Collaborating with artists like Mr Eazi, Burna Boy, and Sampa the Great, the Beninese icon builds upon a proudly pan-Africanist musical vision that celebrates the power of community.

Mother Nature

Angélique Kidjo’s musical vision places Africa at the center of her work. Born and raised in Benin, the polyglot singer/songwriter/storyteller was sourcing from the roots of African rhythms long before they came into vogue as international signifiers of taste and worldliness. On Mother Nature, Kidjo serves up a feast of the most sublime sounds found in the Black diaspora. Recording in France, she calls upon a virtual collective of artists from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mali, Zambia, and the U.S. to craft a dynamic, varied album that nods to the foundational sounds of Afrobeat, the spirituality of Zilin, and the role of the griot, while embracing the sounds of Banku and hip-hop. The end result is a project with shared memories, global reach, and a singular genesis that spans the continent’s artistic realms.
Kidjo is credited as either composer or producer on 11 of the album’s 13 tracks, but in both the studio and her songs, collaboration and community are of utmost importance. Singing in Fon, Yoruba, French, and English, she calls for women’s autonomy, uplifts an African generation raised on political disappointment, and aspires toward a world that understands the true weight of ubuntu. On “Dignity,” Kidjo and Nigerian singer-songwriter Yemi Alade sing about the women they’ve become and for the women who raised them, their voices weaving between pop and Afrobeat. Structured in a call and response between the two, the track hangs on the impassioned refrain, “Respect is reciprocal.” As an anthem of female empowerment, the message is understated but resolute. It doesn’t have the direct confrontation of South African star Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s “Who’s Got the Power,” but it is equally as determined to highlight those who are most marginalized as full and capable beings deserving of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
On “Africa, One of a Kind,” Nigerian Banku singer Mr Eazi joins Malian legend Salif Keita to reimagine Keita’s 1995 song “Africa.” Where some write songs to rep area codes or neighborhoods, Kidjo, Keita, and Mr Eazi address those who claim allegiance to the entirety of the continent, celebrating a pan-Africanist pride that recognizes no borders. These cross-generational collaborations give the album much of its power. On “Do Yourself,” Kidjo cedes room to Nigerian superstar Burna Boy but remains very much present via her distinctive vocal riffs, which, depending on the song, can be cries of celebration or shouts of defiance. Here they are the latter, serving to remind what makes her such a captivating performer and storyteller; her idiosyncrasies add fullness to her work. “Omon Oba,” with appearances by Beninese artists Lionel Loueke and Zeynab, takes its old-school feel from Zimbabwean township music pioneered in the early 1930s, and “Take It or Leave It” is unmistakably influenced by the urbane tones of highlife, with an amusingly frank verse courtesy of EarthGang’s Olu.
Kidjo, 60, comes from the same generation as Burundian singer Khadja Nin and South Africa’s late Brenda Fassie, and her narratives are part of a tapestry of stories collected, given color, and stitched together by African women. All three saw Africa as it heaved and gasped for air, and each offered melodies for the moment. Fassie’s “Boipatong” swept through Southern Africa in 1992, carrying its message of resistance to white colonial rule far beyond her native home. In 1996, on “Sambolera,” Nin sang of the bleeding soil and betrayed citizens who had emerged from the dust to be fed lies and deceit. Years later, Kidjo responds with “Fired Up,” an ode to those who have stormed through streets to get things done. “Ready, set, we are fired up!” she yells.
Kidjo’s music flows most easily, and the messages land with the greatest impact, when she’s not proselytizing, as she does on the Sampa the Great-assisted “Free and Equal” and the album’s title track. Analogies to color blindness and cultural mosaics on “Meant for Me” feel out of sync with an album that proudly centers voices of the Black diaspora. Her collaborators focus their collective lens on Blackness and daily African realities, both mundane and exceptional. To sing of a racial rainbow sounds forced and toothless, and lacks the persuasive power that marks the album’s strongest songs.
Kidjo’s calls for harmony might sound willfully naive were it not for the fact that the entire trajectory of her career has been shaped by a genuine belief that music can change the world. No one is left behind in her body of work. On Mother Nature, she looks backward, to the figures who have come before her, and outward, uniting regional traditions into a celebratory pan-Africanist movement, while nurturing musicians like Yemi Alade, Mr Eazi, and Sampa the Great, young Black creators who follow Kidjo’s example of community-rooted artistry. Her success is not a pyramid but a constantly growing circle.

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Former emo stars ditch much of their raw, co-ed harmonies and refocus their vocal spotlight to train solely on Caithlin De Marrais.

Rainer Maria: Catastrophe Keeps Us Together

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together

On the casino floor at Caesar's Palace, carefully positioned to catch spillover from the adjacent Colosseum Theatre, is a gift shop devoted to a unique and singular brand: the Celine Dion Boutique. Now, I'm not so oblivious as to have missed the luminance of Ms. Dion's starpower, but as a marketable icon, Dion seems a bit hollow, and buying a $250 tracksuit with her name emblazoned on it seems a little like buying merchandise celebrating water or air. This is, after all, a performer whose big-budget Vegas revue features a Cirque du Soleil knockoff troupe to compensate for her shortage of stage presence.
Rainer Maria are far from having a replica historical amphitheater built for their performances, never mind the attached gift shop, but over the course of their five-album career their sound has traveled a path toward the kind of big-voice/big-message concept that would pack 'em in at an indie casino (Cosloy's Palace?). Once upon a time, the trio rode the second or third wave of emo, with Kyle Fischer and Caithlin De Marrais hurling raw harmonies at each other like Fleetwood Mac cum Fugazi. But after mastering that dynamic on the first song of their first full-length ("Tinfoil") the band has refocused their vocal spotlight to train solely on De Marrais.
In a technical sense, De Marrais' pipes are powerful enough to carry the band's load, especially now that they don't have to deal with intrusion of Fischer's indie-boy yelp. However, the band has also streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns. Rainer Maria may still be writing love songs, but the relationships of Catastrophe Keeps Us Together appear thematically and musically less complicated and knotty.
Even with an occasionally dark-tinged lens, Catastrophe's hearts will go on in widescreen style. The title track turns a grim apocalyptic vision into a repopulation fantasy, De Marrais belting out, "At the end of the world, I'm gonna find you," in true end-credits fashion. Elsewhere, "Love is..."-like statements are dropped, instructions for relationship success are dispensed, and acoustic guitars are played crisply. Not every story has a happy ending, but songs like "Life of Leisure" and "Already Lost" don't have anywhere near the meltdown of a good old De Marrais/Fischer screaming match-- and the vocab-heavy narrations fall short of disguising their cloying, cliched sentiments.
Fischer's input throughout is restricted to his guitar, which continues Rainer Maria's trend of focusing mostly on echobox atmosphere rather than serrations. Problem is, the punchier parts still sound the best, the four-chord mantra of "Bottle" or the overdrive-drenched darting between the drums of "I'll Make You Mine" standing out relative to the spacier, flimsier tones of their reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine".
It's useless to keep wishing hard for the heady days of the mid-90s; like the rest of us, the members of Rainer Maria are different people than they were 10 years ago. But it's still discouraging to see a band that once painted such accurate sound pictures of the complexities of love go the primary-color route of the power-ballad, snipping off the loose ends and hangnails that formerly propelled their relationship updates. Like the anthemic stylings of Ms. Dion, Catastrophe's valentines are direct and glossy, but ultimately as hollow as a gift-shop bauble-- a brand unworthy of a tracksuit.


Chewing the foundations of rock into gritty sludge, the New York quartet proudly makes music that sounds loud, messy, and wrong.

And I Revel

Each of the four members of New York band Shimmer have spent the better part of the past decade exploring the frayed fringes of rock music. Anina Ivry-Block and Nina Ryser make chattery, absurdist miniatures as Palberta. Paco Cathcart’s solo endeavor the Cradle is an idiosyncratic exploration of “analog natural jank.” Simon Hanes, once a member of the psycho-surrealists Guerilla Toss, makes intricately arranged instrumentals as Tredici Bacci. As exploratory and otherworldly as their music is separately, their work together is stranger and uglier than anything they’ve made on their own. Shimmer take the foundations of rock music—the flailing riffs, soaring harmonies, stuttering drum beats—and chew them into gritty sludge.
The clearest evidence of this comes midway through their 2017 debut, when they hit a segment of a song called “Not Fade Away” that draws on the oft-covered Buddy Holly standard of the same name. The guitar parts are sickly and curdled, ping-ponging in and out of rhythm and key. The drums stagger wildly. Ivry-Block sings an approximation of Holly’s first two lines in a desperate yowl, then spends the rest of the song making up the words or singing outright gibberish. The whole song is so crumbling and busted that it’s tough to even call it a cover. Maybe it’s not. It is demonstrative of their approach as a whole: proudly making music that sounds loud, messy, and wrong.
Shimmer’s second album, And I Revel, is a refinement of this overarching idea, insomuch as it concentrates the acidic bite of their music more strongly than ever. From the first moments of opening track “Bring It to Me Now,” Shimmer’s component parts congeal into an acrid ooze. Cathcart and Hanes’ guitar and bass lines swim around one another, seemingly agnostic to the martial plod of Ryser’s kick drum. Ivry-Block screams over the top in a painful-sounding squelch that’s more or less impossible to decipher.
Pieces like these feel similar to what they’ve done in the past—and, for that matter, to a lot of bands who have drawn on the lineage of no wave’s atonal rasp—but they’re better than ever at manipulating the dynamics. “All the While,” for example, follows the record’s squirmy opening into a jittery, ecstatic energy that sounds like an AmRep band too caffeinated to see their frets straight. Smartly, there are quieter moments throughout And I Revel, too. The melting ice cream truck interlude “Wet Absence,” the music-box melodies of “Enter the Rounds,” and the hymn-like ballad appended to the end of “Nightvision” only underscore the record’s terrifying disjointedness.
Unlike a lot of bands working under the broad umbrella of noise rock, Shimmer don’t rely on many obvious effects or studio tricks to carry the weight of their wonderfully ugly recordings. They’re dry, which amplifies their bludgeoning nature—it’s as if there’s nowhere to hide, no corner safe from the bulldozing energy. If it sounds upsetting, that, on some level, is the point. But consider: A host on Antiques Roadshow once took a taste from a bottle of urine, human hair, and old brass pins and, based on the rusty, oxidized taste, thought that it might be vintage port wine. There’s less distance between disgusting and beautiful things than you might think.


Departing from his typically electronic palette, the UK musician’s new album plunges into a maze of contradictory influences drawn from dub, post-punk, and alt rock.

Drift

Gaika Tavares has made a career of being difficult to pin down. With each new outing, the south Londoner seems to gain a fresh hyphen: rapper-singer-columnist-curator, producer-activist-promoter. And he has committed wholeheartedly at every turn. Over the past decade or so, he’s swung between relishing an outsider’s status and pushing established institutions to be more adventurous and inclusive. On Drift, he cuts loose. Where albums like Spaghetto and Seguridad foregrounded a largely electronic palette, this record came together in freeform jam sessions. Split between club music and alt rock, its hazy fug is sometimes enveloping and at others, fruitlessly confounding.
Drift is Gaika’s fifth album, or seventh counting mixtapes (or “second proper proper album” if you ask him), and was cobbled together over three years, originating in sprawling, secluded studio sessions in Portugal and East London. These ran as a sort of extension of the Nine Nights livestreams, parties, and exhibitions he’s curated with GLOR1A and Shannen SP since 2020, in the effort to discover and sustain new creative environments for Black artists operating outside of the music industry’s established strictures. On Drift, that exploratory spirit has led to a pronounced stylistic shift in Gaika’s music. He has softened his electronic and industrial edges and folded in guitars laden with effects pedals; steeped in post-punk and even grunge, it frequently captures the energy of a band playing together in real time.
There’s a heavy nod here to the situationist concept of “the dérive”—the drift—developed by French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord in the 1950s. Debord’s drift was a means of liberation from the distracting, oppressive conditions of “the spectacle.” (For Debord, the spectacle referred to “the autocratic reign of the market economy.” Today, the infinite scroll of social media is just one horrifyingly neat expression of what he was seeking freedom from.) On “PIÑATA,” Gaika rasps about “watching bloody murder on the television news” and devotes himself to escape. On “LA VACANZA,” he’s a “travelling man, just drifting on” from New York City to London, Mexico, an empty beach. Guitars swirl and drone, and close collaborator Kidä’s vocal unfolds in a flood of reverb. This sense of stretched possibilities is the album’s driving force.
Where Debord’s drifting occurred in physical space, Gaika takes strides across his own musical geography: thrumming shoegaze guitars, raps that become post-punk sprechgesang, found sounds, and brief club forays (the midpoint turn on “PIÑATA,” when he flips echoing handclaps to the plunk of a rolling amapiano log drum, is a highlight). Some drifts—“O VAMPIRO” dresses the bones of dub reggae with spiny rap-metal guitars—are dead ends; others, like the relentless clunking bass of “GUNZ” or the distant rumble of steel drum and pirate-radio mic pass on “BONEHEAD BEHAVIOUR,” offer snatches of transcendence. The maze of possibilities is the point. But if one thing is bound to drag the listener out of their liberatory trance, it’s Gaika’s habit of defaulting to a preening, hollowed lyric. His previously pointed political observations are mostly lost here to a fog of impenetrable fragments and pat one-liners (“When the penny in the pound drops/Focus on yourself”) that too often conjure that moment at the afters when the conversation turns philosophical and you realize it’s time to leave.
Debord’s revolution ultimately crumbled under a mess of competing practical approaches. But with Gaika’s pursuit of “pleasure that’s not a product”—alongside contemporaries like Inflo’s nebulous SAULT collective, and, on their latest album, Young Fathers—the simple act of running your hands across a guitar and feeling its strings vibrate beneath your fingertips sounds more radical by the long, elongated minute. Drift is Gaika’s riskiest artistic swing to date; the ease and understated composure with which he makes the stroke suggests a sense of quiet liberation, and of a polymath discovering his purpose.


The London jazz musician’s sprawling suite explores the vital function of breath in times of distress. The music can be tranquil, but it also formally mimics the act of calming down.

Breathe Suite EP

When you are engulfed in panic, you’re supposed to breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Slowly, and with purpose. Rhythmically filling and emptying your lungs is said to relieve inner turmoil. But what if the very act of focused respiration, the effort of making an involuntary task intentional, inflames that panic? What if air is simply not available? In Breathe Suite, London composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Marc (né Neil Charles) examines this paradox. His swirling arrangements—which synthesize jazz, hip-hop, neoclassical, and electronic—explore multiple aspects of breath: its inherent meter, vital function, and what happens when it’s stifled.
Breathe Suite consists of four interconnected pieces that recycle instrumental and verbal motifs: two suites with guest vocalists, and two improvisational pieces. Not intending to create a full EP, Marc wrote opener “Breathe Suite A” during the initial months of lockdown and enlisted singer MidnightRoba to contribute lyrics and vocals. “Once Midnight heard it, she asked for a longer version. I was adamant that this was the arrangement,” Marc said in a recent interview. “Whilst the conversation was being had, George Floyd was murdered.” Shaken, Marc extended the piece, adding dramatic string layers and opalescent harp. From that point, the EP took on a life of its own. Marc recruited artists from London’s jazz community and set out to make a record that could soothe in times of trauma. Breathe Suite can be tranquil, but it also formally mimics the act of calming down, the deep inhalations and the things we tell ourselves to curb distress.
Breathe Suite’s main recurring motif is a recording of a children’s choir. Their refrain reappears throughout: “I’ll raise my voice/You raise your hand/I’ll hold the truth/Until you understand.” Their voices are loose and uninhibited. They sound like normal kids rather than trained choristers, an intentional and effective choice by Marc, who wanted their presence to represent youth and innocence. A second motif is the simple but insistent repetition of “breathe.” Its urgent rhythm mimics quickened breath, like forceful exhales into a paper bag.
These patterns adopt different tones depending on Marc’s arrangements; on “Breathe Suite A,” they are meditative and melodic. On “Breathe Improv A” and “Breathe Improv B,” they become fraught. “Breathe Improv A” is scored solely by Marc’s bowed double bass, and its ominous, sickly timbre makes the command to “breathe, breathe, breathe” sound like hyperventilation. On “Breathe Improv B,” Marc buries the choir beneath metallic pangs of synthesizer, trapping their voices between its sharp edges. The allusion to breath in this context cannot be separated from the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner, men whose air was literally taken from them.
If anything protrudes from Marc’s sprawling compositions, it is a pair of verses from London musician and singer Rarelyalways on “Breathe Suite B.” Structurally the song resembles its companion piece, “Breathe Suite A,” but instead of being lifted by MidnightRoba’s satin register, it feels weighed down. Rarelyalways has a blunt, round voice that works well on his own music, but punches through Marc’s sweeping arrangements with dull jabs. Phrases like “Goodfellas” and “Dave Chappelle” rupture the glittering plane of viola, cello, and harp, and their context isn’t clear from a close reading of the lyrics. Marc’s piece feels grand and cosmic, while Rarelyalways riffs on the mundane. It’s not a bad performance, but it seems bulky and thrown-on.
Despite the distraction, “Breathe Suite B” includes a stellar performance from woodwind maestro Shabaka Hutchings, of trailblazing jazz groups Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming. Hutchings is an acrobatic player, and his insistent, nudging clarinet bends and flutters before launching into a feverish solo during the choir refrain. Hutchings’ skronking bristles against Marc’s loping cello, suggesting a deep-sown tension. It is a performance of crisis—the rage that bubbles in each breath and can’t be pacified.

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The British metal legends return with their dark and patient 17th album. While their influence looms large in heavy music, no other band sounds quite like this.

Senjutsu

Iron Maiden’s late-career albums have been stubbornly anti-nostalgia. While plenty of their peers eventually returned to the sounds that made them famous—Metallica on Hardwired…to Self-Destruct, Black Sabbath on 13, Judas Priest on Firepower—the British metal titans have walked their own road, to the frustration of casual fans who just want to relive the high-octane gallop of “Run to the Hills” and “The Trooper.” When they toured 2006’s grim, downtempo A Matter of Life and Death and played the 70-plus minute album in its entirety, it was seen as provocation. But this dedication showed that Maiden take their new work—more concerned with slow-building atmosphere and progressive song structures than the live-wire energy of their biggest albums—just as seriously as the classics. The band’s 17th full-length, Senjutsu, continues this trend. It’s another thoughtful, knotty album that has no interest in rehashing the 1980s.
Like every 21st century Maiden album, Senjutsu shares DNA with the refined melodies and epic scale of their 2000 reset, Brave New World. That album saw lead singer Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith rejoin the band following a mid-’90s exile that coincided with some of Maiden’s weakest records. Dickinson and Smith’s return yielded a strong comeback, and each successive release has nodded to its influence while expanding into new territory. Senjutsu is thrilling both when it’s refining the Brave New World template and expanding on it. “Lost in a Lost World” typifies the former mode, bookending its anthemic middle section with a pair of extended acoustic reveries. Conversely, lead single “The Writing on the Wall” feels new for them, borrowing from country and blues in a way this progged-out version of Maiden never has before.
The laid-back choogle of “The Writing on the Wall” is a rare moment of lightness on what is otherwise the darkest, heaviest Maiden record since A Matter of Life and Death. Beginning with the martial drum pattern and thunderous riffs of the title track, Senjutsu is by turns brooding, elegiac, and bellicose. The album’s darkness echoes some of the real-life circumstances of its creation. Senjutsu is the first Maiden album to be recorded since Dickinson was diagnosed with throat cancer, and during the sessions, he tore his Achilles tendon and learned he needed a hip replacement. Through the pain, he gritted out an impressive vocal performance. Age and illness have cut his soaring tenor down to something more earthbound, but it feels appropriate for the gloomier material.
Senjutsu is also one of Maiden’s most patient albums. That quality is most palpable on the trio of marathon-length songs that end the album, all written by bassist and bandleader Steve Harris. Taken as a triptych, these songs shine a light on both the strengths and shortcomings of reunion-era Maiden: “Death of the Celts” is the album’s only real failure, a plodding, didactic historical epic that feels like a retread of 1998’s “The Clansman.” “The Parchment” gets off to a slow start before letting the three-guitar attack of Adrian Smith, Dave Murray, and Janick Gers trade solos for five minutes, cranking the song up to a frenzied pitch the rest of the album rarely reaches. “Hell on Earth” is the real showstopper, gracefully darting between singalong hooks, histrionic guitar melodies, and weepy slow parts. All three songs share a basic template, but the different outcomes prove that even a rock-solid formula is only as good as its ingredients.
It feels impossible, but the lineup of Iron Maiden on Senjutsu is now the longest-tenured version of the band—they have been intact for longer than their entire recorded history leading up to the 1999 reunion. At this stage, they sound both comfortable and ambitious, settling into their familiar chemistry while adding new chapters to a story only they can write. A new Maiden album remains the only place to hear music with this particular synthesis of heaviness, melody, grandiosity, and compositional intricacy. While it’s easy to find a heavy band who can convincingly rip off The Number of the Beast, nobody else in the world sounds quite like this.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Depeche Mode’s lush and electronic 1997 album, a bridge between the increasing ambition of their early years and the easy confidence of their later ones.

Ultra

With a nearly all-synth approach that balanced technological exploration and pop hooks, Depeche Mode built a canon and a fanbase across the world in the 1980s. In their music, personal, political, and emotional angst could sound both catchy and danceable. Even when regularly dealing with assumptions they somehow weren’t making “real” music, they broke through in a big way—and then it all went to hell.
Soon after the massive triumph of their 1990 opus Violator and the epochal hits “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence,” lead singer Dave Gahan moved from the UK to Los Angeles and became a louche rock star, or a visually coded version of one—long hair, beard, tattoos. It was in marked contrast to his clean-cut appearance until that point, and it became the visual signal of deeper troubles. During the recording of 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion and its subsequent tours, he plunged into a brutal heroin addiction, while guitarist and songwriter Martin Gore wrestled with alcoholism, all of which factored into the worsening depression and eventual nervous breakdown of keyboardist Andrew Fletcher.
In D. A. Pennebaker’s 1989 Depeche concert film 101, Fletcher memorably and self-deprecatingly called himself the member who just “bum[med] around,” but in truth he had become Depeche’s in-house manager, now trying desperately to hold everything together. The overlay of increasing internal dysfunction led Alan Wilder, the group’s key musical experimenter and arranger, to finally leave the band in 1995. Gahan first attempted suicide that same year and almost fatally overdosed in 1996 during a break in the recording sessions. The band’s dysfunction seemed worse than ever.
In this light, Ultra shouldn’t have existed. An official album documentary released as part of the group’s late 2000s reissue series details the impact of Wilder’s departure and Gahan’s crises in particular, and how what typically might have been a three-month effort took close to a year’s worth of on-and-off work. Yet in the end, the trio of Gahan, Gore, and Fletcher put their name to one of Depeche Mode’s best albums, an all-in all-great listen that would be the obvious peak of a lesser band’s catalog. It formed a crucial bridge between the increasing ambition of their early years and the easy confidence of their later ones. If a sick sense of humor was at work, talk about a last laugh.
Two things were key. First, Tim Simenon, who had made waves as dance act Bomb the Bass with “Beat Dis” alongside numerous production and remix jobs including Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” and Björk’s “Play Dead,” came on board. Gore and Gahan were fans of an album he worked on, the intriguing 1995 release Shag Tobacco, by ex-Virgin Prunes singer Gavin Friday, which touched on dance and hip-hop as much as it did late-night jazz or mood music. So Simenon, assisted by regular engineer Q Engstrom, or simply Q, handled the production while keyboardist Dave Clayton and programmer Kerry Hopwood were added as key additional studio musicians. A little further advice from Mute founder and eternal band confidant Daniel Miller didn’t hurt, according to Hopwood: “Daniel gave us a great quote at the beginning: ‘Lads, put everything through a valve.’” Miller was referring to the kind of valve-based tape recorders the Beatles had used through most of their career at EMI Studios; Ultra’s resulting sound was enveloping, almost tactile.
Equally importantly and as part of his recovery, Gahan worked seriously on something key: voice lessons. He’d long since built up his powers of projection: The sweetly peppy vocalist of “Just Can’t Get Enough” turned into a force able to fill the space of the arenas the band was now inhabiting. But by learning how to control, relax, and preserve his instrument, he was able to expand his range and deliver performances that once seemed out of reach. Gore continued to write strong songs throughout this process. His knack for intriguing, catchy melodies matched his portrayals of melodramatic emotional states, and provided the bedrock for Ultra’s development.
“Barrel of a Gun,” both the album opener and lead single, had a lot riding on it, and it turned out to be the searing mirror image of Songs of Faith and Devotion’s own double-duty effort, “I Feel You.” That song was all feedback-laden priapic raunch; in contrast, “Barrel” is a slow grinding descent. Gahan sounds defiant but still wounded, at points ragged. Gore’s tightly wound guitar part is accentuated by massive beats that could suddenly turn even bigger. It feels like the closest that Gore ever got to writing about Gahan’s depths of despair; given how harrowing the experience had been for the band, you could easily imagine a full album exploring that extreme.
But the next track, “The Love Thieves,” is a near 180-degree turn—gentle, tender, and close, like you’ve stumbled across a small combo in a mythical late-night bar, setting an atmosphere. The real shock, though, is Gahan’s voice—his new training is evident from the first syllables, hitting higher notes, sounding smoother without being overly polished. You can almost hear his pleasure, which carries through the album; he experiments just so, his more commanding moments now less glowering, his quieter moments more inviting. Depeche had consistently created music that oozed lust one way or another—Gahan had now become a relaxed loverman.
The whole collective approach had a standout moment with “It’s No Good,” Ultra’s biggest relative hit in America (in Europe, as with “Barrel of a Gun” and the album itself, it scored far higher, reaching No. 1 in numerous countries). Simenon and company created a great arrangement, starting with a pulsing chug, suddenly hitting an explosive, slow bounce, with shuddering sounds as the undercarriage and a huge, focused, and ominous hook. Call it their own collective riff on G-funk that all leads into Gahan delivering a suave-as-hell lead vocal. Gore’s lyric is almost a raunchy riff on Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” but it’s Gahan’s confident delivery that turns it into a confession of barely suppressed mutual interest—in love, sex, or some combination thereof.
Throughout Ultra, the core sense of what Depeche was meant to be in this new phase gets tested and subtly reinvented or reframed. They’re still an electronic group at base, part of a musical universe increasingly receptive to that idea, but they didn’t want to be limited by that description either. Part of that variety lies in the use of outside musicians beyond Clayton and Hopwood; while there had been a couple of extra performers and singers on Songs of Faith and Devotion, the numerous instrumentalists here take a bow, most often in the rhythm section, creating bespoke parts that were then looped into the final results.
Drumming pro Victor Indrizzo provided the beats for “Barrel of a Gun” and “It’s No Good,” while the crack Sugar Hill/Tackhead rhythm section of Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc delivered a sharp, roiling groove for another standout single, the emotional confrontation of “Useless,” further helped by Simply Red drummer Gota Yashiki. Meantime, one of two Gore lead vocals on the album, “The Bottom Line,” featured an unexpected but thoroughly striking pairing of UK steel guitar legend B.J. Cole and Can’s brilliant Jaki Liebezeit, on a performance that Gore assayed with reflective but compelling calm.
Gore’s other lead vocal, “Home,” is a passionate, string-swept declaration of love that seems rooted in his then-recent marriage. Gore’s striking performances of the song, done in combination with backing singers, was a highlight of the comeback tour that eventually followed, although it wasn’t a tour for Ultra. While a slightly ad hoc version of the band performed a couple small promotional shows and TV appearances upon the album’s release, the group only returned for a world tour after Gahan was much more settled and healthy, in support of their second singles compilations, released in late 1998.
That tour answered the last remaining question as to whether Depeche would be fully back, with two new musicians, keyboardist Peter Gordeno and drummer Christian Eigner, anchoring the live lineup from that point forward. Given its by-default retrospective nature solely focusing on the newly collected singles, the tour was also the unspoken transition—one that a full Ultra tour would likely have just as immediately shown—from a fully in-the-moment act to one of comfortable veterans.
It wasn’t quite that Depeche had nothing left to prove, but at almost two decades in, Gahan’s recovery and vocal transformation—and the revamped touring lineup—built on Ultra’s mood to let them steer a new, less generally chaotic way forward. Their core fanbase never left them as they settled into new albums and tours every few years, while they had already inspired any number of younger musicians in turn—to name just two examples, a song like Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” made Depeche’s emotional and musical tension more explicit, while Shakira later described first hearing “Enjoy the Silence” in 1990 as fully sparking her interest in music—with many more to come.
The 1998 tour featured Ultra’s singles but left out everything else, including its final song, the intense grace of “Insight.” The album’s sequencing is remarkable and only “Insight” could have ended it. After starting with one of the album’s trademark arrangements—warm, though murky and slightly melancholy—Gahan’s entrancing voice delivers Gore’s sentiments of renewal: “This is the first chance/To put things right/Moving on guided by the light.” Gore’s harmonies, always one of the band’s secret weapons, intensify the mood, and his soft, repeated delivery of “Give love/You’ve got to give love” provides an elegant conclusion. But the most dramatic part is when Gahan sings “The fire still burns” as Gore matches him and stretches out “burns” as it melts into a rich descending orchestration, which he then adds further wordless harmonies to. It’s breathtaking, still.
Strictly speaking, Ultra doesn’t end there—in a very 1990s moment, there’s a brief hidden instrumental, “Junior Painkiller,” that follows after a short gap—but “Insight” is the ultimate counterbalance to “Barrel of a Gun,” an exchange of fraught desperation and on the brink feelings delivered at high volume for maximum impact, for something else entirely. It is reductive to say that it and Ultra as a whole was Depeche all grown up, but there is a feeling of hard-earned experience, of moving beyond younger behavior that courted disaster. Ultra is an album for reflective nights remembering past selves, a beautifully synthesized combination of talents making music that reflects experience without being trapped by it.


The virtuoso saxophonist’s 1969 album with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette is an essential document of a transitional moment in which everything in jazz seemed up for grabs.

Power to the People

Jazz, like the world it reflected, was in flux in 1969. That year, Miles Davis released In a Silent Way, an album whose low-key atmosphere belied its status as a herald of major upheaval, leading the music into a decade of electric instruments, studio-driven experiments, and rhythms that drew as much from funk and R&B as swing. Yet plenty of people were still playing changes in the old-fashioned way: A musician could devote their entire life to mastering the art, and just because Miles was suddenly doing tape manipulation and listening to Sly and the Family Stone didn’t mean everyone else was following suit. And free jazz, a decade or so old at that point, was still a radical force, its elaborations and deconstructions of melody providing alternate routes forward from tradition, ones that didn’t necessarily require plugging in at all.
Looking back, it’s tempting to see these various styles—fusion, straight-ahead, avant-garde—as utterly distinct and walled off, and it’s true that certain players could be dogmatic in their adherence to one idiom and rejection of the others. The case of tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson gives good reason to consider them more holistically. An old-school virtuoso who taught himself to play by transcribing and memorizing solos by bebop titans like Charlie Parker and Lester Young, he also brushed the edges of free jazz as a sideman with Andrew Hill, and encouraged his own supporting players to experiment with electronics even on records that steered clear of full-on fusion. His 1969 album Power to the People, available on vinyl for the first time in decades via a superb new reissue from Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary, is an essential document of this transitional moment, due in part to its creator’s disregard for rigid stylistic affiliation. If you want to hear, in a single album, how jazz—all of it—sounded just before the turn of the ’70s, you could do worse than this one.
Henderson surrounded himself with a few of the world’s best players for Power to the People. Two, keyboardist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter, were veterans of Davis’ band, and one, drummer Jack DeJohnette, was just joining up with Miles at around the same time; Henderson also recruited up-and-coming trumpeter Mike Lawrence on two of the seven tracks. Across the album, Hancock switches between acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, and Carter between upright and electric bass, choices that mirror the album’s fluid stylistic approach. Carter’s choice of bass, in particular, is a rough indicator of where a given track will fall on the spectrum. On upright, his primary instrument, he tends toward traditional walking lines, outlining the chords with a steady pulse that the rest of the players are free to improvise around. On electric, he dances more freely around the outskirts of the pocket, jabbing in and out in search of new rhythmic possibilities, nudging the music away from the jazz’s well-worn solo-and-accompaniment format and toward more open-ended group improvisation.
Power to the People begins with “Black Narcissus,” one of Henderson’s best-known compositions. Hancock’s Rhodes cycles through two ambiguous chords, setting a misty nocturnal atmosphere through which Henderson meanders elegantly. As his melody slowly rises toward the end of each chorus, so does the intensity of the ensemble’s playing, easing toward a big climax that never quite comes: Just as they seem ready to rip, the form repeats, and they reorganize themselves quickly in the more subdued earlier mode to begin the ascent once more. Each time they execute this rise-and-fall maneuver, the highs are more powerful and the lows more delicate: By the fourth drop, in the middle of Henderson’s solo, the accompaniment dissipates almost entirely, leaving only ghostly traces of harmony and the searching gestures of his horn.
Two pieces mark the far edges of Power to the People’s range. On one side, there is “Isotope,” an original that Henderson first recorded several years earlier, which could almost pass for a lost composition by Thelonious Monk, the idiosyncratic genius of the bebop era who’d first hit the scene when Henderson was still in grade school. On the other, the album-closing “Foresight and Afterthought,” an avant-garde odyssey that Henderson, Carter, and DeJohnette apparently improvised freely on the spot, whose climaxes nearly abandon harmony altogether in favor of ecstatic pure sound. The former is tight and swinging; toward the end of the latter, DeJohnette downshifts from his usual flurry of cymbals into a pummeling half-time rhythm that sounds to modern ears like the breakdown to a hardcore punk song. Even as they demonstrate how far jazz had come in the previous two decades, these two pieces also emphasize its continuity. Monk was essentially an avant-gardist in his time, and “Isotope” highlights the spiky angularity of the great pianist’s music; though “Foresight and Afterthought” is resolutely modern, Henderson makes room in between his streams of abstraction for a few short declarative riffs that carry distinct echoes of the blues.
If “Black Narcissus” is the tune on Power to the People that fans are most likely to know, the title track is the best reason for those who haven’t heard the album in full to seek it out. Nearly nine minutes long and ferociously groovy, it is an astounding showcase for the communal intimacy of these five musicians, many of whom had long histories working together in other configurations. DeJohnette plays like a man possessed by the sound of Henderson’s sax, backing off whenever the horn needs more room to maneuver and reaching nearly superhuman force when it’s time to dig in. During Hancock’s Rhodes solo, Carter begins playing natural harmonics, a technique that can make a stringed instrument sound more like a bell, and suddenly it’s like their two instruments are one and the same.
The minor-key melody they circle, like that of the earlier “Afro-Centric,” seems informed on some level by the South African jazz that had begun hitting U.S. shores earlier in the ’60s, though it’s possible the lines of influence are not so direct. Aside from a brief passage of quick changes, the piece sticks mostly to one chord, which allows for a certain jammy looseness: When there isn’t an elaborate harmonic structure to uphold, you’re free to try just about anything. It’s an approach many later fusion bands would use to great effect, but “Power to the People” still has a foot in older idioms: It isn’t a fancy studio creation, just a faithful document of five world-class musicians playing together.
“Opus One-Point-Five,” the lone tune penned by Carter on an album otherwise filled with Henderson originals, wears its liminality right on its title: not quite one number or the other, but somewhere in between. As it proceeds slowly and pensively, it’s difficult to tell where the composition ends and the improvisation begins. It has the outlines of a tender ballad, but its inner workings are surreal and disorienting. DeJohnette’s cymbals provide slippery texture rather than strict tempo; Hancock seems determined not to allow the music to settle, always spiraling off into some new dissonance. Henderson plays long, breathy lines, as if this really is the soundtrack to a moonlit romance, and then interrupts himself with an outburst of staccato or a scribbled aside. It is deeply strange music, even more so than Power to the People’s more overtly out pieces, precisely because of its proximity to the familiar. Near the end, to punctuate things, Hancock reaches over the keyboard and strums a chromatic cluster of notes directly on the strings of the piano, an eerie and highly specific sound that seems somehow outside the boundaries of the tune as we’ve come to understand it so far. Both out of place and perfectly intuitive, it bears an important message: In this music, anything is possible.


The second EP from these Minneapolis punks is a well-honed collection of crude, soured rock and sardonic humor.

All of Them Naturals

Minneapolis’ Uranium Club seem to revel in being aggressively obtuse. They sprung up last year with their Human Exploration EP, an eight-song tape of some of the most tightly-wound, gleefully mean, and well-constructed punk to grace the underground in a while. Human Exploration quickly became a must-have of the punk scene, receiving multiple vinyl pressings, all while the band rejected any web presence and most interviews as well.
All of Them Naturals, their second EP, is Uranium Club indulging even more in such pranksterish qualities. The first two minutes of audio are pulled from the Nation of Ulysses handbook of sarcasm and myth-making, as a man with a vaguely British accent comments fictitiously on all the band has supposedly accomplished since its last record, from selling novelty pencils to distributing pamphlets for “pseudo-intellectual literature circles and swingers’ parties.” Uranium Club must know that people have been patiently waiting to hear more from them, and the final track of All of Them Naturals winkingly plays into that: it’s a 30-second “excerpt” of another unreleased song.
In between, Uranium Club spits out some pretty damn catchy, no-frills punk rock. They have quickly garnered comparisons to Devo, particularly the twitchy neurosis of the early Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! era. It’s not unwarranted. Both bands share an affinity for guitar riffs so soaked in treble they could cut ear drums, and for attempting to shove as many starts and stops into a song as possible. “God’s Chest” is the frantic centerpiece of this release, and maybe the most directly hooky thing the band has crafted; it even incorporates some haywire synths near the end, a first for the band.
Not that Uranium Club’s reference points are strictly in the past. The sour intro of “Operation Pt.II” clearly evokes Tyvek and the lo-fi punk that the Detroit outfit has been cultivating for over a decade, as do the relentless jagged hits of “The Lottery.” Contemporaries like the Coneheads (and, to a lesser extent, the enigmatic Northwest Indiana punk scene as a whole) have been melding old school punk love to the modern trash punk aesthetic, and are also here in spirit.
The real secret of Uranium Club, though, is how casually talented they are. Besides the ridiculous precision of their playing, the interplay of the guitars clearly takes some notes from Wipers; the music is decidedly crude, but it’s still played with a well-honed intensity that flares up again and again. The buzzsaw solo in the middle of “Opus,” or gradual buildup and release of tension on “That Clown’s Got a Gun,” wouldn’t hit nearly as hard if it weren’t performed so forcefully here. Every song relishes in a ragged intensity, but never for a moment feels as if it could spiral out of control or fall apart, a rarity for bands in this genre.
Of course, Uranium Club has the perfect mask for their technical skills: lyrics marred by a sardonic sense of humor. “The Lottery” spins a relentless tale of someone turning into an absolute monster upon hitting the jackpot, throwing everyone from their son to their mom under the bus. “Who Made the Man?,” with its constant repetition of that platitude, drives ever-darker emphasis on the consequences of your actions, from success to murder. Uranium Club is a band unafraid to toss a line like “Will you please piss on my teddy bear?” into a song for the pure sake of disorientation. The band clearly wants to keep everyone on edge. If the Uranium Club is anything, it is at least very self-aware of exactly what it is doing.


The Los Angeles singer and songwriter’s full-length debut is grandiose and opaque, opting for intricacy over intimacy.

Public Storage

When Hana Vu started releasing music, she was a high schooler straining a muddle of teenage emotions into slick, sparse electropop. She wrung her angst and ache through simple, glum images: crying on the subway, staring blankly at the ocean. In 2019, she expanded her blasé bedroom pop into a conceptual dual EP about Nicole Kidman and Anne Hathaway. She used the actresses as architecture, homing in on the drama of a party or a fateful text message. Her voice sounded faraway at times, distorted through fuzz, and listening felt like eavesdropping on confessions. She wanted to be saved and she wanted to be strong; she wanted answers and she wanted absolution; she wanted and wanted.
On Public Storage, Vu’s official debut and her first release for Ghostly, that emotional core diffuses. These are opaque songs about armageddon, gesturing at morose feelings and crammed with abstract statements. Vu sings about heaven burning, about pleading with the sun, about dreaming in gold. “I live in a hole in the wall/You live in a hole in my head,” she sighs on “My House.” “They’ll blow smoke straight through your face,” she lilts on “Heaven, “And you turn to dust/And you fly away.” Where Vu’s previous releases were vivid and tactile, Public Storage numbs out. But the music is potent. Vu co-produced the album, which oscillates between bright coils of pop (“Keeper,” “Aubade”) and blasts of drums and guitar. At times, the sound is striking—the lush strings on “Maker,” the spatter of keys in “Anything Striking,” the weird wriggles of synths that creep into her choruses.
Vu named the album after the massive self-storage building she lived beside when she started writing it, a structure that reminded her of the storage units she used while moving around a lot as a kid. The record doesn’t convey that personal tie, though, and while Vu makes many pretty statements about God and good and evil, she offers little about herself. Instead she keeps a calculated distance, opting for intricacy over intimacy. “Here are my bruises, all my dents and my fuses,” she sings on the title track, before walking back any suggestion of vulnerability: “But I don’t really care now.”
Critics have compared Vu to Lana Del Rey practically since the start of her career, and there are snippets of Public Storage that recall the dark glamour and seeping melodrama of Born to Die. “Oh honey, I promise I’m the world’s worst lover,” Vu wails on “World’s Worst,” before murmuring, “I wonder if I get any younger than this.” It’s a winking, ironic articulation of the early-adult pain that she spends most of the record circling and dressing up in metaphor. The closest she comes to addressing it head-on is “Everybody’s Birthday,” a hazy song from the Lana and Lorde school of generational malaise. “Everybody’s crying in the hallway,” Vu moans. “I guess it must be everybody’s birthday all the time.” There’s a sense of fear trembling somewhere under the catchy beat, a sadness Vu could excavate. But she hums along, staying cool and coiled, teaching herself how to reset.

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For Shearwater's third Sub Pop LP, Jonathan Meiburg cuts closer to big-bombast '80s rock than anything this band has achieved yet. This time, they are assisted by one of the best arranger/composers in the business in Brian Reitzell.

Jet Plane and Oxbow

The last time Jonathan Meiburg wrote original music for his longtime art-rock outfit Shearwater, he embraced a stripped-down sound, presented on 2012’s Animal Joy with the telling liner-notes disclaimer that "no strings or glockenspiels were touched during the making of this album." Back then, Meiburg was nursing a broken heart, and emoted in a rawer manner than in his band's grandiose "Island Arc" trilogy comprised of 2006's Palo Santo, 2008's Rook, and 2010's The Golden Archipelago. Animal Joy hinted at an intimacy hidden behind the "Game of Thrones" magnificence of the band’s earlier work. What’s more, punching up the influences of early Pulp and Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk helped bring a sense of old-fashioned romantic sweep to the Sub Pop label for the first time since Jeremy Enigk’s Return of the Frog Queen.
Jet Plane and Oxbow marks Shearwater’s second full-length of original material for the veteran Seattle imprint, following a collection of covers in 2013 called Fellow Travelers that featured versions of songs by such contemporaries as Coldplay, St. Vincent, Xiu Xiu, Folk Implosion, and intrepid labelmates the Baptist Generals. Following up on the lead suggested by Animal Joy, Meiburg cuts closer to rock'n'roll than anything this band has ever made. The glockenspiels are back (well, it's a dulcimer this time, actually), but they are manned by former Redd Kross drummer Brian Reitzell, who has spent the last two decades as a music supervisor and film composers, scoring hit films like Lost in Translation, Friday Night Lights, and The Bling Ring in addition to being a de facto third member of Air. Reitzell's arsenal of keyboards, percussion, and various hammered string instruments gives Shearwater the epic 70mm feel Meiburg always seems to be aiming for; only this time, he’s got the man behind the music from NBC’s "Hannibal" at the controls.
Meanwhile, Meiburg—who is also one of the best culture critics in the country—continues down the more personal path he forged on Joy. The lyrics here brim with frustration over the political quagmire drowning the voice of American intelligence, especially in his adopted home state of Texas, over the last decade or so. Meiburg has said in the press leading up to Oxbow’s release that it is a protest record, and he has a very specific kind of protest record in mind: The big-sky rock of tracks like "Pale Kings" and "Glass Bones" are paired with the kind of lofty language that defined mid-'80s albums like U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and A Pagan Place by the Waterboys. These songs really soar, but none more so than "Only Child," a beautiful and lilting ballad. Nobody aims to write big-tent rock songs quite like this anymore.
The album is enlivened by a pulsing rhythmic undercurrent, informed seemingly by instrumental hip-hop and new wave. This more fluid groove replaces the brutal might of longtime Shearwater drummer Thor Harris, who is inexplicably absent from this endeavor. Songs like "Backchannels" and "Filaments" sound as though Meiburg is ghostwriting for Lorde, while "Quiet Americans"—with its big synths and bigger heart—seems to be channeling the Thompson Twins.
Since springing from the rib of Okkervil River, Shearwater has always made music bigger than the capacity of the clubs they play. Jet Plane and Oxbow feels like their moon shot out of that world. Throughout the album, Meiburg seems to be personally willing the band upward and outward, risking the kind of mainstream corniness that you only encounter when ambitions grow mountain-sized. It's impressive, and a credit to the band's pure craftmanship, that so much of this Wembley Stadium-ready collection was partly cut in a friend's home studio. Somehow, from these humble origins, they have made something spacious and expansive enough to feel conjured from the costly confines of a million-dollar studio like Abbey Road or Electric Lady. With Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater achieve not only their grandest statement to date, but their most grounded as well.


Melbourne artist Sui Zhen's world is brilliant and uncanny, and her music explores a familiar theme—the thinness of digital-media life—with a fresh eye.

Secretly Susan

A brain quivers on a plate. A pair of hands appear and mush it to bits, cramming the mess into the mouth of a young woman in a mannequin's sharp blonde wig. She reappears with longer black hair, caresses a large egg, fondles a fern, then lays on her belly while wafting herself with a slice of cheap white bread. The visual world of Melbourne artist Sui Zhen is brilliant and uncanny, as if the girls from Dazed magazine shoots had lost their minds in their inert pastel surroundings, or “The Fuccons” starred in a spread for Maurizio Cattelan’s Toilet Paper magazine. The tactile nature of Zhen’s self-directed videos invites and repulses the viewer, and conjures the internal life of Secretly Susan, the namesake of her second album, originally released last year in Zhen’s native Australia.
Susan is meant to be a simulacra of social-media personae and the one-angle thinness of what we project online, a concept that may also repulse anyone who’s feeling justifiably tired of tedious art about the digital disconnect. But Zhen’s music, like her films, radiates humor and charm. “I am a creature without a tangible home,” she sings on opener “Teenage Years,” which also works as a nod to *Secretly Susan’*s global palette. Across its 10 songs, Zhen blends bossa nova, dub, ersatz pop hooks, and Japan’s ’90s shibuya-kei sound (led by artists such as Takako Minekawa and Pizzicato 5). There are some undeniable similarities to chillwave, but Zhen approaches nostalgia from a position of perfect clarity, as if discovering those bejeweled synthesizers anew rather than on some chewed-up VHS tape. Also, the tunes are miles better.
Despite the obvious depth of thought behind Secretly Susan, it doesn’t wear the concept heavily. It’s lilting and light, but hypnotic from start to finish, shifting nimbly from pop (“Dear Teri”) to funk (“Walk Without Me”) and Drive-indebted glitter (“Take It All Back”). Zhen sprinkles her songs with neat little musical winks, like the odd burst of Phil Collins drums, and the whisper of Spandau Ballet's “True” that adds soul, rather than irony, to “Going Away.” She's also a charming performer, singing sweetly and up-close about communication breakdowns and relationships caught just out of sync. “Nonchalant/Nonchalant for you/Nonchalant is all I can do,” she sings on “Hangin’ On,” finding her groove amid the pattering hand percussion and exotic birdsong synths, and sending up yé-yé devotionals all at once.
Like all good avatars, Susan reaches her limit towards the end of the record, attempting to drive off into the sunset on “Infinity Street,” but short-circuiting against the horizon. “There are people who do this out there/Like it’s a new form of video game,” she laments, echoing Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.” “It's killing me.” Japanese lovers’ rock jam “Safari” hits the Truman Show wall in its search for exotic climes: “Safari can’t find the internet,” she sings, making the prosaic error message sound much more forlorn than it has any right to. The closing song, “Alter Ego,” captures the breakdown of the character in refracted funk guitar and demonic squawking birds, leaving Zhen asking, “When will I see you again?”
The closest thing to Zhen's Secretly Susan going right now is probably PC Music’s QT, another female pop avatar whose presentation is all about aestheticizing shallowness and artifice. But whereas QT’s music relies on her consummate and turbo-charged visual identity, it’s the fragility of Zhen’s creation that makes it endearing. Secretly Susan stands up without any of Zhen’s (wildly enjoyable) visuals, using lounge-pop innocence to bring intimacy and playfulness to technological alienation, a subject that was already starting to feel overdone at the literal dawn of its impact on humankind. Plus, there’s clearly a future to Zhen’s music beyond this particular concept. “I’m grieving still/And I’ll be grieving all my life,” she sings on “Never Gone.” “But nothing really ever ends/It just moves on.”


Like labelmates Glass Candy, the Chromatics recently ditched their early aggro/noise-punk beginnings. Switching labels from the art-rock institution Troubleman Unlimited to the sleeker Italians Do It Better imprint, the trio's gone even darker, feeding sultry, minimal disco-punk through spidery horror flick synths and scuffed guitars.

Night Drive

Ditching your aesthetic (hairy noise-rock troupe) in favor of its polar opposite (neatly groomed pop-dance trio) is a sure way to get some pre-release hype, but the transformation of Chromatics has been so effortless that it's still easy to be wowed by the results. Those who caught the swooning glide of the Chromatics' "Nite" single last year-- or their contributions to the After Dark compilation earlier in 2007-- won't be shocked by the similarly sleek Night Drive (aka IV). But listeners who are only familiar with the band's forays into shambling punk will certainly be surprised by Night Drive's assured songwriting (which would wow even if the band had been chasing this narcotic Eurodisco sound for years) and how it wrings ravishment out of electro moves that should be long-drained of their charms.
Credit some of this to Johnny Jewel-- Chromatics member, one half of Glass Candy, and the economical production whiz/secret weapon in the much-feted Italians Do It Better camp. I have no idea how duties on Night Drive were divvied up between Jewel, founding member Adam Miller, and vocalist Ruth Radalet. But you can certainly hear all of the IDIB trademarks: doleful disco-punk guitars (the menacing clang of "Healer"), starkly monochrome synth patches (especially gorgeous on the bumping goth club slow-jam "Let's Make This a Moment to Remember"), watery keyboard progressions (ditto), and exploitation flick arpeggios ("Tomorrow Is So Far Away"). Even as they've dumped the genre's sonic baggage, Chromatics have retained punk's taste for spare arrangements, but drawing on overripe Moroder-style dance music and early 1980s synth melancholia makes for some sumptuous spare arrangements.
Of course, sumptuous production is often not enough, especially if all you're doing is cloaking a dead heart in good taste. But while the languorous, mid-tempo Night Drive may sway like it's half-drugged, its heart is still beating, thank you very much. The record opens with a female voice (presumably Radalet) dialing her lover as the club rats scatter home from their nights out, and when she winsomely closes the call by telling him that she loves him, she proves that (however much she comes across like a cutie pie version of Nico) she's no ice queen. Even when she sounds half-tranquilized, it's Radalet that adds the very necessary soft touch to all those implacable sequencers. Throughout Night Drive, whether at a kittenish whisper or a husky, longing sigh, her cauterized range fits the band's vision of disco recast as heartsick pop. And even when wholly instrumental on "The Killing Spree"-- forget the title, the sinister descending keyboard fuzz does a perfect job evoking a murderous robot sci-fi flick on its own-- the band uses what could be sterile pastiche to pull your strings. Tastefully.
Night Drive's peak is the rightfully praised cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill", where the band shifts the focus of the (already minimal) arrangement onto three sour keyboard notes and a dapple of guitar. Radalet sounds like the school wallflower trying on the queen of frou frou art-pop, her unsteady hold on Bush's delivery cracking into a yearning coo at the chorus (about as demonstrative as she gets), making for the only moment on the record where the band really lets their emotional guard down. Haters and fans alike often call this neo-disco stuff "cold" and "dark," but I think that's just code for "not kitschy" (on the plus side) or maybe "not emotionally open enough" (on the minus side). But while Night Drive might not be warm, it does feel intimate, like a 3 a.m. ride home, where you're not alone but exhaustion and intake have made talking impossible, the city is silent, and the traffic patterns are as comforting and regimented as a drum machine click track. One of those moments, to paraphrase Ms. Bush, when you should be crying, but you'll be damned if you let it show.


In the 1990s, the Georgia underdogs influenced a generation of indie rockers with their theatrical, reverb-soaked anthems. Nearly two decades later, their first reunion album is more than a throwback.

Sixth House

The Rock*A*Teens have always sounded somewhat zombified. Between 1994 and 2001, the Cabbagetown, Atlanta underdogs blended indie rock, doo-wop, and rockabilly to make unwholesome, reverb-soaked anthems that staggered relentlessly forward, coated in cobwebs and dust. Led by vocalist Chris Lopez, who sang in a brainless howl that cracked helplessly between words, the group often ended songs with bursts of noise or by suddenly launching into a different tune. Their music always flirted with collapse—but it also teased an ascent from the dirt.
Sixth House marks the band’s first album in 18 years, and, unsurprisingly, rebirth suits them. Following a slew of reunion shows that kicked off in 2014, these ten new songs find the quartet in charming and rejuvenated spirits. They may lack the lunacy of should-have-been classics like 1999’s Golden Time, but they make up for it in amiability. Jangling, patient first single “Go Tell Everybody” sets the pace for the record. Its ceaseless spiral of hooks feels joyous, like running into an old friend and catching up for so long that you end up late for work—the perfect reintroduction for a band that has always been both proudly old-fashioned and, in their own humble way, visionary.
This prescience explains why Sixth House is more than just a ’90s indie rock throwback. In the decade after their breakup, the Rock*A*Teens’ impact spread throughout the genre, as the Walkmen, Destroyer, Okkervil River, and the New Pornographers all rode the band’s sweeping, theatrical energy to greater success. On the new album, Lopez’s influence is apparent as early as opener “Billy Really,” a song that seems to find its legs in real time, with a seasick acoustic guitar riff and a rhythm that keeps rebooting. This same clumsy momentum gave the band’s earlier records an emotional urgency that contrasted with the nonchalance of American indie rock peers like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Nothing seemed to come naturally in their music, and that only made it more alluring.
Lopez has also maintained his sense of humor. Like Bob Dylan singing Sinatra, he has a way of making the most innocuous lyrics feel foreboding. In the swooning “Turn and Smile,” he gets his heart broken by somebody whistling one of his old songs. “I always knew that this would end in tears,” he shouts. “I didn’t think that they’d be mine.” The breakup ballad could be about a romance or a rock band, yet Lopez’s delivery doesn’t sound mournful; it sounds more like he wants to punch a hole through the wall. As with any of his most memorable lyrics—when he begged you not to destroy this night, or when he got all weird about cats in your head—the only way to respond is to back away slowly and nod.
Abandoning their characteristic lo-fi murk in favor of a cleaner focus, Sixth House emphasizes the band’s dynamics like none of their previous records. If the joy of their songs once came from digging through the rubble to find the bones of pop music, the Rock*A*Teens are now much less shy about their technical chops. Former members Kelly Hogan (now an accomplished singer-songwriter and a consistent collaborator with Neko Case) and drummer Chris Verene (who left to pursue photography) are absent. But the current lineup—Lopez along with guitarist Justin Hughes, bassist William R. Joiner, and drummer Ballard Lesemann—brings a relaxed, refined energy. Several songs feel like new territory for the band. “Listen, Sonny Boy” is a swirling sing-along that effortlessly channels the Kinks; “Closest to Heaven” surges with a diabolical refrain, like Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night” rewritten as a threat.
Since their breakup, the Rock*A*Teens have developed a mythos as tied to their failures as it is to their successes. Despite their extraordinary catalog and lasting influence, they never quite found the audience their music deserved. Lopez once referred to their tours as “death marches,” and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar has recalled seeing them play in Montreal to just nine people. (“I’m pretty sure four of them I dragged out myself personally,” he added.) But on Sixth House, by embracing the spirit of their best records without leaning on those releases’ do-or-die, hard-luck intensity, they’ve found a way to settle comfortably into their strengths. An old Rock*A*Teens song declared, “Our future was then.” Now that they’ve given us some time to catch up, their present is right now.


While not quite a marquee work for either artist, the new team-up is reliably consistent and casts them as a natural pair, near-ideal complements to one another in writing and execution.

Lil Baby / Lil Durk: The Voice of the Heroes

The Voice of the Heroes

At 28, Lil Durk is only two years older than Lil Baby, though he comes from another era entirely. When he was still a teenager in the early 2010s, Durk recorded many of the songs that would make drill music a phenomenon in Chicago and then nationwide; Def Jam signed him, intent on packaging the sound for a mass audience, then botched his debut. Instead of disappearing from the pop charts or from rap’s stylistic cutting edge, Durk gritted his teeth and kept working. He moved to Los Angeles, he cut a better album for Def Jam, and he doubled down on the mixtape ethos that drove his career in its early stages. In 2017, six years after his breakthrough with I’m a Hitta, he moved again—this time to Atlanta, which had become the unquestionable center of the hip-hop industry. It was around this time that Lil Baby had finally entered the picture.
While Durk was hopping across the country and trying to refine his commercial approach, Lil Baby, a native Atlantan, was in and out of jail on a series of drug charges. He was also poised and preternaturally cool—which might explain why his longtime friend, Young Thug, would pay Baby whatever money he might make during a day in the streets to come to the studio instead. When he did commit to music, it was an onslaught: Baby dropped five solo records in 19 months, an instant favorite of fans, and then critics. Last year, his phenomenally engrossing album My Turn and the Grammy-nominated protest single “The Bigger Picture” made him perhaps the hottest rapper alive. Lil Baby and Durk’s new joint album, The Voice of the Heroes, is not quite a marquee work for either artist, though it is reliably consistent and casts them as a natural pair—near-ideal complements to one another in writing and execution.
As a vocalist, Durk is more broadly emotive and consistently animated than Baby. While much has been made of the way Future uses Auto-Tune’s eerie technological aftertaste to accentuate human pain, Durk is due credit for being one of the effect’s most nimble users, deploying it to keep the listener at arm’s length or to lure them in, underscoring melodies or cutting atonally against them. Baby, by contrast, raps in a rolling, post-Thug legato—a flatter affect punctuated by brief moments of musicality. The fact that the rappers’ voices default to similar registers but are used in such different ways means they often weave in and out of each other’s territory; on one song, Durk will ground Baby, and on the next song, the roles will be reversed. (In this way, Heroes is the direct opposite of 2018’s Drip Harder, where Gunna nearly always acts as the foundation while Baby riffs on top.)
Beyond the clever interplay of the vocal takes, the two expand their world with specifics—like on “Lying,” the way Baby sneers about someone who commits “a little fraud” in order to buy his necklace. Durk’s verse on “How It Feels” is a masterclass in this, at times exultant (“I know how it feel to pour a four right by Obama house”), poignant (“I know how it feel to wake up cut up from them bed springs”), or downright chilling (“I know how it feel to have the killers tell you everything”). Durk has made a career processing sometimes unspeakable tragedy in real time, and this willingness to be raw in front of an audience occasionally coaxes something similar out of Baby: see “Make It Out,” where he raps—almost as an aside—“You don't know how it feel where, everywhere you live, you get evicted.”
Heroes is overly long and sequenced in a way that sometimes undercuts its effectiveness—the title track and lead single opens the album despite being its weakest song. Yet even the pockets of similarly-tempoed tracks are filled with enough charisma from the rappers—and muscle from the beats—to avoid feeling rote. Most impressively, Durk and Baby surpass the numerous team-up records that have been released since streaming was monetized by meshing their styles into a smart, integrated whole.

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The New Jersey band’s seventh album tilts toward pop-punk, modern rock, and more, with a guest turn from Fugazi’s Brendan Canty.

All at Once

For a long while, “all at once” was a neat summary of Screaming Females’ compositional approach. It was nothing for them to, say, slot a swing break after a howling punk-rock passage; the chemistry developed in countless basements and bars just made those leaps cleaner. After four good-to-great albums as a kind of power-trio Fiery Furnaces, the New Jersey band brought their genre-bending dynamic to heel, first on 2012’s Steve Albini-engineered Ugly, then on 2015’s Rose Mountain. It wasn’t a concession to accessibility so much as focus. The former boasted both a seven-minute boogie-rock workout and a string-laden ballad; the latter, produced by Minus the Bear’s Matt Bayles, homed in on the sound of Marissa Paternoster’s guitar.
Though the songs on Rose Mountain were tighter than ever, the record felt like it was gritting its teeth, waiting for a fever to break. On All at Once, it does. Bayles is back, and so is the band’s storehouse of killer riffs. And though Paternoster waits until halfway through opener “Glass House” to fully deploy it, her earth-drilling vibrato remains. But Screaming Females have new modulations here. “I’ll Make You Sorry” is (finally) their first pop-punk song. They’d feinted this way before (notably on Rose Mountain’s “Empty Head”), but the full treatment is gripping. Rhythm section Jarrett Dougherty and “King” Mike Abbate bear down on a churning passage; Paternoster’s multitracked guitars chop and chime against each other. “I once was in love before/I knew you/But I’ve given up,” shrugs the chorus.
It’s not the only pop move. “Soft Domination” carries a refrain out of Trevor Horn-era Yes, loaded with stops and Paternoster’s digs up and down the scale. Fugazi’s Brendan Canty guests as a second drummer, adding his trademark clatter to a song about others’ expectations. It’s a repeated theme on All at Once. They’ve brightened the corners, but there’s danger just past the door. In album closer “Step Outside,” that metaphor is literal. A minute and a half of magisterial soloing builds to the chorus (“I’m sick with worry just knowing/When you step outside/You won’t be safe”). Then, the arsenal: Abbate and Dougherty push forward and drop back—including pop- and ska-punk breakdowns—while Paternoster fires off palm mutes and curlicue solos.
It’s a rousing way to express concern, like comforting a friend with a fireworks show. In welding pomp to dire circumstance, it’s also a bit of an anomaly. Stained with organ and cello, “Glass House” is a social-media waking nightmare. The danger is similarly interpersonal on “Fantasy Lens.” “Touch me through the fence,” Paternoster sneers as the band whips between the gas pedal and the emergency brake. Two different chants and a false ending kick up enough dust for the Females to escape. “I’ll medicate myself,” she intones on “Dirt,” “Suspect that idols lie to me.” Intended or not, the line recalls the band’s 2013 collaboration with Garbage’s Shirley Manson, a formative influence on Paternoster (and a big fan of Screaming Females as well).
Suitably, then, if there’s a chart they’re aiming for, it seems less like the Hot 100 than like Manson’s old chart roost: Modern Rock Tracks. Screaming Females have tilted in that direction before—you can hear it in 2015’s “Criminal Image,” which had a riff Lit would clip their highlights for, and in the STP-style acoustic morphine drip of Chalk Tape’s “Bad Men.” All at Once just offers more. “Agnes Martin” works a prime Tool groove to platonic pop heights, as Paternoster’s double-tracked riffs keep turning up rich soil. Coming right after Canty’s cameo, the dubby groove of “End of My Bloodline” ought to suggest Fugazi. Instead, it’s Sublime. This isn’t just great news for anyone who wants to see how the baubles of alt-rock’s lost years gleam in modern light. It’s great for anyone who’s watched Screaming Females sift through untold guitar-based genres for over a decade. For Paternoster, whose chops are already near-legendary, it’s no big deal to chase a power-pop confection like “Chamber for Sleep (Part One)” with a solo ripped from Tom Verlaine’s playbook, then drop a twin-guitar flourish in “Part Two.” Once upon a time, it might’ve been for the thrill. Now, it’s in service to the song.


Inspired by his love for Stephin Merritt, James Alex serves up chamber-pop covers of his own earnest punk songs on the first album from this Beach Slang spin-off band.

Quiet Slang: Everything Matters But No One Is Listening

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly is a modern classic of therapeutic literature that identifies fear as the root of all our troubles. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of judgment, and, most of all, fear of vulnerability—these are what keep so many of us from achieving happiness and fulfillment. James Alex is probably too much of a Bukowski guy to have read Daring Greatly, but his band Beach Slang might as well be the audiobook version, a compelling and convincing testament to the wisdom of ignoring one’s inner critic.
Fans of beery, bear-hugging guitar music are conditioned to feel embarrassed about it once they reach a certain age, sheepishly accepting their status as the old guy at the club while the latest variation of the “rock is dead” narrative plays out. Alex doesn’t just validate this crowd by expressing their feelings in the most basic language; after debuting Beach Slang at 40 years old, he embodies them as well, bypassing the literary and mythic ambitions that elevate the Hold Steady, Japandroids, and Guided by Voices to Art to go straight for wish fulfillment. Quiet Slang, a spin-off act that reduces the Beach Slang lineup to piano, cello, and vocals, leaves those earnest lyrics fully exposed. Their first full-length, Everything Matters But No One Is Listening, boldly courts what Brown called the “vulnerability hangover”—that anxious feeling you get after showing your true, vulnerable self to people who have the power to vaporize your self-esteem.
Beach Slang have always faced accusations of redundancy and cliché. Alex’s veneration of youth and its simple pleasures give his songs a twee undertone. Taken together with his pop-punk roots, that tendency made him a natural fit to open for Dashboard Confessional on their recent tour. But Beach Slang’s sound is more malleable than they get credit for. The sudsy, saturated guitars and production owe more to Loveless than to the Replacements’ Let It Be.
“If Beach Slang is my adoration for [Paul] Westerberg, Quiet Slang is me head over heels for Stephin Merritt,” Alex offered in a recent interview. The sentimental first-love, best-love spirit that fuels his attachment to the Replacements is an essential part of his songwriting, and since he hasn’t come up with any new songs that reflect his Merritt fandom, he might as well have pledged allegiance to PJ Harvey or Willie D. Unlike Westerberg, whose affably self-effacing music appeals to people for whom losing is winning because the game is rigged against us hard-luck kids anyway, Merritt is a curmudgeon whose craft is so beyond reproach that it often makes up for his cutting, cynical language and disdain for the people who consume his product. This is obviously the exact opposite of everything Beach Slang stand for, and the inclusion of A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings salvo “Mixtape for Future Art Kids” on Everything Matters makes that painfully obvious. Over dainty piano tinkles, Alex gamely sings, “Play it loud, play it fast.” No one ever asks this of Magnetic Fields songs.
There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves—a piano bangs out the exact same chords as the rhythm guitar on Beach Slang records, a cello plays lead, and Alex supplies slight variations on the vocal harmonies. He prepared fans for this kind of thing on “Too Late to Die Young,” which anchored the band’s 2015 debut, by copping to the desperation behind it all: “Too young to die/Too late to die young/I try and fight/But get high and give up.” But the urgency of his strumming aligned with the lyrics, and that’s what earned the song its place alongside the album’s standouts “Ride the Wild Haze” and “I Break Guitars.” Take away that rock setup, and Quiet Slang’s version of “Too Late” turns the original's sweetness into pure sap.
The most captivating thing about Everything Matters is the way it keeps reminding you of what it lacks: Cello replaces the gorgeous racket of the original “Young Hearts.” The new orchestral intro to “Spin the Dial” makes you miss the arena-rock hook from the version on Teenage Feelings. Alex has vowed to reach for his “blue-sky dream” on the next Beach Slang record. Whether that means his take on “Tonight, Tonight” or his own personal The Ugly Organ, Everything Matters makes the prospect of the band’s third proper album sound more attractive than it might have otherwise. In that respect, Quiet Slang could be the first shrewdly calculated move of James Alex’s career.


iTunes-only charity album was recorded as part of ATP's Don't Look Back Series and presumably released in part to finally match the Scottish band's best set of songs with a proper recording of their arrangements.

Belle and Sebastian: If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican

In September 1997, Belle & Sebastian made their American live debut by playing a pair of CMJ shows at a synagogue in New York City's East Village. At the time, the band's U.S. debut, If You're Feeling Sinister had been out in the UK for about a year but to American audiences the Scottish group was more rumor than reality. The record was first issued in the U.S. on The Enclave, a Virgin subsidiary that, soon after releasing the record, went bankrupt. The group decided to stop speaking to press, feeling disenchanted with its initial experiences with the music weeklies. Publicity photos featured friends or band members in curious poses-- their keyboardist doing the ironing, their cellist hiding behind a surgical mask, their bassist crouched over a fallen nun.
What's more, the band were often messy live, typically the route for upstarts to connect with could-be fans. Interminable soundchecks begat shambolic performances, with only the occasional mumble or a few bars of someone else's music to fill frustratingly large gaps between songs. The band members-- selected the year before to support singer Stuart Murdoch's songs on a potentially one-off project-- weren't yet all convinced they were players in a fully functioning combo, and they often performed with what seemed to be a mix of disinterest and ineptitude. Even Murdoch often forgot his own lyrics. True to what was then their form, a performance taped that month for PBS' "Sessions at West 54th" was deemed unworthy to broadcast.
Despite the roadblocks and stumbles, Sinister-- along with a series of early EPs-- made the Scottish group one of the biggest cult bands in indiedom, and almost a decade later it's still considered to be the group's career peak. Murdoch himself-- he'll now do the occasional interview-- has often said these are his best songs, recorded poorly. What's more he's right: Two-dimensional, limp, distant, often the record's more complex, graceful arrangements are buried under C-86-quality sound. Perhaps motivated by this long-simmering dissatisfaction with Sinister, the band chose to not only perform it as part of All Tomorrow's Parties Don't Look Back series-- in which an artist performs its best-loved work live in its entirety-- but also release the results as an iTunes-only charity record. (All proceeds from the sale of the album will go to the DEC's Asia Quake Appeal.)
The irony that Belle and Sebastian would issue a live record in order to correct the fidelity of a studio record must not be lost on either the band or any of its longtime fans. Those introduced to the group on its most recent couple of tours, however, should be familiar with them as a robust, confident collective, with Murdoch and guitarist Stevie Jackson taking turns playing ringleader for an accomplished set of musicians, which on this recording include not only the band's seven members but five additional players. And, appropriately, this LP reflects the current band's confidence, buffering Murdoch's delicate songs about romantic frustration, sexual curiosity, crises of confidence and faith, and existential drift with swelling strings and lilting, airy arrangements. They offer a near-definitive reading of most of the tracks here, turning what could have been a superfluous record into a tempting first purchase for those curious about the band.
The record starts with a whimper, the opening lines of "The Stars of Track & Field" rushed and recorded somewhat quietly. The track finds its feet but still limps through the next two minutes, until its first swell reveals the full force of the 12-piece band. Mick Cooke's "They Don't Know"-quoting trumpet solo is as warm as ever but it serves as placesetter to a muscular finale where on record-- as on almost every track he's featured-- it's the sonic peak.
The tracks best served by the live recording are, perhaps unsurprisingly, those that seem the most slight on record, either because here they punch above the weight of expectations or they were in the most need of a spitshine in the first place. The generation-gap "Me and the Major", now even more rollicking and playful, features an older Murdoch sounding increasingly confident standing toe-to-toe with his fellow titular adversary and supposed social bettor. "Like Dylan in the Movies" and "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" don't leave Murdoch as stranded as they previously did, and yet neither of the simmering dread of the former or the bedsit solitude of the latter is lost without muted backdrops.
Most in need of an upgrade was the title track, which should have been Sinister's centerpiece, a song that encapsulated most of Murdoch's pet lyrical themes circa 1996-97-- religion, sex, frustration, and boredom-- while drawing lines between poor decisions and desperation, doubt and faith, a need for change and a sometimes tragic inability to invest one's energy in self-improvement. Live, the track had a haunting feel, hovering like sadness and doubt; on record, its barely-there backdrop makes it a mere apparition. The version captured at the Barbican doesn't measure up to some earlier performances (best exemplified by the band's Bowlie Weekender performance), but it takes advantage of the extra players, adding a slight barroom tinge to its second half, giving it a more hopeful reading by offering comfort and company to Murdoch's words rather than leaving them stranded.
As the band has changed and years have been placed between these track's first airings and today, they serve not only as a reminder of their durability but their malleability, with the once-quintessential "The Boy Done Wrong Again" somehow seeming the most distant and out of place track here-- the claim that "All I wanted was to sing the saddest song" is the antithesis of the happy-clappy records B&S; now make. That Jackson and Murdoch, charming and almost vaudevillian-like in recent live shows, are restricted here to trading sideways lines that include a request to "hang your head in shame and cry your life away" is almost quaint, an odd reminder that despite the band's former live struggles, it did connect directly and powerfully on late-night BBC radio sessions playing gut-wrenchingly sad songs such as this.
Odd then that the record closes with "Judy and the Dream of Horses", another in a string of tracks about private obsessions and tentative steps toward engaging with one's sexuality. And, yet, unlike most of those that preceded it, it works itself into a gallop, allowing hints of the band's present to mingle with its past-- some overly enthusiastic harmonizing and an extra coat of paint and "Judy" could have fit on the band's most recent LP.
While arrangements here are strengthened and the tracks flourish, Murdoch's wallflower lyrics don't hit as hard or close to the heart coming from a live powerhouse than hushed alongside a hastily assembled collection of friends and aquantinces. The quiet, unspoken desperation of the original songs could somehow become lost on the way from being the last-ditch work of a late-20s underachiever to a flip through the scrapbook of an international indie star, but those worries are swept aside by the pride and tenderness with which the songs are delivered, readings delivered perhaps more casually thanks to the band's success. Whether listeners would take comfort in revisiting this part of their past from the safety of a different decade depends more on the individual than the songs, I imagine, as does whether a once-galvanizing line like "Nobody writes them like they used to/ So it might as well be me" now seems accidentally and unfortunately ironic.


Originally released as a concert film but now reissued as a live album, this cult favorite reimagines the Pet Shop Boys’ own canon and other pop hits, curating a century of pop music history in one jukebox.

Pet Shop Boys: Discovery: Live in Rio 1994

Discovery: Live in Rio 1994

Even more than their remarkably fresh and in-touch new music, which flirts with EDM and high BPMs while never being too “How do you do, fellow kids?”, the Pet Shop Boys’ most interesting activity across the last half-decade is the deep dive they’ve done into their own archives. From last year’s 4K remaster of their 1987 feature film It Couldn’t Happen Here, to a wealth of late-night television performances uploaded in high-quality to the band’s official YouTube page, their mammoth body of carefully curated multimedia is a testament to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s endless invention and creative energy across nearly four decades. Originally released as a concert film in the 1990s but now reissued as a live album, Discovery: Live in Rio - 1994 captures the Boys’ first trip to Brazil, a stop on a global tour of Singapore, Australia, and Latin America—parts of the world the Boys had never played before—on the back of 1993’s Very.
The Pet Shop Boys had first set out internationally in 1991, with an elaborate and operatic piece of theater captured by the concert film Performance. Their most recent album at that time, 1990’s Behaviour, was in part an elegant elegy to friends, comrades, and collaborators lost to AIDS, and though it’s often been critically regarded as the duo’s finest record, audiences failed to warm to its chillier sensibility. With Very, the Boys underwent a significant makeover, adapting to the more up-tempo DJ culture of the new decade—it was designed as a bid for renewed commercial success and would become their best-selling release in their home country, but also feels driven by a desire for outright expression and queer emancipation following a period of deep mourning. As their music itself pivoted to more explicit dance music, Discovery shows the high-art opera house of the Pet Shop Boys’ earlier live performances transforming into a come-as-you-are club night that radiates understanding and acceptance like only popular music can.
Performance drew a line between performer and audience, with Tennant and Lowe feeling more like actors in a drama than musicians in a band. But with Discovery, the Boys came into their own as showmen. Thriving off the energy of rave culture, the mood is jovial, but their trademark theatricality is still omnipresent: the Discovery concert film is stuffed with dancers, local soccer players, chiseled models strutting the stage in loincloths and boxer briefs, Tennant decked out in full papal garb, and literal nipple play. The Pet Shop Boys’ sense of humor might be dry, but their shows are downright wet. The group’s first performances were directed by queer cinema pioneer Derek Jarman, whose Renaissance decadence was a perfect match for the Boys’ frequently baroque sensibilities. Discovery was one of their last collaborations, featuring background video projections directed by Jarman, along with Bruce Weber and Howard Greenlagh.
Opening with a brief, wistful rendition of “Tonight Is Forever” before launching into the exuberance of “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing,” the Discovery setlist is mostly a blend of staples—“Domino Dancing,” “Kings Cross”—with tracks from Very like the bombastic break-up anthem “Can You Forgive Her?” and the more subdued “To Speak Is a Sin.” Halfway through the show, Neil sits down in a solo spotlight and cracks that they’ve never been invited to do an MTV Unplugged, before leading intimate acoustic singalongs of “Rent” and “Suburbia.” The eternal pop kids have long been anti-rock, but are not always anti-guitar—the ease with which their songs lend themselves to stylistic reinterpretation speaks to their strength as pieces of songwriting, regardless of recorded interpretation. The party gets delightfully silly with “Absolutely Fabulous,” a charity single produced from chopped-up samples of the BBC comedy, and “Girls & Boys,” a queerer take on the Blur song which Pet Shop Boys had also remixed into a minor club hit.
Discovery has long been a cult favorite among Pet Shop fans because of how it reimagines the Pet Shop Boys’ own canon and other well-known pop hits. The duo’s original songs are among the most indelible in history, but they’re also somewhat unique as a major music act who have made covers a constant and crucial part of their repertoire. Almost as well-known as “West End Girls” or “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” are their takes on Elvis Presley, the Village People, and U2: not just famous songs, but songs that have almost become a kind of prefabricated folk culture, tunes we hear in the grocery store and all seem to know through pure exposure and osmosis. “One in a Million” and “Left to My Own Devices” are seamlessly mashed up with contemporary club cuts like Culture Beat’s “Mr. Vain” and Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night”—Lowe’s synthesizers already flirt with Eurodance, but these remixes elevate one-hit wonders to high-art pieces while transforming the Boys’ own songs into unabashed dance tracks. Pet Shop Boys’ almost prolific propensity for covers of songs by other artists feels as much like critical reconsideration as it does a creative act.
Just as their music reflected upon the fall of the Soviet Union in songs like “My October Symphony,” it also mirrored the increasingly globalized dance party of the ’90s. The enthusiastic reception of the Discovery tour in Latin America influenced the style and structure of 1996’s Bilingual, an album with lyrics in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Through Discovery, it’s as if the band realized that their desired audience was not necessarily in the imperial core represented by American pop charts, but in the Global South, where anthems of liberation had more resonance.
Maybe the Boys’ sense of humor was too intellectual or refined or just plain British for American audiences; maybe it was their sincere engagement with club culture that was often considered novelty or kitsch by critics and consumers; maybe it was the open embrace of queerness, especially during an era of AIDS and legal oppression. Probably some cocktail of all three—Pet Shop Boys present a challenge to heteronormativity and masculine hegemony, to established industry views about what it means to be a band that makes pop music, and to a culture always moving on to the next idea, as they establish critical links between new trends in music with older, once-populist forms like vaudeville and opera.
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have spent decades not just defending pop music from its detractors, but celebrating it—before there was poptimism, there was Pet Shop Boys. In their covers of other artists and reinterpretations of their own work, the Boys suggest pop’s potential as a living medium beyond recorded product, a songbook of standards that express universal sentiments but are open to individual reinterpretation. Though they have often been accused of a certain stiffness or ironic detachment—criticisms encouraged by Tennant’s wordy wit and Lowe’s Kraftwerk-like stoneface—the Pet Shop Boys’ live work from the 1990s on is where they thrive. In their hands, the setlist becomes a collage, curating a century of pop music history in one jukebox.

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