After rediscovering her creative spark, Nao turns her organic-sounding third album into a kaleidoscopic testament to the pains and pleasures of modern love and the healing process they inspire.

And Then Life Was Beautiful

Nao’s voice glows even in her darkest moments, warm and radiant as a sparkle of fireflies in a mason jar. Since her breakout 2016 album For All We Know, that voice has channeled love and affection in nearly all its forms: love of self, love for your parents, every stage of romance from intoxicating first contact to awkward break-ups. Sometimes, relationships are redefined on songs like Know’s “In The Morning” or altogether broken on “Make It Out Alive,” a single from her second album, 2018’s astrology-themed Saturn. Regardless, Nao’s ear for the blend of R&B, UK garage, and soul she prefers sweetens whatever sour grapes there might be with the precision and power expected of an artist who grew up listening to both Jill Scott and Burial.
Though by no means a bleak album, Saturn showcased more of Nao’s emotional scars than before. She was cynical without being weary, bruised but always ready to give love another go. And Then Life Was Beautiful, her third studio album, addresses many of the same topics with a sharpened confidence. The album was recorded after a creative dry spell was ended by the birth of her daughter during the early stages of the pandemic, a process she called “healing” during a recent interview with The Independent: “I loved that I had something to focus on...It lit a fire in me.” Nao’s rejuvenation has refined her focus even further, reaching bolder points with fewer words against a more varied sonic palette. At its best, Beautiful is a kaleidoscopic testament to the pains and pleasures of modern love and the healing process they inspire.
The synthetic beats and vocal distortion that drove her trademark “wonky funk” sound in the past are largely absent from Beautiful. Nao’s music has always been full-bodied and percussive but live arrangements dominate these songs, giving the album an explicitly organic feel. The thumping kick-drum, guitar plunks, and vinyl crackle of “Messy Love” and “Glad That You’re Gone” recall turn-of-the-century neo-soul and hip-hop, while “Little Giants” soars on swelling piano and backing vocals. When synths and distortion do appear, they’re pit stops, temporary reminders of what came before. The album’s handful of producers, including longtime collaborators like LOXE and Grades and fresh faces like D’Mile and Sarz, cast a wider musical net and use afrobeats, chamber music, and gospel influences to create a lush and sunny atmosphere.
This variety breathes new life into Nao’s transmissions from the front lines of love. On “Good Luck,” she’s no longer second-guessing dead-end relationships and is unafraid to transfer that energy to herself. “Glad That You’re Gone” is particularly cheeky, with Nao barely able to contain her excitement over leaving her soon-to-be ex: “Got my mouth grinning and I know that it’s wrong/I can’t help smiling either way/You’ve bounced, it’s blessed, I’m celebrating.” The feeling expressed in kiss-offs like “Gone” and the bouncy “Better Friend” are reinforced later by the closing track “Amazing Grace,” which ultimately finds solace in failure as a learning process. All of Nao’s conflicting thoughts and emotions—boredom, dread, confidence, happiness—are in conversation with each other, less isolated snapshots than photos on an ever-morphing mood board.
Nao’s self-assurance also manifests in her voice. Her vocals on “Antidote” are sly and effortless, and though Nao’s porcelain voice isn’t quite powerful enough to fully sell the ending crescendo of “Wait,” the acuity of its lyrics about a relationship on the rocks does the heavy lifting. “Tell me the truth even though it might kill me/We both know that we’re just wasting time/Tryna survive instead of just feeling,” she sings with a twinge of sadness. Compare that to the sunny anthem “Woman,” which is musically peppy and pleasing but lyrically anonymous; the line “I’m living in this magic place/It’s showing me that God’s a woman” reads like it was swiped from a Hallmark card. But even when the writing skews generic, Nao’s voice helps the words buzz like neon.
Throughout her career, Nao has treated uncertainty as a challenge. She’s confronted love as a one-day-at-a-time experience, decorating it at its best while attempting to salvage what she can from the worst. Excessive touring pre-pandemic drained her creative energy, but And Then Life Was Beautiful expands her musical range while deepening its emotional impact. Five years removed from her debut album, Nao’s older, wiser, and better equipped to deal with life’s emotional pitfalls. It isn’t a complete reinvention, and there are still a few awkward turns of phrase, but Beautiful is a big step on Nao’s path to self-actualization.

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With a collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, the Hold Steady frontman re-examines familiar characters from new angles.

All These Perfect Crosses

The universe of Craig Finn meshes together imperfectly, like multiple exposures overlaid in the same frame. Its signposts take the form of proper nouns: names, cities, bars, car brands. Occasionally these recur, but in Finn’s recent work they’re more often blurred vignettes—a dancer with a penchant for violence, a troubled former child star, a drug dealer with a vengeance. Finn seems keenly aware of the character details; as the frontman of the Hold Steady, he’s built a career on codifying rambunctious personas in his band’s shout-along choruses. The more intimate lyrics in his solo work extend those characters’ narratives, building on existing frameworks without crafting wholly new stories. “I guess I felt...that visiting them for a song at a time might be more interesting than putting them through a number of phases,” he said after the release of 2019’s I Need a New War. On All These Perfect Crosses, a Record Store Day collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, he returns to the small towns and smaller relationships he’s built over the past five years, carving notches in the edge of the puzzle where he can affix new pieces.
But the shift from the Hold Steady—with whom Finn has continued to release rowdy, closing-time anthems—to his solo work was not always so natural. The sparsely recorded songs on 2015’s Faith in the Future almost felt like unfinished demos, the room tone in “Going to a Show” almost loud enough to swallow his guitars. He wanted to write small stories, but his meekness suggested he didn’t know how to recede gracefully. By 2017’s We All Want the Same Things, he’d refined his approach, adding harmonies from Annie Nero and Cassandra Jenkins and the occasional wind instrument to create an appropriately bluesy atmosphere for his already dispirited lyrics.
The retakes and outtakes on All These Perfect Crosses bring his past three records together into more perfect harmony. The parenthetical “Horn Version” of 2017’s “God in Chicago” casts the striking spoken-word journey in elegiac sepia tones. The somber, scorched piano-and-guitar ballad “They Know Where I Live,” originally offered in an EP accompanying Faith in the Future, draws a straight line between that record’s stripped-back approach and the bolder instrumentation of We All Want the Same Things. But on a record with only one brand-new entry, it’s the acoustic versions of songs from Finn’s previous two albums that feel most revitalized. “Magic Marker,” a sauntering blues crooner complete with tambourine hits and brassy horns, is reimagined as coffeehouse folk, the finger-picked guitar a fittingly pensive accompaniment for reminiscences on late nights and wasted youths.
On I Need a New War, Finn wrote about the life of Ulysses S. Grant and the ennui that follows triumph. When the big war, the new album, the cross-country tour is over, what’s left except to rehash the glory days? Judging by “All These Perfect Crosses,” the only new song on the album, solo Finn continues to be, as he sang on I Need A New War, “Grant at Galena,” taking stock of his life over a stiff drink in western Illinois. Backed by the minor piano chords that have become a familiar palette, he sings haltingly about a dead-end romance between two old friends, a pair who are empathetic but mismatched. “It’s hard to force yourself to fall in love with friends,” he sings, voice ticking up a bit mid-sentence, as if struck by its depressing irony. It’s another new relationship in Finn’s grand narrative patchwork, but its pieces match—the lover’s name is Cindy, who we’ve previously met as a name scrawled in a bathroom stall on We All Want the Same Things. Even as he revisits old wounds, Finn’s world-weary explorations continue to reveal new vantage points.

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Performing live in 1987, the avant-garde composers extracted complexity from simple designs and novel instrumentation. A new release captures their meditative and playful collaboration.

Arnold Dreyblatt / Paul Panhuysen: Duo Geloso

Duo Geloso

In December 1987, avant-garde composers Arnold Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen performed six original pieces at the Eindhoven, Netherlands experimental space Het Apollohuis. They had spent the previous several weeks extensively workshopping instrumentation and techniques at the art house, co-founded by Panhuysen seven years earlier. The resulting concert was recorded, and now, nearly 35 years later, the duo’s inquisitive creations re-emerge via Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label. Duo Geloso is the first release that details the Dreyblatt-Panhuysen collaborative mind, sitting comfortably within a current experimental context despite its age.
In the 1980s, the American and the Dutch experimental artists bonded over a shared interest in challenging conventional conceptions of classical music. Dreyblatt frequently visited Het Apollohuis while based in Berlin, allowing a mutual admiration to develop into an eventual partnership. Their personal approaches varied: Dreyblatt tended to take fewer musical risks, while Panhuysen was inspired by spontaneity. Their complementary styles resulted in projects with straightforward foundations and exuberant quirks. They called themselves Duo Geloso, after the brand of Italian loudspeakers they used when performing.
The performance captured on Duo Geloso uses alternative versions of traditional instruments to produce a sense of unsettling familiarity. In the relentless opener “Razorburg,” the artists apply motorized picks and the still-novel EBow to rattling detuned electric guitar and bass, forming a slow evolution that indulges both stagnancy and motion. The primary instrument for “Synsonic Batterie” is a Synsonics Drum Machine manufactured by toy company Mattel; the track begins with a steady, muffled beat that quickly devolves as the hits begin to stagger and lose their footing. With concentration it’s possible to track a pulse throughout, but sudden sharp snare-like hits and round rippling kicks throw the ear off balance. Dreyblatt enters with insistent hits on a pedal steel guitar, and Panhuysen brings in a hiccuping bird whistle. The guitar climbs in pitch and the bird whistle becomes desperate, screeching as if being tortured until it dies out. It feels both evocative and nonsensical.
With each track, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen extract a multitude of complexity from relatively simple designs. The duo always establishes a degree of steadiness in the beginning, then introduces subtle, consistent alterations to create a sense of meditative misalignment. The deceptively understated standout “High Life,” a 10-minute drone performed on various string instruments, embodies this approach. One note anchors the piece—an E—but from it blossom bristling branches of overtones, harmonics, and diatonic and non-diatonic pitches. At a certain point, dissonance takes over only to fade away. The piece ends with the release of the lower register, leaving only overtones and harmonics lingering within the walls of Het Apollohuis.
With its contemporary release, Duo Geloso now exists against the contextual padding of nearly four decades of artistic experimentation. Motorized picks, EBows, and electronic drum machines do not carry the same novelty they once did; avant-garde composition, no longer confined to niche artistic spaces, has entered the academy. “I was actually surprised that the recordings had ‘aged’ well with time,” Dreyblatt reflected recently. “Perhaps the interest in these recordings is possible now that the musical universe has been so radically changed and widened!” These days we might imagine the expansive wanderlust of “The Louisiana Purchase” and Panhuysen’s echoing vocals on “Love Call” soundtracking an AI-generated art exhibit. The boundaries of classical convention exist to be tested, and decades on, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen’s earnest inventions for Het Apollohuis convey a sense of playful curiosity that feels unexpired.


The Rhode Island trio’s weirdo avant-pop tunes land somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks.

babybaby_explores: *Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow *

Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow

Weeks before quarantine, babybaby_explores were already going feral in the kitchen. In a split-screen YouTube session from February 2020, the avant-pop trio performs “Duck Song” in a house in Rhode Island. As their bandmates scratch out a creepy, cyclical groove on drum machine and guitar, vocalist Lids B-Day stares dead-eyed and delivers frantic vignettes about throwing bread to ducks. During the chorus, Lids performs an arm choreography that resembles a frail vampire attempting the “Macarena.” Then, as the song lurches to climax, they grab some Wonder Bread from a high cabinet, swallow a mouthful, and chuck the rest at the camera.
This clip is a litmus test for whether you’ll find babybaby_explores’ mode of provocation irresistible or intolerable. It also encapsulates the group’s knack for transforming the mundane into a subject of bizarre wonder, much as they manage to turn a drab kitchen into a den of DIY freakiness. Even their new album’s title is a monument to mundanity—“food near me” and “weather tomorrow” are among the most-Googled phrases—while its songs chew up the daily detritus of modern life and spit out garbled humor and absurdist repetition.
Consisting of three high school best friends from a Providence suburb, babybaby_explores began life as a “pseudo research concept project.” As they’ve bloomed into a proper band, you can glean a lot about their aesthetic from the company they keep: They recently toured with Lightning Bolt and signed to an imprint launched by Liars’ Angus Andrew. Their music sits somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the talky, lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks. Songs like “New Band” and “Anthem” are playful and repetitive, forging a bastardized strain of synth-pop from beats that emerge from a Boss DR-670 Dr. Rhythm drum machine, which Gabe C-D plays on nearly every track. The third musician, Sam M-H, specializes in swampy guitar tones that resemble a surf-rock record played at the wrong speed.
On their previous release, 2019’s EP-length Baby;Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk, the Kraftwerk-on-speed synth lines took the lead, while Lids’ vocals either sank deeper in the mix or distorted beyond comprehension. On Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow, the group’s first proper album, the singer comes into their own as a vocalist, reveling in a wacky theatricality that’s unnerving and often hilarious. On “Carolyn,” they evoke Mark Mothersbaugh’s pursed-lip repetitions, exclaiming, “Love you/Miss you/Let’s Facetime soon!” over and over until it blurs into meaninglessness. The thrillingly twisted “Twiddle” dramatizes the inner monologue of someone who’s been cornered by a loud talker at a party: “You, you, you, you/Talk, talk, talk, talk/So much!” Lids vents, giving each syllable its own shade of frustration.
Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow is very funny, very odd, and quite short; it was recorded in just two days. The weaker songs, like “Untitled,” are listless and underdeveloped, never quite landing on a hook or central idea. The best moments pack such bizarre audacity that you can’t help but grin, such as the pitch-shifting “I am a duck!” refrain in “Duck Song.” It sounds like Ween for the hyperpop generation.
In the world of babybaby_explores, the line between radical critique and dadaist nonsense is thin. Past songs, like 2020’s “All Mall,” satirized gender norms and the American dream. On Food Near Me, the jolting, late-capitalist pep talk of “Anthem” or the queer overtones of “Duck Song”—which seemingly plays on the semantic similarity of “ducks” and “dykes”—are equally subversive, but often opaque. Like any longtime friends, these three have some strange inside jokes; we’re on the outside, peering in, waiting to see if they’ll throw us some bread.


The ambitious new album from the Canadian songwriter features thoughtful and transformative interpretations of traditional music. It is both a meditation on the past and a novel step forward.

Myriam Gendron: Ma délire - Songs of love, lost & found

Ma délire - Songs of love, lost & found

Born in Canada, Myriam Gendron sings in both English and French, but her translation skills extend beyond bilingualism. As a vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, she’s a masterful musical interpreter, transforming long-past art into present-tense vision. On her stunning debut album, 2014’s Not So Deep As A Well, she sang poems by early 20th century American writer Dorothy Parker over original acoustic guitar arrangements. It felt like both a trove of unearthed ancient folk and a fresh, immediate expression of a new voice.
Two years later, Gendron dreamed up an even more ambitious idea: to reimagine traditional music from Canada, France, and America. The concept was sparked by the discovery of “Au coeur de ma délire” (“At the Heart of My Delirium”), a Québecoise tune covered by Dominique Tremblay and Philippe Gagnon on their 1971 album Présentent Avec Le Stainless Steel Ça Roule. During a one-week residency at an old Québec mill, she recorded her own voice-and-guitar version, accompanied by sounds of nature, mill work, and her then two-year-old daughter. A few years later, buoyed by a writing grant, she chose more traditionals to cover, fused some into hybrid pieces, and crafted originals inspired by, and sometimes even borrowing from, other works of the past.
Like its predecessor, Ma Délire–Songs of Love, Lost & Found is as much a novel step forward as a meditation on the past. This quality is  due to Gendron’s impressionistic approach to her material, which exudes respect but never serves as mere homage. On one track, “Poor Girl Blues,” she combines one of the oldest blues songs, “Poor Boy Long Ways From Home,” with the 1800’s tune “Un Canadien Errant” (“A Lost Canadian”), originally about the banishment of French-Canadians and famously covered by Leonard Cohen in 1979. Singing in French, she weaves a story of lost family, lost friends, and a lost country over fingerpicked guitar that nods in all historical directions at once.
Transformation abounds on Ma Délire. Gendron remakes two songs by American folklorist John Jacob Niles, including  “I Wonder As I Wander.” It’s essentially a Christmas carol, but Gendron strips away religious aspects to create a secular elegy to love’s power. On two versions of the 19th century sea shanty “Shenandoah”—one instrumental, the other nearly a capella—she morphs the story of a fur trader into a universal paean to nature. Even on originals such as “La jeune fille en pleurs” (“The Young Girl in Tears”), she adapts lyrics from multiple traditional songs into a wandering rumination; with her halting electric guitar and Chris Corsano’s accentual drums, it evokes a lost Dirty Three track.
According to Gendron, what unites the crossbred pieces across this 15-track, 76-minute album are the eternal themes of love and longing. But just as important is Gendron’s own voice, a distinct, clear tool that works on multiple levels. With patient deliberation and gut-level resonance, she often sounds like she’s simultaneously intoning a children’s song and painting a portrait of complex emotion. Some singers approach similar territory—think of how David Berman talked and sang at the same time, how Daniel Johnston treated serious subjects with childlike wonder, or how Haley Fohr uses low tones to vibrate her music—but Gendron’s mesmerizing intonation has no exact parallels.  Her voice is often both frank and enigmatic, grounded and limitless.
That combination makes “Farewell,” one of the few outright originals on Ma Délire, the quintessential Gendron song. It has a simple melody and story, sung as a conversation between two characters: one beckoning, one hesitant. But listen again and uncertainties creep in: Is each person hiding something? Why does Gendron drop certain lines like footnotes but repeat others like mantras? Does the dream conclusion make the whole story a mirage? Ultimately, “Farewell” is a mystery, with much to grab on to but no definite center to hold. In that way, it encapsulates Gendron’s music: plainly open about its themes and sources yet reaching depths far beyond the sum of her inspirations.

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The seventh album from Mew suggests the Danish alt-rock trio could say more with less. It’s a pop record with a light outer frosting of edginess.

Visuals

In Sam Gosling’s book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, the psychology professor sheds light on the complex workings of identity—for example, the person who identifies as a cultured world traveler when in fact he never ventures beyond the homogenous comfort of the resort. Mew sound like a band for pop natives who fancy themselves intrepid explorers of indie, prog, and art-rock, but who don’t learn the language. The members of Mew resist an identification with progressive rock themselves, but the grandiosity of their music has led others to tag them as such.
Ever since their 1997 debut A Triumph for Man, Mew also mimicked the wide-open ambience and clean-toned guitar jangle pioneered by ’90s indie icons like Slint. By 2005’s And the Glass Handed Kites, they were showing exceptional agility at pivoting between styles, albeit with a dabbler’s mentality and a thick coat of commercial gloss. If the members of Mew feel any heat when making their music, it hardly ever comes across from under its pristine surface. And so it’s tempting to view the band as Denmark’s answer to Coldplay, though with more chops—but on their seventh album, Visuals, Mew show that’s not the case, if only in flashes.
If you’re looking for pop with a light outer frosting of edginess, Visuals hits the spot and then some. But if you’d like to hear Mew explore those edges and break free from the stultifying safety of their music, Visuals leaves you frustrated. About a quarter of the way through the album, for example, the bombastic synths of “In a Better Place” give way, ever so gracefully, to soft trickles of jazz trumpet in the song’s final minute. Smooth elevator jazz or muzak-grade new age would have fit the mood; instead, Mew create a tastefully solemn atmosphere that would fit right in on a Jon Hassell record.
Likewise, “Candy Pieces All Smeared Out” closes with an almost imperceptibly quiet loop that sounds like a record needle reaching the end of the groove and skipping over and over. It suggests that Mew could say a lot more with less, and that they even might shock the world if they took a serious stab at their own version of ambient music. In reverse, sometimes they try too hard to rough things up. “Candy Pieces” starts with a dissonant hard rock riff that comes off as forced, almost as if the band had imagined itself scoring a Transformers action sequence. Once they arrive at the swooning keyboards that underscore the verse, it makes you wonder why they didn’t just allow the song to remain beautiful in its plain, unassuming way.
Visuals achieves the majesty of classic progressive rock once, in its closing number, “Carry Me to Safety.” An epic done in trademark Mew fashion—grand but also rigidly economical and concise—“Carry Me” bears the most obvious markings of prog. In fact, the song pretty much follows the blueprint for how to segue from pastoral acoustic guitar arpeggios à la Yes and Jethro Tull to tidal swells of keyboard that invoke a feeling of liftoff into the clouds. “Give them hell!/Give them hell until the bell,” sings frontman Jonas Bjerre. Unsurprisingly, Bjerre barely sounds ruffled, much less agitated. If only Bjerre and company would give us hell from time to time.


The Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds trade in the dour, verbose post-punk of bands like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr, with lyrics that suggest they're aware they walk a well-traveled road.

The Gotobeds: Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic

The post-punk influences on Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds’ sophomore full-length, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic (Wire, the Fall, etc.) are literally right there on the sleeve, with its cut-up design aesthetic and block fonts. Amusingly, the CD booklet contains a hand-drawn diagram of some basic chords with a caption that reads “Please don't form a band!” The word “ADMISSION” is also stamped over and over on the credits page, which suggests that the Gotobeds might be well aware that the sound they are trafficking in—dour, self-aware post-punk—is a well-traveled road right now, and that perhaps they think they can redeem their sense of irony by turning it on itself.
Case in point: On the first verse of opening track “Real Maths/Too Much,” frontman/guitarist Eli Kasan sings about a “rebel yell,” a self-conscious nod to punker-turned-pop icon Billy Idol over a vintage pogo-punk beat. He then goes on to sing about “phony fuckers and their fucking bands,” a laundry list that includes “BBQ-sauce garage rock, or even worse: gluten free jam rock,” against whom Kasan takes his stand by “think[ing] about carbs.” Then (in the same line!) he waxes existential: “Am I the only punk that is free?” His answer: “BLUH.”
To a large degree, what you get out of this album lies in what you read into the “bluh.” Ever since fellow Fall acolytes Pavement crystallized the “slacker” aesthetic in the ‘90s, indie rock has treasured detachment. But the most compelling artists subvert this malaise by struggling against it while stylizing it and making fun of it at the same time. Kasan fills the songs on Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic with references to sensations that have shaken him enough to write about them—alienation, uncertainty, feeling discarded after a relationship, relationships as traps (a feeling he expresses with supreme poetic acuity on “Rope”), etc. Sometimes his openness is fleeting, but you still get the sense that, even if he isn't quite one step away from despair per se, his feelings are still eating him up. Unsurprisingly, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic sounds resolute when Kasan walks the razor’s edge between cheeky sarcasm and earnestness.
But when Kasan scoffs about superficiality—a preoccupation of his throughout the album—his lack of irony becomes damning. “I'm from America, where ‘don’t move on, just move’/have you seen LA? They’re non-living proof,” he sings on the Pavement knockoff “Cold Gold (LA’s Alright).” Admittedly, the song’s title (a reference to Pavement’s “Gold Soundz,” maybe?) hints that the band is all too aware of when it’s mimicking, rather than drawing inspiration from its influences. But the (ahem) “ADMISSION” doesn’t excuse the song’s lack of creativity.
Other times, Kasan stumbles into over-earnestness when he lets his passions get the better of him. On the perhaps well-intentioned but painfully literal “Crisis Time,” for example, he rails against “commercial bands [who] make songs for commercial use” and goes on a pedantic tirade: “Fuck Rolling Stone, that trash rag / Supports a predator like R. Kelly.” A few lines later: “God bless Jes Skolnik / To be the only one who’ll call out sexist bands / When did indie culture accept that shit? / It must’ve been when we were downloading the new Taylor Swift.” A line like that leaves you speechless for all the wrong reasons—perhaps there’s a silver lining in that people may one day look back on it as the death knell for “indie culture.”
Kasan takes these shots with a straight face, which makes you wonder how he measures his own music against the stuff he regards as “BBQ sauce.” The Gotobeds hit all the right jangly, jittery post-punk spots for people for whom carrying the torch for Television and Mission of Burma is a noble pursuit. On “Why’d You?” they show us what the Strokes would have sounded like channeling Wire. This will no doubt satisfy listeners who lionize the movements those bands spearheaded. But at this stage, you can’t help but ask: why do this at all? With band after band mining the same territory, the Gotobeds’ exceptional proficiency in this stylistic area threatens to cast them an afterthought, a remnant of an aesthetic we will have moved on from in five years. This isn’t necessarily fair, as the Gotobeds formed in 2009—before current standard-bearers Parquet Courts—but it’s not like Kasan and company couldn’t have done more to avoid dating themselves.
*Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles. Nevertheless, *Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *tantalizes by making you wonder whether Kasan’s narrators are as resigned as they sound, or whether their agitation will win out in the end. That this album never answers that question works to its advantage and provides some incentive to keep coming back to it. But, like barbecue sauce, you pretty much know what you're getting on first taste.


Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? is a collaboration between underground Chicago rappers Vic Spencer and Chris Crack. It's a concept album that seems less concerned with its concept—Chris $pencer is ostensibly a fictionalized fusion of the two MCs—than in world-building, in craft, and devotion to an acerbic, pointed sensibility. This is lyrical rap which reclaims the word "lyrical," so it is reborn as a synonym for freedom, where verses operate by their own volatile logic.

Vic Spencer / Chris Crack: Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??

Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??

On their collaborative new album Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??, underground Chicago rappers Vic Spencer and Chris Crack appear wholly ignorant of all recent trends, as if they've emerged untouched from a late-'90s time capsule. The record goes against the popular grain in every sense, from the production—sample-based, replete with chiming vibraphones—to the duo's explicit allegiance to capital-L Lyricism. It's a concept album that seems less concerned with its concept—Chris $pencer is ostensibly a fictionalized fusion of the two MCs—than in world-building, in craft, and devotion to an acerbic, pointed sensibility. Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? draws attention to lost traditions, evoking forgotten and under-explored tributaries of rap—the freestyle- and battle-rooted styles of Lyricist's Lounge CDs and classic hip-hop radio (Stretch and Bobbito, Sway & King Tech). It plays not on what we remember from the past, but on what we've forgotten.
Both Vic and Chris' solo work is worth exploring, but together, their powers are magnified. These are not radio records; they are not "bangers." Their songs take up space, as if the duo were less interested in persuading listeners to jump on the bandwagon than in drawing a line between their Backwoods-smoke-filled living room and the one outside. Needless to say, their songs are also not paeans to positivity. (Vic: "Y'all got an A plus for suckin' balls/Leave your ass blind in your house, left you touchin' walls.") Yet they are invigorating, the kind of music which gives voice to all our righteous suspicions that the wider world is smugly disingenuous—an especially resonant, if unpopular, sentiment in an age built on friendly alliances. Chris enjoys a good conspiracy theory, and Vic is the self-described "rapping bastard." Both rappers revel in playing the heel. Where other artists seem obligated to veer experimental or populist, they choose neither.
Yet the album is bold, forward-thinking, and singular nonetheless, because it treats hip-hop as a lineage inherently worthy of celebration, with no other justification needed. Like high school cafeteria battles taken to their outer limit, Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? focuses on the art of rapping not as a technical exercise but as a freewheeling session of shit-talking. This is the dozens on steroids. Songs are shaped by verses rather than the other way around. Their flows never fall into familiar patterns, nor do their twisting narratives, which weave in and out like a boxer, defiantly unpredictable. On "What's Saturday?," Chris Crack's tale of breaking and entering suddenly goes left, as he fantasizes about being smothered by "big girls," before glossing over the story's expected climax ("we got the money, nobody was hurt") and hitting the highway. The story arc is incidental. This is lyrical rap which reclaims the word "lyrical": no longer a trap for those who would fetishize arbitrary formal techniques, it is reborn as a synonym for freedom—where verses operate by their own volatile logic.
The closest thing to a "single" on the album is "No Biggie," a record which flips the same Screamin' Jay Hawkins sample as Biggie's "Kick in the Door." Even there, the underlying "pop" impulse of the DJ Premier flip is cut into jagged shards, while Vic's corkscrew baritone and Chris' raw, high-pitched sneer move at hard angles. The album's main compositional framework comes not from the immediacy of the pop song, but from the smoky, expansive comfort of its atmosphere. Chris and Vic's world is never entirely exposed to the light: The tranquil "Cement," for example, with its melodious chorus from C. Rich, makes one feel as if they've nodded off in a beanbag chair at the recording session, lyrics filtering in while flitting in and out of consciousness.
Their work expresses a contradiction: Chris $pencer cares too deeply while not giving a fuck. Something important is at stake, and yet Chris and Vic live precariously, as if truth and provocation are the only things worth holding onto. If there's a theme which unites Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??, it's one of perpetual skepticism: distrust of ideologies, of consensus, of hype, propaganda, publicity, and bullshit. This oppositional spirit is best captured by a younger generation in the sardonic, cutting perspectives of Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples. But unlike the stoned mumble of the Odd Future-affiliated, Vic and Chris' vocals carve through beats with a wiry, manic, animated energy—best described in the sampled interview with Chicago rapper Drunken Monkee on the song "Drunken Monkee": "It's a lot of niggas that can rap over ill beats but they don't know how to bring that shit to life. And that's what we do, we bring the motherfucking beats to fucking life, dawg."


The electronic artist Martin Glass makes lounge music informed by exotica, emulating 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient. Most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous.

Martin Glass: The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass

The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass

Perhaps as a bulwark against the internet’s information overload, a few peculiar “lost” electronic artists have been rediscovered in the past few years. There’s the marine biologist and self-taught composer Jürgen Müller, the electronic-dabbling housewife Ursula Bogner, and the Endless House Foundation, a series of fictitious compositions set in a “multimedia discotheque” in an Eastern European forest circa 1973. Maybe Martin Glass doesn’t completely belong in this imaginary stable of artists, but he is presented as an American businessman by day who sips fancy cocktails and finds himself “exiled in Taiwan… [falling] under the hypnotic spell of the Pacific.” Perhaps it’s that his name is one vowel away from becoming “Martini Glass” that makes you think about his debut album as the type of lounge music that returned to nostalgic reappraisal during the 1990s and is perhaps due for a return.
Much like the 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient music that is emulated on The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass, Glass is also taken by the sound of exotica. During that same era, Japanese artists like Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto playfully engaged with and subverted these conjured images of tiki bars, bamboo huts, mysterious seaports, mountain-top pagodas, and the like. In their music, these cliché cultural reference points became bent and distorted, lending an otherworldly sound to the compositions. Glass may also draw on this palette, but most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous, suggesting the soundtrack for a kitsch and leisurely lifestyle spent largely in a big leather booth.
The marimba tones that open “Okinawa Fantasia” are beckoning, warm enough to sound luminous. But just as a flute line enters and entwines with the melodic bed, the track fades away after just a minute-and-a-half. “Sound & Image” is Balearic almost to a fault, full of gauzy 1980s sounds looping against a shimmer of wind chimes, bird calls, and a twanging guitar line. It hovers in place and then slowly dissolves.
“Greetings From Under the Ocean” and “Floating to Work” are clear standouts, their gong-like tones and ambient haze unmoored and blissfully drifting like clouds. Nothing much happens on either track, but Glass strikes the right balance here between movement and inertia. But “Paradise Bubble” leans too far towards the latter. It’s ideal for walking slowly across sand, but not towards the horizon so much as in circles.
While most of the elements are there to make for a dreamy listen through the early digital tropes of ’80s Japanese music, Glass has two things working against him. One is that, once a handful of elements are in place, Glass is content to just leave them as is rather than push (or for music this mellow, nudge) them towards anything innovative or revitalized. The other is that by this point, any number of acts have already revisited this same sound. Beyond the stylistic ephemera of the era copped by plenty of fly-by-night vaporwave acts, artists like Jessy Lanza and Kate NV take cues from Japanese City Pop, while Visible Cloaks’ ardent and expert approach to that region’s abstract electronics has played out in vivid new ways. There are more thrilling engagements with this period of Japanese music and hopefully many more to come. Perhaps Glass himself will quit his day job and escape his purported “exile.” In the meantime, Pacific Visions is a missed chance at total immersion into such an ocean of sound, instead reduced to a mere toe dip.


The Ukrainian electronic musician collages a decade of field recordings into a moving tribute to the resilience of his hometown in wartime.

Kyiv Eternal

When Oleh Shpudeiko bought a handheld recorder to capture the sounds of his hometown, Kyiv, it’s unlikely he imagined the significance those recordings would one day take on. It was 2012, and Shpudeiko, who makes experimental electronic music as Heinali, was interested in the concept of acoustic ecology—that is, the relationship between a place, its sounds, and its inhabitants. Recorder in hand, he roamed the city in search of its “soundmarks”: birds twittering in O.V. Fomin Botanical Gardens; the distinctive bleeping of the cash registers at Silpo, a Ukrainian grocery-store chain; the nighttime ambience of Borshchahivka, a bedroom community full of aging khrushchevkas, low-cost apartment blocks common across the former Soviet Union. Shpudeiko kept recording over the next decade, building out his soundmap as Kyiv underwent radical changes in the years following the Maidan Uprising. Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, shredding the normalcy of daily life—and along with it, the familiar fabric of Kyiv’s soundscape.
On Kyiv Eternal, Shpudeiko folds his archival field recordings into a love letter to the city of his birth. The album was inspired by a trip back home after briefly fleeing Kyiv’s air raids, in the initial phase of the invasion, to take refuge in Lviv. “Kyiv was more alive than ever, but I wanted to protect it from harm, to console it,” he says. “This was a city where I had spent 37 years of my life. So this album became a hymn to this part of my identity.” That “hymn” takes the form of a luminous web of atmospheric abstractions interwoven with processed piano, wordless voices, and synthesizer.
The album proceeds as a loosely structured travelogue. It begins with “Tramvai 14,” sourced from recordings Shpudeiko made on Kyiv’s light-rail tram system: The doors chime; a station announcement plays in Ukrainian and English; an overdriven stream of what might be pedal steel, reminiscent of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, extends like a pastel fog over the rattle of train wheels. There are hints of history embedded in the reverie: The English-language announcements, added when Kyiv hosted Eurovision in 2017, offer a glimpse of the city’s contemporary self-conception as a part of Europe. “Stantsiia Maidan Nezalezhnosti” goes inside the Metro stop at Maidan Square, where footfalls and the sounds of the subway are faintly audible beneath a warm, vaporous drone. Shpudeiko doesn’t dwell on the many associations that might attach themselves to Maidan Square: the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, which expelled the Russophilic president Viktor Yanukovych; the many city residents who took shelter underground in early 2022, turning subway stations into subterranean tent cities. The atmosphere is hazy, almost blissful, like a freeze frame of a shoegaze song.
Much of the album follows a similar template, whipping up billowing, Tim Hecker-like clouds around indistinct scraps of everyday life. Some tracks, like the largely static “Rare Birds” or “Shuliavka in Winter,” feel less like standalone compositions than pieces of a mosaic, meaningful primarily as contrasting blocks of color. But the most compelling tracks are suffused in emotion. In “Silpo,” pinging cash registers intertwine with what sound like bright guitar harmonics above wave after wave of ethereal, rising and falling tones, telegraphing a woozy mix of bucolic ambience and bittersweet nostalgia. “Borshchahivka at Night,” a quietly gripping highlight, is as still as a Philip-Lorca diCorcia photograph, capturing the solitude of the sleeping neighborhood in clicking and rustling sounds that evoke the image of trash being blown, like tumbleweeds, down empty, dimly lit streets. A flickering mist has a ghostly choral effect, as though summoning the voices of all those residents who were forced to seek safety elsewhere, lost souls scattered to the winds.
Kyiv Eternal marks a departure from Heinali’s 2020 album Madrigals, in which Shpudeiko adapted Renaissance polyphony for modular synthesizers, and its sequel, Organa, a work in progress interrupted by the war. The new record’s ethereal drones and gossamer collages lack the formal complexity of his more exacting compositions. But there are spiritual parallels, if you know where to listen for them. In his pre-war work, keeping his oscillators tuned is a delicate business; they tend to drift at will, subject to the vicissitudes of the environment. Baroque counterpoints pile up in towering assemblages that might collapse at any moment, like a cathedral tumbling under the weight of its stained glass. That interplay between fragility and resilience lay at the heart of Shpudeiko’s performance from deep in a Lviv bomb shelter last year. A similar tension also animates Kyiv Eternal, encoded directly in sounds imperiled by the threat of extinction. You can hear it in the title track, the album’s gorgeous and hopeful climax, in which arpeggios slip and stumble, yet keep pushing doggedly forward; between the sounds of rainfall above and the muddy bass below, a spirit of determination abides. Kyiv Eternal is a journal of endangered memories and a talisman against loss; above all, it’s a testament to survival.


Former GBV partner and Robert Pollard creative foil Tobin Sprout offers his reliable blend of lo-fi. At his best, he still proves that simplicity doesn’t equate to half-assery.

The Universe and Me

When you hit play on The Universe and Me, “Future Boy Today/Man of Tomorrow” begins as if the “record” button had been pressed just a hair too late. This creates the sensation that the listener is stumbling in on the music and reinforces the idea that it exists in a kind of perpetual flow independent of its recorded form. Of course, anyone who is already familiar with Tobin Sprout’s m.o. won’t be surprised. For decades now, Sprout and his longtime on/off collaborator, Guided By Voices leader Robert Pollard, have generated massive piles of songs that they’ve presented as works in progress, parlaying shoeboxes of rough homemade cassette demos into remarkably durable careers.
Most known for his work as Guided By Voices’ guitarist for two crucial runs during that band’s long and storied history, Sprout has pretty much been the only additional songwriter GBV has ever had, and the closest to a Lennon-McCartney style foil for Pollard. The duo’s shared sense that production values basically don't matter positions Sprout as one of the key pioneers of the early-’90s lo-fi aesthetic alongside Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow and Pavement founders Stephen Malkmus and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg.
Almost 30 years later, though, Sprout’s dogged insistence on sticking to his original strategy casts him as the AC/DC of lo-fi rock. If you’re still attached to the scratchiest Guided By Voices efforts that most bear Sprout's creative stamp—1993’s Vampire on Titus, ’94’s Bee Thousand, and ’95’s Alien Lanes—then The Universe and Me will likely hit you as both a bold reassertion by an artist saying “this is who I am” and a sly step towards progress. If not, it will probably sound like more of the same.
Sprout’s crude recording of piano, for example, drapes a cozy familiarity over the title track. The song’s warm, pleasant ambience also prevents lines like “I’ll take along my wings/So all my dreams can fly” from tipping over into maudlin confessional. On “A Walk Across the Human Bridge,” Sprout wears Bowie’s “Suffragette City” on his sleeve as he offers a way for humankind to avert a future that’s “carnaged all to waste.” The ever-economical Sprout devotes but two lines to the verse before introducing the main hook that repeats over and over. You can’t listen without hearing Bowie’s iconic line “wham-bam, thank you ma’am” in your head, but you also can’t help but notice that Sprout’s head is in a totally different—and strikingly current—place.
At his best, he still proves that simplicity doesn’t equate to half-assery. Still, despite his voluminous output, Sprout’s solo work doesn’t always distinguish his style from Pollard’s. If you’re partial to Sprout’s second tour of duty in GBV—six relatively more developed albums spanning from 2010 to ’14—it might be hard to shake the feeling of been-there-done-that as The Universe and Me unfolds in typically haphazard fashion. Some of Sprout's choices just come off as downright careless. “Honor Guard,” for example, begins with absentminded strums that start out of alignment with the rest of the song, snap into place, and then fall out of sync again—over a drumbeat that’s so unsteady it could have been played by a toddler. Such moves blunt the impact of Sprout’s lyrics, which pop with personality and wisdom.
When an artist spends an entire career riding the line between resolve and stagnation, maybe it’s unfair to take them to task on not changing their tune. By this point, Sprout has made it perfectly clear what he’s going to give us each time. The thing is, The Universe and Me also gives us plenty of indication that Sprout is capable of more. Some minor touch-ups would have gone a long way. Had Sprout tightened a few loose screws here and there, it would have told us more about who he is now.


After a brief detour as Th' Corn Gangg, former Unicorns Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur return with a gorgeous collection of pop songs that draws from disparate sources such as calypso, country, and hip-hop.

Return to the Sea

After dropping their gloriously goofy and endlessly inventive 2003 LP Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, the Unicorns became extinct. Following a brief resurrection as Th' Corn Gangg, a live side project in which Unicorns songs were recast as backing tracks for MCs like Subtitle and Busdriver, multi-instrumentalist Nick Diamonds and drummer J'aime Tambeur announced they'd soldier on without guitarist Alden Penner (née Ginger) as Islands. To prove it wasn't just another one of their bat-shit crazy antics, they leaked two mp3s: "Abominable Snow", an epic about surviving a yeti sighting, and "Flesh", which revealed a sweaty, sexy side to Diamonds' and Tambeur's songwriting. Both songs were outstanding and, just as important, sounded like the work of the Unicorns. (In fact, they were live staples in the band's last days.) But when Diamonds explained they wouldn't be on the new album and then gushed to Pitchfork about how the band's record would be, of all things, inspired by Paul Simon's Graceland, it was anybody's guess as to what Return to the Sea would actually sound like.
It turns out that, while Diamonds' Graceland references weren't just snarcastic pranks, Return to the Sea is a sprawling, gorgeous collection of pop songs that draws from disparate sources such as calypso, country, and hip-hop. The record also relies more heavily on organic sounds and structure than the Unicorns' LP did: Where Who Will Cut Our Hair rewarded listeners with unexpected eruptions in the middle of songs or flat-out rockers dropped off a sonic cliff into plaintive minor chords, Islands present a more linear approach in their arrangements. Songs like album opener "Swans (Life After Death)" propel forward, picking up steam to the point of bursting. Only after "Swans" has marinated for nearly seven minutes, for example, does Tambeur abandon his shuffling and stuttering beats for cathartic, straight-ahead drumming. Islands' charm, then, is all wrapped up in the richness of the production: unusual instrumentation and tiny flourishes create dense compositions that demand repeated listening.
For example, on "Rough Gem"-- a song so insidiously infectious that trepanation may be the only way to get it out of your head-- the main riff is begun by an understated keyboard, picked up midway by plucked violin strings, and completed by a second, more cartoonish synthesizer. All the while, Diamonds cracks puns on his name, declaring "I'm a girl's best friend/ Can you cut?/ I can cut!/ I'm a rough gem."
"Volcanoes", on the other hand, starts by layering meandering lap steel, intermittent triangle, and violins. By the chorus, those violins shed their hillbilly act to become soaring and angelic, like a melodramatic score. Against the strings, Diamonds strums chords and croons in his strained timbre, "We washed our mouths at the riverbed/ When we noticed something glowing/ It was growing/ Things are going to change," before predicting a catastrophic volcano blast that melts Alaska and turns Argentina into some kind of ice land. The lyrics are ridiculous but fun, and "Volcanoes" fittingly features the album's most explosive finale, in which all the instrumental elements that have wandered in and out of the song converge for the song's climax.
Return to the Sea is a case of Diamonds and Tambeur yanking up their anchor and setting sail for new waters, enjoying the freedoms of exploration and discovery. At no point in the record does it feel as if Diamonds is settling into any one genre or style-- hardly a surprise from this shape-shifting songwriter. It won't be a shock if, say, Diamonds and Tambeur announce 18 months from now that Islands is kaput and they're kickstarting another new band. And who really cares? As long as they continue to write songs as striking and immediate as the batch on Return to the Sea, their fans will follow them anywhere.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the iconoclastic German singer’s solo debut, an album inspired by punk rock, Jesus, aliens, and a mother’s love.

NunSexMonkRock

Nina Hagen was an opera-singing punk rock incendiary from Germany who entered 1980 with a major label deal, massive sales figures in Europe, and an outsized fanbase that packed most of the rooms she played. After two albums fronting the Nina Hagen Band in her native language, the 25-year-old signed with Frank Zappa’s manager and landed in New York City to record her solo debut and inaugural English-language LP. There was every reason to believe that this woman with unteachable rock’n’roll magnetism had crossover appeal in the U.S. market. She was riveting not because of her flashy clothes, thick eye makeup, or neon hair—anyone can dress the part. It was the way she screamed, the way she fell into deep and bizarre voices and contorted her face to the delight of her fans. Nunsexmonkrock, released in 1982, was an opportunity to introduce even more people to Hagen—an incomparable performer, a new mother, an activist, a clown, a disciple of Christ, a true believer in UFOs, and without question, a star.
Hagen did not waste a moment playing it safe or easing the listener in. Instead, she charged immediately into a multi-tracked pan-religious chaos sphere. The first time you hear her voice over thundering drums, she’s telling a Bible story about Jesus exorcising a demon out of a man and into a litter of pigs. The overall aesthetic of the album is distilled in Hagen’s desperate, frantic vocals on “Antiworld” as she shrieks about the pigs “running away, screaming.” Her voice is harrowing. It’s calm momentarily, but then her deep demonic growl shifts quickly into an authoritative bark like she’s preaching over an ocean of bodies, and then again, she pivots entirely and becomes tongue-tied like a man possessed. Her intense wailing, her proselytizing about deities and black holes, and her deep commitment to character work is a thrown gauntlet—you’re either in the tank for this maximalist credo or you can’t hang with her at all.
Hagen was born in East Berlin a few years after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic and a few years before the construction of the Berlin Wall. She grew up a member of a creative family in a country that censored cultural works deemed politically inconvenient. Her mother, Eva Maria Hagen, was an actress and singer who regularly brought her young daughter to work; at age 9, Nina picked up operatic singing from professionals. After her father left the family, Nina’s stepfather, Wolf Biermann—the East German dissident folk singer and poet who was regularly blacklisted and ultimately exiled for his views in 1976—became a formative figure in her life.
“Wolf Biermann gave me power,” Hagen told the International Herald Tribune in 1980. “When I was in school in East Germany, parents forbade their children to speak to me. That sort of thing can make you strong. Biermann is a rebel. I took what he gave me and survived the hate against me. Now I am a rebel, too.” There’s a 1974 Bavarian pop hit that Hagen recorded with the band Automobil called “Du Hast den Farbfilm Vergessen”—a bubblegum tune about forgetting to pack color film on a vacation. In actuality, it was written as a teenager’s veiled and upbeat takedown of the GDR—artistic bravery born of courage being a day-to-day necessity.
Hagen joined Biermann in exile, met his contacts at CBS Records, and got a recording contract. Encouraged by the label to travel and immerse herself in the world of rock music, she ended up in London, where she befriended Ari Up and the Slits. Soon enough, she was fronting the Nina Hagen Band and barking over the hard rock sound of their self-titled 1978 album, which featured a cover of the Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope.” Her playful, erratic, and fried vocals on 1979’s Unbehagen hinted at what would come. Those albums led to media attention, especially after a 1979 TV appearance in Austria where she got the host fired by simulating masturbation on camera.
Nunsexmonkrock’s cover shows Hagen cradling a baby in an ostensible homage to Madonna-and-child iconography. One 1982 headline described her as “Blasphemy From Abroad,” and it would’ve been easy enough to read Hagen’s album title and artwork as provocative sacrilege for the sake of irony or shock value. But she’s not doing a Johnny Rotten “I am the Antichrist” spiel; when Hagen growls the words “I believe in Jesus,” her voice is a caricature but her intentions are pure. After being baptized in 2009, she would point back to Nunsexmonkrock as an example of her piety: “Look at my lyrics and you’ll see that I’ve always struggled and preached in the name of love, in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Amid Hagen’s unhinged performances are raucous and emphatic expressions of love. Just look at the baby she was clutching on the album art: her daughter, Cosma Shiva Hagen. Cosma was born in 1981, and not long after, she contributed cooing and giggling vocals to a slinking song on Nunsexmonkrock titled “Cosma Shiva.” Hagen grunts a countdown before singing her daughter’s name in a high-pitched peek-a-boo voice that feels designed for an infant’s amusement: “Cosma. SHIVA! Galax-INA!” Over Karl Rucker’s bouncing bass riff, Hagen trills about outer space in an ethereal alien register. When she contorts her voice into shrill acrobatics and offers a funky transmission to her baby from the cosmos, she is so committed to playfulness that the song’s deep absurdity is overpowered by the radiant, joyful act of becoming a dance music clown for her baby. When Cosma laughs, it’s not hard to follow suit.
Hagen was pregnant when she was preparing to record the album in the early ’80s, and in interviews, she vilified Bennett Glotzer—the manager she shared with Zappa—for allegedly imposing a correlated album delay. “I was sitting there with these wonderful ideas and wonderful musicians and always Glotzer would go to CBS and say she’s not ready, she’s pregnant,” she told the magazine Shades in 1982. “I would love to [record] when I was pregnant, it would be the holiest record in the whole wide world.” She still inserts the requisite holiness in her song for her daughter, deepening her voice for a solemn outro: “And my little baby, I tell you—God is your father.”
Cosma’s actual birth father was Ferdinand Karmelk, a guitarist and songwriter who’s credited as a writer on Nunsexmonkrock. Hagen met Karmelk in Amsterdam when he was a member of Dutch rock’n’roll star Herman Brood’s band; from looking at the raw footage, it’s clear they had a strong connection. In the infamous 1979 Austrian TV appearance, Hagen sat next to (and sometimes on top of) Karmelk, wearing a homemade shirt emblazoned with his name. When they performed some songs that would appear on Nunsexmonkrock together, his choppy power chords took a backseat to Hagen shrieking and roaring while facing the camera. When she simulated masturbation with a calm and determined look in her eye, he laughed.
Karmelk is the sole writer credited on the album’s synthesizer-led single and dark heart, “Smack Jack.” Hagen multi-tracks her voice over a languid guitar groove to form a demonic choir yelping about a junkie looking to score. “You are always running out, and you are always running short,” she purrs with a deep rasp. When the sped-up chorus hits, she’s a frantic devil on your shoulder screaming the words “shoot it up.” Because it was written from a place of experience by a man who didn’t play on the record as planned, the song’s darkness is tough to shake. Hagen told Interview in 1980 that Karmelk was clean after going to rehab, but by the time Nunsexmonkrock was recorded, he was no longer in the band. He “loved the drug more than me and our baby,” she wrote in her memoir.
In a 1980 interview, Hagen outlined her intended personnel for her debut solo album, naming musicians like Karmelk who do not perform on Nunsexmonkrock—seemingly a casualty of the externally imposed recording delays. The band she ended up with is not always a good fit. There’s a grainy video of the Nunsexmonkrock sessions where you can see Hagen and bassist Karl Rucker pulling faces and doing schtick. This was their first collaboration, and the two would go on to work together for years to come. But seasoned session musicians like Chris Spedding and Paul Shaffer were one-time Hagen collaborators, and when they briefly appear in the video, they’re relatively sedate.
On songs like “Dread Love,” you can sense the disconnect between Hagen’s wildness and the comparably underwhelming performances of the label’s hired guns. Hagen’s screams during that song are perhaps the album’s most boldly unhinged, and they remain jarring nearly 40 years later. She’s backed by crisp, thin synthesizers and guitars whose attempts at volatility are undercut by a decidedly early ’80s vintage. The band’s best performances on the album don’t go for a contemporary punk or new wave sound—they’re minimal bordering on ambient (like the elegiac “Dr. Art”) or exaggeratedly grandiose (like the over-the-top theatrical piano work on “Future Is Now”). Hagen thrives at these extremes and handily overpowers more middle-of-the-road efforts.
While Hagen and the band flirt with funk, minimalism, operatic bombast, and ’80s synth-pop, the best song on the album, “Born in Xixax,” is a definitive punk song. The electric guitar power chords are percussive and swift, while the beat feels more stiff and electronic—a catchy jam from the jump. Hagen offers a fabricated origin story that’s played for laughs. “Ugh, sorry, got to turn on the machine,” she grunts at the intro. “My name is Hans Ivanovich Hagen, and this is the news.” In a half-muttered deep voice, she sings about growing up poor on a farm with her junkie father, her Vietnam vet brother, and her Soviet Union spy uncle. She percussively whispers a bit of Cold War gossip—that Mr. Brezhnev is “planning a reunion.” Lyrically she’s joking around in the Radio Yerevan formula, but Hagen’s haunted multitude of multi-tracked voices offers a surprisingly hopeful message: “One day we will be free! We will be free one day!”
Not all of Hagen’s lyrics and character work have aged well. On “Taitschi Tarot,” she adopts a high-pitched voice to sing about Buddha, reincarnation, and yoga. Regardless of her intentions or the social standards of the time, the song’s casual Orientalism is wildly unpalatable, and it’s just one example of cultural appropriation from Hagen’s discography. On 1979’s “African Reggae,” she sang about the “Black Jah rasta man,” and just last year, she released a dub song called “Unity” as an homage to George Floyd that prominently featured the slave spiritual “Wade in the Water.” They’re big aesthetic swings under the guise of solidarity, but difficult to digest.
Hagen built her career on boldness, and often, it earned her ridicule. When she sat down for an interview on Letterman in 1985, the conversation pivoted from her hair extensions to the place all Hagen interviews in the ’80s eventually landed: her story about spotting a UFO on a beach in Malibu while pregnant. “It was in the middle of the night and it was great. I was mesmerized,” she said. “And it was showing all kinds of colors—a real light show.” Letterman dryly asked some follow-up questions: “How big was it? Glowing? Was it doing any hair extending?” Hagen smiled just a little bit, tolerating his playful barb. It was an easy punchline for the media. “E.T., phone home,” one Canadian local news broadcaster proudly quipped after a similar interview.
Hagen is an entertainer, and she wants you to have fun, but she also wants you to know that she really means what she says. She told SPIN in 1986 that the UFO experience “cleansed me of all my hangups”—that she woke up the next morning “the happiest pregnant woman on the planet.” On the Nunsexmonkrock song “UFO,” a simmering ambient synthesizer backs the ASMR of Hagen’s whispered experience before she loudly proclaims: “And you are not alone.” For all the times she boldly declares herself a literal prophet or shifts from one wild voice to another, Hagen spends so much of Nunsexmonkrock parting the chaotic waters to reveal one grounded, genuine message of hope—a maternal assurance to the listening faithful that it’s going to be OK. When she says that you’re not alone and that we’ll be free one day, she’s pulling from her own life. Nunsexmonkrock is fun and wild, and it’s the work of an exiled woman in her twenties processing new motherhood and loss.

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The latest Strand of Oaks album has a sunnier outlook and a hedonistic streak, evoking Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Oasis. But it never really adds up to a bold statement.

Hard Love

On 2014’s HEAL, his fifth album as Strand of Oaks, Timothy Showalter emerged as his own most compelling lead character. Showalter was a grown-up adolescent still mired in dark thoughts and intense desires: for the opposite sex, for self-eradication through drugs or worse, for his favorite song to come on the radio. Making or simply listening to music was a lifeline out of the confusion of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, which informed a song cycle simultaneously bleak and optimistic, as big as an arena yet as personal as an inner monologue. Showalter reminisced about “singing Pumpkins in the mirror,” and it’s not hard to imagine his fans finding similar salvation in “JM” or “Goshen ’97.”
And yet: “HEAL was bullshit, man.” In an exhaustive, candid Stereogum article, Showalter distanced himself from his breakthrough album, which he seems to think is too dark, too self-absorbed. “I’m sick of being the sad white guy with an acoustic guitar… We’re done with that shit,” he said. There’s not much acoustic guitar on the album, but that’s besides the point: Newly committed to his marriage and to a sunnier outlook on everything, Showalter no longer wants to rip his soul out and play harrowing songs night after night. That’s understandable: Who could fault the guy for wanting to be happy?
Consequently, Hard Love is more than a follow-up—it sounds like a direct response to HEAL. These new songs are never quite as dark or as deep, never quite as probing, which is not to say they’re superficial. Showalter seems to have made an effort not to sound quite as troubled. If his relationship to music once seemed desperate, he now sounds like a guy thrilled to be evoking Creation Records, one of the major touchstones on Hard Love. Featuring wobbly guitars and big drumbeats, “Everything” and “On the Hill” nod to bands like Primal Scream, the Jesus & Mary Chain, and even Oasis without making too obvious a reference.
Instead of sulking in his car blasting Songs: Ohia, as he did on “JM,” Hard Love shows Showalter out in the world, engaging with other people through music and, notably, through drugs. This is a peculiarly hedonistic album, one that will doubtless play well on the summer festival circuit. “I have the good drugs now,” he boasts in that Stereogum article, but they’re not especially potent sources of inspiration. Influenced by a mind-expanding episode at Boogie Festival in Australia, “On the Hill” bounds forward with a big, brash sound, but it never really goes anywhere. Instead, it just stays on that hill, blissed out and barely relatable if you weren’t at Boogie and on those good drugs with him.
More rewarding are the smaller moments, the songs that show Strand of Oaks morphing into a formidable rock band. “Quit It” is gloriously raw blues, “Rest of It” a trash-glam stomp. Both sound tossed off in the best way: less burdened with concepts and therefore freer, more fun. They represent a more relatable form of hedonism, with Showalter simply rocking the fuck out. That less-is-more quality extends to those moments when everything falls away except for one or two instruments: The title track builds to a climactic chorus, but instead of pushing everything into the red, Showalter removes everything but the drums. It redefines and redirects the anthem, turning it into an overture for the album that follows.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Hard Love is how far it doesn’t stray from HEAL. Everything sounds weirdly familiar, as though Showalter hasn’t figured out how to move on from that breakthrough. He still makes the most of his murky production, despite bringing in French producer Nicolas Vernhes (Speedy Ortiz, Deerhunter) and multi-instrumentalist Jason Anderson. “Radio Kids” sounds a bit too similar to previous songs about adolescent alienation, and “Salt Brothers” leans too closely toward better cryptic anthems, most notably the apocalyptic “Sterling,” off 2010’s enduringly strange Pope Killdragon. Hard Love never really adds up to a particularly clear or bold statement; there are some strong songs and big moments, but very little that moves the story forward or develops that rich character. It’s a perfectly fine album by a guy who wants to be much more than perfectly fine.


Improvising on trumpet and two guitars, the avant-garde composer and his collaborators mourn the natural world while asking us to forget what we know about conventional musical hierarchies.

Wadada Leo Smith / Henry Kaiser / Alex Varty: Pacifica Koral Reef

Pacifica Koral Reef

With abstract jazz, Wadada Leo Smith writes eulogies. Since 2012’s rapturously received Ten Freedom Summers, his records have memorialized Civil Rights heroes, musical legends, and America’s threatened landscape, bolstering the trumpeter’s compositions with history. The 80-year-old knows that what a country commemorates testifies to its character. But what it protects speaks louder: His monumental 2016 release America’s National Parks suggests expanding the safeguards of natural refuges to include havens for culture, such as New Orleans.
Smith’s latest, Pacifica Koral Reef, fits in with the scope of his past decade’s oeuvre, if not its sounds. He turns his horn to endangered coral reefs, which the U.S. and other countries have been sluggish to defend from climate change. While Smith’s a true conservationist, the thematic focus is reinforced by his two younger collaborators, inveterate improviser (and scientific diver) Henry Kaiser, and Canadian music journalist (and amateur diver) Alex Varty, who plays the guitar as though it’s his full-time job. Using a score Smith wrote in his own visual-musical dialect, Ankhrasmation, they provide a transformative 55-minute tour through acoustic drones and outboard distortion, sporadically awash in the sparse, Miles Davis-inspired phrasing that’s always been Smith’s bread and butter.
The record is a revelation for all three musicians. Varty, who’s previously played in alt-rock bands, shows himself to be a soulful, supple improviser of Indian raga, strumming unaccompanied for the album’s first 10 minutes. Kaiser, who has collaborated with luminaries from Terry Riley to Herbie Hancock, achieves a delicacy of effects and engineering that echoes David Torn, and Smith’s overdubs demonstrate his flair for gentle, almost ambient soundscapes. The unusual trio setup—two guitars and a trumpet—encourages us to forget what we know about genre. Is this jazz? Classical? Or—god forbid—“world music”? And what, exactly, is the difference? After all, avoiding labels and hierarchies is integral to the philosophy behind Smith’s score.
A portmanteau of three words, Ankhrasmation, Smith says, is “a language, not a notation system.” It consists of works on paper, paintings as much as musical instruction, full of bright pictographs that propose ambiguous sets of rules. Colors and representational shapes are open-ended, prompting musicians to ponder both their personal experience and broad concepts such as science. Tempo is marked more ordinarily, as a dynamic of slow and fast notes that increase unconventionally in “density level,” or how much noise fills the composition. These guidelines slyly limit the egos of both performers and composers, letting the former extemporize, but only within boundaries. The players interpret the art as though they’re writing ekphrastic poems with music. They, too, become the pieces’ authors.
We can hear Smith’s score in Pacifica Koral Reef’s languid, thoughtful pace, which quickens when Kaiser and Varty trade blues riffs. It’s audible, too, in the album’s abundant space, the ways that luxurious fits and starts split the single-track piece into something like movements, and in the wide gulfs between the three musicians’ tones: Kaiser’s sculpted feedback, Varty’s acoustic picking, and Smith’s mournful horn are all deeply individual, while working together toward a cohesive composition. The result unsettles the idea of a band leader. Each player cues the others, running a relay race of instrumentation, swirling toward a center that doesn’t quite exist. And why should it? Centers are tricks of perspective. All roads never led to Rome, and the U.S. isn’t the nucleus of the 21st century, either. The very form of music like Pacifica Koral Reef subverts this faulty solipsism.
Such a concept isn’t new, and neither is the core of Smith’s indeterminate scores—he owes a debt to John Cage, among others. But Ankhrasmation allows for commentary, which so much of the avant-garde from Smith’s generation and earlier eschewed in favor of process. With its gorgeous, contemplative interplay of instruments, Pacifica Koral Reef lets itself be a swan song for our ailing environment, and while some may find this topicality pretentious or an easy marketing narrative, examining the outside world is built into the frame of Smith’s musical practice. It’s also human: In our time of desperation, suffering, callousness, and uncertainty, fear about the future can’t be considered an imposition on creativity. For Smith, Kaiser, and Varty, concern lives alongside music. We may not be able to pinpoint it in the sounds they make, or label it with the literal language we’ve learned to use, but the earth wails to them, and they reply, “I hear you.”

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The singular hip-hop band’s second album is a story about America and Philadelphia, memory and survival. Like a good book, it goes by quickly, yet you force yourself to linger.

Do You Want More?!!!??!

For Black Thought, it all really started with his prologue on “Essawahmah.” In the early 1990s, when recording companies and mainstream media thought they’d figured out hip-hop via the popularity of its most beloved torchbearers, he drastically flipped the script. The track from the Roots’ 1993 debut Organix (a precursor to the later “Essaywhuman?!!!??!”) kicks off with a casual back-and-forth between the band and their audience, reminiscent of the ambiance from Gil Scott-Heron’s conversational songs on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The energy is lighthearted and the mood easygoing, until the lead MC decides to shake things up and introduce himself to the uninitiated. What follows is some beatboxing, scatting, vocal riffs, more scatting, more beatboxing, trading fours with the band, all the while telling you a story. It’s about hip-hop, jazz, collaboration, Philadelphia, and everything in between Black artistry and corporate America. What began on Organix arrived on 1995’s Do You Want More?!!!??!, now reissued in 3xLP and 4xLP packages. But the album title wasn’t really a question—it was more of a dare challenging you to say no, because how could you not want to hear the rest? And when you did listen, could you handle it?
The thing about the very best writers, whether Gayl Jones or Toni Morrison, Kiese Laymon or Jesmyn Ward, Paul Beatty or Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that their introductions never waver in clarity or intention. They reveal characters whose journeys take readers into places that force us to forget our own centers, to spend time in the universe of others. To be a good writer, storytelling chops are essential; a non-negotiable requirement. In music, mediocre characters can be shielded behind flamboyant production, drawing your ear to the magician’s assistant so you don’t perceive the sleight of hand. Black Thought is not a magician. He’s an alchemist who’s spent a large part of his career mutating the ephemera of memory into tangible reminders of life, connecting everything, always, back to the root.
The 16 tracks on the 1995 version of Do You Want More?!!!??! run like a good book that you want to get through immediately, but because you need to savor each moment, you force yourself to take your time. His literary intentions are ferocious on “I Remain Calm,” where he fires shots at anyone delivering average or merely good bars: “My rated-X larynx wrecks your context/I’m complex, confusin’, lyrically amusin’/I drink brews then when I’m groovin’/I’m no longer human.” He carries these bold claims of superiority forward into the album’s title track, which reads like a more unruly “Ego Tripping,” echoing Nikki Giovanni’s boastful bravado and always backing it up; different sides of the same literary coin.
Storytelling can be a lonely endeavor, but it’s rarely a solitary one, and while Black Thought tells his own stories, the Roots crew is the echo transmitting his words beyond the scope of any one individual. With ?uestlove on the drums and any other place where soul needs a melody, Black Thought has a reliable anchor. From their very first album, the drummer and joint frontman has written and produced alongside his childhood friend, lending a special gravitas to the idea of “coming up together.” Do You Want More?!!!??! could be read as a question between friends, each urging the other to take more artistic liberties, to up the ante with each level surpassed.
“The Lesson, Pt. 1,” a brief rundown of a life on the margins, is the pair at their most revealing; it sounds like a tentative prequel to Undun, which would be released in 2011. Here, Black Thought brought a different type of cold steel up to his face for protection. Both are heavy in different ways: the weight of taking a life or that of trying to save one with the words projected from your mic. It’s a battle of survivor’s remorse, filled with the gratitude immortalized in essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s Politico essay on the group. “Most people from my neighborhood are just surprised they live to be 30,” Black Thought told Ghansah. “I know I was. And to see the world, to survive, I know I was lucky, I know I was saved.”
On “Lazy Afternoon,” we hear Black Thought’s monologue about the delicate joy of being alive. It’s a theme that flows through the work of artists who grew up to see themselves as the blessed ones who made it through the battlefield. While Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” summarizes a dreamy 24 hours, “Lazy Afternoon” moves like a line-by-line breakdown on the luxury of leisure.
We see him at his most vulnerable on “Silent Treatment,” which sounds like reading aloud a love letter written by someone with nothing to say except “I fucked up.” His tone moves from matter-of-fact to begrudging acceptance of reality, and then dejection. It’s something very few can replicate. At times, Black Thought’s reiterations that he is the best around mean the album starts to lag, but some things really do bear repeating. And for naysayers, the subtext is clear: If you think I am wrong, show me somebody better. Someone who can take a song that flows atop a reggae beat, lyrics that invoke obscure music moments from fellow hip-hop heads (Digable Planets), and coherently turn Afrika Bambaataa and Joe into adjectives, coloring a song about neither person.
Black Thought meets his lyrical equal when Malik B. comes to the page to “write an anthem, throw a tantrum and remain handsome.” Both are sinister narrators on “Distortion to Static,” outlining the truth in all its ugliness without losing sight of the desperation that leads to violence. They go toe-to-toe on “Proceed,” reliving childhood shenanigans and reveling in the spotlight of self-made success. Band member Leonard Hubbard, on bass, and collaborators Steven Coleman, Graham Haynes, and Joshua Roseman, on the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, respectively, bring a cool jazz sensibility to the album, flowing with the steady production of ?uestlove, who evokes the physicality of a classic turntable set: scratching, connection with the audience, and the performance appeal of a cypher.
That concept of creating within a community is where the Roots are uniquely unmatched. Hip-hop has often elevated a sole figure supported by a behind-the-scenes team, and yet for the majority of their career the Roots have worked with over a dozen artists whose musicianship is as diverse as their artistic impulses. “Essaywhuman” (not to be confused with “Essawahmah”) is a prime example of this musical curation. Coleman is having so much fun on the sax it breeds both shoe-throwing annoyance and awe, while Hubbard, on bass, strums along at the same frequency as the riled-up live crowd. With Scott Storch on the keyboard, the whole show becomes not only a performance by a hip-hop group, but a type of orchestral fusion, syncing elements you might expect on stage at Carnegie Hall alongside those you would see and hear on a basketball court in Philadelphia.
Do You Want More?!!!??! showcased the Lead MC at home, at ease with his ability to sink his pen deep into the hidden truths of power, belonging, survival, and hustle. These truths related to his hometown and the legacy of art-making of which he is part. The stories of Philadelphia have only ever truly been distilled by writers who intentionally focused on the city, tracing the source of the intuitive innovation that emerges so fearlessly from those who call it home. The flight of Allen Iverson, the ecstatic sorrow of Patti LaBelle, the sensual nods of Teddy Pendergrass have never been fully articulated by outsiders. But when Black Thought steps to the mic, he is able to translate the very best of his kin. Zoom in on his layered storytelling and get a picture of a breathing, healing, and fighting city, an endless ledger of change documented by its scribe and hometown boy.

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The Berlin- and London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has long had ties to music and club culture, and now he has released a musing and quizzical techno release of his own.

2016 / 1986

Wolfgang Tillmans has been taking pictures for three decades, beginning with photographs from the Hamburg nightclubs he frequented in late 1980s, published in *i-D *and Prinz, and moving into an expansive practice that earned him the Turner Prize in 2000 and numerous major gallery and museum shows since. Though certainly associated with an eye for European youth subcultures, and youth in general, at the heart of Tillmans’ work is a particular relationship with the world, rather than a consistent subject. Whether abstract color field, an image of sinewy youths embracing, or an urban landscape, the images he makes are imbued with emotional resonance.
Still, music and club culture have long been intertwined with the Berlin- and London-based artist’s work (and life), in ways both nostalgic and decidedly forward-facing. In addition to documenting the early 1990s European acid house scene for i-D, Tillmans’ photographs currently hang in Berghain’s Panorama Bar (he’s allegedly also the one exception to the club’s notorious no-photographs rule), and a recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York included pages of a Fade to Mind label profile in German music magazine Spex, featuring his portraits of Kingdom, Kelela, Mike Q, and other label affiliates. He’s also DJed and installed “playback rooms,” spaces equipped with top-of-the line stereo equipment and Tillmans’ own playlists, in galleries and museums. So it’s not altogether surprising that the artist now has what could vaguely be termed a techno release of his own, consisting of a pair of tracks made this year and a trio of recordings from 1986.
The EP starts in the present, opening with what is ultimately its only straightforward dance track, “Make It Up As You Go Along.” A familiar bass groove and upbeat kick drum are met with the shuffling sound of a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL printing press, combining to produce a subtly collaged deep house. While the printing press works to provide a rhythmic spine, it’s Tillmans’ charmingly ungainly vocals—he reiterates the titular phrase and harmonizes with a synth melody—that introduce a degree of instability. It’s a warm and catchy track, but rather than proposing a seamless sublimation into a club environment, it reminds listeners of the conditions of its making—a useful fact, as it turns out, as the song that follows lacks any semblance of a dance vocabulary. “Triangle / Gong / What” follows the literal progression laid out in its title, consisting of a rather minimal sequence of barely-processed sounds: First, the artist plays a triangle, tapping it urgently but irregularly; the tinny crashing gives way to the ambient swell of a gong, at one point quieting to near-stillness. Finally, Tillmans—in a robotic, self-serious monotone—intones the line “what we do here is a crime in most countries. But it’s not. There is no victim. Leave us alone.” It’s a little goofy, particularly in juxtaposition to the jovial track that precedes it.
But his relationship to sound, found and recorded, reminds me of his description in a 2015 interview with Peter Halley of one of his first-ever photographs, Lacanau [self], a self-portrait taken on a French beach in 1986. “It’s a pink shape,” he says, “which is my T-shirt, and then a bit of black, which is my shorts, and then a bit of skin, which is my knee, and then a big space of sand. It’s also my first abstract picture: you can’t make out what it is, but it’s actually totally concrete at the same time.” A compositional element, for Tillmans, can be at once documentary and pure abstraction, and there’s a recurring sense of curiosity in the way he negotiates between the two as he sees—or hears.
The same year that he took Lacanau, Tillmans recorded a series of synth-driven postpunk tracks in a one-night session with Burt Leßmann in Wuppertal, Germany. Restored from their original cassette recordings, three of these songs—with vocals and lyrics by Tillmans and synths by Leßmann—comprise the EP’s B-side. As standalone pop songs, they’re fairly orthodox for the era in which they were produced. However, in addition to their sentimental value (for a fan of Tillmans’ photography, it’s sort of amazing to picture him at age 18 in a rehearsal room in provincial West Germany delivering these affected vocal lines), they temper the meandering restraint of the EP’s A-side with a gust of youthful energy.
Aesthetically cohesive this EP is not, which is, of course, not really its point to begin with—2016/1986’s uneven nature speaks to its status as a less an entry into the club cultures of which Tillmans has long been a part and more a brief aural document of his involvement with and attachment to sound. And that awkwardness is what lends this release its charm, centering the photographer as an enthusiastic experimenter, engaging with memory while using it to produce a colorful present.


The Chicago quartet play nervy post-punk with a groundedness and poise that suggests if your back is up against the wall, you might be able to lean on it for support.

Nothing You Do Matters EP

Anyone can play punk rock. For Ganser, that’s no excuse for low standards. Over a pair of albums, including 2020’s marvelous Just Look at That Sky, the Chicago quartet deployed simple phrasing to make increasingly complicated thematic and artistic statements. On Nothing You Do Matters, a short EP produced by Liars’ Angus Andrew, they offer up their most sophisticated music yet.
Plenty of bands over the past five or so years have distilled the nausea-inducing spirit of the age into limber, rainy post-punk. While those groups have tended to play it lean and feisty, as if chaos might be pinned in a cage fight, Ganser’s groundedness and poise suggests that if your back is up against the wall, you might be able to lean on it for support. Co-lead singers Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines sing from deep within themselves—you can practically hear Garofalo’s rueful laugh as she reflects on a “hell of a day” in Just Look at That Sky’s “Lucky”—as guitarist Charlie Landsman scribbles and flashes. Both singers treat the ferocious noise they generate with their band with the respect and detachment one might a major weather event: It’s nothing personal, but they still stay dry.
Taking inspiration from Adrian Sherwood’s industrial dubs, Nothing You Do Matters’ two original tracks (Andrew also provides a remix of “People Watching”) feel like oil paintings smeared as they dry. Every part washes into another; at any given moment, they could be gathering breath in the middle of a verse or rounding through a chorus. Garofalo’s voice scatters through the background of “People Watching,” her insistent reminder that “No one is asking, everyone’s taking” coming from all directions like people in a train station. Drummer Brian Cundiff seems to drag the rhythm, making the song a little sluggish, a little irked, and it thickens when Garofalo’s synth fills the chorus like injection foam filling the gap in a wall. “Gotta take it all,” Gaines sings in counterpoint. She’s a taunting Greek chorus, the collective knowingness aiming dramatic irony out at the listener, rather than toward the on-stage subject.
Andrew brings the same ethos of ever-expanding mischief to these songs that he did in Liars’ mid-period highs, Drum’s Not Dead and Liars, setting traps throughout “What Me Worry?” Some of his best tricks are present—the single fingersnap recalls the abrupt ping of “It Fit When I Was a Kid,” to similarly unnerving effect—but Just Look at That Sky’s spooked-out details and clipped rhythms suggest that much of his task here was to give Ganser more space for their own ideas. Twinkles of keyboard ring through the scuzz; guitars and programmed strings seem to hum at the same frequency. Everything is dazzling and terrible. It’s as if the music is springing up from a haunted casino.
On both tracks, Gaines plays her basslines like they’re sentences she knows she doesn’t need to complete; they wear their melodicism as if it’s beside the point. She takes the opposite approach to her singing in “What Me Worry?”, luxuriating in the words, her rich tone turned away from the competing stabs and scrapes. Gaines has written about the particular marginalization she’s experienced as a Black woman in indie rock, a position that forces her to maintain a kind of steeliness to survive, and she seems to channel that same steeliness here, with good reason. “When did I agree to this,” she wonders in the chorus, after quoting the title of Nina Simone’s 1964 song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” A classic in Simone’s hands, it was a massive single the next year for rockers the Animals, who had already hit No. 1 with their version of the blues song “House of the Rising Sun.” It’s a canny reference that suggests the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t the only place where Black contributions to rock music’s development go unnoticed. Like Simone, Gaines sounds both resigned to and empowered by the idea that her only hope is to express herself clearly.
The candy-colored chaos of Andrew’s “People Watching” remix notwithstanding, Nothing You Do Matters suggests a deep connection between artist and producer. Like Liars, Ganser know that an otherwise-innocuous set of notes can begin to sound terrifying if it’s repeated enough, just as they’ve always confronted dread by making themselves more dreadful. On this EP, the stakes Ganser find themselves up against have grown, but so has their ability to define and answer to them. As the world becomes more chaotic, their defiance grows more elegant.


The New Orleans country singer’s heartsick, headstrong third album chronicles the fallout of bad breakup with sly humor and empathy.

How Many Times

Alongside its rich history of R&B, jazz, and second line parades, New Orleans is also a bustling hub for country music. The city has had one of the more interesting scenes of the 2010s, a hodgepodge community comprising artists like Sundown Songs, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and the Deslondes, who ground their twang in old-school rock and soul formats. Originally from Columbiaville, Michigan, Esther Rose has been bouncing around the city for more than a decade, first writing and singing with then-husband Luke Winslow-King before striking out on her own. Her albums typify New Orleans country, right down to her high-flying vocal delivery. If her vocals bear strong similarities to those of Riff Raff’s Alynda Lee Segarra, it’s not because either singer is copying the other; it’s because they’re both drawing from the same well.
Rose lets those influences settle a bit more on her heartsick, headstrong third album, How Many Times, which chronicles the fallout of a hard breakup. Her songs revel in subtle rhythms, especially on the thrumming “Keeps Me Running,” and she even channels Fats Domino on the gently rolling “Are You Out There.” Those elements keep these songs anchored to her city, although she moves through it differently than she once did. She’s more closed off, her armor up. “Walking through the Quarter with my hood pulled up/Don’t you stand beside me, boys, I got bad luck,” she sings on the title track, conveying a local’s frustration with the city’s most popular tourist attraction.
There’s a strong sense of place on How Many Times, but even if you’ve never set foot in Louisiana, Rose’s stories still resonate. She’s always had a flair for details, the moments other writers ignore, and she retains a sly sense of humor even in heartbreak. She ends the pained title track with near-ecstatic “Sha la la”s, as though turning her pain into a pop punchline. On “When You Go,” she tells a straying lover, “I think I might just let you go,” immediately following it with: “Can I come with you?” You might chuckle at the turnaround if her fear and desperation weren’t palpable.
If How Many Times is a breakup record, then “Songs Remain” is its denouement. Rather than recrimination and blame, Rose offers a more measured appreciation of their time together, recalling the specifics of the relationship in evocative detail—early mornings of “black coffee and bacon fat,” for instance—and bids her “inner city lumberjack” a sad farewell: “I am glad it was you who broke my heart.” Rarely do breakup songs sound so genuinely generous and tender. How Many Times necessarily loses some of its steam after that song, and how could it not? “Songs Remain” is the heart of this album as well as one of the finest moments in Rose’s catalog so far, showing how heartache can change how you experience a city and how music can keep you running.

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