow Cave*, with Merzbow), drug-caked and deadpan Motörhead take-offs (*Pink*), tepid five-blunt solos [*Altar*, with SunnO)))], and psych-sessions with Ghost's Michio Kurihara (*Rainbow*). Most of these recordings came in at least two versions-- Japanese, American, vinyl, CD, smoke signal, etc.-- and, in the case of *Dronevil Final*, a one stereophonic, two-soundsystem-requiring CD set. If you claim to like everything Boris have done in

Smile

Boris' affinity for every variety of psychedelia has been unending, so it's no surprise they finally went and named a record Smile. They do so after a run of releases that's included hard noise freakouts (Sun Baked Snow Cave, with Merzbow), drug-caked and deadpan Motörhead take-offs (Pink), tepid five-blunt solos [Altar, with SunnO)))], and psych-sessions with Ghost's Michio Kurihara (Rainbow). Most of these recordings came in at least two versions-- Japanese, American, vinyl, CD, smoke signal, etc.-- and, in the case of Dronevil Final, a one stereophonic, two-soundsystem-requiring CD set. If you claim to like everything Boris have done in their decade-plus run, let alone in the past three years, your tolerance for directionless, shapeless, and unending jam sessions is higher than mine.
My guess is the band probably doesn't lose much sleep over the quality or consistency of what they put out, but it was still dispiriting to hear Boris's Atsuo run down Pink in recent interviews. He now refers to the band's "cool rock" phase as boring, which is what I'd call the instrumental noise'n'drone suites the band drops on a maddeningly regular basis. No matter: the scuffed-up, scuzzed-out Pink will be their monument, whether they like it or not. Discovering what you're best at would be a thrill to most bands, but to Boris, it apparently felt like a burden, and so Smile is their exquisite-corpse sequel, a near-automatic exercise in drawing inspiration from anybody but themselves. For the Japanese version, the trio went so far as to leave the record behind with engineer and veteran of the Stars You Ishihara, who mixed and mastered it while the band was out of town.
Among those Smile nods toward: The U.S. version opens with a cover of a song by Kenji Sawada, of Pyg/Julie-renown; "Buzz-In" is named for the Melvins; another track, apparently, cops lyrics from Japanese band Anthem. A friend by the name of Aso wrote the excellently titled "You Were Holding An Umbrella", while Sunn0)))'s Stephen O'Malley plays on the record's final song. Kurihara guests throughout. The Japanese version could credibly have Ishihara's name on the cover, since his demented, scooped-out mixes bear little similarity to what Boris will call Smile in the U.S. There are, as expected, sublime moments on both, but it also seems as if these songs were simply the first eight that the prolific band wrote between one tour and the next.
A band named after a Melvins track wouldn't title a song "Buzz-In" lightly, and Boris' tribute begins with a squealing baby, who sings a little bit before the guitars ramp up. After that, the band charges in at its usual half-stoned, half-time boogie. That swagger-- playing from behind the beat-- is likely what's on Atsuo's mind when he talks about "cool rock," which "Buzz-In" most assuredly is; why anyone would avoid howling over guitars as finely distorted and oil-slicked as these is anyone's guess. "Laser Beam", a whisky-throated, spread-legs titan, dips so low in scuzz and feedback it could be a broken practice-session rehearsal, before a typically Boris pivot: The sound of a computer turning off or on, followed by the emphatically blank return of Takeshi's deadpan vocals. Veering into satire (welcome, for a band who appear to have no sense of humor beyond the name of their label/design firm, Fangs Anal Satan) is "Statement", on which the band breaks out both a cowbell and the "woo-woo" from "Sympathy for the Devil". "My Neighbor Satan" is one of those Boris warblers-- like Akuma no Uta's "Nothingness Song", say-- that sounds like it was written, mid voice-crack, by a 16-year-old boy. The untitled finale is an O'Malley collaboration, plus another shot at breaking out the wail, here mitigated by the droning weight of O'Malley's Stonehenge backline.
Those in the market for something truly unfathomable should seek out Smile's Japanese version. Beyond an entertainingly hollowed out "Statement", Ishihara leaves most of the other instrument sounds untreated-- all the better to scrape off your skin. This swarm-of-hornets sound suits a band that consistently hesitates just at it appears ready to turn loose. I also prefer Isihara's version of "No Ones Grieve", a The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked 2 outtake, which here dispenses with the ceremonial marching of the U.S. version for an undifferentiated, Comets on Fire feedback spray.
It takes a few listens just to sort out which song is which relative to the U.S. version. "My Neighbor Satan"-- subdued, crooning-- becomes, on the Japanese version, thick, layered: a Justin Broderick outtake, drenched in JAMC fuzz. The O'Malley duet, which ends both versions, is a noisier, more guitar-hero affair via Ishihara, whose instinct is to consistently pull out both extremes (melody, solo-y chaos) in the band's sound. It's a creative way of bluffing some unity from the record.
Boris are clearly proud to have made a record as schizophrenic as Smile, and I have no doubt their method helped them see all sorts of colors while making it. But the band may consider their fellow countrymen, Acid Mothers Temple, whose propensity to make ideally psychedelic but for all purposes identical records has, over time, sucked the surprise out of their ostensibly free-form vortex. It's no crime to make the same record twice when the alternative is making a different one, over and over and over again.


On her newly reissued and expanded 2016 mixtape, Destiny Frasqueri—aka Princess Nokia—raps with granular detail about mysticism, childhood, and her native New York City.

1992 Deluxe

Destiny Frasqueri, better known as the Afro-Nuyorican rapper Princess Nokia, has spent the past five years searching for her sound. In 2016, she released a nine-track mixtape called 1992, named for her birth year and the era when her native New York City held a gritty dominance over hip-hop. She has always been a rapper with her shoe on the throat of her doubters, but 1992 was decidedly tougher than 2014’s club music-laden Metallic Butterfly and the mélange of disco, funk, hip-hop, and Corinne Bailey Rae-style pop that makes up her 2015 project Honeysuckle, which she released as Destiny. For those who have been following Frasqueri since her 2012 track “Bitch, I’m Posh”—released under the moniker Wavy Spice—then perhaps 1992 is a shock. It’s a large leap from the posing-primed, vogue ball-inspired “Posh” to her recent rugged sound. But for the 25-year-old rapper, the tape was a realization and release of a lot that has been bubbling inside of her. On a broadcast of her internet radio show Smart Girl Club, she declared, “1992 freed my soul.”
Now with a reissue via Rough Trade that includes eight new tracks, the emotions of her autobiographical lyrics are even more palpable than before. She is open about her experiences in foster care, her coping mechanisms for feeling frightened and misunderstood, and the creative manifestations of abuse on new addition “Goth Kid”: “You make me sick, and all I was was just a kid/You picked a flaw in all I did and go and make me feel like shit... You have no clue to how I lived, in foster care, abused as kids… I was sleeping in the cemetery/Kind of cute, a little scary.” There is joy in skater brat anthem “Bart Simpson” and a wealth of pride for her gender-defiant style and “little titties and fat belly” on “Tomboy.” Describing that song’s video, Frasqueri says, “[It’s] me as Destiny in New York growing up in the city, being a skater, being a comic book head, being a rapper, and being a really androgynous kid.”
The sound of New York is occasionally absent on 1992—in moments, her Migos-like repetitive hooks and regionless hashtag punchlines move it somewhere a bit less rooted—but Frasqueri’s loved for the city never wanes. She sounds especially comfortable on the pulsating “Brujas,” which explores the Taíno and Yoruban mysticism brujería (or witchcraft) that she raps about her “Grandmas” practicing. On “Saggy Denim,” she and fellow NYC upstart Wiki head back in time to 1995 where one leg of Princess Nokia’s jeans are rolled up above her calf like LL Cool J used to do; she is jamming to Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and getting high to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. She excels in these daydreams, but “ABCs of New York” is where she sounds most at home. The lyrical details are granular—she relishes eating bodega food on her mom’s couch and warns of the NYPD’s warrant squads. It is less NYC 101 and more like a native New York vernacular that harkens back to the work of artists such as Big L. Princess Nokia’s voice catches in the back of her throat and her delivery is reminiscent of Fort Greene rapper Paula Perry’s mini-hit “Extra, Extra” produced by DJ Premier.
These similarities square Princess Nokia’s first strictly-rap project right into New York’s remarkable hip-hop lineage, but they also highlight 1992’s primary deficiency: the tinny, crackerjack production throughout. How would Frasqueri sound over classic New York beats by producers like Primo, the Alchemist, or RZA? The most exciting rap coming out of the city at the current moment is by women like Cardi B and Young M.A. If Frasqueri can find more experienced collaborators, she has the ability to transcend DIY tapes and festivals for sturdier money-makers (if that’s even something she wants). Princess Nokia’s done anime cosplay and has taken inspiration from Civil Rights-era funk, and although she’s said 1992 is her most authentic self, she has a lot of time and space to really find her sound.


Brian Eno has done everything from producing huge pop stars to creating tiny art installations to touring with rock bands to inventing ambient music. Another Green World remains his definitive album.

Another Green World

In July 1975, Brian Eno found himself a few days and several thousand dollars into a studio booking with nearly nothing to show for it.
It wasn’t that he had too few ideas, but too many. His first two solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), had reimagined glam rock as sound sculpture and established Eno not just as a practitioner of pop, but a theoretician of it: Someone whose music doubled as a blueprint for how music could be made. In interviews he came off as part drag courtesan and part professor emeritus, scissoring his legs in feathers and sequins while dishing about the thrills of aleatoric composition, shaping ideas few people had heard before into forms anyone could understand.
Jets and Tiger Mountain bookended a year—November 1973 to November 1974—during which Eno released three other, collaborative albums. By the end of 1975, he’d release at least two more, including something called Discreet Music, which pioneered the textured drift of what Eno later called “ambient.”
At the time he conceived of Discreet Music, just a few months before he found himself panicked on the studio floor, Eno was lying in a London hospital after being hit by a taxi. The story—a modern creation myth—goes that his girlfriend brought him an album of 18th-century harp music, which Eno was too weak to adjust the volume on, exposing him to a blurry, impressionistic convergence of music and light rainfall outside. What if, he thought, you could make music to be heard but not actively listened to? (Or, as Eno later formulated the challenge, music “as ignorable as it is interesting.”) [1]
Days earlier, he had been lying in the back of an ambulance, holding his head together with his own bloody hands. Most people who can’t turn their brains off consider it an affliction. Eno accepted it as a gift.
Eno, it should be said, had planned on going into the studio without a plan. As an art-school student, he’d fallen in love with Fluxus, a network of sculptors, musicians, performers, and thinkers who privileged the process of making work over the product. In 1968, he won a small school award for his performance of a George Brecht piece called “Drip Event,” whose score, in full, was “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into them.”
Eno, then 20, added instructions for the instruments to be ground down and cast into blocks of acrylic resin, which should be given to young children. “Now,” he stipulated, “the music begins.” Liberated by the idea that there are no right ways, only different ones, Eno performed the piece two more times, each one unrecognizable to the last. Recording, by extension, wasn’t the endpoint of composition but part of composition itself, the studio less a place of stenography than discovery.
But record companies don’t buy and sell processes, they buy and sell records. If Fluxus and other performance artists defied the reduction of art to an object, Eno’s ambition was to make records—concrete, immutable, physical records—that reflected process. Discreet Music’s 30-minute centerpiece, a loop of slow, feathery synthesizer tones, fades in at the beginning of the record and out at the end, as though to signal to the listener that whatever Discreet Music is—the physical record, the abstract composition—we’ve only witnessed part of it.
“I think I started about 35 pieces and some of ’em were real clutching at straws,” Eno told the NME in 1976, remembering the panic of his studio session. “But it’s interesting: Sometimes that kind of desperation gives rise to things that would never happen any other way.”
Unsure of what else to do, Eno started giving himself instructions. Swing the microphone from the ceiling was one. Hire a trombone was another. A year earlier, he and the artist Peter Schmidt developed a set of creative constraints that codified in a deck of cards they called “Oblique Strategies.” Part Fluxus exercise, part I Ching, part high-concept Tarot, the cards presented what Eno and Schmidt called “worthwhile dilemmas,” scenarios artists might pose to themselves while trying to squeeze through a difficult moment.
In the spirit of the endeavor, I have just drawn three cards at random. The first says “Look at a very small object, look at its center.” The next, “Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation.” The third “Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar.” If freedom is darkness, “Oblique Strategies” were a guide rail: You might not know where you were going but at least you could start to move.
The real challenge of the Strategies is having the faith to surrender to them. Throughout his 40-year career, which has included producing such marquee enterprises as U2, Talking Heads, and Coldplay, Eno has remained a voluntary amateur, someone who seems most engaged when he isn’t sure what will happen next. More than humor, more than work ethic, more than his ability to see and conceptualize in ways nobody had quite seen and conceptualized before, Eno’s greatest gift was his ability not only to find peace in uncertainty, but progress.
Not all Eno’s collaborators shared his sense of play. As told to Geeta Dayal in her book on the album, the bassist Percy Jones remembers him handing out sheets of paper on which musicians were asked to write numbers, which corresponded to a specific note, which Eno wanted them to play on beat with a metronome. Phil Collins—yes, “In the Air Tonight” Phil Collins, then the drummer of Genesis—got about 20 beats in before stopping to throw beer cans at a bicycle across the room. Eno often came home from the studio and cried, later calling the process “almost unmitigated hell.”
A couple of months later, they had a placid, reflective and unrepentantly beautiful album called Another Green World. Though usually lumped in with Eno’s other early “vocal” albums—Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), and 1977’s Before and After Science—only five of its 14 songs actually have singing. While Eno could’ve separated the vocal tracks from the instrumental ones, as David Bowie did a couple of years later on the Eno-assisted Low, he instead dispersed them at even intervals, lily pads of song between deeper seas. The effect is like slipping into and out of sleep while friends talk in the next room.
As a child, Eno had designed houses, blueprints, sketches for fantastical and improbable places, filled with labyrinths and secret passageways. Trees grew through the middle of rooms, streams ran indoors. *Another Green World *captures those rooms in sound. Instead of linear, narrative structures that move from A to B to C to convey development, songs like “The Big Ship” start on A and linger, accumulating countermelodies, magnifying themes, staying the same and yet revealing new sides with every turn. The effect is like seeing a two-dimensional image rise off the page and then slowly fall again.
In the absence of vocals, Eno’s approach, which he once called “vertical music,” becomes a metaphor for intimacy: With every second that the tracks unfold, you feel like you’re getting closer to the heart of something. That you never arrive doesn’t matter. The joy is in the passage. I’ve often felt like the most famous “Oblique Strategy,” “repetition is a form of change,” is as applicable to my best friendships or my marriage as it is to the creative process: When you see her face every day, the challenge becomes to notice something new.
Removing vocals—or at least diminishing their primacy—was Eno’s way of chipping at how we identify the “human” in music. Pop is a diaristic form: A voice telling you their story, seeking identification. In Another Green World, voices ricochet around the mix like people in a busy market (“Sky Saw”) or stumble in the margins, drunk and out of tune (“Golden Hours”). At certain points I get the strange sense that Eno is distracted by something happening at the window, just out of frame. He isn’t commanding the sound around him, he’s inhabiting it. He could just as well leave and everything would be the same.
Among Eno’s fascinations at the time was dub reggae, which was entering an enlightenment phase. “You get an album like, say, King Tubby Meets the Upsetter, where on the back of the album you get a picture of the consoles instead of the ‘stars’,” he said in a 1975 interview. The image—instead of the band, pictures of their equipment—articulated Eno’s developing attitude that musicians are only as important as the way they’re organized and processed. (One of Eno’s other big bang moments had been with “Come Out,” by the composer Steve Reich, a hypnotic piece in which two nearly identical tape loops of a human voice slowly fall out of phase with each other then slide back together—music whose effect depended entirely on the technology used to make it.)
The most remarkable thing about Another Green World, then, is how a stoic Englishman who showed no interest in the conventional expression of emotion managed to make something that feels so intensely personal.
Eno grew up in a small, parochial town in postwar England, the son of a third-generation mailman and a Catholic woman from Belgium. Aside from occasional streaks of melancholy, young life was steady and unremarkable. “My great debt to my parents is that they showed little interest in what I was doing,” he told People in 1982. His first love was doo-wop, the lunar reverberation of echo and percussive babble of backup singers, the uncanny mix of carnal yearning and pure naiveté, of lust without sex. (Talking to the writer Lester Bangs in 1979, he called it “music from nowhere.”)
The impact lingered. The daffy, nonsensical love poetry of “I’ll Come Running,” the sha-la-las of its backup singers. “Everything Merges With the Night,” which opens with the plaintive address to a girl named “Rosalie,” the talk of waiting all summer, all evening. You can see Eno on the corner outside her house under a halo of weird orange streetlight, picking up a pebble to toss at her window. Even some of Another Green World’s instrumental tracks, particularly “Becalmed” and “In Dark Trees,” have the eerie aura of something like Elvis’ “Blue Moon,” at once grounded and hovering three feet overhead.
Another Green World is not a happy record, nor is it sad. There are no demonstrations of personal triumph or failure, pain or elation, tension or release, desire or disappointment. The album’s most dazzling passage, the guitarist Robert Fripp’s solo on “St. Elmo’s Fire,” was made under Eno’s direction to replicate the display of a Wimshurst machine, a generator that creates lightning-like sparks that jump between two metal spheres. Set in the context of the song, a long walk between Eno and his companion “Brown Eyes,” the solo—electricity across the sky—becomes a point of shared beauty, something neither of them expected to see but that overtakes them both. This is the nature of Another Green World’s romance: Not what one person does or says for another, but the bond created between two people bearing witness to something bigger than both of them: Not love but wonder.
As someone who has frequently found themselves in states of deep peace only to have someone ask me if anything was wrong, Another Green World’s apparent neutrality has always been a lifeline to me. Of course, I don’t hear it as neutral—I hear it as ecstatically calm, an album that by some mysterious grace managed to climb just a few rungs higher on the tower and get a more sympathetic look at what it all means. Though self-consciously not a hippie, Eno seemed to understand that the real promise of psychedelic drugs wasn’t to push one’s thoughts into a new beyond but to restore them to a place they hadn’t been since childhood: Drifting but absorbed, naïve but curious, moving laterally, freely, safely. In doo-wop parlance, this was his slow dance with the universe.
“I read a science fiction story a long time ago where these people are exploring space and they finally find this habitable planet,” he said to the NME, reflecting on the album’s title. “And it turns out to be identical to Earth in every detail. And I thought that was the supreme irony: that they’d originally left to find something better and arrived in the end—which was actually the same place. Which is how I feel about myself. I’m always trying to project myself at a tangent and always seem eventually to arrive back at the same place.” In other words, here.
[1] “Most of the quotes and anecdotes in this piece came from either David Sheppard’s On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World, or interviews documented on Eno’s fansite.”


On their debut album, the Irish duo Bicep—founders of the blog-turned-party and label Feel My Bicep—offer a lean and consciously paced survey of UK dance sounds with hints of psychedelia.

Bicep

The Irish DJ duo of Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, aka Bicep, have always had their hands directly on the pulse of the party. Since rising nearly a decade ago with their infamous Feel My Bicep blog-turned-party and record label, they’ve trotted the globe with their own ecstatic sound. Spanning styles like house, techno, disco, and jungle, Bicep are unbeholden to specific rhythms, scenes, or eras. Instead, their M.O. boils down to big moments in clubs. On their own tracks, they favor a boomy low-end balanced with a keen sense of melody, resulting in a range of dancefloor bombs—from notorious edits of forgotten 1990s classics to futuristic, crystalline anthems.
Bicep are most easily bracketed under the house umbrella, but many of their tracks don’t adhere to the style’s typical 4/4 pulse. Instead, Bicep favor uptempo jungle breaks, bumping 808 electro and hip-hop beats, and grinding disco rhythms. Their eponymous debut album is a varied document drawing on the rich history and variety of UK dance music, updated with sleek, modern sounds, vibrant psychedelic textures, and impeccable production.
At every turn, the melodies on Bicep display a grandiose shimmer. Opener “Orca” floats on a sun-dappled pool; its fluttering chords feel weightless as the even kick drum meets a crunchy breakbeat, providing a propulsive churn. A barely-there voice fractures and spreads across the sonic field, giving “Orca” a sense of psychedelia that sets the tone for the rest of an album that bounces and flutters like a summery wind. The dewey synths on “Ayaya” hang in the air and cascade over one another, while the syncopated rhythms on “Ayr” glide like ice. Even with such an immediate sound, Bicep strive for awe-inspiring cinematics in their design, with subtle flourishes that wow as they draw a smile across your face.
The punchy highlight “Rain” recalls recent Four Tet singles, sneaking in a gorgeous Indian vocal beneath a sharp garage house beat, but Bicep enhance the formula with reverberant effects and a meticulously detailed mix. “Glue” offers a satisfying bit of smoked-out jungle, slowed to a more modest house tempo, but across its short four-and-a-half minutes, the track doesn’t transport listeners as convincingly as some of the jungle epics that inspire it. On “Vale,” Bicep veer into a more commercial lane, with washed out vocals and fuzzy bass connecting for a moody anthem in the vein of Disclosure. (It sounds like a deeper and more restrained update to their “You & Me” remix from 2013.)
Bicep’s expansive production and compact song-lengths often lack the transportive and hypnotic potential that the best dance music offers. But it succeeds as a lean and consciously paced album. The strength of Bicep, as DJs, is their intuitive ability to structure songs into digestible morsels—with steady builds, bridges, and breakdowns—and it reflects in their arrangements here. This debut offers a crystal-clear view into the grooves that have captivated Ferguson and McBriar as their DJ careers have launched them into the upper echelon of dance music: shimmering, dramatic melodies, barreling breaks, and booming kicks that ensure their tunes are as hard-hitting as they are fun.