The gale-force frontwoman of Shannon and the Clams collaborates with producer Dan Auerbach on a sparkling debut solo album that sounds like Roy Orbison lost in the Brill Building.

Shannon in Nashville

Underground sensations like Shannon Shaw are anomalies these days. As the gale-force singer of Oakland trio Shannon and the Clams, her name has become synonymous with askew glamor and miscreant soulfulness: She and her misfit bandmates have spent nearly a decade sounding like the nails-tough Shangri-Las reborn and resembling hairsprayed-and-glittered John Waters movie extras, crying their eyes out and ready for a fight. (Waters has called them one of his favorite bands: “They’re like my wet dream!” he once proclaimed.) The Clams mixed punk and girl groups with more conviction and maladjusted, leather-clad character than any other band of the late 2000s. Much of the appeal of their raw early records was in the friction of Shaw’s powerhouse pipes—the agony, the mania, the desperate longing they conveyed—as they tore through a busted-up boombox fog. The Clams’ star has never risen too high, and so it has never fallen.
Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was in a record shop when he first heard their blown-out doo-wop on the stereo and was won over straight away. But the Clams didn’t know of his fandom until an Australian promoter flew them across the planet and relayed that Auerbach had insisted he book them. One DM led to another. Soon Shaw was in Nashville at Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio to work on her glowing solo debut, Shannon in Nashville, with his all-star house band—guys who’d played with Elvis. Shaw hasn’t ditched the Clams: The band also recorded its latest LP, February’s Onion, at Auerbach’s studio and signed to his label. Rock revivalists as famous as the Black Keys are practically nonexistent these days, which makes the serendipity of the story feel a bit fairytale-like. It’s a heartwarming plot twist for an underdog band who recorded their first LP in the living room of a punk house called Telegraph Beach.
Shannon in Nashville is a diamond; it sounds like Roy Orbison and his musicians lost in the Brill Building, and its twinkling, Auerbach-helmed production is IMAX-level vivid within Shaw’s catalog. These old-school masters meet Shaw at the top of her mountain, and she belts out her boldest Aretha-summoning exorcisms of heartbreak and suffering to match their splendor. The vintage sound of Shannon in Nashville is sturdy, warm, and immaculate, from the fireworks of opener “Golden Frames” and the smoky shuffle of “Bring Her the Mirror” onward, with nary a misplaced horn or clap. Through the polished edges and ecstatic backing vocals, the tortured melodrama of Shaw’s songs cuts deeper than ever. She curls the edges of notes like Dolly and maintains the composure of Lesley Gore.
Shaw is an artist who clearly respects the hellish, earth-shattering gravity of tormented emotions. But the greatest song on this wrenching breakup album is not about another person. The simmering ache of “Broke My Own” centers Shaw’s own self-loathing, as she peels back her layers and faces compounded inner demons—faces the fact of breaking her own heart. It’s the most devastating performance she has ever committed to tape. “Don’t worry about this heart of mine,” she sings with chilling resolve. “It’s been busted for a long, long time.” When Shaw lands upon her brashest truth—“My worst enemy is my own flesh and bone”—it is the sound of a person who has dug to the core of her soul and uncovered a lifetime of buried anguish.
Shannon in Nashville never quite scales the heights of “Broke My Own” again. Though the record contains some eccentric edges—“Freddies ‘n‘ Teddies” is her hard-boiled, punk-spirited version of a song like “Irreplaceable,” and “Lord of Alaska” is a bemusing tale of fleeing home—the lyrics can sometimes sit at the surface of a feeling, and you wish the stories said more. Still, Shannon in Nashville feels humbly victorious. The soul-baring piano ballad “I Might Consider” evokes the desperation of the Chantels’ “Maybe,” and when it opens with a fizzy Auerbach blues lick, it’s a reminder of his presence—and of how unlikely it is for the underground and the perilous rock mainstream to intermingle in 2018. Shaw has earned this: For all the dazzling instrumentation here, none comes close to matching her colossal, resilient voice. It’s a thrill to hear Shaw not soundtracking a hypothetical film, but rather starring in her own.


The Toronto R&B singer’s second EP charts the collapse of a relationship through six downcast tracks.

Stone Woman EP

The Toronto singer Charlotte Day Wilson has spent the last couple of years lending her considerable voice to other artists. Since her first EP, a soulful 2016 project with her initials as its title, Wilson has appeared on albums by Daniel Caesar, River Tiber, and BADBADNOTGOOD—fellow Canadians with a predilection for simmering R&B and jazz. They’ve all found different ways to drape the velvet of Wilson’s voice onto their production styles, from the comforting support role she sings on Caesar’s folk-soul track “Transform” to the tranquil siren she plays on the swanky lounge of BBNG’s “In Your Eyes.” In her own music, Wilson most often cultivates a powerful stillness. In the case of her downcast new EP, that means she flirts with stoicism to the occasional point of numbness.
Stone Woman charts the crash of a relationship, from Wilson’s nagging inward “Doubt” to the “Falling Apart” and “Funeral” that follow it later in the tracklist. She treats the opening title track like a mantra to stay grounded, but it has the early and troubling effect of fixing her in place, her voice hovering without anywhere to go. (This is ironic, given that the song’s plot involves her constant travels on the road.) Wilson’s voice is typically the strongest draw to her solo act, its power amplified by the hushed restraint of her performances. Yet that voice has often overshadowed the fact that Wilson writes and produces much of her own music. If her production on Stone Woman sometimes fails to pay her voice optimal service, it’s ample proof of a soft, smart touch behind the boards.
“Doubt” is one of the more gorgeous entries in Wilson’s small catalog, a lush pace-setter for the type of smoky R&B she does best. Synths gurgle over a crisp snare, and Wilson’s voice comes out as a deflated gasp: “Oh, what have I done for your love?/Oh, I’m selfish and dumb for your love.” “Nothing New” fidgets in the wake of that rift and trades in the live rhythm section for a programmed beat and an array of gloomy synths that build to a spacey crescendo. These were the right single choices for Stone Woman, showing off a range between tracks that’s not quite there on the rest of the EP.
On the closing track, Wilson attends a funeral before orchestrating one for her own relationship. First she’s emotionless: “I went to a funeral so I could feel something.” Then she shrugs: “Welcome to our funeral, it’s nice that you came.” The sequencing makes the EP read like an effective songwriter exercise, pushing through a trauma in chronological order, but moments like this feel oddly flat; her detached tone obscures something in the process. It’s proved an asset elsewhere, and the highs on Stone Woman are some of Wilson’s most memorable work, but that measured stillness feels like it’s starting to hold her back.


This score for Justin Peck’s 2017 ballet, performed by the pianist Timo Andres, is a knotty but welcome addition to the singer-songwriter’s growing set of compositions for dance.

Sufjan Stevens / Timo Andres: The Decalogue

The Decalogue

It’s hard to believe, but over the last 10 years, Sufjan Stevens has soundtracked twice as many ballets as he’s recorded solo albums. He and choreographer Justin Peck began working together in 2012, when the rising dance star asked Stevens to rework selections from his experimental electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit for the New York City Ballet. Stevens balked at first, but after George Balanchine’s Stravinsky-scored classics (namely Agon) opened his ears to the expressive possibilities of the form, the singer-songwriter relented, which led to the blossoming of a meaningful creative relationship with Peck.
Stevens’ initial hesitation around entering the world of ballet stemmed not only from his qualms with Enjoy Your Rabbit—he downplayed it as “a ramshackle little personal hobby project”—but also his perceptions of ballet itself. “Ballet seemed so anachronistic, so formal and classical and archaic and irrelevant to pop culture,” he said in 2014. Everywhere We Go, the first collaboration with Peck to feature all new, original music, was defined by its intricate arrangements and emphasis on melody, a pointed repudiation of that perceived stuffiness. By contrast, The Decalogue—a borderline academic suite for solo piano, inspired by the Ten Commandments—suggests a self-conscious attempt to compose according to a notion of what contemporary ballet music should sound like. The result is a knotty but welcome entry to Stevens’ discography, albeit one that feels like the result of the artist immersing himself in Peck’s influences rather than the other way round.
This new studio recording of The Decalogue, which arrives two years after the debut of Peck’s ballet, does not actually feature Stevens in a performing role. The composer instead opts to have the pianist and contemporary classical composer Timo Andres interpret the score. In Andres’ skilled hands, the pieces move and breathe dynamically, and it’s easy to imagine a cadre of dancers performing pirouettes to the constantly modulating chords. Still, as a standalone piece of music, Decalogue may come across as unusually atonal for any Sufjan fans expecting familiar motifs from their favorite baroque pop polymath, who culled from approximately 50 “impromptu improvisations” to assemble the score.
With some exceptions, Decalogue’s piano passages wash over the listener and disappear almost as soon as they materialize. That isn’t to say there are no affecting scenes: The ascendant arpeggios at the beginning of “V” provide an immediately arresting structure for the rest of the piece to flow into. Andres’ execution of the skittering downward runs at the end of “VIII” prove a breathtaking display of musicianship, and the thunderous grand finale in “X” is stirring, if a bit rote. But the album never reveals any whole greater than the sum of its parts, and those parts suffer from a lack of focus.
Stevens has said he wanted The Decalogue to be “more pensive and more cerebral, and less explicitly harmonic and melodic” than Everywhere We Go, and he certainly achieves his goal. He’s since moved on from such exercises, describing his most recent work with Peck, Principia, as a middle ground between those prior scores. That new ballet just so happens to feature orchestrations by Andres, a link that implies the pianist isn’t merely a gifted hired gun. Their collaborations may bear more fruit in the years to come, but ultimately The Decalogue is a Stevens curio like Enjoy Your Rabbit and The BQE before it: riveting to diehards, an agreeable footnote for anyone else.
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Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley and Chicago drill alum Lil Durk team up for a promising mixtape that showcases their considerable chemistry.

Bloodas

Imagine how hard it must be to get a word in edgewise against Tee Grizzley. On his formidable 2017 debut My Moment, the surging Detroit rapper came across as the loudest, most opinionated guy at the Thanksgiving table, the uncle you know you shouldn’t get started on the prison-industrial complex, but whose rants are so passionate, so colorful in their conviction, that you can’t resist. That the album didn’t feature a single guest spot may have been as much a practical decision as a creative one: Grizzley’s rugged yammer consumes so much oxygen that it simply doesn’t leave much of an opening for anybody else.
Given how territorially he guarded his podium on My Moment, it came as a surprise that for his sophomore outing Grizzley opted to explore his collaborative side, partnering with a known quantity at that, Chicago drill alum Lil Durk. It’s a symbiotic alliance: Lil Durk gets to hitch his wagon to one of hip-hop’s most vital rising stars, and he’s given a shot at reclaiming some of his own buzz after a run of projects that, solid as they’ve been, all seemed to bleed together. Grizzley, in return, gets paired with one of the few rappers on the planet who can match his intensity. After a career spent alongside fierce personalities—Keef, Herbo, Bibby, Louie, Reese—Durk has a long record of coaxing top performances out of his sparring partners.
None of that is meant to imply that Bloodas is just a marriage of convenience, or some cynical attempt from two regional rappers to consolidate their market share. It seems to exists for the sole reason that these rappers have such ridiculous chemistry, and it would be criminal if they didn’t take advantage of it. “Bro show me love like we grew up together,” Grizzley wrote on an Instagram post of the two palling around, and despite the Great Lake separating them you could be forgiven for mistaking them for old childhood friends.
Even without the shared upbringing, the two have plenty in common. Each came up amid tragedy, in neighborhoods marred by violence, and neither apologize for the ways that it shaped, and in some cases soured, their worldview. “I’m from the city of Hoover/Bump and slide, we was robbin’ the jeweler/I was in school but shit had made me a shooter,” Durk raps on “WhatYo City Like.” That song begins as a barstool debate over whose city is rougher—both make compelling cases, rapping in furious four-bar blasts that pick up on the threads of the other’s last verse—but ends with extended hands and congenial offers from each to visit anytime.
The tape is never better than when it invites its principals to riff on the same idea. On “3rd Person” they take turns rapping from the perspective of judgmental outsiders. Grizzley assumes the role of the relatives who never bothered to so much as write him a letter while he was in prison, mocking their grievances that he no longer gives them the time of day. He doesn’t disguise what an open wound their abandonment is. Durk, meanwhile, touches on his own insecurity, voicing the casual listeners who gave up on him a few years back: “He tryna rap like Meek/Why he sing like he Future?/He should’ve signed with Keef/He probably be like Future.”
Rappers turn out so much music so fast these days that these kinds of collaborative efforts tend to fade from memory fast. In an age when rappers can paste entire projects together without ever entering the same room, though, Bloodas radiates a real sense of shared creation, suggesting Grizzley and Durk’s pairing has the potential to become something more career defining than just a pit stop. These two don’t just complement each other. They push each other, prodding and coaxing each other to one-up the last verse, which more often than not they do. Bloodas is the work of two elites who admire each other’s craft, but mostly who just get a kick out of each other’s company.


On its debut EP, the sax-and-drums duo forges a signature sound that proves anti-pop experimentation can be a real good time.

Slice EP

This past September, O. were the first act to perform at the 10th-anniversary showcase of South London indie label Speedy Wunderground. While the label—which has released music from black midi, Squid, and Lewsberg—has grown far beyond its mission to be a quick-turnaround singles factory, O. are perhaps the most demonstrative showroom model for that expedient, plug ‘n’ play philosophy. Formed two years ago, the duo was already opening large theater concerts when they could still count their gigs on one hand. With their debut EP, O. make an even more convincing case for why you should have them kick off your show: For an often-abrasive instrumental band, they know how to start a party.
As the term “post-punk” has increasingly become shorthand for aggrieved shout-speak and stern-faced severity, O. reassert one of the genre’s original, oft-overlooked facets: Anti-pop experimentation can be a lot of fun. The four songs on Slice hit you with a delightfully disorienting array of sounds. At various points, you might think you’re hearing a hockey-rink buzzer, or a swarm of insects, or a doom-metal drone, or a squawking sea animal, or a police siren, or a brown-note synth frequency, or an incoming ocean liner, or a tectonic-plate shift. And that sonic spectrum is all the more impressive when you consider all those effects emanate from a single source: Joseph Henwood’s baritone saxophone, which, when filtered through Speedy figurehead Dan Carey’s production wizardry, is rendered equally boisterous and monstrous. Henwood’s sax attack is O.’s undeniable focal point, the novelty that would make an unsuspecting black midi fan heading toward the venue bar stop and wonder, “What the fuck is that!?!” before turning around and making a beeline for the stage. But drummer Tash Keary’s frenetic stickwork is the mortar that holds O.’s wall of sound together, ensuring a harmonious balance of improvisation and rock-solid composition.
On Slice, O. are already in the enviable position of possessing both a signature aesthetic and the confidence to stretch it out without worrying about losing their sense of identity. Where jazz instrumentation in a punk context often favors atonal skronk and splatter, O.’s brand of sax ‘n’ violence largely forsakes free-form anarchy for a more disciplined attack that rallies around muscular riffs and fleet-footed rhythms. Slice’s opening title track burrows a tunnel from The Mudd Club dancefloor to a Reading Festival mosh pit, with the song’s aggro-funk breakdowns and build-ups betraying the influence of Primus on the UK’s current post-punk pack. By contrast, on “Moon,” the duo wades into dubby waters without losing their sense of mischief—even as the beat slows and Henwood’s snark-charmer melodies start to ooze like molasses, Keary continues to ride her hi-hat and kick-pedal as if leading a disco band. Not surprisingly, the most mid-tempo tune, “Grouchy,” is the least interesting one of the bunch, its mutant-metal grind suggesting a pub-rock King Crimson. But the duo save their best for last with “ATM,” which affords them the extra space to deploy their full arsenal of effects for maximal drama. Over six white-knuckled minutes, the duo seesaws between ticking time-bomb tension and earthquaking eruptions, as if waging a war between their avant-garde inclinations and their irrepressible urge to just rock the fuck out. And from that chaotic collision, O. forge a sound as unmistakable as their name is unGoogleable.


Christine and the Queens is the project of the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. Her bold, empowering, and danceable 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine, which features a collaboration with Perfume Genius, has been repackaged as a self-titled debut for her introduction to the American market.

Christine and the Queens: Christine and the Queens

Christine and the Queens

The Christine and the Queens project is guided by one woman, the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. At home she is a known quantity: She capped off a string of EPs and touring gigs with Lykke Li and Woodkid with her debut Chaleur Humaine in June of 2014. But the U.S. release this fall of Humaine, repackaged as a self-titled debut, marks her introduction to the American market: Some of the French lyrics were redone in English, accompanied by a couple of Anglophone bonus tracks. As with the French edition, the record starts with an unequivocal declaration of her arrival. "I'm a man now," she sings in a bold voice on "iT", "And there's nothing you can do to make me change my mind."
A few verses later, she offers up a line whose regal, gory quality seems worthy of Lorde or Kanye: "I'll rule over all my dead impersonations." Out of context, it sounds like a very 2015 pop move: burying past incarnations of yourself that the public never even witnessed and calling yourself king from the off, fueled by nothing but divine belief in your own selfhood. Letissier has the chops and charisma to pull off this role, too: "iT" has gorgeous minimal production—just a sputtering beat, tarnished synth glimmers, and canny employ of sprite-like backing vocals. Her expressive voice leads the lone melody, at first vulnerable and then rasping with defiance.
But it's a feint: Letissier spends the next 11 songs pulling back from this grandstanding (which was inspired by her discarding her feminine identity as a teenager) to explore the nuances of her queer identity and what that means in private and public spheres. On the way, she comes out with some pin-sharp lyrics to rival collaborator Perfume Genius' "no family is safe when I sashay," full of daring and vulnerable truths. "Science Fiction" unravels on spacey burbles that underpin the alienation she and her partner feel when out in public: "They look at me when I stare at you... In this sea of eyes, every move's a coup." Letissier reclaims the discrimination she experiences for not passing as a prescribed gender ideal on "Half Ladies", which moves between percussive gasps indebted to Michael Jackson and pared-back, angular funk: "Every insult I hear back/ Darkens into a beauty mark."
That particular image seems to reference the source of her own liberation. A few years ago, beset by depression, Letissier ran away from college in Paris and crossed the Channel to London, where she was taken under the wing of three Soho drag artists. They heard her humming and encouraged her to make music, so she locked herself away for weeks, garret-style, as she taught herself to write. Letissier named her act Christine and the Queens in tribute to her saviors, an act that also highlights her knack for self-mythologizing. At the end of Christine and the Queens, there is a second arrival, "Here", a work of unbroken tension hooked around disintegrating, crackling beats and an organ's glow. She sings, in French, "I evolve in living trace."
The production of Christine and the Queens follows that mystical sense of becoming. Most of the songs are built from tapestries of microbeats that have an organic, sinewy feel, unfolding with the intricate flow of a centipede's spine. She often forms strong rhythms from a surprisingly delicate percussive backbone—"No Harm Is Done" has a feather-light, trap-indebted beat that sounds as though it was sampled from recordings of magnesium fizzling across water. Tiny shifts in impact or intensity can have a massive effect: The simple beat that hardens halfway through "Tilted" adds a new level of confidence to Letissier's tale of a wonky but thriving relationship. It's a constellation of experience, the sense of a body being animated, twitching and jerking into existence. Letissier literally espouses the power of movement on "Safe and Holy", but the heavy beat and synth-scapes drown out the effect that flows naturally elsewhere.
Letissier's melodic sensibility is as strong as her subtle percussion. "Paradis Perdus" is the work of a real pop scholar, an interpolation of Christophe's 1973 song "Les Paradis Perdus" and the chorus of Kanye West's "Heartless" that unites their common sense of loss over soft piano and a knocking beat. "Jonathan", Letissier's duet with Perfume Genius, confronts a lover whose internalized shame means that their relationship is only acknowledged by night. It's a song of immense grace, the funereal pace guided by exquisite synths and expanding strings. "Can you walk with me in the daylight?" Letissier asks, her head held high.
Christine and the Queens is a beautiful, important negotiation of these liminal states at a time when the media is quick to bandy about the term "post-gender" as if the hard work is done. Her music is bold and fully formed, but Letissier unpeels the façade of outer confidence to shine a light on the way that queer identity requires constant negotiation, to deal with the world's often unforgiving gaze and the one that can come from within—on "Safe and Holy", she admits that her own eyes "mock and judge" her. It's empowering, bold, and vulnerable, and made for dancing. Chaleur Humaine translates as "human warmth", and the album makes good on that intimacy. You get the sense of Letissier guarding her own precious, burgeoning fire, and inviting listeners to share in its glow.


Earlier this week Death Grips dropped another free album without warning, this one featuring vocals by Björk. But nothing is quite as it seems in their world, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus.

Niggas on the Moon

If you need proof that "bad press" as a concept is largely a thing of the past, look no further than Death Grips. The shifting collective—sometimes a trio, occasionally a duo, and at one point consisting of no members at all—have spent the last two years staging a public, low-level coup on people's attention spans that, in terms of subversiveness, has fallen somewhere between egging someone's house and stealing your neighbor's WiFi. Their actions have scanned as humorous, aggressive, contemptible, and puerile—sometimes all at once—and despite any high-minded claims, the ends to the means have been excellent promotion for a body of work that's proved increasingly confounding. Their first record, 2011's Exmilitary, remains their most overlooked work even as it represents Death Grips at their most elemental, a potent, nasty mix of blasted rap figures, percussive mania, and corroded noise that smacked of a modern-day Judgment Night soundtrack featuring collaborations beteween Dälek and Lightning Bolt.
A year later, Death Grips returned with The Money Store, a dizzying rush of an album with a title that likely referenced the group's short-lived major-label contract with Epic. At the time, band mastermind Zach Hill—a veteran drummer who, after a decade-plus of alternating between the roles of reliable sideman and unsung noise-scene hero, has undoubtedly benefited the most from Death Grips' notoriety—claimed that label honcho L.A. Reid air-drummed to the band's music upon signing and compared them to Whitney Houston. The former is a funny image, the latter ostensibly a tasteless joke, but upon engaging with The Money Store, all attendant information becomes irrelevant. A thrilling document of puckered melody and blue-screen-of-death chaos that stands as the project's strongest release to date, The Money Store resembled the revolting, ultra-violent conclusion to director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films: a dead body hung upside down, its contents drained and shoved into a garbage disposal.
Later that year, NO LOVE DEEP WEB arrived without warning and free of charge, triggering a well-documented war between Death Grips and their cash-flow overlords. Quite possibly the most dissonant album ever recorded at the Chateau Marmont, NO LOVE DEEP WEB found Death Grips doubling down on sonic viscera. It's a thick, sludgy record in which the group's wild-eyed mouthpiece Stefan Burnett sounds like he's trapped in hell, dragging himself through a landscape of destruction. Rather than capitalize on the comparatively bright accessibility of The Money Store, it suggested Death Grips were prepared to get weirder. Last year's Government Plates headed even further into left-of-center territory, drawing inspiration from the glitchy terror of IDM's more aggressive elements.
Like its predecessor, Government Plates was released suddenly for nothing—and so it goes, too, with Niggas on the Moon, the project's latest missive that arrived last Sunday evening. An eight-track release that stands as Death Grips' shortest effort to date, Niggas on the Moon comes bearing a title that possibly references Gil Scott-Heron, along with claims of a high-profile collaborator: Björk, who's no stranger when it comes to working with inhumanly talented drummers from the noise scene.
But nothing is quite as it seems in Death Grips' world, so within 24 hours of Niggas on the Moon's release it emerged that rumors of Björk's contributions may have been greatly exaggerated. "i am proud to announce my vocals landed on the new death grips album !" she exclaimed in an official statement the day after Niggas on the Moon dropped. "i adore death grips and i am thrilled to be their 'found object' !" The phrase "found object" suggests that she wasn't so much an active artistic partner as much as a passive supplier of source material, another sound thrown into Death Grips' culture-wiping meat grinder. Her presence on the album is, similar to Venus Williams' guttural cries sampled on The Money Store cut "System Blower", mangled and distorted beyond recognition.
Whether Björk's presence is the result of Death Grips' sampling her previous work or her providing fresh vocal takes for the band's disposal, Death Grips largely lean on her propensity for ecstatic crescendos. On "Have a Sad Cum" and album closer "Big Dipper", her cries are looped in perpetuity, producing a hallucinatory effect not unlike the trippy repetition of Chicago footwork; "Billy Not Really" opens with a perpetual build anchored by glottal coos, while "Say Hey Kid" opens with hyperspeed bass-and-drums a la Squarepusher before twisting Björk's voice into what sounds like panpipes, over a bed of rustling electronics.
Death Grips have remixed Björk before. They contributed takes on "Sacrifice" and "Thunderbolt", two songs taken from her 2011 album Biophilia, to 2012's remix collection Bastards; their remix of the former tune is especially notable in that it recycles the march-of-death bassline from "System Blower". Similarly, Niggas on the Moon finds Death Grips drawing from themselves rather than pushing things forward, a deviation from their mission statement. Anyone familiar with the band's mix of aggressive electronics, barked non-sequiturs, and collapsing song structures will find plenty to like here. After three years of aiming to confuse and shock, Death Grips are approaching reliability, and the presence of truly thrilling moments has decreased accordingly.
Complacency doesn't suit Death Grips very well, but Niggas on the Moon's high points suggest regardless that, for now, Death Grips-as-Death Grips occasionally yields satisfying results. Opener "Up My Sleeves" is a prime slice of mania that, should the band ever release a "Greatest Hits" collection (imagine that), would fit right in with their highest highs. "Black Quarterback" possesses a gleeful skip punctuated by inside-out percussion that hits like repeated punches to the abdomen; the processional gait of "Big Dipper" sounds like poisoned marching-band music, as Burnett throws out bon mots that highlight Death Grips' still-undervalued sense of humor: "I'm a bullshitter/ I'm a shitty stripper...I'm a fucking downer."
As a vocalist and lyricist, Burnett draws strength from his surroundings. When chaos engulfs him, he thrives on the energy; during Death Grips' more downtempo moments, he sounds adrift, his anti-sloganeering coming off as ridiculous and deflated, his audience laughing at rather than with him. Niggas on the Moon is, as a whole, Death Grips' least intense album, which doesn't work in Burnett's favor. Many of the record's songs have midsections that dial down the intensity before revving up again, and while Burnett's phonetic emphasis occasionally pulls him through, elsewhere he sounds listless. Death Grips achieve potency when sounding frantic, untamed, and unstable; Niggas on the Moon's more subdued moments, comparatively, resemble a brisk walk on a treadmill, and as a result it's less immediate than their previous work.
With the arrival of Niggas on the Moon came the news that the record is part of a forthcoming double-album, The Powers That B, set for release later this year on the band's own label, Third Worlds, as well as Harvest, a subsidiary of major-label entity Capitol. Death Grips are, indeed, featured on Harvest's website, so their second flirtation with the music industry's explicitly corporate arena seems to be as structurally legitimate as their first time around—then again, this is a band that prides itself on the capability to catch its audience off guard, so who knows how the rest of the year will play out for them.
With Niggas on the Moon, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus. Even setting aside the creative stasis the music embodies, the major-label affiliations and surprise-release gimmick produces a stale whiff of deja vu. Without new tricks and fresh aggression, Death Grips risk coming across as safe and ordinary, a mess of broken teeth summarily replaced by a gap-toothed smile.


The late trumpeter’s third and final album opens dazzling new paths in her work. It’s a heartbreaking glimpse of where she might have gone next, but more importantly, it’s a joy to hear.

jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))

Midway through “burning grey,” from her riotous third and final album Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)), jaimie branch issues an exhortation that could serve as her artistic mission statement: “Don’t forget to fight.” Whether leading her Fly or Die quartet or working as a prolific collaborator across scenes and cities, the trumpeter, composer, and vocalist, who died of undisclosed causes at 39 last year, made music from a position of joyful defiance.
Her background was in jazz, but she had little regard for putative genre distinctions, pulling in the syncopated rhythms of Latin and Caribbean music, the melodic clarity of folk song, the swirling textures of psychedelia, the abstraction of free improv, the swagger of hip-hop, the pugilism of punk rock. Her commitment to each note didn’t just make these connections between various canons seem plausible; it made the notion of their separation seem absurd. There are inherent risks to such agnosticism about style. For the enthusiastic amateur, it can betray a lack of focus; for the dispassionate professional, a belief that idioms are exercises to be mastered by rote. For branch, whose consummate technical ability never got in the way of her raw passion—or vice versa—it is simply evidence of the conviction that all of these ostensibly divergent branches grow from the same tree. And at its root, as she and her collaborators demonstrate on ((world war)), is the will to fight, to dance, and to survive.
branch had very nearly completed ((world war)) when she died. Her family members and bandmates consulted her notes to finalize details like mixes and track titles before its release. Given those circumstances, it is tempting to hear the album as a requiem, or a grand finale for her brief but impactful career. Its structure, opening with a heroic fanfare of timpani and electric organ and closing with a funereal dirge, does not initially discourage that interpretation. But on further listening, it feels less like an ending than a blossoming cruelly cut short. Though listeners of branch’s previous recordings with Fly or Die will have no trouble recognizing ((world war)) as the work of the same bandleader, they may also be struck by the number of new paths the album opens in her music.
Ideas that showed up in the margins of previous records now assume central positions. The calypso-inflected major-key melodies that came across like a lark on “simple silver surfer,” from Fly or Die II, reach nearly symphonic proportions on “baba louie,” ((world war))’s nine-minute centerpiece. branch’s roughshod and vehement vocals, absent from the first Fly or Die album and tentatively present on the second, are a driving force of the third. She is decidedly not a jazz singer, at least not in any traditional sense: She shouts, beseeches, howls wordlessly, even croons a sort of country song. The lyrics mostly favor pragmatism over poetry, plainspoken calls for resistance to the status quo. Like previous Fly or Die albums, ((world war)) often has the feeling of a raucous block party. As its master of ceremonies, branch never lets us forget that there is not just escape to be found in coming together and letting loose, but solidarity, too.
((world war))’s most striking departure from branch’s previous work comes in “the mountain,” the aforementioned country tune, a reworking of “Comin’ Down” by Arizona twang-punks the Meat Puppets that is drastic and inspired enough to merit its new title. In stark contrast to the rest of the album’s rollicking maximalism, its instrumental accompaniment consists almost entirely of Jason Ajemian’s pizzicato double bass. Ajemian sings lead, and branch harmonizes. Neither is a virtuosic singer, but showiness is not the point. The lyric, about the fitful search to transcend everyday toil, monotony, and misunderstanding, benefits from the humility of their performance. The recording is as sparse and unslick as could be: We hear collective deep breaths, a bit of branch muttering to psyche herself up, the sound of the two musicians physically shifting around the microphone. Given the bare-bones arrangement, branch’s trumpet solo, when it arrives near the song’s end, comes as a delightful surprise, even on an album by a trumpeter. There’s something jaunty and insouciant about the solo’s plainness, especially the simple three-note run that provides its emotional climax, coming at a spot where another player might have attempted a more impressively elaborate gesture. Its self-assuredness and refusal to bow to anyone else’s ideas about presentability obliquely bring to mind the cocked baseball cap that branch often wore onstage.
The hushed intimacy of “the mountain” is the exception on an album otherwise characterized by jubilant ensemble playing. One easy reference point is Miles Davis’ electric music of the 1970s: avant-garde and populist at once, following the certainty that even the most complex dissonance will go down easy if it’s set to a good enough groove. Where Davis took inspiration from the sturdy 4/4 of James Brown or Sly and the Family Stone, branch favors the slippery polyrhythms of reggaeton and dancehall. Like Davis, she is the clear star of the show when she picks up her horn, but she also knows when to lay out, focusing instead on guiding and conducting her accompanists’ gale force.
Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor play as if the fate of the universe rests on their ability to get you dancing. Cellist Lester St. Louis flits between roles, one moment contributing to the rhythm section’s unstoppable churn and the next spinning out melodic leads or sul ponticello cyclones of noise. At one point in “borealis dancing,” he ascends through a series of sustained single notes, the increasing frenzy of his bowing creating an almost unbearable tension against the conversational calm of branch’s trumpet lines. The ensemble often works like this: While one person shreds like crazy, another stays cool. It’s part of what keeps ((world war)) feeling so dynamic, giving the music space to breathe despite its instrumental density and full-throttle tempos. Within the larger trajectory of each piece, there are many smaller overlapping arcs of excitement and comedown, each following the chaos logic of a four-person improvisatory mind-meld.
The rowdy camaraderie of the improv is so powerful that it can be easy to overlook the care and sensitivity with which branch composed and arranged these tunes. Themes reprise unexpectedly; formerly dueling voices slide without warning into choreographed tandem. The longer pieces tend to follow a rough A/B structure, with a burst of body-moving energy to get them going and a turn into headier territory to bring them home. In “borealis dancing,” the band downshifts on a dime into head-nodding half-time; in “baba louie,” calypso melts eventually into ghostly dub. “take over the world” begins on a dembow rhythm played with the addled ferocity of hardcore; in branch’s stuttered declaration of intent to “Take over the world/And give it back to the land,” the song’s fusion of punk and Caribbean music comes across like Bad Brains if they were more focused on the dancefloor than the mosh pit. In its second half, Taylor takes up an effortlessly funky New Orleans-style snare-drum groove, St. Louis begins bowing an insistent two-note figure on his cello, and a delay pedal mutates branch’s voice into increasingly alien shapes. The rhythms keep the music rooted in the traditions of the Afro-Caribbean and Latinx diasporas, and the electronic contortions send it toward some imagined utopian future.
Music of all kinds suffered a significant loss with branch’s passing last year. ((world war)) provides a precious document of her artistry at the end of her life, and a glimpse of where she might have taken it next. Even more important: It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.


Chicago house legend Larry Heard's new Outer Acid EP is his first release as Mr. Fingers since 2005. But his return isn't to rehash or cash in on his old work, but rather to elucidate it, to carry on this dialogue with his machines in a new century.

Outer Acid EP

1985 and 1986 were rather productive years for the Chicago producer Larry Heard. Using a wide array of aliases—be it Disco D, The It, Gherkin Jerks, Fingers, Inc. or Mr. Fingers—he pressed up singles like "Mystery of Love," "It's Over," "A Path," "Donnie," and "Bring Down the Walls," almost all of them epochal, codifying dance music in their wake. Heard did jack, acid, and house like few before him and fewer since, to where his decades-old productions still jerk the heartstrings, from new love to heartache, well into the present.
If you were a rock band with that many sterling singles in your arsenal, you'd release a deluxe edition and put the band back together 30 years later to cash in, but Heard's re-emergence now feels different. Late last year, he finally reissued Another Side on his own Alleviated label, rightly considered the greatest vocal house record of all time, and this month sees his first release as Mr. Fingers since 2005.
Which is not to suggest that his label has been dormant in the intervening years. Just last year, Alleviated released two strong singles from newcomers Ken Gill and Lee Pearson Jr. Collective. Heard sounds emboldened by the new blood; the four tracks that comprise this EP don't scan as old tracks dusted off and spruced up for a new generation of deep house fans, nor do they sound like Heard dabbling in the newfangled so as to prove his relevance on the EDM market. "Outer Acid," metered by closed hi-hats and canned claps, has the telltale gurgle of a 303 flowing underneath it. But Heard programs the track at the pace of a babbling brook rather than a Warehouse rager, acid house as dulcet and calming, with Heard judiciously adding a metallophone melody to give the track a buoyant charm.
"Nodyahead" is a clattering, upbeat house track while "Aether" is downtempo with a nimbus about its fringes. With its spotlight sweep of chords across the patient house beat, "Qwazars" is luminous, from its subject matter to its melody, the sample of "What’s going on?" "Quasars" dialogue (purportedly lifted from a Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture) a nice touch. It shows that Mr. Fingers’ return isn't to rehash or cash in on his old work, but rather to elucidate it, to carry on this dialogue with his machines in a new century.
Correction: The original version of this review incorrectly stated the title of the EP*. It is the* Outer Acid EP, not the Mr. Fingers EP.


Eleventh Dream Day may not have found fame with the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been kind: widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with twelve good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. Works for Tomorrow, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever.

Works for Tomorrow

Few—if any—indie rock bands have been subject to as much armchair quarterbacking as Eleventh Dream Day. They had the songs, they had the chops, but they just never quite got the timing right. Their brief dalliance with the majors was, by most accounts, an unmitigated disaster; Atlantic so badly botched—and then quickly abandoned—1993's would-be breakthrough El Moodio that the band issued a director's cut of sorts, New Moodio, in 2013. They may not've found the fame they deserved in the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been awfully kind; widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with 12 good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. In the wake of New Moodio—a record that may've just put all that "what if?" talk to bed—EDD seem revitalized*: Works for Tomorrow*, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever.
Produced by keyboardist Mark Greenberg, Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout. Works came together quickly; on their first day alone, they'd tracked 13 songs, 10 of which show up here. Works is also the first Eleventh Dream Day record in two decades to feature a second guitarist with Jim Elkington of Tweedy and the Horse's Ha. Elkington and singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo have an immediate on-record chemistry. Rizzo's gloriously ragged, Neil Young-jocking leads have long been EDD's signature, and with Elkington at his side, they can kick up twice the dust.
Works charges out of the gate with "Vanishing Point", in which Janet Beveridge Bean does her damnedest to earn whoever's listening a speeding ticket. Every time she wails "I'm gonna take it from the inside, I'm gonna take it slow," the song's taut, krautrock-indebted pulse seems to quicken. Bean's never held back, exactly, but the way she tears into "Vanishing"—and her searing mid-LP cover of Judy Henske and Jerry Yester's psych-blues stomper "Snowblind"—is something else entirely. Rizzo, as ever, is a quizzical, around-the-beat singer. The pair's frequent harmonizing has only deepened with time, so that the slightest shift in affect from either one changes the entire feel of the line. The raucous, gospel-tinged "Go Tell It" finds Rizzo doing his best Lou Reed, with Bean answering with an even-better Merry Clayton, while plainly gorgeous late-LP highlight "Deep Lakes" finds the pair sighing their way through a perserverer's anthem: "I'm alive, we survived," they sing, with striking calm.
Works, Rizzo's said in interviews, is his attempt to locate the source of some recent emotional turmoil. "My mom's side is northern Europe Swedish and my dad is Italian," he told the Chicago Tribune, "so you've got the Italian emotional half, and on the Swedish side, there's this attitude that you don't talk about the past. That warm front, cold front collision ends up causing a storm." Never is this clearer than on closer "End With Me", which finds Rizzo out east, visiting relatives' graves, trying to figure out why everything behind him seems to be getting in his way. By digging into—and then letting go of—that past, Rizzo can finally reckon with the present. Even if he hadn't spelled it out, that feeling's all over Works for Tomorrow: what's done is done, but right now, things are looking up.


Terius Nash's fourth solo album as The-Dream is packed with guest stars including Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and 2 Chainz. In one sense, it feels like a bold grab at the pop stardom that has eluded him in his solo career. But for the first time, it feels like he’s trying to keep up with everyone else.

IV Play

“I know they ain’t gon’ play this on top 40 radio,” begins “Slow It Down", IV Play’s confrontational first single. An indignant backlash against the wave of EDM-R&B that’s been sweeping the airwaves of the past few years, it’s a ballsy, against-the-grain move that highlights the identity crisis that Terius Nash seems to be undergoing. But in truth, the song's dilemma applies to his entire career. While The-Dream has written some of the biggest hits of the past decade-- ”Umbrella,” “Single Ladies”, lots more-- his solo work has failed to take off. Instead, he's developed a cult and has become a fixation of R&B nerds everywhere. Packed with guest stars, IV Play feels like it’s finally vying for that elusive spotlight. And, while he’s still not making those “motherfucking dance songs,” for the first time it feels like he’s trying to keep up with everyone else.
IV Play starts off shaky with “High Art”, an awkward attempt at a club anthem. Nash has never done this sort of machismo well; his charm lies in his ability to string sweetly sung hooks together, but he forgoes his established style repeatedly in IV Play’s first half. Always a fan of references, he takes a thesaurus to Ginuwine’s “Pony” for the bizarre and plodding “Equestrian”, while the less said about the tepid mess of “Turnt” (with Beyoncé and 2 Chainz, no less) the better. The only decent guest appearance is Pusha T's on "Pussy", which is ruined by Big Sean's embarrassing appearance two minutes later. It’s the first time Nash has disappointed like this; he’s had a bum track or two, sure, but the early string of clunkers is discouraging.
Not that there aren’t gleams of brilliance. The title track is intriguingly out of character-- “I could give a fuck about the foreplay/ I’m talking straight sex,” this coming from the man who once described messing up his girl's hair like it was an elaborate courting ritual. But it falls into a despondent outro that edges on self-doubt. There’s been a string of self-loathing running through Nash’s music since his very public divorce (immortalized on 2011’s self-released 1977), which he can’t quite seem to shake. It’s there in the defensive “Slow It Down”, it’s there in the outro to “IV Play” (“I don’t deserve you”), and it’s there in another one of the LP’s most plaintive tracks, “New Orleans”. Like an outtake from 1977, the song’s subject (“this bitch”) is repeated at the end of every line, and while it’s undeniably affecting, the misogyny becomes grating.
Thankfully there’s at least one classic The-Dream track on IV Play-- the effortlessly airy “Michael”. And, though more questionable lyrics abound (“He say he love you/ I just wanna fuck you/ Over the weekend”), it has all the lilt and masterful vocalisms of his best work. But this song is an exception. For an artist that’s modeled himself so closely after Prince, it’s striking how IV Play resembles the Purple One’s late 80s transition phase when the Minneapolis artist tried to re-engage his black fans by self-consciously urbanizing his music (see The Black Album). IV Play has many of the same restless impulses, from the surprisingly excellent blues slow-burner “Too Early” to the two-songs-stuck-together shambles of “Loving You/ Crazy.” The brilliant auteur we fell in love with is still in here somewhere. He’s just buried under layers of pretense.
IV Play winds down with the epic “Holy Love,” which references his “Umbrella” height of 2007 and hints at emptiness in the wake of success. Where exactly his ire is directed is unclear, but it makes explicit a frustration obvious to anyone who’s been watching his solo career since it started, through record label ordeals, delayed release dates and scrapped albums. “Always with you baby/I’ll never sell out,” he sings in a verse to “Slow It Down,” which begins to feel like a coded message to his longtime fans. Sticking with him through the machinations of the music industry has never been more difficult than it is now, but IV Play still has its rewards. When the world finally heeds the plea of “Slow It Down”, he might achieve immortality all over again. For now, though, he’s merely human.


The noisy, cosmic trio of Philadelphia DIY lifers returns with an unearthed studio album. It’s an upgrade in fidelity and a shit-ton of fun.

Valdez

Birds of Maya are a band who don’t seem all that concerned with the formalities of being a band. The Philly trio doesn’t really remember when they formed—“somewhere between 2000 and 2004” is their best guesstimate. They took about half a decade to properly issue their first album in 2008, and then, after two follow-ups, checked out for most of the 2010s. And while the arrival of Valdez, their first record in eight years, might seem like an encouraging sign of life, it was actually recorded seven years ago, thereby blurring the line between a comeback effort and a reissue of a lost album.
Of course, there’s a good reason for their inactivity—all three members of Birds of Maya are pillars in the Philly DIY community, with multiple projects on the go. Singer/bassist Jason Killinger has stayed busy with his bands Spacin’ and Soft Crime; drummer Ben Leaphart has played with the Bardo Pond offshoot Aye Aye as well as Purling Hiss, the long-running indie-rock outfit fronted by Birds of Maya guitarist Mike Polizze (who also dropped an alt-country-leaning solo release, Long Lost Solace Find, last year). But if the sudden reappearance of Birds of Maya feels randomly timed at this juncture in their respective careers, Valdez’s origin date is ultimately immaterial because Birds of Maya deal in a type of rock music that persists like nuclear waste: the sort of sludgy noise that loses little of its skin-melting toxicity through the passage of time.
Valdez belongs to an exclusive fuzz-punk fraternity whose charter members include Funhouse-era Stooges, Spacemen 3’s “Revolution,” early Mudhoney, Monster Magnet’s Spine of God, Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, and the Men circa Leave Home: records that value blown-speaker distortion, runaway-train momentum, and sinister, brain-scrambling psychedelia above all else. But even as it follows a well-trodden trail of busted distortion pedals, Valdez abounds with thrills and surprises, the same way that standing in the middle of an 8x8 jam space while a band revs up will always give you a heart-palpating jolt.
Birds of Maya always aspired to bring that practice-room experience into your home through their largely improvised, no-fi recordings that were liable to spill past the 20-minute mark. Valdez, by contrast, was made at a proper studio in upstate New York, and although the whole thing was reportedly cut and mixed in 36 hours, there’s a much greater definition and thickness to these recordings that elevate the Birds from trashy basement noisemakers to omnipotent power trio. Most significantly, the album presents an opportunity to truly appreciate the relentless rumble that Killinger and Leaphart produce, through a combination of kosmische-rock velocity and soul-revue vigor that launches Polizze’s fretwork into the cosmos. The 10-minute instrumental centerpiece “Recessinater” epitomizes Valdez’s expansive, three-dimensional attack. As Polizze’s sun-warped, snake-charmer guitar line plays call-and-response with itself, the rhythm section sets the breakneck pace while providing the melodic undercurrent that gives shape and structure to the splatter.
On the tracks with vocals, the upgrade in fidelity doesn’t give us any clearer picture into what Killinger is actually talking about, but it does allow us to hear his voice in strange new contexts. While the opening “High Fly” peels out like Jimmy Page hitching a ride on Can’s “Mother Sky,” the song’s scorching midsection guitar jam is threaded with the uncanny murmur of his vocal track in the background, like a lone parishioner who refuses to snap out of his prayer chant even as his church is burning to the ground. Amid the acidic Crazy Horse churn of “Busted Room,” he breaks out of his diseased-Dylan snarl to deliver a spoken-word passage in a different corner of the mix, as if he were instantly transported inside your brain.
But for all its brute force and suffocating scuzz, Valdez is also a shit-ton of fun, whether it’s making you see stars from all the hypnotic hammering of “Please Come In” or blindsiding you with a two-minute proto-metal spurt like “BFIOU,” which is sort of like Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” for dirtbags on a joyride with a suspended driver’s license. As a seven-year-old recording slathered in redlining guitar squall, caveman stomping, and largely unintelligible lyrics, Valdez has absolutely nothing to say about the state of our world today. And yet the timing of its reemergence couldn’t be more perfect: This is a readymade soundtrack for humidity-choked summer nights spent getting up to no good and going crazy from the heat.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For the first five years of their existence, New York metal outfit Tombs sounded undecided about their sound, but their third album is one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan, they've mustered the heaviest elements of their sound for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement.

Savage Gold

The past of New York’s Tombs feels, in retrospect, like a working laboratory for the success of Savage Gold, their third album and one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. For the first five years of their existence, Tombs felt undecided, a college kid cycling through survey courses while searching for a major. On a series of EPs, splits and albums, frontman Mike Hill moved through a half-dozen members (he’s now the only extant original) and twice as many modes, dispatching ideas in search of an identity. Their very good 2011 LP, Path of Totality, worked through turgid sludge and distant post-punk, seething black metal and prismatic psychedelia, forcing those forms into inchoate but intriguing shapes.
But Savage Gold betrays no such indecision, from the production choices to the stunning execution. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan in his St. Petersburg, Fla., recording studio, Tombs mostly mustered the heaviest elements of its sound—breakneck blast beats and high-stacked guitars, irascible screams and punishing repetition—for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. Tombs made the decision to keep it relatively simple on Savage Gold, and that mandate has reanimated the band for 57 extreme and urgent minutes.
Tombs begins these 10 tracks with an ominous groan of organ creaks and doom guitar sweeps, but the lull is short-lived: Drummer Andrew Hernandez II slaps his kit twice and then steps on the double-bass pedal, commencing a blast beat that swells and shrinks but doesn’t actually stop for the song’s first two minutes. Across Savage Gold, Hernandez emerges as the hero, not only guiding the band through its twists between riffs and breaks between verses but also constantly redoubling each song’s intensity. He often sets a pace and then, at just the perfect moment, fills the space between the beats, acts of sudden escalation that push Savage Gold from a series of plateaus into a succession of peaks. “Ashes” nods to Darkthrone, particularly in Hill’s scabrous Nocturno Culto vocal homage.
But it’s Hernandez who does the heavy lifting, switching—seamlessly, repeatedly—between breathless blitzes, stuttering turnarounds and driving, four-on-the-floor wallop. Hill, guitarist Garrett Bussanick and bassist Ben Brand often split the leads and the distorted textures and counters that surround them. They pass the riffs around and decorate them in a way that emphasizes the momentum more than the melody itself. By shifting so much of the movement to Hernandez’s drums, Savage Gold is locked in motion that’s more felt than heard, more intuited than observed. The decision makes the eight-minute "Echoes" seem much shorter; the whole record becomes an unending rush.
Savage Gold has breaks in the armor, of course, moments where the drumming thunder and the piercing guitars acquiesce to less identifiable, less forceful sounds. The tripwire riffs of “Echoes”, for instance, decay into a slow cycle of feedback, while, just before the end, “Portraits” pulls back on its headlong rush to reveal a gale of bristling tones beneath the beating. But those passing moments—and even the cold, five-minute stare of the album’s only reserved track, “Severed Lives”—serve mostly as setups for a takedown, spreading a calm canvas for the band to soon rip through it.
Just when the electric whorl of guitars at the close of “Portraits” starts to feel almost safe, Hernandez leads the attack of “Seance”, his drums puncturing the reverie as the guitars coil around another militant meter. “Severed Lives” is a menacing drift of hissed vocals and slowly loping bass; after four minutes, it even sublimates into a bowed, sinister drone. It’s only a feint, a trap for the explosive finale of “Spiral,” the radiant and complicated closer that recapitulates the enthusiasm and magnetism of the entire album. Again and again, Tombs mitigate the rumble between a string of onslaughts, tempering one moment only to make the next more effective.
Tombs’ sense of timing, economy and impact throughout Savage Gold suggests the successes of Aesthethica, the second album by another similarly searching Brooklyn metal band, Liturgy. But Hill has no manifestos, no flashpoint politics, elements that would only distract from his band’s newfound decisiveness and direction. Still, Savage Gold’s energy suggests the same sort of “ecstasy” as Aesthethica, a feeling that also gives it concomitant crossover appeal. Maybe that’s a surprising suggestion, that the album where Tombs digs its heels into heavy metal and works with one of the genre’s bulwark producers might be the one that pushes its reputation farthest afield of metal itself. But you can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows. It seems like a valiant journey through what he calls “Shades of darkness/ Kingdoms of ashes”—triumphant and without trepidation.


The 14th solo release from the ambient musician and 12k label head is a refined display of his impeccable devotion to his craft.

Harbor

If the title of Ambient Musician Laureate existed in the United States, Taylor Deupree would be a shoo-in. He’s not an indie-crossover success story like Grouper or William Basinski, nor does his work tend to challenge preconceptions of what ambient music can be, but he’s one of the genre’s most consummate professionals. As founder and head of the 12k label and engineering studio in New York, he’s the guy that people who master ambient albums hit up to master their own records. You can also find him working with David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto, composing music for photography installations and outdoor tea gardens, or releasing pristine-sounding, artfully crafted ambient albums united by his faded, organic visual aesthetic.
Harbor is the 14th and latest of these releases, and Deupree’s sound design ensures it feels as pristine as anything he’s released while creating an intriguing wrinkle. The surfaces of these eight tracks sparkle with effervescent leads clearly played on a synth but not far removed from the Rhodes pianos beloved by the Album Leaf. Meanwhile, a heavy, ominous low end weighs these tracks down and keeps them from floating into the ether. It adds fearful tension to this largely optimistic music. If Harbor is meant to evoke its title, it’s easy to imagine an idyllic surface of beaches and sailboats perched above the murky depths of the ocean.
But Harbor is less effective as a travelog than as a sculptural object, and the way the different layers of sound interact is more interesting than what they’re supposed to represent; it’s easy to marvel at all the individual noises as they flit about the stereo field. There are some wonderful effects here, like the fleck of Pastorian bass on “Mihto” and the moment when the gnarly low end takes over “Desaturation” and turns it into a rather vicious noise-drone. You get the sense that Deupree has been doing this for so long that sound is like bread and butter in his hands.
Deupree loves textural grit, and each track has a slightly different assortment of burbles and hisses emanating out of the depths of the mix. The effect is less to make it sound as if it’s glitching, as in the work of fellow Y2K-era sound explorers like Vladislav Delay and Oval, and more to capture “the imperfect beauty of nature” Deupree cites as essential to both his music and his photography. It’s as if Deupree has taken these eight finely-sculpted objects and left them outside for a while so the rain and wind can work their magic. (Leave this stuff outside for a little longer and you’d have Mike Cooper.)
At times, Harbor sounds uncannily similar to some of the music currently being put out by the West Mineral stable of musicians, especially last year’s self-titled debut from Picnic. But while those artists emphasize mystery and obscurity, as if their music is concealing all manner of shadowy secrets, there’s the sense with Harbor that what we’re hearing is what we’re seeing. This music is so high-definition, each element so precisely mixed and clearly emphasized, that there’s never a sense of anything hidden or left to the imagination. Luckily, what’s already there is more than sufficient to stir it.


Newly remastered and reissued, Instrumentals is an ideal entry point into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic. His early ideas as a downtown composer and cellist were both complex and joyful.

Instrumentals

Getting a handle on Arthur Russell’s discursive career would be tough, even if everything had been well documented. But in the decade following his death in 1992, Russell existed not so much as an artist with an in-print catalog than he did as a rumor—one with the highest class of reputation. The 21st century has seen a boom of Russell reissues, most of which have come from the Audika label’s partnership with the Russell estate.
In 2006, on the set First Thought Best Thought, Audika compiled a few of the cellist-composer’s noisier, long-form experiments, along with Tower of Meaning and Instrumentals. The latter was intended as a double-album set, though the label that first released Instrumentals in 1984 managed to lose its opening half (and to master the second half at the wrong speed). First Thought Best Thought corrected the speed issue, and restored the album’s opening portion, thanks to an archival tape discovery.
While First Thought Best Thought was a gift for anyone immersed in Russell studies, its sonics weren’t as clear as fans might have hoped. Audika took a separate pass at remastering Tower of Meaning, in 2016. And this year brings a new remaster of Instrumentals, available on both vinyl and lossless-digital formats. The album has never sounded better, nor has it ever seemed so much like an ideal point of entry into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic.
The downtown composer conceived of his Instrumentals series as a “modular” piece, in which separate passages of notated melody could be played by an improvising ensemble, in any order. In performance, a relatively spare portion of preconceived material could flower into a full set. But only after the musicians mastered the riffs—a process that took some doing. In the liner notes for this new release, saxophonist Jon Gibson writes that one of the core challenges of this music was Russell’s desire for his band to “improvise with unfamiliar chord sequences placed upon asymmetrical … time lengths.”
During the 1975 sessions that form the first half of Instrumentals, you can hear Russell joyfully rummaging through his toy chest of influences. The indeterminate nature of each performance calls on the theories of John Cage, while the long-lined melodies and rhythms pull from Russell’s study of Indian classical traditions. The fact that the harmonies are full of poppy, countrified accents reveals the bandleader’s Americana affections.
Any mastering job needs some delicacy if it hopes to bring across all the formal aspects contained on these tapes. This new remaster of Instrumentals dials back on the drum-and guitar-heavy sound that swamped some of the lighter timbres on First Thought Best Thought. The subtlety of this edition allows each instrument in the group to sing out in a fresh way. On “Vol. 1, Track 1,” Gibson’s soprano sax has a lustrous, lilting sheen that’s well-matched by Russell’s electric cello lines. Instead of sounding plodding, due to its center-stage presence in the prior mix, the honky-tonk percussion on “Vol. 1, Track 3” now registers as lightly humorous. The competing tempos of “Vol. 1, Track 6” and the mix of woodwind drones and funk-guitar flourishes on “Vol. 1, Track 7” now pass by with a greater Zen bliss.
Performances from 1977-78 make up the second volume of Instrumentals (the half originally issued at the wrong speed in 1984). The pace of these performances is generally slower, the improvisation less animated in nature. And the comparative unison among players in Russell’s ensemble offers a look at the variety of the composer’s underlying melodic progressions. During the half-hour duration of “Pt. 2,” the starkness of some initial patterns leads to concluding vistas of greater sweetness. As on the freshly mastered abstract pieces “Sketch for ‘The Face of Helen’” and “Reach One,” a slight reduction of tape hiss brings real benefits. There’s still no such thing as a prototypical Arthur Russell album, but the range of textures on this new master of Instrumentals gets us closer than ever to his stated intention to fuse the avant-garde with, as Russell put it, “the bright sound and magical qualities of the bubblegum.”


The Irish DIY artist isn’t the first to note that while pop is fun, capitalism is perhaps a bit of a downer. But she’s uncommonly committed to the bit.

H.R.

Human resources, like much of the verbal suit-starch of corporate communication, barely conceals a double meaning. There’s the handbook definition: everything available in your confidential employee assistance plan. Then there’s the literal meaning—human as resource—as well as its logical extension: fodder that grinds easiest when raw.
Meljoann, an Irish DIY pop artist now based in Brighton, knows something about being raw. Her 2010 debut, Squick, won over the Irish music press with wonky self-produced R&B tracks about reptilians and office supplies. Although rough around the edges, it showed ambition and imagination you don’t often get one album in.
HR is the result of a decade’s worth of honing. Once again, Meljoann reverse-engineers the back catalogs of Janet Jackson, Jam & Lewis, and their peers, but this time her Janet album of choice is Rhythm Nation 1814, and more “Black Cat” than “Escapade.” The sound suits the subject matter: 11 dispatches from corporate dystopia. She isn’t the first artist to note that while pop is fun, capitalism is perhaps a bit of a downer. But HR commits to the bit. The first track is called “Assfuck the Boss,” and that’s one of the less angry ones. In its social venom and unsparing bleakness, the album’s closest peer is probably U.S. Girls’ In a Poem Unlimited. But HR is both a one-woman show and a far less heady one: too furious for subtlety.
This is the kind of album that delivers, in a cool R&B purr, lines like, “You’ve got no means of production, girl.” In another artist’s hands, it might be disastrous, and HR sometimes toes the line. The unrelenting pummel of the arrangements is exhausting, though so is a 70-hour week. Not every lyric works, and given their brashness, when the lines miss they miss hard. (There’s lots of careful storytelling; there’s also at least one “wack.”) Occasionally the irony becomes a bit obvious; “Consumer,” a confection of bright synths and candy-coated dreams, could be cut by your pick of extremely online pop star. But it’s about the only track here that could.
Take “O Supervisor,” a Laurie Anderson pun in the form of a new jack swing track, over which Meljoann flings video-game metaphors at turbo speed. The comparison is apt—gaming is a world of bosses, grinding, and power fantasies for the powerless, brought to you by rampant exploitation, and its silliness is its weapon. The titular trip of “Company Retreat” is the stuff of, as one recent exposé put it, “Bacchian nightmare”: team-building banalities and furtive corporate raids, followed by “mandatory blow.” Meljoann brings it to heart-racing life with an industrial beat, frantic chromatic runs, and frayed, high-pitched panting that recalls Britney’s Blackout—itself a hedonistic nightmare of a pop album.
Sometimes the bleakness sets in gradually. “I Quit” is a 1990s ballad in the Brian McKnight or Mariah Carey mold, each chord signaling a poised epiphany and each line a blunt dismissal. But it’s never really cathartic; the structure meanders and the bridge ends in an atrophied version of the “Emotions” run. “Business Card” opens on a doomy synth riff, swaggering like masculinity; next, pitched-down backing vocals akin to the Knife’s “One Hit”; then, a body count: “I’m on the golf course/And I shot 18 souls/Got my PR on it.” It’s the most spiteful take on the subject since Patrick Bateman fumed over his colleagues’ stationery. “Ventilation Shaft” sets Meljoann’s best, bleakest lyric to horror-movie ambience: the human groans and inhuman creaks sound like something grotesque done to people in a storm drain.
At the other end of the doomer-to-optimist spectrum lies “Personal Assistant.” The title brings to mind consumer tech, and the chorus pings out a two-note chime not unlike the yes-sir chirping of Siri or Alexa. But the song’s subject is a human who’s finally glimpsing real freedom. The sound is exhilarating, all celebratory “1999” synths and constant forward motion, and the bridge ends with purpose: “There’s some shit we’re not supposed to take.” It’s a manifesto delivered on letterhead, stamped in venom ink.

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Hallucinogen Remixes follows on the heels of Kelela's last EP, a half-hour probe into the inner workings of love, lust, and codependency. Featuring work from DJ Spinn, Gaika, and others, the remixes here spin her style into footwork, grime, baile funk, and other genres.

Hallucinogen Remixes

Last year, Kelela returned with honed-in vision, sharpened songwriting, and 23rd-century production for Hallucinogen, a half-hour probe into the inner workings of love, lust, and codependency. Hallucinogen's amniotic take on club, R&B, and pop paired with a stronger vocal performance worked so well that it made her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me look like batting practice in comparison. But Kelela has always been an artist who works best when her unfettered voice is placed against unexpected backdrops: She brought effortless calm to Kingdom's metallic, bass-heavy club music on Cut 4 Me; sultry pathos to Kindness' loungey, sax-heavy sophomore LP Otherness; and a sense of gravity to Arca's nebulous electronics on Hallucinogen. This past Christmas, in a seeming bid to show off this versatility, Kelela dropped Hallucinogen Remixes, an EP containing remixes of four Hallucinogen tracks that spin her style into footwork, grime, baile funk, and other genres.
Remixes opens with a high-energy mix of "A Message," courtesy of footwork legend DJ Spinn. Spinn leaves the song's structure relatively as-is, adding fills of high-speed drum patterns beneath Kelela's verses to give the song a shuddering spark that puts it at thrilling odds against the original's languorous production. Brazilian baile funk artist MC Bin Laden's take on "Rewind" goes big, using a single line from the song and studding it with drops and verses from the MC to turn it into a towering baile number that wouldn’t sound out of place on the last Major Lazer record. It's riveting, but ultimately feels like filler against a vet like Spinn, who evokes the same urge to dance with significantly less pomp.
Elsewhere, Bristol producer Kahn gives Hallucinogen highlight "All the Way Down" an ominous grime re-do and recruits rising Brixton artist Gaika for a guest verse, whose elastic rapping and low-pitched voice work as a good complement to Kelela's diaphanous vocals. Melbourne producer Air Max ’97 gives the same song an undertow of fast-paced drumming and a few floating synth lines, focusing on vivid, key lines to dramatic effect: "I'm doing things that I don't do/ So comfortable when I'm with you... I'm staying over at yours tonight/ I'm calling late, let's exercise." The most distinct remix here comes from club and ballroom DJs Mike Q and Divoli S’vere, who strip away the reeling bass of Hallucinogen closer "The High" and substitute just a pounding heartbeat and skittering, sped-up samples of Kelela’s voice. It's a creative flip on the original that, alongside DJ Spinn and Kahn's entries, also makes a good case for this collection's existence.
That being said, Hallucinogen Remixes doesn't eclipse its source material by any means—it's probably only essential if you're already a Kelela diehard. Paired with the original, it at least makes for a good holdover until an official debut LP, which is slated to appear sometime this year. As a brief look at Kelela playing with genres we've yet to hear, however, Remixes is sufficient enough.


The English electronic artist pays tribute to his inspirations while maintaining his distinct, masterful sound.

Crystal Vision

When Nathan Fake emerged in the early 2000s, he was part of a small, upstart crew making splotchy, rough-hewn dance music, a volatile amalgam of techno, trance, and IDM that sounded little like anything else in clubs at the time. The artists on James Holden’s Border Community label were feted by progressive-house jocks and championed by minimal-techno heads, but they didn’t slot easily into either scene. As if to prove his independence, Fake largely abandoned club conventions on his debut album, 2006’s Drowning in a Sea of Love, delving instead into shoegaze textures and krautrock beats diametrically opposed to the snap-tight DJ tools of the era. Over the past 20 years, the Norwich native has developed a highly idiosyncratic style: His drums are gnarled and overdriven, and his synths are as jagged and luminous as cracked-open geodes. The same qualities distinguish his sixth album, Crystal Vision, which, like 2020’s Blizzard, boasts a burly, percussive sound informed by his live sets. But for the first time, he now pays direct homage to his inspirations.
Fake has never made a secret of who his heroes are. Boards of Canada’s tape-warped synths have long been central to his aesthetic, and so have Aphex Twin’s brightly childlike melodies. But his tips of the hat feel more explicit, and intentional, than ever. In “Boss Core,” synthesizers inspired by Autechre’s generative processes twist and turn over a lumbering, serrated groove, changing shape and color with every bar—a scale model of evolution compressed into seven spellbinding minutes. The title track is also in thrall to Autechre, taking the plangent leads of the duo’s 1994 album Amber and pairing them with a shuffling breakbeat reminiscent of prime Boards of Canada; all that’s missing is a well-placed “I love you” sample. The square-wave synths and scratchy drums of “Hawk,” meanwhile, feel like callbacks to James Holden’s remixes of Fake’s 2004 underground hit “The Sky Was Pink,” while the gradually unspooling arpeggios of “The Grass” approximate the drawn-out chord progressions of Holden epics like “A Break in the Clouds.” Both tracks feel like attempts to reclaim emblematic sounds from Border Community’s formative days.
Yet no matter how unambiguous the references, these don’t feel like imitations; they feel like Nathan Fake tracks. In “Crystal Vision,” the breaks are noisier, the mood stormier, than in any of Boards of Canada’s bucolic etudes. “Bibled” also glancingly invokes the melancholy synths of Amber, along with Seefeel’s contemporaneous Succour, yet nobody but Fake could have put those elements together in quite the same way. As much as the harmonic dimension may dominate his music—the billowing chords, the smoldering tone colors—he typically begins with the drums, and you can hear as much if you lean in close. His micro-syncopations are cut with a craftsman’s care; every drum stakes out its own place in the spectrum, offbeat hits cushioning the groove like cells of bubble wrap keep a jostling object from rattling itself to pieces.
Other Fake hallmarks recur across the album. Chief among them is a hall-of-mirrors effect whereby he answers the principal synth riff—sharp, declarative, cutting—with a contrapuntal echo, usually smeared into chords, that makes it feel as if every melodic element were being trailed by a holographic echo. And no sound, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is ever static. Electronic music’s detractors have sometimes derided its practitioners as knob twiddlers, but Fake knows the power that lies in the simplest tweak of the pan pot. His knobs are always in motion. In “Vimana,” he takes a simple 16th-note arpeggio and proceeds to turn the sound inside out—veiling it with filters, dissolving it into a spray of harmonics, molding the trim, snub-nosed envelope into something wide and wheezy. Rather than predictable collections of loops, his tracks feel like 3D models that reveal shape-shifting contours as they spin on an invisible axis. His productions fall at the intersection of intention and accident, striking a delicate balance between control and chaos.
Crystal Vision’s most obvious tribute is “AMEN 96,” a pummeling drum’n’bass tune built from a chestnut of a breakbeat. To hear Fake tell it, writing the track was a lark, just an attempt to see what he could do with jungle’s hoariest trope. There’s no shortage of producers reworking classic jungle sounds these days, but “AMEN 96” doesn’t sound like the work of someone paying fealty to a bygone sound. Where most producers exploit the propulsive properties of the shopworn break, Fake smashes it to pieces, fashioning a brittle frame of snares and cymbals to go with his bright, stabbing synths. It feels less like a rhythm than a dazzling mosaic made of tiny mirrored shards. Nobody but Nathan Fake could have made a jungle track like “AMEN 96”—and at a moment when jungle is one of the most imitated styles in club culture, that’s saying something. Crystal Vision offers a useful reminder that in dance music, a culture built on collective “scenius,” being original is overrated.


Lorely Rodriguez’s third album, largely written and produced alone, refocuses her voice into an emotionally and aesthetically rich album of heartbreak, family history, and pop delights.

I’m Your Empress Of

Lorely Rodriguez has created an album that moves like oil in water. I’m Your Empress Of is more elegantly constructed and beats-focused, yet no less imaginative than the noise-pop wedgie she gave listeners on her 2015 debut Me. Muffled snatches of chatter, the voice of Rodriguez’s own mother, and a zesty club pulse bind the 12 tracks of her third album together to create a short, ambitious song cycle that reinstates Rodriguez among electronic pop’s auteurs.
Empress Of’s scattered previous album, 2018’s Us, took two and a half years and a cast of collaborators to make. In contrast, all but two of I’m Your Empress Of’s songs were produced and written by Rodriguez alone over two feverish months. Reeling from a recent break-up and the zig-zagging adrenaline of a relentless tour schedule, Rodriguez would wake early and set to work in her home studio in Los Angeles, using songwriting to release trauma and confusion. In purging emotional extremes, Rodriguez rises from the embers of heartbreak to hit on a personal and artistic truth: She is better off alone.
Thriving in solitude is cause for celebration, as a triumvirate of bangers makes clear. “Bit Of Rain,” the album’s first track proper, is a stormy flirtation with trap snares and imagistic fragments. “You closed your eyes/Heavy blinds to a house/I want everything inside to spill out,” she sings, like Pablo Neruda at the club. At other times, she is more direct. In the chorus, a forthright declaration is accompanied by a clap of thunder: “I want you under me.” Even more carefree is “Love Is A Drug,” a breathless, buoyant ode to carnal hedonism, while the dancefloor confection “U Give It Up” (produced by Jim-E Stack) feels like a poison-pinkie text dashed off to an ex on the way to the dancefloor. “When something bites/You pull back scared to fight,” Rodriguez intones. You can imagine her raising her hands to laser lights as she sings.
I’m Your Empress Of is a vivisection of heartache, as if Rodriguez is working through the five stages of grief in real-time. She beats herself up for her choices in “Should’ve” among blasts of static and high-pitched squeaks that sound like a moth’s legs stuck in molten rubber. At its most extreme, her self-examination evokes violence. “I get off on being awful to myself,” Rodriguez sings plainly in the album closer “Awful,” in which sharp thwacks bring to mind the slam of flesh into metal. “I need some help.” It’s a chilling moment delivered with flair, the kind of eureka moment that could take a year of therapy to hit on.
While poring over I’m Your Empress Of’s lyrics suggests an author with fresh wounds, the album is also a showcase for Rodriguez’s production abilities at this new peak. The lead single, “Give Me Another Chance,” is a rush of Eurodance, and in the balearic-inspired mid-tempo “Void,” Rodriguez Auto-Tunes her vocals to suggest weightlessness, her ennui dusted with clouds of powdered sugar. “What’s The Point,” is shot through with pitter-patters of drum’n’bass percussion, and you can imagine the song’s thick, creeping bass whipping crowds into a frenzy at a festival (failing that in the foreseeable future, your living room speakers will do the trick). In the hands of a less sure-handed artist the whiplash between emotional extremes could be jarring, but Rodriguez makes it feel delightfully dizzying. What is life in the digital age if not a constant pinball between joy and despair?
One of Rodriguez’s earliest ambitions as Empress Of was to be “weird.” The first music she shared was a homemade series of wonky electronic oddities titled Color Minutes, but by the time of her second album, she was drawing from the high gloss hip-pop of Ariana Grande. Yet the creative furrow she finds on I’m Your Empress Of is enriched by Rodriguez looking closer to home, an impulse literalized with the inclusion of spoken-word passages delivered by her mom, Reina, a first-generation immigrant from Honduras. Reina’s unguided reflections move from proud messages of survival to love and femininity, providing a guiding light while foregrounding the album as in conversation with shared Latinx immigrant histories. “It was not easy speaking English,” Reina says on the album intro, after Rodriguez plays a bright salsa piano line that she learned from her father. “It was not easy having to learn it,” continues Reina. “But I got it.”
I’m Your Empress Of vibrates with the contradictions that one person can contain: how mourning the loss of a partner is bound up with anger, the fatigue of resilience, and the pleasures to be found in escaping it all, if only for one lusty night. With unexpected production and left-field samples, Rodriguez’s album is powered by a heady rawness that bucks the trend for theatrical concepts in today’s electronic pop nonconformists, producing epiphanies like hot stones spat from a fire. You could say it is as addictive as modern love.


On its debut album, the Dublin-based post-punk band channels rage into communal uplift.

Letter to Self

Since forming in 2019, Sprints have released a series of short, ferocious singles and EPs. Songwriter and guitarist Karla Chubb’s dry, comical chants often give way to blistering screeds in a manner of seconds. Anger management worked to a point: On the 2022 single “Delia Smith,” she pondered taking the edge off her eccentricities: “Who wants to be special anyway?” Still, she couldn’t help but answer the question with a defiant scream: “Me, fucking me/And I’m not ashamed.”
On its debut full-length, Letter to Self, the four-piece attempts to channel its rage into communal uplift. “Anger doesn’t mean bad,” Chubb told DIY magazine. “Anger means you’re standing up for something; anger means you’re addressing an issue; anger also means collectiveness.” Letter to Self is a bracing, frantic record designed for both thrashing mosh pits and solo meltdowns, best heard with the volume turned up loud. The racing guitars and fuzzy distortion of “Ticking” and “Heavy” transform paralyzing fear into something that can be batted away with enough headbanging.
Sprints operate like a fitness trainer giving you some tough love—sure, you could take a breather, but it won’t make you any stronger. Letter to Self was produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, who have shaped the Ireland punk scene for almost a decade now. Sprints no doubt take much from Gilla Band, but their inspiration spans far and wide: “Adore Adore Adore,” Chubb’s tormenting screed on misogyny, is reminiscent of Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey. The band’s most manic songs, like the splintering Catholic-guilt noise rocker “Cathedral,” bring to mind the vicious feminist punk of Savages (whom Chubb often cites as inspiration).
The album isn’t locked into just one emotional register, though. Chubb and guitarist Colm O’Reilly play searingly bright pop melodies that pierce through the heavy buzz of stacked amps, bringing a bit of levity to their righteousness. Bassist and vocalist Sam McCann adds a wistful tone when he echoes Chubb’s lyrics, as in the grungy “Shaking Their Hands.” Even when you expect a rush of power chords, Sprints have a knack for breaking tension some other way. On “A Wreck (A Mess),” a humorous dance-punk ode to hyperactivity and social anxiety, Chubb sings with a Matt Berninger-like lilt over just a guitar strum: “Can you hear that sound?/Can you hear that silence?/Can you hear it surround?” Quiet is no reprieve: “It invites violence on me!” she yells, corralling the band for a rollicking chorus.
Occasionally Sprints spread the towering sound a little too thin, and the energy flags on “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Can’t Get Enough of It.” The upbeat tracks are more fun. “Literary Mind,” a re-recording of a 2023 single, remains a standout, capturing the jagged peaks of sapphic yearning with a flirty bassline and, of course, lovelorn screaming—“She Will” for the present decade. And on the sardonic “Up and Comer,” Chubb echos the voices of her critics—“They say she’s good for an up and comer”—before shattering through their doubts with noisy self-acceptance: “If you beat her like a drum/If you beat her like a heart/I bet she’ll fire for you still/I swear to God she’ll make a start,” she belts. Her rage builds toward a piercing climax that feels earned.


The latest solo work from the Armand Hammer rapper is a tribute to his grandmother’s memory that doubles as a statement of identity.

I Told Bessie

Chaz Hall grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and lays his head in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. But for a few years he lived with his grandmother Bessie in the Crown Heights family brownstone, crafting the sound and shape of the persona that would become Elucid, the rapper/producer best known for his work in Armand Hammer. Before her passing in 2017, Bessie was one of his earliest supporters, a confidant who first taught him about Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, and who listened from two floors below as he conjured beats and rhymes in their ancestral home. I Told Bessie, Elucid’s latest solo LP, is a record of those conjurations, a tribute to her memory that doubles as a statement of identity.
Most of Elucid’s work in Armand Hammer exudes a dark, murky mood informed by a pro-Black, anti-capitalist perspective. I Told Bessie feels more abstract yet equally expressive, with dissociative raps that are often rooted in narrative but free from the burden of plot. A latecomer to rock music, he’s professed a love for the chaotic lyrical stylings of the Mars Volta, a band whose disjointed storytelling can seem indecipherable both in spite and in service of the author’s intention. Elucid’s abstractions are similarly both dizzying and profound, obscuring metaphor and clever wordplay in a fog of loose association: “With emphasis, the spirits say/Every hole speak when the mirrors play/Fear of plague, sense-making stop/Hoof-and-mouth to pox, chasing clocks to bed/Spin your top and your TV's cut,” he raps on “Smile Lines.”
Elucid’s collaborators do more than just add color to his songs; they tend to pull him into their orbit, shaping his own style in the process. He’s said that he finds billy woods (his partner in Armand Hammer) to be more precise and calculated, while Rory Ferreira (his partner in Nostrum Grocers) is a bit jazzier, more comfortable with improvisation and embracing mistakes. You can hear Elucid split the difference on I Told Bessie, his precision ebbing and flowing with the music, growing more chaotic as the production unravels. The album’s production feels confrontational and uncomfortable, colored by warped vocal samples, off-kilter rhythms, and hypnotic loops. Even the smoother parts, like the funereal horn on “Impasse,” get disrupted by chaotic percussion and other subtle, unsettling elements.
Despite I Told Bessie’s status as a solo record, billy woods is deeply involved, with guest vocals on four tracks and an executive producer credit. woods’ gravitational force exerts itself on Elucid’s verses, which feel more focused and precise than on the tracks without him. Any of them feel like they could appear on Armand Hammer records, but “Nostrand” in particular—with its twinkling piano and horror-film bass line—feels like a Haram outtake. woods’ EP credit is more than just vanity; he manages to sequence tracks from eight different producers into a cohesive mood, climaxing with the analog static of “Betamax,” in which Elucid hints at finding meaning in rhythmic patterns.
As hard as he often sounds, Elucid’s music is informed by empathy: for his family, his neighbors, his collaborators. I Told Bessie’s strongest moments are with others, like the indica-laced posse cut “Sardonyx,” featuring woods, Pink Siifu, and Quelle Chris, all-stars from the art-rap cognoscenti. Chris gracefully stumbles through his verse, never quite losing his balance; woods manages to cut through the cloud of smoke with some of the sharpest bars on the record, a sardonic stab at avarice: “I can see it in the eyes of your oldest/I can see you just going’ through the motions, feel the coldness/Hop off the private jet, walk into the rotors, that’s new money/Old money mummified corpses, tryna stuff it in their coffins.”
More than a rap record, I Told Bessie is laid out like a book of spells, incantations called out to the ancestors. The conceit isn’t subtle—he spends half of “Split Tongue” chanting and the other half breathing “talking to myself and not listening” before admitting that “words mean things, but don't have to.” It’s the result of man peeling back layers of his spirit, and not necessarily finding any fundamental truths underneath—only a surge of disturbing, intoxicating dark energy. But by wrestling with his past, he may just have cleared the path for a more enlightened future.