On their first new album in three years, the Toronto punk band tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music and rebuild themselves for the better.

Age Hasn’t Spoiled You

In 2011, then nascent Toronto punk band Greys released a vinyl 10" called Ultra Sorta. It was an energetic five-song suite that sounded like the embodiment of a mosh pit; limbs flying from every direction, kicking up dust, and leaving no room to breathe. While it was exhilarating, it didn’t stand apart from the work of other punk revivalists at the time. But over the course of eight years, Greys have steadily refined their approach to rock music, allowing space and thoughtful arrangements to shout louder than frontman Shehzaad Jiwani. In 2016, the quartet released a pair of records—Outer Heaven and Warm Shadow—that played with pace and allowed for new influences to sneak in, namely shoegaze, dream pop, and slow-simmering psych. On their new album Age Hasn’t Spoiled You, however, Greys tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music, and piece it back together from the ragged-but-arresting wreckage. This dark incarnation of the band is one that their 2011 selves wouldn’t recognize—and they wear the change well.
Age Hasn’t Spoiled You was bound to be a grand departure from Greys’ earlier output; it was recorded in the wake of the 2016 election, and coincided with the decline of the group’s creative community. In Greys’ native Toronto, beloved DIY venues shuttered, and fellow bands were calling it quits. “I think this record is largely informed by that sense of instability, musically as well as lyrically,” Jiwani recently told The Fader. “You can’t go back, but how do you know which way to push forward?” Despite the onslaught of discouraging events, Greys managed to push in the right direction, relinquishing sloppy punk velocity for a collection of focused, slow-simmering tracks that are as versatile as they are detailed.
The record is full of surprises, something we don’t often get to say about rock music in 2019. The single “Kill Appeal” kicks off as a driving post-punk cut propelled by blast beats before it crashes and erupts into free jazz. “These Things Happen” and “Western Guilt” recall the spaced-out psych pop of early Blur. Maybe the most striking, however, are opening tracks “A-440” and “Arc Light.” The former serves more as a test pattern than a proper tune, intertwining static thrums and whispers and a shrill buzzing. “Arc Light” cuts through “A-440”’s disintegration with squeals that could be either be from an effects pedal or whales in distress, instantly recalling My Bloody Valentine’s “Touched.” Tiny details are embedded throughout the record, enriching reminders of process and precision.
Jiwani has expressed his fatigue with contemporary guitar music, and he took reactionary measures to that exhaustion while making Age Hasn’t Spoiled You. The record’s success owes a lot to that pushback; Greys flipped their well-worn process inside-out, repurposing instruments until they coalesced into a dizzying whole. Here, the guitar-bass-drums template of their previous music is either shrouded in discord or abandoned entirely. But Greys also took their time. Warm Shadow was laid down in three days; Age Hasn’t Spoiled You, on the other hand, was made over the course of a year, marking the band’s first album since 2016. The space they’ve allowed themselves as artists has translated beautifully into Greys’ new work. In an accelerating industry that demands high turnover, Age Hasn’t Spoiled You is a testament to patience and method.


Early in the pandemic, the Toronto multi-instrumentalist’s bedroom videos made her a viral sensation. Now, her debut album puts a widescreen spin on those whimsical miniatures.

Duality

Years from now, everything we experienced during this pandemic—Tiger King, the sourdough uprising, Zoom background filters, spraying Lysol on your produce—will be compiled into a Buzzfeed list titled something like “57 Things Only People Who Lived Though COVID Will Understand.” And somewhere on that list, between “pre-New York Times Wordle” and “bespoke Loveless face masks,” you might find Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist Hannah Bussere Kim, aka Luna Li. In the midst of the first lockdown wave, Li used isolation to her advantage, posting a series of brief clips to social media that savvily edited together discrete performances on a variety of instruments—violin, bass, keyboards, guitar, a big-ass harp—into splendorous one-woman-band bedroom jams. Thanks to her engaging on-camera enthusiasm and the sheer blissfulness of her instrumentals, Li swiftly became a viral sensation, accumulating millions of views, tour offers from her hero Japanese Breakfast, and copious fan art created in her honor.
But those micro-tunes were more than just fleeting feel-good distractions to take our minds off the ambulance sirens blaring outside; they were also trailers for the widescreen retro-futurist vision that unfurls on Li’s debut album, Duality. For Li, that title carries multiple meanings: It speaks to her experience as a mixed-race Korean-Canadian, a classically trained musician who found her true calling in DIY pop, and an overnight novelty star who’s actually been cultivating her musical aesthetic for a good half decade. Duality also speaks to the experience of the album itself. On the one hand, this is an intensely introspective record, a diary-like catalog of intimate exchanges, wistful memories, and ruminations on loneliness. But on the other, it’s pure fantasy, situating its everyday dramas in a dreamy wonderland illuminated by lava lamps, moonbeams, and wizard-wand sparkles.
In sharp contrast to her soothing videos, Duality begins in mayhem, with the sort of guitar-smashing, drum-bashing cacophony that arena-rock bands deploy as their grand finale. But after 15 seconds, the noise disappears as if sucked up by a vacuum, giving way to the minimal drum-machine beat and winsome guitar melody of “Cherry Pit.” The effect might mirror the unsettling dualism of many people’s lockdown experience—that odd, irreconcilable contrast between the chaos raging in the world outside and the quiet sanctity of work-from-home living. Only here, Li to applies her layer-by-layer bedroom-jam blueprint to an epically scaled romantic reverie: “Spit your cherry pit down in the forest/I will find it, and carry it in my pocket,” she sings, as if secretly nurturing the seed to a blossoming relationship. Sure enough, over its five-minute span, the song grows and grows, gradually adding gently plucked harp and overlapping vocal lines to intensify that light-headed lovestruck feeling. By the time “Cherry Pit” reaches its climactic phased-out guitar solo, it becomes clear the song’s crashing intro wasn’t just some random snippet, but a sneak preview of Li’s psych-rock majesty in full bloom.
Duality’s sound feels instantly familiar, though exactly what it reminds you of could depend on your age: Over the course of its 13 tracks, Li and producer/bandmate Braden Sauder pass a thread through the buoyant harmonies of late-’60s Beach Boys and ELO, the acidic soul of Shuggie Otis and Eddie Hazel-era Funkadelic, the space-age synth-phonies of Stereolab and Air, and the post-chillwave R&B of We Are KING and recent Tame Impala. (The album’s daydreamy milieu is disrupted only by “Star Stuff,” a garage-rock sprint where Li channels her inner Karen O.) But where Li’s viral videos showcased her talents as a musician and arranger, Duality is a testament to her pop songwriting smarts, whether she’s using softly cooed verses to slowly lure you toward the luxuriant stargazing hook of “Silver Into Rain,” or scoring a direct hit with “Alone But Not Lonely,” an all-chorus/no-verse self-help affirmation set to funky drumbeat, disco strings, and mirror-balled Nile Rodgers jangle.
“Alone But Not Lonely” effectively sums up Li’s state of mind while making the album: Though many of its songs feel like interior monologues on the pros and cons of being on your own, Duality is also a summit for the wider community of BIPOC indie artists she’s connected with in recent years. Alt-rock upstart beabadoobee helps thrust the aforementioned “Silver Into Rain” toward the heavens, while dream-pop dynamo Jay Som turns up in the dazed cocktail-soul serenade “Boring Again.” And in its dance between ’60s pop sunshine and ’90s R&B heartache, “Flower” seamlessly slips in a guest verse from Chicago rapper Dreamer Isioma, who uncorks the tension underpinning this seemingly whimsical record when she declares, “I miss making love/Making art!”
Certainly, it’s a feeling a lot of people can relate to after two dispiriting, emotionally numbing years spent in pandemic purgatory. But just as her online videos saw Li making the most out of a shitty situation, the fanciful pop of Duality applies the same silver-lining logic to interpersonal afflictions like dead-end romances, communication breakdowns, and quarter-life-crisis inertia. “I wish you’d see the world as I do,” Li sings on “Magic,” as a stormy gust of strings and a glammy guitar solo whisk her away to another dimension. Her message is clear: When real life has you feeling powerless, you can always rule the universe of your own imagination.


The legendary pop duo’s first new album in 18 years approaches the challenges of middle life with familiar sensitivity and shared intimacy. It’s a strikingly unguarded and forthright record.

The Tipping Point

Sincerity is embedded in the DNA of Tears for Fears, the duo Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith formed in the early 1980s, when they were just out of their teens. Riddled with adolescent angst and besotted with psychotherapy, they named their group after a phrase from the writings of psychologist Arthur Janov, who pioneered primal scream therapy. Janov’s theory that psychic turmoil had its root in childhood trauma resonated. John Lennon introduced the practice into rock with his 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; Bobby Gillespie would later name his band after it. During those early years, Tears for Fears camouflaged some of their psychic pain with clamoring synthesizers and sprightly melodies, a combination that dampened the melancholy undercurrents of their first UK hit, “Mad World.” Yet the very title of their 1983 debut, The Hurting, made it plain they embraced sensitive emotional issues in a way that such new wave peers as, say, Adam and the Ants did not.
The Tipping Point, the duo’s first album in 18 years, feels spiritually connected to The Hurting. Where Tears for Fears spent their debut articulating roiling interior torment, writing as empaths as much as from experience, The Tipping Point is the work of middle-aged survivors who have absorbed the lessons of therapy and loss; its alternate title could’ve been The Healing. Orzabal in particular suffered a series of painful losses in recent years, chief among them the death of his wife of 35 years due to alcohol-related dementia in 2017. He subsequently went through a stint of rehab himself, an experience that led him to recognize the depth of his bond with Smith, a lifelong friend and collaborator.
The pair split at the dawn of the 1990s, an acrimonious fracture that took many years to mend. They reunited in 2004, delivering Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, an album whose very title carried an air of finality. For the next decade and a half, Tears for Fears tended to deluxe reissues of their catalog, mounting the occasional tour with fellow ’80s survivors and releasing covers of songs from new artists like Arcade Fire and Hot Chip. The audience wanted to hear the hits, the band’s management assumed; their reasoning carried over to the first attempt at a long-delayed successor to Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, which paired Orzabal and Smith with fashionable producers and songwriters in hopes of returning to the charts. Displeased with the results, Tears for Fears fired everybody—the collaborators, the management, the label—saved a few tunes, then wrote the bulk of The Tipping Point as they did The Hurting: Alone with guitars, sitting eyeball to eyeball.
That shared intimacy is apparent on The Tipping Point, a strikingly unguarded and forthright record. Tears for Fears never shied away from letting their feelings flood the page—underneath its rallying cry of a chorus, their breakthrough hit “Shout” is about moving forward with only what you truly need. The urgency has faded, and the bruises Orzabel and Smith now bear are evident in how they’ve softened their touch, allowing for moments of sweetly resigned reflection and an overarching sense of contentment. Apart from “Break the Man”—Smith’s pseudo-sequel to 1989’s “Woman in Chains” and an insistent, inspirational anthem for allies of the #MeToo movement—The Tipping Point benefits from being notably light on the kind of broad, open-ended anthems that were long a Tears for Fears speciality; these songs benefit from their specificity.
Naturally, Orzabal writes about his departed wife, hoping she finds peace on “Please Be Happy,” a stately, McCartney-esque ballad sweetened with swelling strings and muted trumpet. He spends “The Tipping Point” waiting for the moment when she passes from this world into the next. Heavy subjects, yet the sound of The Tipping Point isn’t weighty: It’s a warm, even soothing, blend of acoustic and electronic instruments. Tears for Fears also spike the record with a couple of numbers that break the contemplative spell, taking a swipe at their former management on the swirling, sneering “Master Plan” and ratcheting up the rhythm and volume on “My Demons,” the one cut that’s a clear throwback to their shiny ’80s synth-pop.
Despite these fleeting moments of ire, The Tipping Point is grounded by a sense of acceptance, a realization that life goes on—and is worth living—after periods of grief. Nowhere is that clearer than on “Rivers of Mercy,” a lovely, calming ballad that finds solace within images of flowing water washing away pain. Here, Tears for Fears intertwine the ideas that run throughout The Tipping Point, emphasizing grace and growth in the face of trauma. It’s the centerpiece of an album that feels like the most fully realized record Tears for Fears have ever made, a culmination of the musical and emotional themes they’ve held dear since their inception.

Buy: Rough Trade


The third album by maximalist art-poppers Everything Everything feels like the final part of a trilogy about mankind's desperate self-destruction. Get to Heaven pivots on the violent last resorts of the disenfranchised, and the false prophets who claim to save them.

Get to Heaven

It's apt, if dismal, that Get to Heaven arrives the same week as scientists say earth is entering a sixth "mass extinction". We've no one to blame but ourselves, they report; meanwhile the third album by maximalist art-poppers Everything Everything feels like the final part of a trilogy about mankind's desperate self-destruction.
In its appealingly hyperactive way, the Manchester-based four-piece's 2010 debut, Man Alive, confronted the human effects of media manipulation around war, body image, and the environment. 2013's Arc took a morbid turn, casting depression and the shame of social inaction as a hopeless apocalyptic landscape. "I'm lawful, I kept my head down/ I turned a blind eye, I played my cards right," frontman Jonathan Higgs sang on "Undrowned". And yet: "I'm in debt, man!" In an age of ISIS, mass shootings, and the rise of the UK right, there's no need for fictional catastrophes on their third record. Get to Heaven pivots on the violent last resorts of the disenfranchised, and the false prophets who claim to save them.
Perhaps it's rich of four middle-class white guys to think they have anything to say about being marginalized, but Higgs tries to empathize with what drives people to drastic measures—the subtext being that he's lingered on that emotional cusp. The booming "Regret" glimpses a vanishing act on the TV news—perhaps of young people joining ISIS, or volunteers signing up to help aid efforts. "Maybe you're the coldest if you never felt it," sings Higgs of that desperation to do something, as the rest of the band chant the song's title like monks, over a '60s girl-group beat. "Maybe you're the luckiest if you never did it."
The intense, raging narratives on Get to Heaven are frequently rooted in character studies: The terrorist attempting to kill the queen, the convert to right-wing ideologies, the Good Man who admits that he too would be corrupted by power. The driving vantage point, though, is still his frantic mind. Where the forlorn Arc could feel like a study in learned helplessness, Everything Everything sound more enervated than ever on Get to Heaven. They push their maximalist tendencies to extremes, stretching every second with sound as a way of staving off the death that looms everywhere: "I don't want to get older," as Higgs sings on "Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread". And on "Zero Pharaoh": "They tell me there's a way to cheat death."
Lead single "Distant Past" is the standout track, in which Higgs pleads for escape from the present day only to realize that certain backwards ideologies want to revive mentalities from a darker age. Underpinning it is a massive, strafing chorus that stokes the escapist fantasy with its hints to Edenic rave culture. Elsewhere, though, he gawks head on at horror. "To the Blade" is a yowling opening salvo about prejudice that splutters into a paranoid guitar solo borrowed from Hail to the Thief. Over "Fortune 500"'s grave, burbling synths, Higgs sings sadly of a "trail of destruction—but at least it's a trail," as he envisages being at the center of a plot to murder the queen. Heavy kick drums and more chanted vocals kick in at the chorus, ramping the tension somewhere nervy and disquieting.
They don't really let up on the lyrical desperation, but thankfully there are lighter shades on Get to Heaven, like the title track's jaunty Afrobeat guitar and nonchalant whistle, or the chorus of "The Wheel (Is Turning Now)", which erupts in warm euphoria that wouldn't shame Coldplay. The last two songs also offer welcome respite. On "No Reptiles", Higgs dismisses theories that world leaders are evil reptilian shapeshifters by pointing out that they're just "soft-boiled eggs in shirts and ties". And "Warm Healer" abandons the record's scheme altogether—it's a slow, sparkling song about losing the ability to love. There's doubt and desperation in everyone, they seem to suggest, and a little more empathy might go some way to preventing the destruction we wreak on the planet, and on each other. While Get to Heaven's ceaseless terror and heavy arrangements can be overwhelming, more power to Everything Everything for attempting to offer a nuanced understanding of a broken world at a time when a lot of their significantly less imaginative British indie rock peers say worse than nothing.


The Athens, GA indie-folk outfit Mothers’ debut record finds its strength in the raw, striking vulnerability of frontwoman Kristine Leschper.

Mothers: When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired

Vulnerability is the driving force behind indie-folk outfit Mothers’ debut record When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired. Born from the solo project of lead singer Kristine Leschper, Mothers found its niche in the arts-saturated community of Athens, GA. Their debut is composed of only eight songs, but it covers a surprising amount of emotional ground in that short time.  Perhaps, it’s because the songs have had some time to sink in with Leschper and co.: When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired was written while Leschper was finishing art school two years ago and she later fleshed them out with band member Matthew Andregg.
With her high, haunted cries, Leschper evokes singer-songwriters Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten. The music runs from the delicacy of single tiny mandolin (on "Too Small For Eyes") to billowing, unhurried full-band roots rock ("It Hurts Until It Doesn't," "Copper Mines"), but Leschper's struggles to move past two broken relationships—one with her lover, one with herself—give the album a powerful undertow.
Leschper's trembling voice often breaks into wails, ones that feel like longing stares. On opener "Too Small For Eyes," she sings "I hate my body, I love your taste/Bird stirring in my chest, you give and take away." It’s a harsh truth to begin an album with: the idea of someone not giving you what you want or need, and the crippling analysis that comes from acknowledging it. "I've buried you in compromise/Never mind, never mind never mind," she howls on "Copper Mines," the song's pace quickening like an encroaching panic attack.
Despite the agitation and raw nerves, the album feels like a therapeutic offering. The album sequencing traces an uphill battle alongside Leschper as she identifies her insecurities and musters the inner strength to fight against them. The lovedrunk lullabye "Nesting Behavior," arriving at the midpoint, feels like a hard-fought breath of contentment, scored by a sawing fiddle and weeping cello. But there is a sickly pall to the song, and to Leschper's broken-yodel delivery, that gives the song an ominous tinge: "You always made it easy/Reminding me not to bloom," are her parting words on the song, a harbinger of rot and death.
The album title feels wistful in context, an admission of exhaustion and an invitation to join the journey that led there. "You love me mostly when I’m leaving" she sings next on "Lockjaw," as she flippantly dismisses the idea of any reconciliation with a lover and deals with her own ego. On grand finale "Hold Your Own Hand," we’re left with Leschper finding relief while floating through a late-night waltz. The melodic prog-rock fade-out of the song even reflects something Leschper utterly lacking elsewhere on the record: hope. It’s Leschper’s attempt to find strength through storytelling, and she is so transparent on When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired that you find yourself rooting for her.


The soundtrack to the The Game's three-part documentary series Streets of Compton feels like a missed opportunity for the rapper to embrace his comfort zone.

Streets of Compton

Sprawled out across the Game’s heavily tattooed upper abdomen, in huge decorative letters, is the word “Compton.” It’s a branding that reflects Game’s loyalty to his roots—a loyalty that has stood firm even as his fingertips touched the highest peaks of rap stardom. Inked on his chest are the letters ‘NWA’, a reminder that long before the glossy Hollywood biopic and LA gangster rap resurgence, he was pitching himself as the heir apparent to his regional forefathers.
Jayceon Taylor’s love of his hometown is laid bare in three-part documentary series Streets of Compton. The city’s often-bleak history is covered extensively, with the rapper’s upbringing serving as a test sample of the hardships the people face. His parents recall the drug addiction, violence and sexual abuse that occurred under the family’s roof. The Game opens up about violent dope deals and shakes his head at the bullets that once punctured his son’s car seat. His whole life, warts and all, is out for all to see. It’s disappointing, then, that stacked next to the show, the accompanying soundtrack feels so slight and impersonal.
Game should be in his element with this kind of project. His back catalogue has been built on rhymes about dope slinging and the ghost of Eazy-E. Despite tugging at just about all the popular sounds in the rap play book over the last decade, he probably wishes he could rap over mid-era Dr. Dre beats every time he steps into the booth. Working within Streets of Compton’s framework was an opportunity to abandon all pretense of keeping up with trends and do just that. Instead, it’s a record that feels like a hastily-assembled collection of loosies with the series’ logo slapped on the cover.
Some songs do stay thematically on-point. Highlight “Death Row Chain” is a play-by-play of west coast rap history through the lens of Game’s criminal resumé. The throwback street-level narrative depicts the world his South Central rap heroes once stood over. “But, shit, everything changed when Ice Cube went solo/Riding shotgun in my brother’s Fase Lolo,” he spits over the rattle and ping of producer Jelly Roll’s swarming electronics.
Unlike last year’s sprawling 40-track set The Documentary 2 and 2.5, there’s no expensive list of star guests. Local Compton rappers are instead given the space to shine. There’s an excellent draft pick in rising star Boogie on “Roped Off.” The young father stacks his thoughtful ruminations next to Game’s more gritty rhymes, dropping a punchy verse that decries the violence in his city: “With your kid out shopping, you gon’ still yell ‘Bompton!’?/Man, I done lost hope.”
Of course, Game’s turbulent relationship with his one-time mentor comes up. He raps about Dr. Dre with the burning intensity that Rick Ross raps about money, but any lingering beef seemed to be buried when the pair traded guest verses on their respective projects last year. It’s absolutely incredible, then, that Game decides to use Streets of Compton to taunt a legend he spent the series paying tribute to. The audaciously titled “The Chronic” provokes The Good Doctor about his lost opus Detox over the kind of beat that he’s probably collected in stacks of hundreds during the abandoned sessions. On day-in-the-life-of-a-hustler joint “Like Me”, Game calls out the billionaire headphone magnate for losing touch with his roots: “Dr Dre ain’t got time for this/He wearing Beats, I’ve got my ear to the ground, lil nigga, I’m in these streets.” It’s like Game can’t help himself.
Elsewhere, too many of the songs are standard issue commercial rap tracks that make zero sense in the context of the heartfelt documentary. “Can’t Wait” sees Game boast about his relationship with two twin sisters. There’s a song called “Unfollow Me Bitch.” And the lack of vested interest in the album is underlined with “Hit The News” and “Bullshit,” which both use instrumentals by producer Jay Nari that are similar enough to qualify as alternate versions of the same beat.
Despite the lack of lateral thinking—and limited technical proficiency—Game has always been an oddly engaging presence on the mic. His gruff voice can’t hide his fragile nature any more than he can cover up those tattoos. These are strengths that made Streets of Compton such an engaging documentary—strengths that just aren’t harnessed enough here. With the weight of the series pressing down on it, the album feels like a career footnote when it could have been a defining moment.


The Norwegian quartet’s second album effortlessly waltzes between technical art-rock, dissonant post-punk, and pop’s irresponsible sugar high. It’s as daring as it is darling.

Cheater

Over the course of 33 minutes, Pom Poko capture the feeling of adorable debauchery. Though their second album, Cheater, may sound unserious at first, angst and snark bubble up through cutting riffs and heart-shaped chaos. For a band named after a Studio Ghibli film about a pack of malicious but fun-loving mythical pot-bellied raccoon-dogs who also use their testicles to shape-shift, this energy makes a good deal of sense. The Norwegian quartet effortlessly waltzes between technical art-rock, dissonant post-punk, and pop’s irresponsible sugar high. It is a record as daring as it is darling.
Lead singer Ragnhild Fangel’s sing-song falsetto immediately commands the mix. Paired with fuzz riffs and abrupt changes in time signature, the band’s sound recalls any number of prog-pop bands like Palm, Deerhoof, Preoccupations, even Bitte Orca-era Dirty Projectors. But for all its clear touchstones, Fangel’s versatility makes her stand out. She bounces between chants, yelps, and guttural, Björkian snarls with ease. It’s both a buttoned-up homage to indie rock’s frenetic heyday and the indulgent afterparty ushering in a new class.
The title track is the perfect homecoming. It begins wearing a scuzzy residue before launching into Pom Poko’s high-wire act. Crunchy guitars fall alongside menacing drum breakdowns, underscored by bass-led funk. By the song’s end, mathy guitar licks orbit an enormous crescendo with all the whimsy of a runaway flute section. It’s an electric delight.
The record is peppered with other interesting snags: the bouncy guitars of “Danger Baby,” the synth cowbell of “Andrew,” the medieval harpsichord of “My Candidacy,” the glitzy synth arpeggios and warbled vocals of “Andy Go to School.” On a record predominantly composed of unprocessed rock instrumentation, these brief excursions let in some gorgeous nuance.
Lyrically, Fangel is tangled in similar knots. These songs unabashedly honor struggles with identity, acceptance, and self-worth. “Cheater” narrates barriers to achievement and success, and contemplates the false promise of cutting corners to appear smart: “Our work was never enough/So dream on dream on/Next time I’ll cheat,” she sings with snarky pity. “You’re a cool girl, your recognition’s all I need,” she chants on “My Candidacy.” On “Curly Romance,” she sings of uncertain normalcy: “My heart is just as normal as I think a normal heart would be.” Each song tries to fit in by waving its arms and screaming; at times, quivering in defeat.
Pom Poko might not be reinventing any wheels, but they have built a well-oiled machine to gleefully ride out rock’s proverbial free fall. Cheater is concise, well-paced, and thought-through. Its chaos is held together precariously, a ride that feels at once dangerous and secure. Though you know exactly what to expect, you keep getting back in the line.

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Haley Fohr’s latest and best record of experimental folk folds in some of the simpler songwriting of her countrified Jackie Lynn project.

Reaching for Indigo

The events that inspired Reaching for Indigo—Haley Fohr’s stunning fifth album as Circuit Des Yeux—sound at once like an exorcism and an epiphany. As the Lafayette, Ind.-born, Chicago-based songwriter tells it, she mysteriously collapsed one night in early 2016 and found herself “convulsing and vomiting and crying” on the floor. Afterwards, she moved out of her home and eventually adopted a more open understanding of the world around her. In the liner notes, she dedicates Reaching for Indigo to that moment in her life. The jarring story is a fitting progression in the strange evolution of her music, which has always grappled with the way life and nature can change us, despite our efforts to find some thread of logic through it all.
Last year, Fohr took a break from Circuit Des Yeux to pursue a simpler, more straightforward project. The self-titled album she released under the name Jackie Lynn was essentially country music, a set of rumbling, catchy, low-stakes tunes that eschewed the formless sprawl of her previous work. But the quiet, one-off experiment developed a life of its own. The album soon found her faced with new fans, festival slots, and cover stories. “I’m not saying I changed the course of modern music or anything like that,” she reflected at the time, “But it has got a little bit out of hand.”
Reaching for Indigo is Fohr’s first Circuit Des Yeux album since 2015’s In Plain Speech, but it has a lot in common with Jackie Lynn. While In Plain Speech was exceptionally heavy and adventurous—in one song, she played guitar, noisily and viciously, using a butter knife—Reaching for Indigo makes a more immediate connection, marked by warmer, more sophisticated tones. It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog. Sometimes, the eight-song record plays like a more traditional set of music transforming and corrupting itself in real time. The long, winding “Paper Bag” builds from a spacey ambient burble into a staggering primal chant. In the lyrics, she instructs the listener to breathe into a paper bag. Then she narrates, with a dazzling, somewhat unstable intensity, as you find yourself exploring a surreal new world inside of it.
More than anything, Reaching for Indigo is a showcase for Fohr’s voice: a singular, transformative instrument. “At one point a few years ago I was really concerned because my voice was getting lower and lower and lower,” she recently observed, “It has its own life.” These songs are the most effective showcases for her singing yet, as she hums and warbles and howls over music that refuses to sit still. The apocalyptic, amorphous “Black Fly” begins on acoustic guitar and billows away into something darker, and it’s emblematic of the album as a whole; Fohr’s deep yet fragile singing dictates its shifting moods like a conductor before an orchestra. Other songs take a more pummeling approach that reflects the straightforward songwriting of Jackie Lynn. “Philo” is based on a single piano motif, played by avant garde multi-instrumentalist Ka Baird, while Fohr ascends from cryptic ghost story to full-on battle cry.
Recent years have seen an influx of artists pushing folk music toward more experimental territory, from William Tyler’s wordless, wayward Americana to House and Land’s trad-arr drones. Reaching for Indigo is another bold step in this direction, recalling at times Popol Vuh’s dark, luscious soundtrack work and the vigorous sweep of avant-folk guitarist Robbie Basho’s Visions of the Country. Even when Fohr steps away from the microphone—as she does through most of “A Story Of This World Part II”’s psychedelic storm—the world she crafts feels entirely based around the slow, heady cadence of her baritone. Shouting a few unintelligible lines near the end of the song, she suggests another outlet for her work that could eschew words altogether. “Create your own language,” she transcribes in the lyric sheet. On Reaching for Indigo, she’s started to do precisely that.


Beyoncé protégé Chloe Bailey is a generational talent, but the generic songwriting and chemistry-free features on her solo debut don’t make the case.

In Pieces

We’re well acquainted with Chloe x Halle—“gospel-raised,” genre-bending wunderkinds who didn’t utter a curse word until their second studio album, 2020’s Ungodly Hour. Now a 24-year-old solo star, Chlöe is ready to flaunt her goodies to a pop-trap beat, capitalize on the ’90s R&B revival, and tell anyone who disagrees how much she doesn’t give a fuck. Her debut solo album In Pieces is a compilation of soulless singles curated to produce kiss-off captions. It spends so much time defining what Chlöe isn’t—Halle, a Bible-thumping prude, a moral absolutist—that by the end, we have no clue who the mononymous singer actually is.
Beyoncé, Chlöe’s mentor, set her star project into motion when she stepped onstage at the 2003 BET Awards to perform “Crazy in Love.” Chlöe’s solo debut single, “Have Mercy,” aspired to a similar “debuting on top of a neon sign of her name” moment, but landed like a song from the Empire soundtrack—“body language like speaking Spanglish” is something Lucious Lyon would come up with. Eclectic, hands-on production and crafty hooks were a huge part of Chloe x Halle’s magic as a duo, but Chlöe’s solo material feels manufactured to the point of sterility. The forced strut of her delivery and unimaginative “Ms. New Booty” sample made “Treat Me” feel optimized for mainstream radio, and album cuts “Worried” and “Looze U” (the latter co-written by The-Dream) suffer similar genericism.
Chlöe pulls some high-profile features, but they’re all clinical. “Told Ya” wastes a Missy Elliott collab on vocal warm-up exercises. (Meanwhile, the rising British group FLO, who’ve been out for less than a year, managed to refreshingly reimagine one of Missy’s hits and host her brilliantly on their recent “Fly Girl.”) In what reads as a desperate attempt to secure a hit, Chlöe aligns herself with “bad boy” and notorious abuser Chris Brown for “How Does It Feel,” a song with the sexual appeal and emotional intimacy of Apple’s Terms and Conditions. She recruits Future for “Cheatback,” an acoustic ballad that relies on his playboy persona as a sort of meta-commentary on infidelity.
She’s credited Imogen Heap, Donna Summer, and Kelis as influences, which helps explain some of the album’s jarring vocal experimentations. But her yelped “shiieeett” and “wiieeth” on “Told Ya” are mystifying because Chlöe is one of the greatest vocalists of her generation. Dipping into her lower register, she stuns as a contralto. I found myself rewinding her runs on hymnal parts of “Heart on My Sleeve” and could’ve sworn I was levitating during the awe-inspiring bridge of “Pray It Away” and “Make It Look Easy.” This is the Chlöe with an ear for otherworldly vocal arrangements that caught the attention of Parkwood and the world. Her first entertainment jobs were as a gospel singer in the Disney Channel movie Let It Shine and as a church girl—the younger version of Beyoncé’s character—in the 2003 musical comedy The Fighting Temptations, so it was a given that she was gonna take us to church. The operatic arias and bluesy cadences of opener “Someone’s Calling” would’ve been the perfect introduction to an infidelity album, in the vein of Lemonade’s “Pray You Catch Me.”
But In Pieces is not a concept album. If it is, someone please tell everyone involved in its production. The emotionally charged conversational interludes and narrative intros (“Do you ever wonder, like, who else is fucking your man?”) are out of place amid the redundant themes and mind-numbingly online songwriting. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure with only two endings: There’s a good-for-nothing man in her life who keeps betraying her, so will she A) give it to God or B) shake some ass and show him what he’s missing? The unfaithful men and nameless “fuck niggas” she croons about are so abstract it’s impossible to connect with her devastation. Does he buy you nice stuff? Is the dick good? Do you not want another woman to profit from your emotional labor? Moments that could’ve built up to rewarding catharsis are dead on arrival.
Standout single “Body Do,” a bumping dance track overlaid with ethereal falsettos, is flirty and upbeat: a convincing introduction to Chlöe the pop star. Still, her most compelling work has been with Halle by her side, complementing her maximalist tendencies. Together, their music struck a golden balance of lively, introspective, and evocative. Though they’re two years apart, the sisters’ matching outfits and roles on the TV series Grown-ish had people confusing them for twins. As the younger sister of identical twins, I know firsthand the lengths they will go to differentiate themselves when they come of age. Now that Halle is a Disney princess, Chlöe cosplays as a dominatrix. In Pieces meets a fate worse than controversy: banality.


The anxieties of isolation and newfound fatherhood are reflected in home recordings the Wolf Parade co-founder made in his rural home studio during the doldrums of 2020 and 2021.

Spencer Krug: Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One

Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One

Spencer Krug has seldom stood still for long. A founding member of indie rockers Wolf Parade, he has skipped between numerous projects over the past two decades, from Swan Lake—the Canadian supergroup featuring Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and former Frog Eyes bandmate Carey Mercer—to Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, which grew from solo outings into collaborative endeavors. On Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One, his second solo LP under his own name, he ruminates on stasis and change: “First came the death of old ways/Then came the birth of the new,” he sings, just past the record’s halfway point. Recorded between 2020 and 2021 in the seclusion of home studio on rural Vancouver Island, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One offers an introspective and idiosyncratic look at life during downtime.
Like its self-released 2021 predecessor, Fading Graffiti, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One is the fruit of Krug’s Patreon output, culled from the collection of songs that he’s released to subscribers every month since 2019. Influenced by both his newfound fatherhood and the stopped clocks of the pandemic, the album channels the claustrophobia and complexities of the last two years. “The days are getting shorter/The nights are without number,” he intones atop melancholy guitar and synths on “Overcast Afternoon.” There’s an overarching air of heaviness throughout: Days are filled with nonstop rain, feelings of vulnerability (“Do you really know how much I need you”), and doomscrolling past articles about “the start of post-humanism” and “the end of time.”
Krug’s wryly imagistic lyrics often feel like pages torn from a diary. He logs his everyday existentialism in conversational couplets (“I sometimes wonder if I haven’t/In some ways already died/Then I think/Of course I have, and so has any person/Who just burns to stay alive”) and finds poetry in dully quotidian words like “podcasters.” He mulls building “a moat around the house” and populating it with sharks, as though isolation was turning out to be preferable to the alternative. Repetition frequently intensifies the songs’ pent-up energy, though Krug rarely allows his songs to form proper choruses. The closest he gets is the occasional repeated refrain (“My muscles are fine, it’s in my fucking bones”). But in the album’s final moments, patterns are ruptured. “You can hurt me for free/Circa 2020,” he intones three times before delivering his wry send-off: “But come 2021/you’ll have to carve me away.”
Where Fading Graffiti was energized by instinctual indie-rock melodies and embellished with slide guitar, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One leans into relatively unadorned production, augmenting strummed acoustic guitar with broad strokes of synthesizer and the occasional programmed rhythm. The seven-minute opus “Cut the Eyeholes Out So I Can See” weaves acoustic and electronic instrumentation together, echoing the lyrics’ contrast between realism and surrealism; on “Bone Grey” he swaps out his voice for a robotic narrator, while the comparatively jovial “Chisel Chisel Stone Stone” floats atop a buoyant krautrock groove.
The sparser arrangements, where Krug is accompanied solely by an acoustic guitar or piano, are plenty vibrant on their own. His voice trembles against thundering piano in “Hanging Off the Edge” and leaps to its upper register in “My Muscles Are Fine,” lifted by insistent guitar chords. In the opening “Slipping In and Out of the Pool,” he strips the song back from a fuller-sounding live-stream performance in 2021, reducing it to the essentials: strummed acoustic, a hint of synth, and that trademark warble of his. The comparison is a reminder of just how elastic his songwriting can be. “I think the world is a rubber band,” he sings; “I think we’re slipping in and out of the pool/I think an hourglass is different than quicksand/I think it’s cool.” It’s a classically Krug stanza—and a reminder that even the doldrums of isolation are fertile soil for a mind as active as his.
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Volatility is Ho99o9’s brand. The L.A.-based duo merge interests in old-school hardcore and hip-hop on their scorching debut album.

United States of Horror

Hardcore shows have a way of prompting eureka moments in attendees. Whether this is owed to the music’s carnal purity, its defiant spirit, or its crass spectacle is uncertain. Either way, these shows are often sites of transformation. Such is the case with Ho99o9, a duo based in Los Angeles who splice old-school hardcore with gritty hip-hop. Growing up in New Jersey’s public housing system, its members—who go by theOGM and Eaddy—stuck mainly to the likes of DMX and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. During their teen years, in the late-2000s, the pair began venturing across the Hudson to see lauded punk bands like Hoax and Dawn of Humans.
Ho99o9 represents a merger of these two worlds. Their live shows—performed with Black Flag drummer Brandon Pertzborn—exist largely to disorient fans and sponsors. For example, shortly before Ho99o9’s scheduled stint on the 2015 Warped Tour, at the festival’s kick-off party, Eaddy took the stage in a wedding dress, like Satan’s bride shimmying and screaming for a crowd of industry types and teenage fans. Unsurprisingly, organizers booted them from the tour. More recently, SXSW organizers had to shut down one of Ho99o9’s sets two songs in because the moshing had grown out of hand. (That’s not even getting into the onstage nudity or the food fights.) Volatility is their brand, both in concert and on United States of Horror, their debut album.
United States of Horror is self-described as Ho99o9’s “crossbreed mutant” baby and rightly so. It’s a proudly ugly Frankenstein, an LP that clambers along at a fitful pace, stopping for the occasional smoke break. TheOGM raps as if he’s got gravel stuck in his windpipes; Eaddy is his more restrained counterpart, though not by much. They trade turns at the mic like a tag-team of shadowboxers, a deadly game plan between them. Following a highly-technical opening salvo of sharp, barked syllables, they bludgeon the listener with hair-raising screams.
The vessels by which Ho99o9’s hellscapes are expressed span the whole spectrum of sonic violence. “Bleed War” and “Face Tatt” tap into Godflesh’s low-res, deadpanned miasma, conjuring up an apocalyptic rave. “Hydrolics” and “Splash” sport the intimidating, bass-boosted palette typically seen in trap music. A glitchy mushroom cloud sends “Knuckle Up” into careening Code Orange territory; similar sounds power the title track’s scorching chorus.
Ho99o9’s reputation for political cynicism, musical disorder, and commercial self-sabotage invites comparisons to Death Grips: another pack of punk-rap provocateurs dead-set on disruption, playing festivals just to revel in the audience’s confusion. But there’s a crucial distinction. Unlike their viral, hermit-like peers, Ho99o9 see a party in the West’s spiral towards oblivion—and United States of Horror is a compelling invitation.


This collage work by the Los Angeles composer weaves together stray chamber compositions, ambient recordings, voices, and more, yielding a mesmerizing sound both dense and diaphanous.

Puck

For more than 10 years, Sean McCann has been a purveyor of unabashedly precious ambient music. So sentimental are his works that they could soundtrack euphoric dream states shrouded in soft-hued bliss. Some of his recent albums, Simple Affections in particular, have a childlike wonder to them; they exude the charm of expansive, colorful fantasy worlds. On Puck, McCann continues down this path of evocative storytelling, inviting listeners into a space so soothing that leaving its confines can leave one wistful—like waking up to gray skies after the most comforting slumber.
Puck ensnares its listeners with a peculiar assemblage of recordings drawn from his own archives. Dating from between the late 2000s and 2018, McCann’s source material includes chamber works, ambient, and a quaint piece for guitar. They amass into a lively collage that’s as sprawling as it is cohesive: Odd groaning noises and time-stretched samples sit alongside lavish string arrangements. The constant activity prevents listeners from settling into longform drones. Such liveliness is clever: It leads to a hyper-awareness of every instrument’s role, amplifying the richness of every sound and, consequently, song.
The album begins with a three-part suite titled “Folded Portraits.” The first track, “Nightfall,” is a fanfare in slow motion, with deliquescent strings and brass interwoven with human voices—there’s singing, but also humming, background chatter, and the clearing of throats. All this vocalizing transforms the piece into a domestic drama; it overflows with a queasiness and nostalgia akin to sound artist Graham Lambkin’s own collage works. More crucial is how McCann toys with the arrangement and mixing to ensure the song is as dense as it is diaphanous: The swirling instrumentation wraps around listeners without being overbearing.
“Broth” follows suit, but its longer runtime better demonstrates McCann’s compositional skills. Throughout, musical bibelots and snatches of melody become the central focus, but only for brief moments. Dewy piano chords lead to cartoonish yelps, and on to scratching sounds captured at close range—it’s like a cast of actors rotating the lead role, and the result is the semblance of a musical narrative emerging from the hodgepodge of instrumentation. “Damals” is comparatively bare but nonetheless engrossing: It centers on a manipulated, wavering vocal melody that’s occasionally interjected with piano and voices. Even at their simplest, McCann’s pieces intend to mesmerize.
Puck’s whimsicality evokes childhood, especially on the title track. “Puck” fills much of its 21-minute runtime with McCann and sound artist Lia Mazzari reciting found poetry based on Fabergé eggs. They cull from a multitude of sources—recipes, blog posts, news articles—and their reading of the text grants it new meaning. Mazzari’s intonation makes “Puck” sound like a mother reciting a bedtime story. At one point she says, “The family’s only source of ventilation was in the grand duchesses’ bedroom, but peeking out of it was strictly forbidden.” Without looking it up, you might never have guessed that the text comes from the Wikipedia entry on the execution of the Romanov family. Fifteen minutes into the track, we hear snoring amid the sound of pages turning, as if listeners have finally been put to sleep.
More than any of McCann’s previous albums, Puck makes the saccharine sublime. The restlessness of these tracks, which are composed of works from throughout the Los Angeles composer’s career, mirrors the feeling of reflecting on adolescence: Scraps of faded memories, both pleasant and upsetting, create a deep longing to re-experience emotions, people, and places. Puck makes evident that looking back can be like entering into a dreamworld of your own making. As McCann forges a path between past and present, between waking and sleeping states, these pieces transcend mere sentimentalism; they transform reminiscence into something hyperreal.


In the wake of some professional tumult, the snap and ratchet producer stages a solid comeback with more varied production and plenty of celebration.

Cold Summer

2014 was a banner year for DJ Mustard. He released his debut album, 10 Summers, scored seven Top 15 hits on the rap charts—among them Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You,” Tinashe’s “2 On,” and Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em”—and his mere presence spawned Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” a blatant copy of his sound and aesthetic. He became ubiquitous. In the midst of mainstream notoriety, perhaps his greatest achievement was YG’s My Krazy Life, a cohesive gangsta rap epic that he co-executive produced alongside the Compton rapper, his longtime friend. The album solidified both artists as West Coast rap revivalists, bringing new flavor to decades of SoCal and Bay Area rap tradition, and it jumpstarted Mustard’s run, which was capped by Omarion’s platinum hit “Post to Be” that November. But things went sour for Mustard in the following months: The hit-well dried up, he was sued twice—by producer Mike Free for credits on 20 of Mustard’s hits and by BMG Rights Management over the rights to “Post to Be”—and he and YG had a falling out over money, exchanging threats on social media.
This year, DJ Mustard quietly bounced back, mending bridges and retooling the sounds of his patented “ratchet music,” which has often been dismissed for its simplicity and lack of variety, into something with more range. After landing one of the biggest hits of his career with Rihanna’s “Needed Me” and joining her on her worldwide tour, he settled the lawsuit with Free and reconciled with YG, prepping a mixtape with the latter called 400 Summers. While that tape has yet to materialize, he’s returned with a new full-length album, Cold Summer, another seasonal release that brings the bangers.
The entire concept behind Mustard’s debut was that he had enough hits to run rap for 10 summers straight. But summer also embodies a vibe for Mustard, representative of his native Los Angeles. His music is well-suited for the season with isolated synth stabs, sub-rattling bass lines, and dance-friendly tempos. It’s warm, candy-painted, and radio ready. Every summer since 2013, he’s released a project—Ketchup, 10 Summers, and 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1. Cold Summer is a late entry (hence the name) that attempts to continue the custom, letting big-name guests mingle with his Pushaz Ink stand-ins. But where past projects were flexes for his brand or promotional tools for his friends and artists, this record just feels humbled and appreciative.
It’s fitting that Cold Summer opens with “Been a Long Time,” a reunion with longtime collaborators YG and Ty Dolla $ign. The lyrics reflect their bond and their come-up, with YG rapping, “Three Musketeers back together and they winning/And they getting too much money/Turn niggas rich then the crew must love me.” On the closer, “Another Summer,” which ditches solo riffs for a serene synth wash, Rick Ross seemingly speaks for Mustard with bars like “Look me in my eyes and tell me what you see/You watch the homie come up from a mustard seed/Ain’t looking for no problems, just a chance to eat/And I make mama a promise I’m a plant my feet.” In a monologue, Mustard gives the CliffsNotes version of his year, outlining his triumphs, his misfires, how happy he is to be reunited with YG and how thankful he is to be rich. Everything that happens between these two songs seems celebratory in response to these victories.
Some songs, like the Nicki Minaj and Jeremih-featuring “Don’t Hurt Me” and the unlikely Quavo and YG tag-teamer “Want Her,” are designed specifically with the old blueprint in mind—snaps, claps, “heys,” twittering hi-hats, and booming bass. But much of Cold Summer is a subtle departure from the production that led to the reductive yet understandable “DJ Mustard’s Piano” meme. On “What These Bitches Want,” full piano chords and synth strings give way to rich, G-funky production while Meek Mill and Nipsey Hussle recount street tales from their respective hoods. The Ty Dolla $ign solo joint, “Lil Baby,” is sparse with twangy licks that build around the crooner’s performance. Mustard has always shown much more competence laying R&B tracks (like “2 On,” Trey Songz’ “Na Na,” and Ty’s “Paranoid”), and the standout is “10,000 Hours,” a showcase for London singer Ella Mai that turns the Malcolm Gladwell method into a formula for perfect romance.
Cold Summer doesn’t dazzle on sheer star power the way a Khaled album can, and there isn’t anything as delightfully weird as DJ Drama’s sex-shooter collab “Camera” with Lil Uzi Vert, Mac Miller, and Post Malone, but it consistently jams; it knows what it is, and it never attempts to do too much. It isn’t quite as infectious as his debut, and it may not have the punchy, radio-friendly appeal of his freelance work, but it feels like a win.


This record, initially issued in a small run in the early 80s, is richly evocative of the natural world and holds up as an immersive ambient experience.

Science of the Sea

A skeptic might cast aspersions on the tale behind Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea. The story begins at the University of Kiel in Germany, where the self-taught composer was studying oceanic science in the late 1970s. Müller purchased some electronic instruments and set them up on his houseboat in the town of Heikendorf, where he began crafting instrumental pieces that reflected his love of undersea life. His dream of selling those compositions to film and TV companies for use in documentaries never transpired. But Müller did press fewer than 100 vinyl copies of the recordings in the early 80s and titled them Science of the Sea, giving most of the albums away to friends and family. Fast forward three decades and a copy of the record ends up in the hands of Digitalis Recordings, just as a resurgence of interest in the type of new age recordings Müller was practicing is taking place.
So it's reasonable to wonder if the backstory was constructed as part of a larger concept, the way people continue to wonder about Ursula Bogner or Endless House. One intrepid blog commenter even claims to have contacted the University of Kiel and found no trace of Müller's presence. Either way it doesn't really matter, because the music on Science of the Sea continues that superior strain of contemplative elegance records such as Emeralds' Does It Look Like I'm Here? and Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts have touched on in recent times. Like those releases, the relation Science of the Sea has to actual new age music is tangential at best. There are no Gheorghe Zamfir-esque pan flute solos or anything that will drive you to join a local color therapy group. Instead it's an uncomplicated series of recordings, mostly based around gently unfolding synth arpeggios set to faintly pulsing rhythms.
The tracks are short-- only five of the 12 here make it over the three-minute mark-- although Science of the Sea doesn't really make sense when broken down into its component parts. Instead each song works as a natural evolution of the theme set out in the opening "Beyond the Tide", where great washes of cleansing synth are interrupted by spiky twists of becalming noise that were presumably conceived to mimic dolphin chirps. It's not hard to see why this might have been thought of as a perfect soundtrack to a Jacques Cousteau-style undersea documentary. The following "Sea Bed Meditation" is full of rippling loops tied down by globs of tenderly resonating bass frequencies, not far removed from Klaus Schulze's contemplative solo ventures. Müller also shares Schulze's fondness for vaguely humorous song titles ("Dream Sequence For a Jellyfish", "The Elusive Seahorse").
What's remarkable about this album is how acutely it reflects and comments on the environment that served as its inspiration. "Waterworld" doesn't travel far beyond the coiling melody that ebbs and flows throughout the track, but it feels like the musical equivalent of a trail of oxygen bubbles arcing to the surface as a scuba diver peacefully plunges to the depths. Similarly, "Marine Technology" is all digital interference and signal jams, with zaps of synth noise pinging back and forth across the surface as though an urgent piece of undersea communication were being transmitted. Once you get deep into Science of the Sea, especially on headphones, it feels like Müller is simultaneously replicating that world and conveying his chimerical dreams about what it epitomizes. "Coral Fantasy" and "Vast Worlds Beneath" function as utopian fantasies about the great unknown, with Müller utilizing slowly disentangling sounds to give a sense of scale, wonder, and a natural curiosity about all the things that lay undiscovered down there.
The way Science of the Sea subtly shifts in theme, from then-current meditations on the ocean to quixotic impressions about its unexplored expanses, is its masterstroke. It feels like you're on a journey alongside Müller, carefully mapping out the thoughts and fears the murky depths have come to represent, all laid out in a way that your brain would naturally process if you were immersed in that world. The closing "Lonely Voyage" even feels like a warning of sorts, with its foreboding timbre suggesting that you can plunge a little too deeply into yourself if you spend too much time down there. That's where this album disconnects from anything that could perfunctorily be tagged as "new age." This isn't simple relaxation music, although much of it could easily perform that function. Instead the beautifully uncomplicated surface structures are used to prize open a boundless amount of feelings that are every bit as complex and unfathomable as the ocean itself.


The jazz guitarist is more than able to lead both his band and the listener into far-off rhythmic and harmonic places, and crucially finds a way to bring everyone back, too.

Trickster

As a member of jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman’s bands, guitarist Miles Okazaki has learned a few lessons about teasing. Coleman’s music often skates near the R&B mood, while moving restlessly between frequent changes in rhythm and harmony. At its best, tunes by the MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner cycle through the compositional variety with such equanimity, you hardly realize that his ensemble has avoided giving up the straight-ahead funk. On Trickster, Okazaki’s own music proves nearly as ingenious in its play with morphing grooves.
Opening track “Kudzu” begins with a fast flourish: a long, knotty line, played with a clean tone by the guitarist. Then, over the rhythm section’s unusual vamp, Okazaki restates some of this opening music, lingering over the material. Pianist Craig Taborn is in the mix, too, offering some mercurial chords. On a first pass, you might wonder: Where are we, exactly? Is this the main theme? The beginning of a strangely chill avant-garde solo? Before you have time to wallow in the uncertainty, Taborn and Okazaki join forces and display the song’s real hook.
During performances like these, it’s clear that this bandleader is interested in the unstable realm of rhythm and melody, the place where it's easy to get lost. Though he won’t leave you lost for long. On the slowly developing “The Calendar,” Okazaki begins in a contemplative mood. By the end of the track, he solos with fevered inspiration, as if all of time is running out. Like Okazaki, drummer Sean Rickman and bassist Anthony Tidd are also graduates of the Coleman school, which means they make these darting, surprising structures sound fully natural.
Over the hurtling rhythm of “Black Bolt,” one melodic cell travels through different octaves. You know it can’t go on like that forever. This initial lack of a clear destination point creates a suspense that is resolved when the pianist and guitarist begin racing to complete the other’s lines. After a stretch of roaming around in an attractive darkness, you get one clear payoff after another. During the brisk “Caduceus,” the interplay between Tidd, Taborn, and Okazaki results in glorious braids of melody. The execution is obviously complex, the work of virtuosi. But the resulting beauty is easy to appreciate.
Some performances on Trickster don’t quite manage to replicate that feat. A few of the obsessive phrases on the album stop just short of turning into memorable compositions (as with “Box in a Box”). Fortunately, some of the songs that sound the least like puzzles reveal that Okazaki can craft simpler themes that are just as stirring. “Mischief” is anchored by a strutting beat, one that fans of the Meters should appreciate. The relative stability of the song’s pulse allows Taborn the freedom to uncork one of his lengthy, exciting solos. And the miniature “Borderland” offers the album a lyrical coda. While Okazaki can be plenty entertaining as a master of misdirection, he also has a gift for direct communication.


The Colombian pop star’s latest is low stakes, neither offensive nor remarkable, the sound of a reggaetonero you’d expect to find on a mood board for a fashion campaign.

Papi Juancho

Can you really be macho if your best work comes from other women? Such is the quandary with Colombia’s Maluma. The music of the 26-year-old pop star—born Juan Luis Londoño Arias—has long been defined by a latent machismo. But other than a brief moment where online petitions sprung up in protest of his song “Cuatro Babys”—which one Spanish municipality deemed “an apologia for violence against women”—his biggest moments have been with older, more established women. He first dipped his toe into the mainstream with his fellow Colombian Shakira on their duet “Chantaje,” cracking Billboard’s Hot 100, and then again on Madonna’s ode to his hometown “Medellín” managing to out-sexy the veteran culture vulture with a sultry croon. And when he makes his debut on the silver screen in the forthcoming feature “Marry Me,” it will be at the behest of Jennifer Lopez.
But women artists are conspicuously absent from his latest album Papi Juancho, relegated to the familiar reggaetón roles of emotional foils, signifiers of material wealth, and sex objects. Maluma says the character is an alter ego, lonely horny quarantine sessions while hiding out from the pandemic. But it’s par for the course for the music he’s made throughout his career; after toning down the raunch for his last and most successful album to date, 11:11, he’s digressed to his tried and true lothario persona.
And it mostly works, depending on your perspective. Much of Maluma’s schtick feels prefabricated, the kind of reggaetonero you’d expect to find on a mood board for a fashion campaign. The warm and bright melodies are aesthetically pleasing but hollow. It goes beyond the Calvin Klein campaigns and Miami Vice neon visuals. In a genre where literally every song has the same beat, his music struggles to distinguish him from his peers, his sound lost in a wash of inoffensive pastels and vague tropical motifs. Even his overt attempts to add his own spin to classic sounds provide mixed results. Album opener “Medallo City” stands out lyrically for the slang local to Envigado, his neighborhood in Medellín, and recruits local rapper Teo Grajales. But the hip-hop beat’s attempt to work in some salsa rhythms get lost in the sauce, any unique character Grajales might have brought seems to have been buffed out by the time it made it onto the record.
To his credit, Maluma acknowledges his debts to Puerto Rican forebears—upon whose work Colombia’s entire reggaetón scene is built—a welcome nod to the sonic ancestors that we’ve seen recently from the likes of Bad Bunny and even Romeo Santos. Recorded mostly during the COVID-imposed lockdown with his longtime producer collaborators and co-writers The Rude Boyz (Kevin ADG and Chan “El Genio”), Papi Juancho features guest appearances from OGs Jory Boy, Ñejo y Dálmata, Ñengo Flow, Randy, and Yomo, but the production is so tepid you might not even notice.
The album’s highlight “ADMV” is also its most familiar, released months earlier as a single. An acoustic ballad to growing old with the love of your life (“Amor de mi vida”), its earnestness overcomes the slight hint of cheese. It’s one of the few moments on Papi Juancho that feels honest and genuine.
But for the most part, Papi Juancho is neither exceptionally good or remarkably awful. Despite its considerable bloat, none of its 22 tracks demand a skip, even if few moments particularly stand out. It emits a vibe similar to an algorithmically programmed Spotify station, an amalgamation of every popular reggaetón beat that sounds like everything and nothing all at once.

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Even as they negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony, the trio’s expertly attuned playing evokes the openness of improvisation, and the urgency of justice.

Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy

Uneasy

Uneasy—the title of the taut and enveloping new album by pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey—holds a welter of timely implications, from pandemic precarity to political instability. Another choice, less intuitive but just as apt, would have been Unfinished—not as a comment on the album itself but an allusion to the kind of work these three musicians are doing together.
Creative music, to use their preferred term of art, relies in part on this understanding. As Anthony Reed puts it in Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, a new scholarly book that Iyer has vocally endorsed, the core project of the improvisational avant-garde is “a commitment to ongoingness, to experimental open-endedness grounded in something other than the circularity and circulation of received forms.” Throughout Uneasy, there’s a strong pull toward that open sensation, even as Sorey, Oh, and Iyer negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony with the soaring precision of raptors on the wing.
The album is credited to all three musicians, with Iyer as the first among equals. His previous working trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, stood as a defining ensemble of the 2010s; its most recent release, Break Stuff, was widely hailed in the jazz press as one of the best albums of 2015. The trio on Uneasy bears no small resemblance to that earlier band—it retains Iyer’s attraction to dark colors, elliptical shapes, and plunging momentum—but there’s a more pronounced expression of equal say among the musicians, along with a powerful sense of shared purpose and a stratospheric level of attunement.
Within the last several years, Sorey has achieved a rarefied stature in creative music: Like Iyer, he’s been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant, joined the faculty of an Ivy League institution, and been the subject of adulatory profiles, which tend to focus on his extravagant inventions as a composer. Oh is on her way to becoming one of the most highly regarded bass players of our time, if she hasn’t already secured that place—and her achievements as a bandleader and composer are estimable. The three musicians first coalesced as a trio at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, where Iyer and Sorey are co-artistic directors, and Oh a longtime guest instructor. From the start, their interaction was understood as a collective endeavor.
Still, Iyer contributed most of the compositions on Uneasy, and it’s his sensibility as a bandleader that informs the album. Part of that sensibility involves his relationship to “the jazz tradition,” less as a construct than as a tangle of relationships. One of the two non-originals on the album is “Drummer’s Song,” a chiming, intricately layered piece by Geri Allen, one of Iyer’s lodestars as a pianist; the trio approaches it with reverence, but not at any kind of respectful remove. (Sorey simultaneously calls to mind a surgical team and a demolition crew.) “Night and Day” is a Cole Porter standard, but as Iyer has confirmed, the key reference point for the trio is Joe Henderson’s version of the song, featuring McCoy Tyner’s ringing chord voicings at the piano. And for a certain type of listener, the backbeat groove of “Combat Breathing,” in a slouchy 11/8 meter, will almost instantly recall Julius Hemphill’s 1972 cut “Dogon A.D.”—a song that Iyer’s previous trio actually covered.
“Combat Breathing,” of course, also comes out of a pressurized context: Iyer composed the piece after the death of Eric Garner in 2014, amid waves of protest aligned with a recently coined movement, Black Lives Matter. (In its premiere, Iyer performed “Combat Breathing” with a modern dance collective, whose members enacted a “die-in” onstage.) The title track of Uneasy, which Iyer created in 2011 with choreographer Karole Armitage, originally alluded to the contradictions and swirling undercurrents of the Obama era, a decade after 9/11. More to the point is “Children of Flint,” whose foreboding intrigue faintly evokes the compositional signature of Andrew Hill, and whose title refers to the plight of communities affected by a contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan.
Each of the musicians on Uneasy has devoted considerable energy to sociopolitical critique; nothing about this expression represents a new impulse. But the immediacy that burns within the group’s cohesion, from one moment to the next, makes this album feel especially urgent. And with that urgency, again, comes an awareness of this art as part of a larger work in progress. “As the arc of history lurches forward and backward, the fact remains: Local and global struggles for equality, justice, and basic human rights are far from over,” Iyer wrote in the liner notes to Far From Over, his 2017 sextet album, which also featured Sorey. (One unused study from that project, “Retrofit,” is among the more fluidly dynamic pieces here; listen for a wind-down coda that underscores Sorey’s facility with post-Dilla beat placement.)
In the face of these weighty ideals, it feels meaningful that Uneasy concludes with “Entrustment,” a slow, resonant piece that registers as a kind of hymn. It occasions some of Iyer’s most delicate pianism on the album: tolling overtones, silvery glissandi. And it serves as a reminder that the work of recovery ahead, as a society or as a scene, will depend on some form of cooperation, and on good faith.
In a recent conversation on the writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s Object of Sound podcast, Iyer acknowledged that the tradition of radical thought has often bent away from hope. “There’s a sense [that] optimism is a trap,” he mused. “But at the same time, there’s no way that you could make music for others without feeling some sense of possibility—possibility for connection, possibility for empathy, possibility for a shared future.” The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge.

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Who says bows are only for Katniss? South African musician Cara Stacey makes handy use of various strings and wood, bringing in sounds we've never heard before. Things That Grow is a dizzying, beautiful spin.

Things That Grow

Nowadays, a bow usually comes with an arrow in hand and a film camera behind it, though history shows us they've been used as musical instruments ever since 13,000 BCE, a good deal before Katniss ever picked one up. The concept is pretty simple, just string a cord through a bent stick. Then run it over stuff: other strings, other wood, your hands, etc. That’s it. To this day, they’re still frequently used in Africa, including Swaziland—the once-homeland of Cara Stacey.
To call Stacey well-versed as a musician is an understatement. The South African multi-instrumentalist, composer, and researcher received two master's degrees in musicology and musical performance from various universities in London and Edinburgh—and she's still working on a doctorate. With all that knowledge under her belt, Stacey gives South African music a dizzying, beautiful spin, wielding both an uhadi bow and an umrhubhe bow on eight-song voyage Things That Grow. The difference between the two is their resonators, the section of the bow which broadcasts their otherwise quiet sound. The uhadi is a long bow where the player attaches a gourd to the bow, moving it towards and away from their chest to let out pitch-varying overtones. The umrhubhe is a short bow where the player places their mouth on the bow, manipulating their tongue and throat muscles to highlight harmonics coming off the string. The sound hums with an unusually comforting tone, like a saw being sharpened or the coarse bellow of a violin in need of rosin.
Despite its rootsy instrumentation, the album is a raw collision of experimental classical with jazz. Because Cara Stacey didn't grow up in the rural Eastern Cape, nor was she set in the traditional ways of one of South Africa's most traditional instruments, she’s able to explore the bows’ sounds. Opener “Oscillations” hears her scratch the string repeatedly, building up a wall of buzz until the gentle padding of drums come into focus and, almost immediately after, the carefree whistle of someone strolling through the woods. “Durée” places the notes of her bow at the forefront again, even while upright bass begins to grow, so that its resonator captures her every move. There’s the occasional harsh scratch—think a single pinkie nail on a chalkboard—on a few songs, but otherwise the bows act like a never-ending scroll for the other instruments to hammer out a Morse Code message of complex meditation. Joined by Shabaka Hutchings (clarinet, tenor saxophone), Seb Rochford (drums), Ruth Goller (bass), Hugh Jones aka electronic musician Crewdson (concertronica), and Dan Leavers (synths), Stacey darts between animal-like calls over the course of the record, especially on nearly 10-minute album closer “Fox”. On Things That Grow, her companions play sensitively, keeping an eye on her use of the bow as to never overpower it, even with the studio space carefully capturing its nuances. “Sunbird”, full of warm strings and bizarre looped synth, keeps her bow ringing at its core, while it begins to take on the form of a short-seizing robot. Even the eerie bass of “Dark Matter” should go full Wed 21-era Juana Molina on Stacey, its latin-style grooves taking the lead, but they refuse to let it drown her out.
Things That Grow relies heavily on the improvisation of her bandmates and the fluidity with which their melodies play out. The only work composed beforehand by Stacey were melodic aspects and her individual bow parts. Yet that lack of cohesion can drag certain moments of improvisation down. The metal tapping in “Music of the Spheres” veers towards aimlessness in context of the album as a whole. Designated improvisational sections step back for someone else’s solo that occasionally lacks the confidence needed to take over. But improvisation doesn’t have to be indecisive. A track like “Circadian Clocks” treads minimalist repetition with Philip Glass in mind, and, when Stacey reaches far enough, she explores configurations other bow players have yet to publicly investigate, namely bringing the quiet bow into a buzzing room filled with conflicting instruments. For that alone, Things That Grow sees her shoot the image of the bow farther than we’ve come to understand it in the Western world today.


The Denver doom metal band’s third album is streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp.

Desolation

Of all the heavy-lidded legions frequenting Denver's thriving doom-metal scene, Khemmis are far and away the most primed to cross over. Their first two records, 2015’s Absolution and 2016’s Hunted, set the parameters (or perhaps more accurately, endless horizons) for their hometown’s blend of metal almost immediately upon their release, uniting Denver’s various underground communities—traditional doom, debaucherous stoner rock, filth-ridden sludge metal, showboating, Thin Lizzy-style hard rock—under one, majestic banner.
Desolation—Khemmis’ third album and first effort since signing with heavy-music institution Nuclear Blast last year—is the band’s most streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp release yet. Its six tracks are the type of long-form rippers tooled for cavernous theaters, as opposed to cramped clubs. The most candidate for radio play is opening track “Bloodletting,” a six-and-a-half-minute doom crusher driven by dueling stoner licks, galloping tempos, and cleanly-sung melodies: accessible to all, but amenable to the acolytes. Not a bad compromise.
Desolation also marks a shift in the primary dynamic engine, the guitar-wielding duo of velvet-throated belter Phil Pendergast and guttural yowler Ben Hutcherson. When Khemmis started out, the pair played more like adversaries than co-frontmen, bellowing into the din from opposite ends on the sonic spectrum. As with Hunted, though, Desolation have put an ever-increasing premium on the former’s swelling croons, reducing the latter’s larynx-shredding outbursts to select moments, like the death-metal-inflected refrains of “Maw of Time.” Hutcherson still has plenty to roar about: It’s just his guitar that does the yelling now.
Granted, Pendergast no pushover: the lithe baritone runs on “Flesh to Nothing” and “Bloodletting,” prove him more than capable of commanding the mic on his own. If there was an “American Idol” for doom metal, this guy would most likely emerge victorious, even as booming, hyper-enunciated delivery style devolving into oversung silliness at times (the chorus on “Isolation,” with its exaggerated, over-extended syllables and grating melodic progression, is by far the worst offender). Still, Khemmis’ power has always stemmed from collective onslaughts, rather than individual displays—and without Hutcherson’s acrid roars to prop up that dynamic buffer, the record’s overarching gravitas takes a hit.
Khemmis’ triumphant arrangements on Desolation—emboldened with care by the band’s longtime producer Dave Otero, who’s lent deep, crisp production to Primitive Man, Cephalic Carnage, and others—are juxtaposed with Pendergast’s plaintive, plainly-stated reflections on mortality, memory, and nature. On album closer “From Ruin,” he frames his personal growth by way of the vernal lexicon typical of a Colorado band: “Sure as the spring casts a light on the snow/I have awakened to the ashes anew/They’re burning away though I yearn to hold on/Knowing that I can accept this life unblinded, renewed.” If that means pissing a few acolytes off, so be it.


The California band’s blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending defied easy categorization. Their sharpest tendencies meshed on Hybrid Theory, the most popular rock music of the 21st century.

Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory (20th Anniversary Edition)

Chester Bennington was 41 years old when he lost the battle he spent life urging people to overcome. The defining characteristic of Linkin Park’s music was how accessible it made the tools to deal with trauma, an offering intended both for their fans and Bennington himself. His death in 2017 was by all accounts a shock: to the band, to his family, and to the legions across the world who treated him as an inspiration, not just for his power as a singer, but for his dignity in recovery and honesty in relapses. He worked through years of sexual abuse and drug addiction on stage, on record, and through community outreach. For those who witnessed Bennington buoyant and free on stage just weeks before he died, the burden of presence is hard to shake.
All of this weighs heavily on 2000’s Hybrid Theory, already the most popular heavy music of the 21st century. With global sales of 32 million—including 12 million in the U.S., a million of which has come in the past three years—Hybrid Theory is the highest-selling debut in any genre since 1988’s Appetite for Destruction. You’d assume being the only diamond-tinted rock album this side of the millennium might afford a smidgen of clout. Yet on lists of the best metal, hard rock, emo or straight-up rock, Hybrid Theory is often conspicuously absent, as if no axe-worshipping subtribe is willing to adopt it as their own.
Nu-metal would seem the obvious category, but even though Linkin Park were saddled with the tag at the time, it was an awkward fit. They knew the nu- was loaded: Their blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending rendered them suspect to the double-denim dinosaurs of rock crit, so they built a street team on chatrooms and trained in on untapped admissions of despondency and failure. They sang about being filled with tension, feeling betrayed by the light, wishing for a way to disappear. In making themselves small, they became colossal.
Rather than re-re-evaluate the era in which they found fame, the 20th anniversary reissue of Hybrid Theory—featuring over 50 unreleased tracks, B-sides, remixes, live performances and rarities—encourages a closer examination of why this band went supernova. Today, it’s hard to look past the buddy act of Bennington and Mike Shinoda as the skeleton key that unlocked Linkin Park’s appeal for a wider spectrum of listeners. It almost didn’t happen. The group had been active for three years before the departure in 1999 of original singer Mark Wakefield (who went on to both manage Taproot and design the cover for System of a Down’s Toxicity). Even after Bennington was installed, Hybrid Theory’s demos show just how far they had to travel before arriving at anything resembling synergy. On early versions of “A Place for My Head” and “Points of Authority,” it seems as if Bennington and Shinoda are reading from different sheets entirely.
Once they found a comfortable nook within vein-popping catharsis, this duality became the heart of Linkin Park’s music. Bennington and Shinoda were clear-eyed in facing down topics of duplicity, control, psychological and physical abuse, and suicidal ideation at a time when few ventured that far. To anyone tucked under a duvet running their portable CD player hot, this was a revelation. The pair switched perspectives and laced verses through one another with guile, playing out a bracing dialogue between id and superego. Bennington was particularly adept at self-analysis, explaining how the tide of anxiety inside of him could retreat only to return as a crushing wave of depression, or watching the last remnants of serotonin circle his mind’s drain like black tap water.
Linkin Park were committed to making sure you knew their tastes lay beyond just riff-o-rama. The album was called Hybrid Theory for a reason (it would have been the group’s name too, if someone else hadn’t beaten them to it). Drummer Rob Bourdon grew up idolizing the limitless groove of funk and R&B musicians. Guitarist Brad Delson and turntablist Joe Hahn shared a love of glitch, boom-bap and trip-hop, which is why “Cure for the Itch” only ever feels one crab-scratch away from dropping into DJ Shadow’s “Organ Donor.” When a friend’s dad chaperoned the 15-year-old Shinoda to see a joint Anthrax/Public Enemy bill, his mind was blown. Across Hybrid Theory’s sprawl of extra material, you can hear numerous attempts to recreate that nuclear fusion—be it 1999’s “Step Up”; the hit it later was sampled on, the X-Ecutioners’ “It’s Goin’ Down”; or Linkin Park’s 2002 remix album Reanimation, a spirited-if-clunky attempt to bring the vibe of RJD2 and Rage Against the Machine under one roof.
Few of the assembled extras eclipse Hybrid Theory’s strongest material—which is to say, everything up until the album’s final three songs. There are some winners on the box set, though. “She Couldn’t,” long withheld from public release due to an uncleared Mos Def sample, removes the band’s spiked exoskeleton to reveal the tenderness within. “Rhinestone,” which dates back to 1997, fares better than its evolved form “Forgotten,” the only track on Hybrid Theory that truly carries the septic taint of nu-metal. “Krwlng” rouses hidden emotion from “Crawling,” bassist Dave Farrell patiently winding cello and violin around a slower take on the original’s intro, the notes as icy as stalactites arrowing down into the mud. Trent Reznor might spit feathers at the comparison, but you could comfortably sub out “A Warm Place” on The Downward Spiral for the opening minutes of “Krwlng” and no one would blink. Like Reznor, Bennington paid the price for leaning so far into tortuous subject matter. “Crawling,” a presumed description of his teenage addiction to meth, often proved too upsetting to perform live without the help of the crowd.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Deftones’ White Pony earlier this year, Shinoda signalled how Hybrid Theory came to sound both lacerating and palatable enough for mainstream audiences: “Even though [Deftones’] guitars were super heavy, oftentimes they felt smooth like a keyboard, as if the distortion had flattened it so much it was just a wash of chords.” A proper recording process brought out the best in Linkin Park. Collaborating with the Dust Brothers resulted in the low-toned loops of “With You,” though it’s the dynamic shifts which are most striking on playback, the track’s center of gravity lurching so fast it feels like getting socked in the jaw. Skyscraping hooks on songs like “Runaway” and “Papercut” were a by-product of confrontational producer Don Gilmore, who told the group plainly that their cluttered, primitive tunes would be also-rans if they didn’t cough up some melodies for alternative radio. Sufficiently rattled, they retaliated by penning “One Step Closer,” though they probably didn’t envision that Gilmour would react to being told to “shut up” by leaping for joy. One shoot of synchronized headbanging later and the band were on their way to a level of MTV perma-rotation that didn’t abate for years.
And then there’s the crown jewel, “In the End.” Initially titled “Untitled” until D’Angelo’s version rocketed up the video charts, it is the clearest exposition of how the band’s songcraft set them apart from the pack. The glitched drum shuffle and moody piano that lead it off are as immediately recognizable as the nosebleed thrashing which announces “Master of Puppets.” For a song that telegraphs every move so obviously it starts with “it starts with,” “In the End” retains a rare capacity to thrill, even after 10,000 breakdowns-into-bellowed choruses and more late-night karaoke renditions than you might care to admit. Neither Shinoda’s low-risk, mid-reward flow, nor what Bennington would self-critique as “poor, poor me” bawling, would be nearly as captivating without the other one there to flank and fill the space.
Following the emergence of every Stroke, Stripe, and louche derivative, a convenient narrative set in. Indie rock had come down from on high and blasted away the musty dregs of post-grunge and nu-metal, just as grunge once vaporized the cartoonish shredders of hair metal. Linkin Park kept up their hit streak on 2003’s Meteora, particularly with the opening MPC hits of “Numb”—and, by extension, the monoculture moon shoot of JAY-Z team-up “Numb/Encore”—piercing through countless bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, and grocery store speakers. They flashed stadium-sized ambitions by taking one step closer to The Edge on “What I’ve Done,” and came full circle by soundtracking a Transformers film that felt blatantly indebted to the CGI battle fantasies Hahn directed as promo. Four albums in the 2010s treated their internal chemistry as something to be distilled and apportioned: industrial one cycle, electronica the next, synthpop the next.
Yet it is the five-single, international blockbuster Hybrid Theory that people return to time and again. It is here where all the band’s sharpest tendencies meshed and their less attractive aesthetic impulses were suppressed. Open discussion of mental health within pop, rock, rap, and every genre along the heavy axis has been normalized to a level unthinkable 20 years ago, for which Linkin Park—absent a frontman but now endeavoring to make new music together—deserve a significant amount of credit. On Hybrid Theory, Bennington stood tall for as long as possible until that wave washed over him.

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The Australian producer’s new mini-album is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. It mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres.

Lonely Planet

Like a lot of electronic music around the turn of the current decade, Tornado Wallace’s early releases sought a middle path between house and disco. Dissatisfied with dance music’s status quo, they toyed with slower tempos and hypnotic repetitions. Taking inspiration from acts like Metro Area, the Australian producer reverse-engineered his way through his influences, using a variety of ’80s and ’90s signifiers—laser zaps, glassy handclaps, Italo basslines—as stepping stones to time-travel across decades.
His music has consistently gotten spacier and more diffuse, wreathing layered hand percussion in woozy synths and nature sound effects like seagulls and crickets. The approach and the sounds are both straight out of the Balearic textbook, but his new mini-album, the seven-track Lonely Planet, is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. Bookended by a pair of gentle, ambient-leaning cuts, the record mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres.
Even at its most driven, the music remains deeply, imperturbably chill. In “Kingdom Animalia,” loons—the unofficial mascots of Balearic house—jibber contentedly over starry-eyed arpeggios and pitter-pat percussion that seems always to be building toward a climax that refuses to come. The whole thing just circles in place at a comfortable andante tempo, like an Escher staircase carved out of jungle palms. “Warp Odyssey” works in a similar way, and while the drums are fuller and richer, it never really kicks off in earnest; a cozy, slightly weary vibe sets the tone. Synth pads flicker like the steady pulse of sunlight filtered through bridge cables, evoking morning-after cab rides home, and a horn-like lead suggests Jon Hassell’s “Fourth World” jazz.
A faint air of sonic déjà vu only contributes to the music’s captivating mixture of the familiar and the strange. On “Trance Encounters,” Wallace tips his hat to the ringing guitars and muscular drumming of Dif Juz, an instrumental rock quartet that was signed to 4AD in the mid ’80s. “Today,” one of the record’s highlights, invokes still more mostly forgotten acts from that decade: There’s a hint of Propaganda’s “Dream Within a Dream” in Sui Zhen’s monotone spoken-word delivery, and the larger-than-life guitars and drums suggest the big-budget studio sound of quasi-New Wave bands like the Fixx.
It all comes quietly to a head on “Voices,” with slowly swirling digital synths framed by colorful thumb piano plucks and cold, stiff LinnDrum thwacks, and shakuhachi flutes rising like morning mist. Everything, from the major-key chords to the synth patches, seems designed to evoke the sound of mid-’80s touchstones like Peter Gabriel’s So, the Cars’ Heartbeat City, and even Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A—just dubbed out and tropically flavored, in keeping with the candy-flipping mood of the Amnesia terrace when Alfredo Fiorito held court there. At the song’s climax, we even get a gooey keytar solo winkingly similar to Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice” theme. That kind of detail is manna for record collectors, but Lonely Planet will be just as appealing to listeners who could care less about an insiders’ guide to Balearic disco. From its muggy opener to the closing dose of blissed-out G-funk, this short, sweet record covers plenty of ground while remaining cozily supine—a round-the-world journey undertaken from the comfort of your couch.


The second Verve reunion album, released 11 years after the last one, finds them still trying to be the biggest band in the world-- and still failing.

Forth

Despite the fact that Verve singer Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe share a mutual regard that's more Sting and Stewart Copeland than Hall and Oates, or that it's been nearly a decade since the Wigan-based group was last functional, their reunion was a pretty easy call. You could take the succession of cheese-scented flops known as "Richard Ashcroft solo albums" as evidence. You might also see the appeal of being a British band that makes epic-sounding symphonic pop at a time when Coldplay are basically the biggest rock band in the world. Really, though, the reason is more elemental-- something everyone from Jay-Z to the Spice Girls knows is true: No self-made messiah can exist without a resurrection.
Of the top-tier Britpop-era heavyweights, Oasis catch the most flak for delusions of grandeur, but all they ever really wanted was for people to sing along in adoration: It's hard to imagine Noel Gallagher writing a song for any reason other than single-minded devotion to 1) hugeness, or 2) the chorus. Ashcroft wants you to sing along, too, sure-- but he also wants to heal, soothe, and illuminate. What else could the parting skies and emergent God rays on Forth's cover mean but that He hath returned?
To be fair, musically speaking, about half of Forth is as good as the band's commercial breakthrough, Urban Hymns-- and, if you consider the general hit/miss ratio of decade-removed comeback albums, that's actually a pretty respectable showing. It also helps to explain why at least some of the British press have met this new record with typically effusive praise: the soft bigotry of low expectations. (Granted, the Verve's two earlier records were actually a lot more interesting than Urban Hymns, but that's ancient history now.)
The most useful thing about Forth is the mirror it reflects back on us now. In 1997, this kind of thing-- crisp, echoing guitars, provincial strings, existential moodiness-- actually sounded kind of exciting. Just over a decade later, though, the exact same recipe, prepared exactly the same way, conjures up new dominant aftertastes: false profundity, compositional laziness, and outsized egos. What changed? Is it just that we now have better access to more and wider varieties of music? Is monoculture dead? Are big-label bands with these sorts of impulses the dinosaur rockers of the 00s?
Maybe it's just that Forth seems so telegraphed and formulaic that its most awful moments, like the watered-down space-rock of the seriously appalling "Judas" (sample lyric: "New York, I was Judas/ She said a latte double shot for Judas") or the toothless blues jamming on the interminable "Noise Epic" (on which Ashcroft, uhh, raps), end up weighing heavier than the album's highlights. Those hoping to find the Verve in full-on cloud-parting mode may be able to plug comfortably into songs like "Sit and Wonder", "Rather Be", "I See Houses", and "Valium Skies", but even these tracks feel simply like safe, calculated throwback exercises. Ashcroft wants this to be his holy hour, but to many of us, it'll sound a lot longer than that.