Connecting Kansas City and Melbourne, Picnic’s debut full-length is rounded out by a more than an hour’s worth of remixes by artists like Huerco S. and Dntel—a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon.

Picnic

The last decade has seen the rise of a loose clique of ambient musicians enamored by barely there beats, vaporous pads, and big, dubby bass subductions. Many of them are Midwestern, including Huerco S. and Mister Water Wet, whose short-lived Secret Musik party at Kansas City’s Niche club in 2011 and 2012 focused on unreleased remixes and edits from their own circle of friends. Though the crew has expanded to encompass artists like Michigan’s uon and Philadelphia’s Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus, it’s maintained a remarkable level of insularity and sonic uniformity. Combine that with the cryptic monikers of some of its participants (uon, mdo, tcs, Pil) and you might wonder at first if these people aren’t all the same person.
Picnic is the first full-length collaboration between Kansas City’s Ryan Loecker (aka mdo, co-founder of the C Minus label) and Melbourne, Australia’s Justin Cantrell (aka ju ca, founder of the Daisart label). Loecker came a little late to the Midwestern scene, releasing his first music in 2016 and forming C Minus in 2017. But the communal spirit of Secret Musik lives on in Picnic, which doubles as an international ambient summit welcoming Australia’s Daisart into the fold. Heavy on guest features and bundled with more than 80 minutes of remixes, both on the digital album and the limited-edition Bonus CD, Picnic is a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon.
The vinyl version of Picnic runs eight tracks and 41 minutes, including a remix of C Minus co-founder Pil’s “Plush Hooves.” Cantrell’s solo output is typically heavier on percussion than Loecker’s, and the two artists’ music can be thought of respectively in terms of solids and liquids (or gases). But Picnic delights in the way these materials interact. “Bunnyville” is built around what sounds like a bundle of necklaces being untangled, around which all manner of soupy effects slosh and swish. “Drops in the Water,” a collaboration with Detroit artist Theodore Cale Schafer, is permeated with fiery crackles that emerge from a deep, droning house chord. There’s an appealing sense of grit throughout Picnic, suggesting sediment flowing downstream or embers leaping from a bonfire.
Picnic offers few moments of uninterrupted ambient pleasure. When there’s a melody, it’s tentative, like the pearls of guitar on “Dewey” or the clarinet on “Elkhorn,” played by Daisart signee Haji K. Synth pads simmer evilly at the bottom of the mix rather than swooping through the stereo field. The bulk of Picnic’s real estate is taken up by percussion, which means both actual percussion instruments and the digital clicks and cuts that saturate nearly every inch of the record. Picnic deserves credit for managing such a rough and organic sound without being too hard on the ears, but it’s tough to just sink back into this stuff and relax, and ambient fans who like their music a little more amniotic might find the terrain too rugged for their liking.
That’s where the remixes come in. Many of them are by lesser-known Midwestern or Australian artists, with Huerco S. and the Postal Service’s Dntel the only names a casual fan will be likely to recognize. The remixers invariably guide these tracks in either a clubbier or more ambient direction, and Bonus is by far the more accessible of the two discs. But this second disc feels less like a correction to Picnic than a demonstration of another way ambient music can be played, perceived, and enjoyed. If Picnic is like walking barefoot across the rocky bank of a river, Bonus is a plunge into the deep end.

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Roman Flügel's second album under his own name builds on the principles he set out in 2011's Fatty Folders in playful and sometimes surprising ways. If the techno producer's last album reflected a newfound sense of focus in his work, the new one widens its scope without forsaking any of its cohesion.

Happiness Is Happening

Few dance music producers have established a voice quite as singular as Roman Flügel's. That's ironic, because in his two decades as a solo artist, he's recorded gritty acid fugues, limpid deep house, knotty breakbeat hardcore, and clean-lined minimal techno, among other styles, both pure and hybrid. His cheeky 2004 single "Geht's Noch?" was an unwitting midwife to a squawking strain of big-room EDM; the following year, he teamed up with the vibraphonist Christopher Dell for Superstructure, a collection of diffuse, freeform techno-jazz. (For most club music producers, a release like the latter would be the outlier in his or her catalog, but in Flügel's case, it's the populist, over-the-top club jam that remains the exception.)
But Flügel's signature remains legible in pretty much whatever he does, despite the stylistic diversity of his catalog. (That range is one reason he's used so many aliases over the years, including Roman IV, Soylent Green, ro70, and Eight Miles High, in addition to his and Jörn Elling Wuttke's shifting collective identity as Alter Ego, Acid Jesus, Holy Garage, et al.) He's got a way with rippling, wriggling drum patterns, and his knack for daubing on tonal elements proves him to be a skilled pointillist. His ear for nuance and his feel for balance let him take the most shopworn sounds—an unadorned drum machine, a crackling breakbeat, a wily TB-303—and make them sound, if not exactly new, indisputably his.
That's truer than ever on Happiness Is Happening, which builds on the principles he set out in 2011's Fatty Folders in playful and sometimes surprising ways. Reflecting a newfound sense of focus in his work, the latter was his first album released under his own name; the new one widens its scope without forsaking any of its cohesion. At its core, the record foregrounds a strain of house music that's wispy but wiry, favoring all his usual trademarks: scratchy analog drum machines, lush pads, quirky little quasi-melodies, and glassy FM synthesizers with the sour clang of oil-drums half-submerged in water.
A few of the tracks easily could have fit on Fatty Folders or any of the club-oriented EPs he's released between then and now on labels like Dial and Live at Robert Johnson. "Stuffy", sounding anything but, is classic Flügel: a percussive, energetic workout marked by brittle drums and a colorful, pinging melody. The expressive way that the track's cymbals twitch and flare confirm him as one of our most talented hi-hat programmers. "Your War Is Over" plays with similar ideas, as kalimba-inspired synthesizers pluck against watery chords; though nominally four-to-the-floor, the kick drum is little more than a shadow of itself, which aids the track's weightless drift. "We Have a Nice Life" plays with dance-floor convention in similar ways, opening with two minutes of beatless drones before pulling itself up by its bootstraps—well, its arpeggios, anyway—and morphing into a jaunty set of variations on an Italo-house theme, all whispery shakers and laser zaps. (There are only about four elements in play, yet no two bars of the song are the same, proof of Flügel's commitment to composition as a process of perpetual mutation.) And the slower "Tense Times" stretches those same Italo influences, like rubbery bass arpeggios and rich, major chords, into a dubby fantasia that sounds like the Orb gone disco. It's muscular but dreamy, the kind of contradiction that Flügel savors.
But a goodly portion of Happiness Is Happening finds Flügel stretching out and trying out new styles—or styles new to his catalog, anyway.  The delightful "Friendship Song" borrows the chord changes from Grimes' "Oblivion" and turns it into a Depeche Mode song circa Speak & Spell, and "Wilkie", similarly springy and similarly naïve, strikes up a dialogue with the New Order of Power, Corruption & Lies. (That might sound to you like a wholly unnecessary exercise, but once you hear the way he handles the subject matter—gentle but authoritative, and also a little awestruck—you will agree that it is not.) "Parade" twists up the canon yet again, this time by fusing the snap and crackle of early '80s electro with the apocalyptic klaxon blasts of early '90s rave music, like a hybrid of Kraftwerk's "Numbers" and Second Phase's "Mentasm."
Two songs in particular show what a versatile producer he can be.  The opening "Connecting the Ghost" explores a slow-fast "motorik" pulse, its stately, chugging beat a foil for Flügel to indulge in creamy textures and squealing oscillators; the quick-stepping "Occult Levitation" offers little more than a steady patter of lawn-sprinkler hi-hats and rosy sunrise glow. Both, in their way, are genre studies—Krautrock and techno, respectively—but more than that, they're examples of Flügel's unique sensibility, deft touch, and expressive, unmistakable voice.


The Brockhampton leader embraces a grungy, guitar-centric new sound on his first solo album since the dissolution of his rap collective.

Blanket

For some Brockhampton fans, the band’s farewell album felt like a fakeout, if not a betrayal. The form-breaking rap collective’s previous full lengths had been defined by both their abundance and their communal spirit—each was an unruly pileup of voices, personalities, and perspectives. But the group’s 2022 curtain call, The Family, released seven months after they announced their indefinite hiatus at Coachella, turned out to be less an actual Brockhampton album than a Kevin Abstract solo album about Brockhampton, with the project’s founder ruminating on the group in their absence. It was a fundamental contradiction: a one-sided Brockhampton record.

If The Family was Abstract’s eulogy for Brockhampton, his new solo album, Blanket, is his fresh start. In September, Abstract debuted this material at a short-notice live show in Hollywood, with a band that played up the heavy, grungy direction of this new material, all brooding fuzz, dropped tunings, and loud/soft whiplash. Abstract has flirted with rock music before, both with Brockhampton and on solo albums like 2016’s American Boyfriend, yet Blanket commits so completely that it feels like a true makeover. Where modernist rappers like Kenny Mason and Jim Legxacy dabble in guitars as part of a wider, rotating menu of styles, on Blanket, Abstract embraces them to the near total exclusion of rap.

It isn’t always a natural fit. With his whispery lower register, Abstract isn’t much of a rock singer, and he’s not much of a screamer either (his “woos!” on the title track are unsure and truncated, like a basketball fan realizing mid-yelp he’s cheering for the wrong team’s dunk). And too often he mistakes rawness for inspiration. Opener “When the Rope Post 2 Break” aims for Nirvana but plays more like a half-finished demo. Abstract pounded out the record relatively quickly, over just a few months, and he doesn’t disguise when he’s winging it.

What Abstract does bring to the table, though, is an ear for sticky, misshapen melodies and a rap producer’s sense of pacing, which keeps Blanket moving so briskly that its periodic clumsiness doesn’t bog it down much. When he sweetens the nervier edges of ’90s alternative with a strong shot of R&B, the results can be sublime: “Scream” charts an unlikely middle ground between Blonde and Surfer Rosa, while “Voyager” conjures the blistering passion of a Prince rock ballad.

As heavy as the album can be, with its raw-nerved surveys of alienation and rejection, Abstract knows when to lighten the mood. Whenever Blanket threatens to succumb to wallowing, he breaks things up with a peppy, Mac DeMarco/Alex G-style indie-rock tune like “Running Out” or “What Should I Do.” By the record’s final stretch, much of its initial angst has burned off, freeing Abstract to indulge the sweeter, poppier styles that come to him more naturally. On the exuberant “Real 2 Me,” he pines for a crush with puppy-dog longing (“When you signed my cast, I wish I broke both arms,” he gushes).
For the closer “My Friend,” featuring some understated vocal accompaniments from indie breakouts MJ Lenderman and Kara Jackson, Abstract captures the more painful flip side of infatuation, dwelling on the sting of unrequited romantic feelings. With its acoustic guitars and wistful twang, the track is Abstract’s biggest sonic departure yet from Brockhampton. Yet in another sense, it’s the song that feels most of a piece with his old group, simply by the presence of other voices. That’s the challenge that looms over his solo career: As compelling as Abstract can be on his own, he still sounds best when he has some company.


The sixth album from the Iowa metal mainstays has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted.

We Are Not Your Kind

Slipknot have no shortage of rallying cries, but nothing defines them quite like when lead singer Corey Taylor yells, “I’m all fucked up and I make it look good” on their sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind. They’ve made anguish look appealing throughout their two-decade career, finding worldwide success channeling unwieldy, messy anger. Though this is the first record without long-time percussionist Chris Fehn, it’s not as dramatic of  a shift in personnel as 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter, which was marked by the death of bassist and founding member Paul Gray and the departure of powerhouse drummer Joey Jordison. For better or for worse, Kind is a Slipknot record, one that has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted.
“Unsainted” is their signature angst-pop-rock in the vein of their hits “Wait and Bleed” and “Duality,” centered around Taylor’s melodic choruses. He’s aided by a choir, turning it into a reboot of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” fueled by Midwest desolation. Its richness, part of Kind’s more detailed production, doesn’t dilute the angst Slipknot traffic in. “Birth of the Cruel” draws upon tension from industrial drum banging and tense guitar; the song’s explosion proves that they haven’t lost their unifying malaise. Though hampered by Taylor’s awkward spoken-word intro, “Solway Firth” takes that energy even further on perhaps the most intense track of their career.
It’s part of the secret of their success from early on: Longtime guitarists Mick Thomson and Jim Root distilled underground death and black metal for suburban kids sacrificing their allowances to Sam Goody and too young for tape trading and MTV’s“Headbangers’ Ball,” forgoing intricacy for gut-bashing immediacy. (Listen to their self-titled record again if it’s been a while: You’ll pick up bits and pieces of Obituary, Morbid Angel, even a little Cradle of Filth.) They’re not the heretics that underground metal dudes (or even the band themselves) claim to be, they just made the underground more palatable. “Orphan”’s speed, fueled in part by drummer Jay Weinberg’s (son of Bruce Springsteen drummer Max) relentless bashing, alone should nip any metal G checks in the bud—they’re capable of totally unloading. Besides, Thomson has an Immolation tattoo, are you really gonna call him a poser?
Slipknot know what works for them and they exploit it to a fault, but they’re also more wide-eyed than they’re given credit for. “My Pain” and “Not Long for This World” are both hazy and cavernous, the former’s dreamy electronics moving into the latter’s breathiness, like Portishead performing at the Iowa State Fair. Slipknot also try out some post-metal with “A Liar’s Funeral,” which focuses more on panned guitars, volume swells, and moodier drums. “Spiders” is the only flop in their experimentation, with its cabaret piano too hokey for a band that is essentially a macabre traveling carnival. It’s a painful reminder that they used to try a little too hard to be the zany heavy metal equivalent of Mr. Bungle in their early days. For arena-sized metal acts, even fewer and far between now, you could do much, much worse.
The most curious mainstay are those turntable scratches, and while they flow nicely on the record, they do cast a harsh light on Slipknot’s missed opportunity to take advantage of metal and rap’s stronger alliance in 2019. Take for instance Ho99o9, an intense act who can square up against the hardest of any genre; Richmond’s Lil Ugly Mane is a gifted rapper who mainly plays to hardcore audiences because he grew up a hardcore kid. New York duo City Morgue play “Wait and Bleed” at their shows, which Taylor is aware of, and their aggression signals that they wore out a couple of copies of Slipknot’s landmark 2001 album Iowa at minimum. For all their experimentation, it’s disappointing Slipknot ignored hip-hop’s fruitful coexistence with heavy guitar music.
It’s not as though Slipknot haven’t kept up with their audience. They’re pushing their own brand of whiskey, with full knowledge that “getting really into craft booze” is a typical path for aging metalheads. And their anger may not always rise above entry-level, but even that is hardly out of fashion. There’s something to be said for keeping that base rage with you, and it’s not an impediment on maturity: Taylor is a thoughtful frontman who recognizes his fanbases as a mish-mash of misfits, and he’s always appealed to their shared disenfranchisement. Even as masters of fan-service, they don’t condescend to their audience. For as much as they give, there’s an underlying feeling that they could be giving more, that the synthesis that made them ultimately limits where they go next.

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In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, Swans swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.

Swans: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity / Love of Life

In the half-decade since Swans reformed, they have hammered away at a monolithic, all-consuming sound with unwavering focus. The three albums they've released since Michael Gira resurrected the project—2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, 2012's The Seer, and 2014's To Be Kind—taken together with contemporaneous tours and live albums, all feel like variations upon a single theme, expressions of an essential Swans-ness.
For a while, though, they were the most mutable of bands. In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, they swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.
The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know????" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning (how to write a song) as I went."
It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.
The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas.
But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight. "Her" wraps clanging, Children of God-style thunderbolts around one of the tenderest love songs Gira has ever written, and "Song for the Sun", "Love of Life", and "The Sound of Freedom" all stretch their arms wide to embrace the limitless possibility of the universe, anticipating the way that love and spiritual ecstasy will return to the fore in the group's post-reunion work, particularly on 2014's To Be Kind.
A bonus disc accompanying the reissues is mostly anticlimax. It features a handful of alternate takes and mixes from both albums, along with a Burning World-era B-side, selections from the World of Skin's Ten Songs for Another World, and a few live songs from Omniscience and Anonymous Bodies in an Empty Room, plus another live cut, "The Unknown", that doesn't seem to have been released before but probably could have stayed that way. There's a fair amount of overlap with Various Failures, and the sequencing is haphazard, zigzagging from release to release without much rhyme or reason.
But it's never a bad thing to be reacquainted with Jarboe's harrowing rendition of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog", and her a cappella rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes", a centuries-old popular English song, is a welcome addition. (Both are from the World of Skin's 1990 album Ten Songs for Another World.) That the bonus disc leaves off "God Damn the Sun", The Burning World's heartbroken highlight, seems like a missed opportunity. In fact, at this point, a full Burning World reissue (along, perhaps, with both the band's 1988 "Love Will Tear Us Apart" covers) is long overdue, no matter how much Gira professes to regret making that album. Who knows, maybe he'll eventually come around. But for now, for anyone who wants to understand Swans' path from atonal self-flagellators to beatific supplicants of the sublime, these two reissues light the way, blindingly.


Tame Impala bassist Cameron Avery veers away from psych-rock with an album of throwback ballads, a modern twist on the tried and true songwriting of crooners from the ’40s and ’50s.

Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams

Not all albums must strive for greater meaning. Plenty attempt and fall short. A great many seek a comforting adequacy—and even those don’t always pan out. On his solo debut, Tame Impala bassist Cameron Avery veers away from psych-rock cosmic revelations in search of a pure musical greatness of times past. Upon the record’s announcement, he made clear his inspirations: Elvis, Sinatra, Etta James, “the big band stuff with less metaphorical lyrics,” as he put it. From the gentle guitar plucks of “A Time and Place,” Avery’s greatest pursuit is beauty over all else, which he achieves often throughout Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams.
Avery is best when ruminating on loves lost, found, and desired. The album’s limited musical and thematic palette, however, means the burden for excellence falls on Avery’s songwriting, which ranges from subtle, self-aware inversions of machismo to overt chauvinism, and in its worst moments, it’s just bland. Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is a deliberately pleasant album that occasionally soars but at a relatively low ceiling.
In making an album that revels in classicalism, Avery reconciles with the old-timey mores of society. On “Disposable,” the record’s jauntiest track, he sees himself as the most ordinary bane of humanity: a dude. It’s effective in its extreme self-deprecation, as he sings happily about being “just as shit as any other brand,” and making a soaring hook out of “I’m disposable.” Avery sees the haplessness of the male pursuit, that of the bumbling fool who sings to the mountaintops about why he just can’t find the right gal. He achieves the endeavor best on “Wasted on Fidelity,” a track where he is in love, yet is unable to resign himself to the domesticity. On these songs, Avery breathes new life into the male pop figure as someone who sees his flaws but cannot help but do the wrong thing anyway.
He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. The subversion is absent on “Big Town Girl,” with lines like, “You know I’ve never had the time to wait around for a dame/But if I knew that we could make it, I’d wait around for Jane,” as if trying on a terrible-looking fedora. Platitudes like, “You know she’s a lady,” also highlight this lounge singer mode, but the song is far too conventional for his affectations to land with any honesty. Similarly, his take on Elvis in “Watch Me Take It Away” offers little nuance, only chintzy cock rock.
Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet. The opening tracks “A Time and Place” and “Do You Know Me by Heart,” as well as the closing “C’est Toi (Extended)” are tried and true love songs that take their time. They fully embrace the majesty of the American songbook without jamming in any rock’n’roll, winkingly or otherwise. His smoky baritone does the songs justice, though he's still more of an imitator of the past than he is a student of the past. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam’s 2016 collaboration, for contrast, added excitement and contemporary sounds to revive bygone trends. Making an album like this, an album of ancient ballads requires subtle innovation. Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is a focused record with several wonderful songs. It’s not novel, nor does it attempt to be, just like those old 45s it so fondly recalls.


The Brooklyn band’s debut is one of the most confidently executed emo debuts of recent vintage, a bracing fusion of brutality and elegance.

Viewing

Let’s just get this out of the way: Stay Inside would have been just as timely of a band name at any point in the Brooklyn group’s short existence. On their bracing debut Viewing, bassist/vocalist Bryn Nieboer reckons with what she calls “the worst thing that happened to me in my life,” framing her personal trauma within the generational traumas of the last four years. Viewing is the work of a band formed amidst ongoing biological and political disasters, and the songs explore end-times questions: What is the purpose of creation in a state of perpetual impermanence? What is the meaning of forgiveness and hope when the arc of the moral universe is irreversibly off course?
Stay Inside’s music shares the physique of Travis Bickle or Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, if not their regressive nihilism—they sound gaunt and wiry, the songs’ shredded musculature meant to frighten more than impress, developed in isolation as a defense mechanism to New York’s daily interpersonal cruelties. Viewing moves at a dyspeptic churn, its melodies alternately soaring and sour, their imagery borne of a lonesome, crowded Brooklyn, full of corrosives and irritants. Stay Inside earmark their arrangements with reminders of abject and vivid squalor that pop up like roaches—a recurring burst of feedback used to segue between tracks, the burrowing one-note riff of “Revisionist,” the chords of “Veil” slowly denaturing into atonality.
“The picture’s weak/Everything’s a copy that I’m copying,” guitarist and vocalist Chris Johns sings on the opening “Revisionist,” in Viewing’s predominant pose: a snarl and a shrug. Having gotten a bombastically titled EP out of their system (2018’s The Sea Engulfs Us and the Light Goes Out), Stay Inside here commit to clarity, reducing the past two decades of emo and post-hardcore’s most serious variants into its most potent concentrate, stripped of pretensions. Each track hones its essence into urgent, mononym titles, with nothing in the arrangements to detract from their focused messages. A visit to the spacious, twinkling skies of Midwestern emo is pointedly called “Divide,” Viewing’s sole and fleeting beacon of light before Side B plunges towards the abyss. At their most anthemic (“Ivy,” “Monument”), Stay Inside fuse screamo brutality with post-punk elegance, suggesting an alternate history where Interpol recorded Turn on the Bright Lights with the guy from seminal screamo band Saetia still on drums.
Viewing is one of the most confidently executed emo debuts of recent vintage, and it’s poignant to wonder what the live show would be like. Emo albums are usually made with sweaty, crowded, all-ages shout-alongs in mind, the kind of experience quarantine has rendered impossible. But unlike, say, Dogleg’s transcendent Melee, Viewing doesn’t feel designed as group therapy meant to foster togetherness. True to the name, Stay Inside finds purpose and nobility in doing push ups in a stuffy apartment, sublimating anger into action, working through shit in isolation before rejoining society—an aim that will make it just as relevant when the next disaster strikes.


The Sub Pop noise group returns with another collection of tracks exploring the cycle of tension and release.

Human Animal

The cycle of tension and release is a well-worn musical ploy, but Michigan's Wolf Eyes have somehow managed to find new ideas in that technique's cracked façade. The band's best shows are an orgiastic symphony of hypnotic build-up and cathartic discharge. Every Wolf Eyes fan knows what to expect from the latter-- distorted, decaying beats, slashing noise from John Olson and Mike Connelly, and lung-killing rants from Nate Young-- and when to pump fists and jerk heads accordingly. The more abstract sections in between are trickier. Sometimes the trio's gnarled drift stops too abruptly, other times it out-meanders its welcome. But when these scientists hit on the right formula of slow-burning anticipation, the bombast that follows has the profundity of a drug-induced epiphany.
Previous Wolf Eyes records have struck that magic balance during individual songs or sides, but none have stretched it over an album's length like Human Animal. Here the group's pre-climactic swells seem coated with extra allure, such that the first three tracks can spend 15 minutes gradually gathering density without losing momentum. It's partially due to a patient restraint that makes the clanging "A Million Years" oddly quiet, similar to Sightings' shadowy retreat on Arrived in Gold; partially due to Olson's snake-charming sax (something he's perfected with his dirt-jazz trio Graveyards) on the war-torn "Rationed Rot"; and very much due to the way even a purely textural piece like "Lake of Roaches" throbs with insistent pulse, mimicking time's relentless march.
Whatever the reason, this dark, transfixing three-part suite makes the subsequent peak of the title track pretty staggering. "Rusted Mange" extends the climax with rhythms that overlap like competing fireworks. Mixed with more Young vocal screech and Olson sax whine, the piece splits the difference between didactic pound and inscrutable cacophony, delivering the promise of the preceding simmer.
The trio's tension-release loop gets lathered, rinsed, and repeated on Human Animal's final three tracks, this time in a quicker, sharper rotation. The six-minute "Leper War" detonates windy bombs over a smoldering static terrain, fading into the rippling march of "The Driller", whose deadened pound sprouts into a hummable lurch. As Young's moans rhyme with the surrounding din, the track actually becomes more like music than noise.
Which makes "Noise Not Music" a logical closer. Here instead of noise made from pure abstraction, we get music beaten until it shatters into noise, with what sounds like 100 simultaneous punk songs piled into endless climax. The song's chanted title may be a brutal manifesto, and Wolf Eyes' metronomic swing can sometimes be fascistically either/or. But Human Animal is far from black and white; it's more like its melted-face cover painting, a dripping swirl of different shades of gray.


Jay Rock is the member of Top Dawg Entertainment best known for spitting bars on Kendrick Lamar's "Money Trees", but his major-label career dates back to 2005. Where his 2011 debut felt like a formalist relic, his sophomore effort is weirder and more daring, with free-ranging production giving Rock space to dazzle with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery.

90059

Top Dawg Entertainment first signed Jay Rock in 2005, in the wake of the Game's The Documentary. At the time, the Dr. Dre-sanctioned multiplatinum album seemed to promise a resurgence for Cali gangsta rap, which might reclaim the throne it abdicated in the mid-'90s after the death of 2Pac. Instead, Game’s Shady/Aftermath/G-Unit connection combusted spectacularly with the record still fresh in stores and L.A.’s stronghold broke, as Snoop became a ward of the Neptunes, Dre tinkered with a third album we’ve only just come to hear this summer, and everyone else fought nobly but ultimately lost footing in the mainstream for good.
This was the climate that Jay Rock found himself facing when he geared up to release his debut studio album Follow Me Home*.* The album's singles stalled, its release date languished, and it only saw release in 2011, when it sounded like a formalist relic amid the then-just-emerging DJ Mustard, YG, Ty Dolla $ign and Tyga. It stalled at retail, quietly matched for sales (but surpassed in acclaim) by Kendrick Lamar’s insular, world-weary Section.80, released the same month.
Four years later, Kendrick is the sun around which more than just TDE revolves: his gold and platinum successes have bushwhacked a space for young poetic everymen to coexist at radio. Jay Rock might not ever be top dog at his label again, but the lessons of his first failure to launch – that a magnetic persona and perspective outstrip shiny celebrity cosigns and cookie cutter image constructs every time – are crucial to the success of the TDE machine. Jay Rock’s taken the message to heart on his sophomore album 90059, which dramatically shifts the focus of his studio work from making him look tough and cool to illuminating the human struggles beneath.
good kid, m.A.A.d city’s “Money Trees” introduce a lot of listeners unfamiliar with Jay Rock’s history to his talents, so it’s fitting that the pre-album single to 90059 is a sequel: "Money Trees Deuce." The song is an excellent point of entry into the new album’s mood; its panoramic view of West Coast street life is more nuanced than old Jay Rock records, and the production freely traverses styles. The jazz rap of “Money Trees Deuce”, Dilla homage of “Fly on the Wall”, post-Dre Cali thump of “Necessary”, Southernplayalistic future soul of “Wanna Ride”, and Shaolin swordplay of “90059” collide, each a little bit of seasoning in this gumbo, as Rock notes on track three.
90059’s expanded palette allows the rapper to stretch out too, and he dazzles with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery. Opener “Necessary” unfurls the story of a drunken drive-by in lurid detail: “On Forgiato rim tire, automatics spit fire/ Yack in the black canister, look at this bastard go/ It don’t take much to aim, fingers be snatching souls”. Later, “Telegram (Going Krazy)” uses an almost imperceptible hairpin slight of tongue (“I see the telegram goin’ crazy/ I tell the ‘Gram I’m goin’ crazy”) to trip off the story of a couple drifting apart because one is freer with her emotions on social media than she is in close quarters with her lover.
Jay Rock’s concepts are braver and weirder here, his words more arresting and illustrative, but the major reinvention of 90059 is his delivery. On “Easy Bake”, Rock hovers around the high end of his register to counteract Kendrick’s deeper, richer tone. He’s singing a lot now, too, and not in the gruff gangster-on-Easter-Sunday mode of Follow Me Home. The melodic turns on 90059’s “Telegram (Going Krazy)” and “Money Trees Deuce” are unfussed and soulful, while the title track has a drunken Ol’ Dirty Bastard energy  completely unfamiliar to Rock's catalog. The album’s bolder vocal turns are credited to a “Lance Skiiiwalker”, but Lance is about as distinguishable from Rock as T.I. was from T.I.P. or Biggie from bizarro Biggie on “Gimme the Loot.” Cuts like “Gumbo” and “The Ways” juggle all of these tricks to showcase a lyricist gracefully in control of his instrument. It's a heartening showcase, and a reminder of just how much vitality there is in TDE's orbit.


Made in L.A. under the influence of colossal amounts of cocaine, the heavy metal legends’ fourth album, recently reissued, made room for both light and shade and featured several of their signature songs.

Vol. 4 (Super Deluxe)

It would be misleading to argue that Vol. 4 is the work of Black Sabbath at the peak of their powers. When you’re the band that recorded “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and “Paranoid,” and you put them all on the same album, congratulations, that’s the peak of your powers. But *Vol. 4—*recently reissued with a full haul of outtakes, false starts, and live versions—is a close second. The sense of scale, the lyrical directness, and the sheer riff-crunching power that mark the band at their best are all here, along with several signature Sabbath tunes. Paranoid might top the list, but Vol. 4 is indispensable metal in its own right.
Having previously recorded exclusively in England with producer Rodger Bain, Sabbath opted to self-produce their fourth outing, recording it in sunny Los Angeles. If you’re guessing that their new locale exposed these four suddenly rich blue-collar kids from Birmingham to heretofore unprecedented Hollywood excess, you guessed right: By all accounts, the band consumed absolutely Olympian quantities of cocaine during Vol. 4’s recording, with guitarist Tony Iommi claiming to have had the stuff flown in on a private plane and bassist Geezer Butler recently joking (or is he?!?) that the coke bill exceeded the cost of actually, you know, recording the album.
You can glean all that information from interviews and behind-the-scenes accounts, or you can simply listen to “Snowblind,” the album’s centerpiece. (In fact, its riff is similar enough to album opener “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” that it almost serves as a reprise.) As Ozzy Osbourne lays down a blizzard of snowy metaphors for his drug of choice—at one point he whispers “cocaine,” in case the subject matter isn’t clear—Iommi and Butler serve up a riff that feels four feet deep, while Bill Ward’s drums skitter and thud in equal measure. (Ward’s unpredictability behind the kit has always been one aspect of Sabbath that their many heirs and imitators have failed to reproduce.) At times, the lyrics are so evocative (“Let the winter sun shine on/Let me feel the frost of dawn”) that they seem to anticipate the snowbound Viking saga of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” released a year later. At others, they depict the welcoming embrace of drug dependence with unexpected pathos: “This is where I feel I belong,” Ozzy sings in the song’s breakdown—a rough but relatable sentence for anyone who’s struggled with addiction, or loved someone who has.
Rejection of square society is the order of the day across several of the set’s songs. “Tomorrow’s Dream” is about leaving your problems behind by any available means, with the contrast between the grim present and glorious future encapsulated by the break between the verses’ steamrolling riff and the soaring guitars of the chorus. “Cornucopia” condescends to the normies, with their “matchbox cars and mortgaged joys…frozen food in a concrete maze.” For a band that has a bad rap for Satanic worship—you’ll find the devil all over the place in their body of work, but he’s invariably the bad guy—“Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes” sure is a blistering kiss-off to “Jesus freaks” and “preacher[s] telling me about the god in the sky.”
Two of Vol. 4’s ten tracks have found enduring second lives as storied covers by other acts. The rollicking, science-fictional “Supernaut”—like an inverse “Iron Man,” it’s about a voyager through space and time who’s actually enjoying the trip—received a thrashing industrial makeover at the hands of a dubiously named Ministry side project dubbed 1,000 Homo DJs by Jim Nash, the (gay) head of their record label WaxTrax!. (Hold out for the version with vocals by Trent Reznor, which wound up suppressed by his old record label for years.) On the other end of the sonic spectrum, the moving piano ballad “Changes” was converted into a gut-wrenching soul scorcher by singer Charles Bradley, who transmuted its lyrics about a dissolved romantic relationship into a lament for his late mother. Blessed with one of Iommi’s wickedest riffs and Osbourne’s most vulnerable vocal performances, respectively, the original versions of both songs can stand next to these excellent reinterpretations without being eclipsed; Ward’s carnival-like percussion breakdown in “Supernaut” in particular feels like finding a prize in the song’s otherwise thunderous Cracker Jack box.
And no, Sabbath isn’t afraid to show off their softer side. In addition to the untouchable “Changes,” there’s a perfectly lovely guitar instrumental inspired by the California coast in the form of Iommi’s “Laguna Sunrise” (admittedly a bit hard to take seriously once you’ve heard the poetic piss-take the Who’s Keith Moon recorded over it), while “St. Vitus Dance,” a race of a song that clocks in at under two minutes and thirty seconds, encourages a buddy to patch things up with his girl à la the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” an Osbourne favorite. The Sabbath may be Black indeed, but there’s room for both light and shade, and Vol. 4 is a masterful evocation of both by the band that did it better than anyone.

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The British group’s sixth album is a love note to aging indie idealism and to those who’ve reveled in their careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references.

Sick Scenes

Gareth Campesinos! is our bard of throwing up. For a decade, nearly every word that has come out of the Los Campesinos! singer’s mouth has presented itself with rash inelegance, candidness, and the need to be ejected from his body this very second. But sometimes, as anyone who’s stared down the depths of a toilet bowl knows, vomit is just vomit. Like that time he sang of an awkward hookup that was blown when a girl upchucked all over his rented tuxedo; or when he recounted that early heartbreak when he got wasted, ate too many potato chips, and then deposited the greasy snack right back onto a soccer field. For Gareth, such trials are the punchline to humanity’s cruel joke. They are essential experiences, embarrassments that turn into collective elation once they hit open air. Because, for all its indecency, throwing up makes us feel better.
Sick Scenes, the British group’s sixth album, plays like a love letter to aging indie idealism; to the fans who have reveled in this band’s careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references. There is yet another ode to semi-digestion here when Gareth advises: “Save your epiphanies… for chucking up in your own hands.” It’s unconventional wisdom from a man who would know, and the line hints at a weathered sageness that lingers throughout. On the prescription ode “5 Flucloxacillin,” the drums drop out to spotlight the singer’s oh-so-specific stasis as he laments, “Another blister pack pops, but I still feel much the same—31 and depression is a young man’s game.” At that, stalwart musical leader Tom Campesinos! peals off a 15-second guitar solo to lift spirits enough for the next verse.
Given the financial gauntlet nearly every independent band must face in 2017, it seems like a minor miracle that Los Campesinos! still exist at all. And nobody knows this more than Los Campesinos! A large part of their enduring appeal—remember, they began as a MySpace band—has to do with the fact that they were never especially trendy. Too sugary for the emo diehards, too tart for the indie bandwagoners, too emo for the cool kids. Their target audience could be as particular as one of Gareth’s excruciating tales of broken romance, but also just as passionate; strength in small numbers.
To fund the making of Sick Scenes, the band sold about a thousand soccer jerseys with the word “DOOMED” scrawled across the chest. Their message could not be clearer: This is a team, and you are part of it. The idea plays out in one of the record’s most touching moments, near the end of manic-panic crack up “I Broke Up In Amarante,” when Gareth starts a hook on his own, but soon stalls out. “I’m going to need you to help me out here,” he mutters, and a full chorus of voices enter to winningly finish a song about the inevitability of defeat.
Recorded amid the harsh realities of Brexit, Sick Scenes faintly opens up its miserabilia to bring in the wider world. These are not anthems of woke-ness, but Gareth’s disappointment and anger don't sound quite as rash; he’s been around long enough to reflect upon many sad cycles. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “The Fall of Home,” this band’s most beautifully heart-crushing song to date. Backed by little more than a cello, a violin, and some plinking piano notes, Gareth gets to the core of Western society’s current cultural divides: between rural and urban, parents and children, those moving ahead and those staying behind. “Left your hometown for somewhere new/Don’t be surprised now it’s leaving you,” he sings. It’s a eulogy to youth that zeroes in with precision, each detail more wrenching than the last: “funeral for a family pup” and “battery dies on your monthly call” and, finally, “gave the fascists a thousand ticks.” But this song isn’t a simple slam on the generalized “small-town mentality,” considering Gareth essentially still lives in the same small English town he grew up in. Instead, “The Fall of Home” comes off like a sympathetic plea from someone familiar with both sides, who disagrees with the nationalist impulse but can fathom its root. And in its understanding, there is a glimmer of hope.
A strange positivity can also be found on an ambling track called “A Slow, Slow Death” that concludes with the lines: “There’s a slow, slow death if you want it/Yeah, I want it.” Instead of glorifying death or poking fun at it, though, this is a statement of stubborn resilience, of life. Especially in the streamed today/trashed tomorrow world of modern music, the possibility of a slow death can seem revolutionary. Los Campesinos! will never be the biggest, the best-looking, the most loved. But when their time comes, they will be able to look back, content.


It’s thrilling to hear them again, but once the glow wears off, there’s a hollowness to this posthumous project, cobbled together from unreleased Guru vocal takes.

One of the Best Yet

There wasn’t supposed to be another Gang Starr album. From 2006 until his death, Guru was adamant that the group was over and that there wouldn’t be a comeback, even calling DJ Premier his “Ex-DJ.” He seemed to be longing to recreate himself, to put distance between himself and his legendary partner. He was growing edgy about being asked questions about Premier all the time, and even refused to answer them. He had started a new label with a new DJ named Solar, with whom he seemed conjoined at the hip, and his death only further complicated the matter. Controversy surrounded a note allegedly written by Guru on his deathbed disassociating himself with Premier specifically and praising Solar. An oncologist testified that Guru never woke up from his coma and couldn’t have written a letter, so Solar was forced to forfeit everything pertaining to Guru’s estate. Solar later sold 30 unreleased Guru recordings to Premier—“Some of them had two verses, some of them had a verse, some of them just had a hook and then faded,” Premier told the New York Times. The producer molded them into One of the Best Yet.
While the circumstances of the album’s creation remain a point of contention, it’s undeniably awesome to hear the two artists together again. On the intro to One of the Best Yet, the first Gang Starr album since 2003’s The Ownerz, Premier turns an interpolation of “DYWCK” into a sample tour of the group’s storied catalog—“Mass Appeal,” “Work,” “Code of the Streets,” and “Full Clip,” among others—as a little reminder of all they accomplished. The diehards who have dreamt of this throwback will salivate over “Hit-Man,” a Q-Tip-assisted cut that approximates vintage Gang Starr, wherein Guru plays rap assassin and Premier adds a touch of menace, and “From a Distance,” with Guru and Jeru the Damaja barring out over a swelling Premier sample. There are Foundation members at nearly every turn, and they sound very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of another Gang Starr project. There are other things to be grateful for, too: the second Guru verse of closer “Bless the Mic,” the J. Cole appearance on “Family and Loyalty,” a series of carefully devised beats designed to salvage Guru’s afterimage.
Once the initial thrill of the reunion wears off, though the album starts coming apart. Gang Starr was all about balance; Guru’s feel for how best to wade through Premier’s vandalizing, resourceful, and visionary sample work was stunningly natural. With Premier trying to reverse-engineer that process, much of the intuition and congruence is lost. In his prime, Guru was a rapper of singular monotonic charisma. He was so calm and clear and collected that his raps were a balm, and his rhymes themselves felt like proverbs. Bigger names rapped over Premier beats, but no one was better at finding their place in them, navigating their moving parts precisely. There isn’t the same effortless proficiency in these songs. Premier does his best to make sure they don’t sound like a hastily cut-together craft project of scraps, but they are missing a soul. On “What’s Real,” an in-form Royce da 5’9’, who has become DJ Premier’s new partner in recent years, displays just how hollowed-out many of these Guru verses sound.
If there is a theme to be gleaned from these leftovers, it’s that Guru had clearly grown disillusioned with the industry and was sounding its death knell. Gang Starr has always been about rap purism and outing sellouts; a song like “Mass Appeal,” its joke aimed squarely at radio, commercial interests, and posers, set a standard for such meta-mainstream rap crit. But that wasn’t the only thing on their minds then, and their claims were bolstered best by the quality of songs they were making. Here, there are mostly gripes about how fucked up the game has gotten, swipes at lesser rappers, and curmudgeonly grousing about how nobody really raps anymore. “Word to God, if Big and Pac were still here/Some of these weirdos wouldn’t act so cavalier/We all know that the game has changed/It’s crazy out here and rap’s got a bad name,” Guru raps on “Bad Name,” and that’s the hook. “Think about it, what if bling never happened/And the true artists were gettin’ rich from rappin’?/Word to God, some should give/Let’s delete the politics so real hip-hop can live.” Where these moments were once radical, renegades challenging the status quo, they now just sound like old, out-of-touch men yelling at kids to get off their lawn.
There are moments when it’s hard to imagine that at least some of Guru’s ire wasn’t aimed at Premier, a man he’d sworn off working with in life but now gets the final word on his legacy in death. It’s no secret that Guru felt betrayed by the machine that devoured the genre he loved, and came to see Premier as part of that machine, but there’s little disputing that his music is better off in Premier’s hands than Solar’s, either. Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results: Premier meets his standards for sampling and scratching, and it’s just close enough to not feel wrong. Still, doing a tag-team album when your partner can’t consent feels like the kind of breach of trust that ended Gang Starr in the first place. This isn’t exactly a hologram tour, but it reasserts an imbalance. A secondhand Gang Starr album may be better than none, but it’s far less than the sum of its parts, and even less than the late Guru deserves.


The debut collaborative project suffers from a lack of chemistry, as Pi’erre Bourne struggles to stand out within Juicy J’s signature gothic sound.

Juicy J / Pi’erre Bourne: Space Age Pimpin’

Space Age Pimpin’

Juicy J and Pi’erre Bourne may be nearly two decades apart in age, but they have a lot more in common than you might think. They’re both rapper-producers with distinctive sounds who use straightforward metaphors and flex bars to create atmospheric funhouses of sound. And even though Bourne was one-and-a-half years old when Juicy’s group Three 6 Mafia released their influential 1995 debut Mystic Stylez, both men are trailblazers who molded their respective eras of rap in their own images—Juicy with his menacing Memphis swing, Pi’erre with his candy-colored take on contemporary trap music.
Unfortunately, their debut collaborative project Space Age Pimpin proves that Juicy and Pi’erre—who raps on every song—are an awkward match. Lyrically, they’re at the same eye level—smoking copious amounts of weed, lounging with women all over the world, stiff-arming people trying to mess with their money. But it’s hard to ignore that the album’s stylistic trappings heavily cater to Juicy’s sound over Pi’erre’s. Atmosphere is a big element in both men’s music, and while Juicy has slotted himself into Pi’erre’s hard-hitting dreamscapes neatly before, Pi’erre struggles to stand out over the gothic bounce that dominates this album.
Juicy’s been playing with hi-hats, claps, bass drum, ominous samples, and MIDI instruments for decades, and here they appear on nearly every track. Songs like lead single “This Fronto” and “Uhh Huh” are expansive and gritty, with bass deep enough to power blast the grime off a dirty car. Juicy is in his comfort zone—which isn’t surprising, considering he’s the album’s executive producer—and he floats stories of gun-running and silly sex puns (“She a good girl so before she eat this dick, she gon’ say grace”) across these beats on autopilot.
On the other hand, Pi’erre’s airy melodies and pun-heavy bars don’t fit over this kind of production. Take “Smokin’ Out,” which opens with pitched-down Juicy vocals barreling through synths and a punishing low-end. Pi’erre’s croons are quickly swallowed by the drums, crumpling like a used candy bar wrapper. The melodies he chooses often match the the beat exactly (“Uhh Huh”) or, like on “Who Get High,” they attempt to harmonize and meander aimlessly through verses. There’s a handful of moments where his voice assimilates to the track, including his verses on “BBL” and closer “Unsolved Mystery” but for the most part, his presence is bizarre and distracting. Sometimes, it even sounds like his vocals were ripped from a different project entirely and retrofitted onto leftovers from Juicy’s The Hustle Continues.
This is especially strange since Pi’erre and Juicy share production credits on every song. It’s a shame that one of the most influential producers of this generation has little presence behind the boards here, because the zany pop of Pi’erre’s solo and production work is nonexistent on Pimpin. Whether this was by design or coincidence is beside the point. Juicy J and Pi’erre Bourne clearly had a great time making this project, but Space Age Pimpin falls short of the 8Ball & MJG song for which it’s named. Unlike that duo, Juicy and Pi’erre’s chemistry is off at a base level. They’re left dangling in the wind like mismatched car dice, two colorful halves that are part of a different set.


Following 2013’s Change Becomes Us, which re-worked early 1980s song sketches into full songs, Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Colin Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting.

Wire

In the discography included with England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s 1991 study of UK punk’s origins, the entry for Wire simply reads, "the jokers in the pack." Nearly 40 years into their career, Wire remain unpredictable, going through aesthetic phases, reincarnations, breakups, and re-assemblings while dealing with final departures and new members. Yet in spite of it all, they’re still themselves, somehow. With no clear model for being elder statesman in rock, there’s room to do whatever one wants. Given Wire’s long history, it must be tempting for them to create "just" another album. But there’s never been "just" another Wire album, really—their career has always produced as much brow-furrowing and head-scratching as immediate love. Then all those inclined end up loving it anyway, and then, another album.
Following 2013’s Change Becomes Us, which re-worked early 1980s song sketches into full songs, Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Lewis is credited with most of the lyrics, Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting. Cryptic song titles have been replaced with more prosaic tags like "In Manchester", "High", "Swallow"—even "Blogging", the name of the acoustic-led opener, at once moody, drily observational, and tense. Given that the term "post-punk" has reached a signifying-nothing-at-all stage (matching suits? a certain kind of haircut?), hearing a band who was actually there take their sound to a particular place few can truly reach is refreshing.
As lyrics like "fucking by proxy…selling on eBay" from "Blogging" show, Wire remain situated in a timeless retrofuture, simultaneously engaged and removed, which has always been their unique gift. The unease with the self, with the band as a fixed organizational point, that sense of relentless questioning and observation, continues. "In Manchester", for instance, could almost sound like something from early Factory Records days, except that the lyrics are about a song called "In Manchester" that has nothing to do with the place aside from that title. And it’s still a lovely singalong.
At points, you can hear Wire nodding to themselves, something not necessarily inevitable but still perfectly understandable—a guitar break on "Shifting" sounding like an echo from Chairs Missing, the brisk chug of "Joust & Jostle" and the even more thrilling "Split Your Ends" show once again how they can create a clean, brisk, stop-and-start energy. They’re not just nodding to themselves, either—the rumbling slow punch of the album’s centerpiece track, "Sleep-Walking", calls to mind the feeling of tense dread from the Comsat Angels’ "Dark Parade" off their early masterwork Sleep No More. But comparing Wire to another band never really works; nobody quite sounds like this.
Wire, forever the jokers, still never quite got their deserved deal out of the deck, and it won’t happen in the current fragmented musical landscape. They could have just said "FINE" and done a 154 album tour or the like for a lot more money and attention. A song here like "Swallow", perhaps the album’s most accessible-as-such number, the closest track to the platonic ideal of Wire’s pop song form, won’t even get the chance to just miss out on today’s equivalent to "Top of the Pops", whatever that might be. For those new to the band, Wire’s pleasures lie waiting, ready for those who want to take a chance on a daunting discography and a heck of a backstory that still keeps being added to. "There’s always someone who thinks they’ve got a plan," sings Newman here on "Octopus"; thank goodness for a band that had no plan but continues, as they choose, to succeed far more than many who did.


On her second album as Air Waves, Nicole Schneit jettisons some of the twang that marked her 2010 debut, opting for urban chug over playful Americana. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, she winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it.

Parting Glances

For all the characters Nicole Schneit slips into on Parting Glances, all the lives she touches upon and then runs from, she can never seem to sing her way out of her own head. The Brooklyn songwriter’s second record as Air Waves jettisons some of the twang that marked 2010’s Dungeon Dots, opting for urban chug over playful Americana but still holding fast to the guitar as a nucleus for her songwriting. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, Schneit winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it. Parting Glances hones in on her laconic delivery and dry touch on the fretboard, never losing its poise but rarely getting too visceral, either.
As a lead vocalist, Schneit also keeps her cool. Her sandy, stoic timbre mingles easily with the treble- and cymbal-heavy orchestrations she wraps around it with her three bandmates. When she sings over Hunter’s low harmonies on opener "Horse Race" and centerpiece "Thunder", it’s like we’re hearing two sides of the same artist. The voices twin each other, leaving just enough space to cast shadow in the valley between them, and lending an extra slice of depth to a sound field that tends to skew flat.
The lyrics on Parting Glances err toward the simple, too, but even the most well-worn lines work when folded into their surroundings. When Schneit sings "Someone take this pain away from me" in the first few measures of "Fantasy", she cracks the last word into two syllables, two notes, like the pain itself can’t be contained inside the words she uses to alleviate it. "I’m not sure what it’s about/ 'Cause the meaning never came," she sings, and she doesn’t plumb further. Her pain and its weight never resolve themselves; they just circulate in an endless four-chord progression while she sings like she’s trying to keep her head above water.
"I’m a bad man for coming around/ But you invited me here," Schneit proclaims on the enigmatic "Frank", one of many songs where she traces only the shadow of a character and lets us do the work of filling in the rest. Most of Parting Glances works invisibly like that—the album won’t stand out for its depth or its guts, but finds its stride in its smarts, in Schneit's knack for elliptical storytelling. These aren’t the richest stories you’ll ever hear, but they're enough to hook you along for the ride.


The 22-year-old Instagram stuntman turned TikTok sensation has been minorly famous for only a few months, but he already sounds washed up.

MISCREANT

Somewhere in a museum of the most outrageous sex lyrics—between 2 Chainz’s “Dos Cadenas … you can suck my penis” and JAY-Z’s “your breasteses is my breakfast”—is a bawdy declaration from Pasadena rapper Sueco the Child. “Put my D in her V got her singin’ a C note,” he brags in his grungy trap single “fast.” Sueco uploaded “fast” to SoundCloud in April. Then, when a viral TikTok challenge vaulted Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to the top of the charts, he saw an opportunity. He asked Lukas Daley, a 16-year-old skateboard personality and TikTok star, to share a video featuring “fast.” The song became an immediate sensation, inspiring over 3 million TikToks. Shortly afterward, Sueco inked a record deal with Atlantic and dropped a remix featuring Offset and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie.
Sueco was primed for virality: Before “fast” blew up, the 22-year-old born William Schultz had already accumulated more than a hundred thousand Instagram followers by filming musical stunts with a friend, skateboarder Lamont Holt. He made beats blindfolded; he made beats out of condoms; he made beats out of a girl’s butt. It helps that he looks like the illegitimate child of Dwight Schrute and a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher, and yells things like, “I fucking wish I was an industry plant” in a trollish deadpan. “fast” is Sueco’s autobiography—a sleazy account of selling weed, making beats, and “whiskey dicking,” delivered in a croak-whisper reminiscent of the way Justin Bieber once said “chilling by the fire while we eating fondue.” Buoyed by an infectious siren wail and a beat that stomps like a teenager on a DDR machine, it was an easy fit for dance challenges and outfit transformation videos. It didn’t necessarily work beyond the 15-second sound bite: The longer you listened, the more Sueco’s sluggish delivery and monotonous instrumentals started to drag. But like many memes, “fast” could be devilishly fun.
The same can’t be said for the other seven tracks on Sueco’s debut, MISCREANT. The rest of the album is both gross and soppy, like a drunk man who vomits on your shoes, and then, too hammered to realize what’s happening, groans “I love you.” “Put it her mouth have her drink it up like Danimals,” he growls in the album’s second single, “dork,” one of many songs preoccupied with the fact that a girl has touched his nuts. His goofy sex descriptions (“Hit it from the blind side/Sandra Bullock”) could be irreverent and ridiculous, if only the instrumentals weren’t so nauseatingly sentimental. “dork”’s starry-eyed gurgles recall nothing more than Owl City. The emo laptop-twinkles on “cayman” sound similarly trapped in a T-Mobile commercial. “I take a vegan bitch and I give her protein,” Sueco whispers, a pairing of style and subject matter as jarring as an ASMR dub of a “Real Housewives” fight.
TikTok—that Wild West of incest sketches, country throwdowns, and emo kids pretending to choke themselves—can be so vertigo-inducing that “brilliantly terrible” and “terribly brilliant” begin to mean the same thing. But MISCREANT isn’t impish or unique enough to succeed, even on meme terms. Much of it is memorable not for what it is, but for who it rips off. “novacane:)” is taxidermied Green Day, and “no sleep in my body” and “sober” are generic imitations of Juice WRLD. “Call me when it’s over, I can’t function sober,” Sueco whimpers, a line that could’ve come from any codeined SoundCloud rapper. Sueco doesn’t have enough punkish nihilism to imbue the subject with much urgency, anyway. As sad white boys go, he lacks the big hooks and raspy, soulful howl of someone like Post Malone.
Sueco’s been minorly famous for only a few months, but he sounds washed up, bragging about his glory days to a room that’s quickly emptying. His callbacks to “fast”—the reference to “400 on the dashy” in “dork,” a shoutout to “Cashville” in “626/305*”—make it sound as if he’s already run out of material. “I make a bitch sing pitch perfect,” he raps on “dork,” serving up a limp imitation of the joke he made on his first single. TikTok shaved two and a half minutes of “fast” down to mere seconds. It takes a particular kind of hubris to expect one viral moment to last 23 minutes straight.


The long-running rap supergroup’s comic book-inspired boom-bap is formulaic fun.

Czartificial Intelligence

Whether you prefer the pulpy sci-fi yarns of Deltron 3030, the razor-sharp horrorcore of the Gravediggaz, the Atlanta stomp of Bankroll Mafia, or the moody indie-rap bliss of Madvillain, supergroups used to dominate many corners of rap. They aren’t exactly en vogue at the moment, but Czarface, made up of Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck and the Massachusetts duo 7L & Esoteric, persists. Since 2013, the trio has defined itself through mutual loyalty to old-school hip-hop and Silver and Bronze Age comic books. Czarface make hard-nosed, slightly goofy boom-bap for people who can identify Cella Dwellaz deep cuts as readily as the difference between John Romita and Steve Ditko’s work on Spider-Man.
Super What?, their 2021 collaboration with the late MF DOOM, was a high-water mark animated by the presence of rap’s greatest supervillain. Czarface’s latest, Czartificial Intelligence, plays out more like a Guardians of the Galaxy-style buddy action-dramedy. This is nerdy dad rap projected through a cel-shaded lens, a batch of average-to-pretty-good songs that don’t take many risks. Over 7L’s samples and dusty drums, Deck and Esoteric’s raps range from clever to lazy. Deck is known for his direct language, an approach that works best when he’s in storytelling mode: On the dark and heartfelt “Sirens,” he awakens to a tragic morning-after and “thugs crying.” That curt style doesn’t translate as well to his punchlines. Half-assed bars like “Taking ’em to class like I’m driving a school bus” (“You Know My Style”) or “It’s Ray’s pizzeria how I serve it to ’em pronto” (“Blast Off”) pale beside his once-earthshaking bars.
Esoteric takes bigger lyrical swings and gets wilder results. His style is lighter and his references are more specific, using Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry’s mouthguard and motion-capture actor Andy Serkis to big up his rap skills—or shame others’. He isn’t immune to groaners—if I never hear another of his “czar” puns again, it’ll be too soon—but he at least doesn’t take himself too seriously. “Rivalries is short-lived, like dwarves is,” he says on “You Know My Style” before immediately hanging a lampshade on his words: “I take that line back/They couldn’t get it off the track with forklifts.”
That keen wit comes in handy on “Mama’s Basement,” a solo track that examines the root of his comic book obsession. Over a steady drum loop and sparkling synths, Esoteric interpolates A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” as he explains how his love of superheroes endured through a strained relationship with his mother. In the third verse, when he shows up at her place to collect his old back issues, she reminds him that he sold the books years ago and tells him to let go of the past. A Czarface album isn’t usually the place for unpacking trauma, but “Mama’s Basement” fleshes out Esoteric’s personal lore in a novel, even soulful, way.
Fresh spins like this are the exception on Czartificial Intelligence: The trio’s routine is solid but formulaic. “Gatecrasher,” which dramatizes a fake beef with fellow rap dweeb Logic and his supervillain alter ego Doc D, feels like an interlude dragged laboriously to feature length. But even when one or both flounder on the mic, Esoteric and Deck complement each other well: an indie-rap mainstay bouncing off the stoicism of a true-school legend. Take “All That for a Drop of Blood,” one of a handful of tracks where every element locks in perfectly. 7L’s beat sounds like an amped-up version of the original PlayStation startup music, Deck reflects sagely on his come-up, and Esoteric fends off biters like he’s fighting his way through The Last of Us. Czarface may be a nostalgia camp with occasional modern flair, but it’s easy to get swept up in the heroics.


On their fifth album, the UK band enlist Nigel Godrich and Kenny Beats for a smoother, softer rock record that still fires its love songs from a cannon.

TANGK

Joe Talbot treats love like a four-letter word—meant to be shouted, loudly, like a bludgeon to the head. “Look at the card I bought/It says ‘I love you,’” the Idles frontman barked on 2018’s Joy as an Act of Resistance. In the intervening years, his own life experience—the birth of a child, a divorce, a new relationship—has only intensified the word’s meaning and laid bare the power it has over our relationships. While he claims that every Idles song is ultimately about love, leading up to the Bristol band’s fifth album, TANGK, Talbot honed his focus on the subject, reading bell hooks’ powerful 2000 treatise All About Love. But where hooks writes, “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice,” Talbot approaches the topic with a typically broad sense of authority and indignation. On TANGK, Idles smooth their rougher edges as they explore love in all of its facets—it would be their warmest and most melodic record to date, if only Talbot could get out of his own way.
Writing about Idles’ most recent record, 2021’s Crawler, for this website, Stuart Berman wondered if, after a few false starts on an otherwise dark and driving record, they could go “full Kid A” and make the ambitious leap to a more experimental sound. The band seems to have taken his suggestion literally, re-engaging studio wizard Nigel Godrich to co-produce TANGK along with Kenny Beats, who formed an unlikely partnership with the band on their 2020 record Ultra Mono, and Idles guitarist Mark Bowen. The combined influences of each collaborator—Kenny Beats’ taut programmed drums, Godrich’s emphasis on melody and analog tape loops—mesh surprisingly well considering the producers’ disparate backgrounds. On “Gift Horse,” a thrumming bassline gives way to a kick drum that matches the elegant, muscular pacing of its equestrian subject, finding a phosphorescent midpoint between steely electronica and post-punk. “Grace” layers reverberating synths atop familiar drum and bass arrangements, lending a spectral, almost intangible quality to the song that Talbot echoes as he reaches for a thin falsetto. Lest you think Idles are not self-aware of this softer mode, the video for “Grace” is a shot-for-shot remake of Coldplay’s “Yellow” featuring a deep-faked Chris Martin.
In Idles, Godrich saw a band he could mold, gently, in his image: “I thought it would be interesting to see how they would translate if he was a little bit more musical, if he sang more,” he said in a recent interview. Indeed, the record opens with a piano, padded drums, and Talbot’s textured croon, which does bring to mind Chris Martin. Perhaps counterintuitively for a frontman known for gnarled roars, it’s the most expressive he’s sounded. On “A Gospel,” a song that originally began as an iPhone demo from Bowen, featherlight piano and fluttering strings accompany Talbot’s wispy vocals, finding a softness just as emotionally potent as his fiercest howl. Closer “Monolith” oozes to life with a murky synth and a thin, trembling vocal from Talbot. But here, as his voice melts into a crackling saxophone, we’re left with an impressionistic glance, one that lingers after Talbot’s final note. It’s a welcome pared-back approach after a discography full of kitchen-sink catchphrase soup.
Still, even Godrich’s influence couldn’t shake the band of its worst habits. The veteran producer was “astounded and disarmed” to discover Talbot’s unorthodox writing style, closer to a rap cypher than a rock frontman, of coming to the studio without any lyrics, instead preferring to riff live on the mic. Talbot considered writing ahead of their sessions, but decided that it was “bullshit”; as a result, the record must work around his more bombastic improvisations. There’s his interjections of “Fuck the king” at the end of “Gift Horse,” the awkward rhyming scheme of “Freudenfreude” (a German word that’s the opposite of schadenfreude, essentially feeling joy at the success of others) with “joy on joy,” on “Pop Pop Pop,” and most glaringly, the clumsy refrain on “Hall & Oates,” an ode to lasting friendship (don’t check how the real Hall & Oates are doing) that rivals Drake’s son Adonis’ breakout single in its repetition of “My man.” Additional vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang on “Dancer” are drowned out by Talbot’s crude bleats of “cheek to cheek,” evoking a bullfight more than a ballroom.
Talbot could stand to take a note from another one of his inspirations for the record, Aesop’s fable of The North Wind and The Sun. Rather than beating listeners into submission, like Aesop’s personified Wind, Idles works best when the band builds radiant warmth around Talbot’s softer vocals. There’s a subtlety to writing about love that Talbot misses on this record—it’s a topic that’s often best gestured at, rather than bossed around. Press materials note that the word “love” appears 29 times throughout the record, and yet the songs that speak to the feelings undergirding that powerful emotion—the exhilaration of romantic attraction, the fear of abandonment—don’t mention the topic directly at all. On TANGK, Idles seem poised to let down their ironclad armor and reveal a far more interesting and nuanced band, just as soon as Talbot is ready to relinquish his stubborn and self-defeating grasp.


On their second record, the Columbus, Ohio quartet play away the pain.

Like Memory Foam

There’s a fine line between growing weary of the world and giving up on it. The latter marks a political and emotional dead end, but the former can open the door to constructive thought. Growing tired of something grants space for dreaming up its replacement. In the ’90s, guitar bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth managed to funnel their weariness into restive stews of noise that approached political quandaries from an oblique angle. When Kim Gordon asked, on “Kool Thing,” “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?,” she already knew the reply. It’s the asking that counts, even if you’re already sick of the answer.
Following this sly template, the Columbus, Ohio band didi eschew the blunt force of punk, investing their political frustrations instead in the more subtle vessel of melody-rich noise pop. Their second album, Like Memory Foam, darts in and out of the personal and political. Breakup songs mingle with calls for the obliteration of the old guard, and didi treat both subjects with the same swirling mix of gravitas and irreverence. Interpersonal frustrations and political oppressions both cause suffering, after all; the body buckles in the same way no matter the source of the pain.
The band makes space for three vocalists, and the playful juxtaposition of their voices leavens the weighty subject matter. Kevin Bilapka-Arbelaez alternates between offhand clean singing and a corrosive yelp; Meg Zakany offers up a mean deadpan; Leslie Shimizu lets her vocals float airily above the rest of the mix. Their distinct personalities lend dimension to an otherwise familiar sound, and deflate the myth of rock band as delivery system for a bandleader’s interior monologue. The band’s strength lies in its internal variety, and the decentralized power structure of its arrangements.
On “Muerde,” Bilapka-Arbelaez sings in Spanish of a spider biting him during the night and flooding his dreams with poison, making use of the language's abundant internal rhymes. “Una araña en la sombra/Me araña el hombro mientras duermo,” he sings, playing on “araña’s” dual use as a verb (sting) and a noun (spider). At the chorus, against a bubbly staccato bassline, he switches to English to bemoan a communication breakdown: “All I ever want to hear/Is what you never want to say.” The clipped, brittle words contrast with the musicality of the Spanish; Spanish works better for singing about the slow death of a dream, while English is better suited to throwing up your hands in exasperation.
With multiple vocalists singing in multiple languages, Like Memory Foam resists boredom even in the songs about boredom, though the band finds its groove in the tracks barbed with rage. “Dead Tongues” threads together a slouchy three-chord guitar progression to rail against “corpses in suits with outdated ideas/who refuse to relinquish their powers.” Bilapka-Arbelaez sings the words so lightly that it’s easy to miss the frustration behind them, but an earworm often goes down more smoothly than a diatribe. Besides, a guitar song so buoyant it approaches surf rock is easier to hold and return to; in music, like in other media, comedic timing can help drive in a salient complaint about the state of the world. didi serve up their snarls with a grin, flipping off the status quo and running away laughing.
On “Haru,” didi trace a similar riff to Dinosaur Jr.’s “Feel the Pain,” chugging away on an insistent note. The duality that J Mascis probed on that song—“I feel the pain of everyone/Then I feel nothing”—resonates more than two decades later, where the most readily available emotional states seem to be deep, exhausting compassion for all the earth's suffering, or bitter, deadened irony. But unlike “Feel the Pain,” which contracts to a single note, the riff on “Haru” branches outward, as if the band were resisting the urge to fall into cynicism at the last minute, as if they had decided to keep feeling the pain. They know a third option lies beyond depression and numbness: laughter. On Like Memory Foam, they play away the pain, sitting in the middle of hell on earth without staying still long enough for it to sink into their bones.


Following last year’s debut album, the Dutch-Iranian singer continues to mine trip-hop for inspiration, with a voice that evokes the genre’s greats.

The Calling EP

ISON, the debut album by the Dutch-Iranian vocalist Sevdaliza, was one of last year’s quiet standouts, in part because almost no one’s doing anything like it. For almost a decade now, artists have flirted with the (unfairly) maligned trip-hop genre, a bit embarrassedly and usually in the guise of something else: FKA twigs filtering breathy vocals and loops through alt-R&B, the Weeknd working with Esthero’s producer to bring out the genre’s seedier side, artists like Flume adapting downtempo arrangements for an EDM-accustomed world. But ISON, co-produced by Mucky and featuring lush strings by Mihai Puscoiu, leaned fully into the genre, in its The Blue God-era Martina Topley-Bird incarnation: all its breakbeats, all its unabashedly cinematic instrumentation, and all its heady introspection.
The Calling isn’t a departure from ISON so much as a distillation in both sound and in genre. The two pejoratives for trip-hop, the coffeeshop and the bedroom, suggest shallow, half-hearted connections with other people, which was always strange for a genre that, at its best, is about extensive self-reflection. And The Calling certainly has that, occasionally to excess. There’s a fair amount of woo to get past, starting in interviews and peaking in “Human Nature” with a sotto voce spoken-word quotation of the guru Osho, whose more salacious teachings are the subject of Netflix’s cult doc “Wild Wild Country.” Once you do, though, the music is well worth it.
Sevdaliza’s voice evokes the best bits of the genre’s greats—Tracey Thorn’s richness, Nicola Hitchcock’s tremolo—while adding distinctive melisma evoking her Iranian roots. Mucky hones his sound further here. Like Arca, his productions often dwell on empty space, and just how far it can expand; “Soothsayer,” in particular, has moments that spool out slowly, very much like parts of Björk’s Arca-produced Vulnicura. The Calling takes the best part of ISON—the strings—and makes them even more abundant and central.
“Human Nature” has a tough task—building a serious song on a refrain, “touched by an angel,” that shares its lyrics with the title of an unsalvageably glurge-y CBS show—but manages pathos anyway, and a sense of alienation. Sevdaliza’s freestyled vocal is Auto-Tuned and vocoded into the uncanny. The track’s a companion piece to the single “Soul Syncable,” the most traditionally trip-hop piece here. It circles a moody, voiceless refrain, over and over, without resolution: “I’m on codeine,” she sings, “you can’t escape, patterns keep you going.”
The Calling suffers, at times, where ISON did: in structure. The EP is more concise than ISON, yet each track still has enough surprises to fill an EP of its own. “Voodoov” weaves spooky cyberpunk sound effects throughout the mix. “Energ1” is built around a glitch-and-strings bridge reminiscent, in a great way, of the McCarricks (string players who have collaborated with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gary Numan, and Kristin Hersh). And “Observer” is something quite different, the only thing on the EP that can be called “pop”—an insistent bass synth, a nudge up in tempo, and a bit of ironic contrast: The poppiest, most upbeat track on the album is about being an observer, an outsider. But these moments are scattered throughout often sprawling arrangements. Nevertheless, the highs are high, the lows barely exist, and the rest is finely crafted: the work of a mind that has styled its interior down to the most immaculate detail.


Written in the wake of a divorce and while working toward a PhD in musicology, the Los Angeles musician’s first album in four years is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts.

No Sun

In ancient Greece, mourners performed ritual laments at funerals as a way of grappling with the turbulent emotions that accompany grieving. A chorus of women would overwhelm mourners with collective vocalizing, channeling their fear of the unknown and allowing for a cathartic purging of emotion. No Sun, the latest album from Nite Jewel, aka Los Angeles singer-songwriter and producer Ramona Gonzalez, seeks to replicate the formidable vulnerability of those ritual laments by way of expressive, low-lit electronic pop centered on her own heartache. Written in the wake of the dissolution of her 12-year marriage and while working toward a PhD in musicology, No Sun is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts. Lonely synth lines that beep like EKG machines and stretches of silence guide Gonzalez’s sleek blend of electronic, pop, and jazz music. The album is her most accomplished, arresting work yet.
Gonzalez’s music transports you to a dreamy otherworld, with scuffed backdrops and oblique, guarded lyrics. On earlier Nite Jewel albums, her airy voice was a swooning medium for nostalgic electro-pop filtered through funk and R&B. Her voice was often more a texture than a focal point, which some critics have been quick to charge as a weakness, but on No Sun she changes strategies. Gonzalez’s vocals are front and center, to emphasize the grief in her lyrics, especially on the standout, seven-minute opener “Anymore.” An oscillating synth beats in the background as Gonzalez sings about losing her sense of self in the aftermath of her breakup. “I wonder if I took over your life/Because it seems you took over mine,” she sings plaintively, her voice growing more delicate as it arrives at a revelation: “It’s no use now to cry/You have yours and I have mine.”
Gonzalez returned to her own independent imprint, Gloriette, in 2016, following a spate of label troubles, and since then, her music as Nite Jewel has taken on more riveting forms, a shift that was clearest on 2017’s buoyant Real High. With rubbery basslines and melodies that recalled Janet Jackson at her most featherlight, Real High opened up a more lyrically straightforward side that No Sun continues. The ballads “Before I Go” and “This Time” present her pain in cut-and-dried terms. “I won’t talk about my feelings if you come around,” she sings in the former over a glimmering synth; “Mm, what’s it about?/You hesitate to touch the water but I’m swimming out.” She lets her words linger afterward, the silence around them like a vacuum.
Even at its most desolate, No Sun allows light through the cracks. “To Feel It” uses bright keys, jittery synths, and a staggered beat to zero in on how even the most monotonous tasks—getting out of bed in the morning, picking a pen for work—can be loaded with memories of a past life. “I can try and distract my thoughts by getting close to another,” Gonzalez sings in a hopscotching voice. “The thing is there’s nothing like the one who’s your lover.” The songs on No Sun are musically syncretic, joining together sparse, varied sounds with ease; in the album credits, brown paper bags and ceiling fans appear alongside drum machines and string arrangements. Even the instrumental “#14,” with long, ambient stretches of Rhodes, bass, and synths, feels in tune with the album’s inward, thoughtful intention.
“Thought I saw something, or was it a warning?” Gonzalez asks on the late-album highlight “No Escape.” It’s one of many songs on No Sun that lean into passages of silence, a shuffling, stop-and-start synth-pop song that takes its time and allows a way to grieve what’s lost while looking ahead. Cymbals clatter in the background as synths quake, just as Gonzalez comes to a breaking point. “I don’t know where to run,” she admits, “This one you can’t run from.” The song doesn’t find her totally at peace—“there’s no escape,” she reminds us—but in its murmuring melodies and sighing relief, it’s certainly close.

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Presented as a companion piece to last year’s Screen Memories, the John Maus’ latest captures the avant-garde artist at his most irreverent and unguarded.

Addendum

John Maus doesn’t want you to mistake his smarts for being pretentious. Sure, the cultishly adored synth-pop performer holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy and he isn’t afraid to expound on subjects like Freud, the Enlightenment, and Michel Foucault’s Theatrum Philosophicum in interviews that often read like thesis excerpts. But he also loves cartoons, preaches his admiration for pop music in its most accessible forms, and once explained, unsatisfyingly, that he unwittingly participated in an alt-right Adult Swim program because its creators also hated TED Talks. He’s weary of coming across as the Niles Crane of avant-garde music. For his last album, 2017’s Screen Memories he built his own modular synthesizers—the act of a truly devoted audiophile—only to dismiss the exercise as a waste, later on admitting that only “about half a dozen of only the most discerning ears would make out the difference.”
Screen Memories caught Maus in an even dourer mood than usual, playing up the gloom in his deadpan voice with songs about battlefields, executions, and societal rot. It was as odd and indelible, even though it was a commonplace totem of 2017: the Trumpian despair album. It turns out that record’s apocalyptic imagery and stark mood didn’t capture the totality of Maus’ headspace at the time. Recorded during the same sessions as Screen Memories, and on those same homemade synths, its companion piece Addendum captures Maus at his most irreverent and unguarded. Artists of Maus’ intellect aren’t supposed to just fuck around—it’s assumed their work must contain layer after impenetrable layer of meaning. But as often as not on Addendum, it kinda feels like he’s just fucking around.
The bleaker the album’s subject matter, the more overt the comedy. Where Screen Memories had a song about dead pets, Addendum counters with a robotically funky one about dumpster babies (“Take that baby to the dump/To the dump!”) that plays like the imagined soundtrack to a demented Atari game. His surly baritone sounds less Ian Curtis and more the guy from Right Said Fred, and throughout Addendum he plays it for maximum absurdity. “They don’t know shit about outer space” he huffs over neon-hued keys on the opener “Outer Space,” a cross between the sensibilities of Inside Llewyn Davis’ “Please Mr. Kennedy” and Max Headroom. With its treadmill pace and chants of “Run! Run! Run!,” the manic “Running Man” seems to exist mostly so listeners can picture the dance that might accompany it onstage.
By nature of its title and packaging—the album is being pressed only as part of a career-spanning box set ahead of a digital release—Addendum risks being classified as a second-tier Maus record. Maybe that’s by design, but Maus has saved some of his best work for a rarity collection before, and leftovers or not, this material stands on its own. Only “Privacy,” a smoldering buzz-killer written by Ariel Pink, feels like a draft of a song that never quite jells into the pop spectacle it wants to be. But a pair of closing songs written back in 2003 are two of the album’s most spirited. With its feverish drum claps and revved-up synths, “1987” plays like Maus’ curmudgeonly response to the party-starting dance-punk of the early 2000s—his disdainful recitation of the word “sexy” during its breakdown ranks among his all-time great line readings. Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.


Continuing in the vein of January’s Antidawn EP, Burial’s latest three-tracker dispenses with the drums entirely, instead exploring an ambient expanse of choir and strings.

Streetlands EP

While Burial’s music may be famous for its foggy atmospheres and occasional ambient interludes, its off-grid kicks and resampled snares are what make it tick. As a schoolboy, he’d get kicked out of class for drumming on the desk. His self-titled debut album and 2007 follow-up, Untrue, were suffused with the swinging rhythms of jungle and garage. Later output revealed his love of trance music, with its chuggy, thudding kicks, while collaborations with Four Tet and Thom Yorke introduced a wafty house patter to his grayscale textures. Late in 2020, “Chemz” pinned eyelids back with acid stabs and crushed breakbeats. This obsession with percussion made January’s five-track Antidawn EP all the more surprising for its lack of drums—or, really, any rhythm at all.
Streetlands, which arrived unannounced last week, tugs at that same thread, proceeding beatless for three tracks totaling more than half an hour. His trademark re-pitched R&B hooks are also gone. Stripped of the textures that ground Burial’s music however obliquely in clubs or on South London night buses, Streetlands is more evocative of the digital, imagined lands that leak into his music via Metal Gear Solid, StarCraft and Silent Hill samples.
Where Burial’s early records could be interpreted as capturing his corner of London through a lens of sci-fi and soundsystem culture (music critic Simon Reynolds has drawn parallels between Burial and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World), Streetlands is less grounded in concrete and the contained chaos of the city. Instead it drifts, generatively, like rolling vistas in a video game, into untrodden environments of its own making—less future dystopia and more unexplored present possibility. Here, the familiar shrinkwrap of hisses, pops, and crackles is about all that ties the music to his habitually claustrophobic world; instead, Streetlands offers open plains of stretched choir and luminescent strings.
Chimes hang in vaulted ceilings. The Flatliners sample—“There’s something out there”—that opens “Streetlands” is shorn of the fearful sense the same words carried on “Loner,” imbued here with something more hopeful, merely tinged with trepidation. “Hospital Chapel” builds on a swelling choral loop, like whale song, that reveals more at every turn. A reversed, tightly wound vocal on the title track takes on an alien quality, not just in its indecipherability but because for how loudly and starkly it pierces the mix, streaking in like a call intercepted from another galaxy—or, in more traditional Burial lore, a pirate radio station cutting through the frequencies. The overall effect is immersive and uncanny, but ultimately lacks the emotional hooks required to pull you all the way in.
In 2014, the once-anonymous producer broke cover with a selfie and a note posted to the Hyperdub website. He thanked “anyone out there who liked my burial tunes & supported me over the years” and shared plans to release more music. But he couldn’t promise anything, due to the impending release of Dark Souls II—an immersive, gothic role-playing game notorious for its extreme difficulty, and infamous for the apparent cruelty with which it strips players down just as they get going. “I need to play that game a lot,” Burial wrote. Burial’s song structures, almost always sprawling, have a similarly masochistic appeal on Streetlands. “Exokind”—amid panpipes and panicked primate calls—is stuffed all the way up to its closing seconds with fragmented riffs that Overmono or Bicep would kill for, teasing the arrival of a drum break that’ll never come. Ten minutes into “Streetlands” you get a chord progression that, with a billowing breakbeat, could soundtrack an arms-aloft sundown on a hilly field. But still no drums. The balance swings between exhilaration and frustration.
The one thing that remains utterly fixed about Burial’s music is how evocative it is, especially of place. In early interviews, he would reference sci-fi movies like Alien and The Terminator in the same breath as underpass jungle raves. Too young to experience either firsthand, he lived vicariously through his brother: ingesting the atmosphere from decaying tape packs, obsessing over the movie motifs and sound effects—motion trackers, dropships, sentry guns—that conjured whole worlds in his imagination and, later, his music. When he names a track “Hospital Chapel,” he’s putting you in the room, where you eavesdrop on last rites or watch rushed marriages in front of the faux stained glass. The spareness with which the song builds signals perhaps his most accomplished piece of pure ambient to date. The rest of Streetlands pumps this world-building with bolder, more fantastical ambition; on the title track and “Exokind” he comes close to bringing the listener all the way with him. But the lines just don’t quite join up, and instead you’re left to hang—unsettled—in the liminal space.