Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the final album of Patsy Cline’s lifetime, a record that helped define country-pop.

Sentimentally Yours

Hank Cochran probably didn’t think too much about the word “or” when he wrote “She’s Got You” in 1961. He probably didn’t give it much thought when he had a demo made, or even when he drove that demo over to Patsy Cline’s home in Madison, Tennessee, to play it for her personally.
But Cline made that “or” the song’s emotional hinge. “She’s Got You,” which opens Sentimentally Yours, the final full-length she released during her lifetime, is about the souvenirs of a romance that ended abruptly; Patsy has his class ring, his photograph, all the physical objects that typically signify love and commitment. But she doesn’t have the man himself. He’s someone else’s now. “I’ve got your memory,” she sings, sounding as though this alone might sustain her. Then she backtracks: “Or…. has it got me?”
The way Cline sings “or” isn’t a sigh or a sob. It’s more like a deflation. She might have convinced herself that there was comfort to be found in those old objects, but that “or” obliterates any such hope. With that aching note, Cline reaches out of the song, out of the past, and right into the present moment.
“She’s Got You” was another major hit for Cline, one in a series of country-pop smashes that signaled a comeback after several years in the wilderness and established her as one of the most successful crossover artists in Nashville. In the studio and on the stage, Cline did not initially walk those lines confidently: Preferring the cowgirl outfits her mother Hilda sewed for her and the yodeling country and western numbers she cut her teeth singing in Virginia, Cline initially fought against attempts to change her repertoire and gussy up her image.
She didn’t want to record her 1957 hit “Walkin’ After Midnight”; she thought it portrayed her as a prostitute, and she certainly didn’t want to perform it on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a popular singing show on CBS—sort of a black-and-white version of American Idol. Her opinion softened considerably when she won the competition and the song quickly ascended the pop and country charts. It should have been a career-maker, but the horrible contract she signed with 4 Star Records severely limited her material and left her more financially strapped than she had been before her breakout.
Within her small catalog of recordings, however—and especially on her third album, 1962’s Sentimentally Yours—Cline sounds like she has no misgivings whatsoever. She makes pop-country sound natural, inevitable: a reassurance that country music could survive the onslaught of rock’n’roll that threatened to render it obsolete. More crucially, the album marked the culmination of her own development as a vocalist and interpreter. She hit her stride at a crucial moment in Nashville history, when a wave of talented songwriters were redefining the genre’s conventions. Cline was a favorite of Cochran, Willie Nelson (who wrote her hit “Crazy”), and Harlan Howard (“I Fall to Pieces”). She essentially rewrote their songs simply by singing them, elevating their words and wringing every one of their rhymes for maximum dramatic potential.
Cline similarly became identified with what had been dubbed the Nashville Sound—later referred to as countrypolitan. After the explosion of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s, country music saw its market shrink and its influence wane. Established artists were playing to half-empty venues and suffering significant sales slumps. The Nashville Sound was perhaps a desperate attempt to reach new audiences by essentially de-twanging country music. Fiddles and banjos were replaced by lush string arrangements, high lonesome harmonies with smooth backing vocals. Two-steps and honky-tonk beats gave way to more urbane rhythms.
Working with Owen Bradley (considered one of the primary architects of the Nashville Sound) and a stable of ace session players locally known as the A-Team, Cline suppressed the heavy twang that had defined some of her earliest recordings, backed away from belting, and cut yodeling from her act entirely. The transformation extended to her wardrobe, as she traded fringed jackets for cocktail dresses and cowboy boots for high heels. She was by no means the first artist to popularize the Nashville Sound, but she was shaping up to be one of its biggest stars.
Cline shouldn’t have lived long enough to enjoy this career resurgence. In June 1961, she was involved in a head-on collision on Old Hickory Boulevard in Nashville, not far from where the Grand Ole Opry is today. She was thrown through the windshield and suffered a dislocated hip and broken ribs, and a cut that resulted in a scar running the length of her face. Bloodied by the side of the road, the still-conscious Cline demanded that paramedics treat the other driver first. Almost as soon as she was released from the hospital, she was back on the road and in the studio. She made an appearance at the Opry in a wheelchair, and she performed all over the Midwest on crutches. Reportedly, it took her nearly four hours to apply makeup to hide her scar.
It’s difficult to gauge the effect of that accident on her craft. Recording at Bradley’s famous Quonset Hut Studio in downtown Nashville, Cline found that her tender ribs prevented her from singing as forcefully as she once did, and she had to cut some sessions short due to fatigue and intense headaches. This brought a new restraint to her performances, as she created more space for nuance and imagination. Remarkably, there is no sense in her recordings from the early 1960s of an artist re-learning her instrument. She’s not coming into her own as an artist; she’s already there.
The fact that she was even recording long-players like Sentimentally Yours reveals the faith her new record label Decca had in her as a commercial force: Most country artists were recording singles, which appealed to a younger demographic, namely teenage girls who could scrounge together change for an inexpensive single. That audience was a growing presence at Cline’s concerts; a full album catered to the adult crowd as well, suggesting Cline was uniting demographics as well as genres.
Sentimentally Yours shows how Cline navigated a compelling middle ground between the demands of country tunes and pop standards. The chipper “Heartaches” had been a hit decades earlier for bandleader Guy Lombardo. Cline’s version retains that swinging momentum, allowing her to bounce over the melody like a stone skipping across a lake. “That’s My Desire” was a song most closely associated with Frankie Laine, who had a hit with it in 1946, but no one could muster the mature sexuality that Cline invests in a line like, “I’ll gaze into your eyes divine.” Perhaps the most stunning transformation is “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” most popular as a song Judy Garland sang to a photograph of Clark Gable in the film Broadway Melody of 1938. What had been an ode to starstruck puppy love here becomes something much graver and darker.
As for country, Sentimentally Yours includes her versions of “Lonely Street” (a hit for Carl Belew and Kitty Wells) and Eddy Arnold’s “Anytime,” as well as not one or two, but three songs associated with Hank Williams. This version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a favorite from earlier in her career, gets a more cosmopolitan arrangement that crackles with guitar and piano, and she responds by drawing out the last syllables of every line, as though unwilling to cede the spotlight to her backup singers, the Jordanaires. At times Sentimentally Yours plays like a commentary on the history of Nashville crossovers and Cline’s place within that trend. “Half As Much” had already been covered by pop artists like Rosemary Clooney (with Percy Faith & His Orchestra, no less), and Cline strikes a compelling balance between the weighty emotions of Williams’ original with the bouncy cadence of Clooney’s pop cover.
Sentimentally Yours reinforces Cline’s persona: She is always the lonely one, the heartbroken, the one who suffers so that another woman can thrive. Love is a zero-sum game. This is the province of country music starting with the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and codified by Hank Williams at the century’s midpoint. But few artists have managed to find so many facets of despair or to express them so carefully, so precisely, and she was digging even deeper into heartaches on the singles that followed this album. “If you’ve got leavin’ on your mind,” she sings on 1963’s “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” “hurt me now. Get it over.”
“Leavin’ on Your Mind” was Cline’s last single released during her lifetime, before the plane crash that killed her on March 5, 1963. Cline truly did have leavin’ on her own mind; she told close friends, including Loretta Lynn and June Carter, that she didn’t expect to see 30. Her death at that age cemented her reputation. But her star corroded over time, especially in the late 1970s, when country outlaws, new traditionalists, and southern rockers rejected attempts to polish or de-twang country music. Cline was dismissed as an oldie, the figurehead of an earlier era with questionable aims and outmoded sounds. Her crossover success became a burden to her legacy: proof of some inherent inauthenticity.
In the 1980s, however, Cline’s tragically small catalog was reappraised, first with the 1985 feature film Sweet Dreams (a horrendous biopic that’s mostly interested in her ne’er-do-well second husband) and later with compilations like 12 Greatest Hits (a fine starting place for newcomers) and the box set The Patsy Cline Collection (which arranged her catalog chronologically for the first time). Ken Burns devotes a hefty chunk of his new documentary Country Music to her story and her influence in Nashville, and Lifetime has a new biopic that examines the close friendship between Cline and Lynn. Her legacy extends to subsequent generations of young country artists who experiment with pop sounds and vocal stylings without the same hand-wringing that accompanied Cline’s innovations.
Well beyond the loss of life and artistic possibility, her early death remains a central aspect of her legacy, threatening to overshadow the stylistic innovations she made at a pivotal moment in country music history. She defined herself with songs about heartache and yearning, and her voice—simultaneously emotive and restrained—made her deeply sympathetic and endlessly relatable. And yet, that plane crash means we never got to see that suffering abate. We never got to see her expand her repertoire to songs that elaborated on that sadness or countered it with contentment. Patsy Cline never even got a chance for a happy ending.


Channeling an eerily affecting cyborg tenderness, the Austrian producer and digital nomad writes post-club anthems that sound like pop hits from a parallel universe.

Ten Billion Angels

In a scene that typically moves at a relentless pace, Zora Jones is an artist of slow, microscopic precision. Before the pandemic shuttered nightclubs around the world, the Austrian-born DJ, producer, and visual artist was living a nomadic lifestyle with her partner and collaborator Sinjin Hawke, with whom she runs the audiovisual platform and label Fractal Fantasy. Like many touring electronic musicians, Jones writes tracks on her laptop while out on the road, taking advantage of downtime in between parties. Unlike many of her peers, however, Jones is notoriously strict about quality control. After first beginning to produce in 2010, she set herself the task of creating 100 original tracks before ever releasing one. This led to her debut EP, 100 Ladies, in 2015; five years (and a smattering of collaborative releases) later, those 100 ladies have evolved into Ten Billion Angels.
Ten Billion Angels builds on themes that Jones has been meticulously sculpting throughout those years—in particular, the combination of human emotion with futuristic, sci-fi stylings. This cyborg tenderness is reflected not only in pitch-shifted melodies and gut-punch kick drums but also in the LP’s accompanying artwork, which was inspired by CGI tentacle porn. Jones claims she was first drawn to 3D tentacle erotica because of “how obsessive the creators were”—perhaps she saw reflected in them a kind of perfectionism that she also applies to her music. But in addition to its intricate detail, the artwork mirrors the music in other ways: its glossy surfaces, its fluidity, and its seamless combination of the primal and the otherworldly.
Jones’ own voice forms the backbone of the record, spliced and contorted in a way she notes was inspired by AraabMuzik’s 2011 opus Electronic Dream. Jones is a master of wringing ten billion inflections out of a single sound (notably on her recent bootleg of Selena Gomez’ “Look at Her Now,” which amplifies the heartache of the original while erasing almost every lyric other than the word “down”). On lead single “Paranoid,” Jones repeats the titular refrain—“Paranoid, think I’m paranoid”—inside synth flourishes and tightly coiled drums that circle her like vultures, while on the vast “Sister’s Blade,” a single line of melody is repeated over and over, starting out as defiant and silky over scattergun synths before sinking slowly into a lower, more elegiac register.
That emotional double entendre is the strength of this LP, where numerous synonyms for “woman” pepper the tracklist: A “sister” on one track becomes a “bitch” on another and a “princess” on the next. While “Sister’s Blade” teeters ambiguously between aggressive and mournful, “Revenge of the Bitch” is Jones’ most explicit do-not-fuck-with-me moment, all sparse and serious drums. Elsewhere, the fearsome “Low Orbit Ion Cannon”—named for a kind of cyber attack—draws most explicitly on Jones’ love of footwork (she learned from the late, great DJ Rashad and has collaborated with Gary, Ind., experimentalist Jlin), building into a stream of controlled chaos at 160 beats per minute.
While these powerful outbursts are the most high-adrenaline moments, they’re in the minority on this record. Some tracks feel like alien ballads: “Come Home,” the Björk-adjacent closer, is a spectral chorus of voices, and “I Wanna Lose You” twists a would-be R&B hook into a ghostly smokescreen of SFX. Some of these sleepier compositions, particularly towards the end of the record, lose their impact, but others are so richly embodied that they feel like pop hits from a parallel universe. “Melancholy Princess” is a kind of duet between Jones and a bassline, her voice tremulous and sweet as she croons, “I want to feel you,” over the muscular instrumental. There’s a power play between her pitched-up vocal and the brutality of the track, just as there is within the bait-and-switch lyrics (“I’ll make you mine/ Have your way with me”) and even on the cover, where it’s hard to tell whether the female form is dominating or being dominated by the shapeshifting metallic liquid engulfing her. A similar dynamic echoes across the whole LP, as delicate melodies wrestle against chaotic production.
The beauty of Ten Billion Angels lies in its embrace of liminality and refusal to conform to one idea. This double sidedness fits into the broader context of Jones and Hawke’s self-described “post-genre” work together under the Fractal Fantasy banner, where dystopias can be utopian and club music can exist and expand far beyond the physical club. They recently debuted Virtua, their virtual reimagining of a club space which you can “tour” online. It’s an immersive, empty space with 3D projections beaming from every wall, built with no bar, the better to “foster potent communal experiences.” Walking virtually through it feels poignant, as the rooms seem to wait for the sweaty, messy reality of a dancing crowd. There’s both a sadness and a hopefulness in its vacancy. In Virtua as in Ten Billion Angels, even the darkest moment contains the potential for optimism—and there are endless new possibilities dancing on every elaborate, lovingly crafted surface.

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Pagans in Vegas is Metric's slinkiest, slickest album to date. It deepens the new-wave  dalliances of its predecessor (2012's Synthetica), exploring the binary between authenticity and artificiality with zero subtlety.

Pagans In Vegas

Over the past decade, Broken Social Scene alumna Emily Haines has played the role of post-Internet philosopher, struggling to retain her individuality in a world growing more developed and technologically dependent by the day. The binary between authenticity and artificiality has remained a perennial interest for the Toronto-based musician, and it comes up yet again on her band Metric's latest album Pagans In Vegas with zero subtlety. In one corner waits the natural, manifested in dressed-down guitars and Haines’ lilting soprano. In the other, the machines state their case through forays into disco drudgery, stiff synths and Siri singalongs. Over the course of 13 tracks, these two forces collide, with the latter ultimately winning out.
Pagans in Vegas deepens the new-wave  dalliances of its predecessor (2012's Synthetica) with their slinkiest, slickest palette to date. Depeche Mode’s influence is impossible to ignore – opening track "Lie Lie Lie" and mid-album highlight "Too Bad, So Sad" take their rhythmic cues from the bluesy strut of "Personal Jesus", while "For Kicks" channels the nocturnal throb of "Precious". The cartoonish 8-bit bleep-bloops adorning tracks like "The Shade", meanwhile, belie a quirkier, '80s-arcade inspiration.
This gives listeners the chance to experience Metric in an unprecedentedly cheery context, but in the case of "The Shade", it comes at the cost of stirring up traumatic memories of Adam Sandler’s god-awful video game movie Pixels. Fortunately, the group make up for it with lead single "Cascades", a glitched-out dance track that casts Haines as some type of forlorn, sleep-deprived android, whispering against the percussionists’ paranoid, thumping percussion. It’s the perfect synthesis of Fantasies’ meaty fretwork and Live It Out's glossy electronics, as well as a rare moment of stylistic equilibrium.
As with past albums, Haines continues to seek lyrical inspiration from everyday Sisyphean struggles. On "Too Bad, So Sad", she finds herself in a restless transit "back and forth between the desert and the sea", qualifying it with a shrug: "who I was and I will always be". Love proves an equally futile endeavor; on "For Kicks", Haines offers the least-comforting parting words imaginable to a former interest, cooing that she’d stay true "if it was easy" (par for the course in the Tinder age). "I want it all!" she crows on "The Shade", and as the album progresses, Haines’ self-awareness emerges as the most intriguing aspect of the album's character.
In a recent interview with SPIN, Haines revealed that Metric have already prepared an answer to Pagans In Vegas: a follow-up album recorded entirely with all analog instruments. Up to this point, the band’s maintained a long-lasting marriage to the zeroes and ones, but that appears to be changing. The shift would be more compelling if it didn't feel so literal. In Pagans in Vegas, humans and machines exist in a binary relationship. The reality is both more nuanced and fertile than that.


The Australian musician better known as Francis Inferno Orchestra trades his habitual house and disco for lo-fi indie that plays like a love letter to the eccentric records John Peel championed.

Early Grave

Griffin James might seem an unlikely auteur of lo-fi indie rock. Better known as Francis Inferno Orchestra, the Melbourne-born house and disco producer was being hailed as “one of the saviors of Australian dance music” in the early 2010s, while still barely in his twenties; James’s career as a globe-trotting DJ moved him first to London and then Berlin. But his inclinations have long ranged beyond the dance floor, from a 2017 ambient and new-age album under the name Veranda Culture to the psychedelic expanse of a 2021 collaborative EP with Canadian DJ and producer Yu Su. Now based in Los Angeles, James has a monthly Dublab radio show where he rummages pretty deep into the underground rock stacks: Here, have Fennesz’s Junior Boys remix, as a treat.
Early Grave, James’s debut as Sans Merit, plays like an intoxicating love letter to the types of scrappy, eccentric records that the late BBC radio DJ John Peel might have championed. Recorded with live instruments and budget gear, sometimes in bedrooms and closets, the 13-track, 43-minute set rifles expertly through murky post-punk, glistening dream pop, and scruffy indie rock, with touches of sample-happy musique concrète. For all the potential pitfalls that come with such well-trodden territory, it appears that James’ far-flung musical background has served him well. Arriving with little press push via Zen 2000, a small L.A. label co-founded by one of the creative forces behind Brooklyn dance imprint Let’s Play House, the album is also a potent exercise in mystique. Lyrics, when present, are often cryptic or undecipherable; lonesome, fragmentary hooks pile up and then dissolve into unpredictable between-song transitions. But the shadows fall in all the right places. This is ramshackle gloom that carries the rousing charge of personal epiphany.
Whatever James’ self-imposed analog restrictions, he brings an immersive level of detail to these enigmatic sketches. His vocals, at this point, are still as gawky as they are gothy, but the tape hiss, bird calls, and synth pads on album opener “Friends Won’t Kick” suggest an ambient track in jangle-pop clothing. Another round of ethereal synths meets chintzy beats, ominous bass, gossamer lead-guitar tendrils, chugging strums, and other unidentifiable noises on the next track, “Human in Age,” creating an atmosphere that’s far seedier than the Modern Lovers’ Route 128 when James moans about “drivin’ round with my radio on.” The first video, for “Weathered Men,” folds together eight-bit bleeps, celestial sighs, and multiple layers of frosty guitars as James hints at the inevitability of decay in low, stentorian tones over martial drums: “I forget it again and again,” he sings, but all together it’s askew enough to stick with you. Much of what James intones on later track “Heaven’s Gate” is lost in a dense shoegaze fog that could rival Deerhunter or Yo La Tengo.
Early Grave is equally beguiling when James steps away from the mic. “Pill Nye” is triumphant, synth-kissed indie rock that just happens to be instrumental. The crumbling space-station architecture of “Rasslin” gives way to a delicate keyboard melody that you could imagine Damon Albarn crooning his eyes out over on Blur’s 13. Especially intriguing is “Gentle, Caring (& The Murmurings of Geoffrey Baron),” where spoken-word snippets—alternately menacing and serene—float amid a soundscape that’s half hellfire, half choir of angels; this one ultimately lands somewhere between the nonlinear explorations of L’Rain and Spirit of the Beehive’s paranoid pastiche. Wordless finale “Third Wicket” posits what it might be like if the Durutti Column soundtracked a spaghetti Western.
Obviously, there’s plenty of precedent for this stuff, and Early Grave could easily be written off as record-collector rock without much of its own to say. And Avalon Emerson has already made the year’s best pivot from left-field beatmaker to dream-pop frontperson. But the highs are so many, and so high—see also when James gamely shouts a “hey!” as the new-wave swell of “Maniac” crests—that this inaugural outing from Sans Merit feels like a keeper. For all the comparisons to be made, it’ll likely remind you most of your own cherished lesser-knowns: the short, bright flames that tend to get left out when forming a consensus on decade lists or squinting at A-listers’ album credits. For me, here, that’s the shoestring melancholy of American Wrestlers, or the hazy introspection of Shocking Pinks. Whatever you might think of when you imagine a DJ going rock, this ain’t it: Australia’s dance-music savior gives one hell of a toast to the might-have-beens and never-weres.


Recorded at roughly the same time as last year's Rehearsing My Choir, the latest from the Freidberger siblings is free of conceptual trappings, and is another carefully considered, sonically rich release.

Bitter Tea

Seven months after the story-songs of Rehearsing My Choir comes the companion album, recorded around the same time with just the grandkids on the mic. The earlier record's "difficulty" is debatable; Rehearsing My Choir failed for many (including me), but not because it was too opaque or complicated. Taken as a whole, the lyrics were probably the most accessible the band has written so far. But the lead voice and format, both of which were chosen with a reasonable expectation of the intended effect, were never going to work for everybody. It was a specialty item.
Bitter Tea is a very different record: no Olga Sarantos; no overriding narrative; not as much in the way of recurring musical themes. But it's cut from the same cloth, and its "meaning," or the meaning of individual songs, is surely even harder to grasp. This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments. We'll get to those in a sec.
What comes to mind during early listens is how odd this record sounds, and how often the production on Fiery Furnaces' records is overlooked. Some of the distinctiveness is up to Eleanor Friedberger's voice, with her English major's diction and her ability to make the dozen or so notes in her natural range do all kinds of work. Her brother understands her strengths, writing for her crisp lines that draw attention to the grammatical construction. "To see: could there one for me be?" from this record's "Waiting to Know You", for example. But Bitter Tea as a sonic experience, in terms of the instruments used and the effects used on them, is even more exceptional.
For starters, this makes two albums in a row where a tinny upright piano dragged from a the lounge of a depression-era bordello functions as the signature instrument, stitching together the patchwork songs with Matt Friedberger's speedy little trills. Before it seemed to reference a radio play; here it serves as a reminder that we inhabit the world of one band and one band only. Other interesting choices abound: squelchy Moog that references neither the instrument's classic era nor its 90s update; distorted percussion meant to be disorienting instead of forceful; a disco beat that gyrates in place with quotation marks standing in for the mirror ball.
Then there's the regular stream of backward vocals, the record's most pressing recurring motif. On tracks like "In My Little Thatched Hut", "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry", and "Nevers", the words move backward but the melody still fits the chords. The technique may allude to a wrinkle in time or some sort of aphasia, but it also points up how little comprehension of the actual lyrics matters to the enjoyment of Fiery Furnaces' music. I consider myself a curious person but I couldn't care less what's actually being said on the backward bits.
Puzzling over meanings and allusions seems a worthwhile project, though, and I've no doubt that on some level the words can bear such scrutiny. Some amount of detective word might transform some of the less musically engaging tracks into something enjoyable. I can't find much in "I'm In No Mood", "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry", or "Whistle Rhapsody" to draw me back again; to my ears they serve mostly as reminders of Bitter Tea's gassy bloat (72 minutes, though two tracks repeat at the end in different mixes). The album seems to drag in its final third, but really the lesser tracks are spread evenly throughout. It's more a cumulative weariness than any sort of front-loading.
Which is unfortunate since Bitter Tea contains some of Fiery Furnaces' best songs. "Teach Me Sweetheart" is unfailingly gorgeous, a perfect melding of experimental production ideas that match perfectly the mood and the sweet, undeniable melody. "Waiting to Know You" is almost as good with its prom night slow dance chord progression, and bizarre mix; there's no logical reason why this song needs an absurdly fat Moog bass, but hey, turns out it does. "Police Sweater Blood Vow" seems like a quirky leftfield pop hit; in another time it might have been this band's "Birdhouse in Your Soul", And "Benton Harbor Blues", particular in its second mix, which omits a meandering two-minute intro, shows how effortlessly Matt Friedberger can come up with a simple, breezy, and likeable pop tune when so inclined. If Fiery Furnaces wanted a shortcut to a larger audience, this track points the way.
But such a path probably doesn't interest these two. Fiery Furnaces have other things in mind, and so far the project seems in part to be about finding a way to challenge themselves and stay interested when writing good, catchy songs comes so easy. Fiery Furnaces is the work of thought and calculation rather than instinct. This imparts a chilly remove to the records but I don't think that's a criticism. There's no shortage of direct and heartfelt indie rock that talks about the passion, but nothing else going sounds like the Fiery Furnaces' carefully considered babble.


Known for her improvisational aplomb, the pedal steel guitarist and singer returns with her second and most complex batch of composed songs, subversive and rich documents of love and lust.

Throne

For more than 20 years, the improvisational music of Heather Leigh has traveled a clear throughline. From her early 2000s work in Charalambides and her many solo releases since 2002 to more recent collaborations with like-minded experimenters Chris Corsano, Jandek, and Peter Brötzmann, her way of improvising with voice and pedal steel guitar has been distinct. She’s equally skilled at creating subtle, folk-leaning tones or dense, aggressive noise.
But recently, Leigh has forged a kind of rebirth. In 2015, she wrote proper songs for her album I Abused Animal rather than fully improvising them, subsequently recording them during a day in a proper studio. For Throne, she’s ventured even further down that path, spending a week in the studio to make structured, interconnected tunes that are her idiosyncratic versions of pop. She’s made this turn with typical conviction, so the compelling qualities of her previous work remain intact. Even so, Throne feels like a breakthrough.
Leigh’s lyrics come off as sincere but subversive love songs. She cleverly plays with familiar tropes like intimacy, infatuation, and disillusionment. Opener “Prelude to Goddess” expresses the entranced adoration of a teen ballad: “You’re so interesting… You’re the kind of girl I’d like to meet.” But its starry sentiments are undercut by oversharing (“The way you dance makes me cream”) and ghostly vocals that suggest a mind questioning itself. Likewise, the words of “Days Without You” exude bliss—”Why worry about tomorrow, on such a beautiful day?”—while the tense guitar is as ominous as footsteps down a dim path.
And Leigh grippingly extends the themes of oppression explored on I Abused Animal during “Lena,” detailing sexual abuse in a hymn-like tune. The scene she paints is vivid: In verses, a daughter hazily recalls her father (“Been sleeping all night in daddy’s garage again”), while the father reenacts his violations in the chorus (“Oh Lena/Come and sit on my lap/...And lift up your skirt”). Leigh heightens tension with rising hums and guitar plucks. Additions to Leigh’s palette boost such complexity throughout Throne, including drum machine, synths, and backing by John Hannon on violin and her husband, David Keenan, on bass. This layered music feels simple but echoes deeply.
The most complex song on Throne is also its longest. The 17-minute “Gold Teeth” is less a love song than an abstract poem, as Leigh repeats simple phrases to conjure new meanings. Lines like “into the sea” and “it’s the wind” emerge over and over, forming a hypnotic hall of mirrors. A middle section of guitar noise darkens the piece, but Leigh’s lyrical images emerge from the chaos stronger than before.
That may sound heady, and Throne is not easy-listening, even if it is Leigh’s most song-oriented album yet. Leigh, after all, calls her music a personal religion, and it often feels like a series of spiritual explorations and epiphanies. But Throne is also quite sensual, reveling in bodies and the environments through which they move. The album’s back cover shows a posterior, presumably Leigh’s, pointing to her hope “that listeners can connect with the seriousness of the work on one level while shaking their ass to a total fucking banger at the same time.” Throne might not get butts on the dance floor, but its sense of movement—both within its songs and within the arc of Leigh’s evolution—is profound.


On Antenna to the Afterworld, Sonny Smith marries an extensive narrative about outer space and alien life with ruminations on the deaths of two close friends. It's a spiritual, cosmic collection with the alien synthesizers and acid-soaked psychedelic vocals to match.

Sonny and the Sunsets: Antenna to the Afterworld

Antenna to the Afterworld

The title Antenna to the Afterworld seems like an intentional bit of ambiguity from Sonny and the Sunsets. On one hand, the album plays up an extensive narrative about outer space and alien life, which is reinforced by the band's frequent use of synthesizers.  In "Green Blood", Sonny Smith professes his love for an alien android, and maybe the antenna in question is pointing us to a distant planet. But then there's "afterworld." When he made this album, Smith had death on his mind-- a close friend of his had been murdered. Then, Smith visited a psychic, who gave him a message from another recently deceased friend named Nancy. "Through the psychic, Nancy told me not to get too comfortable with loneliness, as she had done, to go out and live," he said. "This could be what many psychics say, I have no idea, and I don’t care really." He began to think about "the afterworld" quite a bit, and on the album, he cuts straight to the point when he folds that encounter into one of his lyrics: "I had a visit from a dead friend/ She told me not to wallow in this loneliness." And where does space come into play? Well, that song is called "Path of Orbit".
As it turns out, the album's title is an umbrella that covers most things spiritual and cosmic-- all the reasons why we stare upward and wonder what's out there or what's next. Smith doesn't get hung up on the specifics-- he accepts every possibility. "I believe in everything," he said. "I always have. Ghosts, afterlife, reincarnation, ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, mystics, shamans, psychics, miracles, the force, aliens. I believe it all." That all-encompassing belief system is the heart and soul of Antenna to the Afterworld. Smith's acceptance of the fantastical is implied in his nonchalant lyrical approach. (On "Primitive": "I love the moon/ I don't know why.") Really, though the paranormal and supernatural make several appearances in the LP's 11 tracks, they're never the center of attention in Smith's songs about love and the banal. His inherent belief in palmistry, for example, makes it so the titular "Palmreader" plays second fiddle to Sonny's scab- and glue-covered hands.
In the past two years, Smith and the band have been genre-jumping shapeshifters. Smith's 100 Records series had him going from reggae to R&B to folk to garage. Last year, on Longtime Companion, Smith took the band country. This time, they've made something that's very much its own creature. When the synthesizers come in, they understatedly float over some soft, warm guitar pop. On "Natural Acts", the country influence has carried over in their guitars, though they're layered alongside synthesizers and the occasional acid-soaked psychedelic vocal stab. Later, on "Void", Smith and the gang have some garage rock fun. Smith whoops like an ape, claps his hands to match his vocals, and then a delighted Tahlia Harbour playfully sings along with the instrumental outro. Both musically and lyrically, the album presents some of the Sunsets' best work yet.
Though Antenna will probably be viewed as Sonny's "space and synthesizers album," it's also full of doe-eyed and fragile moments. Over the jangling melody of "Girl on the Street", he pines over someone he's never spoken to, but who he stares at from a distance. In "Mutilator", he sings an awed love song about a sword swallower. (She's also the girl attached to the knife thrower's spinning wheel.) But as surreal ballads go, nothing beats "Green Blood". His android lover is shot by her scorned cyborg husband, but that isn't the end of the story. She lives, and they try to make it work. So the song gets the same kind of quietly sad ending from most breakup stories-- they just drift away. When Harbour asks if she went back to her cyborg husband, Sonny's reply is dejected and unsure. "I don't even know. But I miss her, you know? I really miss her." Antenna to the Afterworld may have all the dressings of science fiction and fantasy, but like many great works in those genres, it's a strong, emotive character study. He might've replaced the cowboy hat with a spaceman's helmet, but Sonny Smith still writes like a country balladeer.


Guitarist and bandleader Ellen Kempner’s third record breaks down the walls around her wiry, anxious riffs, opening space for levity and the thrill of new love.

Black Friday

A lot of Palehound's last album, 2017’s A Place I'll Always Go, took place indoors. Bandleader Ellen Kempner set her scenes in bedrooms and in grocery stores, singing tightly wound vocal melodies over wiry, anxious guitar riffs. On the Boston band's third album, Kempner breaks down the walls. Black Friday reaches far toward the hazy horizon, letting the nervous energy of Palehound's first two LPs mount and unspool.
Kempner wrote many of the songs on A Place I’ll Always Go during a period of grief after a close friend passed away. That weight lifts on Black Friday, which bubbles around the thrill of new love, and also reckons with the stress that falling deeply for someone can bring. Love, both romantic and platonic, can erase self-consciousness in the moment, but it can also heighten self-scrutiny later. Opening yourself up to another person can drive you to ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions about yourself: Am I enough? Can I be enough? What can I do to be enough?
Palehound wade through this space with a skillful grip on their newly expanded rock toolkit. A couple of synthesizers and drum machines bookended A Place I'll Always Go; here, those accents get fleshed out, woven in alongside long, languid, reverb-heavy guitar lines. The stunning “Killer,” a menacing Western number about taking cold-blooded revenge on a male abuser, punctuates its chorus with sprinkles of saloon piano. “I wanna be the one who kills the man who hurt you, darlin’,” Kempner sings, perfectly poised, as if her shotgun’s already slung over her shoulder. She barely raises her voice above a stage whisper, which only adds to the song’s chill. It’s not a geyser of white-hot rage, but a cold, calculated expression of venom toward a  deserving target. It’s also a brilliant reclamation of the sounds of the Western, a film genre whose women don’t always make it out alive.
“Killer” brings Palehound to some of their darkest places yet, but Black Friday also opens space for moments of levity. With their quick-strummed acoustic guitar and playful vocal melodies, “Urban Drip” and “Stick N Poke” could almost be Sheryl Crow singles from the early aughts. “I think I’m due for a shitty tattoo,” Kempner proclaims at the chorus of the latter, which is such a spectacular way to say “fuck it” that it sounds like she’s running barefoot through summer grass.
But nothing else on the album, or in the rest of Palehound's discography, quite compares to the joy of “Aaron,” a song Kempner wrote for her partner as he navigated a gender transition. “My friend, if you want me to/I’ll call you Aaron/I can, I can, I can, I can," she sings a little breathlessly. The “I can” becomes a refrain, sometimes morphing into “I will,” an urgent, excited affirmation. The instrumentation—nimble guitars and big, booming percussion—keeps building and ebbing away until finally, in the song’s final seconds, it erupts, a little like the climax of Perfume Genius’ 2012 stunner “Hood.” The moment’s ecstatic, a rush of affection where uncertainty gives way to unconditional acceptance, and it cements “Aaron” as one of the best love songs you're likely to hear in a while.
Kempner has excelled at tracing anxiety, fear, and shame through expertly crafted rock songs, and there’s still plenty of those emotions throughout Black Friday—the title track and “Worthy” both tackle the feelings of inadequacy that can attend even the most uncomplicated love. But on her third record, she also allows herself to experience pure joy, and what a treat it is to feel that euphoria along with her.


The Toronto four-piece Dilly Dally's debut oozes with female desire. In almost every song, Katie Monk unleashes a dive-bombing scream that drops like a flare down a well, her band reinforcing the squalor of her voice with a heavy swagger redolent of some of the best ever alt-rock.

Sore

When moves to defund Planned Parenthood attempt to confine female desire, there's something so satisfying about the way Toronto four-piece Dilly Dally's debut just oozes with it. Singer/guitarist Katie Monks' voice is filthy and fleshy, as if the sodden voicebox of Shane McGowan or Pete Doherty had been transplanted into her own healthy 20-something throat. In almost every song, she unleashes a dive-bombing scream that drops like a flare down a well, illuminating the absurdity of mythologizing women's sexuality while also making plain how it feels to carry that burden.
Guitarists Monks and Liz Ball started Dilly Dally as school friends six years ago, immediately confident that they were the best band in town. With maturity came a little humility, but Sore—written and recorded with new bassist Jimmy Tony and drummer Ben Reinhartz—makes good on their early ambitions. The band reinforces the natural squalor of Monks' voice with heavy swagger redolent of some of the best ever alt-rock—the Pixies' malevolent rumble, Hole's poisoned hard candy, and SST-style bile. Monks and Ball's guitar parts are full of personality, making Dilly Dally's dirges distinct and sticky whether they're scaling triumphal peaks like their their countrymen Japandroids, carving out idle, loping riffs—or flitting nimbly between modes in a single song.
No matter what, the record sounds tumescent, like it's throbbing with blood and might spill over. Blood rushes to Monks' head amidst the skidding guitars and angelic coos of "Desire", a spellbound rave about some heavenly girl whose inner fire she's powerless to resist: "Desire is coming at me lately," she sings, as if standing in the path of a runaway truck. On "The Touch", she describes a woman's healing hands, using enraptured language that mocks the cultural tendency to treat female sexuality as some kind of magic. "Snake Head" explores the dark side of that exoticizing. As blood leaks from between her legs, she jokes that she's turning into Medusa, and her bonehead so-called friends agree: "Man, this bitch is goin' crazy/ She'll make you turn to stone."
Despite all this, Sore enshrines Monks' persistent faith in the transformative power of sex and love. There's a Celtic, Pogues-ish tinge to "Green", where a brief moment of lust ("I want you naked in my kitchen, making me breakfast") gives way to a prayer of renewal, and the record's loveliest lyric: "I need food and I need light, and darling I need you/ Just because my heart is clean doesn't mean it's new/ I scrub it up with love anthems written for teens, like by the Libertines." "Next Gold" is festive celebration rock, as Monks swears she'll "stay chasing dreams tied to the road," spurred by the lingering taste of a car makeout session on her lips. She knows, though, that you can't outrun human nature. "I wanna change," she bawls on the piercing "Purple Rage". "You can put it on my grave."
Sore has a definite gothic sensibility, but it's rarely self-serious—only closer "Burned By the Cold", a chilly piano torch song about feeling alienated by the place you grew up, comes off a little grandiose. Like Speedy Ortiz or Parquet Courts, Dilly Dally's music is rich with their own weird humor that puts it a cut above. Monks could be doing a Kraken impression almost all the time, and the band play with the toxic sugar rush of kids on a Halloween rampage. Dilly Dally always sound like they're being crushed throughout Sore, in a good way: They inhabit the dank space beneath dead weight, the place where the good stuff festers.


The Philly band takes influence from the earnest, unfashionable alt-rock of the 1990s on a moving set about sobriety and freedom.

New Preoccupations

One perk of emo is the genre’s indifference to traditional notions of cool, which frees bands to run with some truly unfashionable muses. Few albums have tested that freedom quite like New Preoccupations, the second album by Philly band Caracara, which draws inspiration from some of the least celebrated alt-rock of the 1990s: the minivan post-grunge of bands like Matchbox Twenty and the Wallflowers, with their supple vocals, shampooed guitars, and all. God bless emo labels like Will Yip’s Memory Music, because it’s hard to imagine the Rough Trades of the world pressing a record that sounds this much like the back half of a late-’90s Now That’s What I Call Music compilation.
Perhaps emo was already heading in this direction. This is, after all, a scene that can easily wrangle enough bands to fill a Third Eye Blind covers compilation. But most of those bands are drawn to the scrappier edges of Third Eye Blind—the misfit energy, the “can I graduate?” shoutiness. Caracara can go loud, too, and it’s always exciting when they do, but New Preoccupations is never more transfixing than when it embraces the tame. At times, the album is almost radical in its docility: With its bleary “One Headlight” tempo, “Nocturnalia” is so earnest that singer Will Lindsay never stops to worry that maybe he’s begun to sound like the guy from Semisonic.
Mellow restraint is a new look for this band. Between its creaky arrangements and gothic brooding, Caracara’s 2017 debut Summer Megalith was all exposed nerve, every movement played for maximum drama. Some of those theatrical impulses periodically trickle through New Preoccupations. The mournful, disembodied strings accompanying the broken heartland rock of opener “My Thousand Eyes” kick off the album on a note of quivering sorrow. But the band has grown more selective about going for the jugular, and they’ve gotten better at conveying emotion without leaning on edge. “Colorglut” and “Harsh Light” coast on gentle drum loops right out of a Primitive Radio Gods record. Their guitars churn but have no bite.
The album’s kinder, softer makeover would be audacious if it weren’t all so genuine. Over the last 15 years, indie acts have dabbled in all kinds of outdated or maligned genres, sometimes out of genuine love for misunderstood music and sometimes seemingly just for the challenge, but the results rarely feel as natural as New Preoccupations. Lindsay wrote the record while recovering from alcohol and substance abuse, and in the smooth contours and earnest ache of ‘90s alt-pop, his lyrics find an apt symmetry: clean sounds for depictions of clean living. On the sun-brightened “Strange Interactions in the Night,” Lindsay likens his sobriety to resurrection as he surveys a city scarred by the opioid epidemic: “Under the overpass we found/Evidence of exodus and needles on the ground,” he sings.
Despite his tendency toward biblical analogies, Lindsay avoids moralizing on New Preoccupations. Sobriety may be a gift, but so too, he contends, are some of his memories of using. Tinged with romance, “Colorglut” blissfully recounts a night spent gazing out of the windows of a Volvo and listening to Dirty Projectors. Are those experiences invalidated because they involved drugs? Even during upbeat songs, Lindsay grieves a lost sense of self as he ponders how to fill the void left by recovery.
It’s only on the closer “Monoculture” that the band fully indulges that kind of roaring, go-for-broke catharsis the rest of the album so creatively suppresses. “I’m finally free to let go,” Lindsay screams over crashing, post-rock swells and crescendoing strings. It’s less an epiphany than a lament. That freedom is beautiful, these songs testify, but it’s also a burden all its own.


On his 1981 debut album, the composer and percussionist channels the Fourth World spirit of his collaborator Jon Hassell, to spellbinding effect.

Eros in Arabia

When it came time for percussionist and composer Richard Horowitz to release his debut solo album, Eros in Arabia, he opted for a title that hinted at the unknown. He was no secret, though: He had already worked with jazz heavyweights like Anthony Braxton, John Lewis, Steve Lacy, and Alan Silva as well as being mentored by Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles. So when his album first briefly surfaced in 1981, it was credited instead to one Drahcir Ztiworoh. The album disappeared almost immediately, though Horowitz soon became an integral part of Jon Hassell’s group as they codified the sound of “Fourth World”—an attempt to filter ancient mysticism through high technology. Horowitz also wound up as a soundtrack composer in Hollywood; his most prominent credit has been for Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday.
Nearly 40 years later, Horowitz’s debut returns in this sterling remastered edition from Freedom to Spend (a reissue sub-label of RVNG Intl. founded by noise musician Pete Swanson and record-shop owner Jed Bindeman). It testifies that beyond his contribution to Hassell’s 1980s zenith, Horowitz himself created a singular iteration of Fourth World music. Earthy and alien at once, the eight compositions on Eros in Arabia conjure an imaginary geographical space where divergent cultures converge. Channeling Ituri forest chants, Javanese gamelan, Bedouin plaints, Rajasthani folk, and European electronic music, Horowitz dances around borders and eras to spellbinding effect.
“Bandit Nrah Master of Rajasthan” sets the album’s mood, twinkling like ambient music. Horowitz carefully overlays synthesizer and ney, the end-blown flute predominant throughout Middle Eastern music. (As the notes accompanying the album explain, the ney is associated both with North African sacred music and the sound of bandits.) That the flurry of notes recalls Zamfir is not a surprise, since both the Romanian pan flute and ney are closely related, but Horowitz combines newfangled ’80s electronics and old instrumentation in such a way that seems to suspend time altogether.
A Moroccan frame drum echoes and distorts on “Eros Never Stops Dreaming.” The processed ney recalls the odd sanza songs that Cameroon musician Francis Bebey was crafting around the same time, while the churning bass figure suggests the cavernous interiors of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. A giddiness underpins the electronic textures of “Baby Elephant Magic,” which glimmers like a recording of a gamelan played back at double speed, full of high frequencies that flutter like fruit flies in the stereo field.
From there, the album moves into coarser terrain, taking sandpaper to the magical spells of the opening tracks. The eddying voices and chants of “Queen of Saba” sound like something lifted from a Smithsonian Folkways field recording, while the clanging din of “Never Tech No Foreign Answer” is raw enough to slot into an early Sublime Frequencies compilation of street music. The buzzing, rattling prepared piano of “23/8 For Conlon Nancarrow” name-checks the composer famous for writing compositions that only a player piano could handle, but its keyboard feels like an outlier compared to all the woozy, globe-trotting sounds that come before it.
The second side of the record is mostly taken by the twenty-plus minutes of “Elephant Dance.” It’s one of the deepest wades into the mysterious Fourth World sound you’ll find, as immersive an atmosphere as Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s similarly side-long “Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’).” Utilizing only a Prophet 5 synthesizer and the ney, it creates a state of suspension in 7/4 time. The notes in the upper register of the piece dance like angels on the head of a pin, both as placid as new age music and as amok as a children’s lullaby spun at 78 rpm. Fittingly, for an album whose title suggests the Greek god of love crossing the Mediterranean Sea to ancient Arabia, Horowitz’s music seeks a space in between and finds something magical there.


Steeped in multiple layers of nostalgia, the Norwegian musician’s sixth album spins his habitual vintage space disco into an enveloping fusion of dewy uplift and nocturnal danger.

Everyone Else Is a Stranger

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the original Star Wars trilogy’s grip on popular culture extended well into the discotheque. There were the overt cash-ins, like Meco’s tawny Italo version of John Williams’ famous theme. But sci-fi concepts and a futuristic sound—analog synths oscillated and arpeggiated into burbling, goading, robotic funk—were also proliferating more generally, from Cerrone to Dee D. Jackson to, yes, Space. Like a bridge sentried by Moog and Moroder, this brief span in the history of popular music, and music technology, floated in the void between the terra firma of instrument-based disco and the ethereal frontier of pure electronics.
Two decades later, the second Star Wars trilogy… also gripped popular culture, if a bit more restively, and once again—whether coincidentally or otherwise—space disco trailed it like a comet’s tail. This time, the music had embryonic digital tools to augment its now-antique hardware and the internet to spread itself through. It was more likely to evoke the cosmic than to describe it, trading kitschy vocoders for a chic, chilly, almost philosophical grandeur: a dance music of the mind. Its harbinger was Norway’s Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, who first made his name with a 2006 compilation of tracks from his label, Feedelity. But he really took his place in the crossover firmament with Where You Go I Go Too, an epic mash note to John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream that, spun through Lindstrøm’s own brand of pensive euphoria, played well at indie festivals alongside M83 and Cut Copy.
Now another 20 years have passed, and Lindstrøm has become a double throwback, first to the forward-looking music of four decades ago, then to the early days of Web 2.0, when a sense that genre walls were falling and horizons rapidly expanding found implicit expression in his interplanetary stride. That excitement still flares from his sixth studio LP, his first in four years.
Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks. Bounding basses pick out jaunty melodies, hopping on one rubbery note per bar. The drums merrily foam along, winking with accented guitars. The spray of the synths churns inside and across the measures, in contrast to their perpetual forward motion. Chord progressions worked through at great length will suddenly pause, gasp, then do some marvelous new thing—turn inside out or start to glow or burst into four-dimensional colors. The music gives the impression of being etched in a high place, as high as a person could reach, and then reaches higher.
“Syreen” is the daytime concert anthem, while “Nightswim”—well, you’ve guessed it. “The Rind” has the tastiest, bendiest groove, while the title track is the most involving composition, a sort of monastic bass algorithm with winding, haunting chambers of instrumental writing. The record favors Lindstrøm’s live side, congregating cymbals, triangles, congas, timbales, flutes, cello, and violin with his trusty Solina String Ensemble, though any difference between the virtual and the real has evaporated in his gleaming, shadowless hyperreality.
Lindstrøm’s practical genius and popularity (he’s won multiple Norwegian Grammys) lie in his ability to be many things to many people—a custodian of vintage synths and reverbs to gearheads, a solid floor-mover for club dwellers, or, for indie kids, a comfortingly songful dance-music concierge bobbing in a bucket hat. Like Star Wars and so much else these days, when everything tends to repeat with variations instead of making way for something new, Lindstrøm has become a reliable fixture: a consistent, technically adept stylizer of dewy uplift and nocturnal danger that—with or without nostalgia’s rosy glow—he keeps feeling fresh and fun.


On what he’s called a “prelude” to his next album, the Chicago rapper sets aside the big themes of previous records and luxuriates in letting his mind wander.

The Circus EP

The world is like a circus, reckons Mick Jenkins—hence the title of his latest EP. But the record doesn’t really feel like one. The big-top experience is about chaos and sensory overload—the visceral sensation of the unpredictable that causes hearts to jackhammer. In contrast, Jenkins’ The Circus is measured, soothing, and a suitable accompaniment to brandy and a cigar in a comfortable chair.
Never accuse Jenkins of being unambitious. The Healing Component was a concept album about love that somehow found fresh angles on the well-worn subject, while Pieces of a Man borrowed its title and tone from Gil Scott Heron. At seven tracks, The Circus narrows Jenkins’ scope. Following such epic tomes, there are shades of Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered. in the EP’s “just a bunch of good tracks” layout that will please casual listeners who find Jenkins’ albums difficult to penetrate. The circus concept might be a wash, but we still get a sense of his sonic philosophy—in Chicago’s pluralistic rap scene, Jenkins’ soulful style is closely aligned to that of Saba, Chance the Rapper, Noname, and Vic Mensa’s Innanetape. The booming bass and grueling keys of the Hit-Boy produced opener “Same Ol” aside, Jenkins sits calmly in the pocket, letting the soul-noir beats wash over him, softly reading from his book of rhymes.
Without a strong sense of direction guiding his every move, Jenkins’ mind is free to wander. An artist whose work has dovetailed with the Black Lives Matters movement, he reasserts the message over the neo-soul sounds of “Carefree,” a pushback to racial profiling carried out by law enforcement. “If you living carefree then you probably don't look like us,” he spits before walking through a couple of oppressive interactions with cops. There’s a belligerency to “Flaunt,” meanwhile, with Jenkins grumbling, “Niggas wanna see me stunt, huh?” in a protesting tone. Despite references to his $3,000 watch and dim-sum lunches, the track feels more like a pushback to those who would box him into common hip-hop tropes—like spitting braggadocio about your bank balance—than pride at the ice on his wrist.
Mick has plenty of fun, though. He displays instinct for a solid bar on “I’m Convinced,” where he rhymes “Cappadonna” with “Black Madonna” while referencing the pop legend’s erotic photoshoot with Naomi Campbell and Big Daddy Kane. Then there is the gentle orchestration of EarthGang collaboration “The Light,” which encapsulates the breezy side that defines The Circus musically. So while this feels like minor release—a “prelude to my forthcoming album,” the rapper has called it—Jenkins proves that even his strayest thoughts are worth sharing.


Bonobo’s early records were slightly hazy and indistinct, but Migration is the most sophisticated effort of his career.

Migration

It’s been a long road for Simon Green, aka Bonobo, since his 2000 debut Animal Magic. Back then, he was seeking a bridge between downtempo electronica and the more playful and experimental artists on his soon-to-be-label home Ninja Tune; he came off as a bit too fuzzy for the former and not quite adventurous enough for the latter. Over the years, Green has honed his craft, shedding his early Amon Tobin Lite image and taking downtempo more seriously as a genre. On this way, he’s discovered late-breaking success: His last album, The North Borders, became a mainstream hit across Europe in 2013. On Migration, Green makes his most sophisticated record yet.
Green’s songwriting on The North Borders failed to match the sophistication of his production, and the album’s persistent moodiness grew wearisome. On Migration, Green has jettisoned the tepid slow-build dynamics: The nearly-eight minute colossus “Outlier” and its shuffling gallop of a beat leave downtempo in the dust, taking the listener on a journey that’s part Burial, part Rival Consoles. The song’s breakdown and slowly disintegrating comedown suggests Four Tet at his most delicate. These aren’t typical reference points for Bonobo, and show an artist still willing to seek new ideas. The piano of opener “Migration” is pulled from the playbook of post-classicists like Ólafur Arnalds or Peter Broderick and an “Amen”-esque drum break midway that amplifies the song’s sense of longing. The triumphant “Ontario” is the closest thing this relatively forward-looking record gets to nostalgia, with a booming beat and sitar that hearkens back to Animal Magic and other turn-of-the-millennium Ninja Tune releases.
Green continues his periodic use of vocalists to transform his ideas into full-fledged pop songs. The results in the past have been hit-or-miss, but he finds his stride here. “Break Apart,” featuring the graceful genderless contralto of Rhye’s Milosh over a sampled harp, is exquisite; “Surface,” featuring Hundred Waters’ Nicole Miglis, is even better. Nick Murphy’s (fka Chet Faker) “No Reason” is less interesting, though it’s easy to imagine how it (or “Surface” for that matter) could become a club hit in either current or remixed form.
All told, Migration is an impressive improvement over The North Borders, and easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s fifteen-plus year career. It’s a record with equal appeal for electronic music fans and general listeners, something you could put on anywhere. Essentially, it recasts downtempo as a genre with more potential than party music on the Bosphorus.


A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance, a mix of perplexing quirks and disarming heart.

Harlequin

Los Angeles songwriter Alex Izenberg describes his debut album as the culmination of five years of writing and recording, which is a long time for a record that feels like the product of a few casual studio sessions. A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, grounded in the same evergreen themes of longing and heartache, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance. At times Izenberg shows flashes of Van Dyke Parks’ compositional bravado, but just as often he handicaps himself with Dollar Store chamber-pop accompaniments. He can’t commit to going big, but he doesn’t want to go too small, either.
Mostly, it seems, Harlequin just wants to sound different, and on that front it succeeds. Following in the freak-folk tradition, it never goes too long without an idiosyncrasy: train horns, found sounds, long pauses, blank spaces, and other apparent studio mistakes that are almost certainly more deliberate than they pretend to be. The tropes themselves aren’t especially new, but the way they’re all shuffled together is, and Izenberg is confident enough in the originality of his final product that he directly credits his influences. Instead of downplaying his debt to Grizzly Bear on waltzier pieces like “Archer” and “Changes,” Izenberg leans into it, adopting Daniel Rossen’s top hat-doffing swoon as a kind of homage.
Elsewhere, Lou Reed gets a nod on the choppy cabaret number “To Move on” when Izenberg borrows his “Rock & Roll” phrasing to describe dancing to that “fine, fine music,” although it’s Reed’s Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale who looms even larger over the record. Austere violas and cellos lend an undercurrent of doom to a series of stormy, impressionistic pieces like “Libra” and “The Farm,” which tease the full-scale orchestral album Izenberg might have made instead.
Listening to Harlequin, it’s hard not to wonder if the record would have been better off if Izenberg had gone all in on those arrangements, since the album always stops just short of genuinely wowing. Where Parks, Rossen, and Cage never disguise how much effort they’ve spent meticulously piecing their components into intricate works, Izenberg would rather give the appearance that he just poured a jigsaw puzzle box onto the table and accepted the patterns that formed. That approach sometimes scans as insecurity: Harlequin often feels like a pretentious album afraid of being called pretentious.
The record’s best numbers are those rare ones when the adornments take a back seat to the songs themselves. On the early highlight “Grace,” Izenberg laments losing himself in a misguided crush, and lands one of the better forehead-slap lyrics this side of Rivers Cuomo’s “I’m dumb, she’s a lesbian”: “Darkness had taken over me,” he sings, “Once I’d seen her engagement ring.” And on “Changes,” his struggles as both a romantic and a songwriter converge when he confesses, “It’s getting real hard to talk about her to anyone.” The album could use a few more moments like that, lines where Izenberg comes across like the kind of relatable guy you might want to trade tales of heartbreak with over a beer. Yet for a record so guarded, it’s almost always personable—even its most difficult songs, like the avant sound collage “A Bird Came Down,” have a gracious, likable quality (it helps that he keeps them short). Harlequin is an odd album with perplexing priorities and a conflicted sense of scale, but just enough sweetness and heart to make you want to give it the benefit of the doubt anyway.


Based on improvisation and collage, the trio’s excellent debut incorporates strands of new age, ambient, electronic, and jazz for an illusory, hypnotic experience.

Ariel Kalma / Jeremiah Chiu / Marta Sofia Honer: The Closest Thing to Silence

The Closest Thing to Silence

In textile art, when two bolts of silk are dampened and pressed together, a wavy, water-like pattern emerges known as moiré. This is because the gridded threads of one piece of fabric inevitably misalign with the other, such that the repeated differences in positive and negative space (the threads and the pockets of air between them) give rise to something entirely new. As a kind of illusion, moiré shows up everywhere: in physics, in graphics, and, as with The Closest Thing to Silence, in music.

The Closest Thing to Silence is a collaboration between the seasoned French ambient composer Ariel Kalma and L.A.-based experimental duo Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. The trio first teamed up in 2022, when Kalma tapped Chiu and Honer to work on a session for BBC 3’s experimental Late Junction series. They hit it off and then went on to create The Closest Thing to Silence, with Honer on viola, Kalma on woodwinds, Chiu on drum machine/samplers, and all three contributing synth work. Based on improvisation and collage, the album collates superimposed lines and images, found sound, and space in ways that feel simultaneously organic yet precise.
On the title track, the trio creates a Penrose staircase of ascending and descending patterns. Over sustained saxophone tones, a synth motif climbs gently upward before falling back and starting over again. Textured cabasa keeps time alongside a pendular staccato figure that eventually loops back on itself and begins to phase shift. Hypnotic, offset rhythmic phrases like this recur throughout the album. “Écoute Au Loin,” for instance, displaces one sax line against another in a way that recalls the pulsing interference patterns of Terry Riley’s “In C.” Midway through, everything but a dotted figure drops out, and Kalma’s voice enters in three overlapping waves, repeating, “So I’m going to play today/And see/If you are interested/To make layers.”
Layering and exploration are perhaps the animating forces behind the entire project. This is especially clear in “Dizzy Ditty,” which recalls Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, or a pleasant mushroom trip through an 8-bit forest. A dotted, marimba-like synth totters about; flutes trill and meander like birdsong; strings vibrate like light. It is at once pointillistic and impressionistic. Similarly, “Stay Centered” sounds like it could be an educational ’90s VHS tape about plant cell biology. Little tintinnabulations bookend the track as if announcing the beginning and end of a stretch of active synth mitosis. “New Air,” by contrast, plays less in the light and more in the shadows. Raindrop sounds and fuzzy atmospherics recall the eléctrica selvática music of artists like Chancha Via Circuito and Nicola Cruz.
In many ways, The Closest Thing to Silence is an exercise in the manipulation of breath and space as meditation. The title itself comes from Kalma’s view of music: “Music, for me, is the closest thing to silence. Once you take the words out, once you take the mind out, and you leave everything inside…that is music.” The instincts and considered calculations of Kalma, Chiu, and Honer converge on the record, creating a separate, fourth “inside.” It is a four-dimensional space—one in which old recordings Kalma made in the ’70s (like the drum machine and synth on “Stack Attack”) meet Honer’s present-day improvisations, where a field recording Chiu made in a New York café scores a voice note Kalma made at home in Australia. The fluid yet methodical collapsing, stacking, and stretching of these spaces and silences are what define this record.
Visually, this can be seen in Chiu’s video animation for “A Treasure Chest.” Around two-thirds of the way through, three striped circles of different sizes rotate one on top of another. As they spin at different speeds and in different directions, previously hidden shapes emerge. Thickened lines coalesce and dissipate; dark and light geometric shapes tessellate outward. Layered misalignments create large-scale optical illusions that would otherwise lay dormant—were it not for the three figures animating it.


Enthusiastic, meticulous, and decidedly analog, Clouds of Joy is AM radio music for a late ’70s moment that may only exist in bandleader Max Turnbull’s imagination.

Clouds of Joy

Since his days as Slim Twig, Max Turnbull has demonstrated a compositional freedom that splits the differences between wildly different roles—producer, songwriter, rocker, abstract instrumentalist, glitchy troubadour. Both laid-back and restless, Turnbull reminds us that music can keep us on our toes while relaxing our minds. His current group, the loosely defined, easy-come, easy-go collective Badge Époque Ensemble, is always a screeching solo away from spiritual jazz. But their songs, however lush and layered, never worry over pain long enough to emit a Pharoah Sanders-esque wail, or a devotional worthy of Alice Coltrane; palatable, ceaselessly breezy, the ensemble’s sound is more oriented toward self-care.
Such an anesthetic alchemy feels very now, to a sometimes tired degree. The low-key sprawl of their 2021 album Scroll, recorded under the name Badge Epoch, evoked serene genre-straddler Sam Gendel, yet their new album Clouds of Joy stands out by reaching for the past. Gone is Scroll’s smash-cut editing, as though Turnbull were toggling through 75 open tabs in his browser. Enthusiastic, meticulous, and decidedly analog, Clouds of Joy is AM radio music for a late-’70s moment that may only exist in his imagination: These nine tracks are fun, full of pacifying flutes and disco congas, but also progressive in the purest sense of the word. Despite the gooey new-age sloganeering of Turnbull’s lyrics, the ensemble’s shifting, consonant arrangements push past his mischievous comfort zone and into profound terrain.
The difference is largely an increasing skill at writing for voice. Staggering opener “Conspiring With Nature” floats along on four-part harmonies sung by Dorothea Paas, Alex Samaras, Robin Dann, and Alanna Stuart, forecasting the song’s surprisingly sewn-together parts—a veritable Frankenstein, if the monster had been built with elegance and invisible stitches. The quartet returns on “Let Breath Be the Sum,” which hinges on a lyric as instructive as a good yoga class. “Let breath be the sum/Of consciousness,” they practically chant, while singers drop out of the main melody and slip in at a distant, lower register. Their singing not only teaches us how to breathe—it reminds us of the parts that form the titular sum.
On the page, Badge Époque Ensemble’s spirituality can seem trite. “The world is a bowl/Pouring light unto bowls/Light flows from bowl to bowl,” the four vocalists sing on “Joy Flows.” But their reverberant harmonies inhale these meanings and expel them as something more pulmonary than literal. We notice that “sum” extends into an evocative, meditative hum, the rounded, full tones of the a capella track “The Greatest Joy.” The one solo vocal feature is on “Zodiac,” when Toronto ballroom stalwart James Baley plays off the funk backbeat of Jay Anderson’s drums, Gio Rosati’s bass, and Chris Bezant’s wah-wah guitar. A number of songs were written collectively, and after sitting out Scroll, Bezant and saxophonist Karen Ng make a welcome return. Turnbull is a font of ideas, yet Badge Époque’s crystallization into a true ensemble elevates Clouds of Joy into their most robust, consistent collection yet.
Relinquishing his piano, the bandleader reimagines his own role as that of musical director and sonic mastermind, like Walter Becker’s in latter-day Steely Dan. The songs themselves, though, suggest lesser-known ’70s-originating acts Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, both of whom eschewed compositional convention, merging California sunniness with New York archness. While Badge Époque Ensemble hail from Toronto—a plenty arch, not exactly light-drenched city—Clouds of Joy is beatific, with a puckish quality that bleeds through in brief snatches. Slowed a few dozen BPMs, the title track’s catchy flute hook could soundtrack a long hold on an 800 number. The whole album works so well not because it draws with occasional cheek from the late 20th century—a lot of today’s artists use the past with more obvious internet-age irony—but because it sounds so thoroughly composed. Exhaustively arranged and too tightly wound to permit extended stretches of improvisation, Clouds of Joy is a spiral of great instrumental performances you might miss on a first or even fifth listen. It advertises its traditional aspects, and also hides them in our assumption that such happy, pre-punk-sounding music must in some way be making fun of itself.
A faulty assumption, no doubt, and surely a lack of self-awareness has its benefits. On Clouds of Joy, the hooks shimmer and gleam, landing in a dizzying, relentless succession. The compositions spread out with a comfortable, unhurried sense of purpose. For the first time, Badge Époque Ensemble don’t sound like they’re trying to reclaim Muzak or any other maligned genre of the past—except just a tiny bit. The present itself must be good enough, Turnbull tells us, and his band plays with confidence in the fact that these sounds emerge from the brilliance of their collective voice.


Working with a team of hit-making collaborators, the country-pop icon returns with a bland collection of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms.

Queen of Me

By the time the new millennium rolled over, Shania Twain’s legacy was secure. With her 1997 blockbuster Come On Over, the Canadian singer established a fresh mold for modern women in country and pop music, inspiring the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, and Taylor Swift to make their own way. She’s beloved by everybody from Harry Styles to Haim, Orville Peck to Post Malone, and her songs have become staples of weddings, karaoke nights, and any band looking for a crowd-pleasing cover.
After a decade that brought a son, a divorce, and a life-altering autoimmune illness, Twain mounted a formal “comeback” in 2017 that shifted her closer to typical pop arrangements. At the time, she told Rolling Stone that she wanted to make music that was as far away as possible from what she’d made with Robert “Mutt” Lange, her acrimoniously departed ex-husband and the producer of her most commercially successful work. She accomplished that with Now, which drew more heavily on rock and Top 40 pop textures while keeping a relatively even keel. She goes even further on Queen of Me, where she serves up a dozen tracks of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms. This latest chapter, however, is a case of diminishing returns.
Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” The cheers of “Queen!” in the title track sound half-hearted at best, hitched to a plodding rhythm that proceeds with all the pizazz of a conveyor belt. First, though, you’ll have to get past the stilted opening lines, where Twain insists that she is neither girl nor boy, baby nor toy: She is, in fact, a queen.
She’s still got some of that country flavor, but instead of a seamless crossover, it makes for an awkward combo. The album’s fist-pumping introduction “Giddy Up!” nods at her twangy bona fides with a peppy acoustic guitar melody and lyrics about heading out west from Ohio—never mind that she’s lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years—and a rhythmic, disco-lite bridge soon indicates that she’s not planning to stick around the ranch. “Got litty in the cup,” she bleats, as though that is a perfectly natural turn of phrase for a 57-year-old white woman. Twain peppers other songs with awkward, forcibly modern idioms, like when she sings “I deleted our history” on “Brand New.”
Lyme disease nearly destroyed Twain’s ability to sing, but corrective surgery allowed her to reclaim it in a different timbre. That her voice sounds different from how it did 20 years ago is immaterial; her handful of producers most often fail to deliver material that meets the star where she sings now, instead masking her voice with synthetic effects. The chorus of “Brand New” pushes her into an uncomfortable register, and despite the song’s earnest reclamation of self, her once-steady voice sounds warped and pinched.
Queen of Me warms up when Twain relaxes and stops trying to convince everyone to have a good time, as with “The Hardest Stone” or “Last Day of Summer.” But even these charms scan as impersonal, and more often than not, the album simply doesn’t connect. “I Got It Good” feels like an underbaked counterpart to Twain’s 2002 single “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!,” with none of its thrill. Though it’s co-written with Twain’s son, Eja, “Number One” feels anonymous, something that could’ve been cut by any number of midlevel singers looking to claim a foothold in the waiting-room market. “Pretty Liar” aims to be an explosive indictment of an unworthy man, but it pales by comparison to the Chicks’ incendiary 2020 comeback single “Gaslighter.” (At least Jack Antonoff had enough sense not to get in the way of the Chicks being themselves.)
A hard pivot into pop, or even a general creative reset, isn’t impossible for artists who have made a career out of crossing stylistic lines. Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn both issued their share of pivotal late-career LPs; Aretha Franklin was 56 when Lauryn Hill made her a hit that sampled Edie Brickell; Cher was 52 when she released “Believe.” But Twain doesn’t seem to have the right stewards to get her there. Her music once set the standard for pop-country crossovers, but Queen of Me tries so hard to capture current trends that it already sounds behind the times.


His voice deeper and his aim truer, Pavement’s Scott Kannberg is at his most confident and mellow as he navigates middle age’s ups and downs.

Doris and the Daggers

Former Pavement guitarist/vocalist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg’s solo career has doubled as an ongoing battle for self-definition—a quest to find space for himself in the firmament of American indie rock. Results have varied. There were guest spots on Kevin Drew and Broken Social Scene LPs. There was his label Amazing Grease Records, home to San Francisco’s late, great Oranger. Then there was the trio he helmed, Preston School of Industry. At its most memorable, Preston doubled down on the wilder-card songwriting role Kannberg played during Pavement’s decade-long, indie-rock reign (the spazzy, elastic “The Spaces in Between”) or probed fuzzed-out, country-fried drift (the downbeat “Whalebones”). Too often, though, the music floated by, not leaving behind much of an impression. With 2009’s The Real Feel—his first LP as Spiral Stairs—he gear-shifted, leaning convincingly and promisingly into folk, blues, and the Clean. Then, without warning, Kannberg effectively went silent.
Eight years later, Doris and the Daggers cracks the equation. His voice deeper and his aim truer, Kannberg is at his most confident and mellow here. Backed by members of the National, Broken Social Scene, Oranger, and singer/songwriter Kelley Stoltz, the album patiently navigates middle age’s ups and downs, setting aside sprawl and fantasia aside to focus on succinctness and autobiography. The players lend a patient, casual calm to proceedings mid-tempo, sober, and pedal-steel soaked; these are indie-rock lite tunes playing a long game, in no rush to peak, freak, or wipe out.
With “The Unconditional,” an ode to a growing daughter, Kannberg capitalizes on the song’s elastic nest of guitars, horns, and organs, stretching and savoring each verse. You can feel him fully inhabit this song in a way he never has before; when he confides that the “little girl’s getting older/she’s not telling me what to do,” the prevailing emotion is a rueful sense of wonder. Needled with riffs and horn squibs, “Dance (Cry Wolf)” locates its swing and bounce in lonesomeness. “AWM” might be the most chipper, hummable divorce song this decade; its violins and pianos smartly deployed, its vocal outro more reflective than bitter. Less affecting is the goofy golf-trip remembrance “Dundee Man” featuring a synthesizer line part of a wan, jangling whole. Though the album’s stakes may not be very high at all, it’s nice to hear Kannberg’s increasing facility for arrangements.
This isn’t a record you crank in traffic en route to an across-town meeting; it’s a record to unwind with later that night on your second glass of Syrah—a sturdy shrug to cap off the day. Throughout Doris, a very tricky balancing act is at work: the maintenance of a rangey, ragged looseness, without any sense of over-rehearsal. That Kannberg and company are able to sustain this standard throughout—even for synth-funk wonder “No Comparison” and the chanted, semi-punk head rush of “Doris and the Daggers”—is a small triumph.


The New Jersey indie-folk singer’s debut is a refreshingly modern take on classic themes of displacement, devolution, and love, of course.

flounder

Wales, the Anglo-Saxon name for England’s first colony, loosely translates to the “place of the others.” When the world refers to you as a foreigner on your own land, it’s difficult not to adopt this lens. This identity crisis is the ontological dilemma of the Welsh. It’s the reason that the term hiraeth—an ache for a home you’ve never experienced and can’t return to—originated from this coastal region. quinnie, the New Jersey indie-folk singer, excavates this feeling—more gnawing than homesickness and more haunting than nostalgia—on her debut album Flounder.
A song about gentle men and pleasurable oral sex, “Touch Tank,” garnered her an audience on TikTok in 2022, but the 21-year-old tackles contemporary discourse without making it feel like you’re scrolling through social media. Opener “Man” calls out abusers who co-opt femininity to disarm their victims: “No amount of nail polish could paint you a good man.” Even when she includes terms like “soft boy” and “iPod Touch,” Jake Weinberg’s cinematically homespun production means that the medieval acoustics and twinkling pianos sound timeless. Wind chimes, running water, and sounds of children playing paint scenes of youthful summers spent sneaking out bedroom windows for a stolen moment of tenderness. Disney movies teach you to wait for Prince Charming. Time exposes the men you date as dickheads disguised in Prince Charming cosplay. quinnie doesn’t lean on shock value, psychiatry, or somber pianos to carry the emotional weight. Moments of snark ease you into brutal truths: “You stole more of me than I’d care to admit.”
Abusive relationships are disorienting. They can make you unrecognizable to yourself—a stranger in your own body. When quinnie wants to remember that old self who eagerly pursued love, she taps the rewind button on her cassette player between songs. “I can’t fucking wait till the day that I finally get to kiss you,” she sings on “itch,” yearning for a romantic connection to give her life meaning again. The rush is short-lived, like attention spans trained on dating apps engineered to resemble video games: “Would I die satisfied knowing that it could always get better than this?” It’s nearly impossible to surrender to the all-encompassing flame while third-degree scabs linger.
Listening to quinnie cuss feels like watching a toddler walk for the first time. You get the sense that rage is an emotion that’s been denied, which could explain why she delivers somber lines in a gossamer falsetto that almost reaches a twangy yodel. In the rock-inflected “Get What You Get,” her voice is almost smothered by deafening drums. The drums, like her unpleasant emotions that have been pushed down for so long, demand your attention. Popular music and media are admittedly a bit oversaturated with healing-your-inner-child discourse at the moment. With its nostalgic summer camp energy in songs like “Popcorn and Juice” and “Itch,” Flounder does risk entering Camp Rock soundtrack territory. Still, her lyrics are rich with vivid imagery: “An artifact of human existence/Is fossilized inside of me.”
Childlike wonder is its own character on this album. It motivates her to approach the world with “despites.” Despite being mistreated, she’ll hold the door open for a stranger and savor the brief moment of warmth as their body brushes past hers. Despite the soulless digitization and mind-numbing online discourse, she’s gonna croon about vast bodies of water and ocean animals. Quintessential bedroom-pop “Touch Tank” compares an invasive hook-up culture to the experience of captive starfish and manta rays ogled and prodded by aquarium visitors. A loving partnership frees her from purgatory and on the penultimate, Celtic-inspired “Flounder,” she emerges with renewed vigor and an uninhibited voice: “Money talks but I can scream/Look at all this blue and green.”
In an interview with Vulture, when asked how she felt about receiving comparisons to fictional beings like fairies and elves, Caroline Polachek replied: “As a woman artist, it’s always a struggle to be thought of as human.” We’re so anthropocentric as a species and categorically cruel to other beings that association with non-humans carries the whiff of insult. While quinnie explores the theme of negative dehumanization in romantic relationships, she also reclaims it as escapism.
How glorious would it be if we could somehow turn back the hands of time to prevent our fish ancestors from growing legs and inhabiting the land? There’d be no taxes or credit scores, no need to be embarrassed by failing your road test three times, no understanding of sugar babies or alpha-male podcasts. Perhaps we could “devolve a bit,” as quinnie puts it: “Learn to love the simple shit.” None of us have experienced a world untouched by climate decay and profiteering tech companies. Flounder submerges us in baptismal primordial soup. The Industrial Revolution and Machiavellian men are artifacts of a cruel past. God has graciously unleashed the floods. Maybe we’ll get it right this time.


The jazz supergroup of free-improvising heavyweights—Patrick Shiroishi, Jessica Ackerley, Chris Williams, Luke Stewart, and Jason Nazary—veers between frenetic roar and microscopic textures.

SSWAN: Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster

Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster

A primordial tempest of rhythm—delivered in the form of a tumbling wave of drums and a soaring guitar solo—introduces SSWAN, a jazz supergroup composed of a few of the brightest stars in the loose constellation of U.S.-based free improvisers. Its members—saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, guitarist Jessica Ackerley, trumpeter Chris Williams, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Jason Nazary—have collaborated in various capacities for quite some time. Shiroishi has recorded duo outings with three of the other members, and Nazary mixed Williams’ album Live earlier this year. On Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster, they harness their collective histories to deliver a gripping debut, building fantastic forms that capture each of their unique textural viewpoints.
The record’s title track serves as SSWAN’s slow-building roll call. Nazary and Ackerley’s opening duet absorbs Shiroishi effortlessly; his dense flurry of notes pairs up in dizzy harmony with the guitarist’s chordal slashing. Williams and Stewart enter together, then split apart. Williams winds out slowly, seasick and searching. Stewart bellows groaning punctuation. You can hear the accumulated years of understanding between the players kicking in as they disconnect and reassemble, each taking delicate care to preserve the others’ finely honed voices before the cacophony swells and dissipates, ending in a parabolic mirror image of the beginning. Nazary taps out shimmering cymbal splashes and Ackerley crawls gently over the fretboard.
The anxious thrill of the title track’s frayed attack settles into grounded stillness on “Pattern Phases.” The next scene in Invisibility’s triptych, it brings out each player’s well-documented capacity for tactile ambient sprawl. Taken at a simmer, SSWAN engage in a game of shadow puppetry at the acoustic limits of their instruments, leaving pitch by the wayside and painting with their timbral outlines. Saxophone and trumpet swirl with breath; pick-scraped guitar strings clang like a detuned telephone. One member—it’s impossible to tell who—drops their instrument entirely and offers up a hissing noise similar to one you’d use to lure in a wary cat. It's a spellbinding, adventurous 11 minutes that coaxes you ever deeper into your headphones.
The opener’s frenetic roar and the second track’s patient, near-electronic rebuttal document a group working to break out of their established sonic relationships by jamming in two distinct narrative modes: While they work steadily toward a blended identity, they frequently veer off into a series of fascinating side conversations.
The album’s closer, “A Miracle’s Worth,” parlays the experiments of the first two acts into a 17-minute exhale that buzzes with a spiritual hum. The last five minutes are a perfectly paced six-legged race toward the horizon. Stewart’s bowed bass grinds out a sturdy foundation, with Ackerley’s billowing chords boosting the horns and drums into spiraling ecstasy. Williams shines most of all, his flowing leads guiding the quintet onward like a battle cry. Recorded in 2020, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster is a now-distant scratching of the surface from a quintet that has yet to reconvene, an anthropological dig preserved on the tantalizing cusp of a scientific breakthrough. As the sun sets on this first recording, the glow of their shared eureka moment burns bright.


Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin was a binding agent for Kendrick Lamar's last two releases; Velvet Portraits pulls in R&B and G-funk while paying homage to his native L.A.

Velvet Portraits

You know the story by now: Kendrick Lamar paired up with a few jazz musicians and created some game-changing rap music. The results were To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled and unmastered., both expansive and intricate, scanning the vast spectrum of Black art. Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin was a binding agent for both albums: He co-produced what might be untitled’s best track—“untitled 05”—playing saxophone and keys, and his name appeared several times in Butterfly’s liner notes, credited for producing “For Free? (Interlude)” and adding elements to many other album tracks. (He produced “Real” on Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city as well.) Along with Sounwave, bassist Thundercat, keyboardist Robert Glasper and saxophonist Kamasi Washington, Martin played a big role in shaping Butterfly’s atmospheric approach, the way it spread out in different directions without losing focus. Though it addressed societal despair and Lamar’s own angst, Butterfly was also a love letter to Compton and the West Coast in general, its wide-open funk and soul a direct reflection of Cali’s pastoral grooves.
Martin takes a similar path on Velvet Portraits, which pulls in R&B and G-funk while paying homage to his native Los Angeles. The multifaceted ethos has become useful for the composer, whose music never stays in the same place for too long, while maintaining its breezy spirit. Martin has crafted instrumentals for Snoop, Kurupt and Murs over the years, and his debut studio album, 2013’s 3ChordFold, mixed live instruments and studio beats with refreshing results. In an interview with The Fader, Martin said Velvet Portraits was headed a different way until a mix of family emergencies encouraged him to take another tack. “We went through all these things and it made me want to pull closer with myself, and it really made me want to pull closer with God,” he said at the time. That’s why Velvet feels remarkably scenic, moving methodically and conjuring pastoral scenes. Technically, this is jazz, but the tag is almost a disservice here: Sure it has some of the genre’s traditional aspects—the improvised nature of “Curly Martin” and the Sérgio Mendes aesthetic of “Bromali” are examples—but the album registers as something deeper without a clear definition. This is jazz the way Glasper is jazz, the way Bitches Brew is a jazz record: Martin mixes pieces of the genre with others, setting a vibe that’s uniquely his.
Velvet Portraits is full of subtle shifts that make the album tough to pin down, even if the individual tracks are easily deciphered at first glance. Songs like “Push” and “Patiently Waiting” have pronounced gospel influences—the former an upbeat revival tune; the latter reminiscent of the church-soul hybrids Ray Charles used to make. Velvet Portraits is decidedly nostalgic in that regard, and as it plays, you sense Martin’s allegiance to old-school music and the way it made him feel. It’s in the trunk-rattling bounce of  “Turkey Taco” and the Quiet Storm ambience of “Never Enough.” On “Think of You,” especially, singer Rose Gold salutes soul icons Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye while Kamasi’s sax simmers in the background.
In many ways, Velvet Portraits is Butterfly’s companion piece, harboring the same voluminous reach while conveying uplifting messages of love and inclusiveness, resting in the heart of southern California. Where Martin’s previous work was more energetic, Velvet seems far more relaxed, as if he’s found a creative lane and is fully comfortable in it. The album doesn’t hit as hard as the producer’s other offerings, but on purpose, Velvet Portraits is a soft touch that slowly unfolds over time, best heard under bright skies, on spring and summer evenings with the car windows down. It all culminates on "Mortal Man," the album's epic closer, which takes from Butterfly's closer of the same name. Sprawling almost 12 minutes, Martin's version is theatrical, full of synthesized vocals and sporadic horns. Light keys bubble to the surface, bringing the LP to a radiant conclusion. It doesn’t get more L.A. than that.