On his new mixtape, the South Florida rapper hones the blade of his technical precision while his peers take direct stabs at crossover success.

Ski Mask the Slump God: Sin City the Mixtape

Sin City

Since the release of his major-label debut STOKELY in 2018, Fort Lauderdale’s Ski Mask the Slump God has been surprisingly quiet for an artist known for his full-throated vocal aggression. His hiatus has been especially noticeable in a rap industry that devours trends as fast as it can produce them. But given the details of his personal life and career, it’s understandable that the artist born Stokeley Goulbourne took an extended sabbatical. After the sudden deaths of two of his closest friends and associates, XXXTentacion and Juice WRLD, Ski Mask felt like he needed to slow down, lest he risk becoming a similar kind of cautionary tale. He re-emerges with Sin City the Mixtape, which isn’t so much a comeback or reinvention as it is predominantly a showcase for his unfiltered, unaccompanied flow.
Like the film that shares the mixtape’s title, Ski Mask’s music is self-aware, playfully experimenting with rap tropes while still embodying its genre. Nothing on Sin City the Mixtape is as self-consciously hybrid or cross-genre as XXX’s hardcore-tinted ballads, but Ski Mask doesn’t seem to have the same rockstar ambitions. He’s rather content honing the blade of his technical precision while his peers take direct stabs at crossover success.
Ski Mask reissued his debut this year as two separate EPs, The Lawless Cuts and The Party Cuts, which sums up his catalog. One half skews more pop, the other more punk, both overflowing with energy and aggression; once in a blue moon, a softer side emerges, like on Sin City’s opening, “Intro,” where he flexes a Kid Cudi-like warble before the beat switches and his flow goes up to 11. Peel back the main vocal track and you’ll find layers of ad-libs, a torrent of guttural exclamations—if you took a shot every time Ski Mask yells “Yaw!” you’d black out by the second track. The beats are hyperactive, fast-paced, and prone to quick switches—“ADMIT IT” is built around a loop of frenetic bells, while “The Matrix” is almost exclusively dominated by fat bass tones and the familiar rattling drums of regular associate Ronny J.
The SoundCloud rap movement isn’t usually praised or even considered for technical delivery, but Ski Mask is something of a rapper’s rapper, with a dense chopper flow. The words themselves aren’t complicated, but there’s a lot of them in a little bit of time. Ski Mask specializes in tracks that are tightly wrapped and sawed-off—half the songs on Sin City don’t even make it past the two-minute mark. He cites Busta Rhymes as a formative influence and recently freestyled over “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” for LA Leakers, but at its weakest moments his fast rapping is less Flipmode and more like Eminem’s unlistenable opus “Rap God.”
The Slump God’s flow is in-your-face not only in sound but in the deliberate grotesquery of certain lyrics: “My flow infectious/Can almost hear the pus,” he raps on “Dr. Seuss.” But his affinity for confrontation isn’t just aesthetic; it’s political. His first single post-hiatus was last summer’s uprising-informed “Burn the Hoods,” which redirects his typical boastful rage in a more constructive manner. The political statements sprinkled into his lyrics are more trolling shit-posts than thoughtful theses, but the bluntness of his views can be refreshing, especially when compared to the relative political disengagement of so much SoundCloud rap beyond a general sense of doomer nihilism.
Ski Mask’s aesthetic universe is transparent in the mixtape’s song titles, evoking the childish psychedelia of Dr. Seuss, and alluding to the mythic icons of comic books and Arthurian legend (“Merlin’s Staff” and “Metal Magneto”). The references are on hyper-drive to the point of exhaustion, the lyrical equivalent of a muted video playlist of YouTube poop and trippy pop culture ephemera ripped from VHS tapes projected on the wall of a rave: it’s all about the image and the aesthetic, sans context. Ski Mask name-drops American Dad on “Fire Hazard,” and the overly media literate works of Seth McFarlane seem like a useful point of comparison—like the constant spoofs and parodies of Family Guy, Ski Mask’s references are more non-sequitur than purposeful allusion; they’re a frenetic collage of horror movies, children’s cartoons, commercial brand names, and video games.
The moshpit parts like the Red Sea for a moment of solace amid the storm on “Lost in Time,” a rare unguarded performance from an artist who is constantly in a fighting stance. It’s a fragile and sensitive look behind the ski mask, and one of the few honest indications of where he’s been at mentally over the past few years: “All in life that glitters, it could turn bitter/It could turn to mold.” Over a sparse guitar line on closing track “Mental Magneto,” Ski Mask brings together his more introspective side with the fast and furious style he’s known for, as intricate bars about PTSD and paranoia race out of his mouth alongside sitcom references.
Though the black-and-white style of the project’s cover and accompanying videos are obviously channeling Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s edgelord classic, there’s also a more personal connection to the title: Sin City is the rap name Ski Mask’s father performed under. That kind of subtle tribute that’s bound to go unnoticed by most listeners speaks to how Ski Mask generally expresses himself. Most of the time he’s playing a rowdy comic book character, but if you look hard enough, you can hear his sincerity, struggle, and pain.

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The alt-country singer-songwriter’s new album moves steadily and carefully, lingering on the conflicted emotions of his finely-etched tales and the band’s textured, elegant understatement.

Reunions

The “rigorous honesty” required in recovery programs is a tenet that Jason Isbell has taken to heart. Candor has been at the core of Isbell ever since 2013’s Southeastern, the record he released in the wake of his newfound sobriety and his marriage to Amanda Shires. Seven years and three albums later, sobriety remains central to Isbell’s public image, as does his union with Shires, with whom he had a daughter. Isbell doesn’t shy away from probing personal questions when he sits for an interview, a habit that may be a fruitful part of his recovery but nevertheless can give his songs the appearance of being straight reflections of his personal life.
Reunions, the fourth album he’s written and recorded since getting sober, is indeed filled with images that seem to mirror the personal life he’s talked about in public. Romances are stable but not without their struggles; characters will themselves to accept their fears; whenever a child appears it’s a girl, not a boy. Leading up to the album’s release, Isbell upped the ante by admitting to the New York Times that its creation was fraught with tension, stemming from the pressure to deliver another strong album after making, in his own words to GQ, “three good records in a row.” Buckling under his self-imposed standards, he closed himself off from Shires, who in addition to her solo career and her role in Americana supergroup the Highwomen plays fiddle in the 400 Unit, the backing band Isbell founded in 2009 who have shared album credits with the singer-songwriter since 2017’s The Nashville Sound.
None of this agitation can be heard on Reunions. The album moves steadily and carefully, lingering on the conflicted emotions conjured by Isbell’s finely-etched tales and the band’s elegant understatement. Working once again with Dave Cobb, who has produced every one of his records since Southeastern, Isbell made a conscious effort to push the 400 Unit outside their comfort zone. What they wound up with is not with an album that blares—nothing rocks with the abandon of “Cumberland Gap,” a galvanizing number from The Nashville Sound—but one that’s so full of texture it nearly feels painted on a canvas. Waves of cool synthesizers pulsate underneath “Only Children,” whose mournful verses are accented by economical single-string runs. “Dreamsicle” unfurls with unhurried attention to detail, its bittersweet childhood memories gaining poignance as each chorus seems to be delivered with a sadder sigh. The 400 Unit can still roar—Isbell seems to steel his spine on “Be Afraid” because his group sounds tougher than their singer—but Reunions gains strength through the band’s collective interplay.
That communal spirit is felt throughout, adding a counterpoint to a collection of songs where Isbell ponders the kinds of minor, numbing regrets that can metastasize into self-inflicted wounds. “What Have I Done to Help” provides a keynote of sorts, its narrator gaining no comfort in his successes because he can’t shake the notion they’re selfish achievements. Nearly every successive song proves this doubt untrue, as Isbell focuses on humans striving to connect and largely succeed in spite of their fumbling. Not every one of Isbell’s characters gives into their better nature. The narrator of “River” is tormented by his misdeeds, but the song plays like a guidepost for the rest of the record, illustrating how Isbell favors forgiveness over darkness. The closing triptych of “St. Peter’s Autograph,” “It Gets Easier,” and “Letting You Go” emphasizes his inclination toward empathy, finding grace in love for others.
“St. Peter’s Autograph” is the simplest, sparest song on Reunions, an elegy for the departed friend of a loved one; it’s about giving another person the space to grieve on their own terms. Where “St. Peter’s Autograph” is haunted by loss, “Letting You Go” tells the tale of a father finally able to “see through the great fog of loneliness” by placing his daughter’s needs over his own. Between these two songs is “It Gets Easier,” which is where the heart of Reunions lies. It could be seen as an act of fellowship for fellow recovering alcoholics or Isbell could be singing directly to himself: “Last night I dreamed I’d been drinking,” he sings, “I had one glass of wine/I woke up feeling fine/That’s how I knew it was a dream.” It’s a lyric that anticipates a confession Isbell made to the New York Times, where he cops to drinking Listerine as if it was a shot of whiskey. He told Shires he held himself accountable in public, actions that jibe the song’s bemused, self-aware inventory of longings for substances that are now forbidden but never forgotten.
Reunions is not pure autobiography or a series of confessions to be admired for their bloodletting. Attempts to parse the details in any particular song will uncover how Isbell departs from his own history. Like all great songwriters, he uses his life as a springboard toward a hyper-reality that reveals truths a mere diary entry could not. His candor can sometimes obscure this essential fact, but his forthrightness underscores the emotional clarity of Reunions: The music wouldn’t resonate so richly if he wasn’t able to access his truth as vividly in song as he does in the press.

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The songs on the debut EP from the viral rap and country star do not even come close to the pure magic of “Old Town Road.”

7 EP

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has burrowed itself into the consciousness of an entire nation, managing to stay at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 11 weeks and elbowing out Elmo on the elementary-school popularity index. It’s part luck, part genius, part of the YeeHaw agenda, a song so unstoppable, it has actually shifted the status quo of country music and is currently one of the biggest singles—and memes—of all time. Even if you pass on bootcut jeans, the meme has the same contagious effect.
Before he became the newly crowned prince of country, Lil Nas X was just another guy looking for fame by quietly throwing his music onto SoundCloud. When it happened, it happened fast: A $30 YouTube beat, a hypnotic Nine Inch Nails sample, a faux-twangy accent, and “Old Town Road” went from a viral moment on TikTok to the center of a controversy about whether or not the song could be classified as country music. (It was initially removed from the Billboard country chart because it did not “embrace enough elements of today’s country music.”) One irresistible, if slightly harrowing Billy Ray Cyrus remix later, and Lil Nas X was back—not just on the country charts, but on the Hot 100 with the biggest song in the U.S.
To Lil Nas X’s benefit, it never mattered whether “Old Town Road” was good or bad. It’s so good it’s bad; it’s so bad it’s good. It’s a critical hall of mirrors from which there is no escape. Criticizing “Old Town Road” is like trying to fight the sun. From the start, the song was completely aware that it was essentially a meme. Everyone was in on the joke, and if you tried to criticize the joke, you were now the joke who was trying to ruin everyone’s fun. The fact that Lil Nas X’s vocals were easily imitable or that the lyrics were packed with country buzzwords gleaned from “Red Dead Redemption 2” or that the drums could be programmed by your little cousin who heard Astroworld one time was irrelevant. “Old Town Road” was a spectacle and everyone loved being a part of the ride.
On Lil Nas X’s debut 7—a 19-minute EP bookended with the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and the original version of “Old Town Road”—he opens himself up to the criticism that “Old Town Road” bypassed. Each new song on 7 is an attempt at stumbling into another lighthearted hit. We don’t learn a single thing about Lil Nas X on 7 other than he might have actually been born in a Reddit test tube in 2018. His collaborations with the production duo Take A Daytrip are soulless. On “Panini,” Lil Nas X has the droll personality of a Kawhi Leonard interview when stripped of all the gimmicks. So it makes sense that “Rodeo,” his second track with Take A Daytrip, is a desperate return to the bulletproof cowboy persona. “Rodeo” hits all the beats of 2018’s “Mo Bamba”—also produced by Take A Daytrip—and feels like Lil Nas X just praying that the “Old Town Road” goodwill has enough legs to latch onto this single. It probably does.
That hit-seeking dart game continues on with “F9mily (You and Me),” a cheap rock song made to be performed at summer camp talent shows. In an Instagram snippet for the song, Lil Nas X gets out in front of the potential criticism of this track, calling it “Disney soundtrack confirmed” and “Travis Barker on the beat.” Both are perfect descriptions, neither is positive. While listening to his attempt at SoundCloud alt-rock on “Bring U Down,” I can picture Lil Nas X thinking up this song while sitting at a big corner-office desk at Columbia Records.
For the entirety of 7, it’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music. He uses a lazy, out-of-tune melody on the reflective “Kick It,” a song that looks back on the past six months, which is apparently the only thing he has anything to say about. Then, there’s the sloppy finale “C7osure (You Like),” which sounds like B.o.B. got hired to make a J.C. Penney commercial in 2010. The EP ends up being a set of nothingness, like watching a Kylie Jenner vlog, content made for the sake of justifying its existence.
Eventually, one of these songs on 7 will draft behind the still-overwhelming charm of “Old Town Road” and find some success of its own, and Lil Nas X will be there online, with his savvy internet wit, ready to saddle up and burn another meme to the ground.  What he lacks in musicality he makes up for in Instagram followers, boots he can strap on whenever he needs to remind people that he’s the great unifier, the one who tore down the walls of a genre. When that’s all over, which it will be, what’s left will be “Old Town Road,” an all-time hall-of-fame pop hit that will one day be explained with an “I guess you had to be there.”


After retiring the Lingua Ignota moniker, the transgressive diva takes a scholarly deep dive into the ecstatic and strangely melodious world of traditional Christian hymns and original devotionals.

SAVED!

The voice of Kristin Hayter is a conduit for extreme pain. Her music as Lingua Ignota channeled the violence and abuse that men inflicted on her, which she righteously directed back at them with incantatory singing, transcendent screams, and immaculate sound design. This mixture of performance art and composition recalls Diamanda Galás, whose grief-stricken music is similarly earnest, operatic, and immersed in electronics. Late last year, when Hayter announced that she was retiring the Lingua Ignota moniker because it was “excruciating to perform,” the decision echoed how Galás finds relief from her elegies under the guise of a bluesy cabaret act. Hayter takes a spiritually similar tact on her new album, Saved!, which courses with both religious awe and discomfort. It somehow only pulls us deeper into Hayter’s disturbing vision.
Ordained online as an actual minister, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter blends traditional Christian songs and original devotionals, incorporating gospel, blues, and bluegrass into a washed-out image of American folk custom. She makes her versions sound like aged field recordings without detracting from their genuine emotion—a feat of shapeshifting and supple technological manipulation. With producer Seth Manchester, she recorded these songs on a 4-track and warped the tapes by feeding them through broken cassette players, mangling them further by hand. The damaged finished product evokes found-footage horror films, enveloping us in a world that seems incidental but is actually aestheticized: artifice disfigured to resemble reality.
Hayter grew up Catholic, and she’s made music about a variety of Christian denominations. Her excellent 2021 record, Sinner Get Ready, used a delicate palette to explore faiths native to Pennsylvania’s backcountry, including the Mennonites and Amish. Saved! centers on the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement, a Protestant sect that encourages charismatic activities—among them glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Hayter’s settings journey into spare, tuneful terrain. She strips her toolkit down to an acoustic guitar, minimal percussion, and a piano hung with chains and bells, a treatment that draws attention to buzzing wire more than struck keys. The altered instrument plunks out a harsh, ominous sense of rhythmic consistency during an otherwise consonant 46 minutes.
Hayter seems to play characters—or, as she might describe it, people manifest in her performances. She indeed speaks in tongues, utterances that produce both discordant interludes and a roiling underlay to otherwise tuneful music. And Christianity’s musical heritage allows the past to speak through her. The credits neglect to acknowledge the specific songwriters and standards she imitates, such as 1920s blues legend Blind Willie Johnson on “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” and preacher Robert Lowry on “Nothing But the Blood.” It’s a curious decision, but also a provocative one that feels couched in a lineage of 20th century appropriative writers such as Kathy Acker—Hayter studied to be an experimental writer before she began Lingua Ignota. Her murky source material furthers the illusion that we’ve stumbled upon a cobwebbed and haunted talisman, some cursed keepsake of the penitent American soul.
Saved! has jarring moments and a general atmosphere of unease, but it nonetheless shows a more mellifluous side of Hayter. In place of dynamic shifts, drones, or distortion, the album is full of melody, harmony, and ecclesiastical warmth. Yet no matter how intensely Hayter praises Jesus, she sounds more earnest about the power of the hymnal tradition than her faith. She summoned Satan on 2019’s breakout Caligula, while on Sinner Get Ready, she treated God as though the deity itself was her abuser. Here, her perspective on religion is ambiguous, though the songs themselves are more inviting than ever.
Hayter has an uncommon sense of emotional control and precision: her words swoon, crack, whisper, and plead, but always with just the right amount of embellishment. The poetic original “I Will Be With You Always” builds from a coo into a terrified revelation: “On the night I was beset by demons/I know their names but cannot speak them.” She flexes her muscles as a different singer entirely on the shorter tracks. Hayter serves as her own, rousing accompanist on “I’m Getting Out While I Can,” while on the call-and-response acapella of “There Is Power in the Blood,” she dons a warbly head voice. Her shifts in tone feel like tiny character sketches. When she places a selection of Blind Willie Johnson’s lyrics to her own music on the haunting “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole,” her solemn phrasing imparts a damaged sense of need, a formidable echo of the narratives of abuse in her previous work.
Hayter closes out the LP with the 19th-century hymn, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” Her unadorned piano is a moving, lucid counterweight to the anguished texture of the preceding tracks, until the babble of glossolalia outlasts her dulcet melody. Hayter continues to traverse a biblical, deeply American landscape, surveying both its fire and brimstone and its transformative music. Saved! understands both of these qualities—consequently, rage, wonder, and beauty all churn just under its surface.


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 revisit the 1992 debut from Seo Taiji and Boys, a canny synthesis of rap, techno, and rock that would soon be seen as the dawn of K-pop.

Seo Taiji and Boys

On April 11, 1992, Seo Taiji, 20, Yang Hyun-seok, 22, and Lee Juno, 25, made their national television debut on a South Korean music show under the name Seo Taiji and Boys. They were the first of several groups to perform that night, all of which were angling for high scores from the presiding judges. Seo, their leader, wore a grey vest and billowing black pants, while the Boys were decked in overalls and matching green button-ups. The trio delivered an energetic, lip-synced performance of “Nan Arayo (I Know):” a new jack swing single that wove together rap verses, distorted guitars, and lovelorn harmonizing: “I really only liked you/You, who thrust me into sadness’ embrace,” Seo wailed in the chorus. Their dance routine ended in a dramatic pose and cheers and applause came from the audience. But the panel of established industry professionals standing off-stage were less impressed.
“The melody is a bit weak. It doesn’t feel like you put a lot of effort into it,” said one. “It would have been nice to hear something fresh in your lyrics,” opined another. The judges awarded Seo Taiji and Boys the lowest score of any of the acts performing that night. What happened next can only be described as a mass rebuke by the public: “Nan Arayo” quickly shot to the top of the Korean charts and stayed there for 18 weeks, while the corresponding album Seo Taiji and Boys went on to sell 1.7 million copies, not counting an incalculable number of bootleg cassettes. They didn’t know it at the time, but Seo Taiji and Boys would become the prototype for all of the K-pop groups to come. Seo’s fusion of hip-hop, techno, and rock—colloquially termed “rap dance”—had become South Korea’s first homegrown youth music.
Born Jeong Hyun-cheol in 1972, Seo was a problem student, a self-described rebel who dropped out of high school to pour his energy into music. He immersed himself in the Seoul rock scene as he worked odd jobs and learned how to play the guitar and bass. At 17, he was recruited into Sinawe, the heavy metal institution led by Korean rock royalty Shin Dae-chul. But after recording just one album with them, Seo left the band and started to dabble with samplers and MIDI instruments to try and recreate the sounds he was hearing in American pop music.
The early ’90s marked the first time in modern Korean history that teenagers gained access to disposable income, a phenomenon spurred on by the country’s increasingly globalized economy. At the time, Korean music was dominated by acoustic guitar-driven folk music and “trot,” a slow-moving style that predates the Korean War, but the youth—including Seo—had become increasingly obsessed with the music that was popular in America: high-tempo, dance-oriented tracks, heavily influenced by prevalent Black music genres like hip-hop and new jack swing.
Black music was introduced to the South Korean masses in the ’80s, around the time the country began transitioning from decades of various authoritarian regimes to a direct democracy in 1987. Long exclusive to American soldiers, the G.I. clubs of Itaewon—a district in Seoul adjacent to the U.S. military’s South Korea headquarters in Yongsan—began to open up to Korean patrons. New communities developed; in 1990, Hyun Jin-young, a gifted dancer who’d grown up with American friends while living in a village near the Army base, made his debut as the first signee of a budding record exec named Lee Soo-Man (who would later found SM Entertainment). With years of studio experience under his belt, Seo was poised to tap into the burgeoning cultural moment. The only problem was, compared to other hotshots in the scene, he couldn’t dance for shit.
Driven to improve, Seo called upon a rising star named Yang Hyun-seok to ask him for coaching. (As the story goes, Yang took Seo’s money and vanished into thin air. He later returned with the sheepish claim that he had disappeared because he was serving his mandatory military service.) Yang was impressed with Seo’s music and offered his services directly, recommending they form a group with another dancer, Lee Juno. It was an arrangement that was amenable to Seo, who had little interest in the intense spotlight that came with being a solo artist. He liked being able to hide behind the two older Boys on stage, though he understood as well as they did that the success of their partnership was largely contingent upon his own songwriting and studio prowess. Even to fans, it was always clear who was running the ship. The trio agreed to relatively even financial splits for any touring and performance income—but when it came to album royalties, the split went Seo’s direction, 6:2:2.
With Seo’s leading role cemented, and soon after that fated TV performance, Seo Taiji and Boys’ career became a runaway train. Conservative critics and traditional gatekeepers like broadcasters and radio stations initially blasted the group for their overt “foreign” musical influences, but nobody could argue with the sales. More music shows started catering to the teen demographic, and soon enough, Seo Taiji and Boys became a regular fixture on television. The release of their first album, and the months of live appearances that followed, established several of the recurrent themes of K-pop and its industry: An undiscriminating approach to genre tropes, emphasis on elaborate choreography, and practices like the pre-“comeback” hiatus period that follows every album cycle, now considered customary.
In the same way that production styles tend to linger on Korean charts a few years past their U.S. expiration date, much of Seo Taiji and Boys owes a debt to musical trends that had become passé in the West by the end of the ’80s. By the time “Nan Arayo” was released in Korea, new jack swing was a well-established sound in the U.S. mainstream, but the song is also clearly indebted to Milli Vanilli’s hit “Girl You Know It’s True,” which was already itself a French-German approximation of American pop. The euphoric, New Order-biting synth-pop of “My Everything” would have sounded dated to American audiences, and a disproportionate number of album tracks are peppered with saxophone runs that would give Kenny G pause. At moments, Seo reaches even further back in time: The end of the original album had a song called “Rock’n Roll Dance (‘92 Heavy Mix),” built around a sped-up sample of the guitar from AC/DC’s 1980 classic “Back in Black.” It’s a throwaway club track, but its inclusion reveals Seo’s core musical ethos: Taking the music that inspired him most and refashioning it to be relatable to Korean youth. He even recruited his old mentor Shin Dae-chul to rip a guitar solo, an olive branch to any rock fans who felt betrayed by his musical pivot.
There were detractors, even among the music community, who were doubtful of Seo Taiji and Boys’ viability. Seo pursued his mission nonetheless—not only because he thought it would work, but because he loved the music. “When I said that I was going to write Black music, someone responded by saying that I’d turned to making charcoal, because charcoal is black,” Seo said in 2014. “That’s how some people demeaned Black music back then. But it was all I cared about.” The frontman’s earnest nature shines on slow-burners like “In the Time Spent With You,” where he delivers breathy, sing-song rap verses and long, drawn-out notes about savoring a moment with his lover, reminiscing on the wonderful, fuzzy feeling he gets when he’s with them. Seo isn’t always the most confident vocalist, but when he bathes his voice in cold, digital reverb, he comes alive.
The huge success of “Nan Arayo” was quickly followed by another single, “You, In the Fantasy,” a raucous dance track about questioning your preconceived reality. It foreshadows the lyrics of more controversial anthems from later in Seo’s career, like “Come Back Home” or “Classroom Idea,” where he reached out to runaway teens and took aim at Korea’s pressurized academic expectations. As the years went on, Seo would only grow increasingly passionate about bringing attention to societal ills and interrogating a national culture that he felt like an outcast in. On the street, though, he was no outcast; he was a cultural prophet.
Like the K-pop groups of today, Seo Taiji and Boys developed an obsessive fanbase, one that clung to his every word. For the rest of 1992, “Nan Arayo” blasted out of speakers everywhere in Seoul, aided by the vendors across the city hawking tapes of the album. Half of the Korean recorded music market consisted of foreign imports before Seo Taiji and Boys, but in the years that followed, listeners became much more willing to take a chance on Korean artists working in Western music styles, and the industry followed suit. By 1997, the market share of Korean-made pop music was double that of international acts. With his success, Seo terraformed the market for Korean artists and became the country’s first teen idol, the primary conduit by which a subculture from half a world away would inform the identities of an entire generation of Koreans.
As Seo Taiji and Boys’ popularity skyrocketed, Korean-made pop acts inspired by rap, R&B, and other Black music replaced singer-songwriter types as the new dominant force in the Korean music industry. In 1994, Seo languished in controversy after radio stations banned the singles from Seo Taiji and Boys III and Korea’s Christian right accused him of hiding demonic messages that would only reveal themselves if a song was played backwards. Suffering from the intense public scrutiny and a lack of inspiration, Seo confessed to Yang and Lee that he wanted to end the group once they released their fourth record.
1995’s Seo Taiji and Boys IV was a commercial hit, driven by the Cypress Hill-esque “Come Back Home,” but Seo once again found himself butting heads with censors, who reviewed the album before release and forbade him from including lyrics that were critical of the government on the song “Sidae Yugam (Shame of the Times).” He refused to change the lyrics, instead opting to delete his vocals and keep the song as an instrumental. Fans were enraged and went so far as to protest the censorship with a letter-writing campaign—but Seo had had enough. At the beginning of 1996, he called a press conference: Seo Taiji and Boys were retiring, effective immediately. In a cinematic exit, Seo took a helicopter from the conference hall and went directly to the airport, hopping on a flight to Guam, and eventually, America. Millions of fans were devastated. Mobs of his most faithful trekked to his Seoul house to protest the decision. One student, speaking to The Kyunghang Shinmun at the time, compared it to the assassination of a politician: “The death of Seo Taiji is the death of us all.”
The music industry scrambled to fill the void that Seo Taiji and Boys left behind. Long beholden to the whims of TV broadcasters, Korean record labels had consolidated more independent power for themselves in the years since Seo’s debut. Now, it was up to them to figure out how to rebottle his magic and build upon the playbook that was established during the band’s brief but substantial run. Thus, the Korean idol business was born. The Boys parlayed their fame and experience into positions of power in this nascent ecosystem: Yang started his own company YG Entertainment, the powerhouse behind iconic acts like Big Bang, while Lee became a notable producer. (In 2019, Yang resigned from YG following allegations of drug abuse, corruption, sexual assault, and other crimes. Lee was found guilty on charges of sexual assault and fraud in 2017.) By the end of the ’90s, SM Entertainment’s boy band H.O.T. had made serious inroads in China, kicking off the global Korean Wave (hallyu) of exported cultural soft power that continues to the present day. At some point between Seo Taiji’s debut and H.O.T.’s rise, overseas listeners began to popularize the umbrella term used to this day: K-pop.
With their debut, Seo Taiji and Boys upended the pre-existing power dynamic in South Korea, where broadcasters were the ultimate gatekeepers and songwriters rarely veered away from making music that would fit the norms of the day. For a brief period, the power shifted to the artists, who were incentivized to experiment with different Western genres and build new communities. But as the newly established Big Three companies—SM, YG, and Park Jin-young’s JYP Entertainment—began to dominate the market, new standards emerged. Instead of government censors or disdainful television moguls, the industry became beholden to music conglomerates, powered by trainee pipelines so stringent, they make Berry Gordy look tame by comparison.
The entirety of K-pop owes its existence to Seo Taiji, but the long tail of his influence can be felt most directly in the global force that is BTS. In 2017, during a massive 25th-anniversary concert in Korea, Seo—the de facto “president of culture”—named the group his unofficial successors. Their music draws from myriad influences, with songs that critique Korean society, while individual members like the multifaceted songwriter/producer SUGA take after the DIY auteur archetype established by Seo. His super-fans, the “Seo Taiji Generation,” fought government censorship on behalf of their idol; today, the BTS ARMY and other K-pop fandoms have proven themselves a force to be reckoned with. At his peak, Seo’s influence was largely limited to Korea. BTS are on the world stage, reaching previously unthinkable heights. They are his legacy.
After Seo decamped to America at 23, he became just another face in the crowd. It was a needed change of pace for the notoriously private superstar, and it allowed him to write songs for what would become his first solo LP: a true rock album, a return to his roots. When Seo finally went back to Korea in 2000 to resurrect his career in earnest, his people were there waiting for him—literally. Over a thousand fans mobbed the terminal at Gimpo International Airport, eager to welcome their hero home. They sang his songs and held up signs; one of them read, “We Grew Up a Lot, Didn’t We?” The origin of K-pop is a tale of global capitalism and cultural cross-pollination through American imperialism, but it’s also the story of a flunkie metalhead who was told for years he’d amount to nothing, and then reshaped the course of music history.
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As one of the last sets in the long-running DJ series, FABRICLIVE 100 seems almost willfully perverse, a pointed attempt to upset notions of what Burial is really about.

FABRICLIVE 100

A few years ago at the Unsound festival, deep in a salt mine outside Krakow, a hooded figure stooped over a DJ mixer and played a set of rumbling, echo-soaked bass music that sure sounded like the work of Burial. The theme of the festival that year was “Surprise,” and many headliners remained unannounced until the moment they took the stage. But in this case, the reveal never came.
It’s still not known who was actually behind the decks. It seems unlikely that it was actually Burial, aka William Bevan, a reclusive Englishman who, since 2005, has cobbled together his inimitable style out of rave-nostalgic breakbeats, mournful R&B a cappellas, and the white noise of rainstorms and vinyl hiss. As far as anyone knows, Burial has never performed anywhere. The smart money, many believe, is on Kode9, aka Steve Goodman, the founder of Hyperdub, the label responsible for the vast majority of Burial’s music, who just happened to be performing at the festival that very weekend. Equipped with a USB full of unreleased Burial tunes, the theory goes, Goodman stood in as Bevan’s proxy.
Whatever the truth of that enigmatic set, the two definitively step up to the decks together on FABRICLIVE 100, which makes for an intriguing combination. Kode9 DJs often; between his club sets and his label curation, his tastes are well known. He favors jagged syncopations and cutting percussion, but even at their toughest, his selections are generally playful. Burial, on the other hand, is more of a blank slate. Since he doesn’t DJ professionally, and since his morose music sounds so uniquely like itself, it’s hard to anticipate what he might bring to the table that doesn’t sound like, well, more Burial. And despite the two men’s close relationship, their styles differ in important ways: Kode9 is all muscle; Burial is all atmosphere. Going into the set, it’s hard to imagine how the two might not end up mixing like oil and water.
In some ways, they do. FABRICLIVE 100 is nothing like a conventional club set or a typical back-to-back, where two selectors trade off behind the mixer every song or two. Long stretches representative of Kode9’s tastes—a block of South African gqom toward the beginning, a home stretch of Chicago footwork toward the end—alternate with detours into early-’90s rave music and electro-pop that we can probably assume came from Burial’s crates. In places, FABRICLIVE 100 seems almost willfully perverse, a pointed attempt to upset listeners’ notions of what Burial is really about: Fans who connect primarily with his sad-sack sentimentalism may run for the exits when confronted with the explosion of acid trance that tears through the mix about one-third of the way in. (That’s right: acid trance.) But it’s precisely those curve balls that make FABRICLIVE 100 so entertaining.
It begins straightforwardly enough. First, there’s a gloomy and entirely Burialesque ambient opener of synth drones and vinyl crackle; that’s followed by abstracted vocal processing from Klein, a Hyperdub signee, and a scene-setting bass pulse from Cooly G, another member of Kode9’s squad. In a standard back-to-back set, this is the point where Burial would take over again. But Goodman’s fingerprints are all over the first eight tracks of the set, which blows through a 12-minute, rapid-fire succession of gqom and craggy club music from Uruguay and Shanghai.
Then comes the set’s first major curveball: a garish synth-pop flashback from the techno veteran Luke Slater’s 2002 album Alright on Top. It’s not a record that’s remembered warmly, if at all; the song is a little bit gothic and a whole lot melodramatic. “I can complete you,” sings a robot voice over New Order-inspired bass arpeggios and choral pads, sounding like the epitome of throwback futurism. Yet there’s something to be said for the way they just plop it down here, like someone pulling a semi-embarrassing snapshot from under the bed; there’s a nostalgic sentiment on display that’s in keeping with Burial’s own earnest M.O., and we learn more about him here than a dozen cooler, more underground cuts might ever tell us.
It’s not a conventionally sequenced DJ mix, either: Segments of seamlessly beat-matched tracks (almost certainly Kode9’s handiwork, given the style of them) abruptly give way to left turns and trapdoors. Storming techno cuts simply fade out and make way for slippery, thrashing early-’90s jungle; the beatless parts of drum ‘n’ bass tunes make for escape hatches into the sort of ’90s trance that Burial has hinted at songs like “Indoors.” Whereas Kode9’s considerable DJ skills get him from track to track, the portions of the mix that seem likely to be Burial’s are put together more like collages, with ambient synths and vinyl crackle daubed on like caulk and spackling. You get the sense that they’re not playing records so much as painting with them, often using just enough of a given beat to color the mood before moving on. That goes not just for understated cuts like Cooly G’s “Magnetic” but also for something like Rashad’s “Let It Go,” probably the biggest anthem here—it’s as though they realize that dropping the refrain is all it takes to trigger an emotional response before moving briskly on.
FABRICLIVE 100 is a world away from the smoky intrigue of that subterranean Burial-not-Burial set, but in its own way, it’s every bit as obscured in shadow. We might be able to guess at which selector is responsible for choosing not one but two tunes from Live Adult Entertainment, an industrial-techno label so mysterious that some of its releases have never been sold at all, but how they actually made this thing, and what went through their heads when they were doing it, can only be guessed at. In an era when so much of DJ culture is meant to be consumed under a spotlight, whether on festival main stages or in the center of Boiler Room’s frame, that wiliness counts for something.
The set’s anti-climatic finale, with RP Boo’s “Wicked’Bu,” feels telling. “There is no you/Without a turntable like me,” chants the Chicago producer, as flute runs collide with chopped-up soul vocals and horn blasts in a way that reimagines footwork as free jazz. Eventually, the beat dies away, leaving only a miasmatic churn and a looped declaration, “There is no you…There is no you…” As the two selectors pull the curtain closed, it feels like a refusal to let their process be teased apart.


Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins’ new mixtape strikes the balance between hard-nosed spitting and the breezy consciousness of daisy-age-influenced acid rap.

Or More; the Anxious

The rapper Mick Jenkins, who calls Chicago’s South Side his home, released his debut studio album The Healing Component in September of 2016. It was somewhat heavy-handed in its explorations of love, in contrast to Jenkins’ seminal 2014 mixtape The Water[s], which more artfully examined the redemptive powers of water. The Healing Component resonated with core fans but failed to make significant waves beyond a solid critical reception—a perceived slight Jenkins makes clear he has not forgotten on “Happy Gilmore,” the driving opener of his surprise 2017 mixtape, Or More; the Anxious.
Billed as something of a preview ahead of Jenkins’ sophomore album, Or More; the Anxious is a snapshot of his gargantuan talent. Its seven tracks are punctuated by his ongoing struggle to balance the allure of hard-nosed spitting with the breezy consciousness of daisy-age-influenced acid rap. Taking a more measured approach to composition on this mixtape, Jenkins comes closer to achieving the artistic equilibrium that has eluded him in the past, and he spits as if to settle a score.
“Happy Gilmore” opens with a sped-up clip of Vic Mensa on the Complex-hosted morning show “Everyday Struggle.” In it, Mensa succinctly tells off one of its hosts, DJ Akademiks, for speaking on the climate and culture of Chicago rap with no first-person understanding of it. “Happy Gilmore” then blossoms into a heavy dose of skullcap-and-hoodie rap; produced by Origami Beats, it marries a plodding industrial cadence with ad-libs from The Notorious B.I.G. It’s a reminder to the rap world at large of just how little the Chicago delegation cares for its feelings.
The following “C Is for CashMoney” is a collaboration with ENG Creation and THEMPeople, which features a sample of Gil Scott-Heron describing “the virtues of the letter c”: “It is the first letter in cash money, it is the first letter in Constitution, and it is the last letter in music.” Even more telling is that, for most musicians, half the battle is simply being seen. Jenkins doubles down on the titular investment in “c” with a barrage of alliteration: “Name a campaign more cohesive than truth/A culmination of lies, a compilation of proof/A combination of both is what creates all this confusion.” But his sincerity and social commentary are muddied at points by the acrobatic parlor tricks that rappers use to impress other rappers, or to distract from a lack of substantive thought.
“FreeNation Rebels” is Jenkins’ latest nod to the FreeNation crews—a throwback to the classic A Tribe Called Quest aesthetic and Jenkins’ own 2013 Trees & Truths single “Free Nation Rebel Soldier.” Jenkins gives in to angst, as he inventories the releases that he feels have been slept on: “I brought the coupe out/I brought the tree, I brought the truth out/I brought the waters, I brought the love and niggas had me tuned out.” Jenkins also addresses white audiences who use a perceived camaraderie as permission to chant the n-word freely at shows—one of many micro-aggressions awaiting black artists amid the shinier indicators of success. But Or More ends on an underwhelming note and sounds depleted by the Saba-featuring “Energies.”
Perhaps the most telling part of Jenkins’ mixtape title is the latter half: the Anxious. In two words, it speaks directly to the trauma and scrutiny endemic to life as a public figure and a man of color. With that, Jenkins’ decision to mine his own feelings and fears seems no accident. The psychological trauma underpinning the black male experience thrives in his hometown of Chicago, where violent crime has plagued communities of color in recent years. If Or More; the Anxious is just the tip of the iceberg of Jenkins’ next album, it’s promising. What is clear, if nothing else, is that anxiety is just the beginning.


Singer/songwriter and producer Anders Rhedin is a former member of Choir of Young Believers, has written pop songs for Kid Cudi and Josh Groban, and has toured with Mac DeMarco under the Dinner alias. On his Captured Tracks debut, he offers a darkly deadpan take on ’80s synth-pop like the Simple Minds or Psychedelic Furs.

Psychic Lovers

A former member of Danish chamber-pop group Choir of Young Believers, singer/songwriter and producer Anders Rhedin splits his time between Copenhagen, Berlin, and Los Angeles—in the last of these locales, he found work as a professional songwriter for the likes of Kid Cudi and Josh Groban, though he has compared his commercial pop songwriting effort to "black magic." From 2012 to 2014, Rhedin released a handful of cassette- and vinyl-only EPs under the Dinner moniker, leading the generally fantastic indie-rock label Captured Tracks to sign him in 2014 and issue a compilation, Three EPs: 2012-2014. A tour with labelmate Mac DeMarco followed.
It's less clear from this debut outing if Dinner has the tracks to match Rhedin's impressive trajectory. Three EPs was a relatively varied outing, as suits its cobbled-together origins, but it introduced Rhedin's darkly deadpan take on ’80s synth-pop like the Simple Minds or Psychedelic Furs, complete with an alternate-universe novelty hit: the queasily catchy "Going Out," which sneaks a tale of a druggy night on the town into what could be mistaken for an awkward invitation to go on a date ("Do you feel like going out tonight?"). Three EPs also presented Rhedin's unique vocal style, primarily a goofy baritone that must be how Stephin Merritt sounds to people who don't like the Magnetic Fields.
On Psychic Lovers, Rhedin still sings like a failed Muppet auditioner, and layers more studio gloss on the new-wave noir template of "Going Out," but without any song as modestly pleasant. Rhedin has billed the album as "like sexual Christian rock ... but without all the Christianity," and, frankly, being asked to go out with him worked better when it wasn't really a come-on. Here, he's a "normal guy" longing for something to "Turn Me On." He wants "What You Got." He'd love to spend one night with you, because "in your smile's a nuclear bomb," and you, person whose hips have "oscillations" as you walk down the street, own "The World" ("Every world belongs to you," to be more precise). The neon-glowing production is all just so, but the enjoyment we're supposed to get out of this lyrical mix of the portentous and the trite, and that gawky vocal delivery, in a world where The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink soundtracks have already existed for decades, with proper singing and catchy hooks and everything, isn't clear.
Psychic Lovers does try out a few different hues within its fairly limited palette, but they mainly just add to the confusion. Sentimental slow-dance candidate "Kali, Take Me Home" showcases a children's choir and has a title that evokes the powerful Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. "A.F.Y." explores dubwise vocal effects and clanging distortion. "Holy Fuck!" languidly addresses not the sex, but the "sexless fighting spells," imploring, "Leave behind the lies." Closer to the ’60s art-pop mode that occasionally surfaced on Three EPs is "Lie," with its Nico-like guitar strums and orchestral touches; there's a choral backing vocal here, too. "Wake Up" has a tropical-house flavor and describes, guess what, waking up in various locales "with you."
Rhedin's approach here theoretically could work. As the Nico comparison suggests, unconventional voices can turn out to be the most enduring, and even within the niche that critic Liz Colville once described on Pitchfork as "boys with perpetual colds who can kinda-sorta sing" you can find overlooked nuggets from bands like Seattle's BOAT or Sweden's Suburban Kids With Biblical Names. As for the realm of so-fake-it's-real '80s sendup, Ariel Pink stands out for his eccentricity, while John Maus delivers chest-beating live performances and cerebral songcraft, which brings us to the stage-devouring neo-New Romanticism of justly revered band Future Islands. The subtle but crucial difference, as with anything else—including Christian sex without the Christianity—is in how you do it.


Erik Wiegand produced his wildly fun new record with the digital synth he invented. Fueled by dancehall, its manic pleasure offers a way out of techno’s self-serious cul-de-sac.

Superlative Fatigue

Erik Wiegand, aka Errorsmith, might be one of the most technically adept people working in dance music right now. Case in point: the synthesizer that gives his latest album, Superlative Fatigue, its bazillion-megawatt buzz—part ice-cream headache and part fork in socket. It’s called Razor. It’s a digital synth, a plug-in, marketed by Berlin’s Native Instruments. He built that thing. Invented it, specced it out, programmed it, perfected it. It’s his, and you can buy it—320 sine waves’ worth of additive synthesis, all for $99. That’s some brainiac shit right there. Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert called it “the most innovative software synthesizer I’ve seen in ages.”
Yet Superlative Fatigue, as much as the title might sound like the quintessential cri de cœur of the sleep-deprived coder, is not a nerdy record. No chin-scratching IDM here, no dryly academic number-crunching. No, quite the opposite. It’s fun. Wildly, zanily fun. Some of the most fun you will hear on a techno record this year, certainly on one coming from Berlin. And at a time when underground techno is gloomier than ever before—smeared in charcoal dust, suffused in a post-industrial haze, bled dry of every last iota of color or joy—Errorsmith’s album, in its manic pleasure, is more than just a vivid demonstration of its creator’s technical abilities: It’s a way out of techno’s self-serious cul-de-sac, a shot of energy just when the genre needs it most.
I’m using the term “techno” loosely; there are few four-to-the-floor kick drums on Superlative Fatigue, fewer still oontz-oontz pulses. The eight-track, 41-minute album is fueled largely by dancehall: On tracks both fast and slow, it’s a loping dembow cadence that drives the rhythm. But Wiegand has deep roots in Berlin’s techno scene. Back in the mid 1990s, his duo MMM was turning out some of the most unrelenting and inventive rave bangers ever to shake the rafters of an abandoned warehouse. By the early 2000s, in the duo Smith N Hack, he was flipping Bohannon edits into overdriven floor-fillers. And his third solo album, 2004’s Near Disco Dawn – Live Recordings 2001-2003, pushed techno’s brute-force fantasies to almost comic extremes: In its furnace-blast white noise and pogo-stick bounce, it imagined techno as the midway point between noise music and “Looney Tunes.”
His tools have changed—Superlative Fatigue, his first solo album in 13 years, and his first solo project since bringing Razor to market, was completed almost entirely using Razor, except for two songs that also feature Roland’s TR-808 drum machine—but the hallmarks of his earlier productions are still there. His signature boils down to a single idea: slippage. On fast tracks, syncopated drums bounce like rocks on an incline, racing the beat and catching air with every rebound; on slow ones, they stumble, fidgety and confused. “Internet of Screws,” a woozy take on trap, replaces the genre’s digital precision with stumbling offbeats, and it turns trap’s typically diamond-tipped snares flaccid and loosey-goosey.
It’s not just the rhythms that seem to have come untethered from the grid: His melodies swoop and dive, unsteady as the prow of a small boat on the high seas. If it turned out that Wiegand had also built a slide-whistle MIDI interface to control Razor, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. In “Who-is,” pipsqueak synth leads and elephantine bass drum rise and fall in dizzily synchronized movements, like flea-circus performers with a serious drug problem. In “I’m Interesting, Cheerful & Sociable,” a wobbly melody splits into multi-part harmonies that stack up in halogen-bright arrays, while the laser zaps of “Centroid” take SOPHIE’s rubbery sound design to even more elastic extremes.
It can be pretty full-on stuff, but his keen sense of control counts for a lot; as antic as it gets, it never entirely goes off the rails. It helps that the album’s back half is largely devoted to slower interpretations of the same ideas. “Retired Low-Level Internal Server” is a blippy dancehall tune reminiscent of the brittle style, showcased on Mo Wax’s Now Thing compilation, that producers like Lenky and Ward 21 were developing around the turn of the millennium; the aforementioned “Internet of Screws” stretches Errorsmith’s tactics almost to the breaking point with a rhythm so scattershot that it can sound deliberately errant. These tracks make the most of their negative space, cushioning all that garish, gloriously artificial sound-sculpting in a welcome layer of emptiness.
The closing track, “My Party,” offers an even more refreshing breath of air. Picking up on the eerie vocal processing of the opening “Lightspeed”—essentially a series of monosyllabic hiccups that sounds like a baritone singer running through his vowels—“My Party” strips everything back to just vocoder and handclaps. Scat-like vocal runs bob up and down the scale like a drunken bumblebee, relishing the buzzy nuance the synth lends to the voice; a sing-song refrain (either “Party my party” or “Body my body,” though it’s hard to say for sure) threatens to dissolve into pure gibberish. It sounds a little like Bobby McFerrin if he had swallowed a kazoo and gotten a case of the giggles, which is to say that it sounds totally ridiculous and totally wonderful. The techno scene can keep its dour, atonal merchants of doom; this interesting, cheerful, sociable, and downright giddy album is the real life of the party.


The Virginia rapper-singer is known for her boisterous rap concoctions, but her new album is a sparse showcase of moody, Auto-Tuned vocals that feel more like demos.

Babyxsosa EP

When Babyxsosa first emerged in 2018 with “Beat My Ass,” there was a chirpy, nursery-rhyme quality to the Virginia rapper-singer’s voice. She sings sweetly, her feathery vocals floating through the din like a snowflake in a gust of wind. As her profile grew, she began dabbling in ’80s-style synth-pop, plugg, and harsh industrial techno, the latter of which sounded like Yeezus compressed to 8-bit. Her voice is the one constant, cutting through the digital fog even as the music shuffles around. It feels like a sliding block puzzle operated by someone amped up on two cans of Logan Paul’s Prime energy drink.
Even for an artist prone to unexpected pivots, Babyxsosa’s new self-titled project feels like a left turn. Outside of its explosive centerpiece “Baby G,” the production is somber and stripped-back, consisting almost entirely of moody synthlines fit for a minimalist sci-fi film. That aesthetic choice puts more emphasis on Sosa’s vocals than ever, and she uses the extra space to lather her melodies in a cold, Auto-Tuned foam. It’s hard to make out the freestyled lyrics on “Introduction,” but her coos morph into ghostly wails over a yearning organ sample, her wistfulness overflowing with every breath. Babyxsosa is a radical departure from the boisterous sound she’s been tinkering with; “Beat My Ass,” this is not. She relies on these sparse vibes for the rest of the release with mixed results.
Simple vocal refrains melt into the backgrounds of songs, every element weightless and floating towards the ceiling. “Never Know/Viral” lingers on unfiltered confessions that eventually give way to Kid Cudi-style crooning. At just a little under a minute and a half, the track evaporates and leaves little time for respite before the bludgeoning, Playboi Carti-indebted “Baby G” gallops in. Then the drums and horns fade into the ether, and she’s back to singing sweet nothings on “That’s Just What They Say When They Don’t Know You Like I Know You.” The tonal whiplash is bizarre but intriguing, the bones of a romantic theme peeking through these pared-down flights of fancy. Still, the mechanics aren’t foolproof. Outside of that dizzying three-song structure, these tracks feel so raw they sometimes resemble demos more than finished statements.
The project’s boldest experiments are left for the end. On “I Found It,” Sosa goes full a cappella. It feels like a prelude to closer “I’m Over This Level of Life, My Love,” which takes up nearly half the project’s runtime; the song plays out like a slow ascent to the stars, accented by distorted screams and the throes of a crumbling relationship. “I Found It” is underwhelming because it takes its simple presentation a step too far; Sosa’s presence is diminished when she doesn’t have any other elements to play off of. The similarly brief “Never Know/Viral” wrings a lot of feeling out of a small package, and “My Love” capitalizes on the open space in its construction by letting the words and chords get tangled in a mass of angst and acceptance. You can’t knock her for experimenting, but sometimes she does leave more to be desired.
Babyxsosa carries the weight of a self-titled release—an EP significant enough to get its own website with a handwritten song-by-song breakdown. Sosa’s strongest work usually has an anchor—a catchy melody, vocal fry, or standout line that functions as the foundation. It’s daring to follow this summer’s raucous and techno-drenched BLING BLING EP with 20 minutes of electro-chamber pop. But when the shock wears off, Sosa’s ideas feel static where they should be free. These days, rappers stretch the limits of their voices, indulge weighty concepts, and abandon rapping entirely. Sosa’s ambitions aren’t that grand here, but it’s unclear what exactly she’s aiming for. Her presence is still strong, but it’s hard to tell whether she wants to draw the listener in or keep them at arm’s length.


A remix album of Lady Gaga’s 2020 dancefloor epic is less a wall-to-wall collection of club bangers than an expansion of the Chromatica cinematic universe, featuring Charli XCX, Arca, Rina Sawayama, Doss, and more.

Dawn of Chromatica

It was a tragedy that Lady Gaga’s Chromatica—an album made not just for dancing in the middle of a sweaty, crowded room, but for engaging in communal healing—was released at a moment when it could only be enjoyed in isolation. The timing of Dawn of Chromatica, then, feels less like a tragedy than a cruel joke: a full-throttle remix album with contributions from an all-star roster of pop freaks, unleashed in the world just as a brief and blissful reprieve from pandemic anxiety is replaced by a renewed sense of uncertainty.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Dawn of Chromatica is less a wall-to-wall collection of club bangers than an expansion of the Chromatica cinematic universe: new characters, new sounds, new memes approved and distributed by the Supreme Leader. It’s a welcome excuse to revisit an album that’s galvanized and brought together so many queer people in the year since its release. And thanks to its unusual degree of coherence and flow, it’s a project you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home without feeling a crippling sense of FOMO.
Part of what made the original Chromatica so satisfying was its excavation of ’90s house music. It was consistent and relentless in a way that other Gaga albums—even Joanne, with its pink cowboy hat and committed country drag—never quite managed. The most memorable revisions on Dawn of Chromatica create new links to other standout moments in the Gaga discography. The wailing riffs and drum fills plugged into Rina Sawayama and Clarence Clarity’s take on “Free Woman” place it squarely in the Born This Way ecosystem, and Dorian Electra’s trashy remix of “Replay” pushes the leather-and-metal energy even further into the red.
Pabllo Vittar’s breezy rendition of “Fun Tonight” summons Gaga’s early flirtations with Latin music along with a sax line worthy of Clarence Clemons; it also makes one of the saddest songs in recent memory sound like a sun-kissed Brazilian street fair, an appealing dissonance. And while the Dawn of Chromatica version of “Sine From Above” isn’t a song I can see myself revisiting on a regular basis, there’s a bit of ARTPOP in its flatulent digital provocation.
A few other highlights tilt in the other direction, teleporting Gaga into established worlds of sound with satisfying results. Doss transforms “Enigma” from a chaotic anthem into an expression of her signature featherlight dance music, equal parts gauze and rubber. The Planningtorock remix of “1000 Doves” completely changes the tone of the original, turning a bruised hidden gem—perhaps Chromatica’s closest thing to a ballad, barely skirting their illegal status—into strobe-lit New Wave. (It’s the kind of pop song that would’ve crept onto music critics’ best-of lists in the mid-’00s alongside Annie and the Knife.) It’s no surprise that Dawn of Chromatica’s most radical cut is Arca’s subversion of “Rain on Me,” on which Alejandra Ghersi samples her own “Time” and “Mequetrefe” to situate Gaga and Ariana Grande within KiCk i’s gossamer avant-pop.
The two guests closest to pop stardom in their own right bring their A-game on Dawn of Chromatica, elaborating on the original album’s themes of trauma and recovery with contributions that feel more like full-fledged duets than reworks. Sawayama brings a sense of comradery—I love the way she starts the song with a tossed-off “Let’s go, Gaga!”—and an ecstatic defiance to “Free Woman,” capping it off with a glorious celebration of independence. She’s one-upped just a few songs later when Charli XCX and A.G. Cook blow the doors off “911,” Gaga’s harrowing tribute to antipsychotic medication. Its ultimate form is a crystalline hyperpop epic, one that climaxes with a stunning final verse and outro. It’s some of Charli’s finest work since Pop 2.
Dawn of Chromatica’s provisions feel secondary to its function as a document of influence and stamp of approval for a generation of left-field pop misfits. Maybe it’s an odd thing to say about an album that debuted at No. 1 and yielded multiple Top-10 singles, but Chromatica feels distant from the center of the genre; its position within a pop landscape defined by rap’s continued dominance, pop-punk and alt-rock’s twinned resurgence, and the increasing global popularity of urbano and Afrobeats is unclear. Becoming a true multi-hyphenate force—note the album of Cole Porter standards alongside Tony Bennett, the makeup empire, and the impending House of Gucci Oscar campaign—has also meant Gaga entering the “playing the hits” phase of her career. It’s noteworthy that her biggest non-“Shallow” musical moments of the last half-decade are career-spanning sequences at the Super Bowl and the VMAs.
It’s this context that makes Dawn of Chromatica feel less like a celebration of a world-beating record and more like passing the torch. Bringing together this widely varied group of artists from around the world and calling attention to the qualities they share—their playfulness, their courage, their willingness to push the boundaries of taste—is an elegant way for Gaga to reinforce those same qualities as fundamental parts of a legacy that’s still taking shape.

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In 2010, no band seemed to be having more fun with scrappy garage rock than this one. On their first album in nine years, they forget to replace that spark with anything else.

Oh Boy

For long-AWOL Austin garage rockers Harlem, the excitement of releasing their first album in nine years must surely be tempered by knowing they’re bound to disappoint old fans. In an interview, co-leader Michael Coomers recalled previewing Oh Boy for a friend who was bummed it was nothing like the group’s younger, wilder music. “I’d like them to like what we do next,” Coomers said of similar listeners, “but if they’re looking for that sort of stuff, I think there’s a wealth of material, music made by others, that they can go to that will satisfy that urge.”
If only: While there will never be a shortage of irreverent garage pop records, few scratched the itch as completely as Harlem’s sole Matador outing, 2010’s Hippies. It was a jubilant bear hug of a listen, its infectiousness surpassed only by its puppyish zeal. Of all the bands of that era making scrappy party jams on busted equipment, they sounded like they were having the best time. Buoyed by the fluke resurgence of beach-friendly rock’n’roll, Harlem spent a year on the road playing to eager crowds before breaking Kanye’s Mase rule: They left when they were hot. Curtis O’Mara started the Harlem-esque band Grape St., while Coomers led the more subdued Lace Curtains. Neither group rebottled the lovable mischief of Harlem’s cult classic.
The reunited songwriters return older, wiser, and completely uninterested in recreating the past on Oh Boy. They’ve slowed the tempos, upped the production, and bled nearly every trace of boyish pep from their sound. These sorts of reinventions are always hard to pull off, but not impossible. Six years after their 1980 debut, for instance, the Feelies reemerged a very different band—mellower and more pastoral than their excitable first incarnation, but no less rewarding. They didn’t just mature. They adapted.
Harlem 2.0, on the other hand, illustrate just how difficult it can be to reignite a spark that’s been snuffed out. Oh Boy is so distracted from denying the creature comforts of the band’s early work that it forgets to offer anything in their place. On “Lana,” the guys kick back with some red wine and listen to two of pop’s reigning queens; for all their Lana Del Rey and Beyoncé worship, they share neither of those artists’ drive to chart new sounds. About as cutting-edge as this record gets is “Blonde on Blonde” and “Queen of Mosquitos,” a pair of wallowing, late-night tunes with the energy of the Band’s most laid-back sessions.
Beyond the small pleasures of O’Mara and Coomers’ relaxed chemistry, there are only the faintest echoes of what used to be. With some concentration, you could imagine a raucous jam trying to break free from blue-eyed soul songs like “Smoke in Mirrors” and “Dreams Is Destiny,” but the album’s mopey grip is too tight, its dejected spirit too all-consuming. Oh Boy never gives these songs a chance to lift off. Any band returning from a long hiatus needs to be judged on a curve, but no amount of expectation mitigation can completely shield somebody with an affection for Harlem’s old records from the disappoint here. They waited nine years just to learn the party ended long ago.


On Telefone, Noname pours the joy and devastation we glimpsed in her various guest spots with artists like Chance the Rapper, Mick Jenkins, and Saba into a rich, somber, and incredibly intimate album.

Telefone

When Noname (fka Noname Gypsy) raps, she swims in the bleakness of a life that’s seen a lot of death and change. “I used to have a name that look like butterflies and Hennessy/ I’ll trade it up for happiness but joyful don’t remember me,” she remembers matter-of-factly on “Sunny Duet,” from her new project Telefone. But even while reliving heartbreak her voice is soothing—resigned but optimistic, weary but hopeful. Perhaps it is a credit to all of her years spent writing and performing poetry as part of the YOUmedia Program for Young Creatives at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library: Her skipping cadence and ability to dance around words while establishing that each one is equally important are poet's skills, making you listen to every word without ever seeming overdetermined or obvious. You’re just gripped, trying to catch everything coming at you—and Noname (real name Fatimah Warner) gives you a lot.
On Telefone, she pours all the joy and devastation we glimpsed in her various guest spots with artists like Chance, Mick Jenkins, and Saba into a rich, somber, and incredibly intimate album. Originally meant to be released last summer, *Telefone *has been a long time coming for those who first heard her crushing, heartache-filled verse on Chance the Rapper’s “Lost” from Acid Rap, but the wait was worth it. Centered around transformative telephone conversations she’s had as she’s grown up, Telefone presents an introvert’s path to adulthood in careful detail and emotional intelligence.
If the Charlie Brown Christmas special—with its poignancy, melancholy and childlike, funereal score—were turned into a rap album, it might sound like Telefone. Much of its sound rests on delicate pianos, xylophones, and gentle wind instruments, matching the gorgeousness and dreary tenor of the lyrics. In much the same way as Jamila Woods’ HEAVN, it is a gospel-informed album, suffused with the same hope borne out of grief.
Also like HEAVN, Telefone is very much an album about black pain, particularly black women’s pain. When she raps about her lack of confidence and belief in her dreams on “Reality Check” she speaks of her granny’s spirit telling her, “You know they whipped us niggas?” as a counter. On “Bye Bye Baby” she raps about abortion with gentleness and understanding, referring to a “play date up to heaven soon.” Throughout Telefone, she reflects on the trials of the mothers and grandmothers who’ve given so much to the same world that destroyed them. These black women’s stories, so often obscured or silenced, are presented on center stage here. The joys, the hope and the determination are all there as well as the pain and burdens; they’re not separate but instead move together, forming a balance. Along with its black femininity, Telefone is very much a Chicago rap album in this same sense, telling different sides of the same story Chance or Chief Keef tell; they’re all different patterns in the same quilt covering the violence, plight, and pain that a failed system and poverty has created.
Noname is not drowning in misery but instead staying afloat and assuring you that you can, too: “What a pretty lady in the valley of the shadows/I’m thinking she lost a battle/I’m thinking she found the bottle,” she raps on “Freedom Interlude,” before adding “I know this is a song for overcoming.” It’s inspiring and gripping, so much so that when she brings in others to rap—Raury on “Diddy Bop,” theMIND on “Sunny Duet”—you miss her. “Freedom Interlude” is bookended with a Nina Simone sample in which she talks about the meaning of freedom. Simone’s troubles are well-known, but one thing that was always obvious to those who saw her live is that no matter what was happening in her life, when she got on stage she felt truly free and alive. Telefone feels like that same freedom; dancing and floating righteously amid unrest.


The delicate songs of the nomadic singer-songwriter have the ability to turn the wildest emotions into something calm and centered.

Patientness

Since Johanne Swanson started recording wandering indie pop songs as Yohuna in 2010, she’s picked up her whole life and moved over 500 miles more than a handful of times. She's had stints in Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Boston; Berlin; Los Angeles; and has now spent the last year and change living in New York City. In interviews, she blames this pattern of movement and the general restlessness that’s accompanied the long wait between her releases. For whatever reason, until now, she’s been unable to slow down, to center herself—and to finish the songs that she’d been working out in her head all the while.
But at the tail end of last year she went to another new city, Montreal, to work with some longtime friends—including guitarist Adelyn Strei, Told Slant’s Felix Walworth, Florist’s Emily Sprague, Foxes in Fiction’s Warren Hildebrand, and string-arranger-to-the-stars and multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett—on an album called Patientness that was meant as a summation of this period of drifting and waiting. The circumstances of its creation during a cold Canadian winter after years wandering in the wilderness may suggest that the record might be a collection of frayed ends or muddled feelings. But what’s always been most comforting about Swanson’s songwriting is the way she can make even the wildest emotions feel centered.
From the album’s first moments, on the chilly, synthesizer-led “Lake,” she sings of turmoil on a global level. A multitracked vocal take swims through a few drifting guitar lines, and when she whispers “this world’s just not kind” during the song’s wispy chorus, she does it not as a moment of catharsis or pained mourning, but as a simple statement of fact. Like all the best slowcore songs, the pieces on Patientness are lumbering and weighty, but there’s a peace about them—as if Swanson’s chosen to accept the bad in the world and press onwards rather than sit and sulk. It’s a trick she repeats throughout. The dizzy “Creep Date” proceeds similarly, the brittle crack of a synthetic snare punctuation on all of her dead-eyed, reverb-laden proclamations: “Not confused/Still feel used.”
Those lines curdle on the page, but when caught in the gentle wheeze of a synthesizer line that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Angelo Badalementi piece, Swanson’s able to soften the emotions. Everything comes out flattened, but not in a way that lessens their impact. Her delivery throughout Patientness has the effect that can only come from time and perspective, like the fragile-yet-self-assured quality of a catch-up conversation about everything that’s gone wrong in your life with friend who’s been away for a while.
The full-band arrangements, in contrast to the spare keyboard exercises on Revery, serve to underscore that calm confidence at the record’s heart. On “Badges,” a version of which initially appeared a couple of years ago on a compilation for Orchid Tapes (the small New York label that’s releasing Patientness), Swanson interweaves a few synthesizer lines with plinks of a piano and some percussion reverberating in the distance. It’s delicate and deceptively complex, but in the midst of it all, there’s a gentle propulsion—cautious steps forward in spite of the haze that surrounds it. She mirrors it in the lyrics, bouncing back from self-doubt with a chorus that’s absorbed all of the peace, hope, and love she’s found on the long, turbulent journey to Patientness. In spite of it all, she sings, “I am radiating light.”


Working alongside his longtime bandmates Moreno Veloso and Alexandre Kassin, plus the string arranger Sean O’Hagan, the Rio multi-instrumentalist ponders Brazilian music’s rootedness.

Domenico Lancellotti: The Good Is a Big God

The Good Is a Big God

The notion of place has always played an outsized role in Brazilian music. To read its history is to be confronted with a long and complicated answer to the question of what music originating from a particular place at a particular time should sound like, rather than a log of aesthetic revolutions—notwithstanding its genuinely revolutionary nature. Put differently, Brazilian music offers a resounding rebuke to the notion that engagement with the rest of the world means capitulating to its norms.
It’s an argument that Rio-based multi-instrumentalist Domenico Lancellotti has absorbed for most of his life, and one that informs his new album, The Good Is a Big God. The son of bossa nova singer Ivor Lancellotti, Domenico has over the course of his career collaborated with a who’s who of legendary Brazilian musicians—Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil—and in the early 2000s was a member of +2, a democratic trio with rotating leadership that also included Veloso’s son Moreno and Alexandre Kassin. It was with the latter group that he released his first record as a bandleader, 2004’s Sincerely Hot.
With The Good Is a Big God, Lancellotti rarely wanders beyond his national borders, and in the process he quietly makes a case for giving in to the soft magnetism of home. It finds him hooking up once more with his +2 bandmates, along with frequent Stereolab and Cornelius collaborator Sean O’Hagan, for a thoughtfully arranged and powerfully executed set of songs that, for all of their breeziness, suggest a deep grounding in Rio’s sandy shores and the countryside’s humid crags.
Throughout the record, Lancellotti draws clean melodic lines with his acoustic guitar, then complicates them with clattering percussion, deploying samples and electronics the way the tropicalistas used baroque and chamber-pop instrumentation. You can hear echoes of the elder Lancellotti’s melancholic songwriting updated with drifts of electronic fizzling and distant programming in opener “Voltar-Se,” while “Tudo ao Redor” recalls the sashaying existentialism of João Gilberto; O’Hagan’s string arrangement in the latter deftly shifts along with Lancellotti’s graceful phrasing, here resembling Rogério Duprat’s tropical filigree, there suggesting the well-pressed pluck of Mexican ranchera.
As with Gil and Caetano Veloso before him, Lancellotti’s view of Brazil has only been enhanced by the time he’s spent outside of it. Nine of the album’s 14 tracks were composed for Rio Occupation, a 2012 London art exhibition meant to link the two Olympic cities. Lancellotti answers the flash of the moment with shushed reverence, painting still lifes of brief encounters that seem to take place just beyond earshot of the traffic outside. “The weight of light on your hand vibrates in the morning chill,” he sings in “Tudo ao Redor,” while in “Asas,” he embraces a lover and feels the electric pulse between them: “The left hand on the right hand/Your soul flush to mine/Both perfect/Sweet fusion/Beatitude that burns.”
And where the view encompasses more than he can hold, he simply lets it go: The brief “Serra dos Órgãos,” named for the national park an hour north of Rio, is a showcase for O’Hagan’s strings, which fold in on themselves over and over, forming jagged crevasses and rounded peaks in a way that recalls Maurice Ravel, while the mostly instrumental “Shanti Luz” stutter-steps like the disco thump of a carioca William Onyeabor. Even as “Voltar-Se” threatens to drift irrevocably into interiority, Lancellotti gathers the cloudy programming and spins it into a whirlwind of drums, pounding his way out of his head and back into the rhythms of the real world.
All of which makes The Good Is a Big God a political record powered more by context than content. The protest isn’t against regimes—though that occasion may soon arise again—but against the conditions of the globalized city and the Olympic-sized spectacle that, in its size and scale, blots out the importance of ordinary life and reduces the natural world to little more than an occasionally compelling background. Still, like the tropicalistas, Lancellotti is too engaged with what’s happening around him to turn to a reactionary regionalism. Instead, he places us at the top of the Serras, where the view is lofty enough to see for miles and miles.


On a new mini-album, the Boston slowcore project pares back its sound to uncover new strengths and summon old ghosts.

Heartbreak Rules

Since 2013, Horse Jumper of Love have been a comforting outlet for the heart-on-sleeve compositions of singer-guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos. On their self-titled debut and follow-up So Divine, drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran and bassist John Margaris worked like an ocean tide, pulling you in with a tranquilizing steadiness before abruptly turning aggressive. The band’s latest release strips back its sound to meet a slack current. Recorded in the Catskills over five days in 2021, Heartbreak Rules is a mini-album that, save for a brief piano part in “Chariots” played by Margaris, separates Giannopoulos from his bandmates for the first time in a decade. Backed solely by co-producer Bradford Krieger, he returns with a muted collection that taps into the strengths of the band’s earliest material.
Giannopoulos and Krieger team up for eight new songs, plus two reimagined tracks from 2022’s Natural Part and one cover from the vault. Though not as loud or bold as their previous album, the new material on Heartbreak Rules still charms. Country guitar and cheery melodies expand the band’s slowcore palette, straying from their established brand of gloom. On the title track, Giannopoulos breaks out a looping fingerpicked riff that shimmers next to slide guitar; the combination suits his raspy, confessional voice, especially when he reaches for higher notes. It’s a glum take on alt-country that’s earned the admiration of Wednesday’s MJ Lenderman.
At the band’s live shows, audience members sway side-to-side, caught in a state of hypnosis; Horse Jumper of Love cast a similar ambiance here. On “Sugar in Your Shoes (Last Night Version),” an acoustic rendition of Natural Part’s “I Poured Sugar in Your Shoes,” Giannopoulos sounds like he’s perched at an open window, voice floating into the evening air. The light and unassuming presence of Krieger’s percussion suits the softer material, though there are moments when Vadala-Doran and Margaris’ absence is obvious, like the underpowered build-up in “Queenie’s Necklace” and the meandering tempo of “Act of No Substance.” The familiar tension of Horse Jumper of Love’s more characteristic material is not the goal here.
As a songwriter, Giannopoulos has always been drawn to mundane details, and the quieter scenes on Heartbreak Rules are especially intimate: a person talking to herself while looking through the fridge, a conversation in a closet muffled by clothes. In this setting, the Microphones comparisons that Horse Jumper of Love earned in their hushed early years come back into view. A lyric like “Pendulums swinging in the watch store all in discord/She tracks dirt in and leaves a mess wherever she stomps around” is sing-spoken like an old folk artist, with a slight strain on high notes, all of it delivered with an unhurried confidence. Here and on the bright, simple “Singing by the Sink,” he finds a sense of levity that’s rare in his music. This laid-back approach allows Giannopoulos’ cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Luna,” a home recording from almost 10 years ago, to work as the closer. His reverb-soaked take on the Siamese Dream classic goes for a lonely, uneasy interpretation. Giannopoulos’ voice is audibly younger in this cover, recasting Billy Corgan’s serenade to a lover as a letter to his own future self. Holed away in the Catskills to revisit his roots years later, he sounds just as content with the pleasure of making quiet music in a quiet place.


Self-produced by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden with support from keyboardist Zac Rae, This Is My Hand is an often successful exercise in percussive, jagged art-pop that explores themes of self-acceptance, sensuality, and community.

This Is My Hand

When interviewed about the process behind This Is My Hand, Shara Worden’s fourth LP under the My Brightest Diamond moniker, the operatically-trained singer mentioned writing with a vivid image in mind: an “imaginary tribe of people, gathering around a fire, making music together, telling stories, hearing from the shaman.” The energy of community has fed some of Worden’s best work in the past decade. Beginning with the supporting musicians that helped foster her experimental cabaret pop as AwRY in the early aughts and expanding outward to yMusic’s effervescent chamber music orchestrations on MBD’s last full-length, 2011’s All Things Will Unwind, a sense of collaboration has become as essential to the My Brightest Diamond project as Worden's inimitably acrobatic voice. It’s fitting, then, that Worden has turned that mentality into methodology for follow-up This Is My Hand. Self-produced by Worden with support from keyboardist Zac Rae, This Is My Hand is an often successful exercise in percussive, jagged art-pop that explores themes of self-acceptance, sensuality, and community.
In a frustrating bit of organization, This Is My Hand’s most memorable moments are front loaded in its opening five songs. Lead single "Pressure", which begins with a galvanizing drumline from the Detroit Party Marching Band before stacking Worden's soaring vocals against a rhythmic horn section, is unique and oddly beautiful. "Lover Killer" employs handclaps and howls for a deceptively joyous meditation on our capacity for both affection and violence, while "I Am Not the Bad Guy" evokes an industrial version of St. Vincent with its lurching swagger and pointed, imagistic lyrics (“I’m hungry, I won’t lie/ The cage, the bird, the open sky”). The bracing title track, however, is the true standout, as well as one of Worden’s finest moments. Through powerful repetition of the title’s opening phrase (“This is my…”) with distinct variations on body parts, ideas, and emotions (“fist,” “voice,” “heart,” “hate”, “sex,” etc.), the song elegantly unifies into an impassioned and inclusive rally call.
Where the beginning of This Is My Hand presents an invigorating progression of Worden’s sonic palette, the album winds down with a string of slower, ethereal oddities that blunt the concentrated pandemonium of its earlier tracks. "So Easy" and "Resonance" suffer a similar fate that much of All Things Will Unwind did in that they come and go with little to distinguish themselves, especially heard following the flourishing, self-assured bluster of the opening section. Still, despite uneven pacing, This Is My Hand works on a visceral level, conjuring Worden’s intended image of tribal, fireside collaboration through a rich diversity of texture, detail, and tone.


In recent years, the nonsensical notion of the non-sequential album follow-up has gained a thoughtless acceptance seldom found outside totalitarianism ...

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Master and Everyone

Master and Everyone

In recent years, the nonsensical notion of the non-sequential album follow-up has gained a thoughtless acceptance seldom found outside totalitarianism. Most memorably, Beck's crystalline Mutations was relegated to busywork status while the distinction of follow-up to Odelay was reserved for the vastly inferior Midnite Vultures. Record industry muckety-mucks had miraculously succeeded where scientists had failed: in splitting the Beck, yielding one salaciously marketable flavor-hijacker, one dour, lovelorn folkie, and one 10-kiloton explosion of inconceivable destructive power (though the latter has yet to see the inside of a Sam Goody).
But if the music industry is not bound by the ordinary laws of time and logic, then certainly neither is Pitchfork. And thus, I can state without fear of contradiction or absurdity that I have been waiting for the track that follows "Raining in Darling"-- the final tune on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness-- since 1999.
Now, even by a conservative estimate, I can count some fifty Will Oldham tracks between the conclusion of I See a Darkness and the release of Master and Everyone, without even including his collaborations with the Boxhead Ensemble, Rian Murphy, Johnny Cash or Dave Pajo. But nothing on the rare gems compilation Guarapero: Lost Blues 2; nor his experimental collaboration with Mick Turner and a book of old Rabindranath Tagore poems, Get on Jolly; nor the minimalist Ode Music soundtrack; nor his amped-up covers EP, More Revery; nor the disturbingly smooth adult-contempo album, Ease Down the Road have even come close to the sonorous danse macabre of I See a Darkness. Oldham's relentless prolificity aside, the skullfaced Darkness still awaits its true successor.
Master and Everyone is probably not it. Not that Master and Everyone isn't a fine record-- it is. But like much of Oldham's recent output, it never achieves the black solemnity of I See a Darkness, or even the ramshackle eroticism of Viva Last Blues-- arguably, Oldham's best works. It's sparse without being immediate, ruminative without being particularly profound, and somewhat sadly, confessional without sounding at all redemptive. In a world where chronology serves marketing and music criticism, Master and Everyone is Oldham's follow-up to Arise, Therefore.
Master and Everyone has a stark whiteness about it: bare branches and gathering dark. "Winter comes and snow/ I can't marry you, you know," opens the first track, "The Way"; even the gently swelling strings under the chorus, "Love me the way I love you," hardly warm the song at all. Though seemingly intimate, Oldham still sounds like he's singing in a cavern. The song is so bleakly quiet you can hear the icicles dripping.
The deadening duet, "Ain't You Wealthy, Ain't You Wise?", is even more withdrawn; the refrain, "There's no pain to lament/ And no dream undreamt," seems to mock optimism as cruelly as the presence of female accompanist Marty Slayton mocks companionship. The sparse title track lies little more than a plaintive guitar strum beneath what amounts to a post-breakup resolution: "I am now free/ A master and everyone/ Servant of all and servant to none." Oddly enough, this struck me as something straight out of Martin Luther; his 1520 tract, The Freedom of Christian, reads: "A Christian is a perfectly free master of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." Weird.
This would be (and may indeed be) a stretch were the album not utterly suffused with a deeply confessional Christianity. To be sure, the language and imagery of religion has always been an integral part of Oldham's songwriting, but always rather ambivalently-- as repressive and hypocritical, as well as authentic and redemptive. The boy in the Palace Brothers' stunning early tune, "Riding", summed it up best when he retorted, "God is what I make of him." On Master and Everyone, however, Oldham seems to flirt with downright evangelism. In "Maundering", Oldham proclaims that he is "going to find something true," singing, "Evil is as evil do/ God is always showing this to you/ I'm going to glorify everything good/ And put right what is wrong as I should." Later, over the ringing acoustic pluck of "Lessons from What's Poor", Oldham lapses almost into psalm:
And if I hunger see that I do
Bring me water; bring me food
Fill me up with things that are true
And very good...
I take my lessons from what's poor
That's what God has put me for
Wealth is death; of that I'm sure
Farewell.
But this rather grating homiletics seems to come and go (with the presence of the chirpy and no less grating Slayton).
The supremely stripped down "Even If Love" recalls the post-Slint, Pajo-inflected angularity of Joya, opening with the wonderful lyric, "Once again in the world of 1200 feelings/ All in electric lights/ We see what we can," amidst a low, snaky guitar line. Above all, the fiercely elegant "Wolf Among Wolves" remains Master and Everyone's incomparable highlight, fusing skeletal acoustics with deep and subtle electronic noise underfoot, and punctuated with sharp falsetto howls. "Why can't I be loved as what I am?" Oldham sings, "A wolf among wolves/ And not as a man among men." "Wolves" is really the only track on Master and Everyone that eschews two-dimensional desolation or ham-fisted sanctification to accomplish something truly and believably introspective.
Time passes, but it's a fiction to clock the years by great albums. Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else. It is not a great album by any means, but it is a timely one. Unnaturally cold, and weak like January sun. Perhaps we can do what we want with chronology, but the seasons run of their own accord. And right now, like the rest of America, it is winter in Louisville.


After a few years as an indie-rock hired gun, the former Sky Larkin singer assumes center stage on her solo debut, chronicling the push-and-pull between blurry days and electric evenings.

Harkin

For the past few years, Katie Harkin has been busy greasing other people’s wheels. When her old band Sky Larkin called time in 2014 after three albums of charming, lo-fi fuzz, she carved out a new career as a gun for hire, joining Sleater-Kinney, Courtney Barnett, and Kurt Vile on tour and playing on Waxahatchee’s 2017 LP Out in the Storm. That’s half a decade working in the shadows—unlike rowdy children, background players are supposed to be heard but not really seen—which makes the way Harkin finally steps forward on her self-titled debut feel like an extra striding into center stage and bursting into a lengthy soliloquy.
That’s not to say that Harkin’s jagged, whirring indie rock represents some soul-baring confessional years in the making; listening to its vivid yet impressionistic vignettes is more akin to trying to get to know someone by sifting through a jumble of their candid Polaroid snaps. But it does capture a unique tension. Harkin slowly stitched the album together during a period of time split between touring, staying in New York, and hunkering down in the UK’s picturesque Peak District, and she often sounds as if she’s being dragged in different directions across its 10 songs. The geographical references span from her native North of England to Chicago and Missouri, chronicling the push-and-pull between wanderlust and fatigue, restlessness and sluggishness, blurry days and electric evenings. “No coordinates!” she yelps on “Up to Speed,” undercutting the song’s sweet melody with a scuzzy riff that exudes the fuggy confusion of too many late nights, as her nomad’s life spirals into a rut of scuppered plans and crash pads.
Thankfully that second-guessing doesn’t slacken her songwriting, which coats Sky Larkin’s bright, fidgety din with a sleeker, after-dark sheen. Like most people who came of age in sleepy country suburbs, Harkin grew up enraptured by the way quiet days gave way to transformative nights out, and the best cuts here are charged with a similar witching-hour magic. “I know what love is/Love is a nighttime fight,” she croons over the shimmering rush of “Decade,” a gracious reflection on old memories and mistakes made after the sun went down. On “Nothing the Night Can’t Change,” she fizzes with the nervy, stomach-flipping thrill of seeing your crush at the end of a boring day. “Your eyes, they widen at night just like mine,” she sings, high enough on fumes of lust and adventure to shrug off the naysayers insisting it won’t last.
Harkin is most alive when it sprints with that sense of speed and purpose, surging with adrenaline and sparking with twilit excitement. The one or two songs that stumble into a medium-paced chug, such as the choppy, stop-start “Bristling,” lack that same jolt of energy and come off pedestrian in comparison—yet it’s actually only when things really slow down that some of the record’s most beguiling textures emerge. Stella Mozgawa’s splashy drumming underpins whirlpooling guitars and synths on the woozy, Warpaint-ish “Dial It In,” while the fragile strum of “New France” takes on a strangely wispy beauty thanks to its cloudy electronics. “Red Virginia Creeper” shares its name with both an American plant and an Edvard Munch painting, but Harkin twists its shrill whistles and sticky keys into something that instead hums with the eerie, stultifying haze of the English countryside, until it sounds like she’s scoring a pastoral fever dream.
Having an address book as fat as Harkin’s could never be called a hindrance, but it does inevitably magnify any lingering traces of those she’s worked with before, most notably the thrumming urgency of Sleater-Kinney and the playful wordiness of Wild Beasts, who she moonlighted with while still in Sky Larkin. But for the most part, those elements are shaped into something her own. On the twisting, tuneful post-punk of “Mist on Glass,” its guitars racing on a never-ending loop like souped-up slot cars, an awkward spat blows up into a full-blown culture clash. “Does my Calderdale sentiment/Ring out in American ambient?” she asks, worried that her no-nonsense Yorkshire dialect has been lost in translation or, worse still, corrupted by a new environment. On Harkin, at least, there’s no danger of her voice not cutting through.