Oasis were terrible at being The Biggest Band in the World, but as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album—a three-disc collection packed with demos and live performances—makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be The Biggest Band in the World.

Oasis: Definitely Maybe: Chasing the Sun Edition

"I don’t want [to] get too big," said Noel Gallagher back in 1994, squinting into the crystal ball a couple of months before the release of Oasis' debut album, Definitely Maybe. "I'd love to do Wembley Stadium, but where do you go after that?" At the time, the guitarist and songwriter was talking to a fanzine and getting ready to play the lame, 400-capacity East Wing venue in Brighton, England. So not only was Noel looking forward to playing the UK's most storied venue—which was more than 200 times bigger than the East Wing—he was basically already over the fantasy. "I didn’t think we’d get to this stage here for another two years, and in a way it’s fuckin' pissed me off," he continued, talking about the tumbling hype that had followed their first single, "Supersonic", which debuted on the UK charts at #31 earlier that year. "We were going to be this maverick outcast band from Manchester…we were going to shove it up them for two years and then we’d split up."
Oasis did eventually sell-out Wembley three times over at the end of 1997, but by then they were already mired in bloated obsolescence—and they did split up, but only after about 15 years of spinning their wheels. Noel knew his grandest rock'n'roll dreams could lead to trouble, even when they were still merely outsized ambitions in '94. All of those dreams—the platinum plaques, the American crossover, the record-breaking festivals—came true in spectacular fashion over the course of the next three years, and then Oasis really did have no idea where to go. They were terrible at being The Biggest Band in the World, but as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be The Biggest Band in the World.
Definitely Maybe was made by five losers from the dreary Manchester suburb of Burnage, a locale Noel has described as "a little shitty town where fuck-all happens—it’s one pub and a chippie and a bookie and that’s it." They were second-generation Irish working-class roustabouts who used their government assistance money to buy smokes, drugs, and pints on the weekend before heading back to their dead-end jobs. As Alex Niven writes in his well-rounded new 33 ⅓ book on Definitely Maybe, the boys in Oasis were emblematic of the socio-economic demoralization brought on by England's every-man-for-himself Conservative policies of the 1980s and early '90s. As Noel once said, "Where I come from, people didn't become rock stars. That happened to other people."
But Oasis were also a signpost of hope for an emerging new version of England that was finally mobilizing after being beaten down by the Thatcher years. Against this backdrop, the Gallagher brothers and company emerged: All the anger and nihilism of a go-nowhere existence channeled through Noel's blaring guitar tones and brash, drugged-up lyrics, along with Liam's attack-dog snarl. Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely.
And yet, not wholly impossible. The album's first lines are: "Live my life in the city, there's no easy way out." Pretty bleak. But that song is called "Rock 'N' Roll Star", and it's about the possibility of escape via substances, or standing on a stage in front of a dozen people (as Oasis did many times in the early years), or your own head. "In my mind my dreams are real," sings Liam, and who can argue with that? Dreams play a big role on Definitely Maybe and its accompanying B-sides—all of which are collected in this three-disc re-release, along with many live performances and demos from the period—though they often read as both wistful and demanding, owing to the one-in-a-billion ying-yang chemistry between Noel's words and Liam's delivery. On paper, Noel's lyrics often read as bittersweet; then 27, he was beginning to look at his youth as a lost era. But placed in 22-year-old Liam's mouth, "Rock 'N' Roll Star" transforms from a flight of fancy into something like an inevitability. Yes: This man sounds like Lennon and Lydon's sneering son. Yes: He will stop at nothing until these wanting words become physical fact. Yes: Here is your rock 'n' roll star, because there isn't anything else for him to be.
The contentiousness between the brothers fueled Oasis' best moments, and, early on at least, both seemed to understand the situation—even if they couldn't stand each other. Referring to Noel in an interview from '94, Liam said, in no uncertain terms: "That's why we'll be the best band in the world—because I fuckin' hate that twat there." Like vintage Oasis itself, Liam embodied just enough classic rock, just enough punk, and just enough "I'll spit in your fucking eye" to make his unfiltered id stick. Usually, this type of rock persona is associated with more combustible or aggressive music, but Noel tempered the abrasiveness with a trace of melancholy or a fuzzed-up bubblegum melody, as on career highs like "Live Forever" and "Slide Away". Then, now, and forever, Liam is the Definitely and Noel is the Maybe.
I couldn't express any of this when I first saw Liam's strobed face on MTV in the "Live Forever" video as a 13-year-old middle-class kid from Long Island, but I got my mom to drive me to Nobody Beats the Wiz to buy the CD all the same. At that time, I thought Axl Rose was an insane genius and Kurt Cobain—who died six days after the release of "Supersonic"—was an inscrutable weirdo. And in America, Oasis were practically an underground band; they were amazingly cool, and I felt cooler for liking them. They were blatantly inspired by all of the canonical rock bands I knew, but they possessed the feeling of now. Their version of infinity guitars and attitude made me feel invincible, the same sensation I got a few years later while getting into hip-hop—another working-class-bred artform known to utilize the past, via sampling and respun rhymes, to accentuate the present. ("Never be afraid of the obvious," Noel once said, "because it's all been done before.") Oasis started from the very bottom and, from that very first note, it was obvious where they were going next.
But just as Oasis' undesirable upbringing incited them to lash out through feedback and distortion, you could argue that it stunted their continued artistic existence. Middle-class art-schooler Damon Albarn may have lost the popular vote during Blur's notorious mid-90s battle with Oasis, but with partial thanks to a relatively comfortable adolescence and education, he's clearly won the war, remaining relevant and inquisitive to this day. Oasis' woeful decline, meanwhile, makes a specific line from "Shakermaker" sound a bit heartbreaking in hindsight: "I'd like to be somebody else and not know where I've been." Eventually, the Gallaghers turned into the same rich dicks they were trying to usurp on Definitely Maybe—a sad vengeance. But on the way up, they marked millions. Maybe that should be enough.


The exceptional solo debut from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is a thrilling opus that pushes the boundaries of voice, sound, and soul to new extremes.

Jaime

Brittany Howard tends to get a little restless when things get too comfortable. Just when she and her band Alabama Shakes were branded as innocuous roots-rock revivalists after their 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, she started pushing their retro-soul sound to its outer reaches and beyond. Sound & Color, from 2015, sprawled out into blues and funk and psychedelia, and won three Grammys doing it. Amid the Shakes’ growing popularity, Howard deviated from the course. In 2018, emotionally spent, she called a meeting of her Shakes bandmates to announce that she’d be stepping away for a bit after a spell of writer’s block; she didn’t know what she’d be doing next, but she’d be doing it on her own. In retreating from Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard found herself on a voyage of self-discovery.
From that process comes her solo debut, Jaime, which is full of that same restless energy. Unlike her work with her bands—including the amped-up rock group Thunderbitch and the alt-country outfit Bermuda Triangle—it speaks solely to the life she’s led, the love and hatred she’s faced, and the way they’ve shaped her worldview. Jaime is a daring turn in just about every way imaginable: bolder, freakier, riskier, more experimental, not just deeply personal but cuttingly political, sometimes quietly tender, sometimes brutally direct. Working in a greenhouse in Topanga Canyon, she mined her complicated personal history, first writing out a memoir of her life up until the founding of Alabama Shakes, then transposing it to songwriting. Howard has said that she needed to be in full control to make this record, and it’s easy to see why: It is the kind of soul-baring opus that first requires soul-searching.
The album is named after Howard’s sister, who died at 13 after being diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. It was Jaime who first taught Brittany to write a song, and now she’s writing her most unyielding and vulnerable ones, songs about coming to terms with personal identity, guarded secrets, spiritual and social and sexual awakenings, deep-rooted family traumas. Though Howard feels united with her sister’s spirit, the album isn’t about Jaime. Instead, it is a boundless study of inner character, someone so used to speaking for others—the Shakes as a unit, the struggling masses on songs like “Hold On”—finally taking the opportunity to speak for herself.
Jaime is the sound of Howard coming up for air, getting to know herself better, coming to terms with her place in the world, and then proudly standing in that truth. The songs may be rooted in the same vintage soul that powers Alabama Shakes, but they reach for greater heights and greater depths: convention-defying funkadelia, throwback rap breakbeats, streaking synth-rock, the tense jazz behind D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, the eclectic vocal power of Prince. As Howard breaks all the rules, some songs super busy, others bare, she finds her way home.
The mastery of Jaime is balancing the beauty of Southern identity and culture with what Howard has referred to as “all the ugly things about the past,” both personally and historically. Howard is a queer, mixed-race woman, born to a black father and white mother in the same city as the founder of neo-Nazi message board Stormfront and a former Grand Wizard in the Klan. It’d be easiest to condemn the place itself outright, but it’s still her home. The saying goes: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” and on “History Repeats,” she echoes that sentiment: “We defeat ourselves.” In studying her own past, she finds reasons to keep fighting for change.
“I am dedicated to oppose those whose will is to divide us and who are determined to keep us in the dark ages of fear,” Howard chants on “13th Century Metal,” amid a cacophonous, white-knuckle, one-take jam session. The song is full of positive affirmations, and though she reveals herself to be as weary as the rest of us, she won’t stop: “I don’t know about you/But I’m tired of this bullshit/And I wanna try/To do the best that I can.” Amid the noise and chaos, Howard shows that love can be the most radical tool of resistance.
Even the love songs on Jaime feel like powerful political acts; not just because they revolve around queer love, but because it feels defiant to choose to love and be loved when you’re surrounded by hate. The sweetly skittish “Georgia,” sung with a flushed breathlessness, is written from the perspective of a young girl with a harmless crush on an older girl. The bluesy “Stay High” is about wanting to live in a single moment with a lover forever; the minimalist “Short and Sweet” is about knowing that time is finite, and savoring it. On the former, she lets her voice drift weightlessly skyward; on the latter, her words flit between acoustic strums, like the wick of a candle in an evening breeze. The only thing centering this album is Howard’s remarkable voice, a miraculous instrument of subtlety and power.
Howard uses this versatility to ask: Why is all this hate and bigotry still happening? The fidgety piano-masher “Goat Head” poses rhetorical questions about a hate crime committed against her father when she was a baby. The story, later recounted to Howard by her mother, lifted the veil on a childhood filled with racism. The song is an unflinching vignette illustrating life as a mixed family among an unforgiving community. “My mama was brave/To take me outside/’Cause mama is white/And daddy is black/When I first got made/Guess I made these folks mad,” she howls. Many of those “folks” that were mad then are still mad today, and “Tomorrow” wonders aloud what must happen to enact change now: “We always talk about tomorrow/But now that we’re here/Without lifting a finger/How do you feel?” Her writing is always collected, naked in the way it presents the truth.
Howard wrote and composed all of the music on Jaime, which manages to sound both far-reaching and solitary. She played all the assorted, mesmerizing guitar parts, and enlisted Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell, jazz pianist extraordinaire Robert Glasper, keyboardist Dan Horton, and drummer Nate Smith to play sessions with her. With these highly capable ringers driving the arrangements, Howard pushes the boundaries of sound and space in search of fulfillment and decency. In a world that requires so much fixing, the music works effortlessly. Armed with a deeper understanding of self, Jaime becomes her gospel of empathy. “I promise…to be wary of who I give my energy to. Because it is needed for a greater cause,” she vows on “13th Century Metal.” “And that cause is to spread the enlightenment of love, compassion, and humanity to those who are not touched by its light.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling.

Golden Hour

Kacey Musgraves’ third album goes down so smoothly that it might not even scan as a total reinvention. Throughout the songs on Golden Hour, the East Texas singer-songwriter is radiant, awestruck, taking the scenic route to the bar just for the hell of it. After Musgraves’ previous two albums, which felt like they were cut from the same home-sewn flannel cloth, she now ventures beyond the front-porch hum of country music. The new Kacey Musgraves needs strings, vocoders, disco beats. And if this sounds like a left turn for the lovable cynic who once characterized the world as an absurd beauty contest, a vicious cycle, a bad party, and a toxic boys’ club, well, that’s kinda the point.
Since her last proper album, 2015’s Pageant Material, the now 29-year-old singer-songwriter has changed her perspective. There was a spirited Christmas record, a creatively charged acid trip, and a rustic country wedding. It’s like Musgraves’ life was given the season-finale treatment: a series of climactic turns that left her standing misty-eyed on a cliffside, bellowing “I get it!” at the sunrise. She’s updated her music accordingly. On Golden Hour, everything sprawls and swells and gushes, a gaping sky that makes the sonic landscapes of her previous albums feel like mere set dressing. For these songs of hope and wonder, she nods to meticulous folk epics like Beck’s Sea Change, or Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans if it was re-cut for an IMAX screen. She’s settled on enlightenment as a new resting state.
The result is Musgraves’ most accessible record and her most ambitious, a magnetic, comfortable culmination of her pop and country instincts. While dynamic enough to house both the stirring, alone-at-the-piano fragment “Mother” and a full-on country-disco kiss-off in “High Horse,” Golden Hour is alluringly cohesive, both lyrically and musically. In “Wonder Woman,” she confronts a partner’s unrealistic expectations and gives a simple counter: “All I need’s a place to land.” Throughout these songs, she finds one.
Despite the grandeur of its music, Golden Hour offers Musgraves’ most understated songwriting, a refreshing evolution as stars like Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga accidentally turn Americana-pop into grim satire. In the stunning single “Space Cowboy,” she weaves in at least a dozen genre tropes without drawing any attention to them. Instead, you’re left dazzled by the way her bold, drawling voice can cut through simple ideas—“Sunsets fade/And love does too”—like she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling.
Sometimes, that familiarity belies the complexity of these songs. Tracks like “Love Is a Wild Thing” and “Oh, What a World” swirl around the positive messages in their titles in a state of euphoria. Musgraves includes precious few of the subtle details that made her 2013 breakthrough, Same Trailer Different Park, feel so instantly familiar. On a previous record, she might have provided a tour of the neighborhood that landlocks the star-crossed home-bodies in “Lonely Weekend,” or cracked a stoner joke about the “plants that grow and open your mind” in “Oh, What a World.” In the places where you’d expect Musgraves to land her punches, she sometimes offers just a wistful sigh.
But if the tension in her earlier work came from her sharp observations and underdog spirit, there’s something more complicated at play here. “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight,” she asks in “Happy & Sad,” attempting to pinpoint the creeping melancholy undercutting an otherwise blissful evening. Golden Hour is an album-length ode to not having the right words, to being overcome by the moment and surrendering to it.
Musgraves’ songwriting melts seamlessly between celebration—in heart-eyed-emoji anthems like “Butterflies” and “Velvet Elvis”—and elegies for when those feelings start to dim. The cinematic arrangements rarely distinguish between those two modes, coating the album in a pristine, sepia glow that makes tales of solitude like “Lonely Weekend” seem downright inviting. There’s a subtle awareness throughout these songs of what happens as soon as the golden hour ends, how quickly that burst of light can fade without a trace. In the title track, Musgraves compares her contentment to a temporary trick of the light: “All that I know,” she admits, “Is you caught me at the right time.”
Less concerned with outside forces than internal balance, Golden Hour stands as an assured, artful snapshot of a particular rush of feelings, but its wisdom speaks volumes to Musgraves’ ongoing evolution. “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining,” she sang in the first track on her major label debut, “It’s gotta be a cloudy day.” Even then, she suspected that ecstasy is most rewarding when it’s hard-won. On Golden Hour, she wears the sunlight well.


Nicole Dollanganger is the first artist signed to Grimes' label. Her full LP Natural Born Losers fills out the wispy lo-fi feel of her demos, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentation.

Nicole Dollanganger: Natural Born Losers

Natural Born Losers

"I’d give my body to Satan if I could only keep my soul," Nicole Dollanganger sings in a whispery, desperate voice on "Angels of Porn (II)", a song about how the singer seems to have been trapped in a food and cum-stained dungeon for days. "But I can’t seem to find the split between them anymore." This is the sort of subject matter that made her music popular among her Tumblr followers in the first place, long before Grimes made her the first artist on her new label. And no matter how chipper her plucky bedroom folk sounded on the surface on previous records like Flowers of Flesh and Blood and Curdled Milk, she was still singing lyrics like, "Why didn’t anyone tell me love is like being fucked with a knife?"
Over nimble electric guitar and booming kick drum, her new album Natural Born Losers tells tales of murdering angels, "fucking the soul of the south," and telling your lover he’s going to get fried in jail for his crimes. Like any recording that moves from lo-fi demos to sleeker production, Natural Born Losers fills out Dollanganger’s music, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentals, replacing soft piano and ukulele with thundering electric guitar and murmuring organs. And while the music’s simplicity might ring dull for some, it places what matters most with Dollanganger’s music front and center: her songwriting and her voice.
Dollanganger's fascination with desolate Americana imagery recalls other similarly moody, bleak pop singers: think Melanie Martinez’ broken-housewife routine, Halsey’s tortured teen road-trip anthems, and Lana Del Rey’s dark, star-spangled camp. But those singers’ stories still feel romantic, while Dollanganger's music is only inviting in the way the cute, white Victorian house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was at first glance. "I’ll be your sister, your young bride, your angel, your slave," she sings to her vinyl glove-clad, cop lover in a whisper on "Mean". She sings of drinking the titular liquid and getting chained up in bed on the fuzzy "Alligator Blood" and she’s bleeding to death during knife play on the pretty, minimalist guitar ballad "American Tradition" but "it doesn’t matter, 'cause my baby is still the winner." Her angelic, high-pitched voice coats every utterance in innocence, a façade considering how much this album loves giving and taking pain.
Her elemental lyrics help elevate her record above kinky bad-girl tropes: With every act of violence inflicted on Dollanganger, she reveals how corrupted she can be as well, proving she’s just as a strong and sadistic of a hunter. She never really lets any of the dark sentiments exist in a vacuum, which is important considering the violence she mines for aesthetic and emotional affect. Dead bodies get fed to the Earth’s starving animals, animals get fed to starving humans; she sees a father’s violence in his son’s eyes and sings that "history repeats our whole damn lives."
Her portrait of tortured sexuality and death is tethered to an ambiguous portrait of backwoods living, a North American wilderness where anything and anyone can be hunted. Natural Born Losers plays like a work of wicked anti-pastoralism from the perspective of a bad girl who stares out at her rustic life with not wide-eyed romanticism but sad familiarity and resignation. "This same place is getting old but dreams are fulfilled where the purple grass grows," Dollanganger sings on "White Trashing". "And I can see it all just beyond our window."


The latest from Swedish indie-pop stalwarts the Radio Dept. is the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory, and the gamble pays off.

Running Out of Love

Since their acclaimed debut, 2003’s Lesser Matters, Sweden’s the Radio Dept. have been known for their defiantly lo-fi brand of dream-pop, favoring scratchy, ear-numbing guitars and tinny Casio beats over the lusher sounds of their peers. This became a calling card, something that set them apart. Apart from a career-spanning compilation (2011’s essential Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010) and a smattering of single releases last year, Running Out of Love is the Radio Dept.’s first album of new material since 2010’s stellar Clinging to a Scheme, and while many would have been perfectly content with a total carbon copy of their greatest achievements, what makes this record so refreshing is its unabashed ambition, the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory. And the gamble more than pays off.
The band meant it as a protest record, a bold statement, a document of their fear of an ever-encroaching dystopia. “Sloboda Narodu,” the record’s opener, means “Freedom to the People” in Serbo-Croatian, a reference to a populist slogan coined during the Yuglosav anti-Axis resistance of World War II. Far from your typical twee fare of doe-eyed romance and bedroom dancing, “Sloboda Narodu” sets the stage for a full-blown political manifesto. “Don’t ask for patience/’Cause we just don't have the time/Freedom now,” sings frontman Johan Duncansson, his vocals as blissed-out and buried in the mix as ever. Musically, the track takes its cue from that sweet spot in ’90s Britpop that itself was aping ’60s psychedelia, with fuzzy guitars climbing over bongos.
However from there, Running Out of Love hopscotches from genre to genre at breakneck speed. “Swedish Guns” (a meditation on Sweden’s little-known international arms industry) has the woozy dancefloor tilt of early Saint Etienne, while “We Got Game” (addressing police brutality) sounds like a backmasked, distorted version of Inner City’s Detroit house anthem “Good Life.”  This is far from the first time the band have dallied with electronic music, but unlike, for example, their synth-heavy second album Pet Grief, this feels more like a marriage  than a one-off; it’s as if Belle and Sebastian had decided to write an entire album of their polarizing 1996 song “Electronic Renaissance.” “Committed to the Cause” sounds like Happy Mondays by way of Prefab Sprout’s dandy sophistication, and the six-minute-long “Teach Me to Forget” even flirts with EDM, a broke-down version of a Top 40 banger. The multiple twists and turns here gradually unlock a completely new world orbiting their already adored universe, a daring feat for a beloved cult band. It might take a little longer for it to sink in with fans, but given enough time, the album  portrays them in a completely new light, both politically and musically adventurous.


Translating alt-rock into pristine pop, the L.A. trio’s second album documents sex, drugs, and suicidal tendencies with less melodrama and more compassion.

Saves the World

We listen to pop music because we see our reflection in it, and so we’ve welcomed in more non-heteronormative figures to reflect our realities. L.A. trio MUNA were ahead of pop’s greater recent queering—a space occupied by King Princess, Clairo, and Kim Petras, to name a few. The ’80s-style synths and dark narratives of their early songs prompted the press to label them the “gay HAIM,” a disservice to both acts. Besides, MUNA emerged as punks—producing their own 2017 debut About U, presenting as sexually fluid, and educating on gender pronouns. Yet they’ve hidden in plain sight; the defiant melodies and corresponding political rhetoric of “Loudspeaker” or “I Know a Place” echo in Maggie Rogers’ air-punch moments and the 1975’s slogan campaigns. In 2017, the group toured with Harry Styles. They are major-signed but remain on the mainstream’s fringes.
With their second album, Saves the World, they don’t bask in being on the right side of history. Instead they put themselves on trial, dissecting their own frailties before addressing those of their enemies. “Saving yourself is the key to saving the world,” they say, explaining the spunky title. You can’t function as an activist if your personal fiascos need attention. So MUNA peer into murky puddles and ask who stares back. “I’ve been looking at myself in the mirror,” lead songwriter Katie Gavin sings on “Number One Fan,” as her bandmates Naomi McPherson (producer) and Josette Maskin (guitarist) flex their alt-rock muscles towards state-of-the-art pop.
The soundtrack to Gavin’s transformation is as sentimental as it is versatile. The more she unwinds, the further her bandmates extend their arms, shifting from the Coyote Ugly country-lite of “Taken” to the warbling “Memento,” a meditative vignette about a bee sting. The trio met at USC; they’re a college-pop band, and they peck like magpies from ’80s and ’90s FM radio. “It's Gonna Be Okay, Baby” is Bon Iver as the Police, cradling Gavin’s coming-of-age. “Good News (Ya-Ya Song)” and “Number One Fan” are wordy, turn-of-the-millennium-style confessionals, as bewildered with life’s nonsense as they are humored by it (“So I went to an art exhibit, there wasn’t any art”). “Never” follows the school of Robyn, raving through crisis. The pain and self-worthlessness Gavin exhibited on MUNA’s debut is abandoned in favor of enlightenment. She documents sex, drugs, and suicidal tendencies with less melodrama and more compassion. “You finally read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” she sings, smiling at her own Angeleno new ageism.
A triad of desolate songs at the album’s heart race by as though seeking to end their anguish. MUNA are at their most cinematic on “Navy Blue,” which sparkles like a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. Gavin drives adjacent to the ocean, imagining herself drowning in post-breakup misery. Her notes fly so lightly across the bassline, you can taste the salt spray. Layered club nocturn “Never” serves as the album’s quarter-life-crisis rock bottom. “Consider this my resignation… I'll never sing again,” she broods, and as her voice nears exhaustion, guitars erupt into digital screams of distress, or perhaps rebirth. The brighter, more buoyant “Pink Light” sets her up for a fresh beginning, but the chorus springs her back to the past: “I keep retracing that storyline, thinking if I start again, I can change the way it ends.”
The album’s bookends sound like lullabies. Over simple arpeggiated piano, opener “Grow” wants to let go of “childish things.” Its opening line—“I want to grow up”—is a universal plea for a generation lacking in reliable mentors. Closer “It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby” addresses those past phases of life, protecting Gavin’s voice within the band’s wall of synthetic effects. She addresses her younger self with the candidness of a journal entry, repeating the titular mantra with the benefit of hindsight.

You’re gonna feel much more like God is a mystery
and Jesus is a metaphor
Yeah, you’re gonna tell your reflection
It’s gonna be OK, baby

Eyeing the mirror one last time, she finds a trust in an older, wiser self. After three years in the public eye, Gavin reveals her flaws more plainly. Though her story is one of heartbreak, it’s not about who breaks hearts, but rather what: inherited patterns, old habits, misinformation. Saves the World approaches adulthood with unabashed honesty, so you’ll be ready to smash the system a little more gently. And while MUNA’s pop is preoccupied with that greater sense of purpose, it carries its heavy heart to the dancefloor.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Black Dice member's latest solo outing is ramshackle, blithe, and relatively accessible, with cleaner vocals than usual and a sense of demented whimsy.

Black Bubblegum

Eric Copeland writes slippery, chameleonic songs. Sifting through the accrued, multi-format bric-a-brac of this Black Dice member’s voluminous solo catalogue can feel unnervingly magical, like turning over the acorn cupped in your palm and discovering it was always a quarter. Merry hooks are conked far beyond delirium, gnawed upon by effects, reshuffled mercilessly to accommodate inappropriate tempos. And while it’s often remarked that no one experiences a single piece of music the same way twice, this is especially true for the entries in Copeland’s canon.
With very rare exceptions—“U.F.O.s Over Vampire City” from 2011’s *Whorehouse Blues *EP, for example - vocals in Copeland’s work have been little more than floating scraps. Black Bubblegum upends this status quo somewhat, with Copeland’s voice foregrounded. The LP is ramshackle, blithe, and relatively accessible—a Blues Explosion to its predecessors’ Pussy Galore. A wobbly, piping effect guides the jaunty, absurdist “Fuck It Up,” a junkyard anthem worthy of pre-1993 Beck or Ween. Grease-fire guitars and roadhouse pianos goose “Don’t Beat Your Baby,” while “Cannibal World” dips a foot into reggae, astride watery, wavy effects that suggest a hybrid of steel drums and synthesizers.
Even though the surface is smoother and and the vocals less garbled than usual, it’d be a mistake to read *Bubblegum *as a true unmasking. Filters swaddle Copeland’s voice throughout, distorting and distending it but stopping short of intelligibility; lyrically, he’s striking a tricky balance between deadpan nihilism and pop troubadour nostalgia. Nothing is revealed; the mystery continues.


With its $0 asking price, lawsuit-baiting title, and feline cover art, Wilco's latest album is loose, low-stakes, and fun, adjectives that no one has used to describe Wilco since Being There. It's also Wilco at their most concise and airtight, with songs piercing and subtle enough to get under your skin.

Star Wars

Jeff Tweedy leads a band of escape artists—"ex-Uncle Tupelo," "alt-country," "dad rock" are all boxes from which Wilco has managed to break free. Their most recent restraint has proven trickier because it essentially translates to "Wilco". Between the self-conscious retromania of Wilco (The Album) and the self-produced, self-released The Whole Love, their last two LPs strove for comprehensiveness, containment, cohesion. They were rightly received as "Wilco being Wilco" and offered "something for everyone" except potential new listeners, drawing boundaries around their old ideas. In a concrete way, Wilco’s ninth studio LP Star Wars is their most accessible and least demanding, a free download equalizing the Wilco evangelist and those who swore they’d never pay one red cent for their music.  Star Wars is also Wilco’s shortest and least agenda-driven album since their debut, two things that actually lend it a novelty that endures beyond its instantaneous release.
For its first minute or so, Star Wars sounds like a record Wilco might have been required to give away for free. The skronking opener "EKG" has drawn valid comparisons to both Sonic Youth to AIDS Wolf, though it’s one of Wilco’s least jarring experiments in instrumental noise—compare it to the 15-minute migraine simulation of "Less Than You Think" or "Poor Places" submerging in a drowning pool of static and "EKG" is downright charming. It’s the first thing you might expect to hear from a band trying to familiarize themselves with each other after their longest break between records. It’s playful rather than confrontational, deflates any kind of self-importance projected on the band, and aligns with the $0 asking price, lawsuit-baiting title, and feline cover art—this record is loose, low-stakes, and fun, adjectives that no one has used to describe Wilco since Being There.
That’s something of a feint. Star Wars bears many signifiers of an off-the-cuff recording—the second-longest track is 3:50, and most are filled with all manner of "what’s this pedal do?" sound effects. The topsy-turvy glam-folk of "More…" becomes cemented in thick distortion, a theremin-like squeal seeps through the otherwise subdued "Taste the Ceiling", "Where Do I Begin" backflips into a coda of reversed drums. But think back on a decade of Wilco songs that regularly rode triple-guitar soloing past five minutes and ask if Star Wars is really the sound of them jamming. This is Wilco at their most concise and airtight; the frayed edges, loose wires, and sonic pockmarks are all considered decisions coming from a group of technical wizards with unconventional tastes that treat post-production like a tattoo artist, engaging in very detailed and skillful defacement.
Any discernible influence is unlikely, but Star Wars could be heard as a long-awaited convergence with Spoon, the band who overtook Wilco as America’s most reliable and subtly inventive band in the studio. As with Transference or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Star Wars scans as pop songwriting and rock music, though devoid of blunt force and obsessed with tactility, right down to the word choices. As with "War on War" and "Impossible Germany", "Random Name Generator" takes a phonetically catchy, abstruse phrase and repeats it until it becomes an unshakeable hook. It’s a veritable sonic topographic map, every single instrument close mic’d and enlarged to show texture: Tweedy’s comforting and disheveled vocals are audio two-day stubble, drums get dipped in bristling flange, you can pick out exactly which pedals on Nels Cline’s effects board are being used.
Star Wars quickly develops its sonic character, and if it must have a label, "mini-rock" suffices. For one thing, these are the most compact and aerodynamic Wilco songs, aligning with a host of new-to-them glam precedents who punctured rock’s chest-puffing machismo. The pinched EQ’ing and stylishly sheared fuzz riffs of "Random Name Generator" tips a top hat to T. Rex; the Suicide-al "Pickled Ginger" removes the "blues" from 12-bar blues and replaces it with post-punk rigidity and blacked-out negative space; "You Satellite" continuously wraps itself in seemingly endless layers of high-thread count bedsheets, recalling the unsavory reveries of Velvet Underground.
And while nothing on Star Wars can cut you into ribbons the way "Via Chicago" or "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" or "At Least That’s What You Said", it's piercing and subtle enough to get under your skin. Compared to the sadsack reflections on domestication of Sky Blue Sky, Star Wars strikes at a kind of empty nester fatalism signified by the "separate, but together" connection of "Where Do I Begin", or, more succinctly—"We’re so alone/ We’re never alone." The narrative of Star Wars is driven by a fluid mix of devotion, commitment, and stubbornness, three qualities that are related but not synonymous. "I could never leave behind the part of me that you refuse," is the sort of thing you might hear from a couple who are comfortable enough to snipe at one another, while, "Why can’t we tell when we’re in hell?/ Why can’t I say something to make you well?" speaks to the desperation underlying most prickly jokes. "Taste the Ceiling" hard-sells the LP’s most important lyric, the one that attests to unusual urgency of Star Wars: "Why do our disasters always creep so slowly into view?" Perhaps disasters are always in the frame, but judging from the communication failures and speakers-speaking-in-code that goes on here, it's more likely they don't get called for what they are until its too late.
While you never can really tell with a lyricist as cryptic and elliptical as Tweedy, Star Wars hints at a congruence between his own cautious confessions and Wilco’s sensible risks—while this could just be a dry run for a conventionally released "event", the fact that they're challenging themselves is rewarding enough on its own. Though Sky Blue Sky was met with the coolest reception of any Wilco album, it’s the one that remains the most interesting since A Ghost Is Born—like every record from Wilco’s elite run that spanned the kaleidoscopic roots-rock archive of Being There to A Ghost Is Born’s abstract Americana, it was fully committed to an idea Wilco hadn’t tried before. Because Wilco sounds about 85% committed to a truly new idea, Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade; and if Wilco have another truly great one in them, history strongly suggests it’ll be devoted to sounding nothing like Star Wars.


Centered on 1998’s timeless Painted From Memory, this new compilation showcases the songwriters’ unlikely collaboration and the malleable and enduring songs that emerged from it.

Elvis Costello / Burt Bacharach: The Songs of Bacharach & Costello (Super Deluxe)

Burt Bacharach’s songs are deft studies in light and dark, order and chaos, major-key optimism and minor-key doubt. The lyrics to songs like “Walk on By,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “Trains and Boats and Planes,” and so many others convey messy, overwhelming emotions, while the music itself sounds exquisitely and exactingly crafted. Each element heightens the other to make the song more relatable and somehow even more pleasurable to anyone who has a heart. On “Tears at the Birthday Party,” which Bacharach co-wrote with Elvis Costello for their 1998 album Painted From Memory, the contrast between happy and sad is almost cartoonish: “I see you share your cake with him, unwrapping presents that I should have sent,” Costello sings, knowing he can’t watch but can’t look away either. What might have been maudlin becomes witty, even winking, thanks to Bacharach’s casually swinging arrangement, which is both sympathetic and sugary.
Bacharach and Costello were exceptionally well matched, each bringing something barely glimpsed in the other to the surface. Costello has collaborated intimately with the Brodsky Quartet, the Roots, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Allen Toussaint, but few challenged him quite as much as Bacharach. In return, he gives Bacharach some of his darkest sentiments to score, exceedingly bleak scenarios with titles like “In the Darkest Place” and “The Sweetest Punch.” They’re never quite as bitter as Costello’s notoriously sour love songs on 1979’s Armed Forces, but they still need Bacharach’s light touch. That contrast enlivens The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, which puts Painted From Memory on vinyl along with subsequent collaborations, live cuts, and covers Costello recorded in the ’70s and ’80s.
They wrote their first song together via fax machine. In the mid 1990s, Costello sent Bacharach ideas for a song called “God Give Me Strength,” and Bacharach responded by sharpening a few lines and adding a new bridge, which turned out to be the missing piece. The finished composition first appeared on the 1996 soundtrack to Grace of My Heart, Allison Anders’ film based loosely on the career of Carole King. All the elements that would define their collaborative album were already present in the song: the strings and flugelhorns, the elegant expression of inelegant feelings. It opens as a conventional breakup song, with Costello lamenting the loss of a lover and begging God for the ability to “wipe her from my memory.” But the bridge reveals a darker facet to his predicament: “See, I’m only human,” he sings, attempting to exonerate himself for what comes next: “I want him to hurt.” It’s the first he’s mentioned another man, the third piece in this love triangle, and when Costello returns to the song’s prayerful refrain, it’s with a new recognition of the depths he has sunk and of the violent thoughts he now harbors in her absence.
Both the film and the soundtrack were busts, but the pair decided to continue their collaboration. Over the next few years they met frequently at Bacharach’s studio in Santa Monica, after which Costello would take the music back to Dublin looking for lyrical inspiration. While Costello was enduring a creatively and commercial fallow period, Bacharach was experiencing something akin to a renaissance in the mid to late 1990s, as a new generation of artists—and, notably, one international man of mystery—hailed him as a hero. He was a handy touchstone when Gen Xers were hosting lounge parties and blaring Combustible Edison CDs over martinis, but he was a wholly unironic influence on a new wave of indie rock crooners and chamber pop auteurs like the Pernice Brothers, American Music Club, Jim O’Rourke, and the Divine Comedy. In addition to dominating the soundtrack to 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (and finding a surprisingly deft interpreter in Ani DiFranco), he had a cameo in one of the biggest hits of that year, serenading Austin Powers on top of a double-decker bus rolling through Vegas.
To their credit, neither Bacharach nor Costello seems the least bit interested in re-creating the sound of the ’60s on Painted From Memory.  They settle into the songs with an understanding that this style of pop music doesn’t have to be anchored to any one particular time or place. Especially during a decade defined by irony and distance, these songs are miraculously unself-conscious, even with their great orchestral swell and flugelhorn fanfares. Bacharach’s arrangements have an ease to them: Nothing is forced, everything is orderly, and every next note has already been foretold by the last one. Put that sensibility with a singer like Dusty Springfield or Dionne Warwick, and you’ll get some of the most durable and sophisticated pop songs imaginable.
Put that sensibility with a singer like Costello, however, and you’ll get something very different. His voice is ragged, and his performances emphasize the work he’s putting into each phrase. You can hear him muster up his courage to ascend into a falsetto on “God Give Me Strength,” as though he senses a trap Bacharach has laid for him. And you can hear him laboring to control the drama of “What’s Her Name Today.” He probably wouldn’t argue with that criticism, if it even counts as criticism. He never backs down from the more demanding passages in these songs, and he even makes the strain in what he calls his “reckless and daredevil approach” sound intentional, which adds new dimensions to the self-deluding “I Still Have That Other Girl” and the beautifully delicate title track.
Costello isn’t the only voice on these songs. He’s joined by a chorus of women singing backup and adding commentary to cut his testimony. On “My Thief,” the music quietens so that Lisa Taylor can tell him to leave the room while she dresses, a small moment of domestic drama. A year after the release of Painted From Memory, these same songs were rearranged by the guitarist Bill Frisell, who recast them with different vocalists on The Sweetest Punch. On one of the finer reimaginings, Cassandra Wilson locates a very different set of stakes in “Painted From Memory,” her voice all smoke and sorrow as she makes microscopic adjustments to her delivery until she has to steel herself to deliver the last note.
There’s a showtune quality to Bacharach and Costello’s songs, which has less to do with the sound of the music and more to do with the monologue quality of the lyrics. Each one sounds like someone delivering testimony to an audience, explaining in meter and melody their motivations and regrets. In fact, the duo worked with Chuck Lorre (yes, the Big Bang Theory guy) to turn Painted From Memory into a stage production, even devising a story about a painter in love with his model. Despite their years of effort, it never came to pass, so we’re left with the live versions included in The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, which bring out new angles on these new compositions and even older ones. There’s a great moment when Costello sings the first lines of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” a hit for Warwick in 1969 that apparently still registered as cheesy in the late 1990s. “What do you get when you fall in love?” he asks, prompting chuckles from the audience, but he barrels along with no wink or nudge, absolutely sincere in his performance, until the laughter turns into applause.
That’s part of the joy of this box set: It shows just how durable these songs are, precisely because they’re so malleable, so open to whatever Costello or Wilson or you might bring to them. A different singer or a different listener brings a different set of concerns to them, which bring different implications to the surface. Bacharach was a songwriter as playwright, penning the scripts for other artists to act out, and his death just weeks before this set’s release could have cast a pall over the proceeding. It ought to disturb that balance between the light and the dark, making the unruly feelings even unrulier without making the sweet parts sweeter. But the effect, ultimately, is just the opposite. Especially with Costello recounting their yearslong collaboration in his detailed liner notes—and ending with his wish for more hours with his friend—The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach sounds like a heartfelt eulogy to an artist who helped pop fans find great beauty and even greater solace in all those lonely, uncertain moments.


Decades into their career and on their 15th album, the death metal legends have become their genre’s Rolling Stones: iconic, verging on cartoonish, always reliable.

Violence Unimagined

Who on this wretched, godforsaken earth could have imagined a way for Cannibal Corpse to age gracefully? Probably not the label head at Metal Blade, who admits to signing the Buffalo death metal band in 1989 mostly because they had a song on their demo called “A Skull Full of Maggots.” And likely not Jim Carrey, who asked them to appear in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective after spotting their gruesome album cover in a shop and becoming fascinated. And definitely not the conservative pundits who, as they ascended to cult stardom in the 1990s, positioned their shocking song titles alongside hip-hop as everything wrong with pop culture.
Even within Cannibal Corpse, things were touch and go for a while. Less than 10 years into their existence, they parted ways with vocalist and lyricist Chris Barnes, whose horror-film obsession helped define their sound and image. In his absence, founding members Alex Webster and Paul Mazurkiewicz were adamant about evolving: They replaced Barnes with George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher—to this day, their headbanging frontman and lovable avatar—and worked toward a less immediately provocative and slightly more subtle approach. Or as Webster pinpoints it in Joel McIver’s biography Bible of Butchery, “Maybe the difference between a hatchet to the genitals and a hatchet to the head.”
Of course, this guidance-counselor-worthy wisdom would be useless if Cannibal Corpse didn’t have the music to back it up. And with guitarist and producer Erik Rutan, they have recorded some of their strongest material in the 21st century, settling into a position as death metal’s best-selling band and its most resilient. In this sense, Rutan has been their Rick Rubin, a seasoned outsider helping a legacy act evolve by distilling their work to its raw essence. Even the titles of these later albums, after landmarks like Tombs of the Mutilated and Butchered at Birth, sound like takeaways from a meditative group exercise: Kill. Torture. Inhale; exhale.
Maybe this is why the introduction of Rutan as a band member feels so seamless. Their 15th album, Violence Unimagined, is their first since he replaced longtime guitarist Pat O’Brien after a 2017 arrest. (Breaking and entering; firearms and human skulls—it’s a long, strange story.) Where O’Brien could be counted on to provide the most diabolical and intricate moments on previous Cannibal Corpse albums, Rutan takes a more streamlined approach. His first songwriting contributions to the band are chugging, heavy, and maybe even ...timely? One is called “Condemnation Contagion” and it seems to be about living through a global pandemic when you already have germaphobic tendencies. Open up the pit and scream along: “Mandatory quarantine ENFORCED.”
Minus a few stray lines, the thematic concerns of Violence Unimagined are something you will only glean from the lyric sheet, which, even for the most devoted fans, has never exactly been required reading. Imposing and inimitable, Corpsegrinder has one of death metal’s most singular voices, clustering syllables into a retching iambic pentameter that leaves you absorbing maybe every other line. Take the highlight “Murderous Rampage,” where the title keys you into the fact that he’s singing from the perspective of a vengeful serial killer. And yet, the few phrases you can make out—“foul odors,” “brutal ways to DIE,” “no FUCKING reason”—mostly just communicate a state of mind: Pure rage, total chaos. He could just as easily be venting about an especially miserable day at the office.
So while Violence Unimagined ranks as a top tier late-era Cannibal Corpse record, its triumphs are somewhat understated. It features plenty of impressive turns from drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz and some particularly inspired songs from guitarist Rob Barrett (“Murderous Rampage,” “Inhumane Harvest”). It is also at least their third studio album that feels like a conscious restart, which is impressive but also makes it harder to stand out in their catalog. At this point, they have become like the death metal Rolling Stones: iconic, verging on cartoonish, but always reliable. While some of their ’90s peers have crafted more memorable returns (Carcass’ Surgical Steel) and more artful ones (Gorguts’ Colored Sands), no death metal band maintains such a pure, vibrant energy, resulting in music that plays like an ecstatic tribute to their own unlikely endurance.

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Autechre’s eight-hour NTS Sessions adds another level of the British duo’s legacy of monumental digital music. Though it’s created by a computer, it will bring you to another plane of human existence if you let it.

NTS Sessions 1-4

Karlheinz Stockhausen might’ve imagined the music of Autechre before Autechre did. The German avant-garde composer and all-around insane genius believed that the emergent off-kilter sounds of his time served a specific function: the full-on enlightenment of the human race. His theory, roughly, was that since the dawn of time, man-made music was largely rooted in the natural rhythms of the body (think a four-on-the-floor house beat echoing a heartbeat) but that advances in technology during the late 20th century gave us the means to create new patterns, and that listening to them would actually help us reprogram our biorhythms in kind. “Such complex rhythms can no longer simply be beaten out, tapped with the feet, danced, or even counted,” Stockhausen explained in 1989. “Exposed to such a process, you quickly establish that human beings change. If such new music is produced, that proclaims the development of a new level of human being.” Eventually, he hoped, these newly rewired human brains and bodies might give us the means to travel throughout space and re-establish our relationship with the higher cosmic beings who created us.
It’s an idea that seems almost tailor-made for Sean Booth and Rob Brown who, together as Autechre, have been making highly confounding experimental electronic music together for the past 30 years. Not necessarily the part about convening with our alien forefathers, but rather the thought that sound and rhythm are learning experiences unto themselves, that our ears can adapt and evolve to new music and bring the rest of our being and consciousness along for the ride. Certainly the past two decades of their career can support this theory. Ever since fully outgrowing the crunchy ambient techno of their earliest work with 1997’s Chiastic Slide, the Mancunian duo has stayed the course, hammering away at a completely singular but ever-growing formula of slithering, glitching, post-hip-hop, post-human music. NTS Sessions 1-4, initially released over the course of April as a series of weekly broadcasts for the online London station NTS Radio, is the latest and longest of these experiments, clocking in at eight hours total, and is likely completely impenetrable to the uninitiated.
This is to say that it’s still very Autechrian. It’s the visceral sound of machines powering down then quickly lurching back into motion. It’s that sense of perpetual rhythmic collapse, the feeling that entire songs are slipping out from under your feet. It’s gorgeous and terrifying and awe-inspiring and incomprehensible and frequently even funky—but only if you let it unfold first. Booth and Brown have so completely mastered their aesthetic that it no longer seems rational to compare it to anything born outside of it. Even when they are proudly flaunting their influences, retracing the daisy chained 808 madness of Mantronix or the nauseating cacophony of early Coil, they claim full ownership. It’s not possible for Autechre to sound like anything except Autechre. And, with each new release, they somehow sound more like Autechre than on the previous one. The sound design is fuller, the programming more intricate, the shock of the new hitting just a bit harder than before.
Their recent output can be easily be seen as a running series of mutations on a single body, particularly since they’ve embraced digital music distribution. 2013’s double CD Exai was two hours long and eventually supplemented by a collection of nine hour-long soundboard recordings of live sets from the same era, all variations on the same setlist but not even close to similar in execution. 2016 saw the release of the Elseq 1-5, a five EP digital-only box set of all new material running at four hours total. And now we have a solid eight hours of new material with NTS. These data dumps are welcome indulgences to their cult following, but they’re also instructional: The more time you spend in this world, the more your body learns to adapt to the rhythms. For years now the duo has preferred to perform to completely blacked-out rooms, forcing the audience to fully devote their attention to the sound itself. A solid eight-hour lump of music is roughly the chronological equivalent to this trick. (The original two-hour NTS airing would repeat on an endless continuous loop throughout the week until the next one aired. This provided its own rather disorienting immersive effect—as the playlist sunk into the background of daily internet use it became quite easy to lose track of exactly how many times you had listened to the same songs.)
Unlike Elseq, which felt more like five discrete projects presented in one long bundle, NTS really does take shape when digested as a single extended piece. Each session runs seamlessly into the next, with an arc that goes from abrasion to bliss, from the 18-minute relentless plod of “t1a1” to the shimmering ambient closer, “all end,” which runs for nearly an hour. In between, the mechanical rhythms bend, bang, and break. More melodic elements—or at least brutal raw chunks of chords, which is kind of their thing now—claw their way out of the muck unexpectedly, and the human emotions creep up on you.
Booth and Brown have always been somewhat cagey about their exact production methods. But their primary tool is Max/MSP, a visual programming language that allows them to create generative algorithms that in effect compose themselves. They’ve talked in the past about the increasing sense that the software is becoming a third member of the group, and the workflow goes something like this: The humans give the computer a set of parameters, then the computer jams endlessly, churning out the requested burps and gurgles, which are passed back to the humans, who edit it all down to a manageable composition. The machine is learning, the composers are learning, and, if all goes as planned, the listeners are learning too.
The more time you spend in this world of sound, the closer you get to understanding its true origin—not the sound collages of Stockhausen’s day, but rather the American hip-hop and dance music that Booth and Brown grew up on. When Booth first heard the scratch-heavy electro of Los Angeles electro party rockers Knights of the Turntables in the mid-’80s it was still incomprehensible to him. “I was hearing it the way I heard Stockhausen,” he told Thump in 2015: “If you look at it purely in terms of the sound and science of it, it’s not that far from musique concrète. But there’s this cultural brick wall between the two things.”
The NTS Sessions, like so much of Autechre’s output, serve as deeply encrypted history lessons through which to tear down those walls. The duo was fortunate to come of age at a unique moment in musical history, that brief period from the late ’70s to early ’90s, when the sonics themselves were stacked higher than that wall. Advancements in production technology were rapidly outpacing their expected purpose and previously inaccessible music-making devices were suddenly attainable to kids from across all cultural and economic lines. Hip-hop and electro, house and techno, bass and freestyle grew out of this cross-pollination and quickly turned weird.
Autechre fully inherited the values of that era and they might be the only artists of our time to still live in them today. So much on NTS Sessions seems to offer a hypothetical alternate timeline to ’80s electronic music: What if it all just kept growing? What if each and every Latin Rascals razor blade micro edit was to re-edit itself violently? What if the stuttering vocals of Miami bass dubs were to develop sub-stutters? If all the acid house squelches grew into roars? If the extended DJ mixes lasted for entire days? And what if all the oh-shit moments that first came with these innovations were still central to the enjoyment of contemporary dance music? It would, presumably, keep evolving until it was no longer even recognizable as such.
In 2013, both members of Autechre held an open Q&A on the fan forum Watmm.com, which eventually grew to more than a hundred pages of conversation. It is an essential text in piecing together the Autechre mythology, not only because it’s their longest and most candid interview to date, but also for how well it illustrates the potential chasms between intent and interpretation. When one user asked, “how would a modern [Autechre] dance track sound?” Booth responded with just one unpunctuated sentence fragment: “but we are making dance music.” The divide between the intellectual and the physical has always been false. It’s all just learning.


The cryptic and elusive New Jersey rapper teams with DJ Muggs, who is enjoying a career renaissance as the go-to producer for glowering, throwback East Coast street rap.

Tuez-Les Tous

There are strains of underground rap that predict the mainstream’s future or find themselves in conversation with its present. Then there’s the one that branches from Marcberg’s rib: mid-tempo crime-boss luxury shit that comes from New York City or Buffalo or is beamed from some indeterminate location straight onto Bandcamp, more or less unconcerned with anything happening outside itself. The scene has those who are celebrated as high-art auteurs (Ka) and those, like the Griselda Gang, who turn everything into pro wrestling. Mach-Hommy was once associated with the latter group but is stranger and more elusive than just about all of his stylistic peers, using the musical shorthand that’s been codified over the last decade of New York street rap to assemble records that are strange, militant, and endlessly replayable, if you can find them.
Tuez-Les Tous pairs Hommy with DJ Muggs, who has enjoyed a welcome an unlikely career resurgence. He warmed himself up on solid collaborative records with Meyhem Lauren and Roc Marciano himself, and then scorched eyebrows off with February’s Hell’s Roof, where he teamed with the Rochester rapper Eto. In recent years, many rappers in this lane have taken stylistic cues (or actually commissioned beats) from Alchemist, Muggs’ one-time protege, who’s figured out how to give spare, sinister beats a psychedelic tilt. Muggs has responded by stripping the sound down to the screws. The most arresting song on Tuez-Les Tous is “Piotr,” which sounds like a vacant, perverse lullaby.
Hommy likes to leave gaps and negative space in his phrasing, so that even when there are extended verses with no obvious breaks, on a song like “900K,” there are fits and starts that make the vivid images—say,  Hommy tearing up a lease—come out of nowhere. He also upsets the natural rhythms and chains of logic in rap writing by lurching from the literal to the metaphysical, prose to verse. Take the passage from “Bon Nwit”: “New niggas need to quit it / Ain’t no gimmick / hemorrhage / He with Jesus now, he hardcore / Flip ‘em like parkour / He suspended / you seeing spirits? / … I’m seeing spirits.”
Every piece of press on Mach-Hommy mentions how expensive his music is –– he sells his albums for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, and only a tiny sliver of his catalog has been uploaded to streaming platforms (Tuez-Les Tous, perhaps because of Muggs’ involvement, is widely available). This leads to a kid of scarcity that is rare in an era when most work by most artists can be found with a few touches of a few buttons. The pricing and the scarcity are usually taken as a comment on how Hommy values his art; those factors have also helped to burnish Hommy’s reputation as an enigma and, presumably, have become a working economic model for him precisely because of that mystique.
But just as interesting is the way that cultivated obscurity colors –– and is reflected in –– the work itself. At these prices, it seems unlikely that anyone would have a full view of Hommy’s entire catalog, that they would instead experience it in fragments. His records since the sprawling, nearly definitive HBO have embraced this inscrutability: each one utilizes slightly different vocal or production styles, and there are no explainers for the dialects or allusion to foreign revolutions, no hand-holding. You’re just thrown in. So Hommy, whose work is rich with its connection to Haitian social and political history, and who seems to be in conversation with other artists long dead, is daring you to engage with it as craft before anything else, to marvel at the couplets before decoding them. It makes his music feel coolly, entrancingly mercenary. Tuez-Les Tous translates to kill them all.


Matmos member Drew Daniel has put together a gorgeous album that carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield.

The Soft Pink Truth: Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?

Last year, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt celebrated 25 years of mad-genius musical experiments as Matmos with a Plastic Anniversary—an album recorded entirely using plastic. That’s how Matmos albums work; a concept that might seem silly or crass at first glance is backed by a mountain of research, executed with passion and, in that case, ornately recorded using a parade of PVC pipes, riot shields, and breast implants. Since 2001, Daniel’s side-project the Soft Pink Truth has run parallel to Matmos, applying similar twists to the dancefloor. Yet nothing in either project has presaged Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, a cathartic, emotional windfall unlike anything Daniel has ever recorded.
Daniel thought hard about how to process the anger and despair born out of a worldwide resurgence of fascism and the election of Donald Trump. Instead of making reactive “angry white guy” music, he sought to make life-affirming, healing music founded in community. So he gathered his friends and family, including Schmidt, Horse Lords saxophonist Andrew Bernstein, percussionist Sarah Hennies, and a world-class trio of vocalists: Angel Deradoorian, Colin Self, and Lower Dens singer Jana Hunter. There’s no concept, no edgy sound-sources; its instruments are simply instruments, arranged with a small orchestra of collaborators who generate a huddled warmth against an increasingly cold, dark world. The resulting Shall We Go On Sinning carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield.
Daniel built the album’s nine tracks to flow as two pieces, mixed seamlessly while using a bit of tape delay to unify each peak and valley. “Shall” opens the album with an invocation, as Deradoorian, Self, and Hunter create a choral round singing the titular question, itself an exasperated quote by Paul the Apostle from Romans 6:1. It acts as a focal point of tension, a summoning of negative energy that is exorcised as the chorus shifts on “We” to outward breaths and then long, silky sighs. A glowing synth loop razes any remaining darkness and as the beat drops in, “We” unfurls luxuriously into a deep house odyssey. It’s the first of many spontaneous surprises the album delivers. The rush of glockenspiel on “Go” provides a cleansing transition to the crashing waves of “On,” one of the album’s most soothing corners. Centered around repeating piano chords by pianist Koye Berry, the vocalists fuse into a singular force as Daniel manipulates the edges of the track with mercurial touches. It’s a soothing moment that sets up “Sinning,” a centerpiece for Bernstein and John Berndt’s dueling saxophones as bells, handclaps, and a pulsing bass gradually build up. Though its arrangement feels classical, “Sinning” flows like the sexy, sweaty peak of a house mix.
The second half—“So That Grace May Increase?”—offers its own momentous trajectory. Schmidt joins on piano, developing the central riff on the hypnotically swirling “So,” as horn loops, chanting voices, and percussion fold in on “That.” Daniel’s mixing here is phenomenal, giving each carefully crafted element—the forward swing of the percussion, the warmth of the brass, a garbled tape-looped voice—a moment to shine. Schmidt returns with a tip-toed piano solo on “Grace,” offering a delicate misdirection before the track suddenly explodes into a final, euphoric climax. The album rides this soul-lifting shock to its conclusion, a cathartic gift so breathtaking it rises to the occasion of this moment, that moment, seemingly any moment we have yet to face.
Daniel started the Soft Pink Truth on a dare from UK house legend Matthew Herbert. Matmos just had a breakthrough with the surgery-sampling A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, while Herbert fused jazz, house, and the human form to create Bodily Functions, one of the most revered and intimate club records of all time. The dare suggests Herbert, who released the Soft Pink Truth’s first albums on his Soundslike label, heard something special in Daniel beyond even the visionary work of Matmos. Nearly 20 years later, that provocation has inspired what feels like a successor to Herbert’s own masterpiece while perfecting themes running throughout the Soft Pink Truth. On previous albums, Daniel reckoned with homophobia in black metal or celebrated punk’s queer history. Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? opens its scope to a harsh world where being gay and thriving is itself an act of defiance. It stares down an apocalypse and fights back with joy, hope, and human connection.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 blockbuster comeback, a genre-fluid album about love, disappointment, and aging.

Nick of Time

In 1983, Bonnie Raitt’s career was at a crossroads. The day after she’d finished mastering her ninth album, Tongue & Groove, the fire-haired Radcliffe dropout and beloved country-blues singer received a letter informing her she’d been dropped from her label. Warner Bros. had signed Raitt in 1971, when she was just 21, and put out eight of her records. But none had been much of a commercial success, and it was time to cut the budget.
Raitt was contractually entangled with Warner for three more years, after which they forced her to put out Tongue & Groove anyway; it was released and largely ignored as was Nine Lives in 1986. She was in her late 30s, recovering from the painful end of a four-year relationship, and suddenly tasked with rehabilitating a music career that should have been in its prime. Years of life on the road had taken its toll, too. As an 18-year-old college student, Raitt met the Boston promoter Dick Waterman, and she got to know the ’70s blues circuit in part by dispensing booze backstage for the likes of Fred McDowell and Son House. When she started recording and touring herself, she earned a reputation as a late-night party girl. “I wanted to be the female version of Muddy Waters or [McDowell],” she said in 1990. “There was a romance about drinking and doing blues.” By 1975 she’d moved to L.A. and started practicing what might qualify as that decade’s version of “Cali sober”—cutting out bourbon to merely drink tequila and wine—and described her drug use as “nothing much: a toot ’n’ a toke.”
But as she neared 40—and considered the possibility of appearing in music videos alongside Prince, with whom she’d recorded a few songs—Raitt decided she’d probably drank enough boys under the table to last her career. She’d grown to hate the feeling of waking up and not being able to remember what she’d talked about with people the night before. She had also put on some weight and was increasingly self-conscious about her appearance. “I remember being so proud thinking I was the last girl singer still drinking,” she told Playboy soon after. “Then I looked in the mirror.” At a show in Louisiana around that time, a fan in the front row passed her what has to be one of the most audacious notes in the history of live shows: “What happened? You got fat. Maybe you should work out or something.”
By 1987, Raitt had quit drinking. She began exercising regularly and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She was working on getting her life back on track, but it was a slow reboot. Over the course of the next year, 14 labels passed on signing her; in 1988, Capitol finally offered a $150,000 deal, a package typically reserved for newer artists. “There was nobody interested in signing Bonnie Raitt,” Tim Devine, her A&R at Capitol, told Billboard in 2019. “When I went to sign her, my boss at the time said, ‘Over my dead body.’”
Nick of Time—Raitt’s tenth studio album and first with Capitol—is understandably considered her triumphant comeback. But Raitt herself has often pointed out that there was nothing for her to even come back from: She’d never had a hit record before. For almost 20 years, Raitt had made her career on the road, where she could show off her under-recorded, formidable slide guitar skills and easily compensate for lagging record sales at the box office. “I never pretended to be a great artist or a great originator,” she once said. “I’m just an interpreter of good music.”
The closest she’d come to mainstream success was a 1977 cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” which has her snarling and sliding around a Norton Buffalo harmonica break. It was a big leap from “Mighty Tight Woman” and “Women Be Wise,” the sweet but almost painfully innocent sounding Sippie Wallace covers on Raitt’s 1971 self-titled album. Raitt hit her stride as an interpreter and recording artist when her voice earned some attitude and grit in addition to its innate emotional clarity, and when she began to transform songs written by men (“Runaway,” “Too Long at the Fair,” and “Angel From Montgomery,” to name a few) with her simple shift in perspective. But she still wasn’t really on the radio.
Who would’ve guessed Nick of Time—a genre-fluid album about love, disappointment, and aging—would be Raitt’s turning point? Certainly not the people who made it. Raitt, 39, was emerging from what she called “a complete emotional, physical and spiritual breakdown,” and producer Don Was (of Was (Not Was)), was at “rock bottom” in his production career. He’d only crossed paths with Raitt by chance, at an L.A. studio in 1986, because he’d lost his client’s tapes in the back of a taxi on his way out to California and had to push their session by a day. Soon after, Raitt teamed up with Was to record “Baby Mine,” a song from the animated 1941 Dumbo movie for an album of reimagined Disney songs, and they knew they wanted to continue working together. It wasn’t an easy sell. “If it comes down to it and a record company comes along and insists that she have a real producer,” Raitt’s managers told Was over lunch one day, “we’re going to throw you under the bus.”
But Capitol’s low investment in the project also came with the hands-off blessing of low expectations, and in 1988, Raitt and Was took some stripped-down demos into a week-long session at Hollywood’s Ocean Way Recording. For once, Raitt felt no pressure to emerge with radio-ready hits; she and Was just wanted to make songs they would be proud of. For his part, Was knew the key to production would be staying out of the way: “It was just about hearing her unadorned voice,” he told Billboard. “Everything else would augment that.” They cut about two tracks a day, using as few instruments as they could and aiming for a sound that felt, in Raitt’s words, “as live and uncorrected as possible.”
Raitt’s slide guitar appears on about half of Nick of Time, a unifying thread in an album that jumps from country to pop and R&B. For much of the ’80s, Raitt had been touring with a limited budget, playing full sets with only a bass player to accompany her guitar. As her playing, and reputation for it, had improved, she’d realized it was what set her apart as an artist. “It was time to showcase the things about me that were different,” she told the Boston Globe in 1989. “There are a lot of female hormones in that slide playing.” (John Jorgenson, who played guitar on “Too Soon to Tell,” credits Raitt’s playing on Nick of Time with a general slide revival in country music in the ’90s.)
Raitt, never known for her songwriting, bookended the album with an unusual ode to aging, “Nick of Time,” and a closing manifesto, “The Road’s My Middle Name.” She personally begged the Bay Area singer-songwriter Bonnie Hayes to give her both the torch song “Love Letter” and the heartbreaker “Have a Heart.” According to Hayes, the latter was written as a reggae track for Huey Lewis, and it is difficult to imagine him delivering the iconic opening line—“Hey… shut up!”—with the same playful bite that Raitt gave it. The song peaked at No. 3 on the adult contemporary chart, Nick of Time’s biggest hit.
Raitt’s career might have been adrift, but she had plenty of loyal friends to call on. “Cry on My Shoulder,” doused in ’90s schmaltz, casually features backup vocals by David Crosby and Graham Nash, and Herbie Hancock accompanies Raitt on the aching ballad “I Ain’t Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again.” Among others, “Too Soon to Tell”—which Raitt has called the only true country song she ever made—has Was (Not Was)’s Sweet Pea Atkinson and Sir Harry Bowens chipping in on backup vocals. (Mike Reid, who co-wrote the track, would go on to co-write “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” one of the biggest songs of Raitt’s career.) The lead single was a cover of Jon Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love,” and with a shrewd eye toward VH1 airtime, Raitt cast her friend Dennis Quaid as a flirty himbo in the accompanying music video.
Nick of Time was released on March 21, 1989; it hit the label’s sales goal in a week and then, to everyone’s surprise, continued to sell steadily. The real boost came after the 1990 Grammys, when Raitt—unsigned and bottomed-out just a few years prior—won all four awards she’d been nominated for, including Album of the Year. “I’d just like to thank Bonnie Raitt,” Was said onstage, next to his disbelieving partner, “for setting an example here. If you maintain your integrity, never underestimate your audience, and just try to make a good record, people will respond to you.” A few weeks later, Nick of Time was the No. 1 album in America.
Raitt has likened this post-Grammy rise to a “hyperspace”—it was the moment everything changed for her. But why the hell did it take this long to happen? Nick of Time coheres around a clear and earnest philosophy that no doubt registered with the second-wave feminist boomers who went out and bought it in droves: These are songs performed by a woman who’d reached a personal and professional nadir and pulled herself out. And she did it all, as the New York Times review put it, at a “certain age.” Thirty-plus years after its release, the album’s point of view—a woman who feels liberated by her age and life experience rather than limited by it—is still refreshingly out of the ordinary. It’s the story of Raitt attempting to come to terms with her adult self. “I can handle the things about myself that I didn’t like before,” Raitt told the Globe at the time, just a few months shy of turning 40. “I don’t feel that anything is leading me around anymore—love, or the road, or my career. I feel like I’m in control of my life. I have a real spirit of purpose.”
Nick of Time exceeded everyone’s expectations; it didn’t only sell over 5 million copies, it wholly revitalized Raitt’s career. Her subsequent release, 1991’s Luck of the Draw, surpassed it in sales and cemented her as a ’90s powerhouse with hits like “Something to Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Still, for an artist so defined by interpretations, it’s Raitt’s own “Nick of Time” that stands out from the pack now. Raitt wrote it when she was playing around with a Drumatix synth with built-in sounds, looking for something that had a Philly Soul vibe. After she played the demo in the studio, Was layered in an old synth, and drummer Ricky Fataar got creative: “He put a sandbag on his belly and mic’d it,” Raitt told USA Today in 2014. “Then he played that signature heartbeat sound [on it] that made it intimate.” In the first verse, Raitt sings of a friend who “sees babies everywhere she goes” and “wants one of her own” but has an indecisive partner; in the second, she speaks to the strange sadness that accompanies parents and children seeing one another age. Her voice is unusually gentle and plaintive: “When did the choices get so hard, with so much more at stake?” she wonders on the bridge: “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”
The ’90s were a less forgiving time, but the existential angst of a woman in their mid- to late-30s remains. In an industry that perennially favors the young, that was and remains racked with ageism and sexism, Nick of Time feels startling simply for existing as it was made, a contentedly unresolved document about a grown woman losing and then reestablishing herself at a life stage when her story could have easily joined so many others in the ether.
It’s bittersweet to know that “Nick of Time” played a part in pushing Raitt’s friend’s partner to make a decision: Not long after the album came out, the couple got married and had a kid. (According to Raitt, they nearly named him “Nick.”) Still, it’s nice to know that the song itself ends on what is more or less a white-knight fiction. In the final verse, Raitt sings of redemptive love, someone who “opened up my heart again” and gave her “love in the nick of time.” Raitt was newly signed, sober, and recentered, but she was still single and recovering from heartbreak. She had a lot more life to live.

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The English band’s nervy debut blazes through scraps of jazz, funk, krautrock, dub, and punk. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart.

Bright Green Field

The word “island” is usually synonymous with “paradise”—someplace tropical and warm, skewered by beach umbrellas. We’re less likely to think of Alcatraz. But when English rock band Squid mention a “concrete island” in the first minutes of Bright Green Field, it’s closer to the infamous prison than a Sandals resort. The isle in “G.S.K.” is a dystopian slab ruled by Big Pharma, and the record’s opening scene, as shouted by drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge, confines us to this grim locale: “As the sun sets, on the Glaxo Klein/Well it’s the only way that I can tell the time,” he sings. On this barren rock, the British drug conglomerate is the towering center of daily life—so big, it acts like a sundial. “Island” never sounded so angry or claustrophobic.
Bright Green Field is packed with these moments of compression—lean phrases that steadily inflate into three-dimensional scenes. Driving their expansion are vigorous and detailed arrangements, music that rattles against Judge’s agitated lyrics until it erupts. A sickly undercurrent of strings propels his role as a white-collar drudge on “G.S.K.”; when he embarks on his evening commute, dreaming of the warm dinner that awaits, the music seems to pursue him. The horn section sounds like a fleet of motorbikes trying to run him off of the road.
Squid’s music has always toyed with discomfort. Six years after forming at college in coastal England, Judge, Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson have pushed that unrest to the point of catharsis. Like Squid’s best singles—last year’s “Sludge,” 2019’s “Houseplants”—the songs on Bright Green Field set out on one course, only to flail in another direction just as you’ve settled in. “Boy Racers” kicks off as a linear groove, its noodling bassline and clipped rhythm guitar among the album’s more pared-back arrangements. Roughly halfway through, the beat drops out, giving way to a bleak, distorted drone. A faint mechanical voice speaks, like Daft Punk with a dead battery: “You’re always small/And there are things that you’ll never know.” It’s unnerving but effective, like the moment in Alien when we discover Ash is really a robot.
Squid approach their music like skilled choreographers; though every move is carefully plotted, the dance maintains the illusion of spontaneity. Each track feels on the verge of some massive release, but all meltdowns are carefully preordained. “Narrator,” the album’s best song, exemplifies the band’s calculated pandemonium. Its opening measures recall early Talking Heads and James Chance: Quick ripples of electric guitar and sharp basslines squiggle on top of a crisp snare beat. But it’s the abandonment of this structure that’s most interesting. At the song’s midpoint, guest vocalist Martha Skye Murphy slowly creeps in, lingering around the edges. As Squid explode into a frenzied coda, Murphy wails her voice raw, shrieking like a slasher-flick victim. It’s the album’s most exhilarating stretch of sound.
Like magpies, Squid stockpile scraps of jazz, funk, krautrock, dub, and punk, uninterested in adopting a single identity. Their genre agnosticism extends to equipment: In addition to drums, bass, and guitar, Bright Green Field’s sense of disorientation is aided by alto saxophone, violin, trumpet, cello, trombone, and rackett—a 16th-century wind instrument also known as the sausage bassoon. (Leadbetter’s father, who specializes in medieval rock and Renaissance instruments, handles sausage bassoon duties on “Boy Racers.”) Even amid all these choices, Squid’s spinouts are orchestrated stunts, never heady jam-band accidents. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart.
Yet Squid’s characters and the world they inhabit are in constant friction. On “Global Groove,” Judge deadpans about wearing “tight Lycra,” trudging through the day like a weary Zumba instructor. The pace is a narcotized march, nudged along by stabs of guitar and saxophone. The song offers only a few visuals: mindless TV shows, the oppressive titular dance. Is it a wry take on fitness culture, or sheer drudgery? (The two haven’t always been distinct: Treadmills were once instruments of penal discipline.) “Pamphlets” twists another innocuous item into a symbol of suffocating conformity: “Pamphlets through my door/And pamphlets on my floor,” Judge screeches, as though he’s being crushed by the leaflets blasting through his mail slot. Bright Green Field is filled with these imaginative dispatches from capitalist hell, but it’s Squid’s exacting ruckus that exposes their true nature. The field isn’t green with grass, but radioactive sludge.

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Sob Rock is the sound of a man alone in his success. Even if this is one of John Mayer’s stronger albums, the whole thing feels self-consciously minor.

Sob Rock

Let’s say you play your cards right and end up like John Mayer. Two decades in, you’ve amassed a solid run of hits and a devoted community of fans who will buy tickets any time you’re in town. You’ve got some baggage; who doesn’t? Some notable exes have painted damning portraits of you in a small playlist’s worth of songs, and you’ve said a couple indefensible things to the press that follow you like hellhounds wherever you go. At the same time, you’ve got a dignified side gig as the touring guitarist for a classic rock institution, the kind of role that you can age into gracefully, gainfully employed without ever having to step back into the spotlight. Where do you go next?
“I’m somewhere between a pop artist and a jam band—maybe closer to pop artist,” Mayer recently surmised, and this particular niche has thrust the guitar virtuoso from Billboard charts and magazine covers squarely into the Neil Young-buying-ownership-in-a-model-train-company phase of his career. (For Mayer, now 43, it’s all about luxury watches.) Yes, he’s got a new record, but even that seems like a hobby, something to pass the time. The earliest single arrived in spring 2018, because why not? The suave, undeniable “New Light” sounds no less relevant today than it did back then, and its inclusion proves that Mayer can work at his own pace—trends, release cycles, and global pandemics be damned.
None of this is to suggest that Sob Rock, his eighth studio album, is thoughtless. In fact, its vision is so complete and confident that it pretty much writes its own review. (Judging by the title, bargain bin stickers on the cover, and fake pull-quotes on the merch, the tone is not so enthusiastic.) To make this music, Mayer gave himself a prompt. Instead of an artist who dominated VH1 and frat houses in the early 2000s, what if he’d emerged during the classic rock era and found himself, decades later, as a late-career musician attempting to update his sound? “Pretend someone made a record in 1988 and shelved it,” he explained, “and it was just found this year.” It’s an intriguing concept until you realize that, even in his fantasies, John Mayer is making music doomed to be lost to time, sapped of inspiration and out of his element.
Before we get any further, I will note that the ’80s staples Mayer references on Sob Rock in overt, almost shockingly accurate ways represent a moment in popular music I have a lot of fondness for. It was a time when new technology allowed career artists to embellish their music with smooth, luxurious textures, better suited for the digital precision of CDs than the analog crackle of vinyl. Blockbusters like Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, and Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence—all contented statements from well-established rock acts in the mid-to-late-’80s—come to mind. There is a quiet triumph in hearing someone like Mayer using his substantial resources to recreate this sound, bringing in first-hand witnesses like producer Don Was, bassist Pino Palladino, and keyboardist Greg Phillinganes. If you’re going to go in, go all the way.
Nevertheless, it’s a crowded field. Over the past decade, indie lifers like the War on Drugs, Destroyer, Bon Iver, M83, Jenny Lewis, Cass McCombs, the Killers, and Tame Impala have all taken artful inspiration from roughly the same time period; upstarts like Westerman and Bullion have offered their own underground perspective on it; Taylor Swift herself studied the era for a next-level pop breakthrough, going so far as to name an album after a specific year; Weezer landed their biggest hit in ages with a cover of Toto’s “Africa.” In this context, once the novelty of its production wears off—the stadium synths and slick guitar solos, auxiliary percussion and yacht-paced, mid-tempo cruise—Sob Rock reveals itself to be just another John Mayer album, a work to be judged on its own terms.
This is the part of the review where I should dissect the songwriting, drawing attention to the ways that Mayer misses the mark. But does anyone need me to explain why it’s uncomfortable, maybe even offensive, to hear an adult man from Connecticut singing a chorus of “Why you no love me? Why you no even care?” in a song called “Why You No Love Me”? Do you want me to point out how, despite the Joshua Tree gravitas of the closing “All I Want Is to Be With You,” the melody sounds distractingly similar to “I Want It That Way”? Do you need a music critic to annotate the gaping hole at the heart of the quasi-confessional strummer “I Guess I Just Feel Like,” whose profound melancholy feels as vague as its title?
These are obvious flaws—all reasons why, unlike the records that inspired it, you probably won’t hear artists decades from now dreaming up their own Sob Rocks. But surprisingly—just like the music that inspired it—Sob Rock as a whole is immediate and embracing, peaceful and sparkling, like the ocean as viewed from an airplane window. The 10-song, 40-minute album goes down smooth and breezy; its faults are forgivable (except for “Why You No Love Me”) and its highlights are understated and fun. Listen to those elegant turnarounds from the chorus to the central riff of “Wild Blue.” Tune in for the slow build of “Shot in the Dark,” with a gorgeous, wordless accompaniment from Maren Morris and a staccato string part airlifted from the Blue Nile. Soak in the moment halfway through when Mayer proudly crosses the “Every Breath You Take” threshold, slipping from pro-forma romance—“I want you in the worst way”—to full-on stalker: “Is the gate code still your birthday?”
This willingness to be ridiculous—to merge his outsized personality with the tasteful, somewhat anonymous adult contemporary ballads he’s written since day one—feels like a small breakthrough. “When I’m making this record right now,” Mayer reported a few months back, “I’m laughing out loud. And I’m not even sure if it’s because I think it’s great, or because I think it’s insane.” The truth is he could have amped it up in both departments—more hunger to prove himself beyond his influences, more fearlessness to work outside his comfort zone. Even if this is one of his stronger albums, the whole thing feels self-consciously minor. When Mayer gets back on stage this summer, he’ll be accompanying Dead & Co. for another trek, ripping solos through their classics instead of standing by his new material. And, frankly, who can blame him?
Still, Mayer’s insight suggests that at the heart of Sob Rock lies a desire not just to satisfy himself but to actually delight himself, to elicit a new enthusiasm for his work. What other metric could there be for a John Mayer album in 2021? And if he doesn’t clear that bar then, really, what does he have? Always neurotic and aggressively self-aware, he has already buffered himself against criticism, appearing on the defensive before the album was even out: “I want to get in trouble. I want someone to tell me this is shit,” he told Zane Lowe. “It’s called Sob Rock because it’s a shitpost.” But it’s not shit, and it’s not even that provocative. By design, Sob Rock is the sound of a man alone in his success, playing against himself on the world’s most expensive chess board—oohing and ahhing at his own prowess, scratching his chin meaningfully then cracking a joke when things get too intense. He seems comfortable and complacent. Never losing, never winning.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Recent Kill Rock Stars signees Summer Cannibals expertly balance flame-belching Mad Max riffage with lyrics frankly exploring questions of codependence and need.

Full of It

For their third album, Portland's Summer Cannibals signed to the legendary local label Kill Rock Stars. KRS president Portia Sabin has said that the band “take us back to our roots,” and in songwriter/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux, the four-piece have an insurrectionist frontwoman worthy of the label's well-populated hall of fame. But on Full of It, Summer Cannibals toughen up their assault and hark back to the heavy scene that the Pacific Northwest punks killed off in the late 1980s. Their wailing riff-o-rama, double-tracked guitars, and sharp arpeggios soundtrack Boudreaux's frustrations with a dead-end relationship, wielding (and subverting) machismo rock tropes against a domineering, unavailable guy.
On paper, a lot of Boudreaux's lyrics can seem strangely submissive, pleading for validation and putting her faith in a union that she knows is doomed. “You turn a blind eye to my every appeal,” she sings on “I Wanna Believe.” “You make me feel like nothing matters but I still see your face/It makes me weak.” Her sneering delivery, though, is a self-aware send-up of this piteous-yet-sometimes-inevitable state, and the frustration that can accompany succumbing to such basic romance woes. She puts her anguish into wider context on the lumbering, cathartic closer “Simple Life,” questioning whether it's enough to want a “simple love and a simple home.” It's reminiscent of White Lung, whose recent fourth album Paradise sounds like a hairier sibling to Full of It, and also finds Mish Way reconciling her punk background with her conventional desires.
The 11 songs on Full of It barely break the three-minute mark, and wed incendiary fretwork to bottom-end that rolls like a boulder down a marble run. They can do stadium ragers (“Go Home”), suspenseful Sonic Youth-indebted menace (“Just a Little Bit”), sludgy girl-groupisms (“Say My Name”), euphoria (“The Lover”), and on “Not Enough,” the brittle conversation between Boudreaux and Marc Swart's guitars evokes early Sleater-Kinney. Summer Cannibals balance the abjection of their lyrics by playing like they're auditioning to ride the flame-belching rig in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Despite the ambiguity of some of her lyrics, Boudreaux's ire is rarely in dispute across these songs thanks to her bile-drenched delivery, though the moments where she makes it explicit are particularly good. “Talk Over Me” is full of coolly insolent, stinging riffs that accompany Boudreaux telling some paternalistic ass where to get off: “I'm not gonna let you talk over me one more time, and I'm not gonna wait for someone else to say that I'm right.” That self-assurance is why Full of It works: Boudreaux can sing from a position of weakness thanks to Summer Cannibals' palpable confidence. On the title track, which kicks back at the music press, she makes perfectly clear that her sense of self doesn't hinge on anyone else's approval: “Tell me my worth, I'll tell you my pitch,” Boudreaux drawls, before scoffing: “Another lie, yeah, another unreachable itch.” Full of It may not sound like classic Kill Rock Stars fare, but in these complex negotiations of power—both emotional and musical—they both fit right in and offer a smart update to their history.