The myth-skewing, Oakland-based artist is a chameleonic pop singer on her third album. Whimsical and urgent, these are fairy tales meant to wake us up.

The Turning Wheel

Oakland-based artist Chrystia Cabral, who makes music as SPELLLING, has a knack for spinning fairy tales into jagged and reflective truths. In her lyrics, picture-book scenery and happy endings are swapped with existential longing, political criticism, and unsparing self-questioning. She often incorporates pop music itself as another myth to retell slantwise. On 2019’s Mazy Fly, for instance, she cast lines from an upbeat Paul McCartney song into a dark exploration of the Atlantic slave trade: “Hang our hands across the water,” she sang in “Haunted Water,” subverting Macca’s lyrics with a simple but cutting verb choice to address the deadly history that brought Africans to the Americas: “Hang our hands across the sky.”
SPELLLING’s ambitious third album, The Turning Wheel, serves as a culmination of her myth-skewing sensibility, with decidedly more hi-fi production. The record’s title echoes a line from “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which an imp spins straw into gold at a high human price—a first-born child. “So much about the [songwriting] process is about discovering who I am,” Cabral said in a 2018 interview, and the spinning wheel appears in her lyrics as a spiral of sturm und drang that her characters must navigate on their quests toward self-knowledge. “When I’m complete/I think I’ve found my way around/This Mortal Coil,” she sings on the show-stopping “Revolution,” and the words could be her way of name-checking both the Shakespearian symbol of struggle and the foundational indie-pop group—she invites us to listen for these layers of meaning, to draw our own connections.
On her previous albums, 2017’s Pantheon of Me and Mazy Fly, Cabral looped her voice over swampy chords played on two primary synthesizers—the compact microKORG and a vintage Juno-106—both of which contributed to the thin, bedroom-pop atmosphere of the music. On The Turning Wheel, Cabral favors the fuller tones of a piano. With horns, strings, harps, banjo, and bassoon following in her wake, she reintroduces herself as a chameleonic pop singer. The album’s first half is gleeful, soaring. “Emperor With an Egg” starts like a slow jam before speeding into a chorus that might sound at home on a mid-2000s crossover indie track. The velvety drum-machine ambience of the second half evokes her earlier work, but the crisper production is dramatically more dynamic. A weary song about hard work, “Magic Act” brightens when Cabral sings about turning her “brain [into] a garden,” the soundscape so lush that it feels like its own habitat apart from the rest of the album, with flutters of high-hat and gravelly low notes digging in the soil.
For all its high concepts and ornate orchestration, the true star of The Turning Wheel is Cabral’s voice. We hear her in clearer relief than ever before—ranging, distinctive, and unafraid to show her influences. Her breathy, pinched delivery on the phenomenal opener “Little Deer” suggests Kate Bush and even Marilyn Monroe, another player in the American mythology, while her twee intonations at the beginning of the title track point toward the delicate, chamber-pop records of Anohni. Rather than sounding derivative, Cabral tries on these familiar sounds like meticulous costumes. Her own identity is unmistakable—an actor you recognize from role to role.
While The Turning Wheel was originally planned for release in September of last year, its whimsical presentation and urgent, socially conscious lyrics give it a timeless feeling. There is no fantasy in Cabral’s pop packaging; we meet characters who are in “grave danger” because they’re “waving wands with wizards,” viewing a troubled earth from “high in a tower we call America.” We hear of happily-ever-after concepts like “destiny” and “legacy,” but before her characters can even contemplate a happy ending, they first must “crawl into the daylight.” Cabral’s folklore reminds us that life is arduous, long and full of unexpected beauty, if we just open our eyes to it. Fairy tales are not always comforting—some are written in order to wake us up.

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On her second album, the sophisticated art-rock singer steps toward the center of her own songs, thanks in part to production from Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner.

Perfect Shapes

“Cut Me Off,” an early standout from Perfect Shapes, the second album from art-rock songwriter Madeline Kenney, begins with an order: “Wait,” commands a mechanized voice at a crosswalk, counting down the seconds until Kenney can move. But at last, she lashes through the guitar lines that seem to have looped around her legs. “Don’t cut me off,” the North Carolina-via-West Coast singer counters, establishing rules of her own. By song’s end, she’s found her stride and momentum. “I gotta good thing going now,” she sings, backed by bright harmonies. The line is a personal affirmation, a way for Kenney to steel herself against distractions. But it also serves as a blanket statement for Kenney’s progress on Perfect Shapes, a set of 10 patiently simmering and ambitiously structured songs that offer a new image of self-assurance.
Tory Y Moi founder Chaz Bundick produced Kenney’s debut, 2017’s Night Night at the First Landing. Obscured by layers of fuzzy guitar, with her voice low in the mix, she often didn’t sound like the star of her own songs. But Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner produced all but one of the songs on Perfect Shapes, adding bass, guitar, and synthesizer. Kenney’s frayed riffs still form the backbone of these songs, rising to the top of the spiky “I Went Home,” but she surrounds them with more sophisticated melodic cascades. With Kenney’s smooth voice now at the center of these tunes, Wasner adds her touch for tastefully ornate arrangements. Fluttering saxophone parts from Wasner’s Wye Oak compatriot, Andy Stack, dapple “No Weekend” with light, shining through the spaces between Wasner’s relaxed bass and Kenney’s glistening guitar. As its stuttering beat and ascendant harmonies move over foamy synths, “The Flavor of the Fruit Tree” is effervescent.
These careful layers help frame the distance Kenney keeps from her subjects, as she balances the hyper-specific with the hyper-relatable. Kenney’s wide-angle lens makes it easy to apply her observations to one’s own life, even when these songs stem from specific people and circumstances. She opens “No Weekend” with a stanza about not getting to enjoy supposed days off for being so overextended—“I’m sorry, I can’t go out/I don’t know where my time goes/I’m in the hustle to my elbows”—before she captures the unease of being tempted by old habits. During “Cut Me Off,” when she sings “Don’t cut me off/I’m in my own time,” she’s telling, not asking. Especially in the rising gig economy, establishing personal boundaries can feel frightening, but Kenney does so with cool aplomb.
Kenney maintains an unhurried pace across Perfect Shapes, but don’t mistake her deliberate moves for any sort of lacking. “They’re calling me empty/Just because I know my own limits,” she counters during “Overhead,” setting another guideline for life. On Perfect Shapes, Kenney builds a comforting space for her own reflection and growth. It reflects a welcome boost in confidence, Kenney at last stepping onto the pedestal of her own design.


The long-awaited sequel to the duo’s classic debut contains bursts of inspired lyricism, but a lack of chemistry and uninspired production make this a disappointing follow-up.

No Fear of Time

Black Star have always been preoccupied with the passage of time. Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) and Talib Kweli’s 1998 debut Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star tied references to Black popular culture from across eras—the 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou, DJ Clue mixtapes, Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s “Black Man’s Cry,” and Toni Morrison novels—to a then-evolving consciousness within hip-hop in general and the streets of Brooklyn in particular. Across the album, Bey and Kweli balanced fierce intellect with a perceived sense of duty in their quest to protect hip-hop culture from the Diddy-led shiny suit era. There was an expansiveness to their rhymes and interplay, especially on songs like “Astronomy (8th Light)” and “Thieves in The Night,” where both rappers displayed an urgency to combat violence, ignorance, and commercialism with patois and àses. They weren’t the first or the last to take up this mantle, and the progressive fervor in their lyrics was slightly muted when it came to gender, but Bey and Kweli’s youthful vigor cut the distance between a corner cipher and an issue of the defunct Brooklyn newspaper The City Sun.
24 years after releasing this debut, Bey and Kweli are now internationally recognized icons of rap, activism, and entertainment. Bey pursued film and television projects and released four solo albums before threatening retirement in 2016, while Kweli attempted to find his footing between the underground and mainstream, eventually founding his own label. Both men have faced their share of controversy—child support lawsuits for Bey and harassment charges, sexual and otherwise, for Kweli. But through it all, the legacy of Black Star has persisted and, thanks to their long-awaited sophomore album No Fear of Time, lives on for a new generation.
On paper, Black Star’s return is fortuitous. The world is in a state of disrepair: racism still runs rampant and the Republican party is attempting to dismantle decades worth of civil rights legislation. Theoretically, the people need Black Star now more than ever. Bey and Kweli work best when they spin righteous indignation into catharsis and beauty. The ire in Kweli’s voice when he eviscerates Confederates and Nazis on “So be it” and the smirk in Bey’s voice when he calls out Satan on “Yonders” recall the dizzying heights of their debut. It would be unfair to expect the nearly 50-year-old rappers to come with the same energy they had in their 20s, but in its best moments, No Fear flips this assumption inside out, facilitating a thoughtfulness that ripples and flows with the steady rhythm of high tide in the moonlight.
But while there are bursts of inspired music across the album, the duo’s old-school sensibilities cut the other way as well. Much has been made of their decision to forego releasing No Fear on traditional streaming platforms, but lines like Kweli’s “The OGs is in jail, millennials is for sale” ring insincere considering that the album lives exclusively on the podcast network that also happens to host the group’s Midnight Miracle show with Dave Chappelle. For every clear thought, there are several that meander and flop just for their own sake; like the calendar-based rhyme scheme that starts Kweli’s verse on “So be it” and Bey’s verse on “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” which is esoteric to the point of being nonsensical.
The chemistry that made them both stars doesn’t always translate on group songs, either. Bey’s voice used to be a lower but still spirited counterpart to Kweli’s mid-range tenor, but Bey often sounds bored and unfussed here. On “Sweetheart. Sweethard. Sweetodd.,” Bey’s flow drags and his words slur together like he’s falling asleep in front of the mic. “Freequency,” a collaboration with Black Thought, should be an earth-shattering moment for rap heads, but the measured menace of Thought’s bars (“I don’t relate to fools/They focus on the vision, they all going to Hell and swear you going with them”) barrels through Bey and Kweli’s formless ideas with the barest possible effort. It’s a shame considering that other groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Little Brother have used their recent reunion albums to both address the times and tighten their group dynamic. No Fear establishes a general disconnect between its two emcees, who still rap competently but seem to be on different wavelengths.
Madlib provided all the beats for the album’s nine songs, but even the Loop Digga’s contributions are a mixed bag. The energetic shuffle of “So be it,” ornate loop of “Sweetheart. Sweethard. Sweetodd.,” and the jazzy jam session vibe of “Supreme alchemy” tease out some of Bey and Kweli’s best performances across the album. But several beats lack the texture and warmth we’ve come to associate with Madlib—both “o.G.” and “Yonders” feel limp and lifeless. The ghostly wails and harsh drums of “My favorite band,” a solid beat in its own right, have already been used by two different artists in recent years. When Madlib goes out of his way to deliver all-original beats to rappers like Freddie Gibbs and the late MF DOOM, a group of Black Star’s stature having to settle for leftovers on their comeback record is telling.
No Fear ends with several quotes from the late musician and critic Greg Tate, who muses on rap’s innate relationship to time: “One of the things we know about emcees is, man, they just have phenomenal memories.” As Black Star, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli built careers off of decoding the past and raising hope for the future. However, there are few moments across No Fear that feel immediate, timely, or necessary, and their sense of urgency has dulled. For all the hype, fans deserved something better than just good enough.


In the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which will collect his ambient works, M83's maximalist composer Anthony Gonzalez attempts to get back to his minimal roots.

Digital Shades Vol. 1

New records by M83 are big events not only in the sense that their unrelenting cinematic grandeur seems built with IMAX in mind, but also in that they're generally met with wide-eyed anticipation. So it's weird that Digital Shades Vol. 1 slipped onto the market with so little fanfare. There is a nice symmetry to it, though: Reduced fanfare is what this record is all about.
Ambient music is one of M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez's formative influences, and you can hear traces of it in his music-- especially on "Unrecorded" or "In Church" from 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. The funny thing is that M83, in general, is the antithesis of ambient music: The latter slips into the background; the former saturates the foreground. But on the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which serves to document his ambient recordings, the maximalist composer attempts to get back to his minimal roots.
Brian Eno, ambient music's definitive figure, is a self-professed influence of Gonzalez's, and his mark is all over this album. It's impossible to hear broad piano figures plinking in a deep field of tone without being reminded of Eno's pacesetting Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a record that even came with its own manifesto: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
By Eno's definition, Digital Shades Vol. 1 is ambient only in the most literal sense: sound fills the air. The interpretative openness Eno stresses is absent from the record, which can be pretty handily interpreted in one way: It's an M83 album without the pummeling percussion. If purely ambient music is like sand slipping through your fingers, felt but ungraspable, Digital Shades is more like a rope sliding through your palm, laced with friction where the music hijacks your attention. "Coloring the Void" opens with an angelic chorale, a retiring guitar figure chiming in the background, and Gonzalez's muffled soft rock vocals-- all of which will be immediately familiar to M83 fans. Beyond the humming tone that wreathes it all, it's just M83 on muscle relaxers.
The compositions build organically, but they lack the mystery of pure ambient music, the sense of not knowing how you got from one place to another, and the womblike feeling of enclosure. The transitions are often too overstated-- and the short songs too fast-moving-- to induce that sort of subconscious hypnosis. On the eight-minute closer "The Highest Journey", scattered pianos gradually gather emphasis amid tense drones, eventually blissing out in a way that's satisfying but utterly predictable. But the album's iffy classification does nothing to dilute its pleasures, and only the most prescriptive ambient music fans will balk-- on balance, the record brims with ambient signifiers. There are field recordings of waves and birdsong, lots of efflorescent long tones, vaguely new-age song titles that suggest a naturalistic mysticism, and the usual sky, snow, and sea imagery.
In the end, the album's aura of inessentiality becomes an asset-- a pleasant contrast to M83's usual momentous impact. The songs are big by ambient standards, but tiny by Gonzalez's. All of M83's work is mood music, but the mood is usually one of passion and intensity, which can occasionally be a bit enervating. For those who crave the M83 sound but feel too nervy for all the pageantry, this is a perfect fit: grand and beautiful, but also retiring and relaxing. It's an X-ray view of the skeleton that tends to disappear under Gonzalez's percussive muscle, and a promising teaser for the next proper M83 album.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the ecstatic songs on Mary Margaret O’Hara’s cult hit Miss America.

Miss America

Miss America stubbornly emerged in 1988, named because Mary Margaret O’Hara thought the record was “so much unlike what those two words together said.” The Canadian singer had been made to feel irrational for pursuing her vision (she knew what people said about her: quirky, eccentric, I’ve heard chickens sing better than that), and the grueling process of getting the album out into the world left her emotionally and physically tired, disinclined “to bother people with my own things.”
Her story is familiar in many ways: a powerful label discovering a young female talent, capturing it, then attempting to quash her idiosyncratic style, repeatedly sending her back to the drawing board in search of a hit. What isn’t familiar is O’Hara, no placid archetype, a one-of-a-kind torch singer whose flame floats free of the match. She is an improviser who stacks words and melody in real time to try to approximate a feeling only to immediately question the results, like a sculptor meticulously pressing clay into the shape of a face then wondering why they had ever thought it might appear human. Navigating an unimaginative record industry was small fry for O’Hara, who was then a 38-year-old singer devoted to conceiving a form of expression that transcended physical bounds and conventional relationships. She went in search of pure, unmediated sensation and dared others to experience it with her. As she sneers on “Year in Song”: “Now hit those gleaming faces hard/Though they’ll try to miss it.”
Plenty did. Miss America remains a cult album 30 years after its release, cited occasionally by Nick Cave, Perfume Genius, Neko Case, Tanya Donelly, and the Dirty Three. It would be too easy and somewhat disingenuous to lay the blame for its disappearance at the feet of a sexist music industry—in Britain, at least, it was greeted with total reverence. (That is how you imagine Morrissey discovered it, inspiring him to ask O’Hara to howl on his 1993 song “November Spawned a Monster.”) Maybe some failure of promotion on Virgin’s part denied Miss America its rightful standing alongside the decade’s other jarring noir masterpieces like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, and Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man.
But its creator also wasn’t committed to attaining those heights, disappearing soon after its release. It remains her only full-length album. O’Hara’s disinterest in pursuing success is in keeping with how she expresses longing on Miss America: desire is open-ended and without objects on songs called “To Cry About” and “My Friends Have”; a strange force that mangles her country-tinged balladry. While achieving transcendence through music wasn’t novel at the dawn of pop, let alone 1988, the way in which O’Hara sang about needing to escape the physical confines of her body to do so is just one of the qualities that gives Miss America its contemporary resonance. There is comfort and power in hearing ideas around the confines of gender and physical limitations being echoed back across a 30-year divide.
As convinced as Virgin was that Miss America was an unsellable anomaly, O’Hara’s debut isn’t totally abstract by any means. There are moments of impossibly tender melody that could soundtrack a big-haired ’80s romantic comedy or even a jazzy supper club rendezvous were it not for her destabilizing presence. The firelight in her ballads flickers just enough to suggest something malevolent lingering beyond the window. Her jaunty moments have a rictus determination, and her spiritual pleas could be frightening. Sometimes she drags behind the beat; sometimes her players struggle to keep up. “I am usually trying to jump out of my own skin,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Not trying, though—it’s natural. You know how you can do something and your brain’s just a little bit behind? The thought of doing it is a little bit behind the action?... I don’t like to watch where I’m going.”
If O’Hara had any direction, it was forward into joy: “Joy is the aim,” she repeats on “Year in Song.” Here, her band is steady—moody, loose, a little corrosive twang—but she is a dervish, beating the phrase like a blacksmith. She sings it with idle sweetness, gasps and chews at it until she is spitting scrambled consonants—“See, the aim, eh, joy?” as if nudging the concept, in cahoots with it—and whimpering to an end. She moves in and out of her fraught incantation, seeming to address anyone watching her in the throes of this process: “Pretty soon too much,” she rasps, or taunts, perhaps aware that there will be people who find her pursuit grotesque. She suspected as much from how she made her band “lose their sense of rhythm for a while.” “Maybe I don’t realize how uncomfortable that makes some people,” she told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2002.
There’s no concrete narrative threaded through Miss America, though O’Hara returns to what sounds like a relationship with a person who did not share her vast capacity for ecstasy. Beauty and defeat intermingle on “Dear Darling,” a dusky tear-catcher where O’Hara’s natural vibrato rivals the smoky twirl of the pedal steel around her. And “Keeping You in Mind” is a pouty coffee-shop waltz that tries to reckon with this person’s fears—“Don’t you think that I’m worried too?”—before returning to another of O’Hara’s central tenets: Holding on to one good thought, strong in your mind, makes both solitude and physical unions immaterial. “I’m still happy with what I’ve got,” she muses: “Not having you/But keeping you in mind.” She suggests self-knowledge is key to joy on “When You Know Why You’re Happy,” a woozy meditation in which an upright bass note reliably stretches and contracts beneath O’Hara’s exploratory approach. “You move much better than you know/Not just some jerky to and fro,” she sings, stacking her impressions in real time again, “when you know why you’re happy.” Her lovely tribute comes after the precarious jubilation of “Anew Day,” a vampy ode to new beginnings that’s occasionally unsettled by harsh, ragged traces entering her voice.
O’Hara’s euphoric defiance might seem woo-woo if we didn’t hear her pain. Her most famous song is “Body’s in Trouble,” which bridges the gap between Miss America’s more languorous and choppy sides. “You want to kiss, feel, take, hear, ride, stop, start somebody/And a body won’t let you,” she grieves, becoming ragged, dragged along by the guitar’s circadian tide: “Who do you talk to when a body’s in trouble?” she implores. It’s not even her body, it’s simply a body. O’Hara’s sense of dislocation, rendering her incapable of accessing neither the divine nor the quotidian, comes through more strongly on “My Friends Have” where she wails amid irritable, detuned post-punk about her distance from the chattering world: “I want to get what my friends got,” she mumbles, a few seconds off-cue. “Just physical and some small talk.”
The small stakes of her plea amplify its sorry unattainability, though O’Hara refuses to be deterred from her reach for liberation. If “Not Be Alright” is Miss America’s weakest song—scatty guitar chopping around distracting wobble-board bass—it’s where she recommits to her quest for unmediated intensity: “No curtains on the windows/No covers on the beds/She lays them out on the floor/And she rips them up to shreds,” she yelps in a halting fashion that sounds as if she’s trying to approximate backmasking’s slippery sensation, making her desecration of domestic comforts even more unsettling. “It will not just be alright,” she repeats, barking and seething, sounding so wired with torment and resistance that it’s almost frightening. You feel her heels digging in.
O’Hara’s breakdown of language and unsteady presence mean that quite a bit of Miss America can feel disconcerting to listen to. Its instability often recalls exaggerated cinematic portrayals of people experiencing episodes related to poor mental health—and O’Hara knew that some quarters talked about her as if she was crazy. This diagnosis, she told Melody Maker in 1989, was just another example of a restricted imagination: “I think a lot of the people they say are mentally ill, it’s just ways of thinking.” Making one album and vanishing certainly implies fragility and an inability to bear industry pressures, and O’Hara’s relative withdrawal from the public eye affirms notions of her as a recluse. But what if she got everything she needed from that one album? What if what scans as trauma to unfamiliar ears is actually the sound of escape? From its title down, Miss America defies the notion that women should be pliant, steady vessels and forges a beguilingly fractured statement that holds its secrets to this day.


The comedian, actor, musician, and professional personality recounts a miserable breakup with disarming sincerity and grim humor on a solo debut steeped in rock history.

Hello It’s Me

The first words Chris Crofton sings on his debut solo album are also the words that make up its title: “Hello, it’s me.” If they leave you thinking of Todd Rundgren’s 1972 hit, that’s no accident. Crofton peppers these ten songs with knowing references to rock history: “I cried 97 teardrops today,” he sings on “Numbers Game,” one-upping ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.” “I know what becomes of the brokenhearted,” he asserts on “Find Me in the Bar,” as if he’s responding to Jimmy Ruffin on the jukebox. Somehow, he never sounds like he’s trying to impress you with the size of his record collection; he presents these lyrics as though they’re all part of a common pop language. Crofton is telling his own sad story through the music that has soundtracked his life—and maybe yours, too.
And what a story he has. A comedian, actor, musician, and professional personality, Crofton is one of those guys who just seems to pop up randomly in any number of mediums. You may have seen him in the 2009 Harmony Korine flick Trash Humpers or on the CMT sitcom “Still the King.” Sometime in the past decade, you may have witnessed him fronting an outrageous quasi-metal act, Nashville’s Alcohol Stuntband, or watched him doing stand-up in Los Angeles, or heard him co-hosting one of several podcasts. Perhaps you’ve read Crofton’s long-running advice column in the Nashville Scene or remember bumping into him in one of the city’s bars when he was still drinking heavily.
Several years sober now, he gets serious on Hello It’s Me—although not in the demonstrative, grave manner of, say, Jim Carrey brooding his way through Dark Crimes. Instead, these songs are low-key and open-ended, offering more questions than answers as they chronicle what sounds like a pretty miserable breakup. When he asks, “Would you, could you love me?” on “Non-Conformist Blues,” Crofton isn’t posing the query merely to his ex but to everybody within earshot.
As dark as the album gets, Crofton can still be funny. These aren’t joke songs (thank god), nor is Hello It’s Me some clever meta-commentary on the breakup album, but there are moments of humor, whether it’s the extremely specific locales he names on “Everywhere You Should Be (Except for in Love)” or the stargazing ufologists he describes on “UFO Hunters.” “They’re searching the sky, I’m staring at my phone,” he sings, right before Jim James’ guitar solo explodes out of the song like an Alien chestburster. Even as he waits for a text that will never arrive, Crofton knows the odds of romantic reconciliation are every bit as astronomical as the chances of a flying saucer landing in his backyard. The chuckle gets stuck in your throat.
Jettisoning the heavy rock that defined the Alcohol Stuntband, Crofton embraces a more straightforward pop sound, paired with a sincerity that can be disarming—especially when he addresses his struggle with alcoholism on “Find Me in the Bar”: “That’s where I feel most at home,” he sings. “It’s where I feel least alone.” But the album’s primary subject is his broken heart. Featuring members of Houndmouth and Bully, it deploys the gentle patter of drums, soft-rock guitar strumming, and weepy strings to express a strain of heartache that is familiar from so many other breakup albums. Fleetwood Mac and Sleater-Kinney aside, these records are almost always one-sided, airing the grievances of only half a couple. As a result, they can be exercises in ugly recrimination.
Crofton doesn’t solve this problem, but he does acknowledge it in an indirect way, mainly by hoarding all the blame himself. “I know it’s all my fault, because whose else would it be?” he sings on “It’s All My Fault.” On some level, he suspects he’s unlovable, and that paranoia lends these songs a deep pathos as well as enough grim humor to undercut any self-seriousness. Hello It’s Me conveys pain with an asterisk: It hurts like hell, but it’s not the end of the world.


Ten years have taken some shine off of Daft Punk’s gilded final album, but its unforgettable impact still echoes throughout the pop universe.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition)

It was a provocative thought: What if, Daft Punk wondered, we take our retro flirtations and lean all the way in? Is it the moment to fully consummate a Pharrell connection that stretches back over 12 years? In spite of everything that’s made our name, shall we reject modernity and embrace tradition? To each, an affirmation: Bien sûr, pourquoi pas?
Random Access Memories, which swept into homes 10 years ago on the back of the most fulsome rollout imaginable, arrived with “Classic!” practically etched into the lacquer. Yet Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s fourth and no-fooling final album is their only one to see its reputation stall, or even backslide when put under scrutiny—unlike the rest, which all traveled from varying shades of skepticism to being regarded as either significant, genius, or both.
RAM is slow, it’s said, a long 75 minutes; the airlocked grooves are linear and the opening run sags under the weight of treacle. This was an undeniable event record, but does the lore supersede the songs themselves? Where Homework and Discovery teem with eternal youth, RAM’s unyielding devotion to the past can fix it in time.
The next installment in a post-dissolution push to gild their legacy, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) supplies 35 minutes worth of unheard or hard-to-acquire bonus material, as well as a wormhole back to 2013—an era of buzz, naivete, and fortune-cookie wisdom that good times can last not just all night, but forever.
Having conducted extensive interviews about the duo’s universal influence for a forthcoming book, After Daft, I was surprised by how much was left to discover about one of modern pop’s most pored-over records. Among not only their team but also a small auditorium’s worth of affiliates, the same giddy perspective recurs uncoerced: They were all nestled in the belly of a magnificent Trojan Horse bedazzled with Hedi Slimane sequins, knocking at the gates of the big leagues.
The plan for RAM materialized at a point when Daft Punk’s stock seemingly couldn’t go any higher. Midway through Alive 2006-07, the tour that reshaped live electronic music's potential, they hatched a plan to pivot sharply. Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, and their creative director (or, according to those closest to the nerve center, silent third member), Cédric Hervet, were in agreement: Pro Tools, plug-ins—anything their clubworld peers might avail themselves of had to be ditched unless unavoidable.
They amassed a band of engineers who would keep pace with Bangalter’s cultured ear (“the best in the business,” says DJ Falcon, despite lingering hearing damage sustained from a misfiring speaker in 2002), then spent years rotating between premium studios—including one, Henson B, that required an enormous crystal to be spotlit 24/7 because the ghost of Karen Carpenter was said to lay within. The preliminary sessions in 2008 didn’t produce much, save for the eventual arpeggio on “Giorgio by Moroder,” a moment of liftoff so goofily brilliant it shot into the annals of memes with zero astrodynamic drag.
Following a detour to work on 2010’s TRON: Legacy soundtrack, progress steamed forward “like a train without brakes,” according to core mixing engineer Peter Franco. The Avengers of session players were assembled to jam for days on end while Daft Punk captured, miniaturized, and rearranged their physical essence as they once treated 12"s by Billy Joel and Barry Manilow. After splicing one rhythm section from the West Coast with one from the East, a distinctly buttery texture began to form: two parts Stevie, one part Steely.
The duo corralled inspiration differently. Bangalter drastically reduced his liquid intake to enable 15-hour stints without the flow-jarring mundanity of bodily functions. De Homem-Christo—“the wrangler to Thomas’ wild buck,” as Franco puts it—typically offered feedback from a nearby couch, sharpening a song’s contours by requesting lighter snares here or extra syncopation on a two-bar loop there. (He also nearly wiped Julian Casablancas out with a late tackle during an impromptu soccer game; whether this was a motivating tactic remains unclear.)
No expense was spared. An exceedingly rare Sennheiser VSM201 vocoder, the same make employed on Kraftwerk’s Computerwelt and Herbie Hancock’s Sunlight, met decommissioned hi-hats from Off the Wall, which drummer John “JR” Robinson had dug out for a specific, non-dominant crispness. Old pal Todd Edwards, who crashed out of music in the late ’00s, took up temporary residence in Bangalter’s guest house and was restored to factory conditions. Of the launch recordings that NASA handed over, Daft Punk chose humankind’s last successful moon voyage, Apollo 17. They weren’t exactly burying the intergalactic lede. You think Earth’s orbit can’t be breached again? Watch this.
Heaviness hung in the air, too. Unbeknownst to most, de Homem-Christo was churning through a divorce at the time, which might explain the soft agony marbling “The Game of Love.” When it came to adding toplines in 2012, the project’s gravitational pull could warp those who entered its atmosphere. Pharrell and Nile Rodgers both recall experiencing a peculiar memory fog, which makes you wonder if “Lose Yourself to Dance” really was the result of groove-hypnosis. Noah Lennox, unaccustomed to working under the judgmental glare of soundproofed glass, suffered a nervy first-day flub with his idols. In the end, “Doin’ It Right,” an inspired modular hymnal without any clear antecedent in the Daft catalog, was well worth the pounds lost in flop sweat.
Even mastering wasn’t free of drama. Petrified by the fear of damage or a leak, Franco loaded two duffel bags of foil-wrapped tape reels into the trunk of a gleaming BMW 3 Series and embarked upon the four-day trek from L.A. to engineer Bob Ludwig’s bolthole in Maine, sleeping next to the tapes at night just to be sure. He was pulled over twice, once in Arizona and then again in Arkansas, suspected of hauling supposed contraband across state lines. Which, in a way, he was.
Listening back, one of the most commonly held knocks against the record rings true: It takes nearly a half hour to pick up and sustain momentum. RAM shines brightest in pursuit of fun across a back half where the bow tie hangs loose. That Gainsbourgian extra syllable conjured from the word love-uh during “Beyond” is a hoot. The ’70s songwriting guru Paul Williams punches in the performance of a lifetime on the irreducibly sweet “Touch.” “Contact,” constructed around a sample that DJ Falcon and Bangalter first spun on a joint Cassius/Together DJ tour, then further elevated with pinched synth tones and fusion specialist Omar Hakim’s antic fills, rips. “Get Lucky” is “Get Lucky.” You can’t step to it, and there’s no use trying.
A true monocultural event, “Get Lucky” slammed in at No. 2 Stateside, breezed nicely past the one-million mark within 69 days in the UK, and tipped the scales in favor of team Daft Punk’s five-trophy sweep at the 2014 Grammys. The hit was so ubiquitous, recalls Edwards, that attempts to promote anything else got splattered. As the next four singles whistled clear of the Billboard Hot 100, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo simply made peace with the fact that “Get Lucky” was set to run and run (and run).
Before anyone heard a note off the rest of the album, the noise surrounding RAM was intense. Overall, it’s an unrepeatable highlight reel: Teasers on SNL and at Coachella, a premiere in some remote Australian town called Wee Waa, riffin’ on stage at the Music’s Biggest Night to “Le Freak” and “Another Star.” If you had the industry in the palm of your hand, wouldn’t you?
From that performance until 2021, Daft Punk’s career became marked by silence, save for a few banner production jobs and fan dreams of an Alive 2017 tour melting into a puddle of purest copium. Following a grace period to process all the attendant emotions of calling time on their creative unison, plans for this reissue quietly ran in parallel to 2022’s commemoration of Homework’s quarter century, with 2/22—a date in the Daftian calendar thick with import—of this year destined to be the 10th Anniversary’s kickoff.
Paradoxically, the group now appears more active in death than in life. Many might wish there was more trace material worth flexing for this reissue, yet theirs was not a regimen conducive to cranking out B-sides on the fly. Indeed, none of the outtakes lifted from what we know generate more than fleeting intrigue. Take “The Writing of Fragments of Time,” where Edwards’ eagerness and the happenstance of Franco leaving a tape running hot can’t carry the attempt to retcon a Get Back-style eureka moment atop the original.
Of the unlocked extras, the synthetic croon of “Infinity Repeating” doesn’t quite make up the down payment on Casablancas’ pledge in 2014 of it being “super bizarre,” nor does it hit on the same level as the laser-guided lovesickness of “Instant Crush.” It just… is. “Prime,” however, comes correct with a high-noon epic that brings to mind the superabundance of disco pioneer John Morales’ reel-to-reel edits, or 1997’s Daftendirektour, where Daft Punk would break into a galloping cover of Moroder’s “Chase.” It’s a tantalizing glimpse at how an alternative RAM might have panned out with extra rocket fuel.
“The worst thing you could do for an album is release it,” Bangalter confided to TRON: Legacy’s orchestral arranger Joseph Trapanese. For RAM, however, market conditions could hardly have been sweeter. Both social media and the music press were at peak effectiveness as promotional vehicles, entire staff rooms marshaled to lavish attention upon this monument to midtempo.
Handily, an antagonist had also emerged. The dance sphere had become convulsed by a debate pitched between DJ traditionalists and the high-octane, low-subtlety new breed of EDM stars who brazenly pushed Daft Punk’s theatrical live template toward an event horizon. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo surely couldn't have foreseen a wave of cake-throwing as the direct ramification of Alive 2006-07, yet it provided the perfect opening for these upstarts-turned-scene-elders to splash cold water in the face of a rapidly overheating scene.
Well, here’s the rub. RAM’s titanic popularity offered a roadmap to disposability, sparking a wave of cosplayers who gestured toward the album’s burnished chrome and instructed their labels that, if enough money was dumped down the hole, they too could attain a throwback vibe, man. Top 40 radio and festival bills alike became hopelessly bogged down with yawningly sterile business-class bops, a mid-2010s morass of Earth, Wind & Dire.
There’s still plenty to relish, but front to back, the songs on this set are not airtight enough to be impervious to time’s ebb and flow. The framing of RAM as an antidote to screen addiction has calcified into a Boomerist rind; today, the most compelling forms of expression do emanate from a laptop, and a decade’s worth of denuded disco and rich-guy funk simulacra has rendered plush melodies and scratchy licks of the ’70s bloodless. Human After All, which bludgeoned listeners for being supine in the face of a commodified future, strikes a positively relatable note by comparison.
Such is the curse of music as Fabergé egg. Where the visuals for Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” and Discovery counterpart Interstella 5555 conclude with the dream of a child, RAM comes off like the high-spec dream of an adult. Which is fine if that’s your thing—and to be sure, it is a great many people’s thing—yet the most self-evidently perfect recording of the century can’t help but feel as if it’s best admired through a gold vitrine.
Random Access Memories was assembled to preach the credo of analog over digital, faces over interfaces. To electronic fans who were switched on by the generosity and million-volt charge generated between Homework and Alive 2007, the move suggests a different binary: that of abdication over affirmation. During the press junket for Mythologies earlier this year, Bangalter was eager to state that his communion with the machines was over. It’s not as if we couldn’t already tell.
Whether you love RAM the album, or loved the pomp, circumstance, and deserved celebration of Daft Punk that accompanied it, is to a degree immaterial. Several collaborators have said the group was comfortable in the face of possible rejection, which I don’t entirely buy, but if the very attempt of an Apollo-level moonshot was the goal, why fuss over sticking the landing. The residual memory we carry alongside the music is that of Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, ringed by friends, dangling their feet off the edge of pop culture’s Mount Rushmore, game finessed.


For all of the Decemberists’ instincts as performers, they've never been a band to leave listeners wanting more. The Florasongs EP is culled form leftovers from their last so-so album, but at just five songs and 19 minutes long, it goes down easier than its predecessor.

Florasongs EP

For all of the Decemberists’ considerable instincts as performers, they've never been a band to leave listeners wanting more. Save for 2011’s uncharacteristically concise The King Is Dead, even their best albums often seemed like too much of a good thing, and most have felt longer than their runtimes—much, much longer in the case of 2009’s proggy endurance test The Hazards of Love, a cautionary tale about the overreach ambitious artists are capable of when left unchecked. Like The King Is Dead before it, this year’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World played like a correction to that record, a continued dialing back of the band’s more audacious tendencies, but it was overstuffed in its own right, and with no musical or conceptual themes binding its 14 songs, it begged for some focus. Terrible World was the first Decemberists album that didn’t have the vision to justify its bloat.
Casual fans won’t be overcome with excitement upon learning the band’s Florasongs EP was culled from leftovers from the Terrible World sessions. Even for Decemberists diehards, an addendum to the band’s most forgettable album probably wasn’t high on the wish list, and the EP reaffirms what Terrible World already made clear: that Colin Meloy brought an abundance of songs to these sessions, but not much in the way of a big picture. Unlike its full-length counterpart, though, Florasongs has brevity working in its favor. These days, the Decemberists sound best in small doses, and at just five songs and 19 minutes long, the EP goes down easier than its predecessor.
If the EP has a unifying thread, it’s the band’s wide-eyed fascination with '80s college rock. Filled with ringing guitars and taut melodies, "Why Would I Now?" moves with the swift efficiency of Elvis Costello’s King of America-era output. A shanty caressed with accordions, "Riverswim" plays like it was traced over the Pogues’ "Dirty Old Town". And though Decemberists have so fully internalized R.E.M.’s playbook by now that they could probably turn around a Lifes Rich Pageant tribute album on two days’ notice, "The Harrowed and the Haunted" is one of their most elegant homages, building to the same lovely, slow reveal as R.E.M.’s dreamiest numbers. Even the Communist Russia setting of "Fits & Starts", the EP’s lone rocker, feels like a throwback to the Reagan era in its own way. "I was watching on the apparat/ Some comely little apparatchik felled," Meloy sings over pounding pianos. As rowdy party songs go, it’s hardly AC/DC, but it’s about as close as he’ll get.
As The King Is Dead proved, there’s still some pleasure in hearing a relatively reigned-in Decemberists. But while the band wears restraint well, Florasongs never overcomes the sense that they’re selling themselves short, penning good-enough songs when they used to shoot for grand, great ones. This is a band that once thrived on risks. The Crane Wife shouldn’t have worked but it did. The Hazards of Love shouldn’t have worked and, by and large, it didn’t, and ever since they've been playing it safe. After five years of bowling with bumpers, maybe it’s time for them to start taking chances once again.


The fifth installment of the rapper-producer’s long-running series lands closer to the sweet spot between beats and bars glimpsed on his previous effort.

The Life of Pi’erre 5

As a rapper-producer, Pi’erre Bourne’s musical frame of reference first blossomed under the glow of FL Studio. His uncle inspired him to make his first beats while in elementary school during the rise of Dipset and G-Unit. After a childhood spent traveling between New York and South Carolina, Bourne moved to Atlanta to study sound engineering before taking a job as an engineer for Epic Records. His time in the studio helped refine his songcraft, but it was his direct exposure to the 2010s Atlanta rap boom—artists like 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, and Young Nudy, among others—that truly galvanized him.
At the time, Bourne’s contrasting style was an anomaly within rap: he pitted cavernous 808s against synth lines that wouldn’t sound out of place in a 16-bit-era Sonic the Hedgehog game. Though indebted to producers like Pharrell and Kanye West, songs like Nudy’s “No Stains” and Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia” hijacked genre conventions with chirpy abandon and helped lay the foundation for a new generation of rap psychedelia ruled by song leaks and heavy vibes. Bourne’s beats quickly became the star of the show as his approach became more ubiquitous, but he’s expressed frustration at having his raps looked over as a part of the experience: “I just want everyone to take me seriously for both,” he told The Fader in 2017. The Life of Pi’erre 5—the fifth installment of his long-running series which also doubles as his sophomore major-label album—lands slightly closer to the sweet spot between beats and bars glimpsed on 2019’s The Life of Pi’erre 4. It’s a slight upgrade, less a gear shift than a recalibration.
There’s no denying Bourne’s strengths manifest as a producer first and a rapper second. He’s never been bashful on the mic, but his beats—synths, drums, and sound effects whirring and clicking together like gears in a clock—tend to smother his breathy sing-song. Continuing the refinement seen on TLOP4, the fifth in the series further corrects this power imbalance; his voice meets the production halfway, becoming more than just another detail in an audio mosaic. He cuts through throbbing 808s and minor octave keyboards on mid-album highlight “40 Clip,” where he flexes checks and leaves his jewelry at home to not embarrass anyone. He’s become better at determining whether to skate over his bubbly sonics (“Biology 101”) or submerge himself within them (“HULU”). His voice generally lands a little bolder than before, which gives the raps more impact.
None of this is to say that his subject matter has changed much. Bourne’s raps are wordplay-heavy, funneling boasts about money and fashion, flirtations with lovers, and the occasional autobiographical gem through the tried-and-true art of the metaphor. He isn’t as silly as Big Sean or unfadeable as Roc Marciano, but his jokes and scene-setting are typically colorful enough to infuse each rhyme with enough personality. He invokes rapper Cassidy’s song “Hotel” while describing an anonymous hookup on the chorus of “Biology 101.” On “Couch,” he laments his deteriorating relationship with a brother who let him crash in his living room before talking about untucking his chain at a train stop that used to scare him. Not every line is a winner—“I wear ice on me like hockey dudes” and “I’m a king like Simba, roar,” in particular, fall flat—but they fit the lighthearted nature of Bourne’s music, which takes itself just the right amount of serious.
Pi’erre 5’s guests and production embellishments do the rest of the heavy lifting. Playboi Carti, who’s already set to appear on the album’s upcoming deluxe edition, bounds across the double-time of “Switching Lanes,” while Sharc—an artist signed to Bourne’s SossHouse record label—pulls off abrupt left turns on “Drunk and Nasty.” These two songs also house some of the album’s most surprising production choices. “Lanes” ends with a sped-up ice cream truck jingle merging with the beat; “Nasty” features an abrupt five-second pause after its hook, designed to keep listeners on their toes. Further, on “Butterfly,” Bourne slides between rapping regularly and rapping a half-measure ahead of the beat, creating a beautiful instability. These quirks could only come from a rapper with a professionally tuned production ear; one willing to compare themselves to Kobe Bryant, a basketball player who also made a point of subverting expectations on the fly.
The Life of Pi’erre 5 exists in a world terraformed to Pi’erre Bourne’s sensibilities. His aesthetic reaches far beyond the leak threads and madcap videos that have turned him into a cult icon. Even though his sound has become more commonplace, Bourne’s consistent tinkering brings him closer to fully reconciling both sides of his art. If Pi’erre 5 proves anything, it’s that Pi’erre Bourne the producer and Pi’erre Bourne the rapper are less at odds than ever.

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The latest of many 2008 releases by Hospital Productions mastermind Dominick Fernow tilts away from his (loosely speaking) "song"-based work and back to the realm of harsh and undeniably powerful noise.

Arrowhead

One of a half-dozen full-lengths to be released by New York noise artist Prurient this year, Arrowhead can be considered in either of two contexts depending upon your familiarity with the one-man-band's sizable discography or with noise music at large. If you're interested in Prurient, Arrowhead is a revealing transitional retrospective, intense but with precedent. If you're not, it's a shocking, singular piece of hair-raising noise. Either way, it's yet another essential piece in Prurient's metastasized catalog and one of the year's most obliterative and exhilarating releases.
Originally recorded in 2004, Arrowhead consists of three squelch-and-sustain tracks built by high-pitched microphone feedback, challenged only by spasms of drumming and the mutilated screams of Prurient mastermind Dominick Fernow. He infamously employed a similar approach-- a thin, powerful shriek of feedback that slowly warps and expands until it blooms into a boundless abyss-- on "Roman Shower", the brazen first track from his 2005 Load Records debut, Black Vase. Though exceptions abound, much of Fernow's recent output has been more "song"-oriented, meaning only that the settings have generally been shorter and less of a standstill (see the excellent Pleasure Ground or the second side of Adam Tied to a Stone).
In that historical setting, Arrowhead-- recorded the same year and in the same city as "Roman Shower"-- links many of the facets of Prurient's sound. In the first two tracks, Fernow gradually intensifies sinister, relentless rays until, like "Roman Shower", they become pained, bloody wastelands. The third and shortest track lunges forward, slowly becoming caked in static and sliced by feedback similar to that heard during the first 27 minutes. All the sounds smear, wiping across the speakers like a grimy, gory mess. Imagine Daniel Menche pushing the Fuck Buttons on speed, for four minutes, and you get the point. Together, these tracks-- "Sternum", "Ribcage", and "Lungs"-- show us where Prurient had been in 2004 and where he was delightfully going.
If this release serves as an introduction to Prurient, it'll be a trial by fire, but one well worth the burns. Sure, you'll find noise "bigger" than this, but you'll find little that's so dramatic and masterful. Listen for the control Fernow wields over his electronics as he grapples with the tone, letting it slide into chaos only to bring it back under his hand. There's a violent, lacerating ebb-and-flow to this work that's as nauseating as it is enrapturing.
Both in his Manhattan record store, Hospital Productions, and through his record label of the same name, Fernow peddles the most extreme black metal, a genre that-- at its best-- delivers an idea without apology and with exhaustion. Prurient sounds little like black metal here (with its drowned vocals and saturated, tidal murk, Cocaine Death-- another excellent 2008 release from Fernow-- does; and he's in a black metal band, Ash Pool), but Arrowhead functions in much the same way: Its stylized, specific, and unflinching sound roars with a singular menace, at once terrifying and captivating. These performances sound like the sorts of pieces that happen when every ounce of trouble the performer has gets sweated, bled, and screamed into the cutting room floor. Re-reading that sentence, I'm afraid I've made Prurient's searing power-electronics sound, well, emo. And I suppose, in the end, it is. But for 31 minutes, Arrowhead should keep you too fixated (or, as it were, repulsed) to care.


Dutch producer Bas Bron abandons the understated cool of his cult hit “What’s a Girl to Do” for bright ’80s synths and Daft Punk melodrama.

Spontaneous Order

In the 11 years after Fatima Yamaha released the 2004 single “What’s A Girl to Do,” the whimsical electro-house tune became a cult club favorite. With its earworm hook and gradual build, the song became a dancefloor staple, particularly in Glasgow, and it was a rare night out that didn’t feature its signature hook floating over a sweaty crowd. Its sneaky catchiness, plus the anonymity of its creators, propelled the mysterious entity to popularity. No one knew who “Fatima Yamaha” was, and the original pressing of the song featured a girl on the cover. Then Fatima Yamaha played a set at Dekmantel 2015, and was revealed to be Dutch producer Bas Bron. With this, the spell broke.
His 2015 breakthrough album Imaginary Lines offered more of the same synth-based dreamy electro as “What’s A Girl to Do,” but felt more like pastiche than the genuine article. Follow-up Spontaneous Order was five years in the making, and represents an about-face from the detached cool that brought Fatima Yamaha its slow-burning fame. Instead, the album offers an over-the-top confection of Daft Punk-esque synth keyboards, tight funk beats, and heavily filtered vocals.
Spontaneous Order revels in its campiness, and many tracks here feature cheesecake-rich melody lines that take the songs skyward. Opening track “Drops in the Ocean” features life-like water droplet sounds that mark the downbeat, and a synth melody soars over the top before Sofie Winterson’s vocal feature enters, layered thick with effects. It gathers pace before it’s saved from its own silliness by that signature Fatima Yamaha squelchy bass. “Bar-Bodega ‘That’s It!’” opens with a sharp four-on-the-floor beat before zipping into cheerful bouncing chord stabs and an obnoxiously confident synth melody. The slowed-down “We Are Drops” sneaks into power-ballad territory, with its heavy-handed drums the and shamelessly empty lyrical platitudes (“We’re drops, we’re drops/Together alone, we’re drops”) sung in falsetto by Bron before building to an echoing, spacious climax.
Elsewhere on the album, Bron is subtler. The breakbeats and juddering melody of “Monderman” are a far cry from the up-beat funk of the rest of the album; its chords are transposed up and down the scale as the track progresses, generating patterns from randomness. “Master Zhuang” begins with a booming bass and squelching drums before a blipping, jaunty synth melody pulls it into the realm of vintage video game soundtracks. The title Spontaneous Order is a nod to the accumulating and random set of circumstances that first brought Bron recognition as Fatima Yamaha. To replicate the alluring mysteriousness of “What’s A Girl to Do” would only be disappointing; instead, Bron has created an album that’s shameless in its poppy sensibilities and that doesn’t try to be cool.

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JEFF the Brotherhood's eighth album tries to make up for a lack of direction with pure enthusiasm, like the "responsible" parent letting the high school kids get drunk at their house because they’re gonna anyway.

JEFF the Brotherhood: Wasted on the Dream

Wasted on the Dream

Wasted on the Dream was supposed to be JEFF the Brotherhood's second album on Warner Bros., but about a month ago, the Nashville duo announced they were "SO FUCKING PLEASED" that they had been dropped. Now the title reads as accidentally prophetic: This is likely to be the only album ever to feature members of Jethro Tull and Best Coast and a guy who worked with Poco, and you have to wonder what Warner Bros. were hoping for by allowing a band like JEFF the Brotherhood to conduct their own fantasy draft. But at least their short stint in the big leagues allowed the group a shot to make good on the upward trajectory promised by 2011's We Are the Champions. Instead, Wasted on the Dream just skulks back to a keg that was kicked far too long ago.
No one should have to apologize for party rockin’, of course. But when your basic M.O. is "we’ve got mustaches and a sixer," there’s only three ways your eighth (!) album can go.  You grow increasingly debauched until your body gives out or the authorities come calling. You discover the Replacements and start writing wistful, ruminative songs with acoustic guitars. Or you take a third path, cut by recent Hold Steady and Free Energy releases and followed by JEFF the Brotherhood here: scale back in the name of "good, clean fun." It’s an overreaction to any encroachment of "I’m too old for this shit," countering age with enthusiasm in the hopes of perking the ears of listeners who might still get titillated at the mention of beer and weed in a radio rock song. At best, Wasted on the Dream is an eager, "responsible" parent letting the high school kids get drunk at their house because they gotta do it somewhere. At worst, they sorta sound like narcs.
Sample lyrics: "The world has turned into a great big ball of shit." "Marijuana makes me wanna take off all my clothes." There’s one song where Jake Orrall is too drunk to karaoke and many others that refer to "the dream" as some kind of vague vision quest guided by an unnamed hallucinogen. Quoting the lyrics at length disarms deeper criticism once you realize what you’re up against—it’s harmless, mostly, the sort of played-out and time-stamped easy laughs that lead one to believe the flute solo on "Black Cherry Pie" could’ve been inspired by Ron Burgundy, even if Ian Anderson actually plays the damn thing.
Wasted on the Dream argues for the viability for modern classic rock and at the very least, it wants to interact with the kids rather than resort to Kid Rock-style concern trolling about the obsolescence of the geetar. Their generous hooks and effective riffs establish the Orralls as premiere Buzz Bin archivists,"Cosmic Visions" somehow recalling both Weezer and the one time when the Smashing Pumpkins sounded like they were having fun, which is to say it’s a major bite of "Where Boys Fear to Tread". They’re an able stand-in for fellow alt-grunge torchbearer Wavves on the Bethany Cosentino feature "In My Dreams", and their stoner-rock allegiances are confined to "Melting Place", which manages to recall "Black Sabbath", "Iron Man", "Paranoid" and JEFF's single-entendre spirit guide, "Sweet Leaf", the four Black Sabbath songs known by even the most casual fans.
It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel. Despite doubling their number of guitar strings from three to six and their live personnel to a quartet, Wasted on the Dream is a buzzless, antiseptic recording, with hotshot producer Joe Chiccarelli (The Strokes, Spoon, Jason Mraz, it just gets weirder) spraying Febreze all over the room.  Or, there just isn't an established character selling it to you, no way to ascertain a discernible JEFF the Brotherhood-ness through it all. But maybe that's just as well for an act that always felt destined not to be America's preeminent party-rock band, but a pre-party band—surely fun, but a warmup for something bigger and more memorable.


Inspired by a panoply of club-music styles like gqom, UK funky, and tribal, the Mexican producer’s music revels in eroding barriers between percussive techniques.

Drum Temple

Centering polyrhythms and syncopation in the traditions of gqom, UK funky, or dembow may be the order of the day for club music, but Mexican producer OMAAR isn’t new to these kinds of sounds. Since 2012, Omar Suárez has cut and pasted elements of grime, tribal, and Latin American styles into the structural elements of techno and house. Drum Temple, his debut full-length for Mexican label NAAFI, further cements him as a faithful proponent of rhythmic fluidity and Afro-diasporic percussion. All seven tracks, along with three remixes from NAAFI members and affiliates Lao, Nick León, and WRACK, revel in eroding barriers between percussive techniques, instead embracing a nomadic sense of rhythm and release.
OMAAR’s reverence for percussion on this album is almost liturgical. His tracks possess a hard-charging density, but there is something ceremonial, meticulous, and sacred about his style. “Drum Dance” is a rapturous reinterpretation of gqom and techno, at once resembling an ancient ritual and an intense strength-training session. The title track follows in its footsteps, adopting a similar palette. “Mystery Man” affixes industrial clanging, echoes of pan flutes, and eldritch vocals to this format, culminating in a sort of midnight drum march.
OMAAR adopts an eclectic approach, but Drum Temple is still threaded together by a cohesive percussive atmosphere. The Mexico City-based artist is less interested in emulating any one style than in articulating his own impressionistic vision of these genres. The second half of “Jungla” buries thumping drumbeats beneath field recordings of bird calls and monkey screeches, suffusing the album with a verdant sensibility. Meanwhile, the drum sequencing on “Ritmo” is reminiscent of UK funky, synthesizing a conga loop, hi-hats, whistles, and a dancefloor command that implores you to “pull up.” It is a jagged journey that lands in a dark dreamworld somewhere between the Selva Lacandona and the East London ends.
While OMAAR’s previous releases on NAAFI leaned more heavily on club-ready references and styles, Drum Temple is far more preoccupied with rhythmic introspection and careful control, even as it maintains an athletic tempo. Drum Temple quietly showcases the rhythmic alliances made possible by experimentation, smashing one genre boundary after another, but still communicating a strong sense of character in the process.
NAAFI is now more than a decade old, and it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say it has become the chief reference point for Latin American experimental music (at times eclipsing other equally deserving collectives and labels, though that is largely the result of European and U.S. media’s myopia when it comes to music from the Global South). OMAAR has released on NAAFI since 2014, so he’s become a key artist for the imprint as it has garnered attention abroad. Over the last few years, though, the label has worked hard to expand its original mercurial vision internationally; it’s put out music from British and Japanese artists like Gaika and WRACK, stretching the geographical boundaries beyond its initial realm of collaborators. Drum Temple is an excellent reminder of the label’s original vision: to complicate the narrative of Latin American club music, continually embrace reinvention, and let a love for innovation and experimentation be its guide.

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The Swedish savants team up for their first collaborative project, a sincere commitment to alt-rock and post-punk that brings the genres’ darkness into a new era.

Psykos

A decade ago, before the words “Drain Gang” were ever uttered, Yung Lean and Bladee were the twin flames at the forefront of the Swedish Invasion. Despite the longevity of their creative relationship—and the fact that the collective has always seemed to prioritize their genuine friendships over business transactions—the duo has never actually released a full collaborative project until now. While both artists have flirted with guitar music and rock star aesthetics since their genesis, Psykos sincerely commits to an alt-rock and post-punk palette. More than a step forward, though, it’s also a look back: “Ten years, blood, sweat, and love, still standing tall,” as Lean sings on “Golden God.” Their sound in between genres is a natural byproduct of a life lived in-between, lost in the liminal transience of touring, shuffling from one hotel room and relationship to the next.
With last year’s Sugar World, Lean introduced his schmaltzy Thin White Duke era; here, he transforms into a version of himself closer to Ian Curtis or Robert Smith. It’s a fitting sound for an album that is in many ways about reckoning with the trauma of touring stardom—the titular declaration of “Golden God” inevitably suggests Almost Famous, another story about a precocious kid exposed to the pleasures and perils of rock’n’roll at far too young an age. On the anthemic blog-rock groove “Sold Out,” the pair sing not just about losing their childhoods, but completely destroying them: “I killed my youth/I watched it fall.”
If Psykos is an open-casket funeral for lost innocence, then opening “Coda” is a tender eulogy delivered at the service. So often, the cherubic Bladee has played the ethereal angel, but here he embodies a tempting devil, his crooning voice summoned once Lean says, “I hear God talking/But it’s overshadowed by El Diablo.” From that reflective intro onward, Psykos strips away almost any semblance of the trancey Eurotrash pastiche and lacquered hyper-pop gloss that this collective has become known for. In lieu of the ethereal gnosticism of Drain Gang is a kind of Zen nihilism that finds solace in the comforting stillness of a dark and empty void. When Bladee sings of making “the jump without wings” on “Still,” you can either take it as suicidal ideation, or a leap of faith.
Sometimes the effects-heavy guitar recalls Eno-produced U2 or Parachutes-era Coldplay, but woozier and more dissociative—probably the result of the counterintuitive cocktail of kratom and codeine that Lean claims to have been drinking regularly during recording sessions in Thailand. On the eerie “Still,” titanic cymbals crash into streaks of effects-heavy guitar, while “Things Happen” slips into a more intimate acoustic mode. Most of the overt hip-hop influence is stripped away, but Lean slips into a blunted rap flow on “Ghosts” as Bladee serenades him with circuitous loops, and their penchant for tight hooks lends itself to anthemic singalongs like “Sold Out.”
But it’s as much of an unplugged pivot for producer Palmistry, whose 2022 album TINKERBELL interspersed trance and 2-step with Dean Blunt-ish hypnagogia, alongside collaborator Silent$ky. The whole dissociative feel of Psykos belongs to Palmistry as well, whose struggles with psychosis during the album’s production informed its shape, most literally in the title, which Lean—also a survivor of psychosis—scrawled on the back of a leather jacket. In a recent conversation about the making of Psykos—as much a group therapy session as an interview, which Lean self-effacingly describes as “AA shit”—Lean gently teases his friend about his behavior during these episodes, not just from a place of love, but from a place of firsthand experience with schizophrenia. Lean compares the experience of enduring psychosis and coming out the other side to being a veteran traumatized by combat, fearful that your reality might snap at any moment: “If you’re in a war and your mind is safe, at least you know who the enemy is. If you're in a psychosis, your brain is the enemy. And that should be your best friend, that should be your home.”
In spite of the pain that fueled Psykos, the album is defined by resilience and triumph. After all the lightning strikes and near-death experiences, they owe it to themselves to take their own work seriously. With every release as solo artists and collaborators, there’s a greater intentionality and a heightened sense of focus to everything Lean and Bladee do, as they’ve not only found their voices, but found what they want to say with those voices. To have watched Lean and Bladee maturing over the years is to be reminded that every musician is not just a performer engaged in an ever-evolving creative process, but a human being often just trying to grow up, as the hard armor of life falls away to reveal the frightened child underneath.


The Australian beatmaker Flume mixes woozy Dilla-fied production, R&B-inspired bedside intimacy, and guest vocals on his promising debut.

Flume

In an interview with Dazed Digital last year, Australian beatmaker Flume said, "Music essentially boils down to two main elements, rhythm and melody. I feel tones and textures often get overlooked, so I like to take my time finding the right sounds." The approach is working for the unassuming 21-year-old musician, otherwise known as Harley Streten: In November, his self-titled debut album and its single "Sleepless" beat One Direction for the number one position on Australia's charts. Streten celebrated by posting screenshots of the ensuing Twitter outrage.
He doesn't come off as a firestarter, though, or even all that different from other young electronic producers. He listens to J Dilla and Flying Lotus, started tinkering with production when he was barely a teenager, and still makes music in his parents' basement. While his approach to warped sound owes much to Dilla, Flume's aesthetic can be compared to SBTRKT's integration of R&B's bedside intimacy with distant beats and silky voiced female singers.
Streten explores his sonic palette with varying degrees of success on Flume. It's a little long on instrumental filler ("Space Cadet", "Warm Thoughts", "Ezra"), highlighting the fact that at this point in his career, samples and singers are Streten's most effective asset. Those features mask the fact that most of his songs are structured around samey, distracting background swoops that introduce climactic moments.
On "Sleepless", singer/model Jezzabell Doran is Streten's Jessie Ware, though he gives George Maple more of the spotlight on "Bring You Down". Her featherlight refrain "Hush now, you're standing on a landmine" is the centerpiece around which snares skitter and arpeggios twinkle, her voice soaring as Streten drops a judicious beat into the bridge. On "Insane", Streten distorts Australian singer Moon Holiday's lovely but affectless voice into a melodic foil to his throbbing builds and drops. Sometimes, neither the vocals nor backing can save the show: "On Top" features uninspired rapping from New York MC T.Shirt ("The night's forever young/ It's us that gets old") that falls flat over offbeat thuds and simulated siren wails.
Now and then, Streten strikes an unusually potent streak: On "Left Alone", a chorus persists throughout as if dogging guest Chet Faker's slurred pleas for solitude. Preceding track "Holdin' On" juxtaposes an old-soul male vocal sample and gospel echoes ("Mama, I love you!" "Yes I do!")  with muffled keyboard stabs and serious swing for an effect that recalls Jamie xx's Gil Scott-Heron remixes. Sinuous opener "Sintra" chops up vocals like James Blake's "CMYK", a foil for the calming, sweet "Star Eyes", which closes the album with a dream sequence made up of screwed bits of speech. On "What You Need", Streten makes a claim-- "Been waiting to love you/ ... I've got what you need"-- shiver so that it sounds like she's slowly dissolving into tears. With that kind of control over his songs and performers, Flume could easily evolve into a sought-after producer.

Transgressive / Mom+Pop / Future Classic


Written as her loved ones protested at Standing Rock, during the dissolution of a queer romance, and after the death of a beloved mentor, Katherine Paul’s debut is a work of intersectional mourning.

Black Belt Eagle Scout: Mother of My Children

Mother of My Children

Mother of My Children, the debut album from Katherine Paul’s Black Belt Eagle Scout project, is a collection of pensive rock songs saturated with an oceanic mood. Recorded in the depths of winter, near the singer-songwriter’s hometown in northwestern Washington, it gets its drama from mists and crashing waves—a lush rhythmic force of unruly drums, distorted guitars—with Paul’s voice surfing above it all. Transparent but weathered, her sound has a beach-glass blurriness befitting an album devoted to many forms of loss and mourning that unfolds in moving, hazy episodes. In each one, she rushes towards the elements of her life that have a salt-water sting to them, approaching every one of them with anthemic conviction.
Paul grew up on Puget Sound, on a small reservation called the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. Steeped in intertwined musical and spiritual heritage, her family started teaching her Coast Salish music, drumming, and jingle dress dance as soon as she was old enough to make memories. From there, her musical education expanded across the 70-mile coastal stretch connecting Seattle with her hometown: As a teenager, she taught herself to play guitar and drums from bootleg Hole and Nirvana VHS tapes.
Paul stitched her first album together from a series of heartbreaks. The title song begins with vocals that seem to echo through a vortex. She repeats “without you” enough times to pluck out the phrase’s unique sadness. Like the other tracks on the record, this one was written as her family and friends protested at Standing Rock, during the dissolution of a relationship with the first woman she loved, and after the passing of her beloved mentor Geneviève Castrée, the illustrator and musician (whose death was also the subject of a pair of albums by Castrée’s widower, Phil Elverum of [Mount Eerie](https://pitchfork.com/artists/2919-mount-eerie/). A work of intersectional mourning—queer, indigenous, feminist—Mother of My Children doesn’t compartmentalize these compounding losses.
Specifically, Paul doesn’t draw sharp distinctions between sorrow that is political and sorrow that is personal. Her first single, “Soft Stud” (a track guaranteed to make queer hearts skip a beat), pulses with one person’s specific lust as she navigates a queer community rife with “open, overcrowded love.” The song deserves an award for how deftly it captures the frustrated, wavering intimacies of open relationships.Its lyrics are direct—“Need you, want you, I know you’re taken”—but there’s a layer of discretion in Paul’s delivery. It wasn’t written to be heard by the subject; it exists for the singer’s own purposes. Her insistent guitar and her noble, self-abnegating retreat as the song progresses only add to its potency.
There are confrontational moments on the album. In “Indians Never Die,” Paul questions an oblivious colonizer with chilling calm: “Do you ever notice what’s around you? When it’s all right under our skin?” She is almost furious on “Just Lie Down,” whose distortion and feedback are the aural equivalent of clenched fists. No matter how it’s expressed, her anger throughout the record comes across as righteous. By the closer, “Sam, a Dream,” Paul is ready to blink away her weariness, finding new momentum in its churning energy and static drums.
Mother of My Children is particularly elegant in the way it demonstrates how grief and love share space when something precious is taken from you, how the distinction between those emotions can blur. Paul embeds her coded wisdom in elemental language, refusing to differentiate between forms of heartbreak. But there’s truth behind her vagueness: You can get hit with more than one tragedy at a time; life doesn’t dole them out in distinct chapters. Paul’s project is to show the enormity of this undifferentiated mountain of loss, and to find a way beyond it. If a river dries up, mourning it doesn’t create a new river. It creates a memory where the river used to be, a monument of loyalty to what was lost.


There's an organic and unforced feel to the latest album by Chicago-based post-rock trio Russian Circles, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated.

Guidance

For five albums now, the Chicago-based trio Russian Circles have made great use of post-rock most familiar's dynamic tricks—loud and quiet; stop and start, swell and subside. But they’ve never had qualms about splicing elements of everything from metal and noise-rock to krautrock and post-hardcore into their darkly dramatic, instrumental compositions. Their last album, 2013’s Memorial, fleshed things out even further with keyboards, strings, and guest vocals from Chelsea Wolfe. But on the group’s sixth full-length, Guidance, a slightly different ethos is at play: the fine art of letting it flow.
There’s always been a sense of flow to Russian Circles, but on Guidance, it’s far more striking. On the folk-like opener “Asa,” Mike Sullivan’s delicate guitar is underpinned with surges of dusky ambience; from there, the band’s tried-and-true blend of glacial riffing and overcast atmosphere takes hold, with the chunkiness of “Vorel” tracing a direct path back to Through Silver in Blood-era Neurosis. Brian Cook’s bass churns with seismic force—the tone of his instrument remains one of the Russian Circles’ most instantly recognizable and arresting textures—and Dave Turncrantz turns his drums into an intricate apparatus of temporal dissection. Amid all that, though, the grooves reign. “Afrika” creates an pulsing undertow that’s desperate and triumphant at the same time; “Mota” switches up more often. But even when Guidance gets complicated, there’s a more organic and unforced feel to it, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated.
Just as unforced is the emotional gravity of Guidance. In a recent interview with Destroy/Exist, Cook explained how the album was inspired by a handful of photos his husband was given at work one day—photos of public executions being held somewhere in Asia. No explanation was given, and since then, the photos had haunted Cook. Rather than turning Guidance into a album-length threnody—Memorial, after all, kind of fits that bill—there’s an urgency and even a sense of meditative acceptance to songs like “Mota” and “Lisboa.” It’s no accident that those are two of the most openly melodic tracks on the album, with chord progressions that evoke beauty, melancholy, and cautious hope as potently as Jesu. “Lisboa” is also the only song on Guidance that truly, fully commits to the sudden, super-quiet/super-loud dynamic that’s become post-rock standard issue. But here, when the band shifts abruptly from hush to hurricane, it feels like a introspective collapse rather than an explosion.
Unlike a huge portion of heavy and/or post-rock albums, lately or in the past—including records in Russian Circles’ own back catalog—there are no lengthy, eight-minute-plus tracks on Guidance. Nor are there any brief interludes. Aside from delicate, folk-like opener “Asa,” each track occupies a relatively uniform span of time: roughly around the six-minute mark. Conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that such uniformity would make for a flat feeling; instead, Russian Circles use the strictness of that structure to explore numerous ways of wringing contemplation and ecstatic out of its tightly bound, three-person setup. Then again, that’s what Russian Circles—even at their most sprawling—have always done: searched for resonance and depth in the turbulence around us.


Fetty Wap and French Montana are very different types of rappers, but on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs.

Coke Zoo

Fetty Wap and French Montana are at different points in their careers. Both are northerners with cocaine-centric worldviews – French Montana comes from a rap outfit called Coke Boys and Fetty Wap's breakout single is called "Trap Queen" – but they don't share much else in common at the moment. Fetty's self-titled debut recently hit Number One on the Billboard 200 after a string of trap ballads became Top 10 hits, and French is in the process of trying to muster up some much-needed buzz after a commercial flop and a series of mixtapes that failed to stick. They are also two very different types of trappers: French is a materialist with tunnel vision and Fetty is a hopeless romantic penning Pyrex love poems. They go about dealing in different ways, but they traffic the same thing, and on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs.
Coke Zoo disproves any notion that Auto-Tune is the great equalizer. When Fetty uses it, his voice soars. When French uses, phrases flat-line. It can be jarring going from Fetty's voice, which is robust and full, to French's, which is flat and without depth. French hitches a ride on the Fetty bandwagon for many of his best contributions, but his approach to writing is far more elementary (On "Freaky": "I'ma hit it like a dog/ Then I'ma pass it to my dog"), and it's Fetty's knack for melody that makes songs like "Power" so appealing.
Many of the ideas and sounds on Coke Zoo feel like Fetty Wap b-sides and leftovers: "Sometimes" is a leaked Fetty Wap song from July ("I Wonder") with a French verse tagged on. "Angel" once again showcases the stunning skill set of the trap balladeer ("And I make all this guap just to show you it's ours") before French Montana sucks out all of the energy with lifeless vocals and a mood-breaking verse. On "Gangsta Way", a repurposed Chris Brown song with a French verse, he takes an otherwise solid record and stifles its momentum. It's weird that French Montana, who is one of the more  interesting characters in hip-hop, often writes such simple and boring raps, and on Coke Zoo,standing next to Fetty, he somehow seems even duller.
There are some outliers. Unsurprisingly, French delivers his best performances on the French Montana songs, where he gets to operate in his own space without Fetty creeping over his shoulder. The Lil Durk-featuring "See Me" is French's strongest use of Auto-Tune on the tape over a trudging rhythm, sax, and piano chords. On "Concentration", he takes a minor piano riff (courtesy of the Mekanics and MIXX) and makes one of his signature repetitive, bass-heavy jams. But as the chanting Fetty Wap joint "Damn Chainz" proves, there isn't much French can do better than his trapping Jersey counterpart. Coke Zoo is an interesting experiment that showcases why the stocks of these two rappers seem to be headed in two different directions.


A wonderful, dreamy record of techno music that invites you to float freely in the time between late night and early morning. A perfect soundtrack for getting lost.

Yoyogi Park

Dance music, by definition, is communal—except when it's not. The German electronic musician Lawrence, aka Peter Kersten, makes house music that's as much about getting lost in one's head as being enfolded by the crowd. And while Kersten rarely strays too far from dancefloor-oriented forms, his work has spent the past several years getting steadily dreamier.
Kersten is a key figure in German house and techno, having co-founded Hamburg's Dial label in 2000 and then, in 2006, the deeper-diving Smallville. Early Dial pursued a streamlined take on house music that, combined with the whittled-down sounds of early-'00s digital production, led to its characterization, not always accurately, as a minimalist enterprise. But the label never relinquished its fondness for the skippy rhythms and soulful undercurrent of Chicago house, and it went in hard for a strain of windswept romanticism that was easily apparent in both the label's sleeves and its titles. (From Lawrence's own catalog, just consider bittersweet songs like "Happy Sometimes," "The Night Will Last Forever," and the Smiths-referencing "Fifteen Minutes With You.") Smallville, meanwhile, has represented a distillation of those tendencies, resulting in a hyper-classicist style of house, heavy on all the analog signatures of pioneers like Larry Heard, that's also wistfully misty-eyed. Throughout, Lawrence's recordings—including his albums for Japan's Mule Musiq label, of which Yoyogi Park is the third—have served as a kind of ur-text for the Smallville aesthetic.
His ambient inclinations peaked with 2014's A Day in the Life, a collection of songs that took all his typical hallmarks—the shimmer, the swirl, the open-ended tones—and muted all the drums. The result, delicate and ephemeral, was something like the logical conclusion of his most sensitive tendencies: music for Sunday-morning snuggling, walks in the garden, and gentle comedowns, with the merest memory of the dancefloor traced in the shadow of a pulse. Yoyogi Park starts where A Day in the Life left off. It's suffused in hazy synthesizers, sparkling arpeggios, and melodic lines that twist like green tendrils. But in places Yoyogi Park also marks Lawrence's wholehearted return to the dancefloor. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the three songs that have been reprised—upcycled, really—from the previous album, doubled in length and given a whole new rhythmic underpinning. Where the original version of "Nowhere Is a Place" drifted like a kelp forest, the new one leaps purposefully into motion, driven by tightly wound hi-hats and a walking bassline that's unusually fleet of foot. Flickering chords lend additional color and movement, and the result sounds a little like an updated version of Ricardo Villalobos' great "808 the Bassqueen," but even more full-bodied, if you can believe it. This is not an album for sitting still: "Marble Star" fleshes out its ultra-low lows and ultra-dreamy highs with rugged, rolling breakbeats, and "Blue Mountain" rides white-capped waves of synths and drums that bob like flotsam borne aloft on the tide.
One of Kersten's favorite tricks is to juggle soft and hard textures until you're not sure which is which. "Tensui" starts off with knife-edged hi-hats and tough wooden thumps, but it's soon suffused in drowsy pads and bucolic flutes. It would be easy to imagine the same elements remade for A Day in the Life's beatless reveries; the fact that he manages to marry such diffuse sounds to a rhythm track so overwhelmingly physical—this isn't bass you simply feel; you savor it, with your whole body—only makes the track more remarkable. Nothing on Yoyogi Park is original, exactly; Lawrence has been making music like this for most of his career, and his peers on Dial and Smallville have spun the same material in similar ways. Still, no one else is making this music quite so well. And as far as Lawrence's catalog goes, this is his fullest realization yet of interior and exterior—of thought and movement, of daydream and dance. The line separating Saturday night and Sunday morning is no thicker than a second hand; Yoyogi Park invites you to clear out a space inside that sliver of time, and to luxuriate in it.


Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride remain committed to their tactile brand of minimal synth with a set of nostalgic rhapsodies that embrace a newfound warmth.

Vi/deo

Xeno & Oaklander—the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—came up through Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Nights, an endearingly gloomy fixture of late ’00s New York. In the early days, the pair’s music was of a piece with the sounds popular at Wierd—a posthumously defined category of obscure ’80s synth-pop, largely from continental Europe, known as minimal synth.
Wendelbo and McBride’s early music echoed minimal synth’s dour romantic pathos and stark monochromatic textures. But since Wierd closed its doors in 2013, Xeno & Oaklander gradually embraced color and sensuality. Their seventh album, Vi/deo, gusts in as if carried on a waft of perfume, sweet and overpowering. “Aromas of incense and spices/Will rise again/Feelings of misery/Will fade into the haze,” sings Wendelbo on “Infinite Sadness,” as synth melodies bloom like wildflowers. The track’s title is a sign that Xeno & Oaklander haven’t entirely foregone the pleasures of melancholy, but the frigidity of their early output has been replaced by a welcoming new warmth.
In parallel with her musical work, Wendelbo is a perfumier, and speaks of Vi/deo as an expression of her experiences with synesthesia. Her vocals here have a breathy, translucent quality, as if cast out of vapor. By contrast, the music that backs her is crisp and energetic. McBride is the polar opposite of the synth-pop instrumentalist disinterestedly prodding at his keyboard with one finger. Live, he resembles a technician, sleeves rolled up, grappling the controls of a vast modular synth as if guiding the Starship Enterprise through a particularly perilous meteor storm. You can feel this sense of toil on the record: “Afar” and “Raingarden” build up layers upon layers of melodies that interlace in bright, jerky patterns, often feeling just a whisker from spinning dangerously out of control.
What’s remained constant with Xeno & Oaklander is their firm commitment to tactile analog technologies and nostalgic themes. “Television” and “Movie Star” are thoughtful paeans to popular entertainment that feel descended from Kraftwerk, another group entranced by stardom and the power of mass communication. Elsewhere, tracks like “Technicolor” unfold like subtle melodramas, as if soundtracking the moment when a starlet stares off into the middle distance as a solitary tear trickles down her cheek. But for all this looking back, Vi/deo never sounds retro.
The record’s comparatively brief runtime—eight tracks, dispatched in 33 minutes—combined with its ethereal qualities mean it feels somewhat fleeting. A frequent vocal presence on earlier Xeno & Oaklander records, McBride pops up here only briefly, his dour tones on “Television” offering an appealing jolt of cold reality. Though a few more moments like this would have brought the album’s abundant beauty into sharp relief, Vi/deo mostly passes in a reverie, a set of heady rhapsodies that linger in the senses long after the record comes to a close.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The 21-year-old Detroit rapper ZeelooperZ is a member of Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade. On his latest album, he tries to push the boundaries of conventional rapping.

Bothic

For an artist struggling to stand out, it can be a smart move to focus on your strangest qualities and amplify them. If a conventional approach is failing, then there's no downside to trying something different and getting weirder. On previous projects, 21-year-old Detroit rapper ZelooperZ showed hints of an outsider waiting to break out, but 2011's Coon N the Room is a teenager's failed concept album, and 2014's Help stood out only for its stilted verses (especially considering mentor and Bruiser Brigade leader Danny Brown appears twice and excels). But on his latest album Bothic, ZelooperZ is now both more refined and eccentric than ever. It's nearly impossible to identify a single conventionally rapped verse on the album, which somehow works to its advantage. For the most part, Bothic lacks straightforward melody and ZelooperZ's delivery borders on grating, yet the result is still occasionally enthralling.
ZelooperZ opens the album with his best Lil B impression on "Summit" over a beat reminiscent of Clams Casino. It's truly an inauspicious start to the project; ZelooperZ is not as observational as Lil B, nor does he give off any semblance of stream-of-consciousness rapping, which makes the track simply sound the work of a bad rapper—someone who tries and fails to rhyme or flow. From there, however, Bothic picks up. "Bothic Bout It" is a banger despite (or perhaps due to) a complete lack of comprehensible lyrics. The consistent repetition of "bothic" (a portmanteau for "bruiser gothic" that ZelooperZ coined) suggests that we don't need much more than heavy bass, rhythm, and a couple of well-chosen words or sounds for a song to communicate intensity. ZelooperZ has a rudimentary flow, but the momentary offbeat bits of flair that show he has a feel for the grace notes outside traditional structure. "Bothic, rockin' Rick Owens in Hot Topic / Popped a pack for 175, blew a bag, then I made some profit" is intentionally askew and is easily one of the most memorable lines on the record, not only for its humor, but also for how ZelooperZ withholds certain sounds, creating small bursts of energy.
At times, it sounds like ZelooperZ is ignoring the production around him, like on "Scale," where he moans over jaunty piano. Still, it works, its haphazard parts colliding together to form a mess, but a compelling one. Ratking's Wiki shows up on "Heart" for the Bothic's only guest appearance; he clearly outshines ZelooperZ lyrically, but while his quick "where I'm from" narrative is welcome, it's somehow not as notable ZelooperZ's frenzied shrieks.
Bothic requires a fair amount of immersion to enjoy. With the exception of "Bothic Bout It," "Heart," and "ISBD," most tracks would probably be skipped immediately if heard out of context. "Ocean," for instance, is a relaxing comedown, but ZelooperZ's delivery of "ocean" as "oshaaah" doesn't work without hearing him go through warped exercises on "Scale" and "Automatic." As a whole, Bothic seems intended to be heard as the work of a next-level auteur, but there are still too many moments that beg the question whether it's successful or just plain strange. ZelooperZ is not a finished product as an artist, but if Bothic is any indication, he's willing to push boundaries and could potentially create a style all his own.