The eclectic, party-starting Southern California band make their most accessible record, with big hooks matching definitive statements.

Invisible People

As much as any American band, Chicano Batman represents the diversity of the American experience, the idea that no one thing exclusively belongs to any one group of people. A group of Latinos from Southern California with Central, North, and South American heritage, they grew up listening to as much Ruben Blades and Rigo Tovar as Dr. Dre and Warren G. For the past decade, they’ve honed a distinctly American take on Tropicália’s sun-drenched psychedelic grooves, evolving from the meandering jams of their eponymous debut to tightly crafted psych-funk jams with a political bent.
It’s this perspective that shapes their fourth LP, Invisible People. The album’s thesis—“…a statement of hope, a proclamation that we are all invisible people, and that despite race, class, or gender we can overcome our differences and stand together”—is admittedly a bit hokey, but the songs themselves speak with considerably more nuance and wit, decrying “prophets for profit” and reminding us that race is a construct. The record’s optimism is rooted in love, the subject of most of its songs, and in its rhythm section, which makes even the most macabre tracks danceable. Because while the band has long responded to the contemporary political climate—2017’s Freedom Is Free is a direct response to the idea that it isn’t—they come from a place of perseverance, a dogged resistance to succumbing to the forces of evil.
To that end, Chicano Batman songs typically start with a vibe, the pursuit of a specific feeling. Album opener “Color my Life” grew from a desire to make a song like Queen’s “Cool Cat” that boogied like Parliament. The demo for “Pink Elephant,” a song ostensibly about a predatory woman, was originally named “$40 Car Wash,” for the swagger that bassist Eduardo Arenas felt after getting an expensive car wash on his birthday. The result is a mish-mash of the ’90s hip-hop and R&B of their youth; think Ginuwine singing a D’Angelo song from a lowrider in a Warren G music video. With Chicanos. It’s a lot of fun.
But Invisible People is at its strongest when it gets confrontational. On the title track,  Bardo Martinez’s croon bleeds all over the hook, and the verses plainly state axioms that only sound radical to those privileged by the status quo: “Invisible people, the truth is we’re all the same/The concept of race was implanted inside your brain….Invisible people, the truth is we take the blame/Fuck the system, it created so much pain.” It’s followed by “Manuel’s Story,” a frantic jaunt of a song driven by a spacey synth melody that belies its bleak narrative, which tells of an uncle who fled cartel violence to live in the U.S. It’s a vignette that distills the collateral damage of America’s drug war and Mexican immigration, a reminder of the people rendered invisible by capitalist political forces. Or maybe it’s just a tall tale your drunk tío likes to tell at the cookout. Whether it actually happened is mostly irrelevant.
The 2020 version of Chicano Batman has evolved from its original incarnation. The influences that shaped them are still present, but their perspective has shifted; this is the first Chicano Batman LP without a word of Spanish. They’ve ditched their most distinctive visual elements, like the wedding-band-chic of their matching ruffled suits—an homage to Latin ballad groups of the ’60s and ’70s—as well as Bardo’s shoulder-length mane. But while they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Toronto-based singer stretches big-tent pop music in her own image on a messy but tuneful mixtape.

Elio’s Inferno

Elio introduced herself in 2020 with a dreamy, surprisingly depressing bedroom pop song. “I just want my friends online to be around me when I die,” the 23-year-old artist sang in an airy upper register on “My Friends Online,” about hanging out in public while anxiety-ridden over virtual relationships. The song quickly tapped into generational internet ennui while simultaneously revealing the singer’s pop star ambitions. Elio’s studied songwriting and self-production come from an adolescence playing in a shoegaze band and listening to artists ranging from Ariana Grande to Mazzy Star, leading to a genre fusion that lends her sugary songs some alt-rock nerve. “My Friends Online” eventually earned her cosigns from phenoms like Troye Sivan and Charli XCX, the latter of whom joined her team as a creative consultant to provide the Toronto-based singer with a sounding board for new music. The management choice paid off: Elio’s stickiest songs, like last year’s irrepressible “Charger,” now amplify her relatable themes with Charli-lite hooks. But it’s Elio’s cool delivery, swerving from a conversational lilt to a bratty shout, that makes her music appealing in its own right.
On new mixtape Elio’s Inferno, she steps toward elastic, party-starting pop with a bolder sense of humor. Shaking off some of the more downtempo, Clairo-like balladry of last year’s Can You Hear Me Now? EP, Elio instead focuses on how far she can stretch big-tent pop music in her own image. Elio co-wrote and co-produced all of the songs here, a few of which zero in specifically on her experiences in the industry. The swaggering “Typecast” adopts a lurching beat and menacing vocal delivery to bluntly chew out critics who pigeonhole her. “No, I don’t wanna write like that/I checked the vibe and you didn’t pass,” she sings matter-of-factly. She ratchets up the bravado on the strident “Godly Behavior,” whose production sounds lifted from Britney’s Darkchild era. Elio shoots off boasts about her self-worth that double down on her newfound clout: “Want a feature on the next release/Wanna party with me at Charli’s,” she taunts, offering a winking self-awareness that freely indulges in the image people may hold of her.
The bright spots on Elio’s Inferno are occasionally overshadowed by its more overwieldy lyrics. The Harry Styles name drop on “Inferno” immediately dates it, while the laidback, guitar-laced “New and Improved” aims for self-improvement after a breakup through a misguided hodgepodge of schmaltzy metaphors. Elio attempts to walk a fine lyrical line; even “Vitamins,” with its charming, winding melodies, falls victim to a distractingly overwrought chorus: “I want you the way I take my vitamins,” she coos alarmingly, “Every day or I die a little.”
Elio succeeds when she dials toward a brighter, more featherlight style of pop, like the fizzy club kiss-off “9 Lives” or the delectable love song “Superimpose.” Both tap into the sped-up rush of emotion she’s trying to well up in listeners while offering tuneful dance-pop in the process. Elio’s Inferno isn’t breaking much new ground, but it’s a pleasurable confection from an upstart eager to make her claim, however messy that process might be.


The debut of guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rogers is unconventionally well-formed. Their tightly-wound art punk unspools their anxiety and turns it into something worth celebrating.

Strike a Match

Not even a minute into Strike a Match—debut LP from London-to-Glasgow duo Sacred Paws—and Rachel Aggs is already bouncing back from some minor slip-up. “It’s okay, it won’t matter in a month, in a year,” she reminds herself. A few songs later, she's on the bus, just a few stops from home, cursing herself for skipping breakfast. Hunger turns to worry; worry consumes all. That’s anxiety for you: intrusive, all-consuming, and ultimately sort of mundane. If Aggs can’t shake her woes, she’s gonna do the next best thing and bring ’em to the party.
And Strike a Match, frayed nerves and all, is one hell of a shindig. At nearly every turn, the rainclouds in Aggs’ head are temporarily lifted by shots of radiance. Over blacktop-scorching, genre-darting grooves, Aggs and singer/drummer Eilidh Rogers—fellow alum of Glasgow janglers Golden Grrrls—chronicle every skinned knee and dropped ice cream cone.
A half-day’s ride on the Megabus separates Londoner Aggs and Glaswegian Eilidh Rogers. In interviews, Rogers always seems to be trying to get Aggs to move up to Scotland so they can pal around more. They are friends first, bandmates second, and that off-record tightness lights up Strike a Match—they sing with the informality of flatmates doing dishes with the radio on, crooning not really with but towards each other. Rarely do they seem to be reading off the same lyric sheet, and when they do, they favor these woozy, out-of-whack harmonies that sit rather peculiarly against the album’s dialed-in grooves.
A dozen listens in, and I’m poring over Strike a Match, attempting to work out the couple dozen lines in which Aggs and Rogers’ intersecting vocals have blotted each other out. But these loosely tethered vocals function as a kind of mental cross-check. Aggs plays the pragmatist just trying to keep her head down and make her transfer; Rogers is the intruder, that uninvited nogoodnik who pops up to remind you of everything else you're doing wrong. These exchanges really get at what living with anxiety is like: You’re just bopping along, minding your business, when all of a sudden, some past failing or future worry starts crowding out the present. Though this could easily turn to solipsism or self-pity, Aggs and Rogers mostly just try to keep things moving. The anxiety’s present and accounted for, but if they can help it, they aren’t about to let it get in the way of their good time.
Compared with Aggs’ other projects—the austerity-minded Shopping, the thrill jockeys of Trash Kit—Strike a Match is brighter, punchier, its charms a little closer to the surface. Whereas past Aggs projects felt like they’d been recorded in a rock tumbler, Strike a Match bounds out of the speakers. Producer Tony Doogan’s done wonders in burnishing Aggs’ oft-spendthrift sound without dulling its off-the-cuff impact.
Behind the kit, the looser-limbed Rogers is every bit Aggs’ equal. They urge each other on without crowding each other out, leaving each other plenty of room to finish each other’s sentences. Influences run an impressive gamut—the post-punk/new wave convergence, smartly self-lacerating twee, yelpy mid-’00s indie, Papa Wemba, you name it—but the closest analog is probably the last couple Talking Heads albums, when they’d so thoroughly absorbed all their worldly forerunners that they mostly wound up sounding just like themselves. Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance.


The Philadelphia-based experimental pop musician nails a sunny, carefree vibe somewhere between creepy and sweet.

Hair of the Dog

The experimental Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter ARTHUR once explained that while he often sets out to write songs that sound like the Beach Boys or Gram Parsons, “they end up sounding like Daniel Johnston if he was a cyborg.” His music delights in pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that cheery, bittersweet tunes like “Simple Song” turn on jarring lyrics like “All I know, and all that’s clear to me/Is that everything ends, and everyone leaves.” Time and again, his sunny pop melodies prove to be a Trojan Horse for his brain-warping sonic experiments and existential angst.
Hair of the Dog arrives roughly 18 months after ARTHUR’s debut, Woof Woof, and as the title would suggest, the new record very much picks up where the last left off: it has the same mixture of whimsical, jangling guitars, eerie lyrics, and stomach-drop production maneuvers. But Shea has become more ambitious. The expansive, chaotic “Feel Good” recalls the stretched-elastic percussion of SOPHIE, and the cascading, cavernous beats of “Something Sweet” suit Bronx rapper Caleb Giles’ understated verse. The scrappy psychedelic funk of “Epic” and “I Don’t Want To Talk To You” recall Steve Lacy’s melancholic lo-fi songwriting.
Sometimes, these ideas end too abruptly—as with the too-brief, shimmering “Fatalist”—or are expressed too bluntly. The heavy-handed lyrics of “Biz,” which take aim at the superficiality of the music industry (“Your manager says that you look great/With dollar signs written on your face”), feel at odds with the gentle surrealism of something like “No Tengo,” Shea’s best song to date, which does much more work with oddly touching, evocative images like “I can't help but feel small when she kisses my head.”
Shea’s music seems to exist in multiple genres and time periods at once, and his lyrics frequently evoke a kind of purgatory. Despite his sing-song, carefree style, the protagonist of Shea’s songs seems to be perpetually trapped, whether that’s “inside a jar of Formaldehyde” (“Something Sweet”), or waiting for someone to come home and save him from loneliness (“William Penn”). The latter song is buoyant even as it takes on a creepy dimension, threatening: “You can’t get away from me!” When ARTHUR nails these uneasy moments, the effect is like looking in a funhouse mirror: what you see is recognizable, yet somehow terrifying, and you can’t avert your eyes.


On his latest, EDM titan deadmau5 continues to hint that he might have a better, richer album in him. Once more, he has not made it.

There aren’t many electronic dance musicians more cantankerous than deadmau5. His beefs are legion, his tweetstorms legendary. And the scrawny, tattooed Torontonian’s self-loathing is nearly as famous as his short fuse. Sometimes, the self-deprecating potshots—making fun of his own costume, admitting that most EDM performances are pure pantomime—scan as refreshingly down-to-earth takes on an industry full of metastasized egos and virtually no self-awareness. But sometimes, his snark takes a darker tone. Just a year ago, he threatened that he was thinking about “killing off” the deadmau5 “bullshit” and starting over. “fuck it. why not,” he tweeted, sounding not unlike a man standing on the railing of a bridge.
But where many neurotic artists’ work actively benefits from their neuroses, the same can’t necessarily be said of deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmerman. His music isn’t without its strengths: It can be catchy and immersive, and it’s remarkably well-engineered, packed with satisfying oomph and spine-tingling timbres. And for all the shit that deadmau5 has gotten for being, well, deadmau5, his music has often been markedly less corny than 99% of mainstream EDM. The best deadmau5 tracks burrow into the kind of long, dark groove that has characterized four-to-the-floor dance music since the very beginning; for listeners, they’re more about losing yourself in the beat than gawking at the bozo onstage. (That’s ironic, given his mouse-head gimmick.) Nevertheless, his music tends to be relatively uncomplicated, conflict- and friction-free—in short, far more polite that you’d expect from a guy who smokes like a chimney, swears like a sailor, and, you know, wears a gigantic, light-up cartoon mouse head on stage.
Perhaps it’s this disconnect between his music and his persona that led deadmau5 to trash his latest album upon its release. “i don’t even like it,” he tweeted. “it was like... so fucking rushed / slapped together.” Later, despite “orders from above” not to bad-mouth his own work, he explained to Rolling Stone that it wasn’t written “from start to finish; it’s over a year’s worth of work that doesn’t correlate. It's not *The *fucking Wall!” (Remarkably, this isn’t the first time he’s criticized one of his own records in almost identical language. Of 2012’s >album title goes here<, he lamented the fact that his “tour-heavy year” had stood in the way of him sitting down and making something “from start to finish like The Wall.”)
Still, the album isn’t without its pleasures. The opening “4ware” is wistful and driving, with a pinging lead reminiscent of Eric Prydz or Gui Boratto’s progressive trance. The nu-disco number “Cat Thruster” manages the perfect balance of slouching cool and giddy kitsch, playing legato synth riffs and ersatz electric bass off harp flourishes and clever chord changes; if someone told you it was a new Todd Terje tune, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. And the grinding “Deus Ex Machina” sounds a lot like the kind of gravelly, psychedelic techno that Robag Wruhme and the Wighnomy Brothers used to be known for.
Some songs are more lackluster. Both “2448” and “No Problem” tear pages from the Daft Punk playbook, but the former wastes a perfectly good synth riff on a formulaic big-room stomp whose slow rise in pitch mimics a trick he already tried on 2010’s “Bad Selection,” while the heavy-handed touch of the latter tune makes Justice’s most lunkheaded jams look like surgical implements. And the unrequited-love song “Let Go” aims for bittersweet release, but it gets hung up on the earnest-yet-anodyne vocals of the young singer and producer Grabbitz.
Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions. His synthesizers have never sounded richer, but once introduced, his sounds don’t morph and his themes don’t evolve; loops simply loop, unvarying and uninflected, and once a track gets through its obligatory mid-way breakdown, there's really no point in sticking around for three or four minutes of reprise. His drums, meanwhile, favor cleanliness over character; the disco-leaning “Cat Thruster” has more to do with abstract ideas of disco than the music’s actual essence.
What’s most frustrating is that Zimmerman clearly has it in him to make a better, more exciting record. “Glish,” a three-way merger between IDM, digi-dub, and skweee, could pass for Aphex Twin, and “Snowcone” is a perfectly serviceable Boards of Canada tribute—not a goal in and of itself, necessarily, but at least a stepping stone toward greener pastures. Best of all is “Whelk Then,” which mixes thundering breakbeats and glistening synths until they swirl like the interior of a snowglobe. Finally, here on the album’s penultimate cut—it would have made for a killer close if they hadn't tacked on an unnecessary, 12-minute edit of “Let Go”—we’re given a sense of what one suspects Zimmerman really wants to do. So why isn’t he doing it? What's strange about W:/2016ALBUM/ is that it’s Zimmerman's first album since buying himself out of his contract with EMI; in theory, that means he should finally be beholden to no one but himself. Yet he still sounds like he’s hemmed in by others’ expectations of what deadmau5 is supposed to deliver, and who deadmau5 is supposed to be. Maybe it really is time for him to build a better mousetrap once and for all, and see what happens next.


Selena Gomez’s third album is a smooth and confident pop record that delves deep—but not that deep—into heartbreak, resilience, and self-love.

Rare

Selena Gomez was reborn from a hermetically-sealed fantasyland back into reality when, in 2015, she released her second solo record, Revival. It was the pop star’s beginning of a transition away from Disney incorruptibility towards songwriting that better represented the crossroads at which she found herself. Unlike the overproduced electropop of her 2013 debut, Stars Dance, Revival reflected her expanding sexuality, power, and interest in telling her own stories; Gomez actualized these objectives by posing nearly nude on the album cover, serving among its executive producers, and working with specific songwriters to help translate her experiences. As she proclaimed on the title track, it was her “time to butterfly.”
Over the next five years, Gomez’s journey towards emancipation would be challenged by serious struggles with anxiety, depression, and chronic illness that sidelined her music career and threatened her life. But in 2017, the same year she underwent a risky kidney transplant due to complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, Gomez shared a series of genre-curious singles including the Talking Heads-sampling “Bad Liar.” After checking the cultural pulse, the then most-followed woman on Instagram logged off, removing herself from the public eye once more. Besides popping up for the occasional movie role or fashion collaboration, Gomez focused on herself. “I just needed to let my old self go,” Gomez told Zane Lowe this month.
When Gomez shared the ballad “Lose You to Love Me” last fall, it seemed like the work she put into her physical and emotional wellness had clicked. The song looks at the ways she lost herself in a relationship and solemnly promises to never make that mistake again. While dropping hints at which supposedly “Sorry” singer had been dragging her down, Gomez reclaimed her own narrative. Her anguished soul-searching struck a nerve: “Lose You to Love Me” became Gomez’s first Billboard No. 1. Though the song’s drama is an exception, its moral of losing love and gaining self is the guiding ethos of her third record, Rare. While none of these 13 songs attempt the subtle weirdness of “Bad Liar” and the emotional thesis—self-love!—can be a bit one-note, Rare is the 27-year-old’s most cohesive record to date. It feels spiritually in tune with the woman who once cheerfully told Vogue that people would be surprised to learn how much she loves “depressing things.”
But Rare’s celebration of autonomy, resilience, and growth is overwhelmingly upbeat. After waving goodbye to a lover who does not respect her worth on the blissed-out self-titled opener, Gomez cleanses her heart with an electro-pop party on “Dance Again.” Dancing through pain is by now a tried-and-true motif in pop music, but the sentiment holds extra weight for Gomez, who undoubtedly knows from her lupus how it feels to be powerless over your body. But Rare doesn’t dwell on heavy realities like chronic illness or the ice-cold grip of depression or, really, any sadness lingering after heartache. When Gomez looks back on toxic relationships wracked with mistrust or self-sabotaging anxiety spirals, her perspective is more grateful than regretful, as if to say that everything in life is a valuable lesson.
Gomez’s biggest hurdle as a musician has long been her voice. Low and breathy, her understated vocals are better suited for intimate contemplation than big, belted catharsis. For the first time, Gomez seems to have a grasp on her range and mainly sticks to a husky, bedroom-eyes murmur instead of attempting bravado. Her best performance arrives on the muted, throbbing “Vulnerable.” Though the wordplay can be a bit heavy-handed—“If I let you cross my finish line, then would you wanna make it?”—Gomez sounds firm and assured even when she dips into a whisper. Guided by a vast team of songwriters and producers including Swedish duo Mattman & Robin, Simon Says, and Finneas (of the Eilish brood), Gomez dips her toes into some du jour sounds: “Ring” does a diet-“Havana” with a “Smooth” riff thrown in for good measure; “Fun” aims for a “Bad Liar” redux with a snappy bassline, handclaps, and bubbly frivolity; “Cut You Off” plays with downtempo funk and a familiar yoo-oo-oo chorus. Notably, the songwriting duo of Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, whose melodic playfulness was all over Revival, only appear together on “Lose You” and its clubby companion single “Look At Her Now.”
But Gomez’s malleability can also be her downfall. Though she has a writing credit on every song, a majority of the tracks on Rare’s second half feel impersonal and underwhelming. These songs feel like they could be sung by anyone, and you can’t help but wonder what Gomez saw in them. On “People You Know,” she avoids confronting any real feelings of regret by wallowing beneath a frigid, tiptoeing beat and stale chorus. The trumpet-tinged kiss-off “Kinda Crazy” feels totally inconsequential. Any reference to the relationship-in-question’s halcyon days is so submerged in tired figures of speech about fire and water that their actual separation feels anticlimactic. What is meant to be a seductive liaison on “Crowded Room”—which features a middling appearance from rapper 6LACK and borrows a feeling from Cassie circa 2006—comes off as lethargic and forced.
Rare’s insipid gear shift culminates with its closer, “A Sweeter Place.” Despite his brief contribution, the song feels dominated by the melodramatic-stoner aura of its guest, Kid Cudi, all Auto-Tune and heavy synths. If only the song focused on unpacking one of Rare’s most compelling—albeit cheesy—lines: “Holding hands with the darkness and knowing my heart is allowed.” Sadly, this intriguing notion of finding dignity in depression is erased by a painfully vapid chorus: “Is there a place where I can hide away/Red lips, French kiss my worries all away/There must be a sweeter place/We can sugarcoat the taste.”
“Vulnerable ain’t easy, believe me, but I go there,” Gomez proclaims near the beginning of Rare. Maybe so. But it’s difficult to come away from Rare with any real perspective on who Gomez is other than that she doesn’t want to be the person she was, whoever that similarly mysterious shadow was. Unfortunately for pop stars everywhere, exposing your soul does not equal examining it. Gomez tries, but never quite succeeds at doing either here. Her introspection can only go so deep when it’s paired with sleek, easy songwriting that lets her slip by, just another specter.

Buy: Rough Trade
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An in-demand beatmaker who has worked with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and more, the producer finally releases his solo debut—a dynamic record bursting with soul samples and complicated emotions.

Louie

Kenny Beats has his eye on eternity. Over the last five years, the 31-year-old producer has emerged as one of hip-hop’s most in-demand beatmakers, an ideal collaborator for artists looking to meld genres and eschew chart trends. He’s released one-off singles with Dominic Fike, JPEGMAFIA, and slowthai, made collaborative projects with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and Rico Nasty, and created a content empire that’s lofted him into rarified air: He’s Gen Z’s Rick Rubin, a Twitch streamer’s Madlib. On his YouTube series “The Cave,” he makes beats in real time for artists like Mac DeMarco and Doja Cat; on his Twitch channel, he hosts beat battles, gifts high-level recording equipment to aspiring musicians, and offers practical advice and motivating pep talks. “These communities are things I never dreamed about when my biggest dream was [to] have a platinum plaque, make a million dollars,” Kenny said in a recent interview. “My dream now is: Holy shit, I can have this be self-sufficient way after I’m dead.”
Kenny had yet to drop a solo project until now. The classic producer compilation tape didn’t appeal to him; why gather a bunch of verses from famous rappers when he’d already been doing this for years, across a variety of platforms? “I always said that I wouldn’t do a solo album because I didn’t have anything to say,” he wrote in advance of Louie, his full-length debut. “Finally, I did.” After his father was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, he found the inspiration he’d been looking for. Louie pays homage to Kenny’s father—a former broadcaster—through radio-DJ-style transitions and old recordings of his voice, but the album’s no requiem; it’s a joyous, funky, and texturally dynamic record bursting with soul samples, warm studio instrumentation, and a range of complicated emotions. Although plenty of features are sprinkled throughout, each guest works in service of Kenny’s larger mission: to create a universe both solemn and celebratory, comprising abstract rhythms and melodic detours, unexpected transitions and cohesive eclecticism. With each listen, the universe expands, unveiling new details and surprises lodged within his sample-based beats.
Early on, Louie soaks in the sun, assembling songs from pitched vocals, mangled guitars, warm Rhodes, and live horns. “Hold My Head” blends an exuberant singing sample with high-octane drums and a string of inscrutable bars from Pink Siifu. Two other early highlights, “So They Say” and “Hooper,” mesh giddy percussive grooves with retro soul harmonies. These songs don’t climax as much as they constantly bend into new, playful variations: a waft of wistful keys, a jolt of digitized effects, a barely audible vocal chant that propels the beat toward conclusion. Even when Kenny does his best J Dilla and Madlib impressions—like on the Shades of Blue-indebted “Moire” or the Donuts-inspired “Drop 10”—his creations are idiosyncratic. A quirky, bouncy bassline, a crisp doubled snare, a custom-made saw synth; Louie’s stuffed with little treasures like this, subtle choices that feel like diamonds when you unearth them.
Though the album is mostly instrumental, Kenny incorporates his guests in unique and deceptive ways. On the mid-album standout “Still,” JPEGMAFIA shouts energetic catchphrases over a simple drum line and tender backing vocals from Omar Apollo. Just as JPEG launches into a verse, though, the beat cuts out and stalls into a grainy sample. “Get Around” features Dijon, whose layered cries undergird twangy guitars and musky breaks, his voice a mere stitch within the song’s intricate tapestry. It’s rare for producers to deploy vocal talent in such an oblique manner, but Kenny weds his crate-digging affinities with his collaborative impulses, adding the artists’ most compelling strengths to his overflowing cauldron of sounds and samples.
The sequencing on Louie leaves something to be desired. The first 10 songs feel like their own contained album, wrapping up with the elegiac “Eternal,” which flips a Shira Small deep cut into a gorgeous ode to the afterlife. The record’s B-side more actively weaves in recordings of Kenny’s father, adopting an FM-radio framework and musings on childhood and the past that are rarely seen in the preceding songs. It’s a forgivable incongruity, though, because the beats in the back half are consistently excellent and build upon the record’s foundation. “Really Really” is another flawless emulation of Dilla, while “Rotten” mimics a Voodoo-era D’Angelo number. There’s not a skip in sight; each song collages into the next, changing in pace and tone while cycling through obscure samples and inventive backbeats.
Louie closes on “Hot Hand,” a percussive, chant-laden song that synthesizes the emotions burbling below the album’s surface. It’s designed to make you clap, stomp, dance—anything that lets you lose yourself inside the elasticity of the rhythm. What’s more healing, more affirming, than this sort of communion? Kenny thought he needed to have something to say before putting out a record; turns out the message was always there, just waiting to be channeled into a series of ecstatic grooves.


Yo La Tengo’s second EP in recent months finds them resuming their covers jukebox niche, weaving together selections as unlikely as a 1940s blues oddity and as recognizable as a Bob Dylan classic.

Sleepless Night EP

How many Yo La Tengo deep cuts did you enjoy for years before realizing they were covers? If you’ve been a fan for long enough, chances are it’s a few. The trio’s ability to morph into a kind of living covers jukebox is nearly as legendary as their propensity for making non-Jews care about Hanukkah, and if you always thought “You Can Have It All” was an original, you’re not the only one—it’s a testament to the band’s knack for taking any unsung gem and rearranging it until it’s unmistakably a Yo La Tengo song.
Sleepless Night, the band’s second standalone EP of 2020, finds them resuming this curatorial role, weaving together covers as unlikely as a 1940s blues oddity and as recognizable as a Bob Dylan classic alongside one stray original. Unlike the recent ambient workout We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which felt like a time capsule from quarantine, this one is more of an odds-and-sods collection, with recordings stretching back 10 or even 20 years. (The tracks were originally chosen in collaboration with Japanese visual artist Yoshitomo Nara, and previously appeared as part of a limited-edition catalog for his Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit.) Yet it never feels patchwork: The tone is reliably lovely and hushed, reflective of Yo La Tengo’s recent instinct for responding to outer turmoil with a heightened commitment to dreamy tranquility.
A little nostalgia, too, is warranted during such destabilizing times; much of Sleepless Night’s tracklist reflects Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s 1960s–’70s youth, well before the indie-rock explosion. Guest guitarist (and YLT alum) Dave Schramm nails the jingle-jangle Rickenbacker sound on a surprisingly faithful cover of the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” a song Kaplan first encountered when his mom took him to see Easy Rider in 1969, while Hubley takes the lead on a sighing, leisurely cover of Ronnie Lane’s 1974 gem "Roll on Babe,” first written by forgotten folk legend Derroll Adams. Meanwhile, the trio’s three-part harmony is the star on “Blues Stay Away,” an excavation of a 1949 Delmore Brothers standard made electric by NRBQ in 1972. Yo La Tengo’s take, recorded in 2011, is more aligned with the song’s downbeat blues origin.
The main attraction, though, is a blissful dream-pop recalibration of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Recorded for a John Peel radio show, this version is a newly unearthed recording from the And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out era and it shares that album’s gorgeous nocturnal ambience. Hubley replaces Dylan’s straining wheeze with an understated murmur, and her bandmates swap out the “thin, wild mercury sound” of mid-’60s Dylan for a warm, droney hum. It’s a worthy addition to the band’s recurring Dylan obsession, which dates back to 1989’s President Yo La Tengo.
For the most part, though, Sleepless Night feels like an extension of a different record: namely, the band’s 2015 covers-etc. album Stuff Like That There, which itself was a loose sequel to 1990’s similarly spirited Fakebook. As on those releases, the selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either. For most of us, it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a Hanukkah show this year.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The jangly San Franciscan band the Mantles have never seemed that interested in consistent release schedules, touring, or otherwise playing the indie career game. On their third release in six years, the group's breezy, rickety pop has the poignant feel of a retreat from reality.

All Odds End

All Odds End, the Mantles' third proper full-length in six years, is full of scenes of stasis: Vocalist Michael Olivares sings of baths and bedridden Sunday mornings, delivers a paean to standing—"all day"—in a doorframe, and somewhat sarcastically laments missing his ride down south to Los Angeles. It ends with "Stay". The thematic focus on idleness befits the Mantles' breezy but rickety pop, and though the lyrics rarely despair, All Odds End is nevertheless saturated with a quiet, interior melancholy.
The Mantles, who formed in the mid-'00s, first garnered notice with their eponymous 2009 debut. The record mediated indie-pop, pastoral '60s psych, and the various locales known for jangling in the 1980s, all liberally swathed in tape machine gauze. Along with the Siltbreeze connection, the production pegged the Mantles as "lo-fi," a reductive category that was particularly ill-fitting in their case. After a downtick in output following the turn of the decade, 2013's Long Enough to Leave reaffirmed what the Mantles always sounded like: a band besotted with too many disciples of the Velvet Underground to list but defined by its immutable eccentricities.
That's even more so the case with All Odds End, where Olivares' ragged vocal melodies stumble between notes, emphasizing flair and character over the conventions of pitch. If on earlier material Olivares risked overstraining his delivery, here he's more settled, inclined to deadpan instead of whimper a snappy phrase for effect. Meanwhile, the expanded lineup augments his voice with greater presence and texture. It's still scrappy—with cymbals that fall like trashcan lids and an overall reverence for basic root notes—but while the Mantles continue to prize sparseness and restraint, All Odds End sounds especially confident in that decision. Many indie pop songs endear with their sense of delicate, precarious construction, but here the individually shambolic parts coalesce into a substantial whole. All Odds End suggests an ensemble of players who don't need to hold back; they choose to, together.
Olivares' metaphors for resisting change and liminal places usually have a lackadaisical tone, but the lyrical focus connects to how the band has drifted toward anachronism. Many of the Mantles' early regional peers have dissolved or resettled in L.A.—which "Best Sides" deals with in veiled terms—and the group never demonstrated much interest in consistent release schedules, touring, or otherwise playing the indie career game. Indeed, as Oakland and San Francisco undergo rapid and reckless redevelopment, it's easy to hear All Odds End as a defensive retreat inward, an attempt to suspend time. As a futile endeavor in reality, it's sad. As a listening experience, it's effective.


The best parts of techno group DUST's Agony Planet recreate those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get, when all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth.

Agony Planet

The throwback house and techno that forms the foundation of DUST's Agony Planet has long been overrun with producers aiming for the crispest, clearest, most audiophile-quality sounds the human mind can conceive of, but the Brooklyn trio goes in the opposite direction. They have coated their debut album in a fine layer of hiss and sonic grime, and if you’ve been around dance music for long, the murkiness might remind you of a time before the post-scarcity age of streaming music, when rave devotees would trade cassette dubs of rare 12''s.
Or it might remind you of an overdriven P.A., pushed far past its capabilities to power some kind of under-the-radar, probably illegal rave. Coming out of the Brooklyn DIY electronic music scene, that’s something DUST's members–John Barclay, Mike Sherburn, and Greem Jellyfish–know all about. Barclay in particular is a tireless advocate for pre-EDM, pre-superclub rave ethics, which he wove deeply into the events he threw at already-legendary spaces like 285 Kent (which he helped open, and where DUST was among the last acts to play before it was shuttered) and Trip House, a run-down Bushwick mansion that he turned into a 20-room party palace. More recently he’s gone legit with the Bossa Nova Civic Club, whose shadowy back room has become a mecca for hardcore house and techno freaks.
Barclay’s ventures as a promoter suggest not just nostalgia for a time when dance music was still dangerous, but a fairly successful attempt to yank that kind of seductively undomesticated energy out of the good old days and into the here and now. Agony Planet fits into that scheme nicely. The music has a raw edge that comes part from the redlined production and part from the relentless body-jacking four-on-the-floor beats and stroboscopic synth arpeggios, as well as tempos that feel pitched up a few percentages by the type of DJ who likes to test their audience’s physical endurance.
Singer Greem Jellyfish, a multimedia artist who designs her own surreal stage costumes, helps push the album’s manic energy over into madness. Inverting the concept of a disco diva, she yelps, shrieks, and moans her vocal parts, drawing out the dark, slightly sadistic quality woven into the beats, and really all good techno in general. Her frequently wordless vocalizing suggests someone who’s lost her mind so thoroughly to the music that she’s gone post-verbal.
When Agony Planet really comes together—and it doesn't, always, but it's a hard spot to locate— on tracks like "Alien Prey" and "Tell Me," the effect is downright magical. It can transport you to an unrehabbed industrial loft or maybe even the abandoned loading dock where I went to one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life, and recreates those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get and all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth. And then it’ll make you want to go out this weekend and find that same sensation all over again.


Teen R&B oddball Corbin Smidzik (fka Spooky Black) has refocused his energy. Working with Weeknd collaborator Doc McKinney, he hones his vocal talent, even going for some black metal-inspired screams.

Mourn

Corbin Smidzik has been off the grid. Transforming from a turtlenecked, viral R&B oddball into a reclusive crooner—one well equipped for apocalyptic times—isn’t something he could pull off while maintaining a Twitter presence or popping up at festivals. So into the woods he went, a young man wrestling with an unwieldy public persona. In 2013, when he was 15-years-old, Corbin first appeared online with Forest, an amateurish rap project released under his since-abandoned Spooky Black pseudonym that showcased his ear for ghoulish effects. It scanned as an Americanized take on Yung Lean’s #sadboy opus Unknown Death 2002: decent production bogged down by crude and violent lyrics that flyover state teens were high on after the Odd Future boom. He followed that several months later with Black Silk and abandoned the rap angle entirely, instead bringing to light his incredibly powerful voice, one that stirred up a cult following in short order. Combining the young Minnesotan’s organic vocal talent with delightfully low-budget music video treatments, songs like “Without U” and “DJ Khaled Is My Father” earned Corbin fans in the inner-circles of Drake and the Weeknd.
Now working with Toronto-by-way-of-Minneapolis producer Doc McKinney, who teamed with the Weeknd during the House of Balloons era, Corbin has honed his sound and refocused his energy. Gone are the days where a mention of the Spooky Black moniker merited a chuckle and an inquiry into just how serious we should take this teen with a bizarre aesthetic. Under his government name, Corbin is nearly an entirely different entity. He is driven by paranoia and isolation to some Vantablack levels of doom and gloom.
Corbin’s new album Mourn follows a loose narrative wherein our protagonist builds a bunker for himself and his lover to wait out the apocalypse. The protagonist passes away in a plane crash before things go belly up, and his lover dies alone. If you’re looking for a silver lining in the plot, you won’t find one, but the record does have some positive attributes elsewhere. Most notably, Corbin continues to carve out his signature sound vocally, cornering the market on world-weary vocal strain as an R&B approach.
Mourn is a difficult album to pin down, a piece of music that is both stylistically transcendent and lyrically half-baked. Some songs find Corbin pushing his vocal chords to their limits with guttural screams so packed with emotion you can feel the veins popping out of his neck as he digs through his soul with a rusty pickaxe. Corbin has toyed with this vocal style before, like on the Leaving EP track “Echoes in My Mind,” but he’s never exerted himself this far, to such a viscerally painful threshold. On other songs, like “Giving Up,” he cuts through with a throbbing baritone that shakes the spine. Opener “ICE BOY” is a standout, starting synthy and syncopated with Corbin’s hybrid growl-moan that crescendos into a mushroom cloud of emotion when he wails through the second chorus. “Oh I’m on ice/Can’t you tell?” he howls, with an arctic vocal sneer he credits to listening to black metal during the recording process.
“Find your bite tonight,” Corbin rasps on “Revenge Song,” a track about exacting grim vengeance on a rapist. The subject matter is bleak—a trip into the fractured mindset of a man beset by anger and grief over his true love’s story of being assaulted. The song ends with the couple visiting a house at the bottom of a hill in the dark of night to end the life of the man who abused her. The grim tale is matched by the operatic treatment it receives from Smidzik, who sings like he’s worn his voice down to the last, crying about the wrongs done to his lover, himself, and the world at large. On “Giving Up,” he drops in to say, “Had enough of this world, now I’m giving up,” emerging from the song’s nearly 40-second intro like a specter from the back of a cave. Throughout Mourn, this lyric feels most like Corbin’s mission statement. Take a look around, he implores the listener, because clearly things aren’t going the way they should be.
Tonally, this material feels like a manifesto of sorts. But there’s still room for Corbin to grow. With pulsating, gothic production throughout from Shlohmo and D33J, Mourn is an end-times tale told with a youthful energy that contrasts its finality with freshness. It’s an industrial R&B soundtrack that would not sound out of place in Lars von Trier’s ode to impending doom, Melancholia, but coded through the hectored mind-frame of a young person growing up in the brutal reality we currently occupy. These are teenaged ruminations on the futility of a life without love, a showing of so many feelings fully felt but only half-formed.


Animal Collective have followed each of their last three albums with a short companion EP closely related to its predecessor. Right on schedule, here's Water Curses, containing three tracks from the Strawberry Jam sessions and another recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studio.

Water Curses EP

Animal Collective have followed each of their last three albums with a short companion EP closely related to its predecessor. 2005's Prospect Hummer echoed the bent acoustic folk-pop they'd explored on Campfire Songs and Sung Tongs; it also featured British folk legend Vashti Bunyan on vocals, who was then just returning to public consciousness. While Prospect sounded terrific from the start, 2006's People, which followed Feels, felt more like what it was-- a chance to release a few not-quite-as-good songs out that didn't make the cut. Now comes the Water Curses EP, which contains three tracks from the Strawberry Jam sessions and another recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studio.
The opening title track ranks among the best songs the band has written in purely pop terms, alongside "Who Could Win a Rabbit", "Grass", and "Fireworks". The production is busy with snippets of what could be a gurgling bong, creaking floorboards, and laser-like effects, but it's mixed beautifully and remains light on the ears despite its density. With its de-emphasis on identifiable instrumentation (guitars are there, but they're way down in the mix), "Water Curses" seems unbound by genre or era, and serves as a nice reminder of how many risks Animal Collective is taking sonically these days. It's mostly electronic and it's pop, but it doesn't have anything to do with the 1980s, which in itself makes it unusual; it sounds like something no other band working right now could have made.
Among the other three tracks, nothing else is nearly so direct melodically. "Street Flash", which has been a staple of live sets for a while now, begins slow with dubbed-out scraping noises and distant samples of loud vocalizations. The opening section is pure mood, as Avey Tare sings in his lower register to assorted sounds placed against a wide backdrop of silence, but then his voice is subjected to an underwater effect, some gentle piano enters, and things grow progressively thicker. The baby-like screams that he alternates with sweet crooning aren't going to win the band any new fans (they feel somewhat out of place in this more subtle track), but it's still an effective slice of ambience.
"Cobwebs" is like a mid-tempo and more song-like variation on some of "Street Flash"'s ideas; where the latter gets by on impressionistic drift, "Cobwebs" is like a slow march through a bucolic landscape, the clackity and deliberate percussion occasionally giving into a surging chorus. There's again plenty of intriguing sonic detail, and the track sounds especially good on headphones; with its bright, tactile production, the whole record is very visual, sometimes feeling like a series of weird scenes glimpsed through the glass of an aquarium. The aquatic motif returns on record closer "Seal Eyeing", which is anchored by a few notes of melancholy piano, and nicely wraps up some of the production ideas as they fold in the sound of the traditional instrument on a pretty, evocative ballad while maintaining an air of strangeness.
Though ostensibly a collection of outtakes, Water Curses feels like its own thing, with a consistent mood and an identifiable palette. The record also finds the band becoming increasingly comfortable with integrating unusual sounds and textures into their music. Where they once used synths, delay pedals, and crude electronic percussion in an abstract, noise-oriented ways, they're now discovering how to make odd sounds work with proper songs. You can hear them becoming more experimental and more accessible simultaneously. While Water Curses is plenty enjoyable on its own, it also sets you dreaming about where Animal Collective will go next.


Over a fleeting 10 minutes, the Swedish artist swings between confidence and insecurity and explores an exciting new direction.

PXE EP

Years before they formed the Drain Gang collective, Ecco2k and Bladee were in a hardcore band called Krossad (“crushed” in Swedish) as schoolmates. This fun fact has become part of the Stockholm group’s narrative: their noisy 2007 demo CD has been ripped and uploaded online, and fan pages regularly post pictures of the two artists as kids, wearing patched and studded leather jackets, the sides of their heads closely shaved.
The spirit of that early experimentation—as well as the abrasiveness of his 2015 instrumental EP, Crush Resist—lives on in PXE (read: pixie), Zak Arogundade’s latest project as Ecco2k. He produced every sound on the five-song EP, and many of its individual elements are easy to pinpoint from his past: his distorted guitar on “Jalouse” is reminiscent of Krossad’s rudimentary instrumentation, the same haunting synths that ran through Crush Resist appear on “Big Air.” And the sweet falsetto that’s made him stand out, both next to collaborators and on his own, balances out this project’s more metallic textures. Woven together, with glitchy stops and starts that attract and repel, PXE sounds like an exciting and exploratory new direction, over the course of a fleeting 10 minutes.
Much of Ecco2k’s recent music explores the tension and beauty of living in his own skin. On E, his long-awaited 2019 debut album, he sang about learning to embrace his Blackness in an overwhelmingly white country: “Why are you scared of me when I’m not so hard?/No peroxide, I stay dark.” This self-discovery mirrored a broader shift, as he stepped out from his role as a mysterious behind-the-scenes creative force and became an artist in his own right. It’s fitting then that the first intelligible lyrics on PXE are, “Come out of your shell/Come into the light.”
The EP picks up on this theme of self-discovery but less topically and more viscerally. It presents a few moments of shimmering melody surrounded by distortion, ambient bleeps, and crushing bass, sometimes all in the same song. “In the Flesh,” the closest PXE comes to traditional pop, is a deceptively upbeat song about existential longing where Ecco2k wonders on the refrain, “Someone said, ‘You’ve got to get help’/And I kept asking myself, ‘Is that all there is to it?’” After acoustic guitar-picking builds into messy feedback, the final seconds of “Jalouse”' provides one of the most striking parts of the project; he sings in an aching whisper, “More than I care to admit, I love you, I love you, love you, I love you.” These spurts of vulnerability are quickly pierced by the sharp barbs in the EP’s production, sometimes obscuring his mesmerizing vocal performances. But this contrast, and the give-and-take between confidence and insecurity that it reveals, is a big part of what makes PXE compelling.
At points, Ecco2k seems to consciously pull the listener out of the project—the ambient cassette-tape sound effect on “Jalouse” brings with it an awareness of both the song’s recording and its transmission. On streaming platforms, the EP is presented as five individual songs, but it’s best experienced as one long track, the way it appears on Drain Gang’s YouTube channel. It’s easy to imagine the project falling into the algorithm of full-album rips on that platform, which tends to privilege a specific canon of cult favorites from online forums (some fans have already compared PXE to Sweet Trip’s velocity : design : comfort, Rate Your Music’s top album of 2003). Unlike those works, PXE ends before all of its ideas can be fully fleshed out. It’s a testament to Ecco2k’s evolution as an all-around artist that it feels like there could be even more to say.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we return to the 1999 album from the singer and bassist, a spare and mercurial exploration of a breakup that has become her masterpiece.

Bitter

“Why is the measure of love loss?” Jeanette Winterson asks in her 1992 novel Written on the Body, where a genderless narrator mourns their previous relationship so deeply they write long, vivid paragraphs cataloging the departed lover’s body parts, her legs, torso, mouth, hair, trying to reconstitute the whole through the memory of fine details. Take stock of what the world looks like after a relationship ends; it’s an emptier one, as if an apocalyptic event removed half of everything from existence. Furniture is gone. Certain perfumes and cooking smells no longer hang in the air. Friends who were their friends are no longer your friends. It can feel disorienting to move through this new world where someone who was always there is now missing, like tiptoeing the edge of a crater.
Plenty of breakup albums past and present attempt to depict this feeling, whether from a place of hurt or acceptance or stranded at an uncertain point between. But Meshell Ndegeocello’s masterpiece, 1999’s Bitter, lives inside of it. The doomed timeline that your life diverted into when you broke up with the person you loved the most. The silence that took over every room of the apartment, the darkness that filled in that silence at night. Bitter’s songs develop in this dark space like spider webs in corners. Piano chords and acoustic guitars tremble at the threshold of being heard, while Ndegeocello’s voice cradles a sentiment so extraordinarily vulnerable that it couldn’t be delivered in any register louder than the softest breath, lest it fall apart entirely: “You made a fool of me/Tell me why.”
Ndegeocello made Bitter from a place of abandonment, though it was more creative than romantic: When 1996’s Peace Beyond Passion was misunderstood by her record label, radio, and music television, she threatened that it would be “the last Meshell Ndegeocello album,” that she would retreat into making instrumental music instead. One of the singles from Peace, “Leviticus: Faggot,” about a gay teenager who is beaten to death after getting kicked out of his home by his parents, had its video banned from BET, and Peace itself, an album that swings through various forms of queerness and spirituality in an attempt to find an evasive truth, was worlds more complex than Ndegeocello’s debut single and only solo mainstream hit to date, “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” (Note that from her very first single she was interested in people slipping in and out of categories like liquid.) “I’ve already said as much as I can say in my songs at this point,” she said at the end of Peace’s promotional cycle. “I need a break… I hurt.”
Bitter blossomed gradually out of this hurt. If she was going to make a new album, she needed a new approach. She wrote a few songs with David Gamson, former member of Scritti Politti and producer of Ndegeocello’s first two records. While those albums were smooth soul-funk records chopped up by drum machines, the material Ndegeocello was writing merited a recording process that was more subtle, more live. The songs seemed to fall in line with other singer-songwriters of color that had traveled across the racial boundaries of genre before her, into a kind of celestial folk music: Joan Armatrading, Richie Havens. (Blackness isn’t genre, Ndegeocello is more or less always saying with her work—a person’s race doesn’t necessarily predict the sounds they’re surrounded with or eventually make.) She hired producer Craig Street, who had just recorded a standards album with k.d. lang, to foster this sense of naturalism, to make songs that were less composed and more played, a room of musicians responding to each other’s faintest gestures.
How better to craft a work of art about loss than with an act of subtraction? Peace Beyond Passion’s songs constantly move, developing new branches of melody as they go. Bitter, by contrast, would almost seem static if you didn’t also register its constant quiverings. They are spectral songs in terms of genre, spartan as folk, dynamic as jazz, on edge with feeling as the most incandescent soul record. Sometimes the music stirs lightly, as if it’s been awake in bed for hours, depressed, only moving when necessary. Sometimes it follows a memory back to when the relationship was strong, then casts its focus to when it was only a few strands away from fraying; this is the feeling the title track spins through, just Ndegeocello’s voice and an acoustic guitar wringing the final poisoned kisses out of a courtship that’s run its course. The whole album is like this, an account of a relationship that is constantly adding footnotes to itself: This is where I was almost unfaithful to you, yet here as well is where I felt hopelessly devoted to you. Monogamy is untenable and eventually unbearable—as Ndegeocello sings, “No one is faithful/I am weak, I’ll go astray”—but someone can still be the only person who satisfies you, their love your lone “saving grace.”
It’s at the center of these tensions where Ndegeocello can most effectively play the masculine and feminine against each other, inhaling as one, exhaling as the other, wearing each persona like a mask. A man loves his girlfriend with “sweetness and sincerity,” while she only offers him the pretense of love, a deliberate reversal of how heterosexual relationships are usually depicted. Later, in “Loyalty,” Ndegeocello creates and fully inhabits a man and a woman who, despite the broken homes they emerge from, are trying to find something permanent in each other, even though something yawns beyond them, a future they can’t quite see clearly, where everything they know may end in hurt—as the girl’s mother (another perspective Ndegeocello manages to sneak into) tells her, “Trust only in change, ’cause hearts change/But betrayal always feels the same.”
Like her hero Prince, Ndegeocello’s work is constantly flowing between different embodiments of gender; if she seems relaxed wherever she temporarily touches down on the gradient it’s because she could be one or the other or really anything at all at any given time. “[Prince] fights his femininity and he fights his masculinity,” Prince’s guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who plays on both Peace Beyond Passion and Bitter, said. “Meshell doesn’t pay too much attention to being male or female. She’s not self-conscious about it, and that’s in her music. Sometimes she’s a boy, and sometimes she’s a girl.” Inasmuch as her albums invoke the concept of gender, it doesn’t remotely feel like a binary, like a switch being flipped. Ndegeocello is masculine here, feminine there, without ever losing her coherence as a person. And Bitter is full of different types of voices and relationships as she is—masculine, feminine, lesbian, straight, all like different imprints in the sand made by the same wave.
As on most of her records, Ndegeocello incorporates a cover in the Bitter tracklist, like a conversation with the past to determine where her own music is. Here she covers Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love.” Her version of the song—which in its original form is a dreamy electric crackling, a love song hummed by power lines—is so smooth it’s like a pebble taken from the bottom of the ocean; where Hendrix’s recording gave off sparks, Nedegeocello’s goes liquid in your grasp, a feeling that nothing could contain. She replaces the bridge with an ambient whirlpool, and you hear Ndegeocello’s voice, surrounded by washes of sound, reciting Hendrix’s words instead of singing them, as strings curl outward from the slipstream of keys. It’s masculinity submerged, crystallized, held in the feminine, a perfect prismatic expression of Ndegeocello’s own sexuality through the vessel of someone else’s song; it’s also the centerpiece of Bitter, an album about being held, or at least about wishing you could still be held, by someone who complements you, who is you and isn’t you at the same time.
Critically, Bitter was beloved—Newsweek declared it album of the year for 1999—but it received little promotional muscle from Ndegeocello’s record company, Maverick (she had once again turned in an album that sounded little like “If That’s Your Boyfriend”), and was released to sales as motionlessly quiet as some of its songs. She heard the undertones looming beneath what her record company and the sales were saying: She’d seemingly abandoned the Black music that had gotten her on the radio. But the music on Bitter isn’t any less of a fusion than the records Ndegeocello put out before and after it. It may be her simplest, starkest record, feeling years older than it is, like wood floors creaking underfoot; but that doesn’t keep it from being a soul record, just a soul retreated inward, a door closed behind it—instead of witnessing its full force, you glimpse the evocative shadows of its movements.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


On its third album, the Chicago band continues to refine its strain of post-punk revivalism, trotting out familiar tropes while subtly pushing at the boundaries of its sound.

Careful!

In the constellation of “don’t call it post-punk” post-punk bands that have emerged in recent years, Chicago’s Deeper stand out as proud traditionalists. Many of the young groups lumped together under the genre push against its (already broad) confines, or reject the tag altogether. But Deeper are masterful craftsmen happily existing in a clear lineage. On Careful!, their third album and debut for Sub Pop, they’ve returned with their sharpest collection of songs yet, hitting all the familiar post-punk pleasure centers while subtly expanding their own boundaries.
Deeper’s sophomore album, 2020’s Auto-Pain, documented a difficult period of transition for the band. They had begun writing and recording the record when guitarist Mike Clawson left the group on acrimonious terms. The split, they have said, inspired that album’s pervasive darkness. Then, not long after they had finished in the studio, Clawson died by suicide. With clubs shuttered by the pandemic, and still processing the loss of their friend, the band—vocalist and guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist Drew McBride, drummer Shiraz Bhatti, and new bassist Kevin Fairbairn—began considering what else Deeper could be.
With Careful!, they venture an answer. Nearly every song sounds like a long-lost gem from post-punk’s 1980s heyday, with subtle updates from four subsequent decades of indie music. While Auto-Pain had plenty of hooks—often delivered by Gohl in vocal cadences that echoed Robert Smith’s yelpier side—it also skewed toward colder, more mechanical sounds. For Careful!, Gohl has cited “Bowie’s most coked-out productions” as an inspiration, and you can hear the melted plastic and corroded electronics of Bowie’s Berlin era—still conjuring post-industrial wastelands, but shot through with colors both vivid and lurid. Yet 1980’s Scary Monsters might be the closest antecedent: Careful! can be queasy and zonked, but Deeper wrangle even their ugliest sounds into their poppiest songs yet.
Earworms like “Glare” and “Sub” are driven by the requisite elements: insistent bass pulses, crisp drums, tangled-wire guitars. While those tracks are easy to love, many of the album’s standouts are those where Deeper tweak that formula. “Tele” swaddles its off-kilter chug in icy synths, while “Fame” grows hypnotically out of skeletal rhythms and ghostly strands of guitar and saxophone. “Everynight” has an infectious, sunglasses-at-night new-wave strut, while “Airplane Air” is both as claustrophobic and ethereal as its title suggests. Heavy on jagged, clanging guitars and muscular electric bass, the band’s aesthetic may not convert skeptics of the post-punk revival, nor will it shock those fluent in the music’s various iterations. But Deeper nevertheless make their historical reference points sound great right now, if not exactly groundbreaking.
While Deeper were always more earnest than sneering—the term “auto-pain,” referenced again here in “Glare,” denoted an imagined antithesis to the numbing drug soma, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—they have noticeably brightened the mood on Careful!. “Now build a bridge!” goes the rallying cry of the opening song, and the search for connection underlines much of what follows. The album concludes with “Pressure,” an unabashed love song written in tribute to Gohl’s wife. “Get you someone who kills/All the pressures of my life,” he practically coos. The sense of anxiety that has often plagued Deeper is still present, yet the band sounds more peaceful and content than we’ve ever heard them. That turns out to be Deeper’s real innovation on Careful!: Abandoning the genre’s stereotypical gloom, they’ve opened themselves up to something that looks almost like joy.


Beneath the metallic sheen of goth rock, the cult band’s third album addresses the disquieting anxieties of adulthood with vengeful indignation.

Sea of Worry

Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga live double lives. To a rabid subset of the notorious 4chan forum /mu/, they are the mysterious co-founders of Have a Nice Life, whose debut record, 2008’s foreboding, gauzy Deathconsciousness, is regarded as beyond reproach; its accompanying 70-page manifesto has since begot reams of stoned hermeneutics. But man cannot survive on 4chan fame alone; Barrett and Macuga have day jobs, and day lives, with families and children who might be less enamored by the creation myths of Christian cults. Their follow up, 2014’s The Unnatural World, raised uneasy questions about settling into the tedium of adulthood. Five years later, Sea of Worry presents disquieting answers.
Have a Nice Life’s early work had a tendency to shape-shift, presenting as garage rock on one track only to unravel into ambient noise on the next. On Sea of Worry, these shifts are more abrupt; the pace of the record suffers as a result. The momentum of the triumphant, shout-along choruses on “Sea of Worry” is flatlined by “Dracula Bells,” a track rendered exhaustingly slow by awkward rhythmic shifts, multiple melodic tangents, and a painful dash of free jazz.
It’s nearly grating enough to make a new listener pull the plug altogether, which would be a shame—Sea of Worry finds the band honing in on the metallic sheen of goth rock, a subgenre consistently in the mix on previous records but never given its due. With a propulsive bassline that gives way to shimmering guitars, “Science Beat” sounds like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as helmed by Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, Barrett’s atonal sing-speaking cutting through the blinding brightness. “Lords of Tresserhorn” plays with the same elements—twinkling synths, thrumming bass, clipped vocals—but simmers them slowly, not so much building to a chorus as painting layers of scenery.
But these ambitious experiments are paired with concessions to an active fanbase that is terrified of change. Two of the album’s seven tracks are re-recordings of demos already familiar to diehards, padding a relatively short record with old material. “Trespassers W,” originally a brooding post-punk love song with muffled vocals and a bassline ripped from “Transmission,” justifies its inclusion with a full-band remake. The new version represents what online fans feared for the band, with crunchy, overdriven guitar and full-throated yelps that are more indebted to Superchunk than Bauhaus. But the song benefits from the crisper recording, which highlights impressive chord changes and structural twists that were previously buried. “Destinos,” with a lengthy sample of a sermon about the evils of Satan and Hell, is more similar to its original version; as a closer, it makes a disappointingly safe choice for a dramatic exit.
As Have a Nice Life learn to embrace professional studio recordings and bigger audiences, perhaps the band’s most defining quality will prove to be its lyrics, a potent expression of what one might call dad rage. Sea of Worry addresses the anxieties of adulthood with vengeful indignation. “I opted out by never really opting in,” they sing on the title track, finding simultaneous freedom and sadness in the idea. But the sharpest commentary on the nihilism of total independence comes from “Lords of Tresserhorn”: “I can stay up late whenever I want,” Barrett sings, “but other than that, it’s nothing like I thought. I guess I thought I’d know what I’m doing by now, but I know nothing.” Where Matt Berninger might be ruefully fondling his argyle sweaters, Have a Nice Life eyes revolution: “I am mortgaged to an irrational thought: that we are always on top, and nothing will ever go wrong.” After two records about death, Macuga and Barrett have landed on something truly terrifying: finding oneself, inexplicably, still alive.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Newly reissued on vinyl, this late-career gem from the beloved songwriter highlights the hope, humor, and underdog rage that animate his best work.

Fair & Square

By 2005, John Prine had lived many lives. In his formative years, he had been a Vietnam-era draftee, a mailman, and a contender in the very-bizarre-in-retrospect New Dylan sweepstakes of the early 1970s. Singing in the folk clubs of Chicago, he was discovered by Kris Kristofferson and widely admired by everyone around him, including Dylan himself. But he remained a cult act, a “songwriter's songwriter,” which is just another way of saying not that many people listened. Prine’s audience considered him to be a genius, but his genius was for modesty and humor, and modesty and humor don’t always scale. No writer during the 20th century wrote more beautifully about the overlooked, the under-acknowledged, or the never-thought-about-at-all.
When Fair & Square was released in 2005, Prine was 58, and it had been five years since the world had heard from him, following a diagnosis with neck cancer in 1998. On this late-career gem, newly reissued on vinyl, he sounds weakened, which is different from saying he sounds weak. His voice had dropped an octave from radiation treatment and having given up a 30-year pack-a-day cigarette habit. There is sometimes a slurred hesitancy to his delivery, which contributes to the poignance of shaggy dog stories like “Taking a Walk,” a lovely, loping song which imbues the simple act of strolling around with metaphysical portent.
Given his health crises, you might expect Prine’s spirits to be low on Fair & Square—but it isn’t so. The wry and ebullient opener “Glory of True Love” reflects with awe on spiritual and romantic deliverance: “You can climb the highest mountain/Touch the moon and stars above/But Old Faithful’s just a fountain/Compared to the glory of true love.” Following the tumult of two broken marriages, Prine had wed Fiona Whelan, with whom he would raise a family and remain for the rest of his life. Very much in love and too close to death for comfort, Fair & Square splits the difference between Dylan’s winsome domestic bliss classic, 1970’s New Morning, and his trembling-at-mortality classic, 1997’s Time Out of Mind.
Like the novels of Charles Portis, Prine’s records are loaded with characters you might encounter on a wayward road trip. “Crazy as a Loon,” a co-write with the multi-instrumentalist Pat McLaughlin, is among Prine’s finest, a hilariously forensic biography of a three-time loser who roams the country searching for contentment but can’t escape his own thoughts. A heartbreaking cover of Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” recounts the gnomic utterances of a down-and-out Greyhound-rider hoping to “get back in the game,” whatever that means. And then there is the tale of “Safety Joe,” a man who “wore a seatbelt around his heart” and never took a risk.
There was no safety belt around Prine’s heart—no risk he wouldn’t take and seemingly no limit to his compassion. Uninterested in cultivating the mystery that shrouded many of his folk peers, Prine’s purview was what the writer Jim Gavin once referred to as “people who don’t know how to climb the pyramid of American success.” For all of Fair & Square’s loveliness—the album was co-produced with Gary Paczosa and resembles Nick Drake’s transporting work with producer Joe Boyd—the subtext of underdog rage remains. “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” which takes aim at the George W. Bush administration, may be the angriest song Prine ever wrote:

They screw you when your sleeping
They try to screw you blind
Some humains ain’t human
Some humans ain’t kind

Fair & Square won that year's Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and it began a renaissance of interest in his previous work. He continued making music up to his death in 2020, and he enjoyed a long and well-deserved eminence as an inspiration for younger generations of artists, ranging from Kacey Musgraves to the Drive-By Truckers to the Mekons. In 2013, Prine appeared on an episode of The Colbert Report With Stephen Colbert, a huge fan who confronted the artist with a knowing question: “Were you a mailman’s mailman?” Prine, not missing a beat, responded, “I was the kind of mailman that dogs couldn’t wait to see coming down the street.” An enduring beacon of hope, Fair & Square cemented his stature as an elder statesman of the folk tradition.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. *Merriweather Post Pavilion*, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.

Since their inception,

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion

Merriweather Post Pavilion

With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.
Since their inception, Animal Collective have wandered the territorial edges of music, scoping out where boundaries had been erected and looking beyond them. They've punctuated perfectly likeable indie rock songs with bleating vocalizations. They've seeded pretty instrumentals with irritating noise. They've juxtaposed West African rhythms and melodies cribbed from British folk. They've stayed on a single chord for 10 minutes. But Merriweather feels like a joyous meeting in a well-earned, middle place-- the result of all their explorations pieced together to create something accessible and complete.
Although it will be tagged as Animal Collective's "pop" album, Merriweather Post Pavilion remains drenched in their idiosyncratic sound, a record that no one else could have made. The album is named for a Maryland venue that last year played host to Santana, Sheryl Crow, and John Mayer, but its songs won't be heard on the radio, and besides, Animal Collective's M.O. requires them to exist outside of rigid formats. Nonetheless, they've found a natural way to integrate the sing-along melodies, sticky hooks, and driving percussion that have long been hallmarks of celebratory popular music.
Animal Collective's two vocalists, Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear), have never sounded better together, and the way their styles complement each other is the story of the album. On the one hand you have Panda's straightforward melodies, his fuzzy, head-in-the-clouds dreaminess, and his instinctual trawl through pop music history. The tracks that favor his songwriting typically have an underlying sense of drone, with everything moving forward along a line in relation to some subliminal center: They begin, then build, expand, and contract. Tare, meanwhile, tends to work within a more classic pop structure, with clear bridges and snappy choruses, greater harmonic development, and a sharper lyrical focus. Here, he reins in the blurting vocalizations that he's so often used as punctuation (the hardcore faithful might miss this unhinged emoting just a little). Both songwriters are on exactly the same page and, working with sonic spelunker Brian "Geologist" Weitz and producer Ben Allen (no Josh "Deakin" Dibb this time), they've found a sumptuous musical background for their most accomplished songs.
Merriweather is the kind of album on which any song could be someone's favorite, but two will likely reign as the choice picks: "My Girls" and "Brother Sport", both of which leaked prior to the record's release, contain the album's most effervescent moments, drawing from the communal energy of the group's astonishing live show. "My Girls" grows from a synth-speckled, half-speed intro into a booming electro-pop burner with handclaps and deep bass-- a towering edifice of sound trailed by long wisps of West coast harmonies. The Afro-Brazilian-flavored "Brother Sport" moves from one chanted melodic nugget to the next before building to a huge swirl of psychedelic sound that encompasses rave sirens and immersive tribal drums.
But these obvious peaks would have less resonance if not for the more subtle moments. The oblong architecture of "Daily Routine" hearkens back to the band's less stable earlier days, as it moves appealingly from an awkward organ-based mid-tempo number to a long, droney coda that has the ego-pulverizing bliss of shoegaze. The surging thrust of distortion and drumkick that propels "Summertime Clothes" starts with an almost militaristic pomp, but the song soon reaches a place of pure sweetness with a simple chorus hook ("I want to walk around with you") that could have come from any point in the last 100 years. Similarly out-of-time sentiments mark "Bluish"-- lines like "I'm getting lost in your curls," or, "Some kind of magic in the way you're lying there"-- and the music has the airy ease of 1970s soft-rock that weirdly winds up a little disconcerting. And then "Also Frightened" has the dislocated swoon of first-wave psychedelia, a "See Emily Play"-style mediation on the small insanity of childhood softened with billowing layers of voices.
The lyrics focus on the body, basic human connection, the need to take care of oneself, the puzzle of existence. Where the churning electronic sound, with its fizzes and echoes and underwater cast, brings to mind altered states and the confusing gap between the familiar and the strange, the words seem like a running commentary on the essential mystery of being alive. Animal Collective don't tell stories, and their music rarely has characters; there's little clever wordplay and fewer money lines you'll repeat later on. Rather, the words reinforce the sense of vulnerability that cuts through the music, and wind up being an essential component on an album that oozes confidence from every pore.
Music obsessives talk a lot about originality-- whether it's important, or why having a new sound should or shouldn't matter. In recent years, some fantastic albums have turned a number of people off for being retreads, which has sparked some interesting discussions. This album, which finds Animal Collective completely owning their unique sound, feels like the crucial next step in that conversation. What they've constructed here is a new kind of electronic pop-- one which is machine-generated and revels in technology but is also deeply human, never drawing too much attention to its digital nature. It's of the moment and feels new, but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming. Animal Collective have spent the decade following their own path, figuring out what their music is capable of while also working to bring more listeners into their world. On Merriweather Post Pavilion, their commitment has paid off tremendously.


The ostensible sequel to How Fly offers a few fleeting glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced by the duo 10 years ago.

2009

Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y’s 2009 mixtape How Fly—blog era rap’s own Watch the Throne—was a transitional and somewhat ephemeral moment. NahRight posts were the coin of the realm and going double-platinum on the mixtape database DatPiff was a valuable metric. It’s a tape almost displaced from its time—buried by commercially successful artistic failures from legacy rappers (JAY-Z, Eminem, 50 Cent) and pivotal moments of ascension for their successors (Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Kanye West)—yet also almost entirely of it. There’s a bar on How Fly about playing Nintendo Wii while using the now-defunct iChat. These days, the rap duo swaps in Nintendo Switches and Instagram, but in the decade since teaming up, almost nothing has changed about them.
That’s kind of the point of 2009, a mixtape that has been at least four years in the making: Despite a seismic shift in the world and music industry, they’re still the same guys, only richer, making the same songs. After an unofficial reunion in 2013 on the stopgap EP Live in Concert and years of teasing How Fly 2, the duo has finally released a proper sequel to their high-times epic. And they want their credit: “One of the originals who showed you fools how to turn the internet rhymes into residuals,” Curren$y raps on a song called, well, “Stoned Gentleman.” They are very clearly trying to replicate something here, working with producers from their shared pasts (Cardo, Sledgren, MonstaBeatz) in search of the fleeting high that is nostalgia. There are glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced in the apartment on the tape’s cover, but it’s diminishing returns.
Listening to How Fly and Live in Concert now, it’s easy to see why it worked before. They were lovable stoners. They interpolated OutKast, presenting themselves as the zonked-out second coming of the two dope boyz. They sampled Ron Burgundy flute solos. One was a major-label prospect who’d escaped an unflattering situation to become a prolific artist; the other was a major-label hopeful earnestly producing DIY mixtapes and maximizing a fledgling online economy. They’d taken opposing trajectories to wind up in the same place—the origin story of most great buddy cop movies—and as a tag-team, they felt refreshingly outside of the grinding gears of mainstream machinery. Even when Wiz signed his Atlantic deal, this partnership still seemed to ground him.
But Wiz and Curren$y are an odd couple. They have little in common beyond a love of weed and women, lounging around and cruising in foreign whips. They are very different rappers, too. Curren$y is a marble-mouthed spitter who bends flows so dramatically they can seem out of time. Wiz enunciates each syllable distinctly and sticks rigidly to cadences. Curren$y slithers through verses, perpetually spontaneous. Wiz’s easy-bake flows couldn’t be more formulaic.
At this point, it feels like every line out of Wiz’s mouth is something he’s rapped before. He presents all of his ideas in the most primitive ways. Curren$y, on the other hand, is still capable of rapping something so simple it’ll make you wonder how no one has rapped it already. “The vision for us was quite clear/When the smoke clears decades later we’ll still be here,” he spits, summing up the Jet Life mythos. They have similar laid back ideologies but there’s a noticeable disparity in the presentation. Curren$y summarizes his particular methodology best, on “Forever Ball”: “Musical scholar, pennin’ his own products, straight narcotics/Watch me turn this beat into a foreign with a spoiler on it.” The keyword is watch; the difference is in the showing.
When Wiz raps about expensive supercars they are itemized in his brain: “And my cars is decent, some of ’em older, some recent/Leaving my keys in, this one for today/You gon’ see a new one this weekend.” Meanwhile, Curren$y identifies what he’s driving like each model has a distinctive birthmark—the Cabriolet, the Italian design, the white-wine interior. “Came through in the space coupe, everything new/Umbrellas in the door, galaxy in the roof,” he raps on “Getting Loose.” “Be cool, muhfucker, ain’t nobody asked you.” Many of the Curren$y verses on 2009 make the poorly aging Wiz verses look shapeless. The difference in style and detail can be like going from seeing in three dimensions to two.
Even though his role is diminished, there is still a place for Wiz in this stoner paradise. His delivery can be stiff—stilted, even—but he can also be charming. When he gets a flow off, as on the vintage “Plot Twist,” he seems almost infectiously nonchalant. He sometimes shows off his mastery of the patronizing put-down, self-aware and awkward about it: “My closest filled with all types of shit/It’s bad you’d probably work your whole life for this and I’ll get it in one night,” he raps, almost embarrassed for you. When both he and Curren$y are in their bags, locked in on the shamelessly nostalgic 2009,  it can feel like a How Fly retrospective, allowing the listener to channel that experience. But when the glow wears off, you’re left with half-baked impressions of a bygone era.


The English electronic musician's newest is in many ways a return to his earliest material. If people have forgotten the whimsical-yet-punishing pleasures of Squarepusher's breakbeat chaos, might it be a good a place to get onboard?

Ufabulum

During the first half of his career as IDM troublemaker, Tom Jenkinson became one of the most divisive figures in electronic music, plundering electric jazz and rave music for his own extremist ends, idolized and reviled in seemingly equal amounts. For folks who didn't fall into either camp, who were just looking for futuristic shocks or crazy rhythms, he was one of many artists around the turn of the millennium who seemed to treat dance music like a science-fiction movie, removing all the pesky plot and character development, until just the wild special effects highlights remained.
Ufabulum comes many years and many albums after Squarepusher briefly enjoyed this kind of marginal pop culture recognition. His detractors have since found new things to hate, and his acolytes have weathered the various less-than-effective shifts in direction that come with following any long-running artist prone to frustrating whims. Ufabulum is in many ways a return to the angry-jazz-droids-run-amok vibe of his earliest stuff, and if people have forgotten (or never known) the whimsical-yet-punishing pleasures of Squarepusher's breakbeat chaos, might it be a good a place to get on board?
Yes and no, because it's also exhausting stuff, at least in large doses. This has always been a problem with Squarepusher's music, and Ufabulum is no different. Individual tracks can still induce a "whoa!" response from unsuspecting listeners. But at their best and their worst, Squarepusher's albums remind me of what video game fans call "bullet hell" games, shooters with an impossible density of enemies swarming at you at all times. Bullet hell games have an intensity that makes them initially mind-boggling (how can I process all this?) and quickly frustrating (why am I bothering to try and process all this?). Ditto Squarepusher's long-ish-players like Hard Normal Daddy and Big Loada.
That's why artists like Squarepusher, despite the refusal of rock-star posturing, were so perfect for that late 90s moment when MTV briefly discovered electronic music, and why their albums remained mostly for the serious fans. It's bracing stuff in three or four minute doses, immediately standing out amidst songs running at pop's usual pace, especially when paired with equally oddball and arresting barrages of imagery. Just like a casual player might play one or two levels of some fiendishly hard game, laughing with delight before hanging up the controller, singles are all most people need when it comes to dense swarms of breaks and zaps. As with those devoted arcade button-mashers, you're meant to delight in the complexity. If you don't, maybe it's not for you after all.
The endless explosions of Squarepusher tracks are similarly startling, at first, especially if you don't usually spend time with music this convoluted and hectic. He wastes no time on Ufabulum, immediately plunging the listener into antic, overlapping streams of chopped jazz snares and bass blurts. When opening track "4001" really kicks into gear, with an enveloping cascade of synth played against an almost head-banging drum and bass groove, it takes you back to the thrill and jolt of Jenkinson's earliest productions, where the already unreal speed of jungle was taken to truly inhuman velocities. The nagging worry is still there, though: How much of this am I going to be able to endure before I just get bored?
Part of the problem is tempo. Moments of Ufabulum, particularly the middle stretch, are all but impossible for me to remember after a dozen plays. Maybe there are brilliant ideas in the maelstrom, but I was left too numbed to pick them out. That's why it was great to hear Jenkinson try something new in the first third of Ufabulum, like pacing and funk and giving his ideas space to breathe. He immediately slows things down after "4001" with "Unreal Square", a typically perverse but still groove-friendly take on the half-time funk of dubstep. He can't resist spray-gunning that groove with caustic breaks at the very end, but at least the barrage feels more like an honest-to-god release of tension for a change.
"Stadium Ice" is even better, prog-tronica every bit as overstuffed as anything on Rustie's Glass Swords, but with plenty of Jenkinson's own virtuoso jazz-fusioneer stamp. That's a sound he more or less bequeathed to IDM, of course, helping to make an aesthetic like Rustie's possible. "Stadium Ice" is as transportive a bit of audio world-building as Jenkinson's ever made, a track full of grand peaks that actually work because they follow relative lulls, sounding like all the best bits of old-school RPG soundtracks shoehorned into one track.
So it's frustrating that Jenkinson ditched this measured grandeur just as quickly. "Stadium Ice" hardly lacks that aforementioned "whoa!" factor. It's just infinitely friendlier and more replayable than the hyper-speed and assaultive stuff. It's hard to imagine an entire album in this vein wouldn't have been as whoa-worthy as Glass Swords itself, not only a brilliant reinvention but maybe Jenkinson's first must-listen since 1998. Once Ufabulum launches into overdrive again, it's not long before it becomes another for-fans-only deal.
Worse for those fans, Jenkinson actively seems to be pastiching himself in a few places. "Drax 2" and "303 Scopem Hard" are dead-ringers for the industrial-strength distortion and breakbeats-as-psych-warfare he was plumbing on 1997's virulent Vic Acid EP. But somehow they're duller, too, as if Jenkinson knew he was recycling once-vital stuff and couldn't be bothered to work up the appropriate intensity. Even if you're not immediately bummed out by artists replaying former glories, the least they can do is come hard with it, right?


The latest signee to the $uicideboy$ label is an Atlanta skater-turned-rapper with a voice that’s as aggressive as it is gleeful. His new tape isn’t that serious, but his rapping is.

The Hijinx Tape

The rap label G*59 is the brainchild of $uicideboy$, the New Orleans rap group consisting of cousins Ruby da Cherry and $crim. The underground duo have flipped a tried-and-true formula into international touring dates and millions of Spotify streams, combining Raider Klan’s love of Southern rap samples with the self-destructive lyrical tendencies of emo rap. But G*59 is more than a  flagship group, as the label attests with the latest release from Atlanta rapper Germ, The Hijinx Tape. Germ is a punk-rap court jester and skater-turned-rapper with a voice that’s as aggressive as it is gleeful.
Though his highest-profile project thus far is the collaborative DIRTIERNASTIER$UICIDE EP—a release that showcases the “suicide pimpin’” house sound, as Juicy J’s adlib describes it—Germ stems from a different stylistic lineage than his peers. He’s capable of the tongue-twisting, Lord Infamous type flow that is the bread and butter of $uicideboy$, but it’s not his preferred mode of delivery. There’s a power to Germ’s rapping, but unlike G*59’s crown jewels, Germ is pure Atlanta, owing as much to YSL and 1017 as he does to underground internet rap. He’s collaborated on two mixtapes—the Big Bad Gnar Shit series—with fellow Atlanta rapper and skater GNAR, both of them members of the city’s younger generation that owes a massive debt to the mixtape runs of Gucci Mane, Future, and Young Thug.
There’s little of the metal influence or alt-rock affect of $uicideboy$ either, but Germ still plays with a variety of styles. His voice is, at once, gritty and high-pitched, as confident with tight, biting couplets as he is with smooth vocal runs. In the space of a few bars, Germ will entirely pivot his delivery, like on “AR Pistols,” when he briefly breaks into song amid a precise, exacting verse. Sometimes you can just tell when a rapper is feeling themselves, and Germ always sounds like he’s having a good time—his tape is thoroughly hotboxed, a brash and energetic tribute to the joys of gelato and Girl Scout Cookies. Several of these tracks beg to be the soundtrack to TikTok dances, like the gleefully fat beat of lead single “7 Hunna Horses” or the sharp piano line of “Walked Outside.”
Germ’s Atlanta heritage shines through in his occasional soulfulness. On “Plead the 5th,” the rapper says he feels like Usher as he shares his confessions—the beat sounds like a Drake slow jam from the If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late era, with a fluttering trap beat, pulsing bass, and a gentle chorus in the back of the mix. Germ leans into an almost mournful sound on “Runnin Thru Plastic,” as paranoid synth loops soundtrack an outpouring of feeling; his voice cracks like he’s on the verge of tears, but his response to the anguish of emotion is to just roll another blunt. Germ gets introspective over a distorted guitar line on “We Outside,” but it’s much closer to Polo G than the emo rap you might expect from G*59.
Germ’s debut solo project, last year’s GERM HAS A DEATH WISH, was heavier on the features—The Hijinx Tape only includes one, from San Fernando rapper Shakewell on “Hellcat,” who balances Germ’s high-pitched shenanigans with his more biting, lower register flow. But Germ’s tracks are short, menacing taunts and sucker-punches more than extended bouts. His personality is so commanding and his songs so to the point that there’s no real need for guest appearances. Germ isn’t just goofing off, his skill is serious business.

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