Joey Purp is a member of Chance the Rapper’s Savemoney Crew, and iiiDrops is his most well-rounded and definitive effort: He comes off as boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy.

iiiDrops

“I done been on both sides of the burner/I done witnessed both sides of the murder/I done seen a nigga killed/And seen a nigga kill a nigga.” This is how Joey Purp opens up his new mixtape, iiiDrops—announcing himself as a street-savvy, thug-fluent, criminal-adjacent observer of society's darker corners. He's more on the sidelines than in the fields, but he's not an outsider looking in, either. An accessory by necessity, he's smart enough to not snitch and careful enough to make his death threats subliminal, yet still aware enough to speak as the conscience from within the belly of the beast, because he personally knows of the tolls paid on the backroads to riches. “You see the world in my daughter's eyes/If you had seen what she had seen, you'd be traumatized,” he raps.
It's tempting to simplify when talking about artists, to shave off their multitudes, flatten, and categorize them. Because he is part of Chicago's Savemoney crew—the loose collective of artists that includes Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and others—Joey comes with a certain set of preconceptions, namely that he be a technically proficient stylist with a progressive artistic bent. He fits that bill, sometimes, but he's a little deeper and more human than that. Boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy, longing for the music industry's spoils while simultaneously disregarding them—his various sides come together on iiiDrops, which is more well-rounded and definitive than his woozy The Purple Tape or his word-centric experimentalism as part of Leather Corduroys.
Where Chance spent Coloring Book showcasing the audacity of his hope for a better tomorrow, Joey is a panoramic and holistic realist when he looks around at the forces and people that support the cycle of violence in his hometown. On “Cornerstore” he rides a horn-powered groove from Thelonious Martin and Donnie Trumpet, dropping off pinpoint observations along the way: He recalls speaking to his brother who may never come home from behind bars, confesses of marijuana dreams of drug kingpin success, notes that “White kids deal with problems that we never knew to bother/Arguing with they dads, we pray we ever knew our fathers,” and watches gentrification from ground zero: “Now up in the corners where killers used to inhabit/They built a row of new condos where they tore down project buildings.” He's joined by Saba (another Savemoney satellite), who matches him observation for observation: “My best friend from when I was 11, posted with the weapon/Actin' like he do not see me step into they section/We used to hoop daily and treat it like a profession/And now I'm walking by him like I'm some type of pedestrian.”
Joey’s songs make no distinction between the personal and political, and see systemic failures through the lenses of individuals without ever quite pointing fingers or succumbing to victimization. “We grow up being neglected by our elected officials,” he raps on “Money & Bitches.” “My nigga, cry me a river, I’ll buy you a tissue/ I don’t wanna hear your complainin’, you pressin’ my issue/All I know is money and bitches.” There’s also little difference between good thoughts and worthy wordplay—every rhyme and idea flows into a next; almost every moment is quotable and represents a greater whole. It’s an astounding feat for someone who tried to lean and swag his way through his first solo project.
In a year that's been dominated by headline releases from marquee artists, iiiDrops has the making of a sleeper hit. The POV is measured and insightful, the rhyming is assured by both technical and narrative metrics, and the music is quietly confident and sharply novel—Knox Fortune and GARREN's funky broken soul on “Photobooth,” OddCouple's triumphant swing on “Morning Sex,” the stripped Neptunes-ish drumplay of “Girls@” and “Say You Do,” updated blaxploitation psychedelia on “Godbody,” a semi-paranoid summer evening pulse to “When I'm Gone.” Some of the numbers sound like they belong of a producer’s showcase, more than a rapper’s coming out party, but Joey rides every beat with an easy intensity that makes his worldview the unifying factor here. He never allows the tracks to become the sole point of focus, and it takes Chance the Rapper—going on about dead batteries as a pick-up line to girls “readin' Ta-Nehisi Coates”—to upstage the star of this show.
Purp is adept at juggling and offering competing meanings, often from within the same song: “When I'm Gone” shuffles between a tale of relationship drama and fights with his boss, while the closer “Escape” is a Drake-like stream of boasting and history and chest-thumping prediction that plays like Purp's “5 A.M. in Chicago.” But he never comes off jumbled or all-over-the-place; he not only sees both sides of murder, but also the bigger picture. On “Morning Sex,” he raps, “Look in the mirror, all I see is the money / I close my eyes, all I see is the money.” He's not immune to capitalism's siren, but he's aware of the opportunity costs. Unfortunately, his gaze does not extend to seeing women in whole; there's nary a girl mentioned who isn't a ho, a nag, or one or the other in the making. That’s a disappointing state of affairs, but there is hope: If you look into his daughter’s eyes, you can see the world. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees his mother’s eyes. He's traumatized, but he’s still looking.


The 100% Electronica affiliate channels bits of techo, trance, 2-step, and jungle into contemporary rave hybrids tempered with a hint of vaporwave’s self-awareness.

Us Ephemeral

When New York City’s Jordan Stern stopped playing guitar and bass in shoegaze bands and started making techno, she took the name Vitesse X. As an algebraic variable expressed in French, the name might mean unknown speed. On her debut album, though, the velocity is fairly clockable: mid-tempo, with a nice vroom every now and then to prove the music’s horsepower, transportive if not transformational.
Us Ephemeral is worth a spin, though. Vitesse X came up, in part, through the 100% Electronica scene, which spent the pandemic amusing themselves and amassing followings via ravey, post-vaporwave VR concerts on YouTube. Engineered with precision, her output is among the scene’s most accomplished. It’s a bit peppier than Slowdive and Orbital’s early-’90s crystallizations of noise, dub, and Detroit techno. It’s heavier on the breaks than the current high-speed techno of Brooklyn clubs between the Covid waves, where muscles outflank hooks. And it’s engaged, if a bit neutral. Her work lacks some of the personality of that 100% gang, but it also sidesteps their often exhausting blend of TRL, PLUR, and MST3K.
The title track kicks things off with dust clouds of reverb, little scraps of what might be radio transmissions, a big widescreen beat, and Stern’s floaty vocals. A sped-up voice riding shotgun chants, Go go go go go. It’s a winning start to an album that continues down similar paths, passing landmarks of the last 40-odd years of dance music. “Potential Energy” takes in techstep, trance wooshes, and EDM fizz, landing somewhere near the Powerpuff Girls theme. (Which is not a read: I recently witnessed that bubblegum blaster destroy a small club in Brooklyn.) “Activation” is part Kylie/Cathy Dennis’ “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” part the XX/Florence and the Machine’s cover of “You Got the Love,” and even a touch of t.A.T.u.’s “Not Gonna Get Us.” In a cheeky bit of map-reading, she sings, “You keep getting in my head,” making it sound like a nice, if familiar, place to get lost in.
“Spaces” spatters a chunky frame with buzzy synths and scraps of organ, while Stern’s voice weaves in and out; with a bit more drive, it could charge into Charli XCX or her own tourmates Magdalena Bay territory. Spacier, and more intriguing, are “Rash Devices,” which drips spangled guitar and murmuring sighs across a bed of 2-step, and the smeary “Centrifuge Me,” which offers a hint of the force she might accumulate if she let go of the Télépopmusik tastefulness and let loose. Album highlight “Gated Bloom” unleashes a storm of drum trickery, filters, and fuckery to map out a disorienting stereo field. It may lack the breakbeat-as-breakthrough revelation of Eris Drew, but it’s aiming for stimulation, not revolution, and it surely gets there.
Sometimes, as with the pitched-down vocals and guitar peals of “Therma Maxima,” tracks feel more like tourist traps, obligatory stylistic touchdowns. “Desecrate my mind,” she might sing, but the moment seems dutiful. And closer “Repress Reprise” approaches a crisp weightlessness but gets bogged down in water-feature effects. Vitesse X isn’t there yet, but she’s heading somewhere all her own. Until then, Us Ephemeral is a good trip.


The Canadian rapper’s latest album finds moments of real depth and humanity. The rest of the time, his verses register as monotonous and tame, his energy dictated by A-list collaborators.

Demons Protected by Angels

Nav has an aptitude for fading into the background. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whose fault that is, like when his guest verse on Travis Scott’s Astroworld was the quietest on the album. But on his most recent projects, 2020’s Emergency Tsunami and Good Intentions, Nav’s meekness—combined with generic, Auto-Tuned crooning and flexes ranging from standard to weirdly specific—made his presence feel more like that of a stock image than a main character. On the new Demons Protected by Angels, he attempts to shift focus away from the beats and features, finally treating the songs like they’re his own. Nav lets extended moments of true self-awareness break through his manicured shell, momentarily deviating from the soulless bars that often fill his albums.
His comfort with the spotlight manifests in funny ways, oscillating between moving personal stories and times when he lets other artists control the tempo. Demons Protected by Angels originally included a track featuring Drake, which Nav removed because his fellow Canadian is “such a big artist” that his presence might “take away from anything else on the album.” That makes sense—but Nav then proceeds to feature Travis Scott, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Baby, and Don Toliver within one four-song stretch. The competing logic of the album’s synthesis and final structure exposes the reality of Nav’s stardom: He doesn’t have the draw to carry an album by himself. You begin to suspect that he realizes this as well.
Ceding too much room to guests undermines Nav’s individuality and causes the star-powered tracks to veer toward the generic. “Lots of water on my neck and I could easily get you wet too,” he raps on “Dead Shot,” resorting to cookie-cutter boasts to keep pace with the cosmic pitter-patter of an instrumental clearly designed with Uzi’s cadence and delivery in mind. Lil Baby blisters through his verse on “Never Sleep,” while Nav drones on about foreign cars and putting molly in Travis Scott-branded alcoholic seltzers, getting swallowed up by the Tay Keith beat. Some tracks with features rise above the mind-numbing fray, like “Interstellar” with Uzi (their matched energy is reminiscent of the stellar Eternal Atake) and “Mismatch” with Babyface Ray, who skates over a frantic Wheezy beat with expert precision. But too often Nav’s contributions register as monotonous and tame, his energy dictated by his collaborators, his words doomed to be forgotten until they’re mined for future Instagram captions.
To his credit, there are real moments when Nav draws listeners closer and surprises them by baring his insecurities and pain without flinching. Sandwiched between A-list collaborations, the solo track “Last of the Mohicans” repurposes the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle as a double entendre reference to Nav’s Punjabi heritage and self-described isolation. Supported by little more than a trap drumbeat and wistful background vocals, he sounds remarkably honest on the subject of loss and loneliness, rapping about emotional breakdowns and fears of mortality. “Lost Me,” with its somber Rod Wave–esque piano introduction and Toronto crooner RealestK’s wispy falsetto, is the closest the oft-shallow Nav has come to a true ballad. “In another dimension, I hope I get dementia to get you out my memory,” he raps at the end of the first verse, granting a rare window into what heartbreak feels like for him.
Left to his own devices, Nav sometimes strays back towards raps without substance, coasting on pristine beat selection and Auto-Tune that lull the listener into easy-listening mode. Over the sugary melody and money-counter sound effects of “Loaded,” he attempts to interrogate drug use as a form of escapism, but his abridged verse ensures that you’re more likely to hum along with the electronic keyboard in the background than to remember his accounts of fast living. The saving grace for “Destiny” is the intermittent atmospheric beeping, which forces an intriguing shift in pace and cadence amid Nav’s raps about shooters and Christian Dior floors.
The closing track, “Ball in Peace,” is a dedication to Nav’s late friend Joley Aristhee, who died in February 2022 after falling from a Manhattan rooftop while running from police. It feels like Nav’s enlightened form, the pinnacle of what he could achieve if he decided to rap about things that actually mattered to him. The song is powered solely by his voice, and though the melodies are airy, his words are tinged with pain and regret. “I see you in my dreams, fallin’ away from me/I never met someone as loyal, I’ma just keep shit immaculate for you,” he raps. It’s unfair to expect any artist to reach these depths and share them—but here, Nav does. It’s an extreme example of the emotions that he’s capable of displaying in his music. The challenge is to make these showcases of humanity and meaning the rule, rather than the exception.


Clunky lyrics and inept political analysis hinder Scott Kannberg’s most enjoyable solo album to date.

We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized

Scott Kannberg enjoys the kind of indie-rock legacy that can’t be easily undone, but not for lack of trying. We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized is the Pavement co-founder’s third album as Spiral Stairs, or his fifth solo LP overall, counting two sometimes tedious ventures as Preston School of Industry. Though it represents his strongest and most immediately appealing output to date, Hyp-No-Tized eventually succumbs to the central conundrum of Kannberg’s post-Pavement output: On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.
Twangy, sun-bronzed rock is familiar Spiral Stairs territory, explored first on 2009’s The Real Feel and again eight years later on 2017’s Doris and the Daggers. Hyp-No-Tized accelerates the style to a faster clip, generously supplementing its guitar parts with saxophone and trumpet. The occasional forays into psychedelia—on jaunty opener “Hyp-No-Tized,” probably the strongest track of the bunch, and “BTG,” short for “Blame the Government”—feel effective, if not quite revelatory. Kannberg is a more assured and less nasal singer than he once was, an achievement he credits to imitating Van Morrison. But his lyrical abilities continue to lag behind his instrumental talents: At nearly every turn, he’s hampered by clunky phrasing, whether regrettable rhymes of convenience (“You were dressed up as a clown[...]/You just couldn’t hide your frown”) or ideas more eloquently expressed elsewhere (“There’s something bad going down in Denmark”).
Where Doris and the Daggers incorporated more personal reflection, Hyp-No-Tized taps into a timely but vague political theme. The nonspecific approach offers advantages: The United States’ long political nightmare needs no introduction, nor does anyone want to find out what rhymes with “Trump.” The cumulative effect, though, is uninspired. “Swampland” rebukes Washington, D.C. by embracing its most hackneyed metaphor. “Fingerprintz” begins by decrying partisan bickering, but halfway through it meanders into a thicket of instrumentation, never to return to the subject.
The album’s most topical entry, “Borderline,” addresses sensationalized talk of border walls and migrant caravans—issues on which Kannberg, as a Californian now living in Mexico, could offer a perspective. Yet the song operates in trite and indelicate couplets (“They’ll take your bread/And shoot you dead”), dimming the appeal of what would otherwise be solid pseudo-classic rock. As always, it’s near impossible to avoid comparison to former bandmate Stephen Malkmus, whose latter-day career has yielded both more incisive commentary (“Senator,” “Middle America”) and more enjoyable nonsense.
Those determined to listen to the entirety of the greater Pavement-related discography will surely find things to appreciate: the confident strut of the title track, the guitars that lap and corner around Kannberg’s vocals on “Hold On (Til I Figure It Out).” These are exciting moments and help elevate We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized above its predecessors, which is not a high bar to clear.


The new project from Grouper’s Liz Harris contains some of her most beguiling work. Spread across two long, contrasting ambient compositions, her music remains in an enigmatic class of her own.

Nivhek: After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house

Liz Harris is just barely audible in her own music. Her voice, when she sings, is usually so low that the words sit just below comprehension, teasing that part of the mind that wants to find meaning in the things it struggles to discern. You are forever just about to comprehend a Grouper song. You don’t.
This uneasy little purgatorial space—between understanding and mystery, between anxious hum and beatific drone—is where Grouper’s music lives. It’s where a lot of us live, and Harris’ ability to speak to this place might explain why her music commands such consistent reverence. Rarely does ambient music, by definition lacking sharp form or borders, generate such a specific clutch of recognizable human feelings; rarely does it feel like one person’s breath in our ear. Harris’ music, as diffuse as it is, feels like traveling around inside of a mind.
Last week, she released a project consisting of two long, exploratory works, each broken into two pieces. Working under the name “Nivhek,” she collaborated with visual artist Marcel Weber on an audiovisual installation, one that corresponded with a residency in Portugal and the Russian Arctic. The work, taken by itself, has some of the serene, harsh quality of the landscape itself. The first piece, “After its own death,” is darker and thicker-sounding than anything on either 2018’s Grid of Points or 2014’s Ruins. It is immediately one of the most potent pieces she’s released in a decade. Over the course of its runtime, it expands and contracts and changes shape a number of times, gathering mass with foreboding blobs of tape and Mellotron and then dissolving into solitary bells and gongs, glimmering into thick silence. The atmosphere is severe, a landscape of vast emptiness that nonetheless throbs with alien, unforgiving life.
The second half of the piece feels downright sepulchral, due in no small part to the sound of heavily slammed doors echoing down hallways behind Harris’ murmured vocals. She places other small, field-recorded noises in the corners of the mix—a man’s faraway voice, some shuffling footsteps. A startling surge of distortion from a malfunctioning effects pedal blurts out of the silence, and it might be the loudest sound ever to appear on a Grouper record. The vibe is wet, sucking mud, freezing toes, a faint mildew smell in the air. The overlay of tape hiss gives it a dismal, gray feel, like a damp chill that has penetrated our clothes.
The second composition, “Walking in a spiral towards the house,” picks up where the ringing bells of the first piece began. A circular little theme on mallet percussion, bells and gongs traces and then doubles itself, wandering around prescribed circles. Lou Harrison, a minimalist composer and West Coast mystic, wrote many pieces for gamelan and gamelan-inspired ensembles throughout his decades-long career, and there are hints of some of his works—the “Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan,” for example—at play in Harris’ haunted “walking in a spiral.” The piece is spare and uncluttered to the point of stasis; listening to it, I felt sometimes as if I were watching a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself. The mood is there, a certain mystery and awe, but it dissipates as the bells chime on and the piece gathers no further momentum and takes no forked paths.
That said, one-half of After its own death/Walking in a spiral is her most beguiling work in years. Making hard distinctions between Grouper records feels a bit like ranking and classifying heavy sighs, but there are skin-prickling passages moments that surge out of her work—minor epiphanies that prick the surface of life, startling and haunting you back into yourself. It is not easy to harness or command, and if we have to wander with Harris through some uncertain patches to chance upon these private revelations, all the better.


To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Chicago group pairs new recordings of songs from 2011’s RATBOY EP with a collection of early rarities, contrasting cozy nostalgia with hard-rocking instincts.

Happy Birthday, Ratboy

Ratboys have every reason to be bitter. After nearly a decade of touring, supporting bands like PUP and Soccer Mommy, the Chicago group had cultivated a rock-solid setlist bridging its recordings’ melodic pop with a heavier live sound. Following 2017’s mesmeric GN, songwriting partners Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan rounded out their roster, adding touring bassist Sean Neumann and drummer Marcus Nuccio as full-time members before returning to the studio for their third full-length. When Bernie Sanders shouted them out at an Iowa campaign stop, it became a meme. 2020 should have been their year.
It wasn’t. Printer’s Devil, which would have been a career-defining record in virtually any other timeline, arrived on February 28, 2020. The anthemic “Anj” and “Alien With a Sleep Mask On” never knew a concert hall or festival stage. Ratboys canceled their first headline tour and relegated the album’s nervy guitar pop to acoustic live streams recorded amidst IKEA furnishings. Confined indoors, the quartet was moved to revisit past triumphs, rearranging old demos and concert staples for the new lineup. Happy Birthday, Ratboy, released to coincide with the band’s 10th anniversary, packages new recordings of songs from 2011’s RATBOY EP with a collection of early rarities and one new song, “Go Outside.”
Approached as a companion piece, Happy Birthday, Ratboy is somber and reflective where Printer’s Devil was ebullient and hopeful. But like all of Ratboys’ music, the songs have a glowing warmth even when the guitars roar and Steiner’s vocals border on a piercing shriek. The new RATBOY arrangements are faithful to the midtempo afternoon ambience of the original EP, which Steiner and Sagan recorded as undergrads at Notre Dame. “The Stanza,” which recalls high-school reading lists and nail-biting teenage listlessness, is outfitted with a more punctuated slap-guitar touch, while “Key” swells with a drowsy chorus and woozy synth solo. They also punch up the jangly folk of “Down the River” from the 2011 version.
Steiner describes Ratboys’ sound as “post-country,” which doesn’t quite fit. Their catalog is split between intimate folk pop and louder indie rock, and both strains are approachably earnest in a way that only rarely verges on melodrama. As a lyricist, Steiner finds poignancy in glancing portraits—a little boy playing on train tracks beyond view of his preoccupied father, a dead housecat overstaying its welcome in the kitchen freezer—which together approximate a clear-eyed Americana. When she writes about growing up, her focus drifts to unexamined, interstitial moments, as on “Intense Judgment”: “On the second of July, I stubbed my toe/It was 2010 and my brother was in Mexico.” Her narratives are conscious of guilt, yet redeemed by close embraces. On “Down the River,” her narrator leaves a six-pack of Heineken on a gravestone.
But Steiner and Sagan’s earworm-y melodies have a timeless quality, and Happy Birthday, Ratboy gets really interesting on its back half, where the double-tracked vocals and snarling basslines resemble Veruca Salt and Juliana Hatfield’s mid-’90s work. “Collected” lurches between jagged verses and radiant chorus; the half-time instrumental breakdown features Sagan’s most psychedelic performance in memory. His playing is equally striking on “Cacao to Cacao,” which conjures early Third Eye Blind in its pacing and precise composition.
“Have a Heart” is the record’s most ambitious arrangement, laying violins over guitars for a stirring climax, but Happy Birthday, Ratboy is most rewarding when Ratboys contrast cozy nostalgia with their hard-rocking instincts. To balance the enrapturing melody of “88 Fingers Edward,” the engineering emphasizes Neumann’s rugged bass and Sagan’s growling guitar chords. Steiner’s soft voice lilts in wistful memory: “Follow me back where we were when everything was right/And we were humming and our mouths were dry, we didn’t say it but we liked/When 18 was the age of walking in and doing things you couldn’t do/When you younger, you were dumber, but you’ll be older soon.” Then Steiner pleads, “So give me a nod, and some time to look around,” and the song launches into a two-and-a-half minute instrumental digression, both guitars soaring through a momentous key change. It took them a while to get here, but Ratboys were always sitting on a goldmine.

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With help from Jim O’Rourke and Henry Kaiser, the British guitarist supplies the bittersweet backdrop to Werner Herzog’s 2005 film about humans’ doomed desire to conquer nature.

Richard Thompson: Music From Grizzly Man

Music From Grizzly Man

The first thing Werner Herzog needed viewers to know about Timothy Treadwell was that he was dead. His Grizzly Man had indeed become at best a vanquished hero, eaten by the very bears he sought to protect, or perhaps even become. Just 31 seconds into Herzog’s 2005 documentary, Treadwell—a failed actor with a blond Prince Valiant bob, who spent 13 seasons documenting grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness—kneels in front of his camera and between two bears, bragging to an imagined audience about how dangerous and important his work is. “(1957–2003),” the screen reads, a tacit taunt that offers up the ending by way of introduction. The specifics of Treadwell’s death, though, always mattered less to Herzog than the fundamental question Treadwell’s life presented: What right do people have to think they can completely return to nature or, worse, conquer it?
In his clenched German accent, that’s the issue Herzog repeatedly confronts for 100 minutes above Treadwell’s wondrous footage of bears in the Alaskan bush. But Grizzly Man’s most understated element—its instrumental music, somehow as dark as it is refulgent—may be as important to the film’s emotional gravity as Herzog’s editorials or Treadwell’s views.
Guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson assembled a modest quintet to improvise alongside an edit for two days, part of a spirited rush to finish Grizzly Man before its Sundance premiere. (The credited “James O’Rourke” is indeed that Jim O’Rourke, then on a collaborative tear but too kind to ask that his name be fixed.) Under the aegis of producer and much wilder guitar hero Henry Kaiser, they embodied Treadwell’s personal volatility, Alaska’s untamed grandeur, and the film’s philosophical quandaries. The music never tells us how to feel about this man who seemed to know how it would all end; it only underlines the moral complexity of Treadwell’s tenuous relationship with his harsh reality.
Thompson and his little band display incredible range; their playing suits the action on screen no matter how dramatic or subtle it becomes. “Bear Fight”—a raging duet between cellist Danielle DeGruttola and bassist Damon Smith—introduces a titanic clash between Sergeant Brown and Mickey, two males in pursuit of “the queen of the grizzly sanctuary.” On the other hand, the spirited acoustic tangle of “Foxes” is all agility and so little power, its frothy ebullience the perfect accompaniment to playful footage of Treadwell’s steadiest forest friends. Presaging the solemn blues Earth would soon make, the title theme is majestic but troubled. Unfurling while Treadwell plays with adorable cubs that get too close and Herzog tell us that the man has “crossed an invisible border line,” it is a sublime wordless thesis, perfect in reductive function.
But a newly remastered edition of Thompson’s score is a pointed reminder of how well these pieces work without the movie, especially in the way they speak to our broadening and deepening conflicts with nature. Much like the film it traces, most of this music lingers in a bittersweet daze, pondering questions of right and wrong, and romance and ridicule, that Thompson knows he can never actually answer.
The minute-long preamble “Tim and the Bears” is as light as a Windham Hill feather, but there’s an undercurrent of accepted doom, too—fitting, since this is what plays in those opening moments, as Herzog offers his introductory silent obituary. Thompson’s stately arrangement of “Glencoe,” a Scottish fiddle lament written to memorialize a 17th-century massacre, is gorgeous and warm, its melody lazily sparkling like late-fall sunshine on a country lake. As Thompson lets his licks linger in the cracks of the restrained rhythm section, however, it’s hard not to feel uneasy, like someone is watching you. Unfathomable beauty and inescapable, irresistible danger—is there a simpler distillation of what drove Treadwell to his death?
Those tracks, though, follow the more familiar model for bittersweet or even emotionally ambivalent music in general—make it pretty and approachable first, then tuck the darkness into seams and corners. Grizzly Man is actually at its most stirring and enduring when it inverts this trope, adding pleasant overtones to music that feels sad or despondent. Thompson and crew nail this effect during a mid-album suite of four pieces, including his only two co-writes with O’Rourke. They mirror the way Herzog seems to see Treadwell and nature itself—skepticism and fearful respect, backed with unwavering wonder.
Notice the way that the eerie prepared piano and quiet metallic clanging of “The Kibosh,” the start of this suite, pair with Thompson’s warm acoustic line, cloaking everything they touch in sinister shadows; then notice the way all those elements slowly settle into conversation, as if warring parties have reached a promising compromise. “Small Racket,” the last of this stretch, waltzes with despair, each electric note extending another new frown. Thompson steadily lets a little more air into the lugubrious riff, harmonizing with it until it seems almost to smile. “Treadwell No More,” one of the most remarkable guitar works in Thompson’s very remarkable career, gathers up the loose threads of a Loren Connors abstraction and winds them into a long, tense, and luxurious blues, like some languid Mississippi raga. Sadness and sweetness are never far apart here.
“Human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth,” John McPhee wrote decades ago in his canonical The Control of Nature, “to take what is not given.” He was talking about the Mississippi River and our endless efforts to manage its course, but he could have been talking about Treadwell—a tragic hero or lovable villain, depending on your vantage, who thought he was strong enough to protect animals that could and finally did kill him and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. The bear was subsequently shot, too. Nature didn’t need Treadwell; he harmed it, however much he loved it.
The real magic of Thompson’s work for Grizzly Man is that it could score a million such movies about humanity’s quests to dominate nature or integrate back into it. In the splendor of these sounds and their ingrained fatalism, you can picture wildfires ripping through mountain towns that perhaps shouldn’t exist, or waters ruining coastal cities we couldn’t save. Do you marvel more at the dam whose intricate engineering controls the river for a spell, or the mighty river when it eventually wins? Do you admire Treadwell’s devotion to the bears, or do you privately relish his fate as a subject’s pre-hibernation meal? Thompson steps back and watches, playing along to a sort of beautiful doom that seems bound to become more routine.


The Swedish melodic death metal innovators crib from a career highlight, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease, on their first reunion album that does justice to their legacy.

At the Gates: To Drink From the Night Itself

To Drink From the Night Itself

More than a decade after reuniting, Swedish melodic death metal innovators At the Gates have finally made a record worthy of the excitement their comeback created. Unlike 2014’s disappointing At War With Reality, their new album, To Drink From the Night Itself, marks a delayed reawakening of the band’s melodic sense. At the Gates are still drawing on their own past—that’s just standard procedure for any death metal act that’s been around for a couple of decades. But this time, they’re cribbing from a career highlight, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease.
War was essentially a continuation of At the Gates’ Black Album, 1995’s Slaughter of the Soul, whose streamlined version of their sound catapulted the band to popularity. They broke up shortly after its release, but Slaughter lived on in 2000s metalcore, as acts like Killswitch Engage, the Black Dahlia Murder, and Darkest Hour further simplified the record’s sounds. By the time At the Gates reunited in 2007, the long-defunct Swedish group had become one of the most influential metal bands in America. Their subsequent tour was the ultimate “show ‘em how it’s done” affair—but when they finally released War, it read as a played-out rehash of the sound they’d created.
Drink goes deeper with its melodies, eschewing the shortcuts of War and Slaughter. Its title track almost mirrors that of Disease, weaving ’80s twin-guitar melodies into its thrashing rhythms. This interplay is At the Gates’ signature, and it’s far more prominent here than it was on War. The recent adjustment to their sound is, in part, the result of a changing of the guard: God Macabre’s Jonas Stålhammar replaced original guitarist Anders Björler in 2017, and the band’s other guitarist, Martin Larsson, first came on board with Disease.
Melodic death can sometimes border on AOR sappiness, but the melodies on Drink dazzle without becoming overbearing. The final passage of “Palace of Lepers” provides the most beautiful moment on the album, reveling in At the Gates’ most Romantic, Maiden-as-gospel urges. “The Chasm” is Drink’s oddball, a hybrid of the band’s own sound and the D-beat of Disfear, vocalist Tomas Lindberg’s other main group. It’s more direct than Disease, but in a way that doesn’t mimic Slaughter. Thrash and hardcore seem closer to Lindberg’s heart than melodic death metal, and it’s those influences that prevent Drink from sounding saccharine.
Although it’s a vast improvement over War, the album isn’t faultless. It loses steam over the last few tracks; as much of a relief as it is to see the band shake off the legacy of Slaughter, Drink could’ve used a galvanizing single like that record’s “Suicide Nation.” The strings are almost cinematic, and those embellishments come off as a false puff-up compared to Disease’s delicate chamber flourishes. At the Gates still don’t sound quite as confident as they did in their prime.
Death metal may not be the dominant mode of the metal underground (if there’s a drawback to diversity, it’s that there aren’t currently a lot of unifying bands or styles), but it has never been in a better place than the one it’s in now. Even as newer bands reanimate old sounds, great albums are flowing in from elder statesmen like At the Gates. It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.


The Toronto duo Majid Jordan wrote and and co-produced Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home." On their self-titled major label debut, they succeed the most when they embrace that hit song's sunny, pure-pop-for-pop's-sake energy. When they attempt to go darker, or more serious, they tend to fall flat.

Majid Jordan

Early success has its perks and its drawbacks. Since the Toronto duo Majid Jordan wrote and and co-produced Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home," they've seen every new song and video of theirs given the same treatment as if it were new material from the 6 God himself. The co-sign led to a major-label signing and an eager, supportive audience for their self-titled debut album. But it also means that Majid Jordan are immovably situated in Drake's shadow, and their self-titled debut doesn't really serve to extricate them.
Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman (the group's singer and producer, respectively) aren't run-of-the-mill Drake copycats by any means: They're pop enthusiasts, first and foremost. Witness the synth pads on "Hold On, We're Coming Home," which were cheesy and irresistible enough for us to take Drake's desire for "hot love and emotion" seriously. This sense of fun is often missing on their solo material, where they too often experiment with darker, self-consciously deeper sounds that fall flat. 2014's A Place Like This EP begins at breakneck speed before devolving into easily ignorable background music. Majid Jordan, likewise, mixes brisk pop efforts with moody cuts that blur together.
The album begins promisingly with "Learn from Each Other," which is kept afloat by pulsating bass and uptempo drums. Standout single "Something About You," produced with the Weeknd architect Illangelo (and featuring background vocals from Vince Staples' secret weapon Snoh Aalegra), deftly samples Al Maskati's distorted vocals. But for every "Something About You," there seems to be a dud, whether it's "Pacifico," "King City" (2016 OVO muzak at its flimsiest), or "Shake Shake Shake" (a "Maneater" update). "Day and Night" sounds like a Prince castoff.
And so the question remains: Why bother with Majid Jordan? They are occasionally brilliant—"Something About You," "Every Step Every Way," "My Love," "Small Talk," and "Warm" could make for a tremendous EP—and a full-blown pure pop LP would be welcome. Unfortunately, the duo's apparent ambitions to be something more hold it back from reaching serotonin-peaking heights (like Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION). Drake may have propelled Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman to heights they may have otherwise never achieved. His specter, however, keeps them grounded.


The Leeds-based musician crafts a bittersweet and atmospheric record whose songs find serenity in stillness.

The Last Remaining Light

In the final moments of “Own,” a single from Far Caspian’s The Last Remaining Light, an ensemble of guitars, cello, and violin floats like starlings in a murmuration, shapeshifting from ovals to rhombuses before dispersing against the horizon. The song, a tale of fractured friendship and well wishes, doesn’t just preach melancholic acceptance but demonstrates it. Under the Far Caspian moniker, Leeds-based, Ireland-born musician Joel Johnston uses understated indie rock as a vehicle to access distant memories that still gnaw at the heart. The bittersweet atmosphere of The Last Remaining Light coaxes out precarious emotions with ease.
Johnston debuted Far Caspian around 2018 as a way to showcase his production skills on SoundCloud. Following two EPs and a full-length, 2021’s Ways to Get Out, he wanted to make an album guided by intuition and space, with warm, clean guitar tones and soft percussion. Written, performed, recorded, and produced entirely by Johnston, The Last Remaining Light embraces these muted textures and expands them into a fine-tuned, heartfelt sound. Despite upbeat tempos, songs like “Arbitrary Task” and the title track flex detached, almost despondent vocals against sparse hooks and nimble guitarwork. You might shelve The Last Remaining Light alongside beautiful downers like Sparklehorse’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump.
The record maintains its balance even while Johnston is transfixed by acts of falling: in love, into despair, or, in “Pool,” straight into the deep end. At a glance, The Last Remaining Light can seem like a concept album about descent. Instead of focusing on crash landings or the hope that precedes a fall, Far Caspian captures the sensation of weightlessness that occurs between the two: the fleeting out-of-body experiences that grant insight into who you are and how you’re living. On “Pet Architect,” a foray into post-punk lite not dissimilar to Ought, he grapples with his recent Crohn’s diagnosis by learning to appreciate the moments when he’s not actively in pain: “Again I find myself just trying to find out how I’m strong.” After a while, the repeated falling metaphors start to feel like commentary on the monotony of routine, particularly the notion of being forced to follow through on something sure to end poorly.
Far Caspian’s most impactful lyrics are resigned to motionlessness—“I long to be somewhere I could sleep,” “Bury me beside her/Fill me up with the soil”—as if craving the security of stasis. Even in the album’s most tranquil dream-pop stretches, he doesn’t take stillness for granted. This might explain the sadness underpinning his voice. Johnston sings in the same way Mark Linkous did: so close to the microphone that he can whisper like you’re the last two awake at a slumber party, giving commonplace words the allure of secrecy. He has described these quieter passages as a salve for his own OCD, whether in the plucky bass reminiscent of Pinback on “Choice” or the steady kick drum heartbeat of “Cyril.” In Far Caspian’s music, a pause is a welcome opportunity for respite.
For a musician doing everything himself, Johnston’s most impressive skill is how he navigates the soundboard. His production coats the entire album in an overarching softness: Even the most tightly coiled guitar hooks or dissonant piano notes sound as if they are swaddled in a sherpa blanket. Clean, warm instrumentation can be just as moving as a page of heartfelt lyrics, and Far Caspian makes it a point to deliver both.


Rage rap can be rote and exhausting, but in small doses—like on the Portland rapper’s new pared-down and hypnotic album—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal.

Lyfë

Every pop decade has its cult crazes—Beatlemania in the 1960s, Durannies in the ’80s, Bieber Fever, Barbz, Swifties, and more in the late 2000s and 2010s. Strange as it may seem, Yeat is the newest inheritor of that type of fan delirium. Listeners write comments on videos for Yeat’s new project Lyfë saying his music revived their dying grandmothers and that he’s the best thing the human race has produced since the invention of the wheel. When given a chance to FaceTime the rapper, one fan howled Yeat’s lyrics at his face like a worshiper stunned by God’s light. It’s often difficult to tell whether these typically young fans really think he’s the suprëme being or they’re just shitposting. Either way, it’s the perfect half-meme reaction to a man who rose to fame off TikTok hits, a Minions collab, and a slew of mutant vocal methods.
Detractors often say Yeat’s music style—rage—is too uninspired and repetitive: bashing beats and super-shiny melodies engineered to turn concert halls into mosh pits. They’re not completely wrong. Stretches of his last four projects were fatiguing, and the busyness and intensity dull its impact on repeated listens. But in small doses—like on Yeat’s new Lyfë, which has a pared-down tracklist and hypnotic sound—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal, like giant chainsaws ripping through rubber.
Take “Talk,” Lyfë’s only single. Police sirens set a frantic scene, and then a shrieking synth catapults Yeat’s flexes into the sky: “Head #1 up on these charts, we stuck or what?” Mangled background vocals creep like demonic backup singers shadowing Yeat’s steady voice. Barely any other major label rap production in 2022 sounds as unhinged and off-kilter as this. Even some of Yeat’s most popular rage rivals, especially Ken Carson, are like cardboard Flat Stanleys compared to Lyfë’s explosive charisma. “Talk” was produced by BYNX, a member of the Working on Dying collective who cooked up many of the EP’s best beats, including the blisteringly bright “Flawless.” Then there’s “Out the way,” where Yeat wrenches out dino burps and evil Peppa Pig honks over a beat so squiggly it’s like he’s in front of you doing a goofy little dance. The synergy between Yeat and BNYX is what makes Lyfë more than just a scattered vibe-mash. Equally, without BNYX, the production sometimes drops into rage by rote mega-synths, as on “Up off X” and “Come on.”
Behind the hyperkinetic facade of the sound, though, lurk stream-of-consciousness lyrics that often describe a fucked up life that’s more wretched than rageful. “This could be my last song, hoe, it feel like I’m dyin’ on that X,” Yeat cried on the unnerving 2021 track “Let ya know,” one of many allusions to his addictions to Percocet and ecstasy. “Bag after bag after bag I can’t stop, yert after perc after yert I can’t stop,” he groans over the churning guitar and robotic banshee wail synths of “Can’t stop it.” Extreme drug use comes up so often in Yeat’s music it gets to be surreal, like percs and X are recurring characters in a cinematic universe that also includes his cars, his racks, his twizzies.
The best of Lyfë is pure hallucination music, with layers and sublayers of sound drowned in effects. On the Luca Malaspina-produced “Holy 1,” Yeat grumbles and shrieks about killing people, being a star, and trusting no one all in the same choked breath. Vaporous ad-libs and deformed growls careen over the bassline and dissolve into sacred-sounding hums. Descending deeper into the dissonance on “Killin em,” Yeat twists his low-syllable raps into an anthem for those who “come from that dirty… drinking that dirty.” Yet even on the record’s closest thing to a soul-baring song, it’s still the neon murk of the sound that compels your attention the most. Yeat hasn’t yet reached Future’s tortured tension, Young Thug’s artful eccentricity, or Playboi Carti’s squeak-scream wonder—the three vocal acrobats to whom he’s typically compared and accused of ripping off. But there’s also a sense that he’s not really trying to write heart-seizing narratives or leap much farther than his predecessors.
Yeat fans dig his music’s insularity and world-building, made from the many umlauts, alien voices, and Yeat-lish slang he’s popularized. It’s like the rage equivalent of Drain Gang lore, a similarly dense web of meme mythology. For ultra-fans, everything Yeat makes is a “vibe,” a “feeling,” and if you don’t get it then you’re an oldhead. For haters, and there are many, the 22-year-old is a copycat, a Zack Bia-boosted industry tool, and a man who raps like Yoda with a tummy ache. Lyfë doesn’t prove or shred those allegations, but if anything it sounds like Yeat has no concern for the backlash. He’s off on his own lonely planet, gurgling and spewing ad-libs into the cosmic void.


Free of Diddy's Dirty Money project, the vocalist releases a remarkable EP that eschews traditional R&B, contrasting human sympathies with harsh mechanical sounds.

Armor On EP

The most startling aspect of Diddy and Dirty Money's "Ass on the Floor" was not its liberal use of the militaristic snare loop from Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor", but how that loop was melded so successfully to the tearjerking R&B harmonies of Dirty Money members Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper. I suspect this was the ideological heart of Diddy's Dirty Money project: an insistence that R&B's sonic adventurism and its emotional intensity are in a relationship of mutual necessity, each offering a frame through which the other can be perceived in its best light. Dirty Money is apparently defunct now, but Richard has absorbed, and built on, its aesthetic to the point where she can match or even surpass the heights of 2010's Last Train to Paris, the project's sole album release.
Where Last Train came on like a glittering chorus line of guest stars, electronic costumes, and emotional poses, Dawn's solo work is rigorously private and individual. Last year's mixtape A Tell Tale Heart was modern R&B stripped to its essentials, with almost every song built around muscular rhythm tracks and layers of Dawn's vocals. Dawn's voice often resembles that of a more accomplished Brandy, combining swooping harmonies with a spare central vocal frequently on the verge of choking up. It's as if everything in her music can be divided between the absolutes of the aggressively mechanical and the nakedly, vulnerably human.
Dawn's new release Armor On is billed as an EP, but its 36-minute expanse is longer than many albums and more impactful than most. The collection makes the contrast between the mechanical and the human its central theme, aspiring to steely invincibility as an escape from the frailties of the flesh, with the constant danger of placing one's happiness in the hands of another. Dawn and her producer Druski-- who's responsible for all but one of the tracks here-- frequently turn to dance music in order to express this contrast, but Armor On largely eschews the banging wall-of-sound approach of contemporary dance-pop. Instead, its vision of dance music is one of vast, grandiose structures anchored by persistent repetition, like a vow of survival or fidelity in a rainstorm.
On "Black Lipstick", quicksilver drum'n'bass beats are deployed like landmines, tripped by the twists and turns of this deeply ambivalent song of obsession. I'm guessing that for Dawn the appeal of drum'n'bass is less the accelerated tempo than its facility for layering rhythms to create a sense of ever-deepening complexity and force. This approach matches her vocals, building into complex tapestries of interwoven harmonies, while the songs plummet toward a melodramatic core of regret, of abandon, of anger-- the tenor of the emotions may change, but the intensity is a constant. "Black Lipstick" may be more unexpected, but the by turns sensuous and haunting ballads "Scripture" and "Save Me From U (Remix)" are similarly accomplished and seductive.
Surprisingly, Dawn's distance from the compressed build-up/break-down cycles of commercial dance pop carries over to Armor On's house-influenced tracks. On the devotional "Change", a syncopated kickdrum groove gathers percussive snare rolls around it like fairy floss, until the song's percussive density becomes unbearable (echoing Dawn's romantic absolutism: "If he was religion, I'd be the faith," she declares, sounding like she's watching her lover's execution), while on "Heaven" a seductive tabla-sampling house groove becomes submerged like a fossilized imprint under successive layers of pummeling drums. Even "Faith", the EP's one concession to contemporary R&B mores, is a masterpiece of build, spiraling ever upward toward an anthemic, explosive release.
Dawn's stylistic promiscuity may be Armor On's key talking point, but its most remarkable quality is its essential unity, always returning to her vacillations of defiance and surrender in the face of love's promise and its deceptions. "I feel so artificial when loving you," she accuses a callous, uncaring lover over the rigid robo-groove of "Automatic", then sighs, "I wanna be human…" Her dilemma remains endlessly sympathetic, but it's hard not to hope she remains stuck in this bind when the results are so spectacular.


The Norwegian band's second album, produced by Converge's Kurt Ballou and featuring cover art from Baroness' John Baizley, is their first for Warner subsidiary Roadrunner.

Meir

At their best, Kvelertak register as 40-plus years of aggressive-rock history crammed into one filler-free highlight reel. Frontman Erlend Hjelvik screeched exclusively in his native tongue on the Norwegian sextet's self-titled 2010 debut, but the album spoke a universal riff language. Kvelertak's gambit was to smash the barriers subdividing the metal pantheon, so that the nimble six-string grandstanding of Thin Lizzy and cartoonish machismo of AC/DC could mingle with black metal's tortured yowls and headlong blastbeats, and commune with hardcore's bottomless vitriol. Tracks like "Blodtørst" honored Kvelertak's righteous name (it means "chokehold"), besting Andrew W.K. at his crank-it-up-and-chug party-metal quest, while at the same time mustering enough heft and geeky shred to satisfy any fan of Leviathan-era Mastodon. Extreme metal and rock & roll had cohabitated before-- see: early/mid 90s works by Entombed and Carcass, or the punky hedonism of Venom and their modern-day disciples such as Midnight-- but rarely with such sheer ballsy flair.
Kvelertak's second album, aptly titled Meir ("More"), doesn't tweak the basic formula. The band has jumped from Brooklyn indie the End Records to Warner Music Group subsidiary Roadrunner-- a label that was ground zero for early-90s death metal and currently backs Opeth, Slipknot, and Rush-- but otherwise, they've retained key aspects of Kvelertak: stunning production, almost like an extra-beefy Steve Albini job, courtesy of Converge's Kurt Ballou, eerily elegant cover art from Baroness's John Baizley and a wholesale avoidance of English. Meir also echoes the tantalizing inconsistency of its predecessor. As on Kvelertak, the choice tracks here are stunners, songs that deserve to be fast-tracked into the heavy-rock pantheon. While there are no outright duds, the less memorable material can't quite measure up, lending the album a certain almost-there feel. Meir isn't the magnum opus Kvelertak clearly have in them, but there's enough brilliance here to indicate that LP three or four very well might be.
Kvelertak's strongest songs have a way of making the hammiest stunts seem completely sensible. Lead single "Bruane Brenn" ("Burning Bridges") charges into the band's wheelhouse: pummeling uptempo rawk with Hjelvik-- a stylistically limited yet enormously charismatic frontman-- shredding throat over top. First, the band hints coyly at pop, with a nifty melodic vocal hook from guitarist Maciek Ofstad and the subtle addition of Vidar Landa's pounding piano in the second verse. Then, at the 2:45 mark, they suddenly ramp down the tempo and burst into a half minute of pure power-ballad grandstanding. The moment is so shrewdly integrated, it doesn't feel like winky pastiche; it's simply what the song demands.
Other Meir standouts show off Kvelertak's mastery of disparate metal varietals. "Spring Fra Livet" ("Run From Life") effortlessly juggles bluesy, shimmy-friendly verses and tremolo-picked cosmic-black-metal interludes, as drummer Kjetil Gjermundrød trades blastbeats for stadium-rock stomp. The effect is one of giddy inclusiveness, as though these marauding Norsemen were clenching their scowling, corpse-painted countrymates in a boozy bear hug. Awesomeness also abounds in "Trepan" (the title refers to an arcane medical practice involving skull-drilling) with its breathtaking triple-guitar stop-time interlude, and "Evig Vandrar" ("Eternal Wanderer"), which dispenses with style-hopping in favor of handsomely Zepped-out, stomping-giant raunch rock.
Meir slackens in its second half. "Tordenbrak" ("Thunderclap") features what might be the album's single finest riff-- a florid marvel that sounds something like Boston guitar wizard Tom Scholz embellishing on the Steve Miller Band's "Jungle Love"-- but the band employs the motif like a crutch, failing to situate it into any kind of compelling narrative arc over a near-nine-minute running time. Other songs seem arbitrarily eclectic. "Nekrokosmos" juggles so many sections, it scans as the metal equivalent of a Magnetic Poetry blitz, and when the band kicks into an old-school thrash gallop on "Månelyst" ("Moonlight"), the shift registers as a because-we-can move, rather than one born out of real compositional urgency.
Fortunately, Meir rights itself at the end. The final track-- entitled, yes, "Kvelertak"-- is a timeless beer-hoister, like a Back in Black outtake souped up with hardcore-style gang vocals, post-Jailbreak fret dancing and a soulful, bittersweet chorus. Clocking in at 3:50, it's basically perfect, a reminder that epic-scale songs and frantic eclecticism are secondary to the band's central mission. Like so many of their beloved forebears, Kvelertak sound smartest when they're playing it dumb.


The Nashville egg punks’ debut is a short, speedy trip to the world of “Devo-core.” Bring your giant puppets.

Super Snõõper

Before Jack White signed them to Third Man, Snõõper staked their claim in Tennessee’s DIY scene as the sound of egg punk in the 2020s: fast riffs, fun antics, and no-fucks-given misfit pride. While Indiana torchbearers the Coneheads and Liquids played hardcore-inspired weirdo punk in a Hardee’s parking lot, Snõõper raided the arts and crafts closet. At live shows, the Nashville five-piece rip through minute-long songs, perform choreography in matching tracksuits, and march bug-eyed papier mâché puppets around the stage as singer Blair Tramel curls a comically large cardboard dumbbell. The goal, as guitarist Connor Cummins put it: “Go as crazy as possible for 30 minutes.” A band with an insatiable desire to shred and a keen eye for bold visual aesthetics? Of course the guy who co-founded the White Stripes couldn’t call dibs fast enough. Snõõper’s debut, Super Snõõper, is a highlight in the world of “Devo-core,” with unpredictable riffs and voltaic singing that strike just the right balance of delightful and detached.
On their first full-length, Snõõper crawl out of the basement show circuit and into the light of a street parade, determined to make people who claim they don’t know how to dance finally bust a move. After intro “Stretching,” a sampler platter that splices together song snippets like you’re scanning radio stations, Snõõper sprint through 13 tracks of squealing guitars and sci-fi sound effects in just over 20 minutes, never allowing a good chorus to overstay its welcome. It’s not that they’re trying to leave you wanting more; they’re just constantly being interrupted by another, even more urgent idea. “Pod,” a zippy post-punk number that intertwines a melodic guitar line with jittery drum-machine cowbell, cuts out in the middle of a guitar solo so the band can barge into “Fitness,” a garage-rock send-up of exercise culture that’s interspersed with the piercing whistle of an irritated coach. In Snõõper’s world, there’s no time for fadeouts.
The puppets and props—enormous Magic 8 Balls, retro phones, arcade consoles—are a requisite part of Snõõper’s identity. For Tramel, these constructions aren’t afterthoughts but a crucial impetus for the band, easing her transition from a vocalist with imposter syndrome to a commanding frontperson. (Though she radiates enviable panache on stage, in daily life Tramel is an elementary school teacher who recently crowd-surfed for the first time and immediately called her mom to tell her about it.) More Frank Sidebottom’s big head than Iron Maiden’s elaborate mascot Eddie, Snõõper’s props are born of restless DIY creativity—a defining trait of the egg punk scene, which tends to prefer physical spaces to digital ones. But even without the aid of a glue gun or upcycled shipping materials, Tramel’s voice is electric. On “Xerox” and “Inventory,” she uses a crackling, lo-fi vocal filter that recalls Guerilla Toss’s Kassie Carlson. Whether delivered in a staccato bark, an abrasive shout, or a playful slur, Tamel’s words land like tiny static shocks. The total effect of Snõõper’s high-velocity songs is like clutching a plasma globe with both hands.
The physicality of Snõõper’s playing adds its own power to these recordings. The chugging guitars on “Unable” may sound straightforward, but Cummins and drummer Cam Sarrett beef them up by contrasting guttural tones with dainty chimes and flashes of total silence. On “Defect,” Happy Haugen takes the lead with a breakneck bassline that verges on blues rock, the notes coming so fast you can feel the blisters forming. Blanketing it all is the gritty texture of the band’s 8-track recorder. It’s hard to translate the kitschy performance-art charm of Snõõper’s stage show on record, but the album’s last and longest song puts on a spectacle to rival it: The five-minute “Running” hypnotizes as it escalates from a post-punk pulse into a bongo-smacking, cymbal-crashing, synth-wailing caterwaul. They say you have to see egg punk live to really get it. But the goofy, revved-up glory of Super Snõõper comes pretty close.


As he evolves to match modern conceptions of chillout music, downtempo producer Simon Green lands on a sound that’s pleasant, current, and unoriginal.

Fragments

Electronic music at the turn of the millennium was in a pretty laid-back place. Following rave culture’s expansion into chillout rooms and IDM’s home-listening rebuttal to house and techno, a wave of quirky European producers emerged with the shared goal of taking electronic lounge music to the next level. Downtempo acts like Zero 7 and Lemon Jelly were products of a dance music scene on the comedown, filling headphones and hi-fi stereo systems with grooves so smooth they practically unfurled onto the living room rug. The best of this crop, like Röyksopp and Air, wove colorful tapestries of samples and synths that felt like a logical convergence of trends in trip-hop, electronica, and turntablism. But even then, many of the genre’s practitioners were laying the groundwork for what we now think of as “lo-fi beats to relax/study to,” creating a post-hip-hop template for wallpaper music as feathery as it is faceless.
Simon Green, aka Bonobo, was never the most visionary producer to come out of this movement, but over time he abandoned his early downtempo style, evolving to match modern conceptions of chillout music and his own rising profile as a live performer. Starting with 2010’s Black Sands, Green gradually pivoted to a more club-centric sound, swapping reference points from Kruder & Dorfmeister to Darkside and DJ Koze. But where the latter artists have regularly spun dance music tropes into euphoric new highs, Green’s MO requires finding a zone just mellow enough to settle into until it’s time for the next track. Even if his tempo has picked up slightly, the overall effect hasn’t. His latest dispatch, Fragments, applies a soft, twinkling sheen over a familiar and unfortunate lack of original ideas.
It’s still a pleasant listen, with a bevy of collaborators who help to break up the album’s languid stream of violin interludes and sedative synth chords. The opening stretch is strongest: “Shadows” builds its central deep house groove into a swirl of hi-def synthesizers and yawning strings, while fellow Ninja Tune signee Jordan Rakei provides the generic, inoffensive club R&B vocals. More groan-worthy is “Rosewood,” which pilfers its central “I won’t leave you” line from Maxwell’s “Lifetime,” reducing an actually romantic song to boilerplate garage-house rehash. Throughout Fragments, Green’s use of samples toes this line between tried-and-true and corny, though he finds moderate success in the anthemic Bulgarian choir he deploys on “Otomo.” It’s more than a little cliché, but when the bass drops, you can practically see the heads bobbing in the summer festival crowd.
From there, Fragments blurs into a syrupy slog. Electro-R&B experiments like “Tides” (featuring Jamila Woods) and “From You” (with Joji) temporarily break up the pacing, but otherwise the album’s drowsy club thump carries on unchangingly, borrowing ideas from past decades of electronic music and presenting them in their most narcotic iterations. “Counterpart” and “Sapien” allude to Jamie xx’s technicolor take on garage with none of his inventiveness; layers of plucked and bowed strings on “Tides” recall the dubious “world music”-tinted electronica of the ’90s and early ’00s. It’s hard to get upset at music that’s ultimately this innocuous, but that doesn’t stop the record from feeling more like an overpriced spa day than a club night.
Fragments certainly feels up to date stylistically, with a mix of hi- and lo-fi sounds that evoke the silvery sheen of an episode of Euphoria, or the lavish productions of Green’s more adventurous labelmates. But Bonobo’s latest work still carries some of the worst traits of his earlier records, leaning so deeply into relaxation that it loses urgency altogether. In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes. It’s fine as something to throw on—but then, so is lo-fi hip-hop radio.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each cut on the obscure British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle's Phantoms of Dreamland presents a strange-yet-charming self-contained little sound world.

Phantoms of Dreamland

To call the British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle “obscure” is an understatement. Active since 1983, Turtle’s been in bands like wearedust, It’s 5 to 12, Monika Miller and Wicked Kitchen Staff, which is to say, music entities that are barely blips on anyone’s radar. If known for anything, it’s a collection of six strange electronic songs Turtle pressed up in 1983 entitled Music from the Living Room and if you weren’t residing near said room, chances were you never heard it.
But time has a funny property in the digital age, where even the most reclusive and obscure sounds can find a strand on the web and ride it back to the surface, which is what Turtle did, thanks to the Music from Memory label. Despite its name, the label specializes in music nearly lost from memory, reviving the fringe folks like Gigi Masin, Leon Lowman, Vito Ricci, and now Turtle. The songs that comprise Music from the Living Room scan as both primitive and deeply forward-thinking, sounding loop and sample-based though all instruments were played live and layered on tape. Truth in advertising, that album was recorded in the living room of Turtle’s parents.
And while Phantoms of Dreamland comes from an eight-minute spoken word track that grows fangs as it proceeds, the title scans as truthful in its own way. Twelve of the fifteen tracks are unreleased, phantasmal things tucked away on tape and left unheard for three decades, things once conjured by Turtle’s musical imagination. No doubt it’s Turtle’s sensibilities as a drummer that help give these tracks their ability to be revived in a DJ-centered era, in that all the squiggles, bell dings, synth dollops and guitar string scrapes are rhythmically organized into—if not grooves per se—than at least into peculiar rhythmic patterns. “Village Voice” might originate from Mr. And Mrs. Turtle’s kitchen, all gong-like lids and glugging water sounds with two voices droning at play, but its underlying pulse gives it coherence.
Glittering flits of electronics and layers of hand drums make “El Teb” sound astral and tribal at once, its hazy fidelity making it fit into a constellation between Sun Ra and outsider house producers. But almost all of the tracks follow their own insular logic, as on the nine-minute “Zoote Pointe.” It begins in a Jon Hassell-like world of woozy ritualistic percussion, rattled chimes, fluttering electronics and a cycling bassline. It nearly flickers out before Turtle suddenly changes gears at seven minutes, adding a clang of go-go bells, guitar pings and what sounds like a squeeze bottle of mustard.
Maybe having a track climax with a wet fart made sense to the man himself back then, before he went on to a career writing jingles for radio and TV. It’s a nearly lost history, but each number here presents a strange yet charming self-contained little sound world. As most musicians forgo live interaction to instead get lost in loops and insular music-making (often in their own bedrooms), Turtle’s squelchy proto-techno composition “Are You Psychic?” seems to become more prescient with each passing year.


The trio’s first album in nine years ushers in a patient new era for the band, gracefully shedding the electrifying hunger of its early days to make room for tempered joy.

Cool It Down

If any group could capitalize on indie’s embrace of pop and submission to nostalgia in the last decade, Yeah Yeah Yeahs surely might have reshaped their volatile Technicolor swagger to fit the bill to a tasteful T. But leave it to Karen O and co. to explode out of their hiatus with a cannon blast. Slowing down the drum beat of Show Your Bones opener “Gold Lion” to a mechanized crawl, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” the lead single from their first new album in nine years, hurls the band into a cinematic fever dream, trading the former song’s folky guitar strums for the cosmic churning of synthesizers. O, joined by experimental pop prince Perfume Genius, stares down the apocalypse with a commanding sermon, defiant but reflective as she comes to grips with leaving a rotting world to her son.
Late in the song, O turns the camera on herself and hands him the mic. “Mama, what have you done?” she laments as the doomsday clock ticks down, striking midnight to the screaming fuzz of a barn-burning Nick Zinner guitar solo and Brian Chase’s thundering drum fills. The trio throws all of its weight behind the song’s futuristic arena rock, charging out of the bomb shelter to bet it all on a last-ditch trick play. The message is simple but effective: if you’re going to stage a comeback at the end of the world, throw the strongest hail mary pass you can—and pray.
Though the return to IMAX-sized synths and floor-filling beats will inevitably recall the vibrant electronic rock fantasia of 2009’s It’s Blitz!, Cool It Down brings its own sentimental dance party to life by painting with a more tightly coordinated color palette. Producer Dave Sitek, who’s contributed to every YYYs album since 2002’s Machine EP, chops down the guitars to usher in pianos, strings, and heavier bass than they’ve ever played with. Cool It Down’s deep grooves usher in a patient new era, gracefully shedding the electrifying hunger of the band’s early days to make room for tempered joy.
Due to either the album’s truncated recording process—a breezy five months for a group used to a long demo process—or simply rose-colored wistfulness, Yeah Yeah Yeahs spend some of Cool It Down’s sharpest moments citing and deconstructing their influences with refreshing candor. It’s jarring how cleanly “Burning” lifts the vocal melody of the Four Seasons’ “Beggin’.” But as the shock wears off, it’s impossible to ignore the sweetness of the track’s earnest charm, the slick inventions of the updated arrangement that swaddle the original’s ’60s stomp in tight disco strings, or the exhilarating wail of O’s soaring vocal.
The trio pushes this approach one step further on “Fleez,” where O immortalizes a night out seeing reunited dance-punk innovators ESG live. She shouts them out by name in the verse, bouncing along as the band burns a scorching path to ecstasy with a hypnotic funk pulse of its own. After the opener, it’s Cool It Down’s most thrilling break with the past—a warped memory that refuses to decay, grooving harder with each distorted recollection. If giving the Scroggins sisters their flowers will keep Yeah Yeah Yeahs this charged up in the studio, so be it.
Karen O’s genius at transforming the smallest of phrases into endlessly sparkling hooks is no secret: Look no further than the eternal (and Beyoncé-interpolated) chorus of “Maps,” or the way she granulates “taking off” into a percussive sugar rush on Show Your Bones standout “Cheated Hearts.” But every now and then, her reliable lyrical workhorse hits a brick wall—it doesn’t take scarfing down the stomach-churning choruses of “Mosquito” or “Buried Alive” to realize that simple repetition can’t salvage an undercooked idea, much less imbue it with transcendence. Thankfully, Cool It Down doesn’t quite stoop to those lows, but two of its tracks struggle in vain to lift off—a real nuisance on an album with only eight songs. “Different Today” stretches the phrase to its breaking point, its shimmering synthesizers and finely tuned beat working overtime to give O’s empty optimism a narrative arc. There’s deeper heartbreak to be found on “Lovebomb,” in which vague desires for “time” and “light” flounder in an unconvincing dream-pop wash of texture. What could have been a neat genre experiment only serves to kill the momentum of the opening track’s crushing bravado.

In step with her band’s 11th-hour return, O vaults into Cool It Down’s closing moments with a daring lyrical evolution. Taking advice from fan-turned-influence Michelle Zauner, she tries her hand at poetry, recounting (or at least masterfully fabricating) an impossibly sweet memory of gazing at the ocean with her son: “I watched my favorite show tonight/The dance the light does/On the sea’s ever shifting surface.” As a twinkling synth arpeggio circles overhead, she asks him what the sun looks like. “‘Mars,’ he said/With a glint in his eye,” she recalls, repeating the line—just once—to encase its warmth in amber. In every expansive leap, Yeah Yeah Yeahs reaffirm their magnetic devotion to unearthing vulnerability. It's the magic key to their evergreen formula of amplified tenderness, and hearing them unlock a new passageway is a compelling reward all its own.


The first duo record from the longtime Sea and Cake bandmates exemplifies the ramshackle, improvisatory spirit that’s at the heart of modular synthesis.

Sons Of

The Sea and Cake have always radiated an unusual mixture of ease and control. Their balmy chords and sighing vocals may be redolent of lazy Mediterranean afternoons—Campari on ice, old-money sailboats—yet their rhythms remain impeccably unwrinkled. In contrast, Sam Prekop’s solo electronic work has always been playful, restless, maybe even a little bit reckless. Locked away in his home studio, the Chicago musician approaches his modular synthesizers like a genially rumpled Hollywood scientist, lab coat stained with strangely colored chemicals. Haywire arpeggios twitch and jerk; splotchy sounds undulate like cartoon amoebas. Infused with a guileless and inquisitive spirit, Prekop’s music is experimental in the most literal sense: What happens when I push this button?
Sons Of is the first duo record from Prekop and his longtime Sea and Cake bandmate John McEntire, a producer and percussionist who, between his time in Chicago groups like Tortoise and his work behind the boards for Stereolab and Teenage Fanclub, has put his stamp on decades of indie and post-rock. But the project is a long time coming: A dozen years ago, Prekop told an interviewer that the two men had recently been “very close to collaborating on an ‘old-fashioned’ sequencer record”; then Prekop’s twins were born, and his free time evaporated. The idea, though, did not. In 2019, they played a handful of shows together, recording as they went, and when the pandemic hit, they retreated to their respective studios and began emailing ideas back and forth. Compiling the fruits of those long-distance collaborations with material recorded live in 2019 and 2021, Sons Of represents a natural extension of Prekop’s solo electronic work, full of baubly tones, chirping accents, and supersaturated colors.
But there are crucial differences, too. The first becomes apparent just a little over a minute into the opening “A Ghost at Noon,” as a gargantuan kick drum comes pile-driving its way through elysian fields of synths. The rhythmic dimension of Prekop’s music has never been so prominent: He began toying with drum machines on 2020’s Comma, but every track on Sons Of is anchored by the steady thump of fat, declarative kick drums and crisp electronic hi-hats. Prekop has previously called his beat programming “rudimentary,” and despite McEntire’s prowess as a drummer, the duo doesn’t seem much interested in subtlety here; the album’s beats are proudly, almost defiantly simplistic. Pitched anywhere between a leisurely 118 bpm and a dubbed-out slow-motion crawl, the drums serve mainly an architectural function, like trellises to support the growth of their vine-like sequences. But that simplicity has a charm of its own: a mix of insistence and innocence that’s reminiscent of the very earliest house music.
Compared with Comma’s relatively compact statements, the four tracks on Sons Of positively sprawl. The shortest, “A Ghost at Noon,” is nearly eight minutes long; the longest nearly 24. The expanded real estate gives the duo ample room to dig into repetition’s hypnotic effects. You can hear echoes of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 in their endlessly unspooling arpeggios and patient filter tweaks, but unlike the German composer’s scale model of infinity, Sons Of’s tracks are never content to remain in place for long. They’re not as mutable as either of Prekop’s recent albums for Longform Editions, which meandered across endlessly morphing landscapes for 20-plus minutes at a time. But fresh sounds are constantly coming and going. In “Crossing at the Shallow,” a new set of chords draped over an unchanging ostinato bassline lends a new harmonic dimension, turning a club track into something more like an actual song. And in “Ascending by Night,” when a unison melody line suddenly blossoms into triads, it’s unexpectedly affecting—a reminder of how powerful even the simplest harmony can be.
That expressive dimension is Sons Of’s greatest strength. Even as the music expands in length, it feels more immediately emotionally satisfying than any of Prekop’s previous electronic music. As his experiments have gotten riskier, the music has gotten sweeter. Every track is awash in sumptuous, eminently hummable melodies; the album swells with a newfound sense of joy. That’s particularly true of “A Yellow Robe,” the album’s longest track and clear highlight. Begun as a live improvisation in Chicago and then polished up in the studio, it’s a 24-minute dreamscape of percolating arpeggios and graceful melodic lines. For a time, its layers of soft, staccato tones suggest an ensemble of mallet instruments like marimba and xylophone; the groove moves with a syncopated shimmy, the rhythm’s particulars in permanent flux. (The beat on this one, at least, is anything but rudimentary.) But halfway through, things shift: New drums enter the frame, slipping like marbles around the electronically quantized pulse, and lush pads billow like clouds. Every few bars, there’s a new sound clamoring for your attention; the chords gradually become more enveloping, radiant, even sentimental. The drifting harmonies echo the Sea and Cake at their balmiest and most bucolic, where even the slightest effort melts beneath the glow of the endless summer; the tumbling groove exemplifies the ramshackle, improvisatory spirit that’s at the heart of modular synthesis. The combination of the two is delightful.


Using sparse language and baroque instrumentation, the London artist explores captivity and control over this spectral three song EP.

Concrete

There are ghosts swimming in the margins of Martha Skye Murphy’s songs. Not memories of the dead, per se, but pale impressions of death, conflict, and captivity. The London-based artist never explicitly announces these themes on her new EP, Concrete, but they exist as apparitions—suspended in the space between lyrics, or billowing from Murphy’s layered and processed soprano. With additional production from FKA twigs collaborator Ethan P. Flynn, Murphy’s new record is a quiet eruption of baroque art-pop, evoking the legacy of Kate Bush and Julee Cruise. Concrete stretches and sprawls over a surprisingly expansive twelve minutes, sinking into a liminal space between dreaming and waking.
The three songs on Concrete flourish from their minimal verbal detail. Murphy selects her words very carefully; she is intrigued by what blooms in the space between words. Murphy understands the techniques behind effective poetry: that negative space and diction can often shape an image more cleanly than clunky exposition. On the spectral “Stuck,” Murphy points to the clouds: “Look there, there’s an airplane,” she sings, her voice small and skyward. “I wanna know where it’s going.” By her next breath, the plane has crashed (possibly into the ocean) but we aren’t privy to the details. Murphy only gives us a glimpse of the aftermath, scored by organ pulses and rippling flute: “And when they find the black box/I’ll be there with it/Sinking and kicking as I go.” The tragedy is implied in the space Murphy leaves for us.
On the creeping “Found Out,” Murphy alludes to feeling sinister delight in a power struggle. Whether the conflict is external or symbolic is never stated outright, but she suggests a shift in sexual control. “I’m saying no now/I’m saying slow down/Curtsy before you bow,” Murphy sings over lean classical guitar. “Draw me in/I’ll push you out/Spit into your mouth.” The song gets grimier as it unfurls; an electronic croak rolls in as the word “bow” leaves Murphy’s lips, and the clavinet keys sound drunken and sickly. Murphy’s voice is inherently sweet, but there is something creaking and demonic in its corners. She layers it like swaths of fabric, some coarse and tattered at the edges, others sheer and weightless. Her piercing whistle register—a technique often flaunted by pop divas—becomes something far more menacing.
Murphy pays close attention to dynamics and texture throughout the record. The tonal pivot on “Found Out” is measured, sneaking in on its tip-toes. On the title track however, it comes in one violent blow. Murphy wrote “Concrete” from the perspective of a captor “to their beloved hostage.” The song, which features New York duo LEYA and bass from Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, is a lullaby for confinement. Murphy spends three minutes as a kidnapper and architect, whispering plans for her grand structure. “I want to build a building around me/I’m gonna make it out of concrete/Around us,” she sings, strings surging behind her. “It’s gonna be three stories high/It’s gonna be wide/It’s gonna be right.”
Nothing overt about the song, with its twinkling harp and parlor piano, suggests imminent danger. The repetition of the words “in concrete,” over a dozen times before the song’s end, is the only hint at imprisonment. Each time the words are sung, it’s like another layer of cement is poured onto the structure, leading to a sublime crescendo. Murphy’s multi-tracked vocals are scattered across the song like shafts of light, and strings and synthesizers keen like whale song. Much like sirens led sailors to the rocks in Greek mythology, Murphy’s voice lures you to the abrupt crash at the end of “Concrete”: a harsh collision of metal and pavement. It is only there, in the space of the song’s final seconds, that we understand we’ve been trapped all along.
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One of the hardest-working singers in indie-pop returns to his main band for their first full-length since 2014’s breakthrough Torch Song.

Radiator Hospital: Play the Songs You Like

Play the Songs You Like

Sam Cook-Parrott has quietly built up a bit of reputation in recent years among people who like their scrappy underdog pop-punk with a tender heart on its sleeve. Torch Song, the breakthrough album that his Philly band, Radiator Hospital, released in 2014, featured a highly endearing breakup song, “Cut Your Bangs,” amid guest appearances by Katie and Allison Crutchfield. Since then, Radiator Hospital have cut a split EP with likeminded British DIY-pop group Martha, while Cook-Parrott has lent his bed-headed backing vocals to sweetly shambolic tunes by Fred Thomas, Allison Crutchfield, and, perhaps most visibly, Japanese Breakfast. He also released a self-titled album as one-half of duo the Afterglows. The stage would seem to be set for Cook-Parrott to translate this cachet among indie-pop peers to a wider audience.
Play the Songs You Like, the first full-length Radiator Hospital LP since Torch Song, once again teams Cook-Parrott with fellow guitarist-vocalist Cynthia Schemmer, drummer Jeff Bolt, and bass player Jon Rybicki. Like its predecessor, it’s packed with short, energetic songs that tend toward bashful yearning. Cook-Parrott’s slurry squeak of a voice, which many first heard on Waxahatchee’s 2013 album Cerulean Salt, remains a distinctive instrument, and there’s a spirited sincerity to these songs that should keep the already-converted bouncing around mistily in ramshackle venues. But the group’s highest-profile release to date feels strangely like a missed opportunity.
Although Play the Songs You Like is 16 tracks long, they tend to blur together. That’s true of the fast songs, such as the snare-snapping “Out of Mind,” where Cook-Parrott slurs about waking up “with your picture in my mind,” or the bristling “Lonely Road,” which finds him out there “talking to myself.” But it’s also true of the more midtempo, Byrds-descended tunes, like the dreamily resigned “Nothing Nice,” with its closed-down comic book shop, or “Cheap Day,” a ringing reminiscence on an image in an old magazine. The sharp songwriting voice behind Torch Song—the one that put the kick into “You say you’ll cut your bangs/I’m calling your bluff,” on that album’s kiss-off standout—feels less present here. Maybe those bangs got cut after all. There are a few welcome changeups—the patient space-out “Also Ran,” the winsome Schemmer showcase “Half Empty,” the mumbly acoustic ballad “Heart of Darkness”—but they come across as just that, changeups from a formula that’s not quite working.
Some of Radiator Hospital’s best work in the past has made reference to the ways that music intertwines with memory, going back to “Our Song” and “Down Again” from 2013’s partly self-recorded Something Wild. But here the meta-songwriting seems a tad counterproductive. In one consecutive three-song stretch, we get “Pastoral Radio Hit,” which has a buoyant Shins-like chorus melody; “Old Refrain,” which is enjoyably rambunctious; and “The Songs You Like,” which waxes nostalgic for those nights when a particular piece of music sounded best. None are much more memorable than their placeholder-like titles. (When the Chills called a song “Heavenly Pop Hit,” at least it was actually heavenly pop, dangit.) A few tracks later, “The People at the Show” rips into someone who’s “talking… damn near screaming.” Like much of the rest of this album, that line comes across as well-intentioned and decent, but ultimately uninspiring. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to quiet the loudmouth in the back of the bar.
Sadly, that remains the case even when Radiator Hospital play a song that some indie-pop diehards may already like. The penultimate track, “Sycamore,” is a fine cover of a song by Martha, whose Blisters in the Pit of My Heart was one of last year’s underappreciated gems. It’s a nice gesture of friendship, but the 2013 original managed to convey its jittery internal conflicts more distinctively, without sounding so much like yet another 1990s indie-rock pastiche.
“In between the notes of your favorite song/You try and figure where it went wrong/But it went wrong long ago in many different ways,” Cook-Parrott sings at the start of “Dance Number,” Play the Songs You Like’s bouncy lead single. Sometimes it’s less a question of going wrong than not quite finding the spark that makes something go right. In the same song, he adds, “I find meaning in this life when I wake up every day/But I’m feeling sick and tired in new and frightening ways.” Finally, it’s a memorable line—but what meaning he’s found, and how those ways are similar to or different from the ways we’re all feeling sick and tired, is left for another song.


Toronto post-rock band's latest contains four lengthy tracks that add new dimensions and sharper textures to their sound.

Other Truths

When instrumental rock bands get tapped for soundtracks, it can be kind of a gut-check that tests how a wider audience may view their music. Sigur Rós' folkloric melodrama and emotive language made sense as a backdrop for Vanilla Sky, itself a sort of sci-fi fairytale about misplaced and unrequited love starring someone prone to over-excitement. The charged music of Explosions in the Sky fit the open expanses and crushing blows of Friday Night Lights' take on Texas high school football culture (hell, guitarist Munaf Rayani sometimes bends over his instrument like a lineman crouching down into a three-point stance). So it seemed odd that a track by Canadians Do Make Say Think was chosen for the oil industry drama Syriana. Not to say the Toronto post-rock band doesn't make the kind of mesmerizing music suitable for a film score (or that the more tense, overtly politicized music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have been a better fit). But DMST can sound so pastoral-- the music was literally recorded in a barn, in some cases-- it may seem to lack the bite for a blood-for-oil flick.
While Do Make Say Think can project a gentle, laid-back vibe-- member Charles Spearin did just finish The Happiness Project-- they're far from spinning their wheels and rehashing post-rock clichés. Other Truths doesn't roughen up the band's jazz-steeped aesthetic. But it does add more dimensions and sharp textures to their songwriting, which continues to get tighter yet wider in scope. Spread across a suite of four lengthy tracks and titled with the same string of verbs as the band's name, the album isn't about momentum as much as it is about transitions. Opener "Do" starts with crisp, intertwined guitar lines playing off one another. As the track morphs and unfurls-- cue the slow-build and crescendo-- the themes reappear more charged, parrying with horns and descending into static. "Make" quietly delays the payoff, slowly ratcheting things up and marching toward a climax with a floor of tense bass, echoing chants, and sinewy, stretched string notes. When a warm motif of horns and fuzzed guitars begins to cut through the dread, the song's color noticeably shifts. "Say" strikes a grandiose yet road-weary tone, as a lonely slide guitar melody gets echoed and expanded by trumpets and churning drums, while "Think" may be its companion and comedown, a slow trail set forth by a quivering, reverb-laden guitar line.
Compared to the group's first few albums, filled with echoing melodies reflective of cavernous recording spaces, Other Truths shows Do Make Say Think more adept at sketching out and imagining their own widescreen landscapes. The interplay here is more complex than You, You're a History in Rust, showcasing restraint and more subtle shifts. Calling instrumental rock "soundtrack music" might be stating the obvious. But when it manages to sound as composed and calculated as Other Truths, it isn't meant as a slight.


The German producer’s smooth dance-pop is meant to be played under bright festival lights—and it’s never sounded less convincing.

Polydans

Dance music can only suspend your belief for so long these days. COVID has lapped us, and what used to be baked-in elements of our musical experience aren’t around anymore—the sparks of connection that fly at a club set, the momentum that builds during a live show. We need to grieve those serendipitous nights out, the ones that felt as if they simply sprung from a passing lusty synth line like Roosevelt’s 2015 song “Night Moves,” and we haven’t had the chance. But it’s 2021, and on Roosevelt’s latest album Polydans, Marius Lauber is still offering the illusion of open space and carefree thoughts.
Lauber started out as a DJ in Cologne at 19, jumping from band to band until he started making music as Roosevelt. Where some electronic pop acts might swaddle a song in gauze, Lauber’s music evokes an earnest sweetness, forming crisp melodies around his smooth vocals. The snappy, cooled-off attitude of songs like 2013’s “Elliot” landed him on international festival stages, a lifestyle that manifested on 2019’s glossy Young Romance.
Polydans floats between glorifying the past and dreaming of a future that might not come. On “Feels Right,” Lauber sings of running into the dusk, pretending “it ain’t that hard to carry on.” The bouncing hook on “Forget” is sweet enough to dream along with your headphones. It’s almost hard to believe an album this syrupy came from within the same four walls of isolation as the rest of us. The mysterious depth that shadowed Roosevelt’s earlier work feels sugarcoated.
What to do with the deep-fried Myspace-era nostalgia and “world keeps turning” platitudes of a song like “Lovers”? It’s hard to remember a time where this would’ve hit the spot. Roosevelt’s flavor of dance-pop is meant to be played under bright festival lights, and a wide, empty transition track like “Montjuic” would be perfect for the encore—but on record, it’s just not the same.
Polydans closes with a hint of the moody, steamy dance music Roosevelt was born to make. The wistful groove of “Sign” reveals a glimmer of the grief and loss beneath the saccharine sheen: “Come back and give me a sign of your love.” Still, it’s not enough to contain your skepticism after the music stops.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her sophomore album, the country singer name-checks Minor Threat and Against Me! while drawing inspiration from classic Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.

You Made It This Far

A few songs into her sophomore album You Made It This Far, country singer Esther Rose flashes back to her high school days in Columbiaville, Michigan. In her memory, she hears her mother’s coffee machine, wakes her sister, and scrapes the ice off the car. When they finally get out the door, she proudly lists the artists on the mixtape soundtracking the drive: “Against Me!, Julie Ruin, Minor Threat,” Rose sings. “I light up my last cigarette.” You can picture the scene—the angsty teens, the snowy road, the humdrum day ahead. All the while, a lazy pedal steel yawns and a shuffling beat pushes them forward, in no particular hurry.
The listless young characters in “Five Minute Drive” aren’t far from the ones Rose sings about on the rest of the album, emotionally speaking. But a lot has changed. For one thing, much of the present-tense action takes place in New Orleans, the city Rose has called home for the last 10 years. She addresses it most directly in “Lower 9 Valentine,” a simple love song named after the working-class neighborhood where she recorded the album with her small band. You get the sense that Rose’s setting is as important to her as the company she keeps: “Every day’s a holiday when we’re walking on the levee,” she sings. With a hopeful pull in her voice, she makes you want to join in on the celebration.
As a writer, Rose draws inspiration from the classic country songbook, artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Her preferred delivery is a sing-songy cadence that can package punchlines and hard truths with a cozy, cosmic wink. She’s also noted the influence of traditional blues music—as much the songwriting as the recordings themselves, with their crackle and sonic imperfections. In subtler ways than her 2017 debut This Time Last Night—a stark, stirring album recorded directly to two-track tape—this music incorporates the atmosphere around her. Peaceful, with ample room to breathe, these are songs that could change with each performance, on any night, in different weather.
You can also hear the influence of those old punk mixtapes from high school. For as traditional as her songs come across, you wouldn’t mistake them for throwbacks, and her lyrics can hit with an urgency embedded in the mind of anyone who’s shouted back lyrics in a sweaty, crowded basement at a formative age. (“I hope you change your mind,” goes a particularly cathartic chorus, “Oooh/Try!”). She’s often accompanied by lap steel and fiddle—two instruments that closely approximate the twang of her voice—and the arrangements fill the blanks between her words. In the exquisite “Only Loving You,” her band switches abruptly between its moody refrain and upbeat chorus. It’s an aural jump-cut that makes the music feel darker than her lovesick words would suggest.
Rose focuses her songwriting on self-discovery and how the passing of time shifts her understanding of people. In “Always Changing,” she notices a couple kissing in the park and wonders what their lives are like once they get back home and it’s just the two of them. She puts her own relationships under the microscope in “Sex and Magic,” noting the similarities between the performances in the title, how cheap and fake and desperate each can seem once it turns into routine. The sloppy pedal steel solo adds a kind of slapstick comedy, but Rose’s writing is earnest and direct; when she holds eye contact, it’s like there’s no one else in the room.
The album’s best song is also its sparest. The solo acoustic “Don’t Blame It on the Moon” was written just before the album was finished, and it’s the closest Rose has come to writing her own standard. Outside a bar in the late hours of the night, she lets us in on a series of climactic exchanges between two people in love, at the end of their ropes. Each verse is more hopeless than the last, and both parties sound exhausted and hardened to their own bad habits. “Don’t blame it on the moon/It’ll all be over soon,” Rose sings softly, then ends the song on a resounding major chord. Because soon the sun will be up, and it will be time to get moving again.