The St. Louis rapper’s new album showcases a fly confidence that the thin writing can’t always match.

Fish Don’t Climb Trees

Chester Watson wants to understand his place in the cosmos. The producer and rapper’s new age boom-bap evokes sleepwalking with its narcoleptic rhythms and restless motion; even in the disorienting unreality of dreams, he is constantly plodding forward, searching for answers. His debut album staged his wandering style as a hazy spirit quest through Japanese folklore. On Fish Don’t Climb Trees, the St. Louis rapper strips away the layers of metaphor and murk, aiming for lucid accounts of his shifting thoughts and emotions.

Fish Don’t Climb Trees is titled after an apocryphal Albert Einstein quote: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” On the title track, Watson mines the saying for both its encouraging sentiment and its surreal imagery. “Just a fish up in the mountains outta my element, feeling at home/Thoughts blank when I'm settling deep into zones,” he raps through a shroud of jazzy bass strums and wispy melodies. His normally groggy voice sounds resonant and clear.
Watson seems renewed: The largely self-produced album features a neater take on his signature sound, which is typically waterlogged and bugged out. The crisp percussion on “Grey Theory” snaps and twists like a color guard. The yawning vocal samples of “Money & Love” billow between the drums. His rapping is just as smooth. He talks a lot of fly shit, frequently mentioning touching down in foreign cities and rocking fresh fits. “Chest out, I be working,” he boasts on “East End,” one of the album’s many flexes. As a performer and producer, he’s still shedding the Earl Sweatshirt, DOOM, and Brainfeeder influences, but those touchstones are increasingly guideposts rather than endpoints.
While this newfound swagger livens his songs, the underlying ideas are still thin. Though Watson casts himself as a roving shaman who lives “outside of time and space” as he says on “Daze,” none of his lines feel truly otherworldly or alien. “Bora bora, aurora borealis/Kingdom hearts I feel like Sora Sora,” he says on the leisurely “Bora Bora.” He more often references the fantastical than evokes it, tossing pop culture allusions into humdrum rhymes. Despite all his talk of third eyes and psychedelia, Watson never manages to produce imagery and word combinations as hallucinogenic as the “endoplasmic reticulum within cytoplasm” of $ilkMoney’s “giant portal wizard snake.” Nor does he achieve the stoned elegance of a ZelooperZ line like, “I say what I want like the bible bitch.”

That lack of style underscores the vagueness of his introspection. He often mentions demons and alludes to personal battles: “Going through struggles but I cannot end it/My heart and spirit got tug of war tension,” he says on “Mirrors.” Sounds intense. None of those scuffles play out in the music though. Any sense of turmoil is derailed by throwaway boasts like, “Walk in the building like, ‘Psh, I'm lit.’” Watson is welcome to withhold, but until he can ballast that reservation with some kind of compelling stylistic or narrative perspective, he’s going to remain adrift.


Damon Albarn, Dan the Automator, UK producer Actress, and others traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to meld their sensibilities with those of local musicians. The result is an interesting if uneven album that feels like a more realized version of Albarn's Mali Music project*.
*

Kinshasa One Two

David Toop imagined future music in his book Ocean of Sound as "all winking lights and digital exchanges across alien cultures." In July of this year Blur/Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn brought a group of producers to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an attempt to forge some of those exchanges of his own. Along for the ride were XL Recordings boss Richard Russell, frequent Albarn collaborator Dan the Automator, and self-styled "R&B concrete" producer Actress. Over the course of five days, local musicians came and went, bringing with them various esoteric instruments and lending their vocals to different songs, while Albarn's producer-collective worked as a unit to fashion the finished product into Kinshasa One Two. Video from the recordings highlights the cross-cultural gap that needed to be bridged, with Albarn communicating via hand gestures and vocal inflections, and the rest of his team surrounding the local musicians with the "winking lights" of their digital gadgetry.
In a sense this is a more fully realized vision of the Mali Music project Albarn released in 2002. That record saw him gingerly feeling out whether harmony could be extracted through the osmosis of his trip-hop and pop-oriented outlook and the work of Malian artists including Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabaté. In contrast, Kinshasa One Two is a more confident recording, with Albarn still working outside his comfort zone but given little chance to think or breathe due to the self-imposed time limit on the project. All the colors feel a little brighter here, especially when the energy of the Congolese musicians is allowed to shine through. With so many people involved, both locally and from the imported crew of producers, it's no surprise that Kinshasa One Two feels unfocused at times. There's no underlying narrative or musical structure to this record; instead it's a grab bag of ideas and impulses, assembled as an approximation of the raggedy and lively way in which the recordings were conceived.
For much of this album, it doesn't feel like the two contrasting approaches solidify into a satisfying whole, with stems of ideas stretching out toward one another but never fully germinating. Instead, the focus gently rocks back and forth. At times ("Hallo", "African Space Anthem") the gap between DRC Music and Gorillaz is negligible. "Hallo" comes across like this album's "Stylo", with its featherweight pop groove and Albarn's strained falsetto demonstrating his undeniable pop know-how. On "K-Town" the group moves closer to the exuberant Ethio-jazz swing of Mulatu Astatke's "Yègellé Tezeta", while "We Come From the Forest" leaps into a frantic pace via the great swoons of thumb piano that click and clack into place. The latter is a stark demonstration of the successes and failures of this project, where the bubbling electronics of Albarn's team become cursory and intrusive, causing the vigorous backbone laid out by Bokatola System (who surface four times on this album) to feel like it would work better in isolation.
So Kinshasa One Two often comes across an album that doesn't know what it wants to be, and that's mostly in keeping with the nature of the way it was conceived. But the raw power of the music from the region, which is presumably what attracted Albarn and his group to make this record, often feels curiously lacking in this context. Perhaps that's an inevitable consequence of mixing up these different styles. But the weak, Portishead-lite beats aren't missed when you hear the vocalist Love performing the song "Love" a cappella, and the ultra-distorted hidden track at the end of the album derives a brash charm from its coarse textures. The unshackled nature of those pieces makes the contributions of the Congolese musicians elsewhere on this record feel restrained. There's none of the unhinged joy you might find on a Sublime Frequencies recording like Group Inerane's startling Guitars From Agadez, which causes it to feel like unnecessary restrictions were being imposed for the sake of balance between the musicians involved.
It's when the quest for equilibrium eases up that the quality rises a notch or two in either direction. The contribution of Washiba is barely detectable on the slamming, LFO-circa-"Freak" techno of "If You Wish to Stay Awake", while the softly spun groove of "Lourds" is pleasingly dominated by the forceful personality of Yende Bongongo. Occasionally successful collaborations arise, usually when the loopy impulses of both sides are fully indulged; the rattle and bump of "Customs" is particularly notable in that regard. But often it's hard to reconcile the songs here with the lively video clips from the sessions on the DRC Music Tumblr, and that's its central flaw-- a little spirit got lost along the way, somewhere between the performance and the final mastering, possibly due to the sheer weight of numbers involved in the recording process. Despite those reservations, Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.


The usually-vitriolic indie rapper finds a sense of peace on his sixth studio album, which largely trades in frenetic rhymes for introspective narratives.

Kindness for Weakness

In years past, Homeboy Sandman’s scattered, ruminating cadence would’ve been enough to keep your attention. Though on recent work, like 2014’s White Sands EP with producer Paul White and the full-length Hallways, the rapper seemed more tempered when unwrapping his views. “Minimum wage they can pay you/You can praise, you can choose who you pray to,” he exclaimed a couple of years ago on “America, the Beautiful,” a sarcastic take on the nation’s so-called freedom. Sandman has always tackled real issues, but it’s usually been in spurts, packed within unique flows often praised by rap purists. In an era of glossy pop hybrids, the Queens MC is technically precise, a throwback to shell-top Adidas and truck gold chains. “My shit is ever-present,” Sand once told me. “In hip-hop, it’s like it's mandatory to have a specific style. I don't have a way that I always sound.”
Midway through his new album, Kindness for Weakness, the 35-year-old rapper swerves again, opting for spoken-word on “Talking (Bleep),” a squawking funk-jazz hybrid that recalls Miles Davis’ On the Corner. With humor and candor, he critiques delusional fans, rude strangers, and even The Huffington Post on the flat-out rant. Historically, Sand’s albums have had some sort of antagonist—cops, the term “rapper,” unhealthy foods—but “Talking (Bleep)” is actually a rare vitriolic moment on a record full of soul-searching reflection.
*Kindness *finds the lyricist at peace with himself and his surroundings. He isn’t so combative here; instead, he’s happy with what he has and doesn’t sound so irritated by things he can’t control. “God got reasons for shit that’s gut-wrenching,” he muses on “God.” “I don’t have enemies, God don’t have henchmen.” Sand still captivates lyrically, but on songs like “Heart Sings,” “Eyes,” and “Seam by Seam,” he trades frenetic rhyme patterns for introspective narratives. There’s a creative freedom to this album that comes from years of setbacks and hard work, when you’ve finally found a lane and are content in it. Sidestepping urgent themes, “Earth, Wind, Fire, Water” and “Speak Truth” are simple posse cuts on which rappers yU, Aesop Rock, and Shad trade quick bars about nothing in particular. Transitional songs like “Sly Fox” and “Nonbelievers” are breezy and playful, putting Sand’s rhythmic dexterity on full display.
The album feels resolute, though it occasionally suffers from brief lapses that derail the proceedings. “It’s Cold” starts as a gritty ode to New York City nights, but guest vocalist Steve Arrington sounds especially grating. Instrumentals “Gumshoe” and “Funhouse”—produced by RJD2 and Eric Lau, respectively—seem random and don’t fit within the LP’s scope. To that end, Kindness feels like a nice collection of songs without a clear direction and it doesn’t have the immediate rewind factor of previous efforts Subject: Matter or First of a Living Breed. At this stage of his career, with little left to prove, Sand is making comfortable music that aligns with his place in indie rap. All topics are on the table and clever lyrics are guaranteed. Just don’t box him in.


On his second album, the Nigerian star pays tribute to Benin City and its history with spring-loaded rhythms and gleeful provocations.

HEIS

At the O2 Arena in London last November, Nigerian Afrobeats star Rema came onstage riding a glowing red-and-black horse and wearing a mask inspired by Queen Idia, a cultural icon dating to the 16th-century Kingdom of Benin. The musician hoped it would be a devastating statement on the UK’s continued hoarding of African art, including famous sculptures of Idia. Elsewhere in the show, he performed atop a giant bat, referencing a familiar sight in the skies over Benin City. But the theatrical tribute to Rema’s hometown and his people’s history was met with reactions ranging from confusion to conspiracy theories questioning whether he was part of the Illuminati.
The colossal international success of Rema’s 2022 single “Calm Down” accelerated the rise of a feather-ruffling new voice in Afrobeats, one keenly aware of his potential to ascend to the level of the genre’s big three—Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid. That fateful show in London spurred the creation of Rema’s second album, HEIS, a record that kicks back with spring-loaded rhythms and gleeful provocations and brings the defining elements of his city front and center.
Up until now, Rema was often spotted with a cuddly human-size teddy bear. On HEIS, the 24-year-old artist adopts a roguish anti-hero character, represented by a bat, who flexes with the grandiosity of a U.S. rapper: Rema as both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Alexander Wang, icy wrists, and Richard Mille all wrap around the beat of the wordy yet contagious “Yayo”; on the chorus of “Hehehe,” he unleashes a cartoonishly sardonic laugh. He’s in Venice sipping Henny on the Miami bass-inspired “Azaman,” which sounds like he’s winking at you from what could be the top deck of a yacht.
Rema hadn’t touched base in Benin City since 2018, having moved to Lagos before launching his career with breakout first single “Dumebi.” HEIS reconnects with his home city’s energy: Percussion moves in unbreakable clusters, dusty guitars are swapped for laser-gun synth, and strings outline the album in an ornate gold frame. “Black Bentayga, smoking a reefer,” Rema begins the title track, with Arabic strings rising around him as though Amaarae’s Fountain Baby is filling the Bentley’s speakers.
At just 28 minutes, HEIS moves with ceaseless hustle. Where Rave & Roses opened with a cauldron of sentimental chords and guitar, HEIS begins with four blunt bars of 16-bit synth stabs before springing into uninterrupted action. “Follow me run, you tear your ACL,” he raps on “Azaman.” Far from the chiseled stylings of Asake and Wizkid, Rema opts for an antsy stream of consciousness with the momentum of a Ferrari. Just as the pace threatens to slow, “Ozeba” stages a blind date between snapping kuduro and the sort of deep-voiced vocal inflection Playboi Carti has toyed with recently. The chemistry is immediate.
The final moments of HEIS tease a full-on heel turn. The penultimate “Villain” samples the featherweight piano of Lana Del Rey’s “A&W”—itself a song that cycles through characters and states of moral alignment—and turns it into a sinful amapiano body-winder. “Please don’t be mad at the fact that your baby na my baby don’t take it personally,” Rema sings through a Cheshire cat grin. “Now I Know” snaps out of this fantasy to touch on raw wounds. “All of my childhood I lost ’cause I wan feed family,” he cries, thinking of the struggle of caring for his loved ones after the death of his older brother at 15. It’s a moment of revelation from an album of blood-pumping madness. In going back home, Rema recasts an act of defiance as a thrilling character arc and a snapshot of his home city. It’s as exhilarating as a street race, as gothic as the bats flying above him.


In the wake of Jay Reatard's passing, this San Fran garage-punker is one of rock's better razor-sharp throwback tunesmiths.

Melted

San Fran garage-punker (and former one man bander) Ty Segall pens crackling classic-sounding rock'n'roll tunes about as lean and economical as they come, pushing his rangy shoutalong hooks so far forward there's rarely room for pesky little details like verses. Although he's thrown quite a few more colors into his instrumental palette in recent years, he's still mostly working way out in the red, leaving nuance to others. Melted, his latest, boasts a 30-minute runtime that feels closer to 15. Segall gets in, gets out, and gets it done nearly every time.
Melted kicks off with quite the 1-2-3-4 punch: the swarming "Finger", the strummy "Caesar", the bopalong "Girlfriend", the two-faced "Sad Fuzz". Each tune spends a little time getting situated then settles into a wide-eyed amphetamine groove, levels well blown out, Segall's slack, bratty howl smeared liberally over top. "Girlfriend" in particular feels snappy and effortless. Segall's not taking much time figuring out how to beef up his sound, and while just about everything's bathed in the same warm haze and power trio crackle, he manages to jam the odd nooks and crannies of these straightaway songs with a little squiggly sci-fi guitar, barrelhouse piano, recorder, even the odd vocal collage. Segall's made some fine music in the past, but it's always felt a little hit-or-miss on an LP level, with hooks buried by freneticism and too little emphasis on his natural talent as a singer. Melted seems in some ways like his first proper record-- he's in control of every element of his sound on these first four rippers.
Melted gets a little soft in the middle, its title track lost in a sea of haze, "Mike D's Coke" coming off almost like a third-rate Ariel Pink number. The tracks exhibit a little more range than his Buddy Holly/early Kinks/Ramones triangulation, but they don't hit as hard, slowing the record's momentum. But things pick up rather nicely from "Imaginary Person" on out, riding a wave of sweaty insistence on through to the all-too-hasty end. "Imaginary" is a beast, clattering for a spell before breaking into a surfy chug. "My Sunshine" bakes and "Bees" floats by, but it's the muddy blues of "Mrs." that really leaves its mark, a murder ballad in the "Hey Joe" mold that Segall slows down just long enough to completely kill.
You're not going to hear many rock records that'll kick you square in the pants quite like this one this year, provided Segall doesn't up and crank another one out by December; the kid's got heart, brains, and quite an ear for a hook, and he throws himself body and soul into these tunes. Segall makes quite an impression in half an hour's time, and Melted's the best foot he's put forward yet. It still seems like his best records are ahead of him, like he's still got a couple of things to nail, but as it stands, Melted could charm the sweat out of anybody.


On the pair’s second collaborative album, the stakes of their street sagas intensify as the Detroit rapper contends with the aftermath of a traumatic car accident.

Nicholas Craven / Boldy James: Penalty of Leadership

Penalty of Leadership

In January of last year, the Detroit rapper Boldy James was involved in a car accident that left him in critical condition, with broken vertebrae in his neck and various other orthopedic injuries. When he was eventually released from the hospital, he was paralyzed from the neck down. “Screws and rods all in my shit, I couldn’t do nothin,’” he says on the outro to “Brand New Chanel Kicks,” the lead single for Penalty of Leadership, his haunting second full-length with Montreal producer Nicholas Craven. He recorded that song at his home while in a wheelchair and neck brace, barely a week after he left a physical rehabilitation center. You can hear the strain—his smooth upper baritone, usually fluid and nonchalant, sounds sleepy and stiff. But that doesn’t stop the somber magic of Boldy’s writing and the psychedelic charm of Craven’s sampled chimes; here, their morbid fairy tales are as poignant as ever.
It takes a lot to humble a rapper like Boldy: The vast majority of his songs feature more close calls and dead ends than many people will see in a lifetime, but the crash seems to have jostled something loose in him. What made last year’s Fair Exchange No Robbery so special was Craven’s unvarnished loops and Boldy’s rhymes; the samples unfurled naturally before folding back into themselves like origami, while the bars—blunt and elegant as a fat pinky ring—found the sweet spot between bitter wins and triumphant losses. On Penalty of Leadership, the duo takes another step in this direction, using the grief of Boldy’s accident as a springboard for stories that are variably uplifting and unsettling.
Contending with mortality always plays a crucial role in Boldy’s songs, but here, the paranoia and scars from friendships snuffed out too soon linger more than usual. Take “Evil Genius,” where he weighs the consequences of his “thug livin’” against the memories of his departed friends and his future as an artist: “Shit that they gon’ hold against me when I’m Grammy-nominated/I just wish the bro was with me; look at all the time we wasted.” The swelling accordion and raspy drums are streaked with digital echoes; the effect is as melancholy as the references to powder white enough to make snow angels. His cutthroat chronicles of his hometown—punctuated by vivid details like specific street names—are usually delivered in a cocksure monotone. Stacked alongside the trauma Boldy recently survived, his words feel even more dire.
There is still plenty of business-as-usual storytelling. True to form, Boldy’s imagery is effortlessly sharp, but the unease over what he risks losing puts an asterisk on everything he does. On “Murderous Tendencies,” robberies are sandwiched between harrowing odes to lost comrades and dead perps with tongues hanging out of their mouths like Michael Jordan. Stories of moving drugs and sipping lean hit different when you have to think about how that money can get your son suspended from school (as on “No Pun Intended”) or how your daughter’s “Straight As” could be cut short by being “caught slippin’ where you don’t belong.” He’s still proud of his status among the rabble-rousers of his city, but he’s also more cautious and willing to consider how his remaining family and friends fit into the equation.
Boldy is an adaptable MC, but unlike the Rorschach-style expansiveness of his previous collaborations with the Alchemist and genre-straddling Detroit producer Sterling Toles, Craven’s beats are as direct as Boldy’s writing. Neither has to do much work to meet the other in the middle, and Craven’s ear for beguiling samples sets up and maintains the energy of his creative partner’s tragicomic tales. The clunky organs and whispering violins on “Soccer Mom” are solemn yet campy, helping his bars elicit chuckles and sighs alike. On “Early Worms Get Birds,” thudding drums and piano chords give Boldy and guest Double Dee room to drop puns about Brock Lesnar and Madonna, showing that Boldy and Craven are capable of being whatever they need each other to be.
The pair’s chemistry is still potent enough to chill the blood running through your veins, and Boldy’s brush with death makes Penalty of Leadership a heavier and more reflective listen than their previous joint album. The Detroit rapper’s street sagas have always been white-knuckle levels of intense, but with higher stakes, the concrete feels icier, the creases on the dollar bills feel sharper, the weight of a Kel-Tec pistol enough to break a finger. The further the duo burrows into the darkness of their psyches, the brighter the gems they unearth.


Emerging from prison clean and sober in May, Gucci Mane releases an album looking to capitalize on his massive influence. Featuring Kanye West, Young Thug, and Drake.

Everybody Looking

After a Twitter “meltdown” for the books, Gucci Mane violated probation and went to jail in 2013 persona non grata. In May, he emerged as if from a chrysalis, healthy, clean, and sober. He was greeted with acclaim that, while not as intense as his fever-hot peak in 2009, suggested a much broader cultural consensus about his music. One hopes it’s because the world finally caught up with the creative breadth of his work, but more likely it’s because they’ve recognized that work's consequences. Following his late-’00s mixtape supernova, Gucci Mane became a vector, both creative and collaborative, for a new generation of hip-hop stars: Migos, Chief Keef, and Young Thug, to name a few. In the three years he was away, this influence narrative became conventional wisdom, and a shortcut to argue his significance; those who doubted his creative capabilities couldn’t deny his impact.
The title of the first project since his release, Everybody Looking, could as easily describe this influence as it does his status as a trending topic. (It’s also a reference to his 2010 track of the same name, which would be the best song on this compilation by some miles were it included.) For several years, everybody—at least in the realm of underground street rap—really was looking to Gucci for where to go next. For the most part, Everybody Looking is a Gucci Mane mixtape in the most familiar sense. It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar—now six- or seven-year-old—formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed—halfway between a tribute to the improvisational tapes of his classic era and a fully-rendered album statement, it’s best considered a stopgap to tide over fans.
A few records on Everybody Looking stand apart, suggesting the seeds of a better, unrealized project. While Zaytoven’s “Out Do Ya” feels like a by-numbers 2009 pastiche, his turn on “Waybach” sounds fresh. The gritty Mike Will–produced “Pop Music” is a dark double-entendre that recalls the clever urgency of Gucci’s earlier work without falling into caricature. “Gucci Please” features hypnotic songwriting and a flow pattern that’s yet to suffer from overexposure. And bonus track “Multi Millionaire Laflare” is the moment his rapping sounds its most inspired: “Wrist so rocky got your bitch jockin’ ASAP/Every nigga tote a yopper, nigga, we a K-Camp.” None of these records push too far into new terrain, but they do make the case that there’s gas in the tank.
The space between those moments find Gucci sliding into a frozen approximation of earlier formulas. His lyrics can lean boilerplate. This is blatant on “Richest N**** in the Room,” where he peddles a familiar autobiographical tale he’s been spinning since the beginning. It’s a long-running songwriting archetype for him, but one with which we’re familiar at this point; without new details or a fresh approach, it’s more like hitting the requisite checkboxes than creating. The most unique and interesting aspects of Gucci’s life right now involve his three-year sentence, new healthy lifestyle, and flowering lovelife; they are occasionally alluded to throughout, but for the most part this project is unified by frequent references to his looming influence. While interesting to consider—in a wonkish sense—this is less than fascinating as the subject of music. It’s also become, just in the past year, less true; single “All My Children,” a reference to his aesthetic offspring, might have better been titled “All My Grandchildren,” as the new generation shows a closer debt to Guwop’s spiritual heir Chief Keef.
If albums are carefully selected, heavily A&Red projects designed to maximize an artist’s potential and impact, mixtapes have been a method for under-funded artists to perform a flanking maneuver. Notionally, a mixtape is different than an album in that it’s faster to put together, and perhaps a bit less consequential song-for-song, its best ideas spread out over multiple releases. Yet at his recorded peak in the late 2000s, Gucci gained such creative momentum he drowned out carefully-crafted releases by seemingly “bigger” artists.
Everybody Looking is a tribute to that era. But it’s not that era, and Gucci is no longer that artist. Though his music typically transcended the “disposable” mixtape medium in the late ’00s, those tapes were strategic efforts at pushing to a higher level. Once he got there, partially thanks to his label but perhaps also of his own design (he’d expressed the desire to work with Timbaland and the Neptunes in interviews), the A&R system threw him onto generic pop-rap records, underestimating his songwriting significance, seeing him—as many have before and since—as a wacky character simply in need of pricier framing.
This one-dimensional view of him as a charismatic character, rather than a craft-driven artist with his talons plunged deep into the fabric of American music, meant that recognition of his formal innovations was delayed. This artist was telling us where American music was going, and we tried to force him to follow us instead. Rather than working on records which emphasized and refined his own ideas, we ended up with “Spotlight” and “Gucci Time.” Who does everybody look to when their idol looks to others? An ideal future Gucci album, then, forgets about his “influence” as an end goal in itself. “Influence,” after all, is merely a side-effect of vision, originality and creativity. Moments here—as on recent guest verses for Dreezy and Kodak Black—suggest he’s still got it. Rather than chasing some past mixtape “golden era,” here’s hoping he faces the new challenge of making an album that celebrates him for being him.


On Tindersticks' ninth album, their best with their retooled lineup, the pop-noir balladeers strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and sultry soul.

The Something Rain

It was a mere coincidence that Tindersticks' original lineup dissolved not long after their most faithful students, the National, broke overground with their third album, Alligator. But in retrospect it's hard not to view that moment as a symbolic passing of the torch, akin to proud working-class parents sending their kids off to an Ivy League school in anticipation of future success. While the National's more melodramatic take on Tindersticks' patented pop-noir balladry has landed them in hockey arenas and presidential-campaign videos, Stuart Staples and co. have been defiant in their refusal to follow their disciples' charge into the mainstream.
Since signing to Constellation and introducing a revamped lineup with 2008's The Hungry Saw and 2010's Falling Down a Mountain, Tindersticks have gradually drifted away from the string-swept epics that defined their astounding first three albums and the studious soul tones that defined the next three; by loosening up their performances, amplifying their psychedelic side, and projecting a greater degree of playfulness, they've practically become the world's most dignified jam band. While the more freewheeling approach has provided this veteran group with a renewed sense of inspiration by stretching their signature sound into uncharted territory, their first two Constellation efforts didn't yield the sort of cardiac-arresting emotional wallop that's synonymous with the Tindersticks brand. But with The Something Rain, Tindersticks strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and hot, bothered soul, and if it doesn't achieve the same weightiness as their 1990s-era name-making triptych, it's fully on the level of their exceptional early-2000s releases Can Our Love... and Waiting for the Moon.
Tindersticks have traditionally favored low-key opening tracks to gently lure you into their harrowing headspace, but The Something Rain effects a pronounced break from that logic with "Chocolate"-- for one, it clocks in at nine minutes, making it the lengthiest track in the band's dense catalog. More significantly, it marks a return to the spoken-word soundtrack format of their 1995 signature "My Sister", setting a short-story account of a first date to a molten acid-rock refrain that gradually erupts into a brass-blasted climax that heralds the welcome reintroduction of long-time associate Terry Edwards. And just when you start to question why such a seemingly mundane narrative warrants such an over-the-top presentation, there's a "gotcha!" denouement to the story that constitutes the band's most broadly humorous gesture to date.
In both tone and form, "Chocolate" is by far the most atypical track on The Something Rain, but its audaciousness translates into the fiery performances that follow. Where Tindersticks tend to deploy 1970s soul and R&B signifiers to cut through their albums' prevailing air of despair-- and the cheerful, cha-cha-cha strut of "Slippin' Shoes" and the gorgeously languid ballad "Come Inside" serve a similar purpose here-- Something Rain standout "Show Me Everything" uses its smoky Hammond-organ groove, shots of brass, and female backing singers to coax a masterfully intense vocal turn from Staples, with images of latex-gloved hands pressed against glass that ooze with seedy suggestion. "This Fire of Autumn" works a similar trick to equally captivating effect, but at a quickened tempo that turns more anxious with each verse/chorus pass; glockenspiels have rarely been used to such unnerving effect.
Where Staples' downcast narratives were the driving force of the band's early works, the retooled Tindersticks' power lies in their skills of arrangement; structurally, these songs don't really change once they begin, but they accrue considerable force through the layering of complementary string/horn patterns and Staples' pushing his perennially bruised croon to heightened levels of desperation. That makes the heady rush of "Frozen" all the more amazing-- though the song never breaks out of its skittering, wah-wah-accented rhythm, it still feels completely weightless and disorienting, with Staples' echo-drenched voice contorting in and out of the mix while Edwards' free-flowing horn squawks swoop in like stormy gusts of wind. And each time Staples repeats the line, "If I could just hold you," it starts to sound less like a call to a faraway lover than the predatory intimations of a stalker. It may have taken them two albums to find their proper footing with their new line-up but, with The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.


Taylor Swift’s sixth album is an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, but her full embrace of modern pop feels sadly conventional.

Reputation

For a decade, almost everyone agreed on Taylor Swift. She wrote exquisite love songs and scorching, funny takedowns at an age when most people struggle to put together a cogent email. She scattered breadcrumbs and winking clues through her lyrics and liner notes, inviting diehard fans and pop rubberneckers alike to agonize over what was fact and what was fiction. She won so many awards she was ridiculed for the shocked face she made every time her name was called. She was observant and savvy, and if those qualities were spun into a kind of Machiavellian cunning by her critics, it seemed like a good problem to have.
How things have changed. The Swift that stands before us in 2017 is beleaguered and defensive, a figure fighting back from public relations problems she largely could’ve avoided. She stepped into back-and-forths with Nicki Minaj and her eternal nemesis Kanye West, when silence would have seemed optimal. She induced the Streisand effect by taking legal action over a barely-read blog post that drew connections between her work and neo-Nazism, a decision that shone a new spotlight on her steadfast apoliticism in an overheated political climate. And to top it all off, she released “Look What You Made Me Do,” a petty snarl of a lead single that jumped to No. 1 thanks largely to sheer anticipation. Chart watchers rejoiced when an ascendant Cardi B bumped her from the top slot; Taylor sent flowers.
It turns out “Look What You Made Me Do” was closer to a red herring than a sign of things to come, a relief given how it neglected most of Swift’s generational gifts. Reputation, her sixth album, isn’t a tuneless vengeance tour—it’s an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, one that makes 1989 sound like a pit stop on the way to Swift’s full embrace of modern pop. (This is a trip that began the second the bass dropped on her 2012 song “I Knew You Were Trouble.”) She’s largely abandoned effervescence, wonderment, and narrative. Say goodbye to maple lattes and hello to whiskey on ice, to wine spilling in the bathtub, to Old Fashioneds mixed with a heavy hand.
Her vision of pop, one she realizes with the help of Max Martin and Shellback, and man-of-the-moment Jack Antonoff, is surprisingly maximal: hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths right out of a Flume single, stuttering trap percussion, cyborg backing choirs. Songs like opener “...Ready for It?” and “Don’t Blame Me” are glittering monsters held together by Swift’s presence at their center. Her interest in hip-hop and R&B is most apparent in her voice, an instrument that’s been stripped of its signature expressiveness. Her best performances throughout Reputation are defined by cadence and rhythm, not melody: She’s cool, conversational, detached.
These particular skills may have been hiding in plain sight—listen to the decade-old “Our Song” and focus on the way she places syllables while rattling off “Our song is a slammin’ screen door!”—but they’ve never been highlighted the way they are here. “Delicate” is built around a muted pulse and a murmured question: “Is it cool that I said all that? Is it chill that you’re in my head? ’Cause I know that it’s delicate.” She stretches out the titular compliment on “Gorgeous,” making it a fluttering prayer and letting the rest of the line tumble out in its wake. She even manages to hang with Future on the bizarre, compelling “End Game,” leaving poor Ed Sheeran in the dust: “I don’t wanna hurt you, I just wanna be/Drinking on the beach with you all over me.” The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now—she’s posted up at a Cozumel cabana with her out-of-office reply: “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put ’em.”
Her writing has never been less diaristic or more dependent on dramatic performance. For Swift, plunging head-first into pop has meant leaving behind the short stories on 2008’s Fearless or 2010’s Speak Now and relying more on snippets of vivid imagery and detail. (“Getaway Car,” a sparkling Antonoff production that sounds like an “Out of the Woods” retread, is a dramatic and enjoyable outlier.) She leans on characters, some old and some new: the unrepentant brat, the swooning dreamer, and the determined, seductive adult. The “Look What You Made Me Do” video was prescient in at least one respect: Reputation collects a half-dozen different aspects of Swift and lines them up in a row. You leave the album with a new appreciation for her versatility, for the way the tough-talking schemer of “I Did Something Bad” and the infatuated android of “King of My Heart” can share the same tracklist.
The woman who built a career on family-friendly romances like “Love Story” and “Mine” now turns her gaze to the darker side of passion: obsession, jealousy, lust, the loss of control. A lover turns her bed “into a sacred oasis” on the featherlight “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” and she begs her partner to carve their name into her bedpost on “Dress,” a panting, shuddering highlight. Swift hasn’t played the romantic naïf since Red, and she delivers all of these lines with palpable confidence and ease. Even lesser material benefits: “So It Goes...” is replacement-level trap-pop, but it’s hard to shake the thought of her smeared lipstick, of fingernails dug into someone’s back.
In any case, these songs are more successful than the tracks that invite the listener to revisit Swift’s public spats. “Look What You Made Me Do” is the album’s nadir, and “I Did Something Bad” violates what you could call Katy’s Law: the mention of “receipts” in your quasi-diss track renders it an embarrassment. Things somehow get less subtle: “Here’s a toast to my reeeeeal friends,” she sneers on “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” just before faking a weepy apology and breaking into cackling laughter. She’s shooting for over-the-top, campy villainy, but it scans as stubborn petulance. Every listener is over this.
Reputation isn’t the failure that seemed possible a month or two ago; it’s full of bulletproof hooks and sticky turns of phrase. But in committing to a more conventional form of superstardom, Swift has deemphasized the skill at the core of her genius. The album ends with “New Year’s Day,” a spare, acoustic epilogue for an album made using a lot of synths and computers. It’s equal parts Lisa Loeb and Dashboard Confessional, and she conjures rich scenes with just a handful of lines: a hotel lobby strewn with party detritus, the silent back seat of a cab.
She lands the album’s first true knockout punch in the bridge: “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere.” It’s a tiny universe in a dozen words, an economic marvel right up there with old classics like “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” and, “You call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest.” This song is Swift at her best—not settling scores long past their expiration date but writing the kind of lines reputations are made of.


The latest set from harpist Mary Lattimore is like an audio scrapbook, collecting songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016. It contains a sense of time frozen into snapshots of memory.

Collected Pieces

A few years ago, harpist Mary Lattimore ventured from her Philadelphia home and traveled across the country, making music at various stops along the way. But her resulting album, 2016’s At the Dam, wasn’t a travelogue in the literal sense. Lattimore’s solo harp work is usually instrumental and often improvised, and thus not easily pinned down to specific meanings. The record did work as a diary of her trip, though, with its wide range of sounds and moods suggesting open-ended adventure and keen sensitivity to changing environments.
Now settled in Los Angeles, Lattimore has had time to reflect on what she left behind. Collected Pieces is like an audio scrapbook, comprising songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016, previously available only as downloads or streams. These songs aren’t just from the past—they’re largely about the past, too, recounting places and people that Lattimore encountered in Philadelphia and can now only revisit through recollection. Once again, her pieces are too abstract to carry clear narratives. But through titles that indicate a song’s subject, and music that’s patient and contemplative, Collected Pieces has a sense of time frozen into the snapshots of memory.
In some cases, those snapshots are quite specific even if the music is open to interpretation. The name of opener “Wawa by the Ocean” refers to a convenience store Lattimore frequented whenever visiting the New Jersey beachfront town of Ship Bottom. It’s not hard to hear Lattimore’s delicate string plucks as waves gently tapping at a shore, or to hear the song’s rising and descending notes as analogs to the sun’s slow summer cycles. But what’s more interesting is the way Lattimore repeats and massages her melodic figures, modifying them throughout the song’s 10 minutes while never veering too far away. Her variations blur on top of each other to form a single motif, much the way memory can turn many specific events into one general one. It’s the musical equivalent of a thousand instances of “I'm going to Wawa” becoming one big “I used to go to Wawa.”
That sense of the past as a living mental space pops up a lot on Collected Pieces. Lattimore’s slow plucks on “We Just Found Out She Died” echo like fading pictures—the title references a “Twin Peaks” actress that Lattimore had seen speak not long before she passed away, and the song itself eventually morphs into ethereal hums akin to Julee Cruise’s dreamy meditations. On “It Was Late and We Watched the Motel Burn”—which Lattimore actually did one night—effects give her harp sounds their own ghosts and shadows, which slowly subsume the 13-minute piece until it feels like it’s composed of remnants of music that ended a while ago.
Not everything on Collected Pieces can be mapped to an event from Lattimore’s past, but each track seems to tell a story. Often that’s because her melodies are simple and unabashedly pretty, taking on the qualities of a nursery rhyme meant to stick in your ear. Yet Lattimore’s playing is complex and daring in subtle but distinct ways. You can hear it in the small strums she adds to the gentle sway of “Bold Rides,” skewing them just enough from the song’s rhythm that the tune is hard to predict, at times even interestingly uncomfortable. During closer “Your Glossy Camry,” she plays cleverly with pace, feinting toward an acceleration that doesn’t quite materialize, though your brain might fill it in anyway.
Such layered playing makes Collected Pieces more than a compilation of disparate, isolated songs. Lattimore’s approach to the harp is so thorough that she can practically talk through it at this point; she’s created a language. That helps explain why music that is, on the surface, just a collection of string plucks can paint evocative pictures of the unique hold memory has on the past, and vice versa.


Drake’s fifth proper studio album is richly produced, studded with gems, and grapples with his fatherhood in a way that casts his arrested development into sharp relief.

Scorpion

Drake was hiding a child. He’d like you to believe he kept his son a secret to protect him from the slings and arrows of gossip blogs and internet commenters. On Pusha T’s venomous diss track “The Story of Adidon,” he suggested Drake was biding his time until he could make his baby the centerpiece of a marketing campaign for his new line of Adidas clothing. His motives may still be up for debate, but the heart of it is undeniable. Aubrey Graham was hiding a child, and there’s no way for street-level philanthropy or for-the-ladies anthems to bandage the wound the revelation sliced out of his charming image.
Scorpion, his fifth studio album, isn’t entirely focused on the significance of fatherhood. Many of its 25 tracks are built around standard-issue Drake themes—the audacity of rappers who dare speak his name, the psychic toll associated with dating multiple beautiful women at once, people who use Instagram weirdly—and the hyper-topical nature of the lines regarding paternity suggest they were added to the album at the last-minute. But fatherhood hangs over Scorpion all the same, casting Drake’s emotional immaturity into sharp relief. He’s never been more skilled as a technician or melodicist, and it’s remarkable how many of Scorpion’s 90 minutes are musically engaging. But the kind of juvenile navel-gazing that leads someone to write a line like, “She say do you love me, I tell her only partly/I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is less compelling when it’s coming from a 31-year-old father than a would-be college kid trying to make a name for himself.
Paternity has been a long-standing source of anxiety for Drake, one that’s persisted as he’s become exponentially more famous. He was already sweating close calls on “The Resistance,” a gaseous Thank Me Later highlight that references a one-night stand who wishes she’d kept Drake’s baby. He bemoaned the paperwork that comes with superstardom on 2015’s “30 for 30 Freestyle,” talking about the paternity tests he’s legally obligated to complete for women he’s never slept with. And the issue resurfaced on this year’s loosie “Diplomatic Immunity,” a song released when his son was just a few months old: “I got the sauce and now shorties keep claimin’ preggo.”
Scorpion invites you to pretend that becoming a dad hasn’t been one of Drake’s foremost concerns for the last decade. He makes the disclosure for the first time on the stunning “Emotionless,” coasting on top of an instantly recognizable Mariah Carey sample: “I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world, I was hidin’ the world from my kid.” He refutes Pusha’s claim that he’s a deadbeat dad on the opulent “8 out of 10”: “The only deadbeats is whatever beats I been rappin’ to.” To hear Drake tell it, he can’t be bothered to keep their spat going because he’s just too satisfied. “Kiss my son on the forehead then kiss your ass goodbye,” he taunts. “As luck would have it, I’ve settled into my role as the good guy.”
Claiming the higher ground is a convenient way to elude the fact that Pusha had the last and most memorable word in their battle, but it doesn’t hold up under close inspection. On the odious “I’m Upset,” one of his worst songs ever, he sounds unenthused about the prospect of child support: “Can’t go 50-50 with no ho/Every month I’m supposed to pay her bills and get her what she want… My dad still got child support from 1991.” This from someone who’s settling into his role as the good guy? And it’s hard to overlook the fact that Drake’s still using his son as a tool—maybe not to sell sneakers and sweatpants, but to insulate himself from criticism over taking a decisive loss.
If you can get past Drake’s toxicity, you’re free to luxuriate in Scorpion’s sumptuous sound. With glistening production from his favorites in Noah “40” Shebib and Boi-1da, and new faces like the young Memphis producer Tay Keith (the infectious “Nonstop”), Drake abandons the global pop dalliances of 2016’s Views and last year’s More Life—releases that derived much of their vitality from dancehall, Afrobeats, and grime—to revisit sounds and structures from his earlier career. The tough-talking, rap-centric Side A toggles between the icy, anxious mood of 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and the rich production of 2013’s Nothing Was the Same; the sung tracks on Side B reach all the way back to the moody, nocturnal Take Care, though he sounds less like a lonely sophomore than a zaddy whose heart hasn’t totally frozen over.
This means that Scorpion is the first Drake album to double back instead of chart a new course, and its conservatism is disappointing given the near-decade he’s spent at pop music’s vanguard. Splitting Scorpion into two distinct sides—rap and R&B—detracts from his pioneering synthesis of those two genres, but the best songs here don’t sound like retreads; they’re the most refined possible expressions of familiar aesthetics. Soulful, sample-centric cuts like “Emotionless,” “8 out of 10,” and the long-awaited DJ Premier collaboration “Sandra’s Rose” are pure comfort food, a reminder that Drake idolized Kanye West long before they became each other’s nemeses. On the other end of the spectrum, the frosted android choirs haunting “Elevate” and “Finesse” are as weird and thrilling as any beat you’ll hear this year; they sound like Oneohtrix Point Never demos, but they still have a place in Drake’s sound world.
It’s on Scorpion’s Side B that Drake comes closest to finding his sweet spot, that inimitable zone where aromatherapy candles never burn out and champagne flutes are never left empty. The Michael Jackson “feature” on “Don’t Matter to Me” is a preposterous flex—consider how many artists have the funds to clear a sample like that—but it’s also the perfect exclamation point for a pop song with the warm throb of “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” On the sublime “After Dark,” he upgrades Thank Me Later–era slow jams with filthy, funny smooth-talking and assists from the late Static Major and Ty Dolla $ign, this summer’s most valuable utility player. And the few songs that cover new ground are indisputable highlights: “Summer Games” supercharges a garden-variety breakup with new wave dread, and “Nice for What” and “In My Feelings” are infectious spins on New Orleans bounce. Cramming in 25 tracks means you’re guaranteed a few duds—the cursed, joyless “Ratchet Happy Birthday”—but for a bloated streaming-era release, the batting average here is remarkably high.
Scorpion ends with “March 14,” an extended reckoning with fatherhood in place of Drake’s usual state-of-OVO status report. It’s an appropriate capper for a fascinating, flawed album. He connects his current situation—squabbling with his son’s mother, meeting him just once, buying him a store’s worth of gifts he’s already outgrown—to his recurring analysis of his parents’ failed marriage: “Single father, I hate when I hear it/I used to challenge my parents on every album/Now I’m embarrassed to tell ’em I ended up as a co-parent/Always promised the family unit/I wanted it to be different because I’ve been through it.” It’s some of the most vulnerable writing of his career, and it’s proof that he can still muster the kind of unflinching self-examination that once differentiated him from his peers. And yet, there are chunks of “March 14” that just don’t pass muster. He describes finding out about his paternity as “the first positive DNA we ever celebrated,” which is both a remarkably unsentimental way to react to becoming a father and hard to believe given the content of songs like “I’m Upset.” “I got this 11 tatted for somebody, now it’s yours,” he moans, as if regifting your own tattoo is something other than deeply embarrassing.
The last thing you hear on Scorpion is an interpolation of Boyz II Men’s tender “Khalil (Interlude).” It's supposed to be an endearing transitional moment: an unexpected, consequential development has compelled music's foremost Lothario to change his stripes. The days of finding “two girls that I rope like Indiana Jones” and making “them hoes walk together like I’m Amber Rose” are over. It’s time for Drake to love something other than his bed and his mama. And then you remember that this extended mea culpa might have never have existed if Pusha T didn’t release a diss track featuring a young Aubrey Graham in blackface.
It’s not like Drake needs to serve as a beacon of moral clarity, but this year’s paternity saga—and with Scorpion, its ostensible conclusion—has revealed his shortcomings as a writer and pop personality. Whether it’s 2011 or 2018, you’re getting the same guy: anxious, calculating, and self-obsessed, with a golden ear and a fondness for terrible punchlines. Fatherhood hasn’t made him grow up—and if you’ve gotten older and wiser, Scorpion just feels like the latest in a series of diminishing returns.

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Republic


The Brooklyn rapper’s latest project is a ready canvas for her technical skill and well-earned boasts, but she’s at her best when she digs deeper.

Off the Yak

In a barbershop debate on who could beat Young M.A in a rap battle, there’s only a few strong contenders. She comes from the school of JAY-Z and 50 Cent, rapping with heart, grit, swag, and attitude. Refusing to be categorized as a female rapper or a queer rapper, she’s defied labels and broken stereotypes by shifting the focus to her technical skill. As an independent artist, she may not be as famous as Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion, but her popularity grows organically with every career milestone. Being M.A means being herself—and being embraced in a genre that is now accepting more diverse voices.
Off the Yak, Young M.A’s latest project, arrives at a time when she’s increasing the pace of her musical output. During quarantine last year, the Brooklyn rapper released the seven-song Red Flu EP as a quick follow-up to her 2019 debut Herstory in the Making. On Off the Yak, she’s in that same creative zone, having fun recording songs for brown liquor-fueled parties and riding around her borough. The project presents two sides of her personality, adding Brooklyn drill and aggressive trap beats to balance out her more seductive tracks.
Young M.A isn’t as frequently in the conversation about the future of women in hip-hop as some of her peers, but she’s owned her lane for a long time. She first gained attention in 2014 for her sharp-witted rhymes and realism, freestyling over G Herbo and Mobb Deep songs. It was on her “Oh My Gawdd” freestyle over JAY-Z’s “You, Me, Him and Her” where she first teased “OOOUUU,” her 2016 single that eventually went quadruple platinum. Off the Yak takes her back to when she was hungry. “Still spendin’ money from 2016, bet they ain’t know that/They said I was broke, check my account, fuck am I broke at?” she raps with authority on “Friendly Reminder.” On these tracks, her loyalty lies to her block and her crew.
What works for Off the Yak is the shorter length: 11 songs, compared to Herstory in the Making’s 21. A leaner M.A project means she’s getting better at picking her best recordings and leaving the throwaways on the hard drives. She again teams up with “OOOUUU” producer NY Bangers for five songs, and she’s methodical in her approach on mid-tempo beats. “Successful” is all truth-telling lyrics about winning as an independent artist for six years strong. “I’m one word with 10 letters, successful,” she raps on the hook. When she’s threatening, she’s clever. “Yak’ got me feelin’ woozy, Draco same size as Lil’ Uzi/So don’t ever think that shit amusin’,” she raps on “Henny’d Up,” another NY Bangers production.
M.A hasn’t hopped on the trend of one producer/one rapper albums yet, but it might solve her problem with cohesion if she did. At moments, Off the Yak goes high and low, mirroring both the buzz and the sobering-up. An underwhelming collab with Rubi Rose on “Don Diva,” a reference to the gritty “Original Street Bible,” feels out of place between the harder “Henny’d Up” and the A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie-lite production of “Nasty.” Mike Zombie, who produced five songs on Red Flu, returns with just two: The Fivio Foreign-featuring “Hello Baby,” an attempt at mainstreaming BK drill, and “Big Steppa,” a woozier, weirder rehash of themes from Herstory in the Making single “BIG.”
Off the Yak only skims the surface of M.A’s story, and the decision to release such a varied project on the way to her second album sometimes feels like an effort to test the waters. It’s worth remembering some old M.A cuts like “Through the Day,” “Sober Thoughts,” and “Angels vs Demons”—not necessarily big singles, but her best songs in articulating human emotion. On the new project’s penultimate track, “Yak Thoughts,” she returns to this space of vulnerability and pain. “Paranoid ever since I seen my brother dead/Observing niggas, that’s why I’m always one ahead/Trying to get these evil thoughts out of my fucking head/It ain’t normal when you gotta bring your gun to bed,” she raps. Listening to Off the Yak, you wish M.A had leaned into expressing the whole of what she’s going through.

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The debut album from the Cleveland-raised, New York-based producer is a dreamy, hypnotic style of hip-house. It’s a low-key album that keeps its pleasures close to its chest.

Dark Bliss

You come to Galcher Lustwerk for the sound of his voice. He’s built a tidy career by wrapping soft murmurs in muted deep house and techno. The result: a kind of cottony, soporific hip-house where downy textures meet drowsy moods, and assonant rhymes are as hypnotic as a swinging pocket watch. Occasionally, though, he’ll sneak in a more pointed barb. On “Yo,” the fourth song on his new album, Dark Bliss, it’s so easy to get caught up in the mesmerizing repetition—“I got mine, that’s mine/Range Rover, that’s mine/Private jet, that’s mine/Penthouse, that’s mine”—that you may miss a more tantalizing breadcrumb: “Fuck public, I’m gonna keep it private.”
Lustwerk—not his real name—has been keeping it private ever since his unexpected breakthrough on the back of 2013’s 100% Galcher, a showcase of his own productions. The Cleveland-raised, New York-based producer is remarkably prolific, though most of his releases have flown under the radar. Since the mixtape, there’s been a handful of compilation tracks and EPs; an unofficial bootleg EP of edits of Lumidee, SOS Band, and O.G.C.; an excellent album, and another EP, with fellow White Material member Alvin Aronson under their Studio OST alias; and no fewer than four albums of fly-by-night albums recorded as Road Hog, his low-profile handle for cruise-controlled deep house. But in all that time, he hadn’t put out a “real” album, which makes Dark Bliss, surprisingly enough, Galcher Lustwerk’s debut LP.
It opens with a feint: Digital synths clang while a slow drum machine recalls Actress’ scabrous, lo-fi beats. “I’m drinkin’ a drink on a catamaran,” mutters Lustwerk through nasty distortion, his cadence a pinched approximation of a staccato triplet flow. It’s a long way from his dreamy default mode, though it’s plenty gripping in its own right; it’s also good to hear him pushing himself. With track two, “What U Want Me to Do,” he slips back into his customary lane, where he mainly stays for the remainder of the eight-track LP, threading deep-hued keys and bare-bones drum machines with the faintest hint of G-funk as he drawls a quietly defiant ode to self-actualization: “Two Lamborghini cars/We true Lamborghini stars.”
It’s a low-key album that keeps its pleasures close to its chest. In “I’m in the Coolest Driver’s High,” low-end chords sound like a strummed electric bass; in “Lithuanian Water,” a sleepwalking drum shuffle captures the bleary-eyed reverie of being awake on one’s feet for too long (for a guy who writes a lot about driving, he sure flirts with dozing at the wheel). Virtually every track has minor chords and airy pads center stage while synth counterpoints flit around the edges of the spectrum—the unfussy arrangements sound both streamlined and spontaneous, never over-thought or overworked.
Lustwerk has always taken a no-frills approach to his vocals; speaking to Pitchfork, he attributed at least some of his style to the $80 microphone he has used since he began recording. (“I went to Red Bull Studios once and tried to record a vocal on their $2,000 microphone, and it sounded like shit. I was just like, ‘Damn—maybe I only know how to do this one thing because that’s just what I’m used to.’”) But you can also hear him trying out new ideas here. On “Red Rose,” he plays subtle tricks with filters and delay to play up the music’s underwater vibe; on “Yeeno” he pushes his whisper high in the mix, until the contours of the track feel foggy as a mountaintop. Even on a wheelhouse tune like “What U Want Me to Do,” he stretches out and explores the possibilities of his voice like never before, lavishing attention on long, drawn-out vowels and digging into the consonants as though they were juicy morsels of steak cooked rare.
The album’s closing cut and title track, like the bookending “Catamaran,” serves as a jumping-off point for possible journeys beyond the confines of his core sound. A slow, bumpy number, it represents a kind of deconstructed take on funk. An elastic bassline snakes through drum hits as Lustwerk broods on a shapeshifting rhyme scheme: “Cruisin’ down the strip with your main one/Always thought the main one was the same one/Need a cold drink, so I made one/All I do is play the same old game, son.” The smoky intensity of his delivery works as a kind of mask: Like the “cold drink” non sequitur suggests, Lustwerk’s stern music brims with personality and a sly sense of irony. He may be playing the same old game, but his debut album feels like a quiet victory that’s been a long time coming.


The surreal, audiovisual album from the Philadelphia artist is only 15 minutes long, but it is overflowing with hooks and a powerful sense of imagination.

Whack World

Tierra Whack raps “best believe I’m gon’ sell if I just be myself” less than 30 seconds into her debut audiovisual album, Whack World. But it is nearly impossible to prepare for exactly what she looks and sounds like. Hers is a playful world of surreal scenes and mercurial soundscapes—slow jams while grooming a toy poodle, doo-wop while cleaning up a house party, trap music while lying in a bedazzled coffin. It’s Deep South country and cosmic raps, self-love and middle fingers to naysayers. And you have just 15 minutes to digest it all.
Reared in Philadelphia’s famed cypher tradition, the 22-year-old Whack built a reputation on quick-witted freestyles. She was once known as Dizzle Dizz and her lyrical proficiencies earned praise from Meek Mill and A$AP Rocky. But as she moved beyond straight-ahead rapping across the last few years, her music took on more experimental qualities, toying with various types of vocal processing and psychedelic melodies, to riveting effect. She revealed herself as one who doesn’t take herself too seriously, who warps the boundary between simply making art and letting yourself become it. Like OutKast, Missy Elliott, or Busta Rhymes before her, she forces us to reimagine our realities by plopping us into outré versions of theirs.
Whack World is a funhouse of minute-long vignettes, teetering between a fantastic dream and an unsettling nightmare. Lyrics share double meanings with the corresponding 15-minute visual Whack released alongside the album, which adds even more dimension and intrigue to the ambitious project; light and dark are forced to coexist. At one point, she snips the strings off of red helium balloons while singing in a comically excessive twang to a potential suitor: “You remind me of my deadbeat dad.” In another bubblegum-backdropped scene, she reveals a half-swollen face and declares: “Probably would’ve blew overnight if I was white.” She’s probably not wrong.
This isn’t Whack’s first foray into the absurd. Last year’s “MUMBO JUMBO” video found her in the midst of a horrifying dentist appointment that could double as a deleted scene from Get Out. On that song, she delivers novocaine-induced, mush-mouthed lyrics over a trap beat that forces you to question whether it even matters what she’s saying. Her point, in part, was that mumbling doesn’t always connote the absence of skill but, on the contrary, can be a valid mode of creative expression. It’s a shrewd suggestion and one that lands well, considering her own lyrical nimbleness, and the way she need not rely on it to make compelling music.
Little arguments and stories like this land all over Whack World. Despite the brevity of the songs (every single one is exactly a minute long), there are no half-baked ideas here; huge revelations are nestled in the frivolous. “4 Wings” masks the sting of death in a carryout order, while “Pet Cemetery” smudges the line between mourning your dog and mourning your dawg. “My dog had a name/Keepin’ his name alive,” she sings over a disarmingly jovial staccato piano, complete with barking puppies in the background and a video that’s just as literal. Elsewhere, on a lighter note, she encourages self-care—eating fruits and veggies, and drinking water—on “Fruit Salad,” while affirming that she cannot be defined nor denied.
Whack World puts forth a portrait of the good and the bad, the weird and the unremarkable, while plowing through insecurities. She uses vanity mirrors to magnify her features on a song titled “Pretty Ugly” and bursts out of a house several sizes too small on “Dr. Seuss,” as if to reflect that feeling of having outgrown your surroundings or other people’s expectations. With the walls closing in, she throws down a bit of wordplay in a helium-infused voice—“Look but don’t touch/I should just be celibate/You the type to sell out/Me? I’m trying to sell a bit”—before pitching into a warped slo-mo like she’s being smothered.
The triumph of Whack World feels that much more important given the music industry’s stubborn refusal to champion diverse portrayals of women in rap outside of hypersexualized stereotypes. There is freedom in the margins, and Whack has crafted a work that beautifully manifests her own vision on her own terms. The result is brilliant—from the length of the songs down to the exaggerated imagery. Though she springs from a rich stylistic lineage, her 60-second confections have few modern precedents. Short songs, while in vogue, serve a different purpose here: Where others stretch small ideas and repetition, thinning them out for easy absorption, Whack uses the time constraint to make her big ideas seem larger than the space they’re allotted. Like an evolution in real time, she gives just enough to complete the thought before she morphs and catapults you to the next one.
Whack World morphs into a clever exercise in economy and using only what you need. It’s a visual album prepackaged for optimum social media consumption; every tiny piece stands on its own without losing sight of the larger picture. At its core, though, Whack’s sense of humor—her captivating depiction of a black woman’s imagination—is an opportunity to celebrate an aspect of art that often goes uncelebrated, an opportunity for Whack to celebrate herself.


The precocious 20-year-old singer fuses R&B, soul, and trip-hop on a debut album that documents her ongoing quest to discover who she is and how she fits into a troubled world.

Lost & Found

“Why do we fall down with innocence?” Jorja Smith wonders on the opening title track of Lost & Found. The 20-year-old English singer’s deeply personal debut is full of impressionistic questions like this, yet she never demands easy answers. Her approach to seeking self-knowledge is compassionate and patient, demonstrative of a keen intellect and rich with precocious wisdom.
“I need to grow and find myself before I let somebody love me/Because at the moment I don’t know me,” she admits on “Teenage Fantasy.” On “February 3rd,” she reflects, “I’m constantly finding myself.” But she doesn’t seem worried about the final result of that search. Smith makes the restlessness of young adulthood sound elegant.
That self-assurance is what makes her special, and what makes her music sound timeless. “I know what I’m doing,” she told Pitchfork last year, and her music reflects that independence. After emerging in 2016 with the commanding Project 11 EP and finishing fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2017 list, she employed expert restraint in picking her next moves: two features on Drake’s More Life, a solo placement on Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, a handful of cool collabs, and a few stellar standalone singles. The further she descended into herself, in disarmingly sincere ballads and DIY music videos, the higher her star rose.
Comprising a brisk but dense 12 songs (including four previously released tracks and several others Smith has teased live), Lost & Found is the biggest test to date of Smith’s commitment to making music on her own terms. The result is a bold statement of artistic purpose. There’s nothing resembling “On My Mind,” her infectious 2017 collaboration with Preditah, nor does Smith seem to be taking cues from contemporary pop radio. She’s doing things her way.
While Project 11 often resembled Amy Winehouse’s Frank, Lost & Found forges a more original sound, incorporating adult contemporary, R&B, acoustic folk, jazz, dancehall, and even gospel (on the stunning “Tomorrow”). But it’s most indebted to 1990s trip-hop in the vein of Portishead and Massive Attack. The instrumentals on “Lost & Found,” “Teenage Fantasy,” and standout single “Where Did I Go” rely on the same kind of downtempo, backbeat-laced grooves that so perfectly suited Morcheeba frontwoman Skye Edwards’ silky voice and breathless delivery. But Smith doesn’t whisper—she belts. Lost & Found thrives on emotionally raw minimalism, with her voice as the central instrument. Pure and soulful, it stretches like a rubber band, soaring between virtuosic Winehouse warmth and vertiginous, FKA twigs-style falsetto.
It’s an appropriately mutable centerpiece for an album centered on youthful searching and questioning. “Teenage Fantasy,” written when Smith was 16 and originally released in 2017, has her singing smokily about a good-for-nothing lover, only to unleash the full power of her voice in a poignant chorus so vehement, it feels like she’s delivering it through a megaphone: “We all want a teenage fantasy/Want it when we can’t have it/When we got it we don’t seem to want it.” This is a familiar sentiment, but Smith’s intensity gives it new resonance.
The previously unreleased track “On Your Own” could be a cut from Rihanna’s ANTI, with Smith’s howling vocals moving nimbly through dancehall drums and distortion. “The One” is even better and more surprising, employing morose piano and a Brazilian samba-tinged groove (anchored, like much of the album, by live instrumentation) that simultaneously encourage hip-swaying and wondering about your exes. “I’m not trynna let you in/Even if I found the one,” she warns a suitor. These songs help to build the convincing character of a young woman who is scowling and swaggering, only as vulnerable as she wants to be.
But Smith’s wanderings extend far beyond the personal, and it’s this insight and curiosity that elevate her work. “Blue Lights,” her 2016 debut single, resurfaces here; its heartbreaking and transporting take on police brutality and racial profiling remains a remarkable feat of storytelling. This time, Smith’s questions are posed rhetorically, to illuminate injustice: “What have you done?/There’s no need to run/If you’ve done nothing wrong/Blue lights should just pass you by.” “Lifeboats (Freestyle)” is a spoken-word take on privilege, income disparity, and the failures of the welfare state. “So why are all the richies staying afloat?/See all my brothers drowning even though they’re in the boat/Mothership ain’t helpin’ anyone,” she raps with the swagger of a young Lauryn Hill, indicting her government for its treatment of marginalized citizens and mishandling of the refugee crisis.
It’s not surprising that Smith resents comparisons to other artists, but her link to Hill is clear. Another wildly talented, young, black woman looking for clarity in a world built for everyone but her, Hill used her music to transform her pain into salvation. Just three years younger now than Hill was when The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released, Smith shares her predecessor’s wounded takes on the world’s injustices and compulsion to search for deep truths.
On Miseducation’s luminous title track, Hill sings what could be Smith’s battle cry: “Deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me/And I made up my mind to define my own destiny.” On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.


The long-suffering Pusha and Malice finally issue their troublesome sophomore album-- a record packed with a dozen unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating that features bleak, spare Neptunes beats. It was worth the wait.

Hell Hath No Fury

With the long-delayed, viciously imagined Hell Hath No Fury, Clipse-- hip-hop's meanest, smartest duo-- have done what a gathering collection of internet seekers, record-store goers, and street corner mixtape shoppers hoped they might: release a classic. With musical partners the Neptunes, Clipse have crafted 12 unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating. Lyrically, the album is spare and incisive-- wordplay abounds but the punches are quick and devastating-- and musically, Malice and Pusha T have arguably snatched the best dozen Neptunes tracks in years. Together, the quartet has crafted an album that's sonically deep, dark, and one of 2006's finest.
An unforgivable mean streak powers this album, which is no surprise considering the endlessly documented label drama Clipse have endured, and the ascetic rage that courses through their music. Push and Mal spent much of their lauded 2005 mixtape, We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2, elucidating both their ethical and financial dealings: They were cold-blooded, joyous, and morally complex all at once. But the subject matter remained mostly street talk-- deals, slang, stunting-- with dabs of glitz tossed in. This album isn't about cocaine per se; it's the aftershock of a coke sale-infused existence. The results spray everywhere, from the vacant spending spree of "Dirty Money" to the terrifyingly earned braggadocio of "Trill". This is lifestyle assertion, not something as negligible and confined as drug music.
The two men in the middle of it all are brilliant at nearly every turn. The younger Thornton brother, Pusha, remains star and stylist, brazenly dishing on minor details like his sunglasses ("Louis V Millionaires to kill the glare") while injecting a malevolent, almost maniacal intensity to his verses. His elder brother, Malice, is the vulnerable antecedent, not without floss but more leaning on family and fraternity: "Grandma, look at me, I'm turnin' the other cheek," he laments on "We Got It For Cheap (Intro)". Their rhyme patterns aren't overwhelmingly technical; Pusha rhymes straightforward syllables without tangling his syntax into a jumbled hush-mutter. (Jay-Z, take note: Sometimes directness is a blessing.)
And, as if the sniping slow burn of lead single "Mr. Me Too" wasn't enough notice, Clipse are self-contained entities, seemingly uninfluenced by their contemporaries. Occasionally they recall duos of the past-- EPMD's playfulness, Outkast's willingness to attempt the unconventional, Mobb Deep's unerring rancor-- but they're true only to their sound, a simmering executioner's song. Rarely explicitly violent, their blistering conviction feels like carnage on "What It Do (Wamp Wamp)"-- Malice even compares himself to the genocidal Hutu tribe on the track. It confirms their unjustifiable relishing of moral decay, and while it's impossible to comprehend or condone, the energy and flair is undeniable.
All that said, the Neptunes' mystifying, irregular sonics further elevate the record. When the drum sounds are light and chimey, the surrounding melodies sound sinister and serpentine. Otherwise that formula is completely flipped, as doorknocker snares often accompany spacious arrangements. It's an interesting juxtaposition-- fitting the furious and odd against bubbly and blissful-- but this is what the Neptunes have always done best (think Noreaga's "Superthug" or Kelis' "Milkshake"). Accordions, steel pan drums, harps, distorted synths, cowbell-- Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo throw everything at Clipse. (One assumes Hugo, whose work has leaned toward the dark and spare in the past, had a large hand in this album.) "Trill" and "Ride Around Shining" in particular are monstrous, freakishly beautiful constructions. "Trill" surrounds you with its blown-out bass sound while the tense harp plucks of "Ride", posed against clipped groans and a single straining high note, are both fractured and gorgeous.
But what's perhaps most important here is that Hell Hath No Fury is uncompromising music: Delayed more than three years and pushed into some unclear anticipation vortex, Clipse still refused to make concessions. The one ballad, "Nightmares", featuring Bilal, is long and morose and ragged, while the frothiest ditty is about spending drug money on expensive shoes. Clipse make street music, so the more unlikely members of their fanbase-- hipsters, bloggers, students-- might seem perplexing. Of course, their wit and verve, always touched by a hint of self-loathing, connects with most anyone who's done any wrong in their life. Living with yourself can be a tricky thing, and for Clipse, that's now truer than ever.


Monét claims the spotlight on her debut project, a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Jaguar

Victoria Monét was already in the studio when Ariana Grande meandered in, clutching Tiffany’s bags, tipsy from champagne served at the store. The story behind how they wrote “7 rings,” along with a slew of collaborators, is baked into the song—relishing their new matching jewelry, a huddle of Grande’s friends turned their conspicuous consumption into an “empowering” chant: “I want it/ I got it.” Monét  met Grande two years before the pop star’s first album dropped, and since then she has been a force behind mega-pop hits: Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home,” Grande’s quiet, hopeful, “thank u, next,” and Chloe x Halle’s incandescent earworm “Do It.” But after “7 Rings” became such a hit, Monét  told The Fader last year, she took time off from making songs for other people and focused strictly on her own music for the first time.
The resulting project, Jaguar, is a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control. “I’m just living on instinct,” she croons on the title track, as glossy disco beats skitter and pulse. “What it be like dealing with a queen?” she breathes on interlude “Big Boss,” before launching into a gooey, glimmering harmony. Monét has said she aims to write about sex the way men do. Though she succeeds, the results are sometimes  unfortunate. The simmering ballad “Ass Like That” focuses entirely on her butt: She details her squat routine, burns her calories “like weed,” and insists she doesn’t edit her photos. It’s a catchy song that oscillates between charming and clumsy. “Dive” undulates over the sound effect of a creaking bed with shrieks and moans layered over the swoop of her voice in the chorus. “Life is but a dream, here we are inside of it/ and you’re inside of me,” she coos over swelling violins on “Moment.”  From the velvet of her voice over sweeping strings to the slinky rush of electro beats, it’s the shimmer in these songs that keeps them compelling.
That propulsive sheen reaches a crescendo on “Experience,” the latest in a series of sparkling electro-funk singles announcing a new female pop power. Normani took a whirl with this, matching Sam Smith on “Dancing With a Stranger,” just before “Motivation” catapulted her to a new level of stardom; two years before she released her studio debut album, Jessie Reyez smirked (also beside Sam Smith) on the on the Calvin Harris-produced “Promises.” Dua Lipa, maybe the most prominent figure of the recent pop-funk resurgence, had her juddering single “Electricity,” a Mark Ronson-Diplo collab. Monét’s voice swirls around S.G. Lewis’ disco drums and gauzy synths on “Experience,” and Khalid shows up for a palatable, anonymous-sounding feature.  Monét makes the song a celebration, listing her hopes for a breakup’s aftermath to bleating trumpets that eventually fade in the background.  Like the rest of the project, the track functions as both a triumph and a declaration: Victoria Monét is claiming the spotlight, dazzling and dancing all the way.

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Justin's Vernon's project started out low-key and largely solo but has grown into an expansive and ambitious full-band affair with brilliant results.

Bon Iver

The guy who recorded an album alone in the woods. This line might end up on Justin Vernon's tombstone. There's something irresistible about the thought of a bearded dude from small-town Wisconsin retreating, heartbroken, to a cabin to write some songs-- especially when the result is a record that sounds as hushed and introspective as Bon Iver's 2007 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. These days, Vernon is more likely to poke fun at the image, but it endures because it fulfils a fantasy for us as listeners. Even if we don't care for the outdoors, most of us occasionally want to escape our lives, be alone with our thoughts, and see if we can tap into something true. In a time of easy distraction, the idea of heading into a cabin at the edge of the world to create is alluring. By tying the intimacy of that image to Justin Vernon's music, we're able to take the trip with him.
Since that album's release, Vernon's approach to writing and recording has changed. "I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore," he recently told Pitchfork. "I wanted to build a sound from scratch and then use that sound to make the song." That difference is clear on Bon Iver. Instead of something that scans as "folk," the music here is more like rustic chamber pop with an experimental edge that makes careful use of arrangement and dynamics. And rather than being tied together by a central theme of loss, Vernon has fully shifted into a more impressionistic mode; these songs are broader and more musically sophisticated than those on For Emma at every turn.
But the thread between this album and its comparatively skeletal predecessor is Vernon's voice, an instrument that feels warm and personal and close regardless of setting. Now that we've heard him singing hooks with Kanye West and taking the lead with Gayngs on songs that touch on R&B and soft rock, the general sphere of Vernon's voice is clear. He simultaneously evokes the grain and expression of soul music along with the mythological echoes of folk. But more importantly, no one else sounds like him. The Beach Boys have been the primary touchstone for layered vocals in indie music for years, but Vernon's timbre comes from somewhere else entirely. Where "Beach Boys harmonies" have a spiritual undercurrent that brings to mind a choirboy's dream of perfection, Vernon sounds like a man who has outgrown such ideas. His voice is earthy and wounded and, despite his astonishing upper register, not something you would describe as "angelic."
"Holocene" contains one of this album's many virtuosic vocal performances. "Part of me, apart from me," Vernon sings early on, and those six words hold a lot. The evocative nature of his diction is apparent even in a simple line like "I was not magnificent." He sounds centered and clear while taking stock and allowing memories to be mixed in with the details of the present. His conflicted vocals trigger a half-dozen feelings all at once before releasing the tension with a refrain that finds the fleeting moment where the world seems right: "I could see for miles, miles, miles."
Vernon posted Bon Iver's lyrics shortly after the album leaked last month, but they're not easy to parse-- the storytelling here is oblique. But there are connections. The song titles reference actual places ("Calgary") and places that sound real, but aren't ("Hinnom, TX", "Michicant"); they're less about geography and more about putting a name to a state of mind that mixes clarity and surrealism. And the deeper you sink into these tracks, the harder it becomes to extract specifics. One recurring element is intoxication-- lines about being drunk or high that come with recounted details. Which makes sense, because the album deals with escape and the struggle to get outside yourself. The narrator takes in what's around him, mixing those thoughts with memories of where he's been. Sometimes the lines have a startling specificity ("Third and Lake it burnt away, the hallway/ Was where we learned to celebrate," on "Holocene") and sometimes they contain words that seem to function more as sound ("fide" or "fane" on "Perth"). Throughout, there's a strong sense of an observer taking things in and processing confusing images, trying to figure out what can be learned.
If you caught Vernon live after For Emma, you gradually saw him putting more and more emphasis on his band, moving Bon Iver from that solitary project into something that felt more like the work of a group. And Bon Iver, with its rich and layered arrangements, extends that development in a striking direction that's both logical and surprising. Blending natural instrumentation supplied by recruited players-- such as string arranger Rob Moose (Antony and the Johnsons, the National, Arcade Fire) and a horn/woodwind section that includes versatile saxophonist Colin Stetson-- with an array of electronic and treated sounds, the album combines varied textures in ways that are ambitious and unusual but often subtle enough to miss on first glance.
At points, Bon Iver draws on the experiments of Volcano Choir, Vernon's side project with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees (members from that group play on the album). Freed from conventional verse/chorus/bridge/chorus structure, the songs become more like tone poems, patient explorations of moods that proceed deliberately but unpredictably. The holistic style is evident on opener "Perth", which builds from total silence into a crashing peak over the course of four short minutes. And there's an uncanny moment on the breathtaking "Michicant", a song in part about childhood, where a bicycle bell rings twice, pulling you deeper into Vernon's reverie. It's a simple, brief effect, but it's indicative of how the album uses elemental sounds in unexpected ways.
Vernon has taken that voice, and these arrangements, and crafted an album that unfolds like a suite. The structure is flawless right up to its conclusion, "Beth/Rest", which has been much remarked upon for its unabashed and unironic embrace of 80s adult contemporary pop sounds. If you've spent any time in the vicinity of a radio tuned to light rock, you hear the keyboard tone that opens the song and you think Lionel Richie, Richard Marx, and "No One Is to Blame".
It's almost naive of Vernon to think he could pull this off. Yet, heard in context, it stands as one the record's bravest and most deftly executed moments-- not just because it lays bare Vernon's stated admiration for artists like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby, but because it's executed to perfection. And while the production attempts to wring something new from a long-maligned sound, the song and voice remain true to Bon Iver as an idea. As a closer, "Beth/Rest" is more about finding comfort and resolution after a musical experience that asked more questions than it answered. The song draws a line in the sand for anyone with a deep investment in cool, and Vernon stands behind it with confidence. His belief in himself and in the power of his music is something that encourages us to transcend labels and preconceptions.
After the closeness and austerity of For Emma, Vernon has given us a knotty record that resists easy interpretation but is no less warm or welcoming. You can feel it even as you don't completely understand it-- a testament to its careful construction and Vernon's belief in the power of music to convey deeper meaning. It's a rare thing for an album to have such a strong sense of what it wants to be. Bon Iver is about flow, from one scene and arrangement and song and memory and word into the next-- each distinct but connected-- all leading to "Beth/Rest". On the way there, the music moves like a river, every bend both unpredictable and inevitable as it carves sound and emotion out of silence.


The famously technical New Jersey band ends their career with one final album of squealing riffs, dizzying musicianship, and plenty of nostalgia for their heyday.

Dissociation

The Dillinger Escape Plan’s blend of extreme harshness and technicality had a seismic impact on the metal and hardcore underground with the release of their 1999 full-length debut Calculating Infinity. Not unlike those ’90s-era hidden-image 3D posters, the New Jersey quintet’s transfiguration of progressive metal influences like Meshuggah, Carcass, Human Remains, and Deadguy required a cognitive shift to recognize the detail and structural complexity under all the noise. From that point on, DEP have shown a hunger for pushing boundaries while attempting to stay true to their essence.
Every post-Calculating Dillinger Escape Plan album has contained head-scratching deviations from the original sound, something founding guitarist Ben Weinman and the original lineup once defined so clearly. By their last two albums, Option Paralysis and One of Us Is the Killer, the band had settled into marrying their signature mathcore style with high concentrations of melody and mid-tempo groove. As capably as they had found a middle ground, those albums pointed to a holding pattern. Dissociation, the band’s sixth and final album, touches often on the now-familiar template of pounding, grindcore-level noise flurries that once shook the world. Of course, Dillinger Escape Plan take sharp turns away from that template as well—often in the same song.
Dissociation hits its stride when the band grafts new elements onto its classic sound—something that, for all their chops, hasn’t been easy to pull off in the past. In one four-song stretch, Dillinger Escape Plan stride across a variety of styles as confidently as the one they invented. “Fugue,” the first of those four tracks, tastefully emulates Squarepusher’s hyper-busy brand of synthetic future jazz before opening up into a vista of delicate, gloomy ambiance. “Fugue” makes you wish that Dillinger Escape Plan did a few more Aphex Twin covers or collaborate on a split with Squarepusher. It’s the first of several reminders that they are leaving some untapped potential on the table as they close out their career.
On “Low Feels Blvd,” DEP’s familiar spazz-out crunch morphs into a grand jazz fusion section that you’d otherwise mistake for a Pat Metheny or John McLaughlin record. Not since Candiria’s heyday have extreme metal and jazz sounded like they belong together—a huge achievement for a band that built its reputation on sheer angularity. The song also stands out for how much vocalist Greg Puciato sounds genuinely unhinged. When Puciatio replaced original frontman Dimitri Minakakis in time for 2004’s sophomore full-length Miss Machine, he immediately increased the band’s threshold for melody, but he had to wait until after the Mike Patton collaboration EP Irony Is a Dead Scene to show the world his range. Unfairly or not, Puciato will continue to draw comparisons to Patton, especially on songs like “Surrogate,” where Dillinger scrapes close to Mr. Bungle/Faith No More’s bastardizations of Broadway-esque schmaltz.
Nevertheless, “Surrogate” demonstrates how, somewhere along the way, Dillinger learned how to stop stacking changes in its songs just for effect. As “Surrogate” rolls from one style to the next—grindcore, a crashing downtempo section, film noir—the mood shifts convincingly as well. Where Dillinger once tossed styles around as if changing costumes, now they actually get into character. In flashes, the band still comes up with fresh sounds. “Honeysuckle,” for example, adopts a Latin-flavored grind as though Latin music had originated from some extra-terrestrial psychology.
One of the things that made early DEP music so compelling was the way it conveyed the horrific malaise lurking behind the generic monoculture of the band’s native New Jersey suburbs—a sound so ugly grown out of a soulless environment. Now, the Dillinger Escape Plan aren’t anchored in a time or place, but that isn’t something the band has any control over. It’s a blessing and a curse that they will be forever synonymous with a particular period in hardcore and metal history. In subtle ways, Dissociation reminds us that the band hung in there long after the world could have passed it by.


On his first album in 15 years, the trailblazer cedes the spotlight to a roster of spiritual disciples. There are flashes of magnetism, but the visionary rapper we know and love is mostly missing in action.

G.O.D.’s Network (Reb7rth)

The accepted narrative of Rakim’s solo career—the exacting auteur who couldn’t get out of his own way—makes him an easy scapegoat for his catalog’s shortcomings. Dr. Dre offered the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ beats, but Rakim wasn’t interested; Rakim fled Aftermath with his masters, opting to churn out soggy, unmelodic odes to his own resume. In hindsight, Don’t Sweat the Technique, his final full-length with Queens DJ and producer Eric B., serves as a bookend in more ways than one. The duo dissolved months after its 1992 release, a moment when hip-hop swelled from an underground movement into a global, commercial force. Rakim laid the groundwork, and never quite cashed in.
G.O.D.’S NETWORK (REB7RTH) doesn’t upend that version of the story, but it suggests a few complicating factors. Rakim’s spotty solo run (three albums in 32 years, for those keeping score) is blighted by lumbering dirges credited to no-name producers; G.O.D.’S NETWORK countervails the latter pitfall, at least in theory. Rakim produces everything himself, a quixotic endeavor exposing nearsightedness and structural defects—the metronomic drums are too loud for the mix. It might’ve been a torch-passing exercise, but most of the featured guests are 20 years past their primes. Rakim aims for moguldom, but lands closer to mixtape DJ.
Rakim shoulders the hooks, but only raps three verses across seven tracks, meaning he’s MIA for large swaths of his own album. Still, the posse cuts are pretty good. “Now Is the Time” signals distinctive taste: The transcontinental lineup of B.G., Hus KingPin, and Compton Menace suggests Rakim and his assembly-line A&R are plugged into regional scenes and attuned to stylistic contrasts. What “Love Is the Message” lacks in novelty, it makes up in the magnetism of its contributors. Fresno veteran Planet Asia’s grizzled plea gives way to a double-time showcase from L.A. rapper Louis King; Rakim exhumes an old Nipsey Hussle verse for good measure.
This tape should prompt inquiry into Rakim’s lost decades—he is, after all, an architect of the modern rap album. If he wished to transition into an executive-producer role, mentoring protégés in his image, what stopped him? Somehow, G.O.D.’S NETWORK lays blame at his doorstep. The tempos are plodding and the samples familiar: It’s literate punchline rap for and by middle-aged men, with all that entails. La the Darkman goes full anti-vax on “Pendulum Swing,” seemingly unaware that Fred the Godson, dead of COVID at 35, appears one track prior. “Sign of Se7en” features Sacramento rapper X-Raided, an actual convicted murderer. The curation is prone to hagiography—DMX and Prodigy appear from beyond the grave, along with a voice note from Snoop Dogg that may as well have been purchased via Cameo—without gesturing toward any future.
Projects like this, aimed at a built-in audience of true-school crusaders, tend to be received in hushed, appreciative tones: Rakim’s reputation is hardly at stake. What’s curious is that Rakim can’t find anyone to produce or release his music. It’s no secret that hip-hop, as a genre, fails to look after its elders, and the flipside of the equation is that legends have bills to pay. Common just got an album’s worth of vibrant Pete Rock beats; Buckwild and DJ Muggs are Rakim’s age, and more prolific than ever. G.O.D.’S NETWORK positions Rakim as a passable producer instead of an elite MC, but he did it his way.

Holy Toledo Productions / Compound Interest Entertainment