Turning the gestures and feeling of classic rock into a statement on our modern malaise, this Omaha guitarist balances the tightness of a new band with the the rage of the day.

David Nance Group: Peaced and Slightly Pulverized

Peaced and Slightly Pulverized

David Nance makes music as if he were a member of an endangered species. The Omaha guitarist clings to the most well-worn FM-radio tropes—extended jams, grungy riffs, heroic choruses—like someone grabbing their most precious belongings from their burning house. He draws on those comforting sounds of the past to make profoundly uncomfortable music for the now. This freak-flag-waving allegiance to dinosaur-rock traditions matches his outlook on life and our grim prospects for survival on a planet that resembles a figurative and literal dumpster fire. For Nance, a face-melting guitar solo isn’t just a showcase of virtuosity; it’s a form of therapy, the only means to let out his anger and anxiety without getting himself arrested or committed.
Following a handful of wiggy lo-fi releases and classic-album reinterpretations under his own name, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized is Nance’s first release as the David Nance Group—a sophisticating rebrand that not only signals tighter songcraft and more muscular production but also the last-gang-in-town ardor of these performances. (And hey, if rock is the new jazz—a once-revolutionary sound slowly fossilizing into a nostalgic niche concern—why not get yourself a classy bandstand moniker?) The album was recorded by guitarist/keyboardist Jim Schroeder in his basement, but Nance’s newly anointed four-piece rips and wails through these seven tracks like they’re headlining the Fillmore.
For all its vivid evocations of rock’s bygone glory days, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized is undeniably a product of the tense present. “Poison,” the album’s valorous opener, realizes a flannel-clad fantasy of 1980s Springsteen fronting 1970s Crazy Horse. But its lyrics (“Spent the time/Took a dive/Landed nowhere fast”) are imbued with a very 2018 sense of chronic disappointment and helplessness. The epic “Amethyst” is an even more flagrant act of “Cortez”-killing, but it churns and rages in ways that even Neil Young never broached. As Nance and Schroeder get lost in a tangle of sad-eyed psychedelic leads and atonal screech, the song becomes the musical manifestation of a panic attack. Even when the group settles into the nocturnal Creedence voodoo of “110 Blues,” there’s a queasy quality to Nance’s voice, his words drifting past you like freeway billboards you can’t quite read.
Peaced and Slightly Pulverized still bears the jittery after-shocks of Nance’s more frazzled work. “Ham Sandwich” is a manic blast of garage-skronk that rails against income inequality with lunchmeat metaphors and guitars that squeal like ghost-controlled theremins. And while Nance’s oblique critique of organized religion and capitalism rolls in on a cool groove during “Prophet’s Profit,” it soon roils and boils into a volcanic sax-ocalypse.
But the album also teases out a new tenderness and grace, particularly during the riveting emotional centerpiece, “In Her Kingdom.” The seven-minute track functions as a corollary to Nance’s “River With No Color,” his seething indictment of human overconsumption and trash-filled waterways. “In Her Kingdom” is, likewise, set amid a garbage-strewn scene, though here it’s less a damning symbol of gluttony than a stark mark of poverty. Atop a hazy drift that sounds like Pavement trying to jam on the Doors’ “The End,” Nance paints an affectionate, sympathetic portrait of a woman living in a dilapidated house filled with “cigarette butts and McDonald’s cups.” He marvels at her resilience, resourcefulness, and apparent peace with having nothing in a world where we’re conditioned to crave more, more, more. “In her kingdom of shit!” Nance repeatedly cries as the song peaks, conveying a sense of awe that verges on jealousy. In constructing its own universe from the wood-paneled detritus of classic rock, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized outfits Nance with a cozy kingdom of shit to call his own.


Over the course of the three songs on Montreal noise rock trio No Joy's new EP Pastel and Pass Out,  they extend the accessibility of this year's Wait to Pleasure into a surprising playfulness with structure, brevity, and dynamism.

Pastel and Pass Out EP

With their strong second full-length Wait to Pleasure, Montreal trio No Joy transcended the faithful shoegaze revivalism of their 2010 debut Ghost Blonde and follow-up EP Negaverse by yanking melodies out of their thick, fuzzy guitar stew and operating with previously unforeseen refinement and clarity. Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd pushed their vocals to the front of their compositions, turning amorphous layers of sound into reasonably intelligible, catchy hooks; on standouts like "Hare Tarot Lies" and "Wrack Attack", their silvery, melodic guitar lines scrubbed away sludge, leaving behind straightforward dream-pop songs. The band's new EP, Pastel and Pass Out, is meant to coincide with an upcoming trek through Europe, and over the course of its three songs No Joy extends the new accessibility of Wait to Pleasure into a surprising spryness with structure, brevity, and dynamism.
The EP's playfulness begins with its title. Pastel and Pass Out is the perfect tagline for No Joy c. 2013: they're a band equally comfortable with soft-hued palettes and brutal knockout blows, like Mike Tyson waking up early on a dewy April morning to paint with watercolors. Lead single "Last Boss" conveys this message with impressive efficiency, as it moves from a simple marriage of melody and motorik chug into slugging, squealing riffs into a final, meditative section in just over three minutes. The band makes thoughtful use of volume and space to chop the song into these three discrete parts, and in doing so they amplify the size of the difference between said parts; we hear guitars massing like dark clouds on the horizon towards the end of the song's first minute, and in the next second we're thrown into the eye of the storm.
The other two songs on Pastel and Pass Out take the two faces of "Last Boss" and blow them up into distinct tracks in their own right. "Starchild is Dead" subjugates a rather pretty guitar lead with incredibly dense, crunchy waves of noise, the kind that compel listeners to zip over to cleaner songs just to make sure their headphones aren't broken. The arrangement's weight, and the appeal of the plumes of the melody that finally rise from the arrangement, are reminiscent of the chewiest work done by No Joy's shoegaze ancestors; when a single note escapes and starts roaring and squealing above the din, there's almost something classical about it.
Meanwhile, EP closer "Second Spine" benefits from thoughtful sequencing and the band's understanding of rhythm and momentum. Coming on the heels of two ferocious performances, the band establishes tension with little more than slight upticks in rhythmic intensity, channeled through drum and bass volume. When the chorus comes and goes without a crushing wall of guitar sound, it becomes clear the listener has been subject to an artful feint, one that elevates a simply pretty song into an interesting one.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Pastel and Pass Out is its economy: it takes No Joy less than twelve minutes to refine and expand on the musical ideas they first presented on Wait to Pleasure earlier this year. With two sets of full-length albums and accompanying EP extensions, the band has established a dependable pattern of step-wise growth; Pastel and Pass Out is a small but strong release that should tide fans over until No Joy's next major statement.


Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements—see his 2012 recording Red Book, which drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes. The Emissary is in comparison an album of quiet miniatures, with tracks built on pulse and echo.

The Emissary

Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements: His 2012 recording Red Book drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes—a metaphorical "journey by DJ" that could, in fact, accompany a moderately lengthy journey, or at the least one hell of a commute. But he's equally a fan of far more modest statements. Since 2005, his annual contributions to Kompakt's Pop Ambient series have typically taken the form of bite-sized reflections on a single mood, texture, or tone. Now, on The Emissary, he strikes a balance between these approaches. It is an invitation for the listener to travel but as travelogues go, The Emissary features no panoramic views, no grand vistas, no monuments, no scenes of splendor. It's more of a soothing blur flashing past, as seen from a comfortable seat aboard the bullet train.
There are two principal modes at work across the album's nine tracks: pulse and echo. "It Started on Wednesday" uses both at once, and it's serene to the point of detachment, in which patient bass notes dissolve into reverb trails so thick you could smear them with a putty knife. In "Moonshine Tangerine", quarter-note taps are fed through filters and delay, gradually building up into interlocking shapes with a debt to Robert Hood's brand of ultra-minimal techno, but drum-free and dew-bubbled. "The Life Of" also brings to mind techno rendered in water droplets.
The pulse-oriented productions aren't always so regular, however. The opening "St. Pop" is comprised of short, monophonic synthesizer bursts, first fast then slow then fast again; they suggest neurons firing in some post-cryogenic scenario, and they feel both melancholy and slightly numb. In "Hands", a three-note piano figure reminiscent of new age pianist George Winston runs in unsteady cycles, its shifting accents conveying a simultaneous sense of stillness and movement. The same goes for "Water Dancer", a duet for looped guitar and sloshing waves that evokes Grouper's method of traveling without moving. The remainder of the album is more placid—"About Turn" hangs glowing in the air like a fog that veils the sun, while "Trip the Light Fantastic" slows a sense of ecstatic wonder to a deathbed crawl with a minute-long fadeout.
These tracks aren't terribly sophisticated; as per Kompakt's Pop Ambient dictate, the album is content to take a pretty simple idea—ambient music as comfort food—and stretch it as far as it can. But there are also promising signs that Beyer isn't quite content to leave things there. As "Moonshine Tangerine" fades out, a scrappy guitar figure, run through tremolo, pops up from out of nowhere, and the same thing happens at the end of "The Emissary", this time with a tentative little piano prelude that runs for nine-and-a-half bars and then breaks off, silenced by a sigh in the background. These codas feel like riddles, hints of wormholes to other worlds that lie just out of reach of the album's sheltering ambient cocoon. They're reminders, maybe, that every journey is also the story of a journey not taken—teasing snapshots of the world beyond the train's windows as it comes fleetingly to rest.


The expertly sequenced and always vibrant debut from the Puerto Rican rapper collects every fascinating side of Bad Bunny into one singular statement.

X 100pre

In the first three years of his nascent career, Bad Bunny put out enough singles and did enough guest features to fill out several albums. As an audition for pop superstardom, it’s been impressive. He can adapt to seemingly any style—trap, R&B, reggaeton, bachata, dembow—with a heavy, nasal croon perpetually drenched in Auto-Tune. He became a huge star in 2018, circumventing terrestrial radio and government censorship to become the third-most streamed artist in the world on YouTube. Why does Bad Bunny even need to release an album?
In some ways, X 100pre (a stylization of “por siempre” or “forever”) presents a new Bad Bunny, a bellwether for the new stars of urbano. Like his contemporaries J Balvin and Daddy Yankee, he’s refused to pick a lane or to repress parts of himself that might seem antithetical to an urbano audience historically resistant to deviations from traditional masculinity. He bucks gender norms (wearing cutoff shorts and nail polish) and uses his massive platform to decry domestic violence. With X 100pre, we’re finally able to see all of these sides of Bad Bunny in a singular statement.
Free of bloated posse cuts and seven-minute remixes, X 100pre’s guests are expertly calculated. There’s an absolutely filthy low-slung trap beat from global gentrifier Diplo (“200MPH”), a hook in Spanish from Drake (“Mia”), a hookah-bar anthem with Dominican dembow don El Alfa (“La Romana”), and even a secret cameo from Latin music’s ultimate crossover artist, Ricky Martin (“Caro”). He’s also parted ways with DJ Luian and Hear This Music, who were instrumental in helping him bridge the gap between the reggaeton OGs and the new-school Latin trap artists. DJ Luian may have helped catapult Bad Bunny from the SoundCloud underground to the YouTube mainstream, but he also prevented him from making an album. Upon X100pre’s release, he told Beats 1 he “never had the support” to do an LP. It’s a little crazy to think that, even as we witnessed Bad Bunny’s incredible pre-album run, we were watching an artist who felt like he was being held back.
It’s clear, however, the thrill that comes when he’s left to his own devices. X 100pre reveals an artist both proud of and unafraid to tell the truth about where he comes from. On “Estamos Bien,” he brags about driving his Benz through the potholes in Puerto Rico’s poorly maintained roadways, then takes a nostalgia trip for the perreos of yesteryear on “Cuando Perriabas,” which recalls a “party de marquesinas” that should sound familiar to any boricuas from the island.
And even if his reference to the famous missing persons case of Rolandito Salas Jusino (“RLNDT”) feels a bit self-absorbed—“Y no sé si me raptaron o estoy perdido,” he sings, or, “I don’t know if they kidnapped me or if I’m lost”—those feelings of loss and hopelessness are still likely to resonate with anyone who remembers seeing posters with the young boy’s plastered all over the island. He even dabbles in the political: When he questions the logic of closing schools while new trap houses proliferate on “Ser Bichote,” he’s talking directly to La Junta de Control Fiscal.
Most of X 100pre was produced by reggaeton veteran Marcos “Tainy” Masís and Roberto Rosado and from a production standpoint, it’s nearly flawless—the lone misstep being the ill-advised foray into pop-punk “Tenemos Que Hablar,” which features a stiffly programmed guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted from the Kidz Bop studio session for “Since U Been Gone.” But X 100pre’s high points are numerous, like the two-part, beat-switching jam “La Romana” that expertly marries three genres birthed by Dominicans—bachata, dembow, and Latin trap; or the trap banger/ballad “Caro,” which is at once the hardest and softest track on the record.
Bad Bunny’s perspective is decidedly Puerto Rican, but he’s always drawn musical influence from across the diaspora, from Juan Gabriel’s Mexican boleros and Héctor Lavoe’s salsa to the Colombian (J Balvin) and Puerto Rican (Daddy Yankee) reggaetoneros and trap stars (Ozuna) he’s been collaborating with. And while much has been made of his similarities to Drake’s sad-famous rich-boy aesthetic, it only takes a few seconds of their duet “Mia” to see that the influence flows both ways. The synthesis of this Pan-Latino perspective is difficult to express in any language, yet X 100pre’s masterful sequencing somehow manages to weave a diverse arrangement of styles into a coherent statement, one that represents one of the most honest depictions of urbano music. Because while Latinidad might consist of a collection of distinct and vibrant cultures, they’re in constant conversation—from América Central to del Sur, from the Caribbean to the barrios in the states. X 100pre is what that conversation sounds like.


The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has worked with artists as diverse as A$AP Rocky and Show Me the Body. On Holy Wind, he leaves the city behind for an otherworldly record with ecological themes.

Holy Wind

The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has cast a wide net. Working across New York’s rap and experimental scenes, he’s collaborated with everyone from A$AP Rocky to Eartheater to Show Me the Body. In the process, Dadras has developed a unique and versatile sound of the  sort that can only be incubated in a place like New York City, blending house, hip-hop, and dancehall with a wide palette of samples. But his new album Holy Wind seems to unfold in a place far from the steel-and-concrete landscape that’s shaped his career.
There’s a clear ecological theme running through the album, from the song titles to its  all-encompassing ambience. The elusive effects and samples Dadras uses sound like they could be field recordings or purely digital creations: flutes mix with high-pitched chirps, and kick drums blend with the creaking of trees. His compositional approach resembles an evolutionary process— on tracks like “Bird Strike” and “Eucalyptus,” he takes the sound of wildlife and organizes it into the rhythms of human life.
Holy Wind isn’t strictly a dance record. The percussion is varied, and when Dadras slows down the tempo, his compositions mutate into darker and more haunting territory. The brightness of the album’s first half recedes into the foliage as you descend further into it; “Jungle Sweat” is a torrent of drones, rumbles, and wails over an almost-military drumline.
The natural and the digital come together on tracks like “Labyrinth,” blending 808 cowbells and inscrutable vocal fragments. Electronic bleeps and bloops dissolve into the hum of nature. On “Pyrrhic,” a lower BPM, dancehall-like beat is paired with a clipped and compressed vocal sample, as cascading synthesizers roll in like the tide. “Sloth” and “Bird Strike” are experimental and strange, but sound much closer to hip-hop beats, evidence of Dadras’ fluidity and flexibility.
There are occasionally clearer samples of the human voice — a segment of John Lurie’s surreal and underrated travel program Fishing With John on “Fishing,” a snatch of a Charlie Brown special on “Bottle Princess,” what sounds like a nature documentary on “For the Frogs.” But mostly Holy Wind is guided less by a human touch and more the world around it. Pulling from our recollections and imaginations of nature, Dadras is able to conjure a vivid environment that’s palpable and felt even inside city limits.

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Magic Circle's members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, but they make traditional metal with a deceptively useful spunk. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses.

Journey Blind

There's little better than the mixture of punk speed and metal riffs. Punk tempo supplies the adrenaline injection that metal's compositional superiority clearly needs. Massachusetts' Magic Circle are a variation on this principle: its members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, such as Mind Eraser, the Rival Mob, Innumerable Forms, and Doomriders, and they make traditional metal with a deceptively youthful spunk. Even as most of its members were known figures in their home state, Magic Circle's debut still came out of nowhere in a sense: who knew they were capable of this? Their second record, Journey Blind, doesn't have the mystique of the first, but it makes up by being more assertive.
With its faster rhythms paying homage to that nook when NWOBHM was picking up but thrash hadn't quite emerged, the lead-off title track shows the influence of Stone Dagger, which features bassist Justin DeTore, vocalist Brendan Radigan, and guitarist Chris Corry, bleeding into Magic Circle. Don't get fooled by the Mellotron intro and think this will be a prog effort. Corry, along with Dan Ducas, turn every melody and lead into a hesher motivational speech. "The Damned Man" takes the majesty of the title track and gives it a more proto-thrash, biker-like thrust. Radigan is the ideal vocalist for this material, going in for maximum horn-raising wailing while maintaining a tough edge in most of the verses.
Another spirit that Magic Circle absorb, albeit not as obvious, is that of early Pentagram. Radigan's vocal range is greater than that of Bobby Liebling's, but he is able to convey darkness with a light of hope shining through, like Liebling before he descended into the path that's been covered to death elsewhere already. "Ghost of the Southern Front" is where the Pentagram influence really emerges, with Corry and Ducas adding a macabre boogie to their riffing. Their ending solos have that purgatorial feeling of Pentagram's "Death Row", perfect for looping. Closer "Antedivullan" begins with a softer passage not unlike Black Sabbath's "After Forever", and when they rage into their standard battle charge, the song's placements gives it a do-or-die urgency. Much like Metallica's "Damage Inc.", it's a choice anthem for going down swinging.
Magic Circle belong to a special group of new traditionalist bands alongside High Spirits, Crypt Sermon, Ranger, Iron Age, and (on the more progressive, much weirder end) VHÖL. All of these bands wear their influences on their battle jackets while bringing a real hunger to the table. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses. Hardcore kids can do something with more complicated structures too, and can draw the same sense of purpose that metal has been excellent in instilling for decades.


The Dipset capo wins not by breaking new ground but by alternating between trying existing trends and throwing back to the sounds of his past.

Jim Jones: Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends

Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends

Since the last Dipset album flopped in 2018, no member has been more culturally visible than Jim Jones. Every day, he tends to his online following (fun fact: Jones has 10 times more Twitter followers than one Cameron Giles). In the past two years, Jones has opened a virtual music studio and sought the role of hip-hop tech tycoon by launching his own cryptocurrency. He’s maintained a respectable recording schedule, too, including his solo project El Capo and a full-length collaboration with producer Harry Fraud. Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends spans 79 minutes and features an army of rappers, with Jones assuming the role of a veteran, inviting disciples to show him what they’ve got.
To be fair, the title won’t get past many fact-checkers. Jones hasn’t been part of any musical trendsetting since the Diplomats turned Harlem into their own slick-talking, flashy paradise some 20-plus years ago. As for DJ Drama, his approach hasn’t changed much since he was personally selling mixtapes for five dollars a pop. Drama is entitled to enjoy the attention bump he got from Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, but the addition of those legendary adlibs was an exercise in nostalgia. So don’t expect the cultural fabric to be altered by this project. In fact, Jones wins not by breaking new ground but by alternating between trying existing trends and throwing back to the sounds of his past.
Like the best Gangsta Grillz tapes, there’s no overarching theme, just Jones behind a minigun, firing off 200 ideas a minute, hoping more hit the target than not. Of course, going with youth comes with the risk that you’ll become the rapping personification of a “How you doing fellow kids?” gif. There’s “Crunk Muzik,” which appropriates lyrics from an old Dipset song of the same name that more legitimately qualified as crunk music. Fivio Foreign is a solid recruit to lead off a Brooklyn drill standard, but Jones lacks surefootedness over the murky beat, simplifying his cadences down to an underwhelming bare-bones flow: “Bang bang, bang bang/Hooligan, gang gang.” Much better is “Militant,” which combines drill’s thumping 808s and shadowy basslines with a sample of reggae classic “World a Music” as Jones and rising New York co-stars Connie Diiamond and Rah Swish interweave their bars fluidly. The most disappointing collaboration is with the Migos on the title track. Jones’ verse is alright, but the song is built around a generic tooting keyboard riff that should sound triumphant but instead drags the record into the mud.
Not surprisingly, most of the best stuff on the album throws back to the 2000s. “That Gangsta Grillz feels like it’s ’06. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like,” Drama shouts on “Ven Aquí,” its Middle Eastern flavors evoking classic Neptunes and Timbaland productions. “Record Me Baby” essentially resurrects the Neptunes’ P. Diddy and Lenny Kravitz collaboration “Show Me Your Soul.” And if the stripped-down funk of the excellent “Shots” doesn’t signal its influences strongly enough, it even includes Pharrell’s trademark four-count intro. With its tightly wound sample and snare drums, “Different Ways” is the closest thing to a Dipset tune the tape has to offer and draws attention to the fact that despite a sea of guests, the presence of Cam’ron and Juelz Santana would have been the icing on this decadent cake.
And what of Dipset’s third-best rapper? Jones has never been a particularly singular performer, but when he keeps his flow at a comfortable level, he retains that swaggering confidence that made him such a fine foil to Cam and Juelz. He’s reliable with his concepts, too: you get shameless boasting, sleazy narratives, uptown recollections, and bizarre humor. “Fit Lit (Betty White)” pays tribute to the beloved icon in the best way Jones knows how: by claiming he went out on the day she died and bought a Porsche in her honor.
A three-song run over the tape’s second half provides a gripping dichotomy. “Batman” and “Vamps” use fantastical imagery: Jones springing from a dungeon like he’s been “looking for Bane” to sell crack by the g-pack; men turned to monsters in prison cells, unleashed to skulk late-night New York streets. Balancing the unreal feel of those songs is the nostalgic “Barz.” Jones and Dave East pass the mic back and forth, recalling “days in the hood” listening to the Purple Tape, watching Family Matters, and hating that they needed food stamps. The combination of Jones attempting to tap into the zeitgeist and reveling in his veteran status can make for some messy moments, but the fusion of past and present never feels contrived. He comes across not like a guy chasing relevancy but a hip-hop polymath with a curiosity for new forms. The result is wildly entertaining.

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On their collaborative EP, the UK electronic duo provides a lush and polished bed of sound for Iggy Pop to grouse about the state of the world.

Underworld / Iggy Pop: Teatime Dub Encounters EP

Teatime Dub Encounters EP

Iggy’s got a few complaints: The world’s changing, nothing’s fun anymore, he hardly has any friends and the ones he does have are a pain, the music industry is a drag, his reputation isn’t what it used to be. Oh, and you can’t smoke on flights. On an EP filled with these kinds of lamentations, one couplet neatly epitomizes his gripe: “It’s getting harder to be free/It’s getting so much harder to be me.” The first line might be on the money, but the second reduces his message to one of solipsistic whining.
Pop belongs to a tiny club—alongside Keith Richards, George Clinton, and perhaps no one else—of the hard-living, perma-cool rock-icon survivor whose lives are marked by a steel imperviousness to consequences. Pop’s work writhed and spasmed to historic effect while he remained, apparently, unbreakable. As the frontman of the Stooges, he set the high-water mark for punk intensity. As a solo artist, he narrated the tumultuous dreamlife of a junkie street urchin who was also a star. Now, teamed up with UK electronic duo Underworld on Teatime Dub Encounters, he sounds like something else entirely: a resentful baby boomer grumbling about the state of the world.
The collaboration came about via a bit of sabotage in 2017: With the release of Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting looming, Underworld began to envision their own sequel. After all, their anthem “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” highlighted the iconic soundtrack to the original film (the start of the disc was Iggy’s 1977 groover “Lust for Life”). A plan was hatched to get Pop to a meeting at a hotel and surprise him, upon arrival, with a fully functioning studio and a batch of tracks ready for vocal overdubs. The fruits of this impromptu session sound exactly as you might expect. Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.
The pairing itself is a canny one. Iggy’s always had a pop edge that balanced out his feral persona, and Underworld frequently added doses of weirdness to their crossover electronica. In the Venn diagram of the two groups, there’s an overlap that’s worth exploring and might even bear fruit. So it’s unfortunate that Iggy, now 71, is in such a half-baked and aggravating form. His voice has the leathery gravitas to pull off more reflective moods while still being elastic enough to go for a full frontal attack.
But he needs better lyrics than these. On “Bells & Circles,” he bemoans an uptightness encroaching on his daily life.

If I had wings I wouldn’t do anything beautiful or transcendent
No! I’d get my finger into everything I wanted
I’d do all the beautiful things
Those things you can’t do
Because nobody wants you to be able to do the things that make you feel good

The man dated Nico, made it out the other side of a heroin addiction, collaborated with Bowie, helped to invent modern rock, and hasn’t worked a day job since the ’60s—who exactly is victimizing him? The revealing double use of “beautiful” suggests a worldview hopelessly skewed by entitlement. Later he bemoans a character named Johnny for getting a mortgage, thereby killing his inner child. At a time when the middle class is reaching its nadir and basic services like health care and education are cripplingly unaffordable for many Americans, stale critiques of a dated bourgeoisie are callously out of touch.
Die-hard followers of both artists may find something to love here, in the same way Star Wars fans devour hastily written, officially branded novels set in the same universe. Aging rockers might get a jolt of smug satisfaction from Iggy’s rants, but few will be genuinely thrilled. If Iggy were to dissect his pride more surgically, he could harness some genuinely moving work. But on Teatime, his reflections lack rigor and drift quickly into petty grievances.
Closer “Get Your Shirt” poses as advice to a younger generation of musicians on the perils of the music business. But it’s just a matter of time before the real thesis comes: “Wait for the music of the spheres/To move the stars/Into the right position/To reclaim my fortune/I want my shirt back!” Artists as varied as LCD Soundsystem and Drake have made riveting art exploring vanity and its pitfalls, and in the process gotten more than a few shirts. Will Iggy take us into his dark heart of vulnerability with the next line, reminding us why we should care about his fate? “Not a hair shirt!” he whines. “A fun fair shirt!” This type of flourish used to represent Pop ’s primal id, the one he spent his career turning into blistering art. But, as Freud said, “Where id is, there shall ego be,” and it takes a lot of ego to make a record as dull and demanding as Teatime.


Refining the sound of last year’s sprawling Spirit Counsel into more focused riffs and songs, By the Fire suggests a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental instincts and his desire to rock.

By the Fire

In the nine years since Sonic Youth played their final show, the members’ solo projects have taken various elements of the band’s sound and run with them. Whether with her noise duo Body/Head or the stylized future-punk of last year’s No Home Record, Kim Gordon has eagerly played the experimental jet-setter, while Lee Ranaldo has embraced his standing as Sonic Youth’s resident beatnik on his wistfully melodic and psychedelic solo outings. But for those fans who just want the jams to run free forevermore, we have an impressive string of albums from Thurston Moore that essentially amount to Sonic Youth on steroids, reimagining the group as the sort of fearsome, festival-rockin’ workhorse that could theoretically lay waste to crowds at both Bonnaroo and Unsound with equal aplomb.
Moore’s new record, By the Fire, features the same core engine (guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe) that powered his previous rock-oriented releases, 2014’s The Best Day and 2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness. It also brings back two contributors (Negativland electronics expert Jon Leidecker and drummer Jem Doulton) that helped produce the mammoth, 63-minute “Alice Moki Jayne” movement from last year’s 3xLP collection of improvised instrumentals, Spirit Counsel. But where Moore typically files his avant-garde excursions outside his official discography, By the Fire mirrors the typography and spartan cover design of Spirit Counsel, suggesting a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental and accessible sides. The relationship between the two releases is analogous to that of Sonic Youth’s 1998 epic A Thousand Leaves and the concurrent series of free-form EPs they released on their SYR imprint, elements of which were refined into proper songs on the former. (In fact, By the Fire’s opener, “Hashish,” is essentially a more sinewy revamp of A Thousand Leaves’ “Sunday.”) While By the Fire doesn’t explicitly reference Spirit Counsel in the same way, it provides a more concise distillation of the same methodology—i.e., using apocalyptic noise to achieve an ecstatic peace, while reminding us that the punks and the hippies were always on the same side.
Of course, in this case, “concise” is a relative term—By the Fire still runs as long as most feature films, hovering just below the 90-minute mark. But it’s a record that justifies and even demands the extra space to explore; Moore and co. take their sweet time to sculpt squalls into riffs and lure extended meditations into melodic focus, like a roving crosshair that finally locks on its target. Moore’s first verse on “Siren” doesn’t surface until we’re three-quarters of the way into its 12-minute runtime, but the song’s gorgeous circular guitar pattern, which imagines Television transplanted from the East Village to the West Coast, makes it easy to sit back and savor the journey. “Locomotives” is even longer—and a much more forbidding prospect, with its extended death-cult procession of dissonance—but it too blossoms into something wondrous. “We are here, we come in peace,” Moore gushes as the song hits its strut, confirming that noise isn’t a mere aesthetic device on By the Fire but a narrative one too, representing the dark forces in the world that can be extinguished by the radiance of positive energy.
Like its song-focused predecessors, By the Fire once again features lyrical contributions credited to Radieux Radio, a mysterious London-based poet whose online presence just so happens to be limited to name-drops in Moore-related press. But whether Radieux Radio is an actual muse or elaborate ruse (or both), their partnership has invested Moore’s work with a more passionate perspective that gives his shape-shifting songs a clear ideological throughline. Where Moore spent his preceding records drifting between the personal and the spiritual, By the Fire is more firmly rooted in the political, though not in an obvious, “Yeah the president sucks/He’s a war-pig fuck,” kinda way. Rather, its songs suggest that peace is not passivity, and love is not sentimentality—they’re powerful yet perpetually under-siege forces that must be defended at all times, especially now.
Moore and his group bring heavy artillery to the battlefield. Though he has made plenty of psychedelic music, “Cantaloupe” is the closest he’s ever gotten to the sludge of pure stoner rock, as he rewrites the Book of Genesis into a call to arms for electric warriors everywhere: “On the second day/We drew streaks/Of lightning on your Tele.” Where Moore and Sedwards’ lacerating squall provides the frontline offensive on “Breath,” the rhythm section drives the armada forward with motorik propulsion, with Googe keeping her bass set to “You Made Me Realise” levels of griminess. Even when Moore strips back to just guitar and bass on “Calligraphy,” the album’s energy level doesn’t waver; his tense, tactile strums judder with Velvets-esque verve.
By the Fire is evenly divided between double-digit excursions and more compact rock songs, but its emotional climax, “They Believe in Love (When They Look at You)” hovers somewhere in the middle, rendering the eternal struggle between good and evil as a seven-minute cage match. As Moore writes in the liners, it’s “obviously a love song,” but one that announces itself with a menacing backbeat, needling guitar pricks, and nauseating ray-gun squeals. Dressing up its terms of endearment in ominous clamor, the song evokes the classic Sonic Youth chiller “I Love Her All the Time,” updating its “she’s on my side” refrain for more perilous times: “Where do we go after long goodbyes/Heart torn up when we’re not side by side.” Rather than surrender to doom, Moore keeps fighting for the light, transforming the track into a love song for love itself: “It's a profound wonder,” he sings, “a revolution, a truth!” At a time when the politics of hate sometimes feel like they are pushing the world to its breaking point, By the Fire posits that love constitutes its own act of radicalism.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The composer’s electronic music dates back to the 1950s yet still sounds radical today. This five-disc box set illustrates the spirit of possibility animating even his most forbidding pieces.

Electroacoustic Works

As a composer, Iannis Xenakis had a fraught relationship with emotion. Blame childhood trauma: His mother died when he was five, and the memories tied up with the Romani folk songs he heard as a boy were too much to bear. As an adult he would burst into tears upon hearing sentimental melodies, then begrudge his own response: “Music shouldn’t be listened to in this way,” he would admonish himself. He viewed such mawkish reactions as a response to “subjective coloring”: the frames of reference that alter music’s effect on each person, be it their cultural upbringing or the century in which they lived. He wanted timelessness, universality. “Something that remains in the past,” he once declared, “is dead.”
For the late Greek-French artist, the beauty he sought in art couldn’t be attained via religion, emotion, nor tradition. His path to understanding this was arduous. After his mother’s death, he was sent to boarding school on the Greek island Spetses. He was miserable, bullied by classmates and considered stupid, so in his loneliness he turned to books, learning about astronomy. At 16 he moved to Athens for bigger dreams, eager to attend the Polytechnic School. He loved math and physics so prepared for the entrance exam, but also studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration under the composer Aristotle Koundourov; these ostensibly disparate fields were always of simultaneous interest. Xenakis’ innovative compositions, ranging from chamber works to computer music, would be based on game theory, apply stochastic processes, and look to inspiration from concepts such as the kinetic molecular theory.
The day Xenakis learned of his passing test result, the university closed: Italian forces had invaded the country, prompting him to join the Greek Resistance in 1941 and then the Communist Party. While he obtained a civil engineering degree in 1947, he could no longer stay in Greece—his country’s government was sending Communists to concentration camps. The ideals Xenakis fought for had been, in his words, “senselessly, hopelessly defeated.” He relocated to France, but doing so became a tremendous source of guilt—some of his friends who stayed behind were imprisoned, and others died—and felt an excruciating need to do something important with his life. He could never be content with heartstring-tugging ditties; at the very least, his music needed to capture the entire sweep of the cosmos.
Listening to the five-disc box set Electroacoustic Works, it’s clear that Xenakis succeeded. These 13 compositions date from between 1957 and 1994 but could easily shock audiences today—their sonorities are strange for the unacquainted and immensely energized compared to similar works today. (There are discrepancies in the dating of Xenakis’ pieces; Bandcamp and the compilation’s liner notes offer competing years. The dates in this review come from Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, by Bálint András Varga.) Xenakis wasn’t interested in mere provocation, though; he wanted a listener to “los[e] his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.” In other words: ekstasis. Take Orient-Occident (1960), a two-channel tape-music piece that soundtracked Enrico Fulchignoni’s short film of the same name. As sonic accompaniment, the work is diluted by the images and voiceover, but heard alone, its intensity is palpable. Fulchignoni’s project compared art from different countries and centuries; Xenakis’ piece makes more elusive connections. There are meditative drones and bowed strings, animal roars and percussive bursts, all manipulated in nuanced fashion. Despite its straightforward structure, Orient-Occident uses juxtapositions to help these sounds transcend specific cultures and eras; every noise extends beyond easy representation, and invites listeners to dig deeper.
In France, Xenakis found a job at Le Corbusier’s architecture studio, working his way from computation to advising to design. All his free time, though, was devoted to music. His first masterpiece came with Metastasis (1953-1954), an orchestral work for 61 players. Though not included on Electroacoustic Works, for obvious reasons, it’s a crucial inflection point in Xenakis’ career, as it inspired his contributions to the Philips Pavilion; Xenakis saw a relationship between the composition’s striking glissandi and the building’s hyperbolic-paraboloid shells. Xenakis had been motivated; he found a way to bridge art and science at an impressively large scale. Now, he had the experience and vision to pursue what he called polytopes—site-specific multimedia works that utilized light, sound, and architecture.
One such example took place in the ruins of Mycenae, a Bronze Age acropolis. Mycenae Alpha (1978), the audio component for the presentation, has the ferocity of a power saw piercing your skull, though it occasionally rests on silence and simpler tones. Its most breathtaking moment is subtle: After six minutes of whirlwinding noise, electronic blips arrive and nearly vaporize, their ascending melody dragging you into the ether. The audio was the first of his completely digital pieces, produced by a computer music system he devised called Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC). It requires an electromagnetic ballpoint pen for drawing compositions onto a tablet, the shapes then translated into digital waveforms. In the score, those escalating notes look like a plain curved line; the conversion from graphic notation to sound is an uncanny marvel.
Regarding his orchestral work, Xenakis described brass and string sections as being “controlled like clouds” or herded like animals, and UPIC was another way for Xenakis to take command of his materials. This was, after all, the same person who stated, “This is my definition of an artist, or of a man: to control.” With lights and ritualistic performances, his Mycenae polytope featured reenactments of Greek mythology. Xenakis had felt he was born two millennia too late, but he knew that music and the natural sciences—for him, the links between past and present—were worthy of lifelong devotion. As such, this installation served as a meditation on his own understanding of Greece. Xenakis hadn’t been back to the country in decades, so here was a recollection of his experiences there: constant unrest and catastrophic violence.
The war’s most consequential impact on Xenakis happened in 1945: The shell of a British M4 Sherman tank left his left eye blinded, his cheekbone destroyed, and his hearing irreparably damaged. “I don’t live in reality,” he explained years later. “Because of my weakened senses I can’t immediately grasp the surrounding world.” One can imagine his larger works as being self-created worlds unto themselves, the kind that could transport Xenakis into a zone of heightened perception. Persepolis (1971) is a 55-minute, 8-track tape-music piece that was part of a massive polytope involving laser beams, 59 loudspeakers, and groups of children carrying torches. The music is incredibly dense: There are clarinets and timpani rolls, ceramic windchimes and string harmonics. It’s monolithic and inescapable, channeling the apocalyptic terror of a locust swarm—even the composition’s initial moments sound like petrified screeching. One can acclimate to the noise, but its rapturous churn maintains an atmosphere of forlorn dread, like trudging aimlessly through a dust storm.
Xenakis followed Persepolis with a polytope in Paris, a city where many young people considered him a lodestar. Restive French students had previously invoked his name in demonstrations, declaring “Xenakis not Gounod”—a reference to Charles Gounod, a 19th century French composer whose influential works, such as his Faust and Roméo et Juliette operas, they deemed hopelessly fusty. Xenakis’ concerts would sell out and zealous fans would defy security guards to witness his radical art, one they felt channeled a welcome freedom from tradition and nationalism; to them, his work telegraphed crises ensnaring the entire world. Polytope de Cluny (1972), more sparse than Persepolis but equally as charged, was housed in the historical thermal baths of its namesake. Xenakis used lasers and flashbulbs, but also 400 mirrors whose changing orientations could allow for evocative interplay between the densities of each aural and visual element. The 8-track tape contained seven tracks with music and one with 43,200,000 binary commands to control his different tools. Just as lasers, largely associated with weaponry at the time, held new meaning and form in this polytope and ancient site, Cluny’s abrasive strings and whimsical mbira felt strangely alien.
The most awe-inspiring composition on Electroacoustic Works is La Légende d’Eer (1977), a 46-minute epic whose title draws from Plato’s Republic. It begins with an alternation of high-pitched tones and silence, the former dotting the piece in a delightfully speckled array. As it progresses, it offers a suggestion of the universe being birthed, with electronics circling the listener and expanding outwards. Much credit should be given to sound engineer Martin Wurmnest and mastering engineer Rashad Becker, whose work across the box set, and especially on this track, captures crucial dynamic range surpassing that of older editions—one senses real gravitational pull here. There are incredible bursts of noise and bubbles of synthesized murk, and the atmosphere Xenakis conjures is glorious. Xenakis, who “found God” at 13 but was a staunch atheist later on, once said that art could “lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.” If there’s any track in his oeuvre that’ll convert non-believers, it’s La Légende d’Eer.
It’s humbling to hear Electroacoustic Music because Xenakis’ music is never about simple novelty; these pieces instill hope in unimagined possibility. Such arresting inventiveness is there in his earliest tape-music experiments: Diamorphoses (1957) crafts haunted soundscapes out of trains, a jet engine, and an earthquake, whereas Concret PH (1958) transforms smoldering charcoal into playful, metallic plinks. Even his later electroacoustic pieces show no signs of complacency: The UPIC composition Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède (1989) has one passage that sounds like hazy, crackled techno, while Gendy 3 (1991) and S.709 (1994) are the strikingly different products of dynamic stochastic synthesis. Whatever Xenakis was attempting, it was out of insatiable desire for the next step, the highest possible height. When asked if he felt closeness to his past art, he responded, “I try to avoid any strong emotional ties with older works because I need to concentrate all my energies on the one being written.” He added, “Otherwise I’d be imitating myself.” Xenakis didn’t allow himself to be stuck in the past—neither his artistic triumphs nor his many tragedies. That’s why, even decades after his death, his music lives on.


The Numero Group’s latest installment in the Eccentric Soul series paints a vivid portrait of the Norfolk sound and its unsung influence.

Various Artists: Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label

The Shiptown Label

For a brief moment in the mid-20th century, Norfolk, Virginia was the center of a musical universe led by Noah Biggs. The freewheeling wanderer originally came to the city at the height of the Great Depression in search of a job in the shipping industry, and eventually found work as a longshoreman with one of the area’s thriving shipyards. With a passion for gambling that fueled his interest in entrepreneurship, Biggs placed his bets on the record industry, incidentally starting one of the few great labels to ever emerge from the area. Shiptown Records was Norfolk’s answer to Motown, a commercial outlet for the loose network of soul and R&B musicians who made a living performing in the area’s nightclubs. A new compilation from the Numero Group, Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label, offers a window into the imprint and into the era’s strange and exciting landscape, showcasing its importance without overspeaking on the music’s behalf.
Shiptown established an image and brand identity for the “Norfolk Sound,” a regional style of soul music that supposedly inspired the Beatles and found new life as part of England’s “Northern Soul” movement. The label also benefited from the steady influx of people (and capital) moving through the city during the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to its booming shipyards and navy base. Frank Guida, a local record executive who owned the shop and studio where much of the “Norfolk Sound” was first recorded, helped build out the infrastructure of the scene through a successful suite of labels and artists, like vocalist Gary “U.S.” Bonds, who released a handful of singles that spent multiple weeks on the Billboard charts. There was also a certain continuity between the sounds of coastal Virginia and other Black diasporas abroad, as acts like Jimmy Soul borrowed ideas from the calypso records coming to Norfolk from the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the saxophonist Gene Barge’s style seemed to channel the influence of the big band ensembles present throughout his time in the U.S. military, providing backing instrumentation for an entire roster of musicians beyond Shiptown, on labels including Chess and Stax Records. Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label brings these influences together, connecting the spirit of the region with the broader sounds of the 1960s.
Ida Sands, a vocalist and member of the Soul Duo and the Idets, became one of Shiptown’s biggest stars. Her solo track “Start All Over Again” appears about halfway through this compilation, reverberating like a triumphant firecracker explosion from the golden age of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. With brash horns, thick guitars, and a fuzzy, lo-fi warmth, the 1969 single feels like a clear standout, the kind of perfect pop single that crate-diggers spend their entire lives looking for—even as it’s conspicuously buried by the album’s sequencing.
Sands eventually married founder Noah Biggs, pushing her group the Idets closer to the label. Her bandmate Barbara Stant would become another breakout star for Shiptown, as well as its most prolific recording artist. With their support, Stant released a variety of singles, including “Baby I Love You/I'm Going to Outfit You Baby,” “My Mind Holds onto Yesterday,” and “Unsatisfied Woman,” all of which appear on this compilation. The latter is a sparse, downtempo standout with all of the pain and heartbreak of an Etta James song. Over soft guitar tones, Wurlitzer chords, and steady drums, Stant sings about the humiliation and debasement of investing time and energy in a relationship that’s fated to fall apart. It’s an agonizing entry into a catalog of inarguably sublime breakup songs, one that transcends regional and temporal boundaries to tap into something timeless.
The entire album is filled with similar moments of transcendence, where passion, grief, and joy become more than the sum of their circumstances. With its warm, slightly detuned horns, Wilson Williams’ “I Got a Lot to be Thankful For” is glorious and sure to be sampled by rappers for years to come. For all the incredible blogs, websites, documentaries, and local archives dedicated to preserving the depth of this historical period, nothing compares to musical moments like these.
To listen to the compilation is to bear witness to just how circumstantial the canonical histories of Motown, Stax, Chess, and other mid-century soul labels really are, despite the obvious quality of their catalogs. Shiptown will never be Motown, but it feels equally representative of that particular time and environment in pop music and Virginia, in part because it echoes Motown’s orientation to the political and economic climate of the 1960s. By welcoming listeners into the formation of a minor history—with all of its theaters, streets, neighborhoods, and diasporic influence—Numero gives us something more than the immediate satisfaction of even the best recorded music. It provides a snapshot of unfinished, imprecise histories for an audience eager to participate in the archival process.


A mosaic of rhythmic snippets and melodic scribbles, most averaging a minute or less, this LP is in the tradition of the single-artist album as DJ set.

Prefuse 73: Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian

Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian

Guillermo Scott Herren has become a model of 21st-century post-techno productivity, if not necessarily consistency. Qualitatively, that is; there are certainly audible links between and within each of Herren's not-quite-disparate endeavors. Despite being most identified with genres known for their rhythmic punch (hip-hop) and textural layering (glitch electronica), the Prefuse 73 discography is united by Herren's skill with melody, the warm glue binding his often ultra-fractured rhythm and noise together. It's the comforting low-end hum of fusion-era organs, or the bright synth line guiding listeners through his gloriously disorienting vocal and percussion edits.
And no Prefuse album has ever felt so thoroughly edited than the new Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian. An hour-ish mosaic of rhythmic snippets and melodic scribbles, most averaging a minute or less, Ampexian is in the tradition of the single-artist album as delirious self-constructed DJ set, many tracks combined into one flowing composition to discourage shuffle function tomfoolery. Even Prefuse's 2001 debut, the indelible Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, featured more sketches than songs, but Ampexian is built from stacked fragments of boom-bap and digital ambiance that would bounce right past your half-conscious ear when removed from their context, rather than two-minute interludes slid between traditional three- or four-minute grooves.
So, sure, you could sieve the nerve-jangling music-box miniature "No Lights Still Rock" for some personal playlist, but it's designed (presumably) to follow "Simple Loop Choir", an ultra-chill moment in love. Does this tapestry aesthetic pay off? Yes and no. "No Lights Still Rock", annoying in that overly antic way common to several generations of Warp Records artists, is a bomb dropped to disrupt the listener's reverie, but it comes off as an irritating intrusion rather than a mood-altering segue. That's obviously a problem when the goal is end-to-end enjoyment, with your fingers a comfortable distance from the skip button.
Unless you're making outright background music-- and Ampexian is too restless for that designation-- lack of flow is a cardinal sin when constructing an album that asks to be played first minute to last, especially in an era of endless easy distractions. And perhaps non-fans used to mixing and matching MP3s will suffer Herren's occasional sequencing missteps for the moments when that aforementioned melodic instinct makes him shoot for swoon-worthiness over laptop shock-and-awe. It's hard to imagine any Prefuse project fully abandoning agitation, the thrill of Herren's digital slicing and dicing. But the highlights of Ampexian suggest that if he did want to use the moniker for easier listening, the results would genuinely beguile, rather than demand your full attention and hope for the best.


Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and the story of its creation sounds like a "Portlandia" synopsis. Guests include three-fourths of Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus.

Break Line the Musical

Over the last five years, a group of Brooklyn musicians got together and recorded songs from a planned musical about a doomed interracial romance in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, drawing inspiration from an old folk song taught to children in Quaker schools in the 1950s. No, that’s not a summary of a special East Coast episode of “Portlandia”—this actually happened. Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and pianist Maxwell Kardon, and work on the project began a decade ago when they were fiddling around with a guitar and a banjo on a front porch in Philadelphia. They spent the next five years sporadically working on the songs and began putting them to tape in 2008; around that time, details of the project emerged, including the potential involvement of a gospel choir and plans to bring the production to the stage. The latter hasn’t happened yet, and if the liner notes for this recording are to be believed, the former never happened at all; regardless, Wilder and Kardon’s sense of ambition is inherent.
Considering Wilder’s main gig, the mere existence of Break Line makes some sense. Yeasayer’s buzz-generating 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals leaned hard on proggy mysticism, while the melted pop structures of Odd Blood from 2010 and Fragrant World from 2012 exuded a try-anything-once sense of adventurousness. While Fragrant World was a dismaying, grayed mix of muddy electronics and moody vocals that smacked of a band getting lost in their own heads, the initially divisive Odd Blood has aged better, its high points an intriguing realization of the psychedelic-pop promise some of their peers once held. Even at their lowest, Yeasayer have never sounded “normal,” and it’s that relative weirdness that has, for the time being, drawn the curious towards the band and their associated projects.
In a recent interview with The T Magazine, Wilder claims the pair looked to Celine Dion and music from the ‘70s for creative inspiration for this project. But despite those claims and his own pedigree as a moderately odd songwriter, the most surprising thing about Break Line is how ordinary the project sounds. These 11 songs are almost disarmingly straightforward and simplistic, adhering to the platitudes and rigid structures of a high school musical. From the harmonica that kicks off “Coal Into Diamonds”, featuring vocals from Aku Orraca-Tetteh of synth-proggers Dragons of Zynth, it’s apparent that Wilder and Kardon weren’t interested in taking risks. But even after discarding any expectations brought to the table while approaching the project, Break Line is as an exceptionally dull collection of songs, with flickers of hammy theatricality weighed down by leaden arrangements that sound boring even by the standards set by modern self-important faux-indie music.
Heard as an album, the mid-tempo bombast and insufferable balladry of Break Line coalesces into flavorless mush, so maybe it’s better to approach it as a musical with a cohesive narrative. But it's no better on that level. Beyond the details already provided in the lead-up to the album’s release, few lyrics suggest a narrative—Suckers’ Quinn Walker plaintively singing about blowing up coal mines over the folksy shuffle of “They’re Stealing Our Coal”, the ruminations on strikebreaking and lynching uttered by that same band’s Austin Fisher over the colorless plod of “Better to Die”. But even with a lyric sheet on hand, it’s impossible to understand what, exactly, Break Line is about.
Whatever sense of story exists comes from the rotating cast of vocalists: In addition to Walker, Fisher, Kardon, and Wilder, there’s Yeasayer co-lead singer Chris Keating, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus, among others. (MGMT's James Richardson and Delicate Steve contribute instrumentally, but you can’t hear either in the music’s beige Americana.) With the exception of Wilder, who is painfully awkward on “Wedding Day”, none of these vocalists embarrass themselves. Honus Honus, in particular, has never sounded more at home than he does barking about “bombs in the mineshaft” over the coffee-shop blues of “It Doesn’t Seem Right”, a pairing so hilariously on-the-nose it scans as unintentional comedy.
The most notable contributors to Break Line are Yeasayer themselves. Three-quarters of the band’s current lineup pitches in, along with former member Jason Trammell. And while it’d be unfair to think of this record as the proper follow-up to Fragrant World, Wilder’s recent claims that the band will be taking a more organic approach to their next album is, in the face of this collection’s plain-faced blahs, disheartening. For now, though, Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one.


Recorded in Memphis before lockdown, the Mountain Goats’ second album of 2020 is lush and loose, full of stories about personal fulfillment, in whatever form it takes.

Getting Into Knives

The Mountain Goats used to be an acquired taste. Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century indie rock, they were too esoteric for most, the vocals too sharp, the emotions too raw. But that edge has dulled naturally over the years, as songwriter John Darnielle retired his old boombox for a full band. It was a surprise, then, when Darnielle made a return to his home-recording roots earlier this year with his quarantine album Songs for Pierre Chuvin. Yet where that record captured The Mountain Goats as they’ll always exist in the popular imagination—an unadorned songwriter baring his soul—the second Mountain Goats album of 2020, Getting Into Knives, documents them as they really are: a tasteful ensemble that plays with the kind of easy grace that can only come from years of seasoning on the road.
As they’ve dialed down their eccentricities, their sound has grown more approachable. Darnielle, a musician once indifferent to the notion of fidelity, has gradually become a master of it, and even his frayed vocals have been smoothed out. He’s still got a voice like Miracle Whip, with a tang that’s always going to turn some people off, but he’s learned how to sub it into just about any recipe. And over the last several years in particular, he’s relished the freedom that’s given him to branch out.
Getting Into Knives is the full-on Memphis record the group’s increasingly lavish albums have been foreshadowing for some time now. Recorded just weeks before March’s lockdown at Memphis’s Sam Phillips Recording, an old Elvis hangout that’s hosted Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, it’s the band’s loosest LP by some distance. Opener “Corsican Mastiff Stride” nods to the studio’s heritage with a rockabilly jaunt, full of brushed drums and shimmying guitars, while bluesy horns punch up “Get Famous.” Session players deftly color every track, most notably Hi Records organist Charles Hodges, so instrumental to Al Green’s heyday records, whose swooping Hammond organ tops “Tidal Wave” and “Harbor Me” like pats of melting butter.
Unlike previous Mountain Goats albums about underground wrestlers, aging goths or fantasy worlds, Knives doesn’t have a high concept, but it’s loosely bound by Darnielle’s stories about the pursuit of personal fulfillment, whatever form it may take. On “Corsican Mastiff Stride,” it’s an adventure-seeker courting death at sea, comforted by the companionship of his loyal dog. On the rocker “Rat Queen,” it's the image of vermin scoring big in a fast-food dumpster. And on “Picture of My Dress,” a story spun from a tweet by poet Maggie Smith, it's a liberated bride basking in the open road. In typical Darnielleian detail, she pauses in a truck-stop Burger King bathroom to take notice of an Aerosmith song (“Mr. Steven Tyler is on the overhead speakers/He doesn’t want to miss a thing.”)
Even Getting Into Knives’ title track, while ostensibly a revenge story, is framed as an account of someone discovering a new hobby. “I sought wisdom from the sages,” Darnielle sings, “Consulted with master tacticians/Met up with some guys who wouldn’t tell me their last names/They specialized in non-conventional munitions.” As a songwriter, Darnielle’s key rule is never to judge, only to sympathize.
That title track caps offs a mellow, low-key final stretch that closes the record not with a bang but a contented sigh. Darnielle’s best songs stick like parables, leaving behind lasting images both poetic and mundane. Most of these songs don’t quite land like that; for all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With unexpected musical contrasts that evoke a constant sense of uncertainty, composer Jung Jae-il’s score hints at what lies beneath the characters’ superficial appearances.

Jung Jae-il: Parasite: Original Motion Picture Score

Parasite: Original Motion Picture Score

Sunlight streaks into a low beige room, where rumpled socks hang from the ceiling as Kim Ki-woo learns that his family’s free WiFi hookup has been locked with a password. Bouncy pianos and bells lend a playful air to the discovery. This is our first taste of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a stark, genre-blending satirical film that paints a harrowing picture of class divide through the impoverished Kim family’s attempt to infiltrate a wealthy household. Composer Jung Jae-il’s score strikes a delicate balance between gentleness and severity, creating unexpected musical contrasts that evoke a constant sense of uncertainty.
Jung previously scored Bong’s 2017 drama Okja, providing a bustling backdrop to the story of a girl’s quest to save her beloved companion animal from the clutches of a greedy corporation. Both films spotlight the inequities of capitalism, but with the Parasite soundtrack, Jung emphasizes disparate styles. As the film’s chaotic trajectory gets underway, the sense of hope from “Opening” soon dwindles. Juxtaposing exultant orchestral passages with gloomy piano ballads and rich melodies with spine-tingling violin glissandi, Jung uses sinister sounds to hint at what lies beneath the characters’ superficial appearances. As the score proceeds from lighthearted early pieces like “Mr. Yoon and Park” to the horror-movie pandemonium of “The Hellgate,” sly humor gives way to discord.
The early stretches of the score feel too sparse without their accompanying visuals, more texture than melody. “Conciliation I” lacks forward motion; the heavy pizzicato of “Plum Juice” serves little dramatic purpose on its own. But with “The Belt of Faith,” a lavish suite that alternates between grand orchestral statements and solos, the score finds its voice. A baroque-sounding theme recalls Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, building towards a melodramatic climax. Immediately the score shifts to a moody piano ballad, “Moon Gwang Left,” sinking back into a darker reality.
Contrasting styles inch into closer proximity as catastrophe looms. “The Frontal Lobe of Ki Taek” first appears placid, but its ominous blend of piano and strings shivers with nervous energy. “It Is Sunday Morning” presents a nostalgic vocal melody with a powerful sense of irony, until strings enter with alarming dissonance. With “Blood and Sword,” the music at last succumbs to fear. A pained cello melody echoes over a drone, while strings accompany with searing tone clusters reminiscent of Penderecki and prickling col legno as the Kim family meets tragedy.
As the credits roll, we get one final glimpse into the daily life of Ki-woo. On “Soju One Glass,” actor Choi Woo-shik sings lyrics—written by Bong—that describe his character’s daily struggle. Cheery acoustic strums and an arena-ready electric guitar solo lighten the mood as he describes his unfortunate circumstances. It could be considered a musical mismatch—but it’s merely one final reminder of the way relentless positivity has a tendency of giving way to blunt reality. Like the plot of Bong’s film, the twists and turns of Jung’s score turn out to be circular path back to an uncannily familiar place.

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Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren is a devoted student of NYC '90s rap, and on his latest, he pitches himself as a veteran crime boss too deep in the game to change his ways.

Piatto D'Oro

New York’s golden-age gods loom over many of the city’s current crop of emcees—from Joey Bada$$’s dusty boom-bap, to Ka’s bitter-cold drug slinging narratives–but Meyhem Lauren is among the most fiercely dedicated students. Operating in an outline sketched out by Martin Scorsese and Reasonable Doubt, the Queens heavyweight pitches himself as a veteran crime boss too deep in the game to change his ways, too flush from the life to take a step back.
Sticking to this trusted methodology, Lauren has struggled to separate himself from the pack. The wheezy-voiced rapper often deploys a steady-paced flow that rumbles into view like a packed SUV, his style landing somewhere between NYC legends Raekwon and Big Pun, without the former’s eye for detail or latter’s technical complexity. When Meyhem overexerts himself, he sounds like the air can’t back into his lungs fast enough; in his best moments, his gruff vocals hit hard and effectively. He’ll rap blood-soaked confessions with the eerie calm of a guy who isn’t kidding, and his sex stories are cooed like he’s still dragging on that first post-coital cigarette.
His latest offering Piatto D’oro is derivative as hell, but it’s still fun to throw on. The sturdy, familiar beats and the no-nonsense hooks—like on the sidewalk-smashing "Deep Cover" homage "Badmon Ting" and shimmering street anthem "Elevation"—mostly stick. It’s old school gangster rap appropriation for those who can’t get enough of the familiar stuff.
"Money in My Pocket" lays out Meyhem’s manifesto: "Lunch at Don Pepe’s, life in rap essays/Top grain leather, we tryna enjoy decades." Like his frequent collaborator Action Bronson, Meyhem raps about food a whole lot, bragging about eating crab meat "right out the shell" on the soul sample-swaddled "Garlic and Oil" and his 4am steam fish take-out runs on the tough drums of "Vintage." In Mey’s world, the quality on your cuisine is the ultimate status barometer.
Though there’s surface-level value to the set, *Piatto D’oro *too often wilts under close inspection. Meyhem might take us on a slow drive around his neighborhood, but we never get close enough to the drama. The violent imagery and drug-dealing narratives lack rich specifics, a moralistic center or any sense of a beating heart behind the poker-faced protagonist’s bluster. It’s a widescreen crime flick with a seven-page script.
Take the Large Professor-produced "Not Guilty." The minimalist beat leaves plenty of space, and would have been a good opportunity for Lauren to delve into his outlaw origin story. Instead, we get more stock similes: "Breitling on my wrist since I’m 21/Became a man, bought a watch and a gun," he spits, passing up chances to dig any deeper. "Bonus Round" keeps the retro charm ringing, but with a Sega Genesis-jacked sound. Roc Marciano, Action Bronson and Big Body Bes guest as the lean 16-bit pyrotechnics swarm around the squad’s voices. Here, Bronson does with a bar than most rappers need whole verses to lay out: "Daddy didn’t believe I was an earner/‘Till I showed up in the Lamb with the safari window," he raps, connecting the past with the present, and family with his hoodlum life, in just a couple of lines. It’s a reminder that most of Piatto D’oro is all gusto with little underneath.


The veteran singer-songwriter made his name penning songs for other people. The classic rock and adult contemporary of his first album of original material in 18 years sound slick yet curiously anonymous.

Body of Work

“Certain things get clearer/In the rearview mirror,” sings Albert Hammond on “Looking Back,” a song deep into Body of Work, the first album of original material the veteran singer-songwriter has released in 18 years. A hitmaker who ceded the spotlight to his songs, Hammond built a catalog that could sustain a career without a need for new tunes. Save perhaps for “It Never Rains in Southern California,” a satiny smash from 1972 that was his only single to enter the Billboard Top Ten, all of Hammond’s tunes are best known as renditions by other artists. The Hollies turned “The Air That I Breathe” into a soft-rock perennial, Leo Sayer brought the ballad “When I Need” You” to the top of the charts in both the UK and U.S., and Whitney Houston chose “One Moment in Time” as her contribution to the 1988 Summer Olympics. The key title in Hammond’s catalog is “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” a collaboration with lyricist Hal David that became a global blockbuster when covered by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson in 1984. With one foot planted firmly in American corn and the other in cloying Continental sophistication, Iglesias and Nelson revealed Hammond’s grasp of the international language of schmaltz: His heightened sentimentality knows no borders.
Hammond is deliberately looking outward on Body of Work. He recorded the album in Nashville and Berlin, then reunited with his old songwriting partner John Bettis—who co-wrote “One Moment in Time” with him—to help him finish a surplus of ideas he developed during a particularly tumultuous time in his life. In the years leading up to the album, Hammond divorced his wife and struggled with vocal atrophy brought on by an immune disease. He responds to those trials by confronting the clamor of the modern world—albeit through the prism of a showbiz lifer who feels at home surrounded by high-end recording gear.
Relaxing into the comfort of studio craft, Hammond dabbles in a variety of styles, striking a note of insistent defiance with the arena rock of “Don’t Bother Me Babe” and relying upon his adult-contemporary skills for “Somebody’s Child”; he counters those unabashedly commercial plays with such gentle love tunes as “Bella Blue” and “Young Llewelyn,” whose narrative balladeering hearkens back to Hammond’s folk roots. An able, old-school professionalism flattens these shifts in tone and direction, helping the album glide unperturbed from one song to another. What cuts through the gloss are lyrical barbs, with Hammond taking potshots at “social addiction” and “Chinese phones” in full Boomer-yells-at-cloud mode; the cynicism of “The American Flag,” with its swipes at “the money brokers” and “the media… just propaganda clowns,” is more Roger Waters than Woody Guthrie.
Despite these occasionally acid undertones, Body of Work veers towards hopefulness, conveying a sunny disposition in its unrepentant slickness and offering a couple of welcome detours from its deliberately classy soft rock. “Like They Do Across the River” bops to a reconstituted Bo Diddley beat; the Beatlesque bounce of “Gonna Be Alright” is punctuated by an exhortation to “Fuck all night/Fuck all day”; “Looking Back” is incongruously draped in neon vaporwave trappings; and the acoustic blues of “Goodbye LA” ends the proceedings on an unexpectedly ramshackle note, warmer and looser than its predecessors. These lighthearted departures give Body of Work a needed pulse and also reveal the sense of anonymity inherent in Hammond’s universality; instead of sounding at home everywhere, it’s curiously rootless.


Drake’s new project is a mixtape of glossy “demos” from the recent past. It showcases his precise delivery, sticky flows, and arena-sized hooks, but comes with a fair amount of well-tread material.

Dark Lane Demo Tapes

Drake’s house is a gleaming monstrosity. Inside the 50,000 square-foot Toronto mansion called the Embassy, the rapper girdles himself with spikey chandeliers, slabs of Spanish marble, and sumptuous-looking fabrics. In one room, a shiny golden art piece constructed out of semi-precious stones occupies an entire wall. In another, beneath a microphone and requisite pop filter, there is a daybed upholstered in technicolor Jean Paul Gaultier and Louis Vuitton textiles. Dark Lane Demo Tapes, the 14-track mixtape Drake has released ahead of a proper studio album he says is coming this summer, shares the house’s gilded finish. As he toggles between a decade and several cities’ worth of rap styles, there is a consistent sheen, as though the project was furbished in the same workshop as one of his coffee tables.
Though Drake has spent much of his career predicting and synthesizing trends in rap and pop, Dark Lane Demo Tapes proposes not a new sound but a new format, formalizing recent snippets, one-offs, and collaborations onto streaming services. He experimented with the mixtape as album on 2009’s So Far Gone, the album as mixtape on 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and the LP as playlist on 2017’s More Life. Last August, he dropped Care Package, a collection of songs he’d casually released or teased over the years. Billing these tracks as demos may offer the slight advantage of lowered expectations, a kind of ad-hoc market test. But it’s also a clever rejoinder to the current internet economy, in which artists like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert have had their momentum derailed by endless leaks. The concept of the compilation may ultimately wind up being more useful in their hands than in Drake’s.
Contributions from a broad range of producers—including Southside, Cardo, MexikoDro, and Axl, each representing their own little corner of hip-hop—allow Drake to travel. Earlier in his career, he likely would have tried on new subgenres like “SoundCloud rap” and transcontinental drill closer to their emergence. And yet the lag isn’t much of a hindrance. On “Pain 1993,” a Pi’erre Bourne-produced song that leaked earlier this year, Drake sounds comfortable softening his consonants alongside SoundCloud emissary Carti, even as the style is past its peak. On “Demons,” he matches the energy of Fivio Foreign and Sosa Geek, a pair of Brooklyn rappers who have been at the forefront of the borough’s drill subgenre; both sound genuinely thrilled to have earned his recognition. The single “War,” released this winter in support of longtime manager Oliver El-Khatib’s partnership with a high-end incense brand, is a spot-on UK drill track. It’s one of Drake’s most effective songs in a while, harnessing the genre’s menacing energy, barbs delivered convincingly.
Demo Tapes contains moments of precise delivery, sticky flows, and hooks primed to be enjoyed in the context of an arena show, but there’s a fair amount of well-tread material, too. Drake begins the album with his tradition of pointed bars, includes a pair of slow burners with R&B vocals from Giveon and Chris Brown, and links up with Future and Young Thug for a solid, if entirely familiar song that has the tectonic bounce and clever flexing Atlanta rap has perfected. He follows that thread on the private jet anthem “Landed,” luxuriating over a spinning beat by Cardo and Dez Wright. Still, Drake remains more interlocutor than interloper. It helps that, unlike many of his peers in the top tier of the music industry, he has maintained an unwavering focus on music: “They too worried bout selling out shoes/I don’t give a fuck about jeans and crep/Or going to Milan or going to the Met/I just wanna make these songs for the set,” he rapped in a Link Up TV freestyle, in a verse ostensibly aimed at Kanye. Dark Lane is similarly a promise, or threat maybe, that he has the confidence to release music at a clip rivaled by few others at his level; as he points out on “When to Say When,” “He’s exceeded 500 weeks on the Billboard charts.” He’s a one-man monopoly, controlling both the supply and demand of his own work.
But for all of Drake’s strengths, he has not evolved past the tensions that have defined this half of his career—the sulky revenge fantasies of a petulant man-child who is capable of loyalty to men but treats all women with suspicion. He remains in a suspended state of something resembling teenage boyhood, in which he is constantly aggrieved, but never accountable. As ever, Drake finds new ways of expressing escalating amounts of pettiness: Instead of snow tires and designer purses, the women he dates now want butt lifts and Lasik eye surgery. Instead of tracking their mileage on his Bugatti, he sends a friend to take back a gifted car. One song, “Desires,” features the unhinged regret that he didn’t isolate a woman he was dating so as to avoid losing her: “I should’ve put you somewhere where no one could find you/Mansion out in the sticks with nothing around you.”
Drake lives in symbiosis with Kardashian-style celebrity culture, using veiled lyrics and social media posts to carefully extend or withdraw access to his narrative. Incidentally, one of the most evocative things he has written recently is the caption to an Instagram post he made celebrating his son’s birthday and sharing photos of him with the public for the first time. “It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past or what is happening around us now, you can always make the choice to break free of the wheel of suffering and panic and open up to your own light,” he wrote. The venue was appropriate for an artist whose success was formed in part on his ability to fill songs with pithy captions. But the message was a rarer thing: earnest, tenderhearted, with the focused sobriety of someone who has been meditating or studying Eckhart Tolle. Unfortunately, very little of that sentiment has made its way into his music, which remains guarded and skin-deep, even as it grows, like his houses, bigger and more expensive.


Baltimore's Co La belongs to a shrinking group of composers for whom sampling remains a singular muse. His new album aims to explore the banging, echoing sounds of the club, and all of No No's sounds are recognizable, or at least conceivable. Increasingly, those sounds are drums, or things that sound mostly like drums.

No No

Sampling isn't a lost art form just yet, but it's fair to call it a diminished one. This has happened even as the sample itself remains a staple of modern music production: how Young Chop has access to an orchestra, how every bedroom producer from Los Angeles to Berlin owns an 808. Those sounds are meticulously recorded and integrated into popular software. Sampling itself—the act of sourcing, manipulating, and arranging previously recorded sound—is more esoteric; certainly there are fewer producers rewriting the history of jazz and funk (DJ Premier, the Bomb Squad) or expanding the cosmic vistas of the dance floor (the KLF, the Orb). The practice remains more common in dance music, but it's still notable when someone returns to the old methods, and licensing concerns crowd many out. Instead, sampling has followed a path opposite that of most musical trends: from the unobtainable feel of early studio instruments to widespread pop deployment to the obscure and niche.
Baltimore's Co La belongs to a shrinking group of composers—Flying Lotus and Bibio among them—for whom sampling remains a singular muse. His last album, Moody Coup, was a genteel patter that stitched together everything from ASMR-like frivolity to reggae toasting. His third-ish album (he's had several cassette and low-run releases) and second for Software, No No, arrives with a harsher mandate, aiming to explore the banging, echoing sounds of the club. This makes for a louder, tenser listen, even as Co La's methods remain largely unchanged: all of No No's sounds are recognizable, or at least conceivable. There's nothing truly alien here, and you'd always feel comfortable at least guessing at a sound's source.
Increasingly, those sources are drums, or things that sound mostly like drums. There's a lot of diffuse banging on No No—only rarely does a deep kick-like sound arrive on time—and it sounds like Co La is one of a growing pool of producers inspired by the rhythmic daring of artists like Pearson Sound and Jam City. This manifests itself in tracks such as "Crank", which rises from a clutch of voices into a surprising, hands-in-the-air throb, and "Gush", which revels in a suspended state before perforating the bubble with rapid bursts of percussion.
Of course, No No isn't dance music; Co La seems unwilling to commit to that level of structure. So while you could see a deft turntable hand or a devout remixer turning this club-ready, there are lots of potent moments ("No No") and transfixing loops ("Barricade"'s pitched dollops) that are abandoned too quickly. Elsewhere, as on opener "Squeeze", the percussive elements feel placed at random, and the track, untethered, scatters away. I miss the gentleness of Moody Coup, and when the latter half of "Tragedy" opens up with a laughing voice and a rich piano lament I realize how stern and abrasive much of No No sounds.
That's probably intentional, given the playfulness that's baked into Co La's methods and sound sources. This is avant-garde music at its core, and the precision with which these sources are treated and deployed means Co La probably has more in common with, say, Steve Reich than with DJ Premier. No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort.


After a protracted battle with Stormzy and a scrapped crossover album, the grime veteran regroups and offers what he calls his final album.

The Godfather 3

When Wiley started picking fights at the end of 2019, most grime fans assumed it was the scene’s old hand turning to a tried-and-true promo playbook: call out another MC on the radio, trade a few diss tracks, piggyback off each other’s rep, create a buzz, then drop a new album. Having rattled through a 15-minute BBC radio interview—calling Drake a “pagan” and Ed Sheeran a “culture vulture”—Wiley followed up with a bunch of tweets and war dubs aimed squarely at Stormzy, who was preparing for an extensive world tour off the back of a second number one album in a row. It worked, of course. The two sent shots at each other. Wiley met with A-list boxing promoter Eddie Hearn about promoting a live clash between him and Stormzy at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena. Broadsheets filled pages awkwardly explaining the dispute, while fans debated online as to who was coming out on top—and whether there was anything more to the beef than Wiley stirring the pot to his own end.
But then no album appeared. According to people on Wiley’s side of the argument, label wrangling behind the scenes meant Wiley had to wait out his term’s expiry date before he could release the record on his own. But while his beef with Stormzy tailed off, Wiley was driving around London linking up with MCs to lay down verses. To what end, they couldn’t be sure—when Godfather III finally dropped last week, a number of MCs tweeted out that they didn’t realize they were going to feature on the finished album—but for Wiley this was an exercise in taking grime back to its roots or, in his words, “back to the village.”
All of a sudden, the beef started making sense. His real umbrage is not so much with Stormzy’s success or the perceived lack of homage paid to grime’s originators, but the way in which he believes control has been wrested from artists by the suits—or, in the case of Sheeran’s “Take Me Back To London” remix, by a dorky singer-songwriter. It’s hard not to view Godfather III as a direct response to all of this. The album’s first half is stacked with songs directly addressing the issue. “Protect The Empire” packs a blunt-force chorus of “We built this up, that’s why we must protect it.” On “The Game,” he can’t resist taking another jab at his former protégé and fellow grime innovator, Dizzee Rascal, for starring in ads for Ladbrokes (a gambling chain accused of targeting deprived urban areas and leeching off the UK’s most vulnerable) instead of putting his efforts into pulling the scene up with him.
Wiley has flirted with major labels throughout his career, and he’s left pretty much all of them with a bridge blazing behind him. Last year, a star-studded dancehall album called Full Circle featuring Future, Tory Lanez, and Nicki Minaj, among others, was ground into nothingness by rights disputes. A commercial shoo-in that would surely have been Wiley’s retirement fund following the massive success of 2019’s “Boasty,” the record was canned as egos and bureaucracy prevailed over the music. Godfather III, which packs close to 30 featured artists over its 22 tracks, shows Wiley holding up a mirror to the industry’s bureaucracy.
In place of familiar faces from the Billboard Hot 100, he invites grime MCs from all eras of the sound to bar alongside him. Veterans like D Double E, Flirta D, and Scratchy bump up against newer names like Jammz, Jon E Clayface, Big Zuu, and Capo Lee. Some, like K9 and Manga, straddle both epochs, while others have just a handful of credits to their name. Two tracks—“West London” and “South London”—are dedicated to showcasing talent from small pockets of the city. The beats derive from the years of dubplates and car-trunk distribution up to streaming hits too: On “Alla Dem” he raps over a Scratcha DVA instrumental that dates back as far as 2007; Zdot’s beat for “Da Vibez Is Back” hooks on a sample of one of Kanye’s infamous 2016 rants; while “South London” is produced by Mazza—one of the beatmakers behind Big Shaq’s viral UK drill track “Man’s Not Hot.”
At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago. This plays out to literal effect on “Eskimo Dance.” Named after the series of raves Wiley started in 2002, the track shows 11 different MCs passing the mic to spit their most explosive bars in an eight-bar rally as classic instrumentals from the sound’s first golden age slide into one another. (In a neat historical nod, the first three instrumentals on the song are the same three instrumentals that opened the very first Eskimo Dance.) When things do slow down and Wiley centers his own voice—see “Free Spirit” or reflective closer “Press Record”—the pause is welcome: Not only for the insights and insecurities revealed (“We’ve done things in music we didn't know we could/The crowd’s gone overground but we all came from the hood /I don’t know where I'm going but where I’m going is good” on “Free Spirit”) but for his idiosyncratic ability to drop punchlines like “I never liked Marmite on toast, and no no I never liked porridge” amidst the profundity.
This month, Wiley told The Guardian that Godfather III will be his last album. Needless to say he hasn’t mentioned any retirement plans. Maybe this was just another leaf from that well-worn promo playbook? But if Godfather III is to be his swan song, then fans could hardly hope for a better send-off: it’s about as pure an encapsulation of grime’s past, present, and future as the album format allows.


A revelation hidden in plain sight, this Memphis rapper’s latest project is more proof that he’s headed for bigger things.

2 Heartless

Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo’s voice falls somewhere between the monotone largesse of his mentor, Yo Gotti, and the watery warble of Kevin Gates. It’s a voice that, at first listen, is unremarkable, but, after a few songs, reveals its humor and dexterity like a magic trick. Like his voice, Moneybagg himself is a revelation hiding in plain sight. Largely unknown to mainstream rap audiences but a full-blown celebrity in his hometown and, increasingly, beyond, he’s finally starting to see the payoff to his patient and calculated approach to regional rap stardom. The street album Federal 3x, the highlight of his highly productive 2017, debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 last summer, outselling SZA, Ed Sheeran, and Bruno Mars that week. A polished collection of outsized brags and ominous trap instrumentals that lacked a clear single or a notable guest appearance outside frequent collaborator YoungBoy Never Broke Again, that album provided the strongest argument yet that Moneybagg is headed toward a broader breakthrough.
2 Heartless, Moneybagg’s first project of 2018, builds on his momentum. At a bloated 18 tracks, it lacks the efficiency of Federal 3x, or the bounce of Moneybagg’s 2016 collaborative tape with Yo Gotti, 2 Federal. But the new album, which features Quavo, Gotti, BlocBoy JB, and Lil Baby, succeeds as a fruitful exercise in sticking to what works. This isn’t to say that Moneybagg’s execution is simplistic. Instead, he’s a self-sufficient enterprise of one, capable of conveying on his own what many rappers struggle to do with help. It’s sometimes hard to identify the highlights of a Moneybagg project, but that’s the point: Whether threatening his enemies or mourning lost love, his songs purposefully blend into one another, making his albums best consumed in a single sitting. In an age of relentless single-chasing in rap music, Moneybagg Yo’s low-concept, consistent work ethic is refreshing.
Moneybagg, a 26-year-old father of seven, is a master of colorful wordplay. Each song is a treasure trove of quotables: “Fire up the Backwood, it smell like a skunk dead,” he snarls on “Back Then,” “I been gettin’ to it, a hundred thou trap cash/Pockets lookin’ like bunk beds.” On the Tay Keith-produced standout “Super Fake,” he takes a similar thought a step further: “Chandeliers on both my ears, my earrings look like two lamps,” he starts, before continuing in the same breath, “This might not mean nothin’ to you, but I used to get food stamps.” Moneybagg wields vulnerability the same way he does his boasting, with an offhanded speed that nonetheless provides a deeper look into his psyche. His reliance on rhetorical questions and conversational ad-libs—“Remember Mario from eleventh grade?/(Remember me from Mitchell?)” he asks on “Super Fake”—can make it sound like he’s talking to himself, or confiding in a close friend.
Really, though, he’s more of a lone wolf. “Earn my trust, keep all my secrets,” he whispers in the fading moments of 2 Heartless, rewarding us for making it to the end of yet another project. But unlike most musicians on the come-up, Moneybagg genuinely doesn’t seem to care if you listen. He’s so brazenly secure in his sound, so convinced of his impending success, that you’re left feeling like you have to win him over, and not the other way around.