Exploring the tensions of a long-term relationship, the pop artist’s second album is the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist.

Hold On Baby

Cheap Queen, the debut album by King Princess, played like one of those summer nights that stretches on forever. Across a series of louche, Mellotron-heavy ballads, the New York songwriter and producer born Mikaela Straus sang about shooting the shit with friends and exchanging furtive glances with girls across crowded parties, each scene rendered with the insouciant, reflexive cool of an Eve Babitz story. It was a debut whose supreme confidence belied the fact that Straus first became famous after their Patricia Highsmith-referencing debut single “1950” went viral in early 2018. Where so many musicians react to virality with hesitance—quickly shifting gears or denouncing their early work—Straus delivered on her early promise with the grace and mien of a star.
Like Cheap Queen, Straus’ second record Hold On Baby is urbane and self-possessed, the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist. She sounds even more like herself: More flexible as a vocalist, more cutting as a lyricist, more confident in her own power to bridge gaps between disparate styles. If Cheap Queen’s palette was ambiguously vintage—all old-school soul flourishes, redone as to slot in easily somewhere between Troye Sivan and Lorde—Hold On Baby firmly positions Straus as someone who came of age in the 2010s, when indie rock was hitting its mainstream peak.
Working alongside a murderers’ row of mainstream-indie heavy hitters including Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Ethan Gruska, Shawn Everett, and Mark Ronson, Straus pulls influences liberally but never thoughtlessly: A Strokes-y guitar line lopes through “Cursed,” while “Crowbar” nods to Sufjan Stevens’ fluttering piano ballads; the piano at the beginning of “Dotted Lines” recalls Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid’s work on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, and “Sex Shop” feels of a piece with the alienated sexuality of St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy. These references never feel winky or obvious, in large part because Straus’ own sense of mood—their fondness for warm tones and spacious atmospherics that can turn cold and claustrophobic in a second—always takes precedence. She presides over the affair with a cool hand and a keen awareness of when to pull back—the restrained elegance of someone who’s spent most of their life hanging around studios.
Hold On Baby is a more solemn record than its predecessor. The energizing frisson that Straus found on Cheap Queen has been supplanted by anxiety and despondence. Hold On Baby isn’t a breakup album; instead Straus finds inspiration in the tensions that arise in a long-term relationship. On “Hold On Baby Interlude,” they describe themselves as “a chipped tooth with the nerve exposed,” and that queasy tension pervades the album. The plush, weightless love song “Winter Is Hopeful” curdles its sweet nothings (“I’m always thinking, thinking, thinking of you”) with ribbons of acid: “But you never believe it.” Straus practically whispers the lyrics; it feels like she’s practicing lines from across the room rather than actually addressing the object of her desire. “Change the Locks,” one of a handful of songs produced with Aaron Dessner, explodes from pleading minimalism into booming, gritted-teeth arena rock, even though one of its primary tensions is impossibly small: “Losing your mind over something I wore/Just ’cause it’s yours.”
Despite its subject matter, Hold On Baby is far from dour. It’s rich with little details that make the whole thing feel alive, like the goofy, overdriven synth that opens “Too Bad” or the crunchy, stomping drums, played by the late Taylor Hawkins, that power “Let Us Die.” The unfussy orchestration of “Winter Is Hopeful” feels like a verdant update of Cheap Queen’s humid atmosphere; it floats in and out of focus like the scent of jasmine on a spring breeze. Everything on Hold On Baby feels so easy that its missteps are particularly overbearing: “Little Bother,” a collaboration with New Jersey musician Fousheé, feels too similar to all the other emo revival songs that have shown up on pop albums over the past couple of years. It’s one of the few times when Straus’ personality gets lost in the vibe.
Between records, Straus has become a more interesting vocalist. No longer singing with the soulful but slightly anonymous affectation of Cheap Queen, they refit their vocals to suit the needs of each song, jumping into a nasally drawl to convey the sneering nihilism of “Too Bad” and adding a strained, breathy tension to “Change the Locks” and “Dotted Lines.” And her lyrics still possess a dark, needling humor, whether running through a deadpan lockdown routine (“I watch TV, fuck my girl, check my phone, babe/PS5, change my shirt and drink alone, babe”) or telling an ex, “You look the same/Did you stop smoking weed?/Or trying to please your dad?” As with Cheap Queen, Hold On Baby doesn’t achieve any great innovations, but thanks to their stylistic and structural instincts, and their innate star power, Straus still manages to thrill.


On his odd and ambitious new album, singer-songwriter Will Toledo dons a gas mask, adds electronic textures, and tries to separate himself from the indie fame of Car Seat Headrest.

Car Seat Headrest: Making a Door Less Open

Making a Door Less Open

Feeling like shit is the emotional baseline in Car Seat Headrest songs. Sex, drugs, or, if we’re taking Making a Door Less Open at its word, indie rock’n’roll fame only make it worse. Car Seat Headrest mastermind Will Toledo self-recorded and self-released nearly a dozen albums in the six years leading up to 2016’s feverishly lauded Teens of Denial, a commercial breakthrough that could easily be framed as an argument for the relevancy of an entire subculture. Released on Matador, feverishly debated and annotated on Reddit and Genius, a fount for major and minor Twitter controversies, Teens of Denial was a triumph for the past three decades of indie rock: a unification of ’90s aesthetics, ’00s blog-rock ascendancy, and 21st-century consumption.
It has taken Toledo four years to release another collection of new material. And with it, he’s introduced Trait, his gas-mask-wearing alter ego that writes and sings exactly like Will Toledo. Though it’s ostensibly a gimmick or a distraction, Toledo has explained Trait as a means of clarifying his intentions by allowing everyone, himself included, to take the focus off Will Toledo for once. Or, put more plainly, it’s a way to make a Car Seat Headrest album without being “Car Seat Headrest.”
This requires revisiting a time when “Car Seat Headrest” wasn’t loaded with meaning, heavy with all of the inane interviews, critical misinterpretation, endless tours, lawsuits, and deadlines earned by the success of Teens of Denial. At 43 minutes, Making a Door Less Open is one of the shortest Car Seat Headrest albums in the catalog and the first to be explicitly modeled after that year’s quartet of introductory, numbered compilations that preceded any flicker of buzz: a collection of singles with no overarching concept, no real allegiance to the “album” as a finalized document. Vinyl owners will hear “Hymn” as an interminable three-minute drone, while the CD and digital format feature its breakbeat-riddled remix. “Deadlines” has “Acoustic,” “Hostile” and “Thoughtful” retoolings, while “Martin” variously appears as the fourth, sixth, and seventh track. Making a Door Less Open already exists in three different formats, with more fan-made “Best Of”s inevitably to come.
But all versions start with the essential “Weightlifters,” which functions the same way “Fill in the Blank” did on Teens of Denial, acknowledging the heightened stakes and validating the expectations of a “new, improved Car Seat Headrest.” Toledo kicked off Teens of Denial with an exuberant defense of depression that positioned him as an heir to Matador’s prolific slacker icons Stephen Malkmus and Robert Pollard, while here, “Weightlifters” reflects Car Seat Headrest’s status as the only Bandcamp-to-bandshell success story that warranted a live album. There have been many Car Seat Headrest songs structured like “Weightlifters”—where the beat builds for two minutes or so while Toledo breathlessly untangles a web of thoughts until its pithy core is revealed (“I should start lifting weights/Cause I believe that thoughts can change my body”). But Car Seat Headrest has never operated with the level of showmanship displayed here. The whirring synths and electronics sound more like walk-on music for the mighty septet that held its own at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl.
It’s the best-case scenario for the newly bionic Car Seat Headrest, one that Toledo designed to compete with the pop and hip-hop acts that have banished rock bands like his from the zeitgeist. If anything, Making a Door Less Open benefits from the inherent repetition of electronic music. Rather than the circuitous, tangential songwriting Toledo once stretched out to five minutes or more, songs like “Can’t Cool Me Down” and “There Must Be More Than Blood” just circle back to their hooks and hang on for dear life. It’s an apt structure for songs inspired by exhaustion, as Toledo’s most memorable images find him half-asleep on a red-eye and taking the stage through fever sweats and lemon throat lozenges.
Yet, it’s not the “electronic influence” on Making a Door Less Open that belongs in scare quotes, but that of Toledo’s electronic “side project” called 1 Trait Danger, where Toledo and drummer Andy Katz imagined a band’s entire fictional career arc within two albums. Anyone who’s swapped guitars for synths likely understands the thrill of reinhabiting a beginner’s mindset, where pressing a button on the arpeggiator feels as significant as learning the chords to a Green Day song as a teenager. From that angle, maybe there’s a contact high to be gained from the overeager panning effects, samples, and redlining drums that clutter “Life Worth Missing” and “Famous” and leave them sounding like incoherent remixes of themselves.
That same sense of gleeful adventure goes missing when Making a Door Less Open hews closest to autobiography. When Toledo describes Hollywood as “a place where people go to make their fantasies come to life, and they end up exploiting other people and doing terrible things to maintain their fantasy,” does he even expect people to repeat his words like he’s making a novel point? “Hollywood” is essentially Toledo’s version of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” somehow both the laziest and most ruthlessly calculated thing he’s done. Its concept is catchy and banal enough (“Hollywood makes me wanna puke!”) to realistically get co-opted by the very people in its crosshairs. The most generous possible reading of “Hollywood” is as a lyrical Eephus pitch, something that destabilizes through counterintuitive simplicity. Perhaps it’s not a mockup of Hollywood’s facade, but the cliché of people feeling like they have something new to say about it.
This take becomes impossible to sustain with “Deadlines,” where Toledo’s stylistic tics— in-game metacommentary, nagging harmonies—start to feel like Car Seat Headrest cannibalizing itself. But if a song about the drudgery of songwriting is itself a slog, does that mean “Deadlines” achieves its goal? Or does it suggest that not even Toledo can use writer’s block as a prompt at this point? The latter seems more realistic in light of Making a Door Less Open’s more overtly inessential tracks. In the past, “Hymn” and threadbare interlude “What’s With You Lately” could’ve been written off as the churn of Toledo’s bustling DIY cottage industry. But when they make up 20 percent of the tracklist of his only collection of new material in four years, they become a working definition of filler.
They’re not spectacular failures either, but Making a Door Less Open would inevitably benefit from a willingness to risk spectacular failure—this isn’t the hard left-turn “Can’t Cool Me Down” hinted at. Though I’ve seen plausible comparisons to Julian Casablancas chasing off the squares with the Voidz, the album never alienates and antagonizes to the same extent—its mild disappointments and half-realized experiments lack the contrarian conviction that mints future cult classics.
For that, I direct you to 1 Trait World Tour, a concept album about 1 Trait Danger accepting the “Softmore Slump” after a critically acclaimed debut and taking good-natured shots at Car Seat Headrest's actual neighbors on festival side stage lineups: Beach House, the xx, laptop EDM producers, Mac DeMarco. As far as Matador artists moonlighting with hip-hop, it somehow drew less attention than Interpol singer Paul Banks’ experimental rap album, Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. Katz worried that 1 Trait Danger would jeopardize Car Seat Headrest’s reputation, but they followed their muse anyway. The side-project only essential for being so profoundly inessential, yet more than Making a Door Less Open, it feels like a project in which Toledo followed his own artistic credo: commit yourself completely.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his second LP as a duo with DJ Premier, Royce 5’9” fights mightily to offer more than corny punchlines and pointless bars.

PRhyme 2

Last May, a simmering generational conflict between Lil Yachty and Joe Budden came to a head on Complex’s Everyday Struggle. Budden’s dual claims to fame are the 2003 hit “Pump It Up” and his status as the most Old Man Yells At Cloud person in hip-hop. So he was playing to type when, within minutes of the show’s opening, he began berating Yachty for everything from the younger rapper’s album art to his claim that he was happy 24/7. The beating heart of the confrontation comes 11 minutes in, when Budden demands that Yachty rank his contemporaries, and Yachty refuses to because “that’s kind of weird.”
Royce 5’9”, Budden’s sometime bandmate in the rap group Slaughterhouse, says that the encounter gave him nightmares. On PRhyme 2, the second album he’s made with DJ Premier under their (poorly chosen) joint name, he raps that Yachty, 19 at the time of the interview, is about the same age as his son. He recalls the rapper Canibus reacting poorly to Eminem’s rise, points out that time goes in circles, and concludes his verse by saying that he’s not here for villainizing the youth. In case anyone missed the point, the song is called “Everyday Struggle.”
If only the rest of PRhyme 2 were so generous. The contrast between Budden and Yachty provides a helpful way of understanding Royce’s struggles throughout the record: Sometimes, the veteran Detroit rapper transcends his natural Buddenism, avoiding corny punchlines, esoteric lyrical easter eggs, and bars that lead him nowhere. At other times, he doesn’t.
In this LP’s best moments, like the opener “Black History,” Premo laces him with a rich tapestry through which Royce weaves compelling narrative threads. His long experience in the industry allows for an incredible depth of texture, replete with echoes of JAY-Z, Snoop, Tribe, and Camp Lo. “Loved Ones” is a fantastic duet between Royce and the North Carolina rapper Rapsody, in the tradition of Biggie and Lil’ Kim on “Another” or Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek on “Coming of Age.”
But much of the time, Royce spins his wheels, hurls retrograde insults at foes, or performs lyrical tricks for a small audience. His already not-great verse on “Era” is interrupted by a semi-functional triple pun that involves XXXTentacion. It’s the second triple pun in two songs and, throughout the record, Royce comes across as the kind of rapper who thinks that this alone should earn him five mics from The Source. This is a 40-year-old who’s shameless enough to drop the line “I am the absolute shit/I actually speak latrine” (on the otherwise good “Sunflower Seeds”), which belongs in a category that Lil Wayne exhausted a decade ago.
Guests like Dave East and Roc Marciano mostly avoid these challenges by opting for straightforward revivalism, a significantly safer mode. They fare moderately well. 2 Chainz, though, has a standout verse on the late-album cut “Flirt,” in which he expertly combines the new and the old, with his trademark jokes and a vintage Eminem flow. (“Flirt,” by the way, is preceded by the funniest skit I’ve heard in years.)
If Royce often has to fight his instincts, DJ Premier should have trusted his more. Both of PRhyme’s records have operated under an unusual constraint, with Premier using another producer’s beats as source material for his own. On their 2014 album, it was Adrian Younge; this time, it’s the underrated Philadelphia producer Antman Wonder, who, like Younge, mostly eschews samples in favor of original compositions. Premier mines some gems from Wonder’s cache, including the beats for on “Respect My Gun,” “Sunflower Seeds,” “My Calling,” “Made Man,” and “Do Ya Thing.” Elsewhere he makes strange decisions, like the little squeaks that ruin “Era,” or the occasional doubling of the beat that drags down “Everyday Struggle”. And someone needs to be held responsible for the Flock of Seagulls interpolation on “Streets at Night,” which isn’t even an original way to tweak that song. (The Slim Thug version wasn’t good either.)
One of the most fundamental challenges facing elder statesmen like DJ Premier and Royce is how to balance their values with those of the younger fans they hope to win. Royce sometimes seems as though he’s aware of that tension. On “Streets at Night,” after he says that he comes from “where you don’t disrespect none of your successors,” there’s an interesting line. “‘Who the best?’ is a horrible, rhetorical, sick question,” he raps, perhaps suggesting that the practice of pitting artists against each other in an arbitrary hierarchy is better left in the ’90s. Or, alternately, maybe he’s just saying that he is so clearly the best that it’s not even a question worth asking. (Which, lol.) Either way, he makes it clear where his loyalties ultimately lie on “Black History,” where he can’t help telling us about his own ranking of the best rappers alive. His list? Kendrick Lamar, Pusha T, Eminem, himself, and the other three guys in Slaughterhouse—including, of course, Joe Budden.


With stripped-back instrumentation and poignant emotion, the English singer’s latest release is a stopgap EP that punches above its weight.

Be Right Back

On her 2018 debut Lost & Found, Jorja Smith presented a coming-of-age album on her own self-assured terms. Vivid lyrics and a flexible vocal range revealed the then-20 year old as a preternatural talent whose sleek songs speak to both small-scale romantic dramas and broad social and political ills; that year, she landed a coveted Mercury Prize nomination. Since then, the English R&B singer has kept a relatively low profile, providing the occasional guest feature while plugging away at a follow-up. Now Smith returns with the low-lit Be Right Back, a stopgap EP between albums with eight tracks from the cutting room floor. With its stripped-back instrumentation and forthcoming lyrics, Be Right Back proves that even Smith’s rejects are worthy of attention.
As an artist, Smith is adamant about working in her own style and at her own pace: “I don’t feel like I need to be doing this or that,” she told Pitchfork in 2017. “Ever.” Be Right Back maintains the ethos, contrasting the glossy, hip-hop-inflected production of her peers with a focus on mellower, guitar- and piano-driven instrumentation. “Addicted” is a particularly heart-rending missive from a fractured relationship, sung over rolling percussion and a faint, reverb-washed guitar. “The hardest thing/You are not addicted to me,” she confesses, stretching out the word “addicted” in a wounded search for reciprocity. Over rhythmic bass and guitar by co-producer Jeff Gitelman on “Burn,” Smith adopts a gently rolling delivery that feels on the verge of tears: “You burn like you never burn out/Try so hard you can still fall down/You keep it all in but you don’t let it out.” It’s one of her most confessional moments to date, a delicate yet plainspoken depiction of trying to keep it together while falling apart.
The mood shifts slightly on the propulsive, reggae-tinged “Bussdown,” but Smith sustains her languid style. She recruits the cool-headed South London rapper Shaybo to describe a self-made woman who can’t find happiness, even when surrounded by the spoils of success. The song eventually pivots to a sharper first-person point of view: “They call me Miss Naive, I’m still naive/I put trust in all the ones that got me,” Smith reels off in a curling flow, an admission of both vulnerability and strength that she then wrinkles with a sneer: “They never really had me.”
Be Right Back’s most appealing quality remains Smith’s voice, which stretches at will as she taps into various emotional states. She sings with insistence against echoing shouts on the moody “Digging” and flies up to a heady falsetto on “Weekend,” where her background vocals dovetail in operatic melodies. Be Right Back can at times feel like a minor expansion on Lost & Found’s melancholy moments, but Smith’s emotional acuity and resolute confidence prove that she’s still just getting started.

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On her second album, a country singer-songwriter accustomed to crafting songs for artists like Miranda Lambert and Lee Ann Womack finds her own voice.

Pins and Needles

Over years spent crafting material for others, songwriter Natalie Hemby has come to specialize in creating songs around thoughtful characters. Country music, happily, thrives on narrative. On Pins and Needles, the artist who earned a publishing contract barely out of her teens tackles her own tunes, songs that she might have written for clients/friends like Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town. Her second solo album benefits from her zen approach to singing: She won’t go beyond what her men and women feel. In a genre with a penchant for melodrama, Hemby has a novelist’s range and a short story writer’s concentration.
An imagist adept at supplying singers like Lee Ann Womack with vivid ideas (“The Bees” could be in a Songwriting for Dummies manual), Hemby has earned those royalties in the last decade. A rousing, blowzy number for Kelly Clarkson in “Don’t Rush”; songs about simple stuff like “Pink Sunglasses” and “Smoking Jacket,” among others, for Lambert; and delicate bubble-disco bops like “Velvet Elvis” and “Butterflies” for Kacey Musgraves—whether she’s writing alone or with a team, her material functions as scripts bereft of camera directions, as if aware the star will change things around. Hemby’s 2017 debut, Puxico, was the equivalent of an indie film whose makers had previously hobnobbed with George Clooney: tentative, conscious (if not self-conscious) of its smaller scale. Two years later, a project with Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlisle, and Maren Morris called the Highwomen allowed Hemby to blend with three exemplary vocalists and songwriters in an album-length demonstration of democracy at its most blithe.
Pins and Needles, assembled over several years with help from buddies including Lambert, Morris, and Brothers Osborne, captures a moment when an artist, calling in her chits, audibly blooms with the assurance of having found a voice after years of experimenting with others’. People making do without making a fuss is her subject; her women are wary, not weary. Occasionally Pins and Needles softens when the allure of her conceits is just about the only thing she’s got—for example, comparing a relationship’s chill to “Radio Silence,” or letting the dull syncopations, whistled hook, and redundant vocal filters on “Banshee” shrivel the track into something decidedly un-banshee-esque. Call it the complacency of metaphor. Hemby is best riding mid-tempo grooves like “New Madrid,” whose acoustic guitars chug at the pace of her recollections, and “Pinwheel,” a song heavily indebted to Sheryl Crow jams like “A Change Will Do You Good.” (In fact, Crow co-writer Jeff Trott had a hand in both.)
Hemby, married to producer Mike Wrucke, projects the self-confidence of an artist who understands how collaboration with equals rebounds to the credit of the top-billed person. She helped make Miranda Lambert into the last decade’s most dependable country act; Lambert and other pals are returning the favor. “I don’t wanna be a hero/Just wanna be a face in the crowd,” she announces in the first track, as if we needed reminding. Thanks to her understatement at the mic, the women in her songs feel too deeply to show those feelings. Reminiscing about days when she and a lover left clothes on the waterbank while she “breathed in” his kiss in “Lake Air,” Hemby gives each word its weight, as if the memory were a flower pressed between the pages of a favorite book. The bounty of Pins and Needles suggests she’s got plenty more tales to tell.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two of Puerto Rico’s most promising independent rappers join forces for a summer-ready album, threading samba and ballroom into the worlds of R&B and reggaeton.

Duo Deleite / Gyanma / Enyel C: Duo Deleite

Duo Deleite

The collaborative album has a storied place in hip-hop. It’s a celebration of two artists’ creative synergies, typically honed in prior team-ups that became hits and/or fan favorites. But sometimes, it can be an opportunity for each rapper to test their mettle. The examples are plentiful: Jay-Z and Kanye came together as The Throne for their now classic LP, Method Man and Redman entertained audiences for nearly a decade, and the legends of Black Star and Madvillain will outlast us all.
But in the world of Spanish-language hip-hop and reggaeton, it’s harder to recall projects with the same kind of consistency. Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam released knockouts in the early aughts as Los Cangris, and Arcángel and De La Ghetto still insist they were never an official duo, in spite of all the singles they’ve released together. Fast-forward to the present: The burgeoning alt-urbano scene in Puerto Rico has transformed into a hotbed for experimentation. Two of its most promising acts, Gyanma and Enyel C, have appeared on the same bills in recent years. In early 2020, they dropped “Oro Centro,” which has become a show-stopping live staple. Later that year, they jumped in the booth again for “Joe Exotic.” So they decided to take the next logical step: releasing a joint album under the moniker Duo Deleite (aka Delightful Duo, or Duo That Delights).

The self-titled album collects many of the styles that have made alt-urbano so rich over the last few years (and a creative hub where labels discover new talent). As solo acts, Gyanma and Enyel occupy different lanes: Gyanma’s sound is the lovechild of trap, R&B, and the roguish energy of reggaeton, while Enyel C began his career as a lo-fi hip-hop savant who eventually came into his own as a lyricist and producer on his debut EP Angelito. Those abundant influences make Duo Deleite an album whose biggest strength is its variety; it forgoes some of the more predictable pop templates that currently dominate the urbano mainstream.
Take “Café,” a song that resembles an urbano version of the “jet set” song made popular by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Tony Bennett (a “Corcovado” for the streets, if you will). Produced by New York’s Balbi, the song wafts through the air like the aroma of its namesake, quietly lighting up the synapses as Gyanma and Enyel rap over a smooth, samba-fusion beat. It’s far removed from the boisterous trap they’re known for, but even in tranquility, the duo is capable of innovation.
Even when they venture into familiar thematic territory or dabble with a more standard pop sound, the duo avoids monotony. “Millonari” and lead single “MTV” kick the album into a higher gear, as they let loose and lean more aggressively into catchier trap hooks and bars. Both tracks touch upon the well-trodden topic of daydreaming about wild success, but they don’t feel redundant when the production and lyrics are so snappy.
Around 2020, urbano producers began to experiment more frequently with house and electronic music. Some artists, like Rauw Alejandro and Randy (of Jowell & Randy) successfully pulled it off, but others became victims of their hubris, thoughtlessly overlaying one rhythm over the other and calling it a day. Gyanma and Enyel are both producers themselves (the former is a Berklee alumnus), so the care they take around crafting and selecting beats is palpable, especially on tracks like “De Vogue.” Here, they traverse ballroom’s steady synth stabs, modulating their cadences and darting between tempos to match the lightning pace. With the added spice of a cheeky YHLQMDLG interpolation, the track proves that when it comes to making the music authentic, Duo Deleite have done their due diligence.
The last two songs on the eight-track album contribute to that mission of authenticity: “To’ Los Gantel” and “Número Uno” invoke two pillars of the Puerto Rican urbano sound—malianteo (read: gangsta rap) and perreo. Both are filtered through Duo Deleite’s vision, yearning for light-heartedness without diluting the song’s effectiveness. “To’ Los Gantel” carries Enyel C’s best verse and a ragga-inspired coda, while Gyanma excels on “Número Uno,” flaunting his talent for threading romantic overtures with flirty innuendo, as he did on his previous EPs Rompecorazones and Lado A/Lado B.
Duo Deleite showcases the pair’s symbiotic relationship and the versatility with which they can tackle new genres. The interest in older sounds is foreshadowed even in the cover art, as Enyel dons a colorful New Jack Swing-type jacket and black beret, and Gyanma appears in ’90s street hoops drip. But don’t get it twisted: The twosome is still very much of this moment, not just in the tangible enthusiasm they imbue in the production, but in their lyrics as well. On “Café,” Enyel raps, “Damn, mi loquite, conmigo tú coronaste,” utilizing the gender-neutral “e” suffix (a practice that has caught on among younger Latines to make their Spanish more inclusive).

Duo Deleite is a lean array of easygoing anthems—one that feels like a soundtrack for road trips, beach days, and vacilón. The duo has said that “good vibes and having a good time” is the thesis of the album, and while they’ve certainly achieved that, it more closely resembles a goodie bag rather than a cohesive, well-rounded collection. If and when they decide to reteam, here’s hoping for a more linear sonic throughline. Still, the LP illustrates the indie scene's capacious, experimental vision of urbano, which is forcing the mainstream to take notes. The young guns got next, and they have the talent and drive to back it up.


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 one of the biggest albums of all time: its origins, its impact, and why it remains a permanent fixture in the rock canon.

The Dark Side of the Moon

When Pink Floyd first premiered what would become the most successful rock album of all time, it was quite literally too big for the system to handle. A half-hour into the band’s concert in Brighton on January 20, 1972—the live debut of what was then called “Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics”—the band started to play “Money,” which required synchronizing their performance to a pre-recorded sound collage of jingling coins and ka-ching-ing cash registers. But coupled with the band’s power-sucking sound system and lighting rig, the show slowly ground to a halt. After a brief break, bassist Roger Waters came to the mic to explain: “Due to severe mechanical and electronic horror, we can’t do any more of that bit, so we’ll do something else.” Less than a month later, the band had to abandon a performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall when the same thing happened.
Over the prior half-decade, Pink Floyd had established themselves as, if not the best psychedelic rock band, then certainly the most technologically extravagant. From late 1966 through the fabled Summer of Love, they were the house band at the UFO, the Swinging London rock club/art space/drug den, which gave them free rein to blend their droning jams with trippy visuals, sound effects, fog machines, and extreme volume. That August, Waters told Melody Maker that he wanted Pink Floyd to travel from city to city with a circus-style big top. “We’ll have a huge screen 120 feet wide and 40 feet high inside and project films and slides.”
His prediction never came to be, but for an invite-only gig at Queen Elizabeth Hall in May 1967, the band installed a joystick dubbed “The Azimuth Co-ordinator” on top of Richard Wright’s keyboard to send the band’s potent, droning sound and sci-fi effects careening around the first-of-its-kind quadraphonic playback system in the venue. For the back cover photo of the 1969 double album Ummagumma, drummer Nick Mason arranged the band’s road gear to resemble an aircraft carrier, a concise reversal of one philosopher’s claim that rock music is not much more than “a misuse of military equipment.” Waters told Melody Maker that Pink Floyd’s gear fixation was a matter of going where no band had gone. “We’re trying to solve problems that haven’t existed before.”
So, too, was NASA, whose decade-long effort to put men on the moon was coming to fruition at the same time. It was a perfect match: Around 10 p.m., Pink Floyd appeared on the BBC’s marathon telecast of the Apollo 11 landing and jammed on a song they called “Moonhead.” Along with the requisite panels of astronomers and physicists, the quartet was joined by space-themed poetry readings from Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, and recordings of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra”—prominently featured in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi opus 2001: A Space Odyssey—and the new single “Space Oddity,” released to capitalize on moon mania by ambitious 22-year-old folkie David Bowie.
Though Bowie was just beginning to explore the cosmos, Pink Floyd had been traveling the spaceways since their inception: The first track on their debut album was “Astronomy Dominé,” a slab of B-movie sci-fi cheese masterminded by the band’s co-founder, songwriter, and frontman Syd Barrett, which, along with “Interstellar Overdrive,” landed them the “space rock” sobriquet from critics. Though no band likes to be classified so generically, they grew to embrace the idea. Eighteen years later, the band’s official tour t-shirt read “Pink Floyd: Still First in Space.”
Barrett watched the moon landing at his Wetherby Mansion flat in London with a group of friends and hangers-on. By 1969, Barrett had disappeared into a haze of quaaludes and LSD that eroded his already-fragile mental health. There was a depressing irony in the fact that Barrett had churned out the whimsical art-pop character studies “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” that got the group signed by EMI, then immediately soured on the non-stop promotional requirements that came along with hit singles. When Barrett showed up to live gigs in 1967, he was more of a distraction than a contributor. Forced to lip-sync on TV, he barely moved.
The band hired Barrett’s childhood mate David Gilmour as a live replacement, and one day they simply headed to a gig without picking up their singer. While Barrett was a master of making quotidian things charmingly weird, Roger Waters—who’d become Pink Floyd’s leader by dint of his forceful personality and big ideas—was honest about his careerist impulses and grand aims. “That was always my big fight,” Waters later said, “to try and drag it kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical.” It would take a half-decade after splitting with Barrett for Waters to reroute his obsession with outer space into a grand treatise on—as he’d later call it—inner space.
In the five years between Barrett’s departure and the 1973 release of The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd wandered the hinterlands as European psychedelia fractured into the high-minded progressive rock of the Moody Blues, the Nice, Procol Harum, Yes, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull; the jazz-fusion experiments of John McLaughlin and Soft Machine; the rock-operatic pretensions of the Who and Genesis; fellow space-rock travelers Hawkwind; and the synth-obsessed German bohemians Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, and Popol Vuh. Without their putative leader and most charismatic member, Pink Floyd recorded a string of low-budget film soundtracks, released the classically gassy concept albums Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, helped Barrett record his 1970 solo debut Madcap Laughs, and toured the world. They earned enough money from their elaborate live shows—which journalists were beginning to describe in terms of tonnage—to make up for their paltry album sales.
With 1971’s Meddle, the band finally settled into a studio groove. The best of the new songs was the side-long “Echoes,” over 20 minutes of airtight studio jamming, a bit of jazz and folk, a single, repeating piano note fed through a Leslie speaker, and Waters’ newfound lyrical focus on the riddles of social alienation. Gilmour and Wright’s serenely harmonized voices intone Waters’ lyrics: “Strangers passing in the street/By chance, two separate glances meet/And I am you and what I see is me.” This recognition of a stranger’s shared humanity and pessimistic view that empathy is an impossible thing to communicate was rooted in Waters’ regret at being increasingly unable to reach his friend Syd. But as “Echoes” demonstrated, that fear could be blown out to galactic proportions.
There’s a good chance that Waters was among the billion or so humans who first saw the far side of the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo 8 beamed the first detailed images of the mysterious lunar surface to televisions around the world. As astronomers have stressed for decades, “far side” is the accurate scientific term, but the spooky indeterminacy of “dark side” allows everyone else to tap into the same stoned undergraduate awe of learning that “lunatic” is derived from the 13th-century notion that some forms of mental illness were caused by adverse reactions to the moon’s phases. For Waters, the dark side of the moon was an inaccessible psychic space to which Barrett had retreated, perhaps forever, ingesting immeasurable amounts of psychedelics to cope with the unbearable stresses that accompany life on Earth, let alone one lived in the luminous glare of the public eye.
On the penultimate Dark Side track “Brain Damage,” he leads the band on a quest to find their wayward friend. There are elements of old Floyd on the verses: Gilmour alternates between major and minor chords, Waters sings of creeping madness like a seance leader while a man’s deep voice emits a maniacal haunted-house laugh. But on the choruses, the band soars skyward into a gospel-rock echo of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Let It Be,” with Waters making an even grander attempt toward cosmic connection: “And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes/I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
Pink Floyd’s expansion of the interpersonal to the intergalactic materialized at a moment when the record industry was more than ready to accommodate it. Waters’ ambition toward art-rock as gestalt—records, packaging, films, and concerts combined into an overwhelming whole—accelerated the rapid growth of the rock-industrial complex of the 1970s. In 1972, Pink Floyd introduced Dark Side’s songs in 3,000-capacity theaters. By 1975, they and their arena-rock contemporaries were playing 60,000-seat stadiums. Like the post-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and many of their prog peers, Pink Floyd viewed the album as the paragon of rock meaning, and Dark Side is the culmination of rock’s transformation into sacred druggie ritual and the elaborately packaged rock album’s transmutation into a rockist totem, a bearer of secrets, something to be decoded. With the help of their Cambridge friends Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of design firm Hipgnosis, the Dark Side album’s prism-on-black design ushered in a new era for rock iconography, as stark and suggestive as 2001’s obelisk.
The Dark Side of the Moon is by just about any measure rock’s most overdetermined album: It can be hard to talk about the music itself, and not the stats and legends accreting around the eighth-highest-selling album of all time. The music’s sense of scale and gravity communicates importance, but 741 consecutive weeks on the album chart is something else entirely. Dark Side’s unhurried tempos and swells of emotion are grandly cinematic, and the band maintained mystery by avoiding the press, but that’s true for lots of bands that don’t generate widespread conspiracy theories about secretly composing their music to sync up with The Wizard of Oz. In truth, Dark Side’s music didn’t sound much like Pink Floyd’s previous work, and went places that firmly separated the band from its peers. Few 1973 bands were blending rock with jazz, sound montages, electronic sequencers, and interviews with average people about their deepest fears and secrets. Overwhelming earnestness and statement-making are tough for a band to pull off at the same time, and attempts at making profound alienation sound beautiful that aren’t Dark Side or OK Computer inevitably fail.
Though Waters himself has described Dark Side’s theme as a simple battle between darkness and light with outer space as a backdrop, he’s actually underselling the album’s elegant doomerism—apropos of, well, everything that was happening at the time. Some light bleeds through, but not much. From the moment your lungs draw air your innocence is lost, and your life is spent fighting against the forces of time, money, religion, death, and politics, culminating in a sizable psychic (“Brain Damage”) and existential (“Eclipse”) collapse. If the real subject of English psychedelia, as the Beatles’ chronicler Ian Macdonald has it, is neither drugs nor love, but the lost innocence of childhood, then The Dark Side of the Moon could reasonably be called the end of the 1960s countercultural dream. The vivid spectrum of refracted light surrounded by depthless pitch black. The sun is eclipsed by the moon.
Dark Side was the No. 1 album in the U.S. for a week in April 1973, pushed to the top by incessant FM radio airplay of the single “Money.” Preceded by the same coin-and-cash register montage that melted down their 1972 Brighton concert, Waters’ spongy introductory bassline marks a tonal shift in the album’s mood and flow. Even with the necessity of a side-flip between tracks, the decision to follow the orgasmic death-wail of “The Great Gig in the Sky” with the crass sounds of commerce counts as the album’s lone wanly humorous moment. In interviews, Gilmour has implied that he took Waters’ demo as an opportunity to make a kind of prog-rock “Green Onions,” but the closest comparison to a blues in 7/4 with a sarcastic lyric about grotesque greed, complete with a fiery sax solo and a three-part guitar solo, was Steely Dan’s July 1973 single “Show Biz Kids” (the following year, the O’Jays would issue the definitive take, with the definitive bassline, on the topic).
Though Pink Floyd had to be talked into even releasing “Money” as a single, the programmers in the Album-Oriented Rock radio format wouldn’t have minded either way. The most successful new format of the decade, AOR was a corporatized, data-driven update of the late-’60 “free-form” model of radio programming. Free-form merged the anti-establishment tenor of the era with the FM band’s sonic superiority over AM (the home of transistor radio-friendly Top 40) to merge political progressivism and progressive rock, eschewing standardized playlists and constant advertisements in favor of the Ummagumma version of “A Saucerful of Secrets” and plugs for local head shops and third-party candidates. But in the same capitalist metamorphosis that turned field festivals into arena shows, AOR engulfed free-form, replacing the DJ’s ear with demographic research and point-of-sale polling. Rock album sales exploded: Apart from Dark Side’s week at No. 1, 39 weeks of 1973’s Billboard 200 album chart were topped by AOR-programmed acts: the Moody Blues, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Wings, George Harrison, Chicago, Jethro Tull, the Allman Brothers Band, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John.
That list underscores two effects of the AOR revolution: the final cleavage of (white) “rock” from (Black) rock’n’roll, R&B, funk, and soul; and AOR’s blatant preference for music made by men. One of Dark Side’s greatest tricks is making sure that suburban stoners could find their way into songs like “Money” or “Us and Them” through their countercultural aura, while Wright’s modal jazz tints, Gilmour’s tone, and Parsons’ lush quadraphonic engineering could just as easily rope in the “high-fidelity first-class traveling set” of pseudo-cosmopolitan Playboy readers (who voted it fourth in their 1973 Jazz and Pop poll in the “small combo” category, behind Chicago IV, Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, and Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play).
During production, Waters advocated for a drier sound, and more intense psychological exploration inspired by Plastic Ono Band, an idea that was thankfully nixed in favor of what Gilmour called a “big and swampy and wet” mix. “Breathe,” “On the Run,” and “Time” are the exemplars of this approach, forming the sonic and theoretical core of the album’s Side A. “Breathe” dramatically blooms into existence out of the album’s opening sound collage with Gilmour’s placid Fender 1000 twin neck pedal steel at the fore. Though the steel guitar was a mainstay in Jerry Garcia’s country-rock arsenal at the time, Gilmour’s open-G tuning hewed closer to the languid tones of the Hawai’ian islands where it was born. Combined with the vibrato effect of the Uni-Vibe pedal on his Stratocaster, the track is both impossibly tranquil and gently unnerving. The recommendation to simply “breathe” can be said to someone giving birth, meditating, or having a panic attack or bad trip, and Waters moves the story quickly through the beginnings of life through an existence marked by tireless labor, then a premature death.
When Pink Floyd entered the studio in May 1972, they’d road-tested their new material for a year; the songs were all fairly far along, leaving ample time for production and experimentation. On Meddle and the Obscured by Clouds soundtrack they recorded in France a few months prior, they’d deployed one of Wright’s new gizmos: a synthesizer and primitive sequencer made by the English company EMS Synthi-A that he had bought from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They were all the rage in 1973—John Paul Jones fed his piano through one to create the eerie mood of Led Zeppelin’s dirge “No Quarter” and Brian Eno used one on the Roxy Music song where Brian Ferry sings about having sex with a robot. For Waters, however, the Synthi’s eight-note sequencer generated an inhuman, hyper-modern sound-swirl that, when mixed with the recorded sounds of airport terminal announcements, mimicked the intense travel panic that he was increasingly experiencing as a touring musician. Life as he saw it was not a matter of wrangling modern technology toward a sunny future, like Kraftwerk a year later, but a numbing cycle of alienated labor and idle, wasted moments.
Introduced with its own two-minute overture that moves from Parsons’ clock-sounds montage and Nick Mason’s roto-tom solo, “Time” is Dark Side’s grooviest and simplest song, with Gilmour’s taut riffs backing Waters’ best set of lyrics—a far more serious take on the sardonic Kinks-glam of Obscured’s “Free Four.” About as close to a Marxian statement on industrial capitalism as one could hear on FM radio, “Time” combines with “Breathe” to evoke Marx’s well-traveled claim that capital’s institution of tight factory clock regulations caused a psychic rupture in the human understanding of time, and a took a physical toll on our bodies. When you are young and time is long, your days are occupied “killing” time, but as you age, you increasingly focus on “saving” and “spending” it—until, all of a sudden, it runs out. “Time” gives way to a brief “Breathe” reprise introducing the opioid effects of softly spoken magic spells.
Titled “Religion” in its demo form, “The Great Gig in the Sky” initially took shape as a cyclical Wright-led instrumental with Gilmour accompanying on pedal steel, but the band made the last-minute decision to add a female vocal to the track. They called in Parsons’ acquaintance Clare Torry, a local session singer who came into the studio cold, and was prompted by Gilmour and Wright to, she recalls, improvise over the track while imagining a “birth and death concept.” She nailed the album’s ecstatic emotional peak in a few takes. In the context of Dark Side, “The Great Gig” feels like a transitional point—in musical flow and skyward narrative ascent—but AOR programmers extracted and rotated it regardless. In the right sequence—say, near Merry Clayton’s powerhouse choruses on “Gimmie Shelter” or Jim Gordon and Duane Allman’s elegiac piano-and-slide coda to “Layla”—it slotted in perfectly.
So did “Us and Them,” the album’s best song, which gently moves through Wright’s modal chord changes and highlights the album’s soulful backup quartet (which included Doris Troy, who’d co-written her own hit a decade earlier, and had provided vocal punch for the rollicking coda of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”). The seductive music is a feint, of course, softening the blow of an evocative and elemental Waters sentiment about the cruel abstractions of war. Waters’ father was a schoolteacher and member of the Communist Party who, after initially refusing to join the Army in lieu of volunteering closer to home, decided to join the 8th Battalion Royal Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. He died on the beaches of Anzio when Waters was five months old. Thirty years later, “Great Gig” and “Us and Them” cycled through the FM airwaves, providing a doleful backdrop for the senseless, state-sponsored murders slowly concluding in the dense jungles of Vietnam.
The Dark Side of the Moon remains Pink Floyd’s greatest musical achievement, and despite the band releasing four more albums before dissolving a bit more than a decade later, sent an early signal of its demise. Waters was growing ever more certain of his singular genius and forcing his will, while Gilmour and Wright resented his lack of musical chops and production choices in the studio. When the band split after 1983’s The Final Cut, Waters and Gilmour released solo albums within a month of each other, and toured separately while performing the same Dark Side songs. Waters’ new band (including Squeeze’s Paul Carrack on vocals) was still capable of booking arenas, but Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, as Pink Floyd, staged the highest grossing tour of the 1980s. Leave it to Pink Floyd to generate quantum versions of its original self.
In a 1987 Rolling Stone feature pegged to the release of the first post-Waters Floyd LP Momentary Lapse of Reason, David Fricke interviewed the ex-bandmates separately, surfacing just how much Gilmour resented Waters’ megalomania, which had driven Wright out of the band during the tense 1979 Wall sessions, and paraphrasing Waters’ characterization of the remaining Floyd members as “lazy, greedy bastards hacking out a record and sleepwalking through a tour to build up a multimillion-dollar retirement nest egg,” using, in Waters’ words, “the goodwill and the name Pink Floyd.”
By the time of Pink Floyd 3.0’s 1994 Division Bell world tour, the band was a cultural institution and had long been recognized as a formative cog in the same globalized, financialized record and touring industry that they used their music to decry. In Europe the tour was sponsored by Volkswagen, which released a “Pink Floyd Edition” Golf in commemoration. Such a tacky corporate tie-in may have caused a younger Waters to retch, but Gilmour—who’d recorded much of his post-Waters music on his posh houseboat—defended his affluence matter-of-factly in a 1995 interview: “When you compare [my wealth] to what chairmen of big companies earn, I think that I am more entitled to my millions than they are. After all, I have made the world happier than Unilever.”
The second set of each Division Bell date featured Dark Side played in full, and the tour was the largest-grossing in history before the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge trek eclipsed it the same year. When it came to Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome in June 1994, a high school senior named Charlie Savage drove down from Fort Wayne with some friends to see one of his favorite bands for the first time. A few months later as a college freshman, Savage availed himself of his university’s internet connection to explore Usenet—a messageboard predecessor to the World Wide Web that contained information and discussion about thousands of topics—and quickly dove into alt.music.pink-floyd. There, he learned about a DIY multimedia ritual that Floyd fans had concocted, likely by stoned accident: synchronizing the CD version of Dark Side (which didn’t have to be flipped over) with the VHS version of The Wizard of Oz. At numerous moments, the music seemed to perfectly soundtrack the film’s action, inspiring speculation about whether the band had secretly intended it that way. The next summer, Savage wrote a piece about the phenomenon for his hometown Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette during an internship (Pink Floyd didn’t return several faxed requests for comment), and once he reposted it online, it went mid-’90s viral. By 2000, TCM paired with Capitol Records to program it.
While there’s no truth to the rumor, the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” myth does provide bold evidence for two dimensions of Pink Floyd and Dark Side. First, its omnipresence. Despite being one of the 20th century’s most recognizable works of popular culture, Dark Side has never ranked highly on any of Rolling Stone’s canon-creating album lists: It came in at No. 35 on their 1987 20th-anniversary Top 100, dropped to No. 40 on the 2003 Top 500 and slid to No. 55 on the 2020 edition. But it kept selling and selling and selling, only dropping off the bottom of the Billboard 200 in 1988—fittingly, the year after its home format, the vinyl LP, was outsold by its successor, the compact disc. The solemn, rockist vinyl rituals that Pink Floyd helped initiate with Dark Side were reimagined for the era of CDs, VCRs, and urban legends spreading online. It says something that Savage has won a Pulitzer Prize for his political reporting but still receives more questions about his college Floyd piece.
The second thing that “Dark Side of the Rainbow” highlights is that Pink Floyd is perhaps the classic rock band for whom the descriptor “cinematic” not only rises above cliché, but feels absolutely necessary. Their career started, after all, playing at the London Free School and UFO Club with synchronized imagery that engulfed them. Though they declined Stanley Kubrick’s request to use “Atom Heart Mother” in A Clockwork Orange, the methodical pace, overwhelming seriousness, precision-tooled production, and obsession with man/machine dynamics of Dark Side and its follow-up Wish You Were Here are deeply Kubrickian. “Breathe” was originally written as part of the soundtrack to the 1970 Vanessa Redgrave-narrated documentary The Body, and Michelangelo Antonioni rejected Wright’s “Us and Them” instrumental for a riot scene in Zabriskie Point. In 1973, an Australian filmmaker commissioned “Echoes” for a legendary surfing film, and for part of their 1974 tour, Pink Floyd commissioned several animations and short films to project on giant screens behind the stage. Though it’s true that any music played under any motion picture will inevitably synchronize somehow (“Echoes” over the end of 2001 works decently), it also makes perfect sense that this particular conspiracy attached itself chiefly to Pink Floyd.
The full Pink Floyd reunited for the London portion of Live 8, Bob Geldof’s 2005 sequel to Live Aid. Taking the stage between sets by the Who and Paul McCartney was a fitting end to a live career that began in Swinging London with must-see psychedelic multimedia spectaculars that both McCartney and Townshend popped in on. Waters and Gilmour were diplomatic and agreeable on stage—though Gilmour later said it felt like “sleeping with your ex-wife”—and they ran through “Breathe,” “Money,” and “Wish You Were Here,” Waters’ tribute to his long-lost friend Syd Barrett, whom Waters acknowledged from stage. Barrett died at his parents’ home a year later.
Like its predecessor, Live 8 was based on the notion that rock stars could save the world by staging a large enough spectacle. In 1985, at MTV’s early peak, that idea wasn’t yet as quaint as it would seem in 2005, long after rock stars had ceded the cutting edge of cultural and political conversation to subsequent generations and new technological infrastructure. In 2020, Gilmour and Mason reformed Pink Floyd for a one-off charity single, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” to support Ukraine’s battle against a Russian invasion, but it came and went without much fanfare. Waters, on the other hand, enters political debates with a vengeance, and with the kind of “freethinking” contradictions that suggest deep YouTube rabbit holes. In Waters’ mind, support for Palestinian independence and disdain for Donald Trump share space with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, his desire to perform in SS-style uniforms in Germany, and his both-sides view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Where he once barked at his ex-bandmate in the pages of Rolling Stone, Gilmour and his wife, writer Polly Samson, lit Waters up on Twitter.
Over the past few years, Merck Mercuriadis, the avaricious industry veteran, has spent billions buying up the publishing rights to dozens of Pink Floyd’s classic rock contemporaries and others, naming his firm Hipgnosis in tribute to the Dark Side designers. Waters himself has decided to expand the Dark Side franchise, re-recording its songs in new arrangements, ostensibly pegged to the album’s 50th anniversary, but also, one suspects, so that he can reap the profits from what one might call “Money (Roger’s Version).” And though the music and fanbases are different, trace backward in time from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s blockbuster 2023 stadium tours and you’ll find Dark Side-era Floyd hiring the Bond films’ effects coordinator and filling multiple semi-trailers with their amps and lighting rigs. Pink Floyd’s era of the rock star guru gave way to multiple waves of larger-than-life icons decades ago, but any performer-mogul bent on building impossibly huge and expensive musical experiences to call the faithful to their knees is, to some degree, working from The Dark Side of the Moon’s original text.


The Zambian Canadian rapper and producer’s third album is heavy and suffocating, cranking up the murk and intensity to reveal the relief within unbridled anger.

Backxwash: I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES

Backxwash’s previous album, the Polaris-winning God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It, ends with a benediction. Over a serene loop of breezy guitar and tender hums that wouldn’t be out of place on a MIKE record, the rapper and producer samples a recording of the pastor T.D. Jakes, as if inviting the people who have forsaken her to forgive themselves. Backxwash tends to tuck such moments of warmth and reprieve into the margins of her raucous, blistering music, but “Redemption” is forthright, an olive branch extended to an undeserving world. On her third album, she’s uninterested in reconciliation. I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES embraces wrath, cranking up the murk and intensity of Backxwash’s snarling nu-metal to reveal the relief within unbridled anger.
God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It raised Backxwash’s profile, but because the album was laced with uncleared samples, she was forced to withdraw it from streaming services. That setback seems to have pushed her toward a less rap-first approach to songwriting. Instead of riding the drums and bass, here she adopts a slower, breathier delivery that thunders over the percussion. She trades drum loops and recognizable samples in favor of layered production with tighter pockets and denser mixes. These shifts produce heavier, more suffocating music, a backdrop that fits her tales of manic benders and grim ideation.
The record oscillates between Backxwash resisting the relentless current of her thoughts and surrendering herself to it. “Wail of the Banshee,” a frank litany of self-harm, is the latter. “Look in the mirror, it’s telling me I should kill something,” she raps over a thick wall of drone and screams. “Terror Packets” is equally despondent as Backxwash and guest Censored Dialogue relay personal brushes with transphobia, many involving relatives or romantic partners. “I am just dick to these hoes,” Backxwash growls, the double entendre pointed. The song ends with a clip of Angela Davis detailing how constant surveillance foments explosive rage.
Backxwash’s rage takes an array of shapes: Sometimes it’s destructive, as on “Burn to Ashes,” where guilt trips flare into fantasies of self-immolation. On the self-produced “In Thy Holy Name,” anger is jet fuel. Placed after a sample of a homophobic pastor, Backxwash’s final verse grows denser and craggier, then spills into a cathartic gurgle of noise and distortion. It feels like she’s run out of words. On “666 in Luxaxa,” the instrumental channels her fury. Rapping over a sample of a ululating Zulu chant, Backxwash, who grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, gives a quick lesson in colonization, allowing the loop to act as a marker of what empire erased. It’s also a subtle monument to Black resilience: When Backxwash’s bleak verse ends, the loop endures.
I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES has an introspective bent that distinguishes it from more cathartic pairings of rap and industrial music. While rappers as varied as Rico Nasty, Playboi Carti, Kanye West, and El-P have sought harsher sounds to unspool themselves and tap into spontaneity, Backxwash’s embrace of chaos and rage is meditative. Many of these songs attempt to both articulate anger and harness it in the name of self-acceptance—as well as more elusive feelings, like transcendence and euphoria. Backxwash’s sneering use of religious imagery demonstrates her deep skepticism of this impulse, but it’s a fixture of her music, buoying her when she careens toward rock bottom and propelling her when peace is just within her grasp.

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The Liverpool band’s debut looks at rock music and quotidian life through their own bizarre, distorted pop lens.

Guitar Music

If you were caught up in the acid-trip instrumentation of Courting’s cheekily titled debut album, Guitar Music, unmindful of Sean Murphy-O’Neill’s charged lyrics, it would seem that he and his bandmates were running around London, partying, falling in love, having the time of their lives. But even their funniest songs have a dark underbelly, and on closer listen, Guitar Music is occupied with far thornier subjects: the BDSM power structure of paypigs, bodily autonomy as it relates to beauty standards and adulthood, and the way changing cityscapes can create tour routes for poverty porn.
Guitar Music was originally made as a “rock” album before producer James Dring helped rip it to shreds and put it back together. Album opener “Cosplay/Twin Cities” is the sound of a band who is annoyed at publications who label them a guitar band. It’s Courting’s abrasive and deceptive prelude: A lush melody and romantic strings are consumed by an earth-shattering bass, sinister glitches, and censor beeps. The SOPHIE-inspired track immediately reveals that Courting aren’t afraid to pull the rug out beneath the listener. The cumulative effect makes these songs feel like tatters of unearthed time capsules that got mixed up in the same burial ground.
Since their 2019 debut single “Not Yr Man,” a satirical screed about masculinity norms, Courting have evolved beyond tight-fisted romps in the style of Parquet Courts or IDLES. There’s still plenty of pop culture shoutouts and nods to modern mundanity delivered in a deadpan voice, but at their best they feel less like provocations and more like world-building details—observations of a messy world contextualized with messy anxieties about growing up. “Famous” references luxury trends associated with self-care and upward mobility: “All of my friends are getting work done,” Murphy-O’Neill notes. “Fillers, facials, personal trainers/Calvin Klein collaborators/The American dream.” After imagining a now-scattered group of friends flying home to hang out and watch sports like the good ole days, Murphy-O'Neill cries, “Why’s everybody getting older?” Serrated guitars, short-circuiting background vocals, and Murphy-O’Neill’s searing tone create a sense of distrust and disgust while working through tumultuous changes.
The album’s longest song is a strange, alarming ode to falling in love with a robot influencer, inspired by content creator enigma Lil Miquela and Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. “Uncanny Valley Forever” begins as the album’s quietest track, with an eerie sweetness reminiscent of a Smashing Pumpkins ballad. Garbled high-pitched speech staggers into softly plucked electric guitar, then Murphy-O’Neill begins to sing gently about the future’s infinite possibilities. He sounds like he’s in love, but something isn’t adding up: “Every day she makes me laugh and I make her dinner/Although she can’t eat.” Soon, reality sets in and the division between humanity and technology appears like an exposed wire; it becomes unclear who’s the robot in this relationship as the song simpers from a guitar jam into a nearly indecipherable fried vocal outro. From head-scratching to head-banging, Courting transform observations from our bizarre reality into vivid storytelling and ambitious song structure, all in an effort to push pop further into the future.


On the third album of an astronomically-inspired trilogy, the German producer suspends lonely, isolated instruments within a sweeping cosmos. It sounds appropriately epic and a little vacant.

Extropy

The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and it’s so evocative as to induce a little bit of whiplash. Such a terrifically ancient sound makes for a great contrast with Guentner’s hyper-treated textures; it’s just about the last thing anyone would expect to hear on a record like this. The bell itself is such a loaded sound—so deeply intertwined with religion, ritual, death, and inevitability—that it’s easy to start thinking in outlandish, cosmic terms: Could this be the bell that tolls for all of us, floating somewhere in the seas of time?
Extropy leans hard into interstellar new-age aesthetics and sci-fi splendor. The portentous horn on “Everywhere” immediately conjures associations with Also sprach Zarathustra, the theme used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to announce humanity’s transcendence and in innumerable parodies to mock sci-fi self-seriousness. The rest of the seven-track album sounds like the searching, minor-key themes from countless science documentaries and space operas, amplified and blown up until it resembles the vastness of space itself. Within these ebbing, flowing sheets of sound, Guentner suspends lonely little instruments—a sonorous cello on “Here,” a sparkling vibraphone-synth on “Nowhere”—to approximate the luminous little objects that twinkle from the murk of the cosmos.
Guentner is probably best known for his association with Wolfgang Voigt’s Kompakt label. He appeared on the first eight Pop Ambient compilations, and his 2001 debut In Moll is a highlight of the label’s early catalog despite being clearly indebted to Voigt’s almighty GAS project. But Guentner’s textures have always been a little colder and more metallic than Voigt’s vivid swaths of sylvan psychedelia, and the compositions on Extropy have a steely edge that keeps them from feeling too weightless or incorporeal. They move like tied-down balloons, yearning to drift away but still tied to the constraints of gravity. There’s a heaviness to this music, which may have something to do with Rafael Anton Irisarri’s mastering. The Black Knoll Studio boss favors a gauzy yet bottom-heavy sound in both his own music and his engineering jobs for artists like Warmth and Loscil. It’s easy to see why he’d be drawn to a project like this.
Extropy does a great job of sounding epic and huge, but “epic and huge” isn’t quite enough to sustain the project over its seven-track, hour-long runtime. This music is too forceful to be soothing, too gentle to be buffeting, and without any contrasting techno-oriented material, as on In Moll or 2005’s 1981, the great, gauzy textures seem to swirl around vacantly, with nothing to stir them up. Guentner claims this music was inspired by the “pseudoscientific prediction that human intelligence and technology will enable life to expand in an orderly way throughout the entire universe.” But Extropy never really expands; it just pulses and contracts like an astral object viewed through the cold remove of a telescope.

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The Spanish group’s second album displays the superior songcraft of the band, as vocalists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials wade through love’s messy feelings with confidence and exuberance.

I Don’t Run

Hinds specialize in songs about love—which are not the same as love songs. Their jaunty tunes don’t so much offer declarations of devotion as catalog all the conflicted emotions, second-guessing, and compromises that lead up to them. In a Hinds song, love isn’t the product of the universe bringing two soulmates together, love is the result of uncomfortable conversations and ultimatums issued after one too many casual hook-ups. But on I Don’t Run, the Madrid quartet wade through these messy feelings with confidence and exuberance to spare, taking us on a pleasure cruise through choppy waters.
If Hinds’ 2016 debut, Leave Me Alone, presented more discrete genre exercises, I Don’t Run melts down its ’60s girl-group, ’90s twee, and post-DeMarco indie-pop influences down into a lustrous swirl befitting its superior songcraft. But like its predecessor, I Don’t Run’s charm offensive is powered by the interplay between singer-guitarists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials, who share songwriting duties with Ade Martin on bass and Amber Grimbergen on drums. Their sugar-and-spice dynamic presents a study in sharp contrasts: the former favors a calm tone that belies her cutting sentiments; the latter voraciously devours her lyrics and lets the words melt in her mouth like pieces of sponge toffee. But unlike most foils, these two are always working together, whether they’re eagerly finishing each other’s sentences, providing emotional support, or just amplifying the sense of hysteria through harmonies that push the mix into the red.
Their audible sense of camaraderie functions as a form of group therapy. Atop the deceptively laid-back groove of “Soberland,” the two lay into a potential partner who’s getting older but still wants to be the life of the party and enjoy all the non-committal sex it promises. They sing as a united front, delivering an ecstatic chorus that doubles as a tough-love intervention. “Tester” is even more testy, with the duo voicing the frustrations of a woman who realizes she’s a second-class citizen in her boyfriend’s little black book: “Why did you have to kiss me after sex/Should I’ve known before you were also banging her,” they seethe, before the song’s spirited jangle-punk stomp clears a beeline from the bed to the door.
The critiques are self-inflicted, too: The giddy “New for You” couches Perrote and Cosials’ pledge to change their duplicitous ways and be better partners—yet when they admit, “I don’t want to disappoint you with my new persona,” they tap into the latent fear that even positive changes can have destabilizing effects on relationships. And with the roughed-up ’50s pop of “Rookie,” they suggest the key to happiness is overlooking your mate’s imperfections: “Don’t know who messed your bed,” Parotte sings, “but my socks are staying there.”
On an album overflowing with cheeky ruminations on modern romance and pleas for commitment, the lo-fi acoustic closer “Ma Nuit” offers a stark portrait of Hinds’ day-to-day reality as touring musicians, and its inherent logistical incompatibility with domestic bliss. As Cosials’ Spanish-sung lyrics chronicle the difficulties of long-distance love, Perrote offers this glimmer of hope: “Every night when I’m on stage,” she sings, “I picture you in my favorite lines.” It’s a vulnerable moment, but for Hinds, this is what a proper love song should sound like.


Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre's latest album features guest spots from The Pet Shop Boys, Primal Scream, Cyndi Lauper, and...Edward Snowden.

Jean-Michel Jarre: Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise

Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise

Emerging in the mid-'70's, Jean-Michel Jarre was part of wave of musicians that were incorporating synthesizers, tape loops and state-of-the-art effects systems into pop-leaning forms. Unlike his mentor Pierre Schaeffer and his peers in the avant-garde and academic communities, Jarre married sweet, hummable melodies and traditional European harmonies to star-gazing soundscapes, making electronics seem safe and inviting to the masses. To some, this was tantamount to treason; one of electronic music's first manifestos, written by Luigi Russolo in 1913, demanded composers “break at all costs from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.” For those not interested in modernist treatises and radical new forms, however, Jarre was the sound of the future.
Without doubt, Jarre was on the right side of history. In addition to album sales well into the millions, in 1979 he broke the world's record for concert attendance, bringing 1,000,000 people to Paris' Place de la Concorde (he went on to break that record three more times). Yet in many ways his influence pales in comparison to his sales; his sheen is futuristic but his music looks fondly to the past. Though titled Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, Jarre's latest album is anything but an exploration of the genre's roots in the radical manipulations of raw sound and analogue circuitry. Rather, it's an overstuffed, overlong string of collaborations that smothers Jarre's nimble melodicism under heaving EDM production and spooks his guests into cliches of themselves, or worse.
And what a series of guests. The Pet Shop Boys, Yello, and Gary Numan are all here, as well as Cyndi Lauper, ambient pioneers the Orb and pop shapeshifters Primal Scream. In their heyday, each of these artists had an unmistakable sound signature (except perhaps Primal Scream, who made a career out of reinvention), yet on Electronica 2 they are bulldozed by Jarre's production. There are flashes of recognition, such as the gospel choir on Primal Scream collab “As One,” an obvious nod to “Come Together.” More often though, Jarre appears resolutely in the driver's seat. For the previous installation*, Electronica 1:The Time Machine*, he said he tailored each song as a demo with the specific collaborator in mind, to be fleshed out or rewritten together in the studio later. If that's true here, it's hard to tell.
Jarre's decades on stadium stages may have something to do with the broader-than-broad strokes employed throughout the album. His preference is for slow, bombastic tempos and questing, classically-leaning chord progressions, and he runs this formula into the ground. The arrangements, heavily layered and sound-designed, telegraph an up-to-the-minute sheen yet lack a timeless quality. Sadly the effect carries over to the singers' performances; Lauper attempts an Ellie Goulding impression on “Swipe to the Right.” Numan, once both campy and sleek, is a bogged-down wannabe pop messiah on “Here for You.” The Pet Shop Boys fare a little better on “Brick England”—they simply sound like a boring version of themselves. Yello are meanwhile unrecognizable on the aptly titled existential dirge “Why This, Why That and Why.”
Other collaborations promise to push Jarre a bit out of his comfort zone, yet you feel him fussing. The presence of Jeff Mills suggests that Jarre might be game for a descent into a techno wormhole. Though “The Architect” eventually speeds up to a danceable clip and features traces of the claustrophobic minimalism that Mills perfected in his younger years, it also foregrounds string flourishes worthy of a James Bond opening sequence. The structure, too, is a mess, scrolling through breakdowns, sequences and buildups that have little relation to each other.
Intriguingly, the brief presence of NSA whistleblower and non-musician Edward Snowden on “Exit” yields the liveliest results. Jarre described the track as “trying to illustrate the idea of this crazy quest for big data on one side and the manhunt for this one young guy by the CIA, NSA and FBI on the other,” and “Exit” could certainly soundtrack a frenetic chase scene. Mid-song, the music slows to a halt and Snowden gets on the mic: “Technology can actually increase privacy... Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say... And if you don't stand up for it, then who will?” Jarre grabs that last phrase and loops it as he builds to a rushing climax. It's grandiose, cheesy and sounds like any generic rave scene in a movie, but coming halfway through Electronica 2's slog, it's a high point.
Closing with a pair of solo expeditions, one strangely credited “with JMJ himself,” the lasting impression isn't of a journey to the heart of noise, but rather of a blustery loneliness. Jarre recorded his breakthrough 1976 album Oxygene in his kitchen on a rudimentary setup; now he's has assembled a collection of his "heroes" and been given access to the finest studios in the world and yet repeatedly fails to engage the imagination. One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive. Perhaps Yello caught a glimpse of this while working on their lyrics: “trying to dig out the man that I could be, and I was shouting loud to find there's little me. ”


Made months before he cut his masterpiece and almost exactly a year before he died, these newly excavated recordings show the exploratory vigor and versatility of the jazz revolutionary.

Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions

Eric Dolphy heard things differently—his ears seemed attuned to the notes between notes. And so, his own sound was unlike anything anyone had heard. He brought a brittle, scabrous tone to the alto saxophone and bass clarinet, using extended techniques like multiphonics, which allowed him to produce more than one note at the same time. His solos performed wide interval leaps, and he twisted into braying, off-kilter runs, often veering outside a piece’s basic chord structure. Dolphy drew inspiration from the rhythmically loose, microtonal quality of bird song, which he liked to transcribe; his flute playing fluttered, like a whistle.
This singular sound earned famous enemies. Miles Davis called him a “sad motherfucker,” and in an infamous DownBeat pan from 1961, the critic John Tynan labeled the music Dolphy was playing in John Coltrane’s group “anti-jazz.” Dolphy, though, appeared on some of the most vital jazz albums of the early 1960s—Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure. But his abrasive style could sound out of place in more traditional settings, so he struggled to get work. In 1964, he moved to Europe, hoping to find a more hospitable audience. He died the same year in Berlin, succumbing to undiagnosed diabetes at the age of 36.
A number of posthumous archival excavations have cemented his spirit as a bandleader and composer, including Out to Lunch!, recorded four months before his death and regarded as an avant-garde masterpiece. But for the past three decades, very few unheard studio recordings have emerged. Now, a new triple-album combines two previously released records and 85 minutes of unheard recordings, almost all taken from the same two-day session in the summer of 1963. Carefully curated, Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions illustrates the breadth of Dolphy’s artistry and gives an intimate look at his process during the last full year of his life.
According to the collection’s producer, Zev Feldman, there were nearly eight hours of tape to comb through in order to find the essential cuts. Several of these recordings are alternate takes from two albums Dolphy made at that moment—Conversations and Iron Man, smartly included here for context. The new tracks are startlingly good, with Dolphy reveling amid fresh ideas in a variety of unique settings.
There are, for instance, two new solo alto saxophone recordings of “Love Me,” the longing romantic ballad most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra. They complement the original take from Conversations, the last album Dolphy released before he died. Dolphy rarely repeats himself, deploying well-timed pauses to let the echo of his surprisingly sultry tone ring into the room. An alternate take on Conversations’ “Alone Together” finds Dolphy paired with the great bassist Richard Davis. On the album, Dolphy, with his bass clarinet, is a spasmodic force against Davis’ rhythmically amorphous accompaniment. But here, Davis mostly walks the bass with rich, round notes, giving Dolphy a firmer foundation to hew closer to the uplifting melody.
Dolphy and Davis had one of the more meaningful connections in jazz; they communicated almost telepathically, as if completing each other’s thoughts. Their takes on “Muses for Richard Davis,” eerie and ruminative, are among the best work here. Rendering an unsettling drone, Davis’ bowed bass operates much the way a tanpura would in Indian music, which Dolphy admired. It occasionally aligns with the gritty tone of Dolphy’s clarinet, creating a satisfyingly disorienting frequency.
By the time of these recordings, Dolphy had been tinkering with unconventional instrumentation for several years; on 1960’s Out There, he moved bassist Ron Carter to cello. He doubled down on that mandate for these sessions, presaging the introspective chamber-jazz of Out to Lunch!, which he recorded seven months later. The vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson—a crucial presence on that album, contributing spare tone clusters and odd single-note embellishments—makes his first appearance alongside Dolphy in these sessions. His shifting chords, loose and echoing, imbue the music with a strange, nebulous feeling, like a theremin whose pitch keeps modulating.
Dolphy also recruited an unorthodox assemblage of horn and wind players, including two saxophonists, a flutist, a bassoonist, and trumpeter Woody Shaw, a late innovator on the instrument who makes his recording debut here. Together, their voicings are dense and unfamiliar, as on the alternate take of “Burning Spear,” originally from Iron Man. Ominous harmony and a jagged arrangement evoke a Stravinsky orchestration.
Dolphy is at his most ferocious with a full band. Though the Fats Waller composition “Jitterbug Waltz” is a relatively amiable tune, Dolphy warbles through his flute like a delirious songbird. During an alternate take for “Music Matador,” an upbeat, Spanish-tinged composition, he gobbles like a wild turkey on his clarinet, creating tension by working against the playful rhythm.
There is one song here that is not from those July 1963 sessions—“A Personal Statement,” a haunting meditation on race by the pianist Bob James (yes, the smooth jazz pioneer). Dolphy recorded it in March 1964, four months before his death. He plays all three of his instruments at different times, but his own eccentricity is overshadowed by the abnormally high countertenor of the little-known vocalist David Schwartz. This is an apt reflection of Dolphy’s willingness to put himself in unusual situations. Although he felt alienated by the domestic music scene, he managed to perform in a staggeringly wide range of settings—alongside drummer Chico Hamilton, with Charles Mingus, on a jazz-meets-classical album conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a big band backing Sammy Davis Jr.
Had he not died in the middle of his 30s, during his most creatively fertile period, Dolphy could have gone in several directions. Listening to these tracks now, it’s admittedly dispiriting to realize what he might have accomplished had he lived even a little longer. Still, Musical Prophet is a worthwhile compromise, a valuable reminder of his capabilities and vision. And it is gratifying, more than 50 years after his premature death, that he still has new things to tell us in a way no one else could.


Camila Cabello’s third album embarks on an exploration of her musical heritage while holding onto familiar themes of love and anxiety. She swings big and often hits.

Familia

With “Havana,” Camila Cabello barrelled past the quasi-anonymity of her girl group days to announce who she was and where she was from. The realignment felt complete by the time she sang the hit, a crackling ode to her birthplace, at the 2019 Grammys, making stops to shimmy opposite Ricky Martin and trill along to J Balvin’s “Mi Gente.” Fifth Harmony, the Simon Cowell-engineered quintet with which she’d performed girlbossy pop anthems, was in her past. Now, if not exactly carrying Martin’s torch, she was warmed by the flame he had ignited on the same stage, two decades prior, with a famous performance that heralded the so-called “Latin explosion” in the United States.
Latin pop was an energizing, though not dominant, force across Cabello’s first two solo albums. “She Loves Control,” from her 2018 debut, deploys a reggaeton beat to underscore a statement of self-determination; trumpets and flamenco handclaps adorn the taunting “Liar,” from 2019’s Romance. On her third album, Familia, Cabello—who is half Cuban, half Mexican, and lived in both countries before immigrating to the U.S. at age seven—embarks on a more immersive exploration of her musical heritage. Abandoning the revolving-door approach of previous albums, whose credits read like a directory of pop producers, Cabello locked in with a smaller group of collaborators including Latin pop veterans Cheche Alara (Thalia, Natalia Lafourcade) and Edgar Barrera (Maluma, Natti Natasha). She ushers in the sonic revamp with the tale of a lover—a proxy for her audience, perhaps—who’s transfixed by her culture and compelled to take up salsa dancing. That song, “Celia,” is the first release of her own to be sung entirely in Spanish.
We’ve known this was coming since at least last summer, when Cabello went full Gloria Estefan on Familia’s first single. A neon-streaked entreaty to a partner threatening to bail on a night out, “Don’t Go Yet” is like an overstuffed house party: The guitarist arrives first, then the percussionists, then the brass band, and when there shouldn’t be any room to spare, the choir. The song offers a fitting introduction to an album that swings big and often hits. “La Buena Vida” is similarly maximalist, with an urgent tempo and mariachi theatrics to dramatize the hurt of being stood up: “Why am I home alone with your glass of wine?” Cabello gripes, trumpets blaring in the background.
Even when she’s mad, Camila sounds like she’s having fun. In both Spanish and English, she’s an exuberant and expressive transmitter of language, smashing up words in her mouth and bending phrases around her tongue. Hear how she treats the titular lyric of “Don’t Go Yet” like a rubber band, alternately stretching it out and snapping it back. A capable vocalist with a lightly nasal tone and a dramatic streak, Cabello rarely misses an opportunity to riff or sail into her wispy head voice. But her spoken delivery can be just as captivating: “Baby don’t go yet/’Cause I wore this dress for a little drama,” she says, slipping in a seductive rasp and showcasing her skill as a percussionist as well as a melodist. The line is tossed off like a teasing glance over the shoulder.
Cabello’s actual familia does appear on the album that’s named for them: her young cousin, Caro, on the cover and on “Celia”; her father in the backing vocals on “La Buena Vida.” But on the whole, the record is more taken with romantic than familial love. As the first full-length release by either party following Cabello’s high-profile breakup with Shawn Mendes, Familia can’t avoid tabloid scrutiny, but handles its presumed subject lightly. A few lines reference identifiable details of their relationship, like the Hollywood Hills home Cabello sold shortly after the split; for much of the album, though, the love interest’s main function is to hold up a mirror. Peering into it, Cabello grapples with anxiety and loneliness that surface in her partner’s absence, the paranoia that runs rampant in her brain. On “Hasta Los Dientes,” the album’s second all-Spanish song, Argentine singer Maria Becerra joins to trade lines about fixating on a paramour’s romantic history. Cabello does her best reggaetonera on “No Doubt,” stuttering and heavy breathing while confessing to “seeing red flags that don’t even exist.”
The topic of spiraling is most conspicuously but least effectively handled on “psychofreak,” which guest stars Willow Smith, lending her emo bona fides and a vocal riff that sounds like “Tom’s Diner” got a poltergeist. Forgoing the live instruments that color much of the album, Cabello repeats a single descending melodic line ad nauseum atop moody, blown-out synth. Between its streamlining of musical ideas, vocal cues taken from alt-rappers like Doja Cat and Ashnikko, and trendily self-lacerating subject matter, the song scans as TikTok bait. Much more affecting is “Boys Don’t Cry,” an R&B number where Cabello plays the consoler rather than the inconsolable, swatting away toxic masculinity in the process. She veers ever closer to rapping, landing unexpected rhymes and playing with cadence while pleading for vulnerability in the verse; when the beat falls out in the bridge, it feels like a gust of cool air. The sentiment is sweet, and the writing here is leaps ahead of “In the Dark,” a song from her first album with a similar conceit.
Cabello is a credited writer on all her post-5H songs, and her Instagram essays offer further evidence of her active pen. In a recent one, she mused on the state of perpetual otherness she experiences as an immigrant, mentioning frustration with the limitations of her Spanish and feeling like an outsider in Latinx spaces. “I want so badly to sit at a table I don’t belong to as much as everybody else,” she confessed.
Familia’s penultimate track, “Lola,” works to prove that her Latin immersion is sincere. It centers on a girl growing up poor, her dreams stunted by geography. A lyric referencing “90 miles to the shore”—the distance between Cuba and Key West—sheds light on the story’s setting, as does a guest verse by the rapper Yotuel, whose song “Patria y vida” (“homeland and life”) provided a rallying cry for anti-government demonstrations in Cuba last year. On “Lola,” Yotuel reprises that song’s keystone lyric, which flips the old revolutionary slogan “patria o muerte” (“homeland or death”). Something of a thematic outlier on Familia, “Lola” coheres because it remains grounded in the personal: Cabello’s imagining of her own life, had her family not left Cuba. It shows that she is paying attention not only to her homeland’s cultural exports, but to the plight of its people. Her heart really is in Havana.


Philly septet continues its winning streak on this sprawling and ambitious affair, masterfully puzzled together from a wide range of parts.

Ashes Grammar

The predominance of digital-editing software and increased use of sampling have made piecing together an album a much easier task than it once was. Ashes Grammar, the sophomore album from Philadelphia septet A Sunny Day in Glasgow, doesn't sound composed with modern tools-- overdubs ad infinitum-- but like pop music masterfully puzzled together. Featuring bushels of tracks that blur the line between interlude and song, many listeners will associate the two-dozen-strong tracklist with either unfinished business or lazy editing, but Ashes Grammar is a surprisingly disciplined affair. Watch the band tunnel a small groove during "Evil, With Evil, Against Evil", drop it, and pick it back up again before moving quickly on. They mine the ringing, orbital electronics of "Canalfish" for 90 gorgeous seconds before letting it slip into "Loudly"'s more concrete whoosh. "Passionate Introverts", however, needs its four-plus minutes of glowing pulse to deliver its serpentine melodies and abstracted nostalgia ("Do you believe in dinosaurs at all?", asks the chorus), and SDIG provide it the necessary breathing room. Summed, the shifting tracks pull Ashes Grammar through its hour-long runtime smoothly and patiently.
Ashes Grammar is more propulsive than SDIG's debut, Scribble Mural Comic Journal, whose effects-heavy compositions sometimes felt leaden or overconsidered. "Blood White" and "Loudly" thrum along with Krautrock-y beats. Those rhythms, when mixed with SDIG's lite-psych jams, recall Caribou's The Milk of Human Kindness or Múm's whipped electro-folk. The band plays with contrast, often layering their catchiest and most concrete vocals ("Passionate Introverts [Dinosaurs]", "Failure") over their least tidy, far-flung compositions, while their most traditionally orchestrated moments ("The White Witch", "Close Chorus") receive affected cooing and wordless harmonizing.
If there's a real complaint to be lobbed at Ashes Grammar it's that the vocals are too often buried, and their mushmouth-y Liz Fraser-timbres too willingly blended into the pooled sonics. If SDIG didn't imbue so much of Ashes Grammar with a terse rhythmic presence, many of these songs would easily be swept into the ether.
Ashes Grammar is not for those who need their pop music spit-shined and robust. Instead, SDIG form their hooks stealthily, letting acoustic guitars and a steady patter rise from the ambient beginnings of "Starting at a Disadvantage" or repeating phrases amidst the disparate stretches of "Nitetime Rainbows". "Close Chorus" offers big, breaking hooks only after four minutes of morning chatter.
Ashes Grammar draws you in by offering outstanding moments in strange contexts; you'll re-listen to hear specific pieces even though you're unable to remember exactly when and how they occur. Ashes Grammar often feels like the result of a band who took Martha Reeves & the Vandellas' "Come and Get These Memories" in the most abstract, art-damaged way possible: nostalgic, jigsaw pop music from a group of writers strong enough to keep you humming and courageous enough to make you guess.