Produced by WHY's Yoni Wolf and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth, the Chicago MC's solo Anticon debut marks a return of sorts for the label.

Family and Friends

As L.A.-based Anticon has expanded its horizons, it has slowly moved away from the navel-gazing, leftfield hip-hop that made its name. Chicago rapper David Cohn, who performs as Serengeti, represents something of a return for the label. Following a 2009 collaborative record with producer and fellow Illinois native Polyphonic, Serengeti's first solo album for Anticon is an unflinching homage to an indie-rap template that has otherwise largely gone the way of the dodo.
Producing Family and Friends are enigmatic WHY? frontman Yoni Wolf and ex-Casiotone for the Painfully Alone mastermind Owen Ashworth (now working as Advance Base), who provide a sparse but sometimes gripping backdrop for Cohn's stable of strange characters-- all down, a few out-- and their struggles. As an MC, Cohn is part broken rambler, part highly attuned people-watcher. He sounds like he could use a drink, but his easy, near-spoken-word delivery is nothing if not welcoming. If you're up for hearing about absentee junkie fathers or suburban malaise, Cohn has a barstool ready for you.
For such a conversational rapper, though, Cohn often makes it difficult to know exactly where you've landed in the conversation. Tracks like the free-associative "A.R.P.", which finds the narrator taking DMT and later stubbing his toe, or the cryptic "Ha-Ha", about falling in love with the girl at the hardware store, would benefit from a bit more coherence. And even when lucid, Cohn frequently has trouble living up to the cleverness of his own concepts. For every moment as arresting as UFC-fighter lament "The Whip", which pairs Cohn's workmanlike flow with spirit-crushing toy keyboard plinks, there are too many where the pieces fit awkwardly. The desperate "PMDD" pines hazily for a girl in a pharmaceutical ad, while the depressive title track echoes the famous "Choose Life" speech from Trainspotting, but both make their points a little clumsily.
Fortunately, Wolf and Ashworth each prove to be positive enablers, adding nuanced touches when things get a bit too ham-fisted. Base's chunky "Ha-Ha" could pass for a minimalist tUnE-yArDs track; Ashworth's soulful, lonely "Dwight" features carousel music piped in from the ends of the earth. Not quite stylistic opposites but still distinctly different, the two producers almost always make sure to stay on the same page, taking skeletal percussive tracks and shocking them with little flecks of light. But as with much of Family and Friends, that light seems to be just out of reach.


On her first record as Yowler, All Dogs frontwoman Maryn Jones uses her guitar and voice to create something more complex than it first appears. Her deep, sad songs don't feel restricted to a single person, and when synthesizers, drums, or extra voices seep in, they show up as naturally as weather.

The Offer

On her first record as Yowler, Maryn Jones stares down all the water she can find. It comes in the usual forms—oceans, river, rain—and the ones we don't consider as often, like tears and spit and nicks of blood. Jones, known for her work at the front of All Dogs and with Saintseneca, uses The Offer to hunt down form inside a looming infinity. She hungers for the human shapes that break up the drones of time, space, and sea.
Jones' dark guitar and gently creased voice form most of the album on their own, but her songs don't feel restricted to a single person. They spill out of themselves, flow into each other, and cohere into a whole, like circuits in a system. When synthesizers or drums or extra voices seep in, they show up as naturally as weather. Jones might be alone, but there are no seams between her and her atmosphere.
There is a song called "Yowler" on The Offer, a name that resists convention—you don't name your project after a song or vice versa unless you're trying to make a point. Here, it fits; on the chorus, Jones sings, "Your hands look just like mine." She's looking across at another human body, amazed at the mirror image she finds, disturbed by the strange kinship. Hands are dense, complex machines, and yet you can hold your own up to someone else's, and most of the time, they'll match. On Soundcloud, the track appears as "Yowler :: Yowler". The mirror is there before you hear the song.
Jones reveals a love of language just in the way she bends it. She chooses and pronounces her words carefully. She'll invert cliches: "You can lead me to the water but you cannot make me drink," she sings on "Yowler". A chorus of low voices swarms her, like a mob about to dunk her in the river, or a hand guiding her away from the bank. "You will not be avoided/ 'Cause your ghost is haunting me."
She sings about drowning on "Holidays", only she calls it gestating. She imagines her body floating beneath a sheet of ice, and she uses a word intended to describe new life. Is there hope in that image, in the idea that dissolving into death is its own kind of birth? "If I return my body to the running black dark... will it be me? Will I see me?" Jones wonders. Does the person break apart when the body does, or is there a different shape you can't see?
"I am nothing/ I am but a shape," Jones sings on "Water". Those two lines seem to contradict each other, and she spends The Offer negotiating the tension between them. The album is a deep, sad comfort, more complex than it first appears, like a pond frozen over and still writhing with life.


On spirited songs that shift eagerly among pop, hip-hop, rock, and soul, the voice of standout singer Wolf Weston emerges as a stirring new instrument.

first bloom

Wolf Weston is the dynamo singer of the restless New York pop quartet Saint Mela. Across the 13 tracks of her band’s debut album, first bloom, her voice sears and smolders and yearns. The quartet tinkers with genre, moving among traces of rap, pop, and wailing rock, often within the same tune. But Weston’s voice is striking no matter what the rest of Saint Mela does, imbuing every note with a pulse-quickening urgency, like a direct shot of adrenaline.
According to Weston, the album unfolds in three sequential parts, all related to the floral nature of the title—soil, stalk, and sun, a loose movement from pain to anger to dewey, light-dappled hope. The first four songs are the “soil.” During “root(less),” a clamoring, vibrant jumble of fuzzy bass, synth, and keys sets the tone; though Weston is heartbroken and hurt here, her spirit, expressed through her magnetic voice, seems indefatigable. Weston laments the people who take advantage of her time and effort, reiterating that she’s careful with her energy while demonstrating just how potent that energy can be. Likewise, “the bends” is deceptively sunny, with skipping synths and chattering drums setting a chipper framework for a searing class critique embedded inside a love song of longing.
Her pain begins to transform into powerful, righteous anger for the “stalk” section. On “blk,” the pounding drums and distorted guitar elevate Weston’s words into a battle cry. She likens herself to smoke, “thick and stinging, leaving you blind.” Emotions peak with “jericho,” a lilting rock song complete with gnashing guitar and siren-like backing vocals. Even this dense tapestry can’t rival Weston’s intensity, buzzing with the brilliance of a dry pine tree set ablaze as she commands, “Let me in/Let go/Tear it down.”
With her gravelly falsetto pasted over watery synths at the start of the final section, Weston is tender. Recalling the glorious haze of Moses Sumney, she hasn’t yet reached catharsis—her love remains unrequited, and she questions who she is and where she’s going. Still, she sounds hopeful. The prepared piano that introduces album standout “buckley” clears space for Wolf’s voice, which oscillates from raspy highs to a honeyed tenor. As her need intensifies, stuttering drums fill out the atmosphere. At the climax, a distant sound that suggests scraping gears (familiar from Lorde’s “Hard Feelings/Loveless”) fosters a soaring sense of ecstasy before it all vanishes, leaving only Weston’s whispered croon.
Despite Weston’s tremendous voice, the lyrics here are oblique, shaping Mod Podged mood boards rather than clear narratives. Feelings and stories bleed from one song to the next, creating a vagueness that sometimes doesn’t resonate. The songs broadly address emotional scars and wrongdoings, sometimes skipping their real-world grounding. This distracts from the emotion evident in Weston’s voice, tantalizing no matter what she sings. Still, what would a first bloom be without room to grow?


In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder. Their latest is their most varied and compelling yet. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic.

City of Brides

In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder—a little glimmer of light from the depths of a well. A co-president of the beloved, minimalist-focused Root Strata label, Croy devotes much of his time to building a sophisticated, wonderfully weird roster of artists (Grouper, the Alps, and Driphouse have all issued LPs on the label): but he's also earned a reputation as a gifted electroacoustic auteur. Devane, meanwhile, comes from a guitar background, tempered by a love for the digital greats (as his acoustic cover of Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" attests). The duo’s latest, City of Brides, is their most cohesive—and perhaps paradoxically, sonically varied—statement to date.
Establishing a sense of momentum when nothing moves is one of the biggest challenges in drone music. On City of Brides, Croy and Devane supply propulsion through juxtaposition: not just between the organic and the artificial, but also between the serious and the playful. For every period of restraint—the two-part, vaguely erotic shadow play of "Songs for Diminished Lovemaking", for instance—there’s a burst of playfulness to balance it. On the buoyant "Mendocino Nature Rave", the duo ventriloquize their motherboards to reproduce the sounds of dolphins, bats, and other wildlife, while "Hall of Mirrors" sounds like a thrilling, grim game of Peek-A-Boo, constantly threatened by melodramatic synth swoops.
There are no samples to speak of on City of Brides; every sound we hear is built from scratch. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. "Blonde Is Back" is the most magnificent, its warm swathes of synths simultaneously soothing and suffocating. The experience of listening to it isn’t that far off from being smothered by a fleece blanket.
The diversity of the instruments here helps distinguish City of Brides from peers like Pete Swanson and Oren Ambarchi, or influencers like La Monte Young. On "Mark of the Slav", En use a koto to create a foggy soundscape before drifting out into the horizon. In addition to honoring its reputation for graceful precision, En challenge the koto’s inherent solemnity by way of energetic arrangements that render it assertive, even abrasive; its shattered-glass-strums break the reverent murmur of "Secret Samba". Indeed, one could make a strong case for Croy’s playing as City of Brides’ secret weapon: a valuable source of energy on an extensive, occasionally exhausting album.
If you’re not a fan of drone, City of Brides probably won’t turn you into an acolyte. The LP gets off to a sluggish, vaguely narcotic start with "Blades" and "Dead Ringer", two relatively straightforward ambient pieces that lack the standout quirks of later tracks. Those looking for a more leaden approach may walk away disappointed as well; Devane’s guitars never reach the intensity of, say, Sunn O))). Nevertheless, there are plenty of secrets refracted through City of Brides' glassine spaces—and peering through such a globally-inspired prism is arguably as compelling as any seismic axe riff.


The latest from the ambitious British musician is a grim vision of the future: a crumbling, corroding monument that feels strangely devoid of a soul.

The Ruby Cord

Richard Dawson sings as if he’s waging a one-man war against all of modern civilization. His broken-down style of English folk music feels like it was beamed in from another time, each frayed blemish possessing an ornate, worn-in beauty. All the missed guitar notes and accidental voice cracks betray an intricate design, a refined musicianship somewhere between the brutal virtuosity of Bill Orcutt and the classical elegance of Joanna Newsom. His paranoid voice booms and rumbles like a doomsday sayer hollering from the side of the road, but if you stop to listen, you’ll hear moving tales of squalor, cruelty, and tenuously held hope.
Though Dawson has regularly reconfigured his music into gnarled, sprawling shapes, he’s gradually sharpened his off-kilter style into something more concise and digestible as the years have gone on. His last two solo albums, Peasant and 2020, were twisted song cycles that chronicled the everyday struggles of characters dwelling in the forgotten underbellies of society. The former took us into the Middle Ages, following stories of grieving beggars and vengeful sex workers facing down the malice of their oppressors; the latter flashed forward to the present day, locating that same desperation in the suffering of Amazon warehouse workers and UFO conspiracy theorists. The Ruby Cord, on the other hand, envisions a distant future dominated by virtual realities, where metropolises have begun to decay while Dawson’s protagonists get lost in worlds of their own design. It’s a looser, more free-associative approach for Dawson—one that still bears his uniquely unsettling touch, even if he seems to lose his own way the further his songs drift into abstraction.
If Dawson’s music has previously hinted at a proggy sense of scale, The Ruby Cord launches it to towering extremes with its gargantuan 41-minute opening track, “The Hermit.” The song’s opening 10 minutes are its most entrancing: Dawson and longtime producer Sam Grant concoct a delicate sway of flowing folk music, as brushed drums, a faintly strummed guitar, and hissing violin strings creak and wobble together in unison like some great old barge about to collapse in on itself. Even as the song picks up steam when Dawson’s voice finally enters 11 and a half minutes in, the track never leaves this simmering mood, gently humming along through a capella passages and pedal-harp-laden bridges as if it really could go on forever.
Of course, with Dawson, the music is always only half of the picture—his lyrics are where his songs come alive, and it’s here where “The Hermit” starts to reveal The Ruby Cord’s lack of focus. Dawson’s propensity for surreal and surprising storytelling has been one of the most powerful elements of his music, his arcane vignettes depicting a fractured portrait of humanity at its most harrowing. Comparatively, “The Hermit” never quite finds itself, spending much of its runtime exercising Dawson’s esoteric wordplay as he describes lush swathes of undisturbed nature populated by “vaporous shafts of a burgeoning sun” and “patchwork meadows labyrinthed with hedgerows.” The tale gains a little momentum once Dawson’s narrator is mysteriously granted the ability to perceive his surroundings in unimaginable detail, being moved to tears over each individual follicle of the bees buzzing by and the mushrooms growing beneath his feet. But just as it seems as if the story is starting to go somewhere as the reality of Dawson’s world begins to crumble around him, the thread trails off into nothingness, and a vague 12-minute choral outro carries the song away into the clouds. As hypnotizing as its headspace can be, the song leaves the distinct impression that somehow, even after 41 minutes, Dawson still hasn’t really taken us anywhere.
The remaining tracks on The Ruby Cord offer more pointed parables, though some reward more than others. “Thicker Than Water” marks the album’s high point, as Dawson suddenly brings us into the middle of some kind of apocalyptic event, singing in his whimpering falsetto of how “at the end/I didn't really comprehend that I/was saying goodbye for the last time/to all my friends and family.” Carrying the song on his bittersweetly fingerpicked guitar, Dawson pulls the rug out at the very end, as his protagonist returns to the city only to find his parents hooked up to a Matrix-like alternate reality device, his own unconscious body lying motionless next to them. It’s the kind of pit-in-your-stomach reveal Dawson excels at in his finest moments, the tremble in his voice conveying warmth and fear in the same haunted breath.
Elsewhere, Dawson struggles to deliver the same thematic punch, nor the musical inventiveness that’s made his past work feel so original. After “The Fool” opens with a skronking sci-fi stomp straight out of Mad God, it meanders into a fairly generic love story, and Dawson’s acoustic baroque pop fails to bring the song back to the unexpectedness of its intro. Meanwhile, the stately “Museum” paints some pleasant imagery as it follows a gallery tour guide chronicling the human race long after its extinction. Harps spiral as Dawson reads off his exhibit list with a genteel remove: “Throngs of cheering football fans/A doctor crying alone/Riot police beating climate protestors/Babies being born.” It’s never particularly profound, though Dawson’s skills as a bandleader carry some of the slack as he stretches the song past the eight-minute mark with a swelling, chorus-assisted backend.
As ambitious as The Ruby Cord is, its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise. Dawson’s vision of the future is a grim one, and without the human element that’s made his songs so gut wrenching, The Ruby Cord ends up like a colossal, corroding monument strangely devoid of a soul.


Fashion Week is yet another surprise Death Grips album with a weird and fragmented backstory. This time out, it's a collection of instrumentals and there's no question that MC Ride's vocals are missed.

Fashion Week

Remember when Death Grips were as much a band as they were a bunch of agent provocateurs? No slight to the hype cycle-upending stunts they've pulled post-The Money Store—skipping highly anticipated shows (including Lollapalooza), holing up in the Chateau Marmont, sending every fan of theirs a cover-art dickpic, telling Epic to go screw, releasing an album that was supposedly a legitimate Björk collab but presumably merely sampled her voice, breaking up, ditching an opening gig for Nine Inch Nails, maybe not breaking up, and so forth. But even as the sound that made all this relevant in the first place got a fraction of the press as the crazy shit orbiting around it like noisy satellites, the music itself is more notable than the social media gimmickry. Anyone can be an aloof dildo on the Internet; not everyone could bring the trans-genre aggro bravado that those antics were meant to justify at a couple hundred kilobytes per second.
That said, it wouldn't be a Death Grips album without some weird mystery behind it, and Fashion Week has its share. For instance: someone of unknown origin and affiliation downloaded this entire album from some arcane private corner of Death Grips' website a few months back, posted it to the band's fan subreddit, and was widely dismissed as someone trying to pass off a fraudulent leak. Then Death Grips, or a representative thereof, actually posted the album on Soundcloud to prove its legitimacy, gave it a track listing that spelled out "JENNYDEATHWHEN" as a taunting acknowledgement of their supposed last album's all-question-marks release date, and then went off to do who the hell knows what else.
Leaving hungry listeners with some scraps to pick over means that what might be a stopgap release in the context of any other band is going to be pored over fiendishly by one of the more dedicated cult fanbases in music today. So Fashion Week is going to be put through the wringer, and there will be speculation about future direction. Maybe this is a bunch of scraps from the archives that hints at ideas they eventually strengthened and routes they could've taken instead, or maybe it's a few things Zach Hill scraped together to keep Death Grips in the public eye as jenny death struggles to life, or maybe it's an actual Fashion Week soundtrack some designer commissioned, or maybe it's even the instrumentals for jenny death itself, or maybe it's just some record.
Whatever it is, it's pretty bracing—not hellaciously noisy or completely impenetrable, but at least raucous enough to feel legit. That it was so readily dismissed as a hoax when it first leaked months ago gives you some idea of its quality, but what makes this record likable is still pretty elusive. You get careening invocations of trademark ideas all butting up next to each other, riding on sparking, hissing, glitching synthesizers and Zach Hill's drums rattling like a lost-time accident at the corrugated steel warehouse. And it really knocks in a surprising way when some distinct elements jump out through the familiar framework: feverishly lighthearted circus organ on the first "Runway N", occasionally abrasive but otherwise straightforward classic Detroit techno on "Runway D", a nasty, mud-trudging lope driven by oozing nightmare Moogs on the first "Runway H" that plays like a power struggle between Tobacco and Trent Reznor. Hell, "punk" usually seems like a "for lack of a better subculture" term that gets thrown at Death Grips as a Gen-X dadrock assessment, but the second "Runway H" proves that if they wanted to, they could be this decade's Devo.
What Fashion Week's really missing, though, is some kind of central idea—if anybody ever thought this music could melt steel without MC Ride acting as threat-slinging, dinosaur-lunged instrument of corrosion, they'll probably be let down. The album needs the percussive abrasion of his voice, and digging into some of the more typical slabs of Death Grips' instrumental tendencies doesn't unearth much more than a pretty solid workout soundtrack. It makes for a good exercise in how grimy and knuckles-out they can get even when going straight-up electro, but don't try and call "Runway A" or "Runway W" transgressive hardcore art when they barely transcend the possibility of sounding like decent Run the Jewels outtakes. The titles aren't the only parts of the songs that spell out a question about what Death Grips' future is supposed to sound like, and don't expect answers to come easy.


The dancehall artist’s first act at OVO is not to push forward but to look back. The mixtape is a bit like a recent Popcaan retrospective that sounds simply like a companion piece to his last album

Vanquish

Popcaan and Drake have been courting each other for quite some time. There was the OVO Niko directed video, the “No Tellin” interlude, the “Know Yourself” outro, the lost “Controlla” verse. Popcaan appeared in Drake’s short film, Please Forgive Me. Popcaan has shielded Drake from criticism of his vampiric use of dancehall music. Drake got an unruly tattoo. Popcaan remixed Drake’s “Hype” for OVO Sound Radio. In late 2018, Drake finally “officially” signed Popcaan to OVO Sound. His first release on the label, a mixtape called Vanquish, only brings diminishing returns.
The decision to classify Vanquish a “mixtape,” much like the one made for 2015’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, feels like an attempt to control the narrative. Dubbing it a treat for fans takes some of the pressure off of Popcaan’s OVO debut. The distinction between an album and mixtape is even more dubious in dancehall, a subgenre without much industry or infrastructure dominated by deejays and sound clashes, its very name a nod to its function in live settings. Popcaan’s first act at OVO is not to push forward but to look back. The mixtape is a bit like a recent Popcaan retrospective that sounds simply like a companion piece to his last album.
His 2014 album, Where We Come From, was a landmark moment for dancehall, cohesive and autobiographical, as much a pop record as a reggae one. It wasn’t just narratively driven, it felt like an ode to life along the Jamaican coastline. Unlike the uniformity of Where We Come From, his last album, 2018’s Forever, was decidedly less organized. Vibrant and manifold, its 17 tracks didn’t really hold together. It seemed to exist in diametric opposition to his debut. Not only was it more spiritual, but it was also more luxurious.
Vanquish is on the same wave, seeking health, wealth, and love in the new year. Popcaan once sang that he’d “empty di MAK 90 inna your face and gone” and that the police would find his foes dead in the street like a dog on a song called “El Chapo,” but he has turned a corner toward preserving his quality of life. His songs are categorical here: they are either about living extravagantly and skirt-chasing, seeking salvation from a violent world or trying to defend his empire. “Did what is due to Caesar/Dem wan’ see mi life hard, everyday man life is gettin’ easier,” he toasts on “Father God Ah Lead.” Most of the songs, lifted by his weightless and shining vocals, are joyful, but Poppy can’t help peering over his shoulder.
If Popcaan picked up anything from his new boss, it’s a king’s paranoia. Since inheriting the throne from Vybz Kartel, Poppy has been to dancehall what Drake has been to rap; Drake has mostly groused about the many usurpers lurking in the shadows since his coronation, and Popcaan seems to be feeling the same heavy head. Dancehall is hyper-competitive by nature, and Popcaan is no stranger to silencing pretenders to the crown, but Vanquish is the first time he really seems on edge. “Opportunist and di hypocrite par/Badmind and envious, dem always at war/Mi nuh trust dem, mi nuh mek nuh loose par/Pussy dem ah pray fi see mi behind bar,” he sings on “Jah is For Me.” “Can’t wait pon police fi dweet/By time di jeep dem reach/People done spread out pon street,” his sings on “Can’t Wait,” citing poor response times from cops as the reason he’s heavily armed. He makes himself sound like he’s a gunslinger in the Old West, but these anxious moments scattered about feel tonally inconsistent with the rest.
Since Popcaan and his new label made this project low-stakes, it’s only fair to listen on those terms, and it’s hard to hear this as anything other than an intro to Popcaan for OVO fans who haven’t been paying close attention to the impact he’s made across the Drake discography. There’s nothing new or revelatory, but Popcaan is still one of dancehall’s most stunning performers and it’s painless to appreciate this as easy listening. The glistening sheen of “Promise” is a pleasant compliment to his translucent voice. The loverman come-ons of “Gimmi Love” are made passable by the contrasts of his Auto-Tuned grumbles over a xylophonic bounce. The only real ballad is “One Ting Alone,” a dedication to his one true love: weed. He sings the phrase “I can’t do without you” with a profound sense of commitment. So many of the songs find a genre-straddling star in stasis. After all, dancehall has given American pop music in recent years, it’s nice to see Popcaan finally make a serious play for its audience. But a half-measure like Vanquish isn’t going to move the needle.


Beck continues his inspired work leading famous friends in covers of older albums. Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell here help him tackle Skip Spence's cult classic.

Oar

On October 10, 2008, I was ready to give up on Beck. That night, the singer looked too embarrassed, bored, or confused to make his show at Manhattan's United Palace Theater anything more than a depressing dud. It wasn't like the album he was touring behind, Modern Guilt, was exceptional, and the same could be said of his previous few LPs, too. Meanwhile, his website was a lumbering, flash-based nightmare that was successful at crashing browsers but little else. At that point, it seemed like a good idea for longtime Beck fans to cut and run.
But perhaps Beck was growing weary of himself around that time as well, because 2009 marked an under-the-radar creative comeback for one of the alternative era's most beloved stars. His team-up with the increasingly ineffectual Danger Mouse on Modern Guilt was so-so, but it apparently spurred his collaborative spirit as he went onto write and produce Charlotte Gainsbourg's surprisingly stunning IRM. And he completely overhauled his website, swinging his online presence from worst to damn-near first almost overnight.
The best feature of the new web space is Record Club, which finds Beck and some (usually quite famous) friends covering an entire album in one day. Along with people like MGMT, Devendra Banhart, Nigel Godrich, and brother-in-law Giovanni Ribisi, Beck tackled the Velvet Underground & Nico's 1967 debut and Leonard Cohen's 1967 bow Songs of Leonard Cohen via weekly videos across the second half of 2009. According to a modest disclaimer on the Record Club homepage, "There is no intention to 'add to' the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording," and, aside from a few flashes of offhand greatness-- usually occurring when the players took more liberties with their source material-- the covers were passable trifles. But hey, seeing Beck, MGMT, and Devendra goofing around in pixelated home movies was a lot more fun than seeing Beck halfheartedly rehash his old hits live.
With Record Club number three, the ante was officially upped: This time Beck wrangled Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell, legendary session drummer James Gadson (Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5), and others to take on Skip Spence's 1969 cult favorite Oar. And most everyone stepped up to the task-- this is the best, most focused Record Club yet, at times transcending the project's transitory, celebrity-cover-band conceit.
Spence originally recorded Oar after a six-month stay at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he was deemed schizophrenic. (The onetime Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape member was committed after hacking a bandmate's door down with an ax during a particularly rowdy LSD trip.) The Summer of Love hangover LP was predictably all-over-the-place-- at times funny, dark, psychedelic, folky, somber, spiritual. And, if nothing else, Beck's diverse group do an admirable job of conveying the album's infinite tangents and possibilities; their many-voiced approach could be descended straight from Spence's cracked psyche.
Since each song comes packaged with its own in-studio video, Record Club gives people a rare glimpse at not just an artist's sound but their creative temperament as well. With this in mind, the undoubted star of Oar is techno twiddler-cum-soul blower Jamie Lidell, who grabs the spotlight on two of the project's most offbeat covers and can be seen spreading merriment throughout. Locking in with Gadson, Lidell transforms folk-blues tracks "Cripple Creek" and "Books of Moses" into skeletal funk workouts while losing none of Spence's tortured soul.
Feist nails her lone solo vocal performance on one of Oar's more indelible tunes, the harrowing lament "Weighted Down". Instead of trying to match the original's heft, the crew wisely backs her with bubbly, Midnite Vultures-style electro-pop and a virtuosic, hummingbird-like solo from Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. And this project's finest moment is also one of the simplest; woozy strut "All Come to Meet Her" is stripped down to a near-a cappella hymn with almost everyone involved forming a half-circle around a microphone. As the voices of Beck, Jeff Tweedy, Lidell, and others blend into one, it's like hearing the imagined goal of Record Club brilliantly coming to life.
Elsewhere, Tweedy does his best with the album's sillier songs, including innuendo-laced sex romp "Dixie Peach Promenade" and the skewed "Margaret/Tiger Rug", but not even he can make such hippie nonsense vaguely contemporary. (He fares better singing with Feist on "Broken Heart", which could pass for a Wilco outtake.) And then there's Beck himself, who takes lead on the least-risky covers, "Little Hands" and "Diana", and often looks more content directing traffic on the sidelines.
In fact, when it comes to Beck, the session's most enlightening moment is featured in a behind-the-scenes mini doc posted in January. In it, we see Gadson and Lidell in a heady funk, grooving on "Books of Moses". Then the camera turns to Beck on the other side of the studio glass, debating whether to fade the jam out or let it ride. "Let's fade it, we've got like 10 more songs to do," he says-- a disappointing-yet-logical choice indicative of his latter-day mien. Then he just stands there, smiling and nodding for a few more seconds. "I hate killing it-- let's fade it back up," he tells the engineer, laughing. He's not ready to call it quits just yet.


Dej Loaf is the rap equivalent of a well-executed eye roll—simple, excellent viciousness. All Jokes Aside is a record full of nonchalant barbs. Men and/or those messing with her money: watch out.

All Jokes Aside

Like many of her songs, Dej Loaf’s surprise hit “Back Up,” from last year’s #AndSeeThatsTheThing, was a shoulder check to nameless irritants. It mired in Dej’s patented annoyance, here almost comically blunt: “If I fucking make you cum you’ve gotta promise not to sweat me/ Don’t be blowing up my phone and don’t be leaving voice messages,” she rapped unenthusiastically, laying the ground rules for transactional sex. Those ground rules still apply on All Jokes Aside, her new mixtape, which subjects more men to her relational gauntlet. "I change your life, come spend the night/ I ain't gon' ask you twice/ I asked you once/ You with her? Okay, wrap it up" she raps on “Keep Going,” picking right up where she left off. But men are only the side attractions in Dej’s writing; her attention span is far too short to be preoccupied with any one of them for long. Instead, she dedicates her time to the things she finds most interesting: herself and her money. “I’m single, I’d rather be filthy rich and hardheaded,” she declares on “Who Am I.” All Jokes Aside finds the apathetic wunderkind at her most pragmatic.
Dej Loaf has always been particularly fond of conservation, whether it be with time, or cash, or emotional effort. She works smarter, not harder. For her, expending energy is a hassle, and her general disinterest in everything, including rapping, makes her fluid raps seem all the more effortless. All Jokes Aside doubles down on both the blank-faced expressionism and the technicality with some of her most arresting wordplay, but maintains the same level of efficiency. There's a lot of compact rapping reminiscent of her boom bap days pre-"Try Me," especially on "Chase Mine," which even has a traditional breakbeat. This is the closest she’s come to unifying the two very different aesthetics she’s honed in recent years: her singsongy, bittersweet villainy and her backpacker repartee. Her ultimate assessment of the competition embodies both: “Niggas got too much time on they hands.”
It's sugary Auto-Tuned hostility that made “Try Me” so intoxicating, and Dej continues to be most comfortable in that space as she settles into a nice rap-sung balance on All Jokes Aside, delivering casual death threats through candied vocals, especially on "How" and “Bout That” (“Put the TEC to his neck while he eating cereal”). On "Bitch Please," she takes on a Big Sean flow, only without the jerky punchlines, and really leans into her disinterest, damn near filing her nails in the booth. Much of the best production comes from frequent collaborator DDS, who seems to know just how to accentuate Dej’s yelped raps. His synths pulsate in the periphery and are usually punched up by a bare-bones keyboard riff. These, along with a rather choice assortment of beats, open up around the Detroit rapper, who gives them life. Dej strings together some of her sharpest, scene-setting raps on All Jokes Aside, yet it remains natural. She still seems so unimpressed by everything, which makes her all the more impressive.


Both impressive and tiring, Logic’s seventh studio album stuffs 30 tracks’ worth of throwback beats and technical rapping into overbearing conceptual frameworks.

Vinyl Days

Part of Logic’s appeal relies on his transparency around mental health struggles, regularly sharing narratives about not feeling accepted in the world, and especially in hip-hop. He’s a mixed-race, self-proclaimed comic book nerd who can solve a Rubik’s Cube while freestyling, a boom-bap-loving thirtysomething vying for relevancy in the age of plugg and trap. Naturally, his brand of earnest, wife-guy rap has its supporters and detractors. Joe Budden called him “one of the worst rappers to ever grace a mic”; Ellen DeGeneres labeled him “the voice of his generation.” In 2020, Logic retired from rap to remove himself “from a bunch of negativity” and to focus on being a dad.
He announced his return in the most Logic way possible: By mimicking Michael Jordan’s “I’m back” press release. Like his music, the announcement was derivative and took itself too seriously. (He never really left, either; in his 11-month absence, he released music under an alias, Doc D, and regularly streamed on Twitch.) His first post-retirement project, the 2021 mixtape Bobby Tarantino III, leaned into some of his least compelling qualities: deriding modern rap trends while simultaneously imitating them; hyping up his wife’s hotness; promoting mental health awareness with the directness of a PSA announcement. He’s released 15 projects in 12 years, wrote a novel, retired, unretired, and now he’s ready to show us something new. But what would a good Logic project even sound like nowadays?
His seventh studio album, Vinyl Days, is his strongest project in years. The beats here are the best Logic’s ever rapped on—most of the production is handled by longtime producer 6ix and Logic himself—and his rapping is as technically electrifying as ever. Logic can rap, and rap well, and he showcases this skill ad nauseum on Vinyl Days, which is 30 tracks long. Absent are the forays into ska-rock and Trippie Redd trap; present are the odes to Madlib, J Dilla, and DJ Premier. Just look at the guest list: Action Bronson, RZA, Curren$y, Royce Da 5'9", AZ. Vinyl Days is a YouTube playlist of Funkmaster Flex freestyles, dudes gripping the mic and flaunting an elite arsenal of bars. It’s impressive and tiring, but it nonetheless highlights the reason why Logic’s so famous in the first place: He’s a really good rapper, and, resultantly, has earned the respect of some other really good rappers.
Similar to past projects, Logic’s at his most dynamic when he doesn’t tell us about his rap talent or the state of his crypto portfolio and instead just spits bars. His verse on the Action Bronson-assisted “In My Lifetime” is all slick wordplay and exuberant punchlines, while “Rogue One” boasts a high-energy double-time flow over the same sample as Wu-Tang Clan’s “Protect Ya Neck.” One of the album’s more memorable moments comes on the Beastie Boys-sampling “Bleed It,” where Logic offers imaginative, image-laden verses with a sense of urgency. Another driver of urgency is Flex himself, who serves as Vinyl Days’ omnipresent host, a larger-than-life hype man affirming Logic’s place in the contemporary rap pantheon.
But the choice to hire Flex to host Vinyl Days feels a little cheap given that Tyler, the Creator just deployed this conceit to perfection with DJ Drama on last year’s chart-topping, Grammy-winning Call Me If You Get Lost. Unlike Tyler and Drama’s comedic, experimental, and thematically resonant love letter to hip-hop’s mixtape era, Flex’s presence on Vinyl Days feels less considered. His main purpose is to explosively reiterate whatever Logic says in his verses: He retired but never left!; he’s one of the hardest rappers out!; real hip-hop is back, baby! It’s hard to hate—who doesn’t get an adrenaline jolt from a Flex bomb?—but the playfulness required to pull off a gimmick like this is mostly absent.
It’s not just Flex’s hosting that interferes with an otherwise pleasurable listen. It’s nearly impossible to enjoy Logic’s music without being swarmed with whatever conceptual framework he’s applied to a given song. One can’t simply relish in the sampling nods to Dilla and Madlib; Logic repeatedly reassures us that he reveres these guys, stans them, is an heir to their lineage. In the intro to “Ten Years,” we learn that Logic beat GZA in a chess match. And have you heard that he recorded this album with a microphone once used by JAY-Z? What about the 10-minute outro, where he personally thanks all the people he worked with at Def Jam? Or how, as he tells us on “Introducing Nezi,” he “found a strong Black woman from the land of Nigeria…Helping other musicians is my criteria”? It’s not enough that Nezi Momodu’s verse is excellent on its own; Logic wants his flowers for putting her on.
On a record ostensibly concerned with letting loose and returning to one’s roots, Logic seems set on clearing up the reasons for his retirement. On “BLACKWHITEBOY,” he describes how the up-and-down nature of the industry messed with his psyche; on “LaDonda,” he recalls a fantasy of murdering YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano over a negative review. Although clearly still grappling with these insecurities, Logic seeks to assure us that he’s moved on. Despite the good things going for it, Vinyl Days is weighed down with bitterness and frustration. Logic wants to get his respect and can’t for the life of him understand why it’s being withheld. So he tries harder than ever to elicit our understanding, to force us to see him the way he sees himself.


Seattle indie scene veteran Matt Batey contrasts bouncy power-pop with lyrics about anxiety and failure on his cathartic solo debut for Barsuk.

Winning Star Champion

Power-pop isn’t necessarily the ideal medium for defeatism, but Matt Batey makes the unexpected combination of style and mood work. On Winning Star Champion, his debut LP as Ruler, the Seattle-based singer-songwriter reckons with anxiety and failure, in lyrics that act as perfect cloud cover for the sunshine his bright, infectious melodies constantly radiate.
It's hard to make feeling bad sound so good, but Batey pulls it off with ease. A fixture of Seattle's indie rock scene over the last decade, he’s played in Rocky Votolato's band and been part of the synth-driven indie-pop outfit Cataldo. Around 2011, he began working on his Ruler material in earnest, paying his compositions sporadic attention while working day shifts at Alaska Airlines. “I'm very poor,” he told Billboard in a remarkably candid interview that accompanied the premiere of his single “Petrified,” explaining that, “Sometimes I had money to spend on stuff, so that's when I would take time in a studio, and when I didn't have money it just kind of stopped."
In the same interview, Batey connected his struggles with anxiety to the experience of turning 30 and watching his friends settle down and start families while he kept making music and barely paying bills. When he left home, at age 18, he told himself, “‘I'm not gonna be one of those guys that just plays in this band forever.’” But now, “12 years later it's like, 'OK, maybe I will be that guy.’” That revelation fuels Winning Star’s “Cars and Houses,” a swinging highlight in which Batey's boyish voice contrasts his peers’ aspirational, suburbs-and-minivan lifestyle with his own days spent gigging through small towns and crashing on floors.
Some songwriters may hit 30 and decide they have it all figured out, but he's forthcoming about not having all the answers—or, really, any of them. “When I get a new book I always draw in straight lines/For at least a couple pages I can pretend that is what I'm like,” Batey sings on the jangly title track, in which he also admits to being "the winning star champion of fucking up.” On “The Cure,” a simple bass-and-drum pairing buoys a dark pronouncement: “One day I'll relax/And it will be perfect/To feel my bones under the ground.” Fatalism often sounds self-pitying or pretentious, but Batey’s admissions don’t come off as performative. He’s simply expressing the salient truth that modern life can be exhausting.
Lest he come across as too much of a mope, though, Winning Star packs even its most morose tracks with bursts of exuberance. Like Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, Batey uses rock music to transmute his anxiety into fist-pumping catharsis. Assisted by a bevy of Pacific Northwest studio geeks (including his co-producer and kindred spirit Michael Lerner, of Seattle power-pop mainstays Telekinesis), he finds joy in joylessness. “Petrified” thrashes with an energy akin to that of late-era Superchunk, while the winding “Unhindered Pace” is garnished with lovely vocal harmonies and a floaty keyboard solo. Smack dab in the middle of “Cars and Houses,” Batey lets loose with an exuberant “whoa-oh-oh” over guitars that sound massive, in a shameless act of rock indulgence that nonetheless feels appropriate to the song.
For much of the current decade, the kind of sugary, hook-laden rock music that predominates on Winning Star has been woefully unfashionable. Meanwhile, the album’s quieter moments (particularly "Get to You," with its chugging drum machine) evoke early Death Cab for Cutie, who’ve maintained their cultural cachet even as their whispery, wordy songwriting style has largely ceased to influence younger bands. So it makes sense that Batey has found a home on Death Cab’s old label, Barsuk, which has persisted for years in supporting this specific variety of indie rock. An alternately raucous and pensive soundtrack to fucking up, getting by, and learning from all of it, Winning Star is proof that the Barsuk sound is still worth championing.


Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, the Russian avant-pop artist emerges with a visionary record that offers an escape from gloom.

Room for the Moon

The Russian experimental pop performer Kate NV has her feet in two worlds. In one, the artist born Ekaterina Shilonosova sings and plays guitar in the fiery post-punk band ΓШ (Glintshake). In the other, she works with the Moscow Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble inspired by the improvisational pieces of the English composer Cornelius Cardew. In her work as Kate NV, she commits fully to the unpredictability and openness that unites them both.
NV’s sophomore record, 2018’s для FOR, was a whimsical, ambient portrait of her native Moscow made mostly on a synthesizer. But the stiffness of sitting or bending over a Buchla soon took a toll on her body; it was time to return to a more flexible method of making music. The result, Room for the Moon, is a return to the joyful grooves of her 2016 debut, Binasu. If NV’s striking voice was largely absent from для FOR, here it springs forth like an acrobat who has been waiting on the bench for her time to shine. Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, NV emerges with a visionary avant-pop record that offers an escape from gloom.
But even while Room for the Moon bursts with exuberance, NV has explained that the record was finished during “the loneliest period” of her life. With that in mind, it’s easy to see these 10 songs as a sanctuary NV willed into being, a fantasy world where that solitude could be replaced with a cornucopia of melodies. The air of escapism is palpable in the album’s wriggling synth flourishes and chirping flutes like hummingbirds. For one track on для FOR, NV set a poem by the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky to song. While the Russian expressionist is not so explicitly invoked this time around, Room for the Moon gestures towards the synesthetic splashes of color that define Kandinsky’s work. NV’s music feels akin to being sucked into one of his paintings, where there’s no linear thinking, only liberation.
NV has said that Room for the Moon’s influences include Russian children’s movies and television shows and she has described her album as a fairy tale, saying “Each song is like a character who, to one degree or another, is presented in me and shapes me as a person.” For the most part, these studies are loose and upbeat. The blips and bleeps that begin opener “Not Not Not” are soon joined by a mix of bass, saxophone, and synth. “Ça Commence Par” is carried by a symphony of woodwinds, marimba, and faraway giggles that eventually give way to a riddle which NV presents like a Mad Hatter for club kids: “We buy it to eat/But we never eat it/Starts with a ‘p.’”
But beneath these sparkling tracks lie anxious ruminations. The message coursing through “Not Not Not” is considerably less chipper than its squawking horns: “You’ve got no time/Soon!/You’re getting old.” “Sayonara,” which turns wistful repetitions of its titular phrase into a hook, is mired in indecision. On “Marafon 15” NV layers an assortment of eerie synth effects atop a dogged bass line, creating a sensation of creeping uncertainty. “Your hand will grasp and let go of the precious moment/What will happen to it/It will return,” NV blithely murmurs in Russian. The lullaby “If Anyone’s Sleepy” explores the slipperiness of time in a similarly elegiac register.
But ultimately, Room for the Moon emanates a gentle sense of hope. Late album highlight “Plans” is an ’80s dance party featuring a bleating sax solo pulled from Found Sound Nation’s “broken orchestra” sample pack. “Somewhere on the planet there are plans where everything is clear, where we are given words,” NV promises in Russian. Even if that cloudless place is impossible to grab ahold of right now, Room for the Moon offers respite until we find it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Blonde Redhead's first album in four years finds the NYC avant-rock veterans following down the same path they started on with 2010's Penny Sparkle. Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy.

Barragán

The next-to-the-last song on Blonde Redhead’s new album, Barragán, is titled “Penultimo”. Since when have Blonde Redhead been so literal? Since 2010’s Penny Sparkle, if we’re being honest, a lackluster album that traded in the trio’s lush, fathomless mystique for little more than a cellophane wisp of no-calorie beauty. It sparkled, and that was about it. Four years have passed since then, and while it may be perfectly reasonable to expect the group responsible for entrancing albums like Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons to return to form at some point, that point is not reached on Barragán.
Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy. Singer/guitarist Kazu Makino has always kept her voice solemn and controlled, but the sense that there's something vast being held behind that mask is gone. "The One I Love” is about as compelling as tears plopping into a bucket, a hollow exercise in vague, impressionistic storytelling set to an limp art-pop track of acoustic guitars and flutes. “She does nothing all day/ But sit down and cry,” Makino chants like a bored chorister. The ennui is so on-the-nose, it’s oppressive.
The album is stubbornly unassertive. “No More Honey” is the closest Barragán comes to featuring a flesh-and-blood song, but lead guitarist Amedeo Pace’s swells of My Bloody Valentine-like riffage are kept on a short leash, then quickly shooed away. Ambient noises are sprinkled throughout—birds, what sounds like a typewriter, echoes of echoes with no discernable source—but they serve no purpose other than punctuating the emptiness of the music surrounding them. It’s a recurring theme, but one without a point—unless, as with the shuffling, exhausted-by-its-own-existence “Penultimo”, Blonde Redhead are trying to write songs that are featherweight and leaden at the same time.
Blonde Redhead began dabbling in electronic sounds on 1998’s “Missile + +”, and they go down a similar path on two Barragán tracks, “Dripping” and “Mind to Be Had”. Neither use those icy pulses to decent effect; the former teases with glimpses of ghostly melody without fully coming into focus, and the latter is a nine-minute slog of ping-ponged monotone. “Defeatist Anthem” sums it up best: Makino coos and sighs expectantly, and for a second, it seems like something—anything—might take flight. Then it just squirms in a circle of listless prettiness. “We wanted to make something timeless and pure, and perhaps a little minimalist too,” drummer/singer Simone Pace recently said in an interview. Instead of timeless, though, Barrágan is static; instead of pure, it’s blank; instead of minimalist, it’s stingy.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Blonde Redhead’s second single, “Vague”/“Jetstar”, their first for Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records imprint. Accordingly, the single sounded a lot like Sonic Youth, from its soft, discordant buildup to its cyber-psychedelic climax. The band went on to master that nervy dynamic, and many others, during their late '90s/early '00s peak. They effortlessly recontextualized avant-rock, electro-pop, shoegaze, and white noise. Their back catalog is a deep well of potential to draw from, and it's enough to make you wish that Penny Sparkle had only been a fluke. Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.


The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye, which riffs on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, is an immense stylistic step from their previous full-length which, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained by pop punk subgenre boundaries.

The Blackest Eye EP

The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye is an immense stylistic step forward for a band whose previous full-length effort, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained in places by pop punk subgenre boundaries. Pop punk is not a subgenre known for its attention to nuance.
Their newest EP, The Blackest Eye, the title and lyrical themes of which riff on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, breaks out of those subgenre forms. On it, Aye Nako are exploring, stretching, and pushing their sound into a unique place. Opening track "Leaving the Body" is a relentlessly catchy but also deeply affecting personal account of living with the cycle of sexual trauma in many of its complex realities: the reiteration of patterns of abuse ("Dead men don't abuse/ Still you resurrect") cemented by the common reaction of disbelief when one tries to tell one's story ("Who would believe me anyway/ It's just the kind of lie a girl would say"). "Killswitch" and "White Noise" examine racial fetishization and the immediate heaviness of a society that prizes whiteness at all costs.
Closer "Sick Fuck" addresses the weariness and predictability of dealing with a society that would rather turn away from you or place you into a box than acknowledge your queer humanity. "Already know what you'd say," main vocalist Mars Ganito and new guitarist Jade Payne sing together on the chorus, which breaks down into a bridge: "In lust we trust." To follow a path away from heteronormativity, away from society's maps, is exhausting, but it is also necessary for so many to live in truth. Is it more exhausting to lie to yourself or to deal with others' approbation, the song asks.
The guitar lines*,* vocal interplay, lyrical poignancy and pointedness, and song structures on The Blackest Eye avoid predictability and heavy-handed formulae; there are plenty of stylistic curveballs. Though there's a lot of music out there that references the '90s by people who experienced their early childhood during that decade, little of it is as playful or as interesting; where others fall into the trap of directly replicating a sound, Aye Nako take scraps of sonic references to any number of early Sub Pop/K/Yoyo artists and manipulate and repurpose them to their own effect.
One gets the sense that Aye Nako are this tightly coiled and elegantly structured because of the urgency of what they have to say; they can't afford to be anything less than precise. This is a band that is "political" because the circumstances of their own lives necessitate it, and we are all lucky to be able to hear their voices.


Atop imposing hardcore, the New York group’s Lebanese-American vocalist tackles politics, identity, and the complexity of his Shia Muslim upbringing.

HARAM: بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost”

Nader Habibi once said, “Everything about Haram is haram.” The New York hardcore group’s vocalist meant that he was raised to consider his behavior now to be impermissible, deserving of shame, or, as the Arabic word is usually translated, “forbidden.” Fronting the group, who’ve hit upon an imposing sound on their debut, is at once an embrace of his upbringing and an unburdening. He used to pretend he didn’t know Arabic; now he uses the language to untangle the conflict of growing up Lebanese-American in a Shia Muslim household while attending Catholic school in Yonkers. He makes the process sound like flensing flesh from one’s own bone, then grafting it elsewhere on the body—visceral transformation via self-discovery.
The phonology of Arabic is important to Habibi, who’s called it “harsh and intimidating” as well as “beautiful,” and his sputtering delivery of fricative and guttural phrases complements the wily, careening approach of Haram’s instrumentalists on بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost.” Abrupt dropouts and selective vocal doubling charge uptempo songs with combustible energy; some degenerate into static. Often Habibi retches a few syllables on a measure’s first beat before the guitarist, in a spasm of needling notes, seems to complete the point. Haram makes that kind of joint articulation sound like intuitive interplay, not clinical or overdetermined, like less arresting hardcore groups.
Heard front to back, the album seems to gather purpose and girth, like a hurtling object that absorbs debris in its path. Opener “Who Am I, Who Are You?” is fitful and kinetic; closer “Road to Liberation” conveys dignity and confidence at the pace of a disciplined trudge. It’s a stride from their What Do You See? EP last year, which was a great big leap from a comparatively unremarkable demo released in 2015—a strikingly dramatic progression, one that sounds borne in large part out of relentless and ferocious gigging.
Haram play often with New York groups associated with the labels Katorga Works and Toxic State, a punk and hardcore scene that’s loosely characterized by performative sickliness, trash-compactor fidelity, and local pride to the point of insularity. They seem influenced by their peers, incorporating snare-drum patterns à la Crazy Spirit; bracing, mid-tempo meanness in the style of Warthog; intensely personal lyricism reminiscent of Mommy. Some of these groups own the phrase “ground zero hardcore,” and Hank Wood and the Hammerheads have for some years thrown memorial or benefit gigs on September 11. But Habibi’s vantage is from another side of post-millennial New York, one where the gall to shout in Arabic prompts an investigation by agents in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Habibi, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon to New York in the 1980s, has recalled in interviews how he was bullied at Catholic school and alienated at home by what he’s called a “more conservative” practice of Islam. “I remember a day when I was done with all faiths,” he has said. He formed Haram to confront lingering shame: “I wanted to bend [Arabic] to my will and work it back into my identity.” Last year, cops who suspected him of extremism on account of the band’s imagery interviewed him. Soon bombings rocked New York and New Jersey, so Haram rushed the release of What Do You See? Its title is not only a challenge to outright prejudice, but also to listeners’ implicit biases.
Habibi is not the first punk musician of Middle-Eastern descent to sing about his experience as such in North America. Texas hardcore-turned-thrash outfit Fearless Iranians from Hell satirized ‘80s anti-Iranian sentiment by writing from the perspective of an Islamic extremist. Michael Muhammad Knight, an American convert to Islam, published a novel about Muslim punks in 2003 called The Taqwacores. “Taqwacore,” a portmanteau of hardcore and “taqwa,” which is Arabic for religious piety, was embraced by groups such as the Kominas, who’ve sung in Punjabi and Hindi about their experiences as Pakistani-Americans. But Secret Trial Five, a Canadian group named after five Muslims detained under circumstances eventually deemed unconstitutional, rejected the label, taking offense to a supposed Muslim punk movement invented by a white guy.
This year marked the first installment of YallaPunk, an Arab-American punk festival and conference in Philadelphia. Performers included Baltimore’s Bidet, whose singer is Lebanese-American, and Al-Thawra, a Chicago crust band with some lyrics in Arabic. There’s a parallel movement in electronic music: Oakland label and collective Club Chai was founded by DJs of Turkish and Armenian descent whose mixes emphasize their respective heritages; they’re close with DJ Haram, the Discwoman affiliate who’s said that her handle “refers to my attempt to communicate the nuances of where I’m at—being a Muslim and being queer and being a DJ.” In the 1990s, Los Crudos helped inspire both a contemporary Latino punk scene and a broader reassessment of Latinos’ role in punk since its inception. Haram are illuminating another secret history.


As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. On his new Abandoned City, songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods.

Abandoned City

As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. What he plays matters less than what he does before playing it: shoving bits of junk (wood, foil, paper) in the harp or tacks in the hammers. He feeds this snaggletooth grin a diet of frantic minimalist ostinatos and sweetly lingering right-hand themes. Its digestion produces outlandish sounds, not just percussive but also melodic, thanks to live electronic effects. Even when he's playing alone, as he is on Abandoned City, we seem to hear everything from kick drums and rattles to synth arpeggios and violas. You'd swear there was a plucked lute on "Sanzhi Pod City", a runny music box on "Pripyat". I still can't quite believe there aren't strings on "Who Lived Here?".
Bertelmann says he was unaware of John Cage when he had the idea, though someone must have clued him in after his first album, as his second was dutifully titled The Prepared Piano. Coming from a techno background, he basically wanted to make an acoustic synthesizer where each key could be programmed, after a fashion, with its own timbre. Quite different from the austerity of Cage, his songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods. The latter gain ground on Abandoned City, as though Bertelmann were glimpsing a desolate future in the discarded places for which the songs are named.
After learning his way around solo prepared piano improvisations, Bertelmann started branching out. Enlisting collaborators and adding electronics, he enshrined his knack for pert chamber froth on Ferndorf, perfected his acoustic house music concept on Salon des Amateurs, and tried out bracing modern chamber music with a world-renowned young classical violinist on Silfra. Abandoned City brings him full circle to solo piano, but with bits and pieces he's picked up along the way. It's often patterned like electronic dance music, its busy syncopation redoubled by a small fleet of clean and filtered microphones.
Within its limits, the album is fairly diverse, though after so many records, the style might be wearing a bit thin. There's horror-movie buildup music like "Elizabeth Bay", acoustic IDM like "Pripyat", slowly sweeping melancholia like "Craco", techno in homespun disguise like the exhilarating "Agdam". But no matter what Bertelmann puts in his piano, every clever noise it makes necessarily deprives it of another, expanding timbral range at the expense of harmonic. All the skittering pizzicato, clenched syncopation and scudding bass overshadows distinctions in the compositions. When the convulsions relax on "Who Lived Here?", where Bertelmann lets a beautiful melodic structure unfold, it's a nice change of pace to hear more of his voice than his piano's.


Three years after an encounter with Pharrell turned her into a viral phenomenon, the accidental star finally delivers her debut album, but her talents are eclipsed by overproduction.

Heard It in a Past Life

It is tempting to imagine Maggie Rogers’ career rollout had she not found viral fame from Pharrell’s patronage: the narrative she might have chosen, the songs she could have deployed to establish her aesthetic. This student at the Clive Davis Institute had just started incorporating electronica into her folky songwriting when the visiting producer poured lavish praise on her class project, “Alaska.” It is ironic that a song about a recent personal reclamation (“And I walked off you/And I walked off an old me”) led to a renewed loss of control in Rogers’ life, one that she has likened to a violation, or, in the naturalistic songwriting she prefers, a bout of freak weather.
But how different, really, is Rogers’ ascent from that of any other nascent pop star? A new artist finds traction thanks to a song landing on a Spotify playlist or a celebrity boosting it on Instagram. A game of Battleship ensues as the label triangulates a semblance of strategy around anticipating fickle public tastes. If the shots miss, they try different directions, producers, collaborators. When enough land, an album might appear. Poleaxed by the attention and the demand to produce more music as quickly as possible, Rogers released a hesitant EP but then resisted immediately capitalizing with an album, craving time to figure out what she wanted to say. Understandably, a good part of Heard It in a Past Life is about the crisis induced by losing control, its intimate electronic production tasked with keeping her earthbound. Rogers taking her time seems like a rebuke to the cheapness associated with viral success, though the result melts easily into the algorithmic slipstream.
It’s easy to hear what Pharrell heard in “Alaska.” Rogers has a classic case of consonant-averse indie voice, meaning it’s often hard to decipher the words, but still, the falsetto-layered chorus has a lightheaded euphoria that makes her feeling of freedom plain. She co-produced the song—apparently in 15 minutes—and her production, however self-consciously whimsical (there’s a mourning dove in there somewhere), charmed like fireflies at dusk. Considering this student’s idiosyncratic work left one of the most successful producers in pop history speechless, the sight of so many big-ticket pop aides on Heard It in a Past Life’s credits is depressing: It feels symptomatic of the fate of young female pop producers not to be trusted with their own voices. I would bet cash that if Pharrell had bestowed approval on a male student, his would be the only name on the credits.
Whether it’s down to Greg Kurstin, Rostam and Kid Harpoon, or Rogers’ own intentions, her major-label debut is overproduced. Teeming with cicada hiss, beats as tacky as an army of tongues, synths that reverberate like a pigeon cooing down an exhaust pipe, bell-like resonance, and wan R&B runs, it suggests a more sylvan Sylvan Esso, Haim if they’d grown up in Portland, the last traces of residue from a decade of Bitte Orca.
It’s also melodically indistinct. Songs often hew to similar structures: somber, one- or two-note verses with the emphasis landing at the end of each line, followed by a bolder, boilerplate chorus. The bright, polysyllabic incantation of “Give a Little” has the homespun quirk of a song from a decade-old iPod advert. A tribute to Rogers’ fans, “Light On” feels written to inhabit a rousing spot towards the end of a setlist (and is no “Remember My Name”). “Burning” sparks on the kind of vocal exhortations that Florence Welch uses to rally her players into battle. The innate elegance of “Alaska” is a bug crushed under heel.
While often precious, it’s never bad or incompetent, but there’s a frustrating sense of bets being hedged, particularly once the more ambitious production gives way to mildly anguished stadium boom towards the end. There are some misses: Piano ballad “Past Life” feels like a stab at “Writer in the Dark,” right down to arriving at the album’s halfway point, though it lacks the brazen weirdness that made Lorde’s song so sublime. The opening notes are also heavily reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” though the clunky, folksy repetition of “I could feel the change a-coming” smothers the potential for rueful mysticism à la Stevie.
Rogers actually invokes Nicks on “Retrograde,” an angsty, chugging song about reconciling her past and present that references a line from the title track of Nicks’ 1981 solo debut, Bella Donna. Nicks wrote the song to warn herself to slow down following six years in the biggest band in the world, copious substance abuse, a tumultuous relationship with an autodidact who once kicked her on stage, and a tour of Europe in what transpired to be Hitler’s old train. It puts the stresses of having an indie-pop hit into perspective.
But, to give Rogers credit, those are the moments she communicates most effectively: running around the block twice in Paris to clear her head and convince herself not to run away (“Back in My Body”); being “drenched in madness, tangled blues” (“On + Off”). Maybe it’s something she always had, but perhaps having her life exploded in three minutes and nine seconds has given her an acute sense for the alchemy of transformation. Precise instances of clarity, infatuation, and confusion abound, yet the underdeveloped writing offers mostly exposition instead of the potential for Robyn-like communal revelations.
She is capable of them: Watch her heart-punching performance of “Fallingwater” on “SNL,” which she tackles with a hunter’s bloodlust that puts the album’s benign Spotifycore-friendly version in the shade. Rogers’ voice is often stubborn and serious on record, refusing to give up the expected drama. It’s a compelling refusal in some respects, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying, especially when you know what she is capable of. While Rogers has criticized the Pharrell narrative as “so fucking dainty,” that restraint preserves her as the meek deer in the headlights, the girl who got lucky, not the ambitious auteur ready to set her own fate.


The Broken Social Scene member's second full-length is decidedly laid-back and homespun. Every track is built around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment.

You Gots 2 Chill

Compared to the messy, sprawling indie rock churned out by his main band Broken Social Scene, Brendan Canning's 2008 solo debut Something for All of Us was a surprisingly low-key affair filled with humble, simply tuneful songs. Canning's kept busy in the half-decade since that album's release with a wide variety of activities, from Broken Social Scene's studio swan song (2010's Forgiveness Rock Record) to film scores (this year's Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle The Canyons) to a complex, mysterious interactive multimedia endeavor involving director David Cronenberg and a biotech lab. Given the scope of these projects, it's easy to understand why Canning's approach to his new solo record You Gots 2 Chill was decidedly laid-back and homespun: he put together his own independent label to handle the album's release (named for his home street, tucked into the heart of downtown Toronto), drew the cover art himself, and recorded without help from any of his Broken Social Scene associates. The album title isn't a command to listeners—it's a note to self, the kind of thing you'd throw on a Post-It note and stick onto your fridge.
The music contained within You Gots 2 Chill is true to the album's low-key origins and winking title. Every track is built up around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment; Canning draws a rough-hewn, earthen beauty from the strings on tracks like the misty "Never Go to the Races" and the wistful "Last Song for the Summer Hideaway". There's a refreshing sense of humor present in the album's song titles and sequencing: "Makes You Motor" chuckles at its unhurried mid-tempo groove, while the frisky "Plugged In" lives off the grid just like the rest of the record. Taken together, this sense of humor and the album's unadorned songwriting combine to give You Gots 2 Chill, and Canning, a charmingly unpretentious vibe. That's not to say that the record is entirely devoid of fully realized songs: cuts like the bubbling, slowly layered "However Long" and the pedal steel-flecked lead single "Bullied Days" (sung by Snowblink's Daniela Gesundheit) are fleshed out without sacrificing Canning's ear for gentle, slowly shifting melody.
You Gots 2 Chill also pays quiet tribute to the sound and feel of analog technology, with two interludes ("Long Live Land Lines" and "Once a Lighthouse") recorded directly onto Canning's voicemail and placed onto the album. He tips his cap at the influence of the experimental acoustic guitarist John Fahey on album opener "Post Fahey", and by devoting the remainder of the album to an exploration of the instrument's melodic possibilities and moods, he makes a decent argument for its continued relevance. But You Gots 2 Chill's defining characteristic is also its key weakness: if listeners fail to grant each new mid-tempo acoustic number its fair share of attention, they begin to blur together into one large mid-tempo acoustic blob. This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory.


Since its release in the summer of 2002, Rjd2's commercial debut Dead Ringer has become recognized as one of ...

Since We Last Spoke

Since its release in the summer of 2002, Rjd2's commercial debut Dead Ringer has become recognized as one of hip-hop's most highly regarded turntablist records. A drum-funk tour-de-force, the record continued Def Jux's then-unparalled creative streak, spotlighting Rjd2 as the only hip-hop producer since DJ Shadow capable of taking to both long-form rhythmic experiments and 3:30 rap cages with such effortless dexterity.
But just as seasons lead to new colors and moods, careers lead to new directions, and in two years, things have changed dramatically for R.J. Krohn. Since We Last Spoke is a dizzying taster's choice that plays like a broken radio dial, jumping from nostalgic A.M. soul and funk-rock cantinas to tech-house jams and retro synth vamps. Yet, while variety has been inherent in all of Rj's work, the mish-mash of styles on display here feels less like a result of intent than of indecision, and as a result, these sudden 180s tend to cut into the record's cohesiveness.
Fortunately, Rjd2's picked up a wealth of new tricks since Dead Ringer to compensate for the unexpected stylistic transformation: Since We Last Spoke is packed with crashing silences and false senses of security, radical mutations of Dead Ringer's gritty electronic textures, and an overall darker tone that conjures rusted bridge girders, fractured kaleidoscopes, and smog-shrouded sunsets. "Making Days Longer" in particular breeds success, opening with the light pluck of oriental strings as a cavern opens to reveal a double helix of Metroid-evoking synth lines. Here, framed by reverberating analog lines and an aorta drum pulse, Krohn sweetly dictates the greatest telephone jingle never made: "Strange how a phone call can change your day, take you away/ Away from the feeling of being alone/ That's the telephone."
For a guy who's been shadowed by a certain comparison throughout his relatively brief career, it's ironic that his sophomore slump, while never as problematic, so closely mirrors that of Josh Davis. Many of the missteps of Shadow's The Private Press are repeated here, as Rj shirks rapping and scratching in lieu of synths, and discovers the gentle strength of the indie rock vocal. On "1976", Krohn dons a leisure suit and bongos out his own copa-cobanger while subtle Moog helicopter drones, machine-gun horns, and car-chase bass spin a tale that might've felt more at home soundtracking Magnum P.I. than serving as the showcase cut from his latest LP.
Rjd2 does return to his strengths on occasion here: "To All of You" is a soft-focus blaxploitation love theme recalling Isaac Hayes' Shaft mood-setting; "One Day" mellows out with gently pressed piano chords and dusky synthtones punctuated by a muted kickdrum and handclap-inflected snare hits; "Exotic Talk" jumps between a reworking of his fiery Urban Renewal Program contribution "True Confessions" and tense dropouts dripping with wah-wah'd clavinet. Still, Since We Last Spoke is something of a checker game: For every track like "Someone's Second Kiss", portraying the emotional severity of an android funeral dirge, there's another in which Rj throws back to the worst of the 1980s with a cheesy, guitar-centric pop/rocker like "Through the Walls".
Over the course of Since We Last Spoke, Rjd2 experiments with indie rock, IDM, metal, Italo-disco, downtempo, and 80s R&B.; Unfortunately, few of these tracks wield the same impact as his tried-and-true hip-hop productions, and more often than not, feel like attempts at being everything to everyone. At the end of "To All of You", there's a minute-long stretch of rugged blues boom-bap and a scratched vocal repeating, "Play that beat." If only Rjd2 had heeded that advice.


With its wistful musings on adolescence and nostalgia, the indie rock trio’s first album in eight years picks up right where they left off.

Pono

For most of their career, A Great Big Pile of Leaves have existed only in fond memory. With their first two albums, 2010’s Have You Seen My Prefrontal Cortex? and 2013’s You’re Always on My Mind, the New England indie rock trio amassed a cult following for their playful songs about classroom banter, carb-heavy meals, and late-night skinny dips. Their disappearance for the better part of the decade only emphasized the wistful nature of those records. Pono, their first album in eight years, picks up right where they left off. An enjoyable if predictable return, AGBPOL’s long-awaited third record sounds less like a sign of progress and more like a grateful nod to the fans who stuck around during the hiatus.
Although AGBPOL’s inception in 2007 coincided with a larger wave of “emo revival” bands, their sound is less abrasive than many of their peers. Their music alternates between the punchy riffs of Algernon Cadwallader and the whimsical breed of 2000s guitar rock dubbed “landfill indie.” Pono often sounds like a postcard from that era, which makes sense: Much of the album’s material was written years ago, some even predating You’re Always on My Mind. So although this isn’t quite a pandemic project, the timing feels appropriate: The narrators of these 10 tracks long for childhood routines like school and summer vacation. Like catching up with an old friend you haven’t seen in god-knows-how-long, the underlying message seems to be, “Weren’t things nice before life got in the way?”
With its nostalgic gaze toward adolescence, Pono sounds nonchalant but never careless. The memories feel precise and purposeful, even if songs about crushes and sneaking out can easily border on hackneyed. In the highlight “Beat Up Shoes,” frontman Pete Weiland recalls indulging in post-curfew cruises over a gradually crescendoing instrumental: “Mrs. Wurmbrand would be happy/That we were using our geometry,” he sings, contemplating the mechanics of leaping from upper-story windows. “Writing Utensils” begins as a tribute to classroom mundanities but soon raises larger existential concerns: “So focused on the parameters of the test/But forget to bring something to write with.” While AGBPOL’s past work addressed similar topics in what felt like the present tense, Pono offers a more bittersweet perspective: With Weiland now a married father, what do these guileless moments represent?
“[The pandemic] glorified a lot of memories, getting you to miss some of the things that you didn’t even like when you were there,” Weiland recently observed, and there’s something poignant about a band like AGBPOL—who, for most of their fanbase, serve as a soundtrack to reminiscence and yearning—releasing an album so focused on this behavior. Many of the anecdotes on Pono are best served with this kind of hindsight; after all, the freedom of adulthood you crave as a teen almost never feels as transformative as you expect, and once-aspirational antics like “waking up in yesterday’s clothes”—as Weiland sings on opener “Yesterday’s Clothes”—become less enchanting with age. Perhaps Pono should be taken less at face value, and more as a case for enjoying whatever season of life you’re experiencing in the moment.

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As the title implies, the latest New Order release contains extras from the band's Waiting for the Sirens Call era-- their last sessions with Peter Hook. Following tussles over mixes and copyright, they release the leftovers, a remix, and "Hellbent", from 2011's Joy Division/New Order singles cash-in, Total.

Lost Sirens

This isn't a new New Order album, exactly. During the long, expensive sessions that produced 2005's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, New Order recorded a small pile of extra material, the idea being that they'd get a few more songs down after the subsequent tour and call it another album. But they stopped playing together after 2006, then bassist Peter Hook left the band acrimoniously, and the two camps spent a few years bickering at one another. However, since the return of keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, they've been touring again as, effectively, an oldies act-- minus Hook. (Their set lists last year featured, typically, all of two post-1993 songs, and encores from the Joy Division catalogue.)
Now, following extended tussles over mixes and copyright, they're finally releasing the leftovers from their final sessions with Hook: six previously unheard songs, plus one remixed Sirens' Call track and the awesome "Hellbent", which appeared on the 2011 Joy Division/New Order singles cash-in, Total. Eight songs in a bit under 40 minutes; that's an EP by 2013 standards, but it's longer than either Movement or Brotherhood.
Singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner has called Lost Sirens "a non-completed album, [the likes of] which we've never released before." That's not necessarily evident from listening to it, and they've certainly released a lot of more ragged material in the past. These are densely packed, finely detailed arrangements in New Order's late-80s rock-with-keyboards mode-- much more recognizable as the work of the band that recorded "Dream Attack" than the one that recorded "Fine Time". Sumner's lyrics are, as usual, almost half-baked a tad more often than they're almost profound, and his voice still sounds exactly as clear, earnest, and likeably strained as it did when he was a babyfaced ex-punk with a ridiculous haircut.
A lot of what made 80s-era New Order special, though, was their perpetual fascination with body music and the culture around it-- the way they always latched onto the dance music of the moment, from the tail-end of disco to Latin freestyle to acid house, and reworked it in their own idiom. Lost Sirens obviously can't suggest much familiarity with what's going on in dance clubs in 2013, and it doesn't suggest what was going on there when it was recorded close to a decade ago; the clock stopped for their groove sense around the time they first broke up. ("Hellbent" would sound totally natural mixed out of Primal Scream's Madchester anthem "Loaded.")
Peter Hook's presence on Lost Sirens is, understandably, somewhat muted-- there are a few of his signature fretless bass solos scattered around the album, but this is very much a guitar-driven, Sumner-centered record. Aside from occasional New Order-y instrumental flourishes, it wouldn't be a surprise to learn that these were actually recordings by Sumner's 90s band, Electronic. Even so, every time Hook's bass rears up in the mix-- the lead to the chorus of "Californian Grass", or the instrumental break in "I've Got a Feeling"-- it's a reminder of how well Sumner, Hook, and Stephen Morris always played together, and how their collaboration had an instrumental identity as distinctive as any band's. It's worth noting that the titles of both of those songs echo the Beatles' postponed, bickered-over swan song, Let It Be.
"It's been 10 long years since I've been home," begins "I Told You So", the one song here reprised from Sirens' Call. (The very different mix here sounds more like a rewrite of "All Tomorrow's Parties".) That's a doubly barbed line in this context, made more so by how Sumner follows it a moment later: "It's an occupation I don't like/ But it pays the rent and turns on the light." Maybe New Order have some more albums in them; maybe with Gilbert back in the fold they'll recast themselves as a singles act again. Maybe not. These remnants of their most recent burst of creative fecundity are a decent way for them to go out, if they are indeed going to be playing the hits to pay the rent from here on out. As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.


With battering-ram drums and cavernous bass, the producer’s second album is a high-energy drama about planetary destruction that almost dares you not to take it seriously.

Planet’s Mad

For a moment, the image was everywhere: the most famous teenager in music, sticking out her tongue and unfurling a shirt reading “No music on a dead planet.” The specter of climate change haunts modern pop: Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey croon about fires in Los Angeles, Grimes embraces global destruction, the 1975 shout “fossil fueling masturbation.” Of course the crisis trickled into festival-core electronica—possibly the genre best equipped to depict the throb and disarray of a decaying world. On his new album, Planet’s Mad, “Harlem Shake” producer Baauer again tries to outrun one-hit-wonder status, this time using battering-ram drums and dancefloor fracas to soundtrack planetary destruction. The clumsy twist is that Baauer means it literally: Through a set of accompanying videos and forced sonic cues, he attempts to convey the tale of a rogue planet crashing into Earth, filling our world with aliens looking to party.
The conceit works when the songs evoke chaos, tangling up tightly controlled instrumentals into an all-out mash. On the title track, sirens wind and screech as the beat builds; a bassline reminiscent of James Bond plunges into thwacking drums. For a producer who gravitates towards trap and tropical house, it’s startlingly guitar-heavy, and the instrumental gnarl creates a lively vision of dystopia—all bang, no whimper. “Aether” erupts in frenetic hi-hats and titanic bass, the notes sounding like muted, glitching screams as they spiral and leap. “Cool One Seven One” opens on a smattering of laughter, climbing with the chatter of a faraway crowd, until the steadily ticking beat and flurry of beeps crescendo in the kind of bassline that blows out speakers. This isn’t necessarily club fodder, but Baauer retains the cavernous bass and drum shuffles that played well at frat parties and proms; most of these tracks have the power to wobble through your body.
The sci-fi narrative disrupts this flow, though, and the interruptions of Baauer’s robot narrator are grating. “Tempo has reached critical level,” says a monotone announcer in “Cool One Seven One.” “This is an emergency.” “Rhythm… sound… rhythm… sound,” a glitchy voice repeats on “Hot 44,” only abating after an avalanche of a beat drop. Countering these are the presumably human voices Baauer employs when his songs soften and slow, a device that only emphasizes how jarring all the beeps and buzzes are. At the end of “Planck,” a mournful sigh floats over a synth; on “Pizzawalla,” one of the few moments the album lurches towards hip-hop, a prayer-like vocal undulates over a wispy chord before getting chopped up over the drums.
Baauer’s last album was stacked with features, including a Future and Pusha T. collab and an M.I.A. banger. On Planet’s Mad, the only guest vocalist is English singer Bipolar Sunshine, who’s best known for crooning on DJ Snake’s diet trop-house hit “The Middle.” “The pain is too strong to hold in,” he cries through AutoTune on “Home.” “I’m on my way, so don’t change your pin.” It’s a sterile, palatable pop song that feels jarringly out of place; it doesn’t make sense in the flimsy alien chronicle, and musically it has nothing to do with the clanging bedlam that animates the rest of the album. Baauer has been pointedly self-aware about his work in the past (he once said he “hated” “Harlem Shake”), but his latest songs are too jittery and goofy to land. Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.

Buy: Rough Trade
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