On their spectral new album, the Oakland musician explores the promise of connection and the terror of the past.

Spike Field

Since the 1980s, teams of engineers, anthropologists, and other specialists assembled by the U.S. government have attempted to warn us about nuclear waste repositories. A field known as nuclear semiotics was developed around the challenge of relaying danger in the distant future when our existing modes of language might become obsolete. One proposed method was creating a “spike field,” or demarcating a hazard zone with giant, ominous granite prongs jutting from the ground at odd angles. This unshakeable image struck Maria BC, whose overcast music explores the complexities of human communication, the promise of connection and the terror of the past intruding.
On their second album, Spike Field, they balance raw beauty and digital destruction. They recorded it at a family friend’s home in San Francisco instead of their cramped Brooklyn apartment, and the album’s languid, widescreen sound reflects a newfound sense of space. Listening to Spike Field is a paranoia-inducing experience: all eerie ambience, punctuated with unexpected moments that are small but explosive. A melodic guitar line will reverse without warning, an acoustic squeak will jump from the mix, and an out-of-tune Steinway will dissolve into oblivion. Those glitches play like brain zaps, momentary electrical pulses that alert the senses even at the record’s most serene. There are moments of reprieve, like the fog lifting on the soaring chorus of “Mercury,” but it takes wading through the murk to get there.
What ties everything together is Maria BC’s mezzo-soprano, a lilting, trembling guide through the wreckage. After adopting a hushed tone in their early music to avoid disturbing their roommates, the classically trained singer gets to display their full range as they sort through old, unresolved memories. “Return to Sender” dwells on a lost connection with a friend who went through a psychotic episode; “Still” expresses an ambivalent relationship to a younger self. “You’re looking good now, double crossing every line still/In the blue light of my mind,” they sing. These are blurry snapshots that Maria BC explores by stretching out every detail to the edge of comprehension. On “Watcher,” they regret being a bystander to someone’s pain, chanting the words “I saw” as harmonies from Dear Laika and G. Brenner accentuate the angst.
In these songs, we hardly know the specifics; disembodied thoughts are charged with emotion but devoid of context. On “Haruspex,” Maria BC invokes an ancient Roman practice that involves inspecting the insides of sacrificial animals. “Is my body right?/A pound of flesh/A dime for the haruspex,” they sing. The impressionism of the lyrics precludes easy understanding, but the unsteady terrain is what makes Spike Field intoxicating. The tension between abstraction and emotional intensity comes to a head on “Tied,” a song that shifts from dissonant guitars to hopeful, major-key melodies with cello accompaniment from MIZU. Spike Field is a lonely record, but it demands close listening for the moments when the light breaks through.


Aesop Rock's second album on Rhymesayers and his first in several years is the most specific he has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling.

The Impossible Kid

Rakim once famously said he thinks of 16-bar verses as a grid and measures out exactly how many syllables can fit neatly within it. If this is true, then Aesop Rock’s grid must look like the cascading sea of glyphs from The *Matrix. *He has a wickedly extensive vocabulary, once deemed by a study to be the largest in rap, and he uses it to warp time and disrupt balance with phonetic pairings that sprout out unpredictably, an idea best articulated on the Busdriver collaboration "Ego Death": "I am ivy up the goddamn lattice/March to the math rock."
On "Rings," the single from his latest album *The Impossible Kid *and his second on indie rap mainstay Rhymesayers Entertainment, he eulogizes the visual art career he abandoned. "I left some years, a deer in the light/I left some will to spirit away/I let my fears materialize/I let my skills deteriorate," he raps, splitting all of the syllables on the back end. But he still is a visual artist in his way, coiling carefully articulated sentences into diagrams, each syllable a pixel in the frame of an image. He sketches in vibrant detail on Impossible Kid, balancing heavy verbiage with sharp clarity. This is what it sounds like when rap’s greatest wordsmith only uses the ones that count.
It's also the most specific Aesop Rock has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling, and it borders at times on confessional. "Question: If I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage/Would the neighbors smell the corpse before the cat ate my face?/I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain/I’m trying to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste," he asks on "Dorks." That doesn’t mean he’s making it easy; his yarns are still sometimes purposefully written like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. But the album loosely outlines the series of events and strained relationships that led him to abandon San Francisco for the seclusion of a cabin in the woods.
"Get Out of the Car" is a poignant reflection on loss and grief that points to the death of close friend and rapper Camu Tao as the starting point for much of his anguish. "Ah watch the impossible kid, everything that he touch turns promptly to shit/If I zoom on out I can finally admit, it’s all been a blur since ‘Mu got sick," he raps before diving down a rabbit hole of depression, explaining his withdrawal in expertly articulated tidbits and snapshots ("Into the woods go his alien tongue/It was that or a textbook faking of funk, and I can’t"). Then there’s "Blood Sandwich," which casts his brothers in starring roles in two memorable vignettes: In the first, his younger brother plays in a Little League game interrupted by a wayward gopher, a rodent that suffers a bloody end at the hands of the enraged coach. The second is a remembrance of his older brother's teen angst at being denied the opportunity to go to a Ministry show, resulting in a suicide threat. Later on, he studies the actions of his cat on "Kirby" before psychoanalyzing their relationship and society’s larger relationship with the felines as a whole, which have been everything from gods to memes. Each one of these songs constructs little worlds out of simple ideas using dexterous lyricism.
But The Impossible Kid is measured by more than its virtuosity. The soundbeds of dizzying synth abstractions, ominous piano crawls, and slow-strutting garage rock samples, all provided by Aesop Rock himself, are monuments to his growing skills as a producer. He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple, like "Lotta Years," giving Aesop the room to set up dialogue. Then there are beats that are simply hard-hitting, like "Rabies" and "Water Tower," with slapping drums that seem traditional until they stagger. These all supplement his writing, which is as crisp and as fluid as it has ever been, bending breakbeats to the whims of his strung-out cadences. Aesop Rock has yet to run out of words. After nearly 20-years in the rap game, he is still finding new means of self-expression.


Unearthing 11 lost recordings from the late ’90s, the Suicide co-founder’s newest posthumous release frames him as a doomsday prophet of the information age.

Insurrection

Hell is real, Suicide often seemed to suggest, and it sounds like an anguished Elvis Presley gurgling for dear life, half-submerged in raucous, reverbed waters. For a good amount of his time on Earth, Alan Vega was drowning, too. Long before he was Suicide’s vocalist, he braved a bleak version of New York, sleeping on sidewalks and subsisting on one-dollar tuna sandwiches. He saw the potential of expression to pierce through his oft-barren reality—an itch that led him to the gallery, then the studio, then the No Wave circuit, then the nightmares of innocent concertgoers. (Come for the music, stay for the masochism: If you were lucky, the sharp object he used to slash his chest could have been your shattered wine glass!) As Alan Suicide, a short-lived moniker that preceded his musical career, he exhibited garish pile-ups of light bulbs and wires, like Rudolf Schwarzkogler pieces sans the corpse. The music he made as a solo act felt similar in effect: hazy hellscapes that combined styles like ’50s rockabilly and ’80s synth pop into concoctions that loomed in your head, often for reasons you couldn’t put a finger on.
In the years since, it’s become much easier to locate that finger—maybe because his stuff sounds so familiar in retrospect. There are lines to be drawn between Suicide and a number of successors, be it Crystal Castles or Death Grips, but those connections, particularly with Vega’s late-career work, are rooted more in approach than attitude. He was an ideas person, like most denizens of the information era, and decades before SoundCloud, or Kim Gordon avant-rap albums, or distortion-happy hip-hop underclassmen, he gave shape to the impulse to combine those ideas as loudly, and unforgivingly, as possible. That’s what makes Insurrection, his newest posthumous release, such a thrilling listen: Here’s this guy who grew up on Elvis and the Stooges slurring strange, ghastly aphorisms over headbusting drum loops and fighter-jet ASMR. Relentless as it can be, it also sounds like he was having a blast.
Since his death in 2016, Vega’s estate has bolstered a scattered catalog with more straightforward collections, their shared tumult less diluted by the happy-go-lucky attitude peppering his earliest efforts. Insurrection unearths 11 punishing, industrial lost recordings from the late ’90s, throwing his radiant vision and wretched reality into direct combat. More often than not, the reality is winning. There’s something both wrenching and invigorating about his gothic, moaned lamentations—“Oh, the angels bleed”; “Where is the light?”; “Oh, the words don’t exist”—on “Mercy,” a trench fight of a track with downbeats that blast like bombs. Vega was never so much a singer as a drawler; on songs like “Sewer” and “Murder One,” he’s rustling unnerving dictums, somewhere between streetside heckler and mythic doomsday prophet.
Should you need any further proof that doomsday is now, the music here—co-produced by Jared Artaud and his widow, Liz Lamere—is a mammoth, earth-shaking messenger. Listening to Insurrection feels like being trapped in an insurgent wasteland, where arson fires scorch corpse-ridden backstreets and police helicopters whir overhead, searchlights blazing. The gurgling Elvis of Suicide fame is present on “Crash,” except instead of doggy-paddling through a sea of reverb, he’s writhing beneath a heap of scrapyard metal—clipping drums, blaring static, single keys that detonate like a dystopian funeral dirge. The one time the background noise settles, and for just one moment you can clearly make out what he’s saying, it’s “Who should we kill?” “Fireballer Fever” rattles like a lawnmower that chewed up a thousand wah pedals and went rogue; Vega isn’t controlling the beast so much as running from it, wailing in anguished, breathless desperation. Again, it’s difficult to parse what he’s saying, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you’re in fucking Hell. Vega’s Inferno is loud, clamorous, and largely homogenous, but in a bludgeoning, performance-art way. It feels like the sort of immersive war exhibit you have to sign a waiver for.
Insurrection’s track titles invoke varying levels of death, torture, and superlative injustice: “Chains,” “Invasion,” “Cyanide Soul,” “Genocide.” Born into a brazen New York underworld, Vega spent his career taking evil, masticating it to its sonic rudiments, and spitting it back out, often directly in people’s faces. Half of experiencing his work is allowing yourself to suffer, to be under his control. This newest collection is an oppressive, nauseating roller-coaster ride. Once you get off, you’ll want to do it again.


The European philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said, "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." It's high time hip-hop finally figured this out, too.

Meow The Jewels

Cats are the Internet's favorite pets for many reasons, not least of which is their endless mystery. By some estimates, felines were first domesticated around 12,000 years ago—and yet, even now, we humans don't fully understand something as simple as their purr. There are theories. A purr can translate to contentment, sure, but it could also indicate hunger, or fright. Most intriguingly, those low rumbles may double as a healing mechanism for cats and people alike: purrs vibrate at frequencies between 20 and 140 hertz, which happens to be ideal for mending bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. If purrs do indeed have such powers, Run the Jewels' new cat-sampling remix album could very well be the most physically restorative record ever made—there are a lot of fucking purring sounds on this thing.
Before it became an IRL curio featuring the production talents of everyone from Prince Paul and Dan the Automator, to members of Portishead and Massive Attack, to hip-hop heavies Just Blaze and the Alchemist, Meow the Jewels was merely another LOLcat goof. In the runup to last year's Run the Jewels 2, El-P and Killer Mike decided to have a bit of fun with online feline culture as well as fan-gouging pre-order-package culture by offering to “re-record RTJ2 using nothing but cat sounds for music” for $40,000. Soon enough, modern crowdfunding mentality kicked in and a Kickstarter raised $66,000 to get the idea off the ground. The way in which this project lines up with the duo's paradoxical ethos, where they're able to spit the most cartoonish puff-chest bars alongside deadly serious tales of death and strife, can be observed in a recent El-P tweet: “did we make the silliest, occasionally most grating possible remix album? of course. and we did it for you, mike brown and eric garner.” (All profits made by the album will go to charity.)
It's easy, and not wholly inaccurate, to dismiss Meow the Jewels as a well-meaning wisecrack that went several steps too far. Even El-P himself told Deadspin, “I would never even insult the world by saying [the album is] 'good,' but it's certainly the high-water mark for cat-sound records, I think.” So while the way these remixers warp meows, hisses, scratches, yelps, and purrs into passable rap beats is impressive, only a few songs rise above the level of novelty. Part of this has to do with the fact that, you know, this is 42 minutes of rapping over cat sounds, but it's also hard to compete with El-P's original Earth-scorching production, perhaps his finest beatmaking in a career that has spanned two decades.
While some tracks unwisely try to replicate the source material's dystopian energy, the best moments come when remixers go blissfully off-script. Portishead's Geoff Barrow empties out the beat of “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)”, replacing it with a disorienting, subwoofer-shaking purr, a tiny cat-collar bell, and some stray yowling for good measure—it sounds like what “Grindin'”-era Neptunes may have done with this odd opportunity if given the chance. But best-in-show honors goes to frequent Grimes collaborator Blood Diamonds, whose featherlight beat for “All Due Respect” injects some appropriate, non-corny levity into the proceedings, which can otherwise feel weirdly dark.
But Meow the Jewels isn't really about music at all; instead, it's a major milestone in cats' slow-but-inevitable climb to the status of Hip-Hop's Favorite Animal. In the '90s, I grew up with Snoop Doggy Dogg (whose grace and ease in life and on record always seemed more cat-like anyway) and DMX espousing canine superiority. It was a particularly masculine—and perhaps, um, overcompensating—pose during an era of unparalleled hip-hop machismo. There was a sociological element to this: The use of snarling pitbulls as a way for underprivileged men to exhibit control while caught in an unjust system of power. But, for DMX at least, the obsession could also get strange and ugly—the rapper has been charged with dozens of counts of animal cruelty since his heyday.
This century, as hip-hop continues to grow up and expand its borders, the genre's once-strong walls—between mainstream and underground, masculine and feminine—continue to crumble into dust. Run the Jewels itself is a sterling example of this, a duo that could bury any given meathead rapper with outlandish tough talk while also out-smarting any indie-rap dork with vitriolic politics and heart. Meow the Jewels is the result of what happens when cats are afforded more respect and notoriety (largely thanks to umpteen YouTube videos) as hip-hop's subversive streak is allowed to flourish (largely thanks to umpteen YouTube videos). Paving the way to this moment were fellow rap rebels Lil B—the form's most committed rule-breaker—and his adopted tabby cat KeKe, who released a wild, purr-sampling track three years ago; Danny Brown and his beloved bengal Siren; and Tyler, the Creator's tendency to put cat heads on every shirt he can sell. Cats are fascinating in part because of their autonomy: They will most certainly lie down, but not on your command. This is the same independent spirit we desire in our artists. The European philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” It's high time hip-hop figured this out, too.


Gold Panda’s Derwin Dicker adopts a new alias and a new sound, trading his typically lush, sampledelic style for clean-lined house music with a dry sense of humor.

Jag Trax

You might not guess that the YMCA in Chelmsford, Essex, a commuter hub about 30 miles outside of London, is a hotbed of electronic music talent. It’s where town native Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, allegedly played his first show, in 1987, as a 12-year-old with his old band Sub Zero, according to an old bio quoted on the We Are the Music Makers forum. Years later, it’s also where Derwin Dicker, better known as Gold Panda, saw Squarepusher and Aphex Twin perform for about 50 people, even though he didn’t recognize the artists at the time. “They were both completely under camouflage in a DJ booth,” he recalled in a 2013 interview. “It was only later that I found out who they were.”
Chelmsford makes an appearance at the top of Jag Trax, a full-length Dicker surprise-released this month under his new alias DJ Jenifa. On album opener “Dresscode,” a male voice deadpans, “Chelmsford on a Saturday,” over a three-chord keyboard motif with sad-trombone blasts bent wildly out of shape. “White shirt. Blue jeans. Brown shoes,” he continues, as though he were Mike Skinner just getting started on yuppie brunch crowds.
The track reveals a smirking side of Dicker he hasn’t really shown before, except in interviews, unless you count him titling a track on 2011’s Companion “I Suppose I Should Say Thanks or Some Shit.” While Gold Panda owes as much to Four Tet’s warm, intricate electronics as J Dilla’s masterful sampling, “Dresscode” is closer to sardonic house productions like Santiago Salazar’s cool and cutting “Your Club Went Hollywood.” Opening Jag Trax with such a distinctive statement is meant to clearly separate Dicker’s main gig from his side hustle.
As Dan Snaith’s Daphni side project is to Caribou, DJ Jenifa is more club-oriented than Gold Panda. Jag Trax is a sleek and propulsive alternative to Dicker’s historically sample-stuffed style. The breathlessly hypnotic single “You,” off of 2010’s Lucky Shiner, cherry-picks elements from bargain-bin vinyl pressed in India, Mexico, and Japan, while 2013’s Half of Where You Live name-checks Brazil, Hong Kong, and the Japanese island Enoshima. Running these samples through his S950 and Akai MPC, Gold Panda conjures ecstatic, pan-global pinwheels of moods, tone colors, and textures. It’s dance music that can’t be traced to time or place.
DJ Jenifa’s genealogy is more self-evident. He pledges allegiance to Chicago house (“ES1A31Flora”), plays with the intersection of disco and garage (“Trainfilters2”), and serves up lush, hands-high rippers (“Whyileft122”). Still, he doesn’t attempt to fully camouflage who’s behind the moniker. The chiming cymbal taps and beguiling violin figures on “MLL” briefly tricked me into thinking my iTunes had shuffled to Gold Panda, and “Whocares808_7B” wouldn’t be out of place on 2016’s nostalgia collage Good Luck and Do Your Best.
Though the release seems casual and off-the-cuff—it’s a pay-what-you-wish download with track titles that read like file names—Jag Trax is focused and functional. Kick-and-clap workouts “Tuesday” and “TuesdaySTRINGSMIX” are dancefloor tools, for selectors by a selector. But it’s tough, if not impossible, to distinguish the Shazamable highlight of a DJ set on an album’s worth of serviceable house jams. It’s like a toolbox full of screwdrivers: No matter how many variations, or how pretty the candy-colored handles, they’re limited in their utility. Under the guise of DJ Jenifa, Dicker has sacrificed a little bit of the worldly, whimsical charm that makes Gold Panda’s sampledelic Shangri-La worth returning to. At least if you hear one of these tracks pumping out from the DJ booth, you can say you know who’s behind it.


Feigning coupledom, the two singers offer a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it.

Bobby Gillespie / Jehnny Beth: Utopian Ashes

Utopian Ashes

Utopian Ashes is not the most obvious record Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie and Savages belter Jehnny Beth could have made together. A cross between Primal Scream’s frothy, beat-driven psychedelia and Beth’s scorched-earth punk would have been their path of least resistance, and it’s easy to imagine how great it might have sounded. But instead the two opted for something higher risk, higher reward, and much higher concept: a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. It’s a side project in the truest sense, a departure from anything either has attempted with their primary bands.
Utopian Ashes gambles everything on its contrivance. Gillespie and Beth are not a couple, nor are either of them going through a divorce. But while history romanticizes divorce albums born of real-life decouplings—Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights—in truth many of the best breakup ballads were written by songwriters for hire who happily went home to their spouses at the end of the day. Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” wasn’t written about a real divorce, either, but that doesn’t diminish its impact any. Gillespie and Beth were so enamored of the form they had to invent a marriage just to kill it.
Indebted particularly to the soured-love duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, Utopian Ashes commits fully to its premise, flaunting the many ways that a sad song can be dressed up. On opener “Chase It Down,” it’s with disco strings and a wah-wah pedal right out of a Tom Jones record. For “Remember We Were Lovers,” it’s with bluesy Memphis horns, and on the Summer of Love-hued “Stones of Silence,” it’s with kaleidoscopic the Mama’s & The Papa’s vocal projections. Each arrangement is staged for maximum melodrama. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it.
Only once, on the wallowing “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” does the record get so caught up in its imagined misery that it becomes an actual buzzkill. Otherwise, Gillespie and Beth execute these songs with the tact of seasoned studio pros and the vigor of a couple crushing shared Righteous Brothers favorites at karaoke. Gillespie is fantastic; his pleading, ornately cracked voice tests every millimeter of his range. But Beth is the record’s real revelation. Removed from the brutalist intensity of Savages’ records, her wooly voice is tender but unyielding, all smoldering resolve. “You wonder why I never have sex with you anymore? Well, without trust, how can there be love?” she sings on the harp-swept “Living a Lie,” in a seething whisper that cuts just as deep as any howl on a Savages record.
It helps, of course, that they’ve got such strong songs to back them up. At its best, like on the rangy Sticky Fingers callback “Your Heart Will Always Be Broken,” Utopian Ashes sounds every bit as timeless as the classics it emulates. Of all the album’s feats, the most remarkable may be that it never feels like a gimmick. Gillespie and Beth have taken a concept that’s audacious on paper, even frankly unappealing, and they’ve made it soar.

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Hunee, the South Korean-born, Berlin-based DJ gathers a dozen of his favorite dancefloor cuts from across the decades, surveying South African funk, Chicago house, and fusions galore.

Hunchin’ All Night

In 2012, the South Korean-born, Berlin-based DJ Hun Choi felt stuck in a rut as a dance-music producer. He put aside the tracks he had made under his Hunee alias to work for a technology startup. He relocated to Los Angeles the following year, thinking his DJ gigs would soon dry up and he would do something else with his life. “But I realized what I had built as a DJ and in music was more solid than I thought,” he has said. His Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 from last year is as eclectic and as seamless as they come, somehow finding the through line from Japanese new age to Argentine minimal wave, tingly Caribbean zouk to experimental techno. Anyone who makes it to one of Hunee’s sets can testify to his ability to find emotional resonance in the unfamiliar.
In that regard, Hunchin’ All Night, a collection of the DJ’s favorite dancefloor cuts from across the decades, has its work cut out for it by asking 12 standalone tracks to conjure the same magic as a wee-hours DJ set. But Hunee’s deft touch remains intact. He not only spans the globe and makes connections across eras; he also pays tribute to the masters of house and techno along the way, often using the music of Africa as conduit to connect all the dots. And he overlays his earthy grooves with many more ephemeral patterns and resonances as well.
Take the opener “Blu Terra,” by the Portuguese musicians Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro. Originally released in 1991, it’s a bittersweet blend of Indian tabla, Brazilian cuíca, hiccupping pan pipes, mbira, and wordless voices whose converging ethnic tonalities suggest a kind of utopia. That sensation reappears later in the set with Mappa Mundi’s ambient house classic “Trance Fusion,” recorded during the same era. This Belgian duo also conceives of an imaginary place, this one along the ethno-ambient axis, at a time when the Orb and Future Sound of London were just beginning to use electronic pulses to mimic tribal rhythms and to use samples to create surreal new topographies.
Maybe such selections speak to Hunee’s own background as an émigré from South Korea who grew up in Germany, spent time in the U.S. and now calls Amsterdam home. He gravitates toward the thundering Senegalese mbalax of Aby Ngana Diop, but in the form of a slow, chugging remix by Australia’s Michael Ozone, and he prefers mantra-like vocal hooks that add another rhythmic layer to each deep selection.
Hunee has a keen ear for African music. He unearths a South African funk track from the 1980s that anticipates Blood Orange’s heartbreaking boogie by a good 30 years, and he digs up a squiggly, disco-tinged highlife goodie from Ghanaian legend Pat Thomas. He even finds a thrilling 2016 track produced by Bill Laswell that matches an upbeat groove and group chant to the sawed melody of a Ethiopian masenqo.
But the set ultimately isn’t just a collection of African curios, as Hunee deftly switches to stomping electronic and crisp techno tracks in the blink of an eye. He burrows deep to come up with unexpected selections from some of the form’s greatest craftsmen, like Ron Trent, Larry Heard, and Kenny Larkin. Heard’s “Burning 4 You” is a mid-’90s rarity featuring vamping piano atop sampled voices and a deep-house groove. And with a Trent remix of Blak Beat Niks’ ludicrously rare Chicago house cut “Ritual of Love,” Hunee reveals a deeper truth about nightlife. “A dream brought into being, escape from entrapment,” intones a voice; it might be describing the religious experience to be found in the presence of the right DJ, one capable of transforming a night out into a ritual of love.


The boy band graduate remains desperate to remind you that he has sex, eager to insist that he smokes. His falsetto is beautiful, but he’s never sounded like this much of an amateur.

Nobody Is Listening

Amid the constant political turmoil that has shaken the foundations of American democracy, Zayn tweeted his phone number in an attempt to break the internet. Callers could listen to snippets of each track from the former One Direction star’s latest solo album, just long enough to hear him breathe the words “fucking on the windowsill” and launch into his falsetto. Moments after hanging up, a text would appear—“yoo, Zayn here!”—offering the singer’s alleged contact number and a promise to “stay in touch :-) x.” The gimmick revealed a larger gambit: that in the middle of… all this, fans will still leap at the illusion of proximity to a pop star.
This next iteration of Zayn’s music has no hour-and-a-half-long concept albums tenuously based in Greek mythology, no sweeping intermissions or inane opening statements. Nobody Is Listening begins with a wincing mumble of spoken word: “My brain lives with the cannabis/Can I resist the dark abyss/Leave a mark on this with no start, just exist,” he intones, punctuating the words with dramatic piano chords. He oscillates between brooding and breezy, different shades of the sound he’s strived for since he started recording on his own. He remains desperate to remind you that he has sex, eager to insist that he smokes—well-trodden themes in Zayn’s solo music. But he’s never sounded like this much of an amateur, the shimmer and sheen of his earlier music reduced to the rumpled nonchalance of another stoned guy who thinks he can rap.
Nobody Is Listening is a record born of the Justin Bieber school of R&B: blathering and diluted, a derivation of a derivation. “Hope I only leave good vibes on your living room floor,” Zayn croons over Starbucks-core guitar chords on “Better,” before floundering into a mangled O.J. Simpson metaphor: “Like it’s a crime on trial, I got acquitted/Me and you wasn’t meant, we wasn’t fitted,” he cries. “Like it’s a glove, I hated to admit it.” These are billed as confessional songs, supposed windows into his breakup and reunion with Gigi Hadid, but Zayn’s plodding self-seriousness contaminates any sense of closeness. He agonizes over whether to keep his dog after a split, wailing that “when I look at him, I think of you”; he marvels that his “connexion” with a lover can be “digital, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, but physical, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.”
The album’s most tolerable songs fixate on the physical, a pulsating goo of slow drums and reverbed descriptions of skin mashed against skin. “When Love’s Around” builds on a Views-era Drake beat that’s catchy enough to distract from the sound of Zayn moaning about his aura. “We are who we are when we’re alone,” he hums on “Tightrope,” between trickles of guitar and accounts of wrapping his legs around someone’s torso. His words slosh together on “Windowsill,” an indistinct slush of vowels over hazy synths and bass. Then the British rapper Devlin barrels in and punctures the song’s trance, sputtering about Satan and mimicking Zayn’s ridiculous phrases.
In 2015, months after Zayn became the first to leave One Direction, he told The Fader that he disdained the boy band’s music, that he would never listen to it at a party. “If I was sat at a dinner date with a girl, I would play some cool shit, you know what I mean?” he said. “I want to make music that I think is cool shit. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.” Nobody Is Listening makes a painstaking attempt to disguise an endless supply of sweat and sex and cigarettes as a love story. “Baby, this far from mediocre,” Zayn brags about his relationship on a song called “Vibez.” It’s yet another low bar he congratulates himself for clearing—knowing that no matter what he sings, legions of fans will listen.
Editor’s note: This review has been updated for clarity.

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The rising Dominican star carries dembow into the mainstream on this mammoth double album, sanding down some of the grimy genre’s rough edges in the process.

El Androide

Urbano’s various genres and styles come from across the Americas: Latin trap was born in the U.S., reggaeton in Panama and Puerto Rico, champeta in Colombia, and baile funk in Brazil. Dembow is the Dominican Republic’s urbano export, but unlike the others, it has not yet had its mainstream moment. Amid the mainstream success of reggaeton and Latin trap, the rising Dominican artist El Alfa has remained steadfast, churning out dembow hits and becoming the go-to guest feature for other urbano artists looking to dabble in the genre. He’s also responsible for dembow’s highest-profile moment to date, the stunning trap/dembow/bachata megamix that was Bad Bunny’s “La Romana.” If anyone was poised to carry the dembow torch into the 2020s with a massive dembow album, it was him.
El Androide is not that record. El Alfa is still a dembowsero, but his latest LP is all over the sonic map, with romantic trap vibes (“Besalo,” “Enamore”), hints of Jamaican dancehall (“Un Dia Si,” “Singapur”), hip-hop en Español (“El Lobo de Wall Street”), Mexican folk and Colombian vallenato (“Chapon”), and even Detroit techno (“Tecnobow”). And even the dembow tracks have had their rougher edges sanded down with slick production, in stark contrast to the grittier nature of the genre’s underground roots.
At 20 tracks, El Androide is essentially a double LP, with the first half consisting of 11 new songs, and the second half cobbled together from previous releases, many of which can be found on last year’s Dembo$$ EP. It’s a somewhat cynical marketing ploy to boost streams of the album with established hits, but does offer the most complete snapshot of El Alfa’s output over the past year.
And that output has been mostly impressive. One of El Alfa’s—and Chael Produciendo’s, who produced much of El Androide—more impressive skills is a preternatural ability to sequence musical DNA, finding the common ancestry of different subgenres and mating them together to make something new and fresh. Beyond the trapbow, he recruits Yandel and Myke Towers for the line-blurring mashup “Dembow y Reggaeton,” and taps legendary cultural colonizer Diplo to tie the common threads between Detroit techno and dembow on “Tecnobow,” a track that effortlessly interweaves dembow’s machuqueo with a four-on-the-floor beat, lacing a Spanish dembow flow with analog electro textures. And it’s hard to pin a genre on the buoyant “A Correr los Lakers,” a goofy romp with mostly inconsequential lyrics that nonetheless sports an impossibly catchy hook and horn melody.
This is the way you “cross over” in 2020; not by releasing English-language milquetoast pop with Anglo superstars, but by using the global internet to assimilate sounds from around the world into your music and make them your own. It doesn’t always work—Lil Pump’s dogshit verse ruins the otherwise catchy “Coronao Now,” and the straightforward hip-hop beat on “El Lobo de Wall Street” makes for El Androide’s most tepid offering. And dembow purists will likely be disappointed that El Alfa didn’t drop a record with the nostalgic rawness of Bad Bunny’s Las Que No Iban a Salir. But he hasn’t completely abandoned the heads; they can take solace in the fact that he makes a concerted effort to give Dominicans a signal boost, especially those whose music never gained traction off the island. “Hablamos Nunca” is a stripped-down dembow cut that features two OGs (Kiko El Crazy and El Fother) who weren’t always down with dembow—a bellwether of the genre’s sea change. The entire beat consists of drums, a bass line, and what sounds like a truncated guitar sample—and of course, the trademark repetition that makes the genre so danceable. And “Jalapeño,” one of the grimiest songs on the record, features the duo Doble T y El Crok, who hit their zenith as teens as the first artists to bring dembow to the ubiquitous variety show Sabado Gigante, but could never quite match the success of their first hit “Pepe.”
If the expectation was for El Alfa to carry dembow into the mainstream, he most certainly has: El Androide debuted in the top 10 on Billboard’s Latin Albums chart. It might not look or sound exactly like the grimy old school jams that persisted in the underground while battling a classist and racist stigma on the island, but it pays homage to its roots in a different way—songs like “Singapur” and “Un Dia Si” draw directly from the Jamaican dancehall toolkit upon which dembow was originally formed. And most importantly, the beats still knock, and are sure to make even the most determined demagogos—the Dominican version of a “hater”—move their bodies. So even if his sound has veered from the streets, it’s aimed directly at the club, and is poised to dominate the dance floor.


Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s guitar duo collides with noise icon Aaron Dilloway’s inscrutable electronic methods, resulting in a thrilling mutation of all three artists’ signature sounds.

Body/Dilloway/Head

Open the gatefold of Aaron Dilloway’s 2012 album Modern Jester and the phrase “SHATTER ALL ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES'' is unmissable, its bold letters splayed in stark monochrome. Dilloway’s music abides by this chaotic imperative, ranging from warbled abstractions and barely-there tape hiss to crushing loops of found sound mangled beyond recognition. But he also acts as the fulcrum of a dynamic community of experimental musicians from the Midwest and beyond. His label Hanson has provided a platform for countless noisers, and he has released dozens of collaborative albums over the past two decades. Despite the hermetic impulse that drives his solo tape music, Dilloway is always drawing others into his surreal mirror world, where his collaborators’ artistic visions are splintered and reassembled in bewildering ways.
This is especially true of Body/Dilloway/Head, his first collaboration with Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s guitar duo. The union makes a great degree of sense. All three musicians are some of the most accomplished improvisers in the American underground, and in the decade since Sonic Youth split, Body/Head’s three albums have masterfully deconstructed rock music by saturating it with negative space, much the way Dilloway has reimagined noise. But few could have predicted the way this collaboration seems to unravel their respective styles into a miasmic swirl with a black hole tugging at its center.
It’s unclear exactly how this music was made, but all clues (including a statement by Gordon insinuating as much) point to Dilloway being handed a grip of unreleased Body/Head tapes and feeding them through his various apparatuses and effects. Looped snippets of distorted guitar sputter alive and recede just as quickly, and the queasy sound of tape speeding up and slowing down is a dominant feature from the album’s opening to its final minutes. Still, it would be reductive to describe this as a Dilloway album with Gordon and Nace’s music as the source material. Their singular guitar tones, open chords ringing behind sheaths of distortion and delay, remain intact and are pushed dramatically to the fore at various points. And then there’s Gordon’s voice, its oracular drawl made even more mysterious as it is sliced up and reassembled into an inscrutable mosaic.
Music made primarily with magnetic tape has an inherent sense of time-shifting, which Dilloway tinkers with repeatedly. The more he lets entire sections of entwined guitar drift play out, allowing the listener to momentarily forget there’s an extra layer of manipulation at play, the more shocking are the moments of disruption. Are we listening to Body/Head ruminate on this strange riff, or is that one of Dilloway’s loops, generated long after their amps shut off? That ambiguity, as well as the startling passages where time seems to fold in on itself—or stop completely as the tape cuts out—is central to the disorienting nature of the album. We’re left constantly wondering if our ears are playing tricks on us or if, perhaps, our own playback device is malfunctioning.
The bleak negative space that extends across Dilloway’s and Body/Head’s discographies often manifests as quietness. Quietness is one of those magical qualities in music that draws you closer, inviting more attentive listening. The first five minutes of “Body/Erase,” which stretches over Body/Dilloway/Head’s entire A-side, consists of a low, droning hum that spits up soft crackles of noise, almost inaudible if you’re hearing it on speakers without much bass response. Each time I listen it pushes me to the edge of my seat, straining to hear every muted slip of magnetic tape against the head; only once it has my undivided attention does it coalesce into a cathartic mass of sound. This music is demanding—of your patience, of your attention, of your tolerance for cacophony—but the reward is a fascinatingly confounding journey through the fragmented mirror world.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Max Richter's score for the narrative dance piece Woolf Works shows how the minimalist composer has become obsessed with storytelling in the later years of his career.

Max Richter: Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works

Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works

Two years ago, the choreographer Wayne McGregor premiered “Woolf Works,” a narrative dance piece based on three Virginia Woolf novels (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves) at the Royal Opera House. He enlisted Max Richter to pen an original score for over two-hour, three-act affair. The production, by and large, was polarizing, eliciting high praise and violent rebuke. The New York Times singled out Richter’s score, which “frequently veer[ed] into cinematic manipulativeness.” It is hard not to read this an indictment of Richter, but in reality, it highlights how his score is able to stand apart from the piece it belongs to. Now available for the first time, a slightly truncated version of Richter’s score proves something he has been talking about quite a bit in the later years of his career: that his work is unified by an obsession with storytelling.
The score opens up with “Word,” the first movement in the first act (inspired by Mrs. Dalloway). The piece is composed of a chorus of bells, gongs, and sampled human bustling (the bell of Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, traffic in Gordon Square). Seconds later, through the haze, the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice plays. She reads a portion of the essay part of a BBC broadcast called “Words Fail Me,” waxing poetic on the ghostly nature of the English language (“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations”) and the impossible negotiation between private meaning and public discourse in prose writing. It is a stunning way to open the score, and gives credence to Richter’s invisible hand shaping the narrative of the dance.
After the introduction, the next three pieces cleave closer to convention. Apparently, much like Dalloway, the sounds are supposed to evoke the novel’s revolutionary focus on the “texture of the ordinary day,” and here, Richter takes that to mean something closer to rote string arrangements, where dips and dives are telegraphed like a routine ballroom dance. Some of it is quite beautiful, foregrounding his graceful piano playing. “War Anthem,” in particular, is quite similar to some of his earlier work, like “On the Nature of Daylight,” epic scale and all.
The more adventurous side of Richter is made more apparent in the dance’s second act, based on Orlando, Woolf’s most personal work. Inspired by the novel’s transformational conceit, (it tells a fictional biography of a 16th-century male poet who turns into a woman, and lives till the present day) he turned to the “La Folia,” a Portuguese folk dance so wild and noisy that it was associated with madness. Richter's singular ability to meld electronics into classical arrangements breathes life into this idea, and on pieces like the “The Explorers” or “Modular Astronomy,” he deploys electronics that are both silken and pointedly mechanical. He uses glitches, hiccups, and washes of noise to elevate pockets of lonely strings and keystrokes to heights of anachronistic beauty. Other works like “Entropy” recall the squeamish grace of Oneohtrix Point Never.
The score concludes with the sounds of waves lapping in the middle of the ocean, and Gillian Anderson’s voice floats into focus, giving dramatic reading of Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband Leonard. After almost 40 minutes of instrumental music, the introduction of an august British voice is startling. For a second, it can feel too on-the-nose (of course the section about The Waves has waves), and maybe even manipulative to use the letter to elicit an emotional response. But, as Anderson’s voice dissolves into the oceanic strings, the next 21 minutes build to a plaintive, melancholy peak. Richter said that his 8-hour piece Sleep was a much easier work than Woolf Works, and it shows; he was asked to make a musical world for three vastly different novels, united by an almost private language of symbols and themes. His goal with the score was to “evoke the experience of jumping between languages” in order to mimic what Woolf so often does in her writing. Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless.


Eight years after his last album and seven since the crowd-pleasing “New for U,” the Detroit house and hip-hop staple shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of soul, disco, and Latin music.

Andrés IV

Kenny Dixon Jr. and the late James Yancey represent opposite ends of Detroit’s musical spectrum: The former, better known as Moodymann, makes murky house music; the latter is revered for the hip-hop productions he turned out under the aliases Jay Dee and J Dilla. But both native sons are branches of the same musical tree. Humberto Hernandez knows that nexus well. Working at Detroit’s legendary Buy Rite record store, he would play Jay Dee’s early beat tapes in the shop and dare co-worker Dixon to bust moves to them. Using the handle DJ Dez, Hernandez was the DJ for Yancey’s group Slum Village, but he also dropped soul-flecked house tracks as Andrés on Dixon’s labels KDJ and Mahogani Music.
Like his more revered peers, Hernandez is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the African American pop vernacular, be it obscure deep soul, smooth jazz, or roller-rink standards. Catch one of his sets and you can hear Andrés confidently traversing these genres and more at a dizzying clip. His previous albums were just as dynamic, spinning like a restless radio dial and never staying on one sound for long. Coming eight years after his last album, Andrés IV captures all of the above while catching him at a professional peak, coming off a run of singles that was among the decade’s most pleasurable.
Across the first four tracks, Andrés toggles between percolating Brazilian and Cuban grooves, ethereal vocal R&B, and soul jazz. On “Mighty Tribe,” he lifts snatches from Doug Carn’s jubilant “Mighty Mighty” and a Motown dancefloor classic, twines them together, and then sends them soaring. Hear him chop what might otherwise be a coherent phrase into seductive gibberish on “Truth Serum” and the lineage connecting him to both Dilla and Moodymann becomes clear: Andrés cuts through an otherwise familiar groove to find something tantalizing and novel in its depths. And on “Waist Deep,” the way he flips the overly familiar Parliament classic “(Not Just) Knee Deep” is akin to hiking a well-trodden path in a handstand.
In 2012, Andrés inaugurated his own La Vida label with “New for U,” an anthem built from little more than a gorgeous garland of Philly disco strings, one-note Rhodes throb, and a tough house kick drum. Simple and elemental, it would go on to become one of the decade’s most delectable dancefloor cuts, selling out multiple pressings and introducing Andrés to an audience well outside of Detroit. It’s included here, but to say that nothing else on the album approaches its heights would be unfair, since little from the last decade of dance music does. A live version of the song adds a few more wrinkles and Andrés’ own drumming, but it feels unnecessary.
He comes closest to matching the resplendent “New for U” with “Free,” a celebratory house number that rides an echoing gospel organ, tapped hi-hat, and buttery group harmonies. You can imagine it being a crowd-pleaser no matter the occasion: skate-rink birthday party, club night, or wedding reception. Later tracks veer into 132 BPM club fare (“Learn 2 Love”) and screwed-down hip-hop instrumentals (“Run Dat Shit”), highlighting his versatility more than his mood-building. But for most of IV, Hernandez makes clear that he’s a vital part of Detroit’s musical lineage.


Chicago producer Jamal Moss has explored techno's outer limits for years, under various aliases. With his latest release as Hieroglyphic Being, he assembles a powerhouse group that includes Liturgy drummer Greg Fox and members of the Sun Ra Arkestra: Together, they travel to some truly interstellar reaches.

Hieroglyphic Being / J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl: We Are Not the First

We Are Not the First

When it comes to techno's outer limits, there are dabblers, there are explorers, and then there's Hieroglyphic Being. Few have ventured further out than Jamal Moss, a Chicago producer and DJ who also records as the Sun God, I.B.M. (Insane Black Man), and under various permutations of his main alias, like Hieroglyphic Being and the Configurative or Modular Me Trio. Moss' roots lie in drum machines and synths and four-to-the-floor rhythms, but he's equally interested in Sun Ra's Afrofuturist flights of fancy, and his music has been getting more and more free-form in recent years. On We Are Not the First, a top-notch group of collaborators—the J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Bul (or the Journey Into The Unexpected Ensemble; Moss loves his wordplay)—help him travel to some truly outerstellar reaches.
Moss and his ensemble recorded the album during a week of sessions in New York, and while the lineup shifts slightly throughout, it consists mainly of Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen on saxophone and keys; Elliott Levin, a longtime member of Cecil Taylor's ensembles, on flute and saxophone; and Shahzad Ismaily, a member of Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog, on guitar. Ben Vida pitches in with modular synths on a few tracks, and Shelley Hirsch and Rafael Sanchez both contribute vocals—swooping, birdlike incantations and spoken-word, respectively. And then there's Greg Fox, the lightning-handed drummer for Liturgy, Zs, and Guardian Alien, who plays on eight of the album's 11 tracks, and whose contributions are the first indicator that we've left the limits of dance music far behind.
A few tracks still feature Moss' trademark drum-machine chug. "Cybernetics Is an Old Science", strafed by echo-soaked clatter, sounds a lot like the kind of techno that Moss has been producing for the past two decades, just slathered in a three-way duel of squealing saxophones and modular synth. On "Fuck the Ghetto / Think About Outer Space", Moss' loping toms and hi-hats provide the frame for Sanchez' exhortation to choose space over subjection, to think one's way out of the "ghetto of the mind." "Pussy Thumper" rides atop hypnotic, hi-hat-heavy programming that flits between an andante 100 BPM and a dizzying double-time tempo, depending on how you hear it. And on the strutting "Cimitière des Innocents", Fox restricts himself to filling in the space around Moss' programming while synth and reeds run circles around each other.
Elsewhere, though, Fox's liquid timekeeping sets the pace, and that's where the album really takes off. The title track is an 18-minute jam featuring Carter (flute, saxophone, trumpet), Ismaily (guitar), Vida (modular synth), and Fox along with Moss' synths and electronic drums. It is a pulsing, clanging din of chirp and squeal; it feels like eavesdropping upon a dozen conversations at once. The rhythm holds it together; it's chaotic, but it's also meditative, in the same way that being alone in a crowd can be meditative. For all its length, it doesn't really go anywhere; you just drop in and drift along, buoyed by its steady turbulence. We Are Not the First is an album deeply invested in the idea of evolution—of apes becoming upright and then heading offworld. But in its relationship to dance music as it's conventionally understood, the album is less an evolutionary step than a quantum leap into the unknown.


The German minimal house producer returns for his first full-length since 2005's We Are Monster and his sound is as distinctive as ever.

Well Spent Youth

Rajko Müller's unique gift as a producer is his sense of play. His best tracks are the sonic equivalent of page-turners, constantly making room for new sounds, melodies, and rhythmic half-thoughts, constantly in motion without ever sounding like they made a radical departure. When they work, it's in subtle ways: All their parts sound like they belong even when their entrances feel unexpected. Müller tends to stick to house music's basic pattern of one bass-drum thunk every beat and one snare every other, which is another reason it never seems like he's up to anything overtly unusual: There's always a simple rhythm to tie you down if the other ones-- the sneaky, evaporating ones-- don't. In between the beats are sweet, detuned melodies, computer wheezes, and flashes of dissonance. That his experiments don't always work makes me like him more-- it seems like he'd rather hear a track fall short than bend to the rules.
Müller's last full-length as Isolée, 2005's We Are Monster, sounded like a cluttered dollhouse, micro in scale but overflowing with ornaments. It's still an amazing album for listeners who'd prefer a parade of tiny surprises to a few skullcrushing ones, and probably my favorite piece of legitimate dance music to crossover to an indie audience in the past several years. Since then, he's released a few singles and EPs, and an early works collection called Western Store-- basically, a total of maybe nine or 10 new tracks over the past six years.
For people who've followed him-- through the "Albacares" single, "October"/"Nightingale", and "The Fantastic Researches of Yushin Maru"-- the feel of Well Spent Youth will be familiar. It's less cheerful than We Are Monster, still soft but more dissonant and evasive, and significantly more invested in that recurring fascination of contemporary techno, the squelchy noise.
Its most unusual tracks--"Going Nowhere" and "Transmission"-- are so littered with sound that they feel almost random, and while Müller manages to tie them together for a few seconds at a time, the coherence is mostly exciting because of these wild, slippery moments on either end where the music appears to come in and out of focus. He reprises melodic and rhythmic ideas, but to my ears the tracks themselves are never cyclical-- it's flux-music, and music that sounds better when you're willing to be patient with it than when you're not.
In other places, he lapses into moody, low-key house, and in a couple of instances-- "Thirteen Times an Hour" and "Taktell"-- revisits the bright slow-plays that marked We Are Monster. While this record doesn't feel as spirited as his last full-length, I think it's also a different album with different aims. I'd imagine Isolée fans who thought the pretty, toy-like tracks on We Are Monster bordered on twee will prefer the open-ended and more mysterious sound of Well Spent Youth.
The album is the first full-length on Pampa Records, a new label run by the prankish and wonderful DJ Koze (about whom I have a lot of nice things to say, almost all of which can be summed up in a "commercial" he recently made for the music tech company Native Instruments). The label that put out We Are Monster, Playhouse, is still around but has receded into a happy routine. At this point, Müller's music isn't really part of a conversation about the future of dance music. "Microhouse"-- what We Are Monster was classified as-- is an old-fashioned term.
And I doubt Müller cares. He's a venerated producer with a style that people can probably recognize but nobody can imitate well. Hearing him come off a fairly quiet six years with something that doesn't sound at all anxious about being an Isolée album is a show of confidence-- warranted, of course.


On his deeply expressive debut album, the electronic artist SW. refuses to adhere to any one style, covering atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass, deep house, lush techno-jazz, peak-time floor-fillers, and more.

The Album

The artist known simply as SW. doesn’t really do titles. Most of his tracks don’t have them; neither do most of his records. His debut album is called The Album. This edition, via R&S Records’ ambient sub-label Apollo, is actually the reissue of an untitled 2x12” from late 2016 that fans tend to refer to by its catalog number, SUE015—SUED being the Berlin-based, vinyl-only record label where the spotlight-shy electronic musician releases most of his music. Most of SUED’s releases don’t have titles, in fact; tracks on the label tend toward identifiers like “Track 1” and “Track 2.” And SUED’s artists go by aliases that don’t even sound real: SW., SVN, XI, PG Sounds, Club No-No. The lone exception in SW.’s catalog is Reminder, a trio of EPs released between 2013 and 2015. The title is simple, he explained to Resident Advisor: It’s meant as a “reminder of the good things” that have come out of Detroit, Chicago, and the UK’s dance music scenes.
We can only guess at the reasons SW. is so tight-lipped, and what that might have to do with his particular style of electronic music, which is at once ecstatic and guarded: a distrust of flowery language, a delight in tripping up search engines, a desire to keep the focus on the sounds alone? Because his music is anything but generic. These aren’t identikit club tools, but deeply expressive machine jams that draw from the breadth of dance music’s history—particularly the mid and late 1990s, an often-overlooked period for which SW. displays a particular fondness.
Much like DJ Sports’ recent Modern Species, which covered similar territory, SW. refuses to restrict himself to any one style. The album’s 11 cuts cover atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass, deep house, lush techno-jazz, peak-time floor-fillers, and pure, pulsing ambient. A few of the record’s tracks are suffused in chirping birds and insects—a tantalizing bit of rainforest ambience that only contributes to the music’s humid, enveloping feel—and if temperatures run a few degrees hotter than usual, so do tempos. On the mellow end of things, tropical fantasias like “Untitled A2” and “Untitled B1” bubble along around 130 beats per minute, a generous clip by any standard. Full of brushed cymbals and snares, rippling hand percussion, and shimmering synths, they feel a little bit like drum-circle variants of Detroit techno and classic IDM. The bookending drum ‘n’ bass tunes are somewhere around the 140-BPM mark, and so is “Untitled D2,” a bone-shaking techno anthem that’s part “The Bells,” part broken beat.
But the lively way SW. sculpts his rhythms, with an emphasis on syncopated offbeats and glancing accents, means they rarely feel as fast as they are. With a few exceptions, the bass drum is seldom the center of attention. Even on the peak-time techno of “Untitled B3,” the four-to-the-floor kick drum only occasionally breaks through to the surface, leaving it to pumping chord stabs and supplementary percussion to carry the groove. It’s a small but significant detail that sets SW.’s music apart from the vast majority of club-oriented house and techno.
A few cuts never leave the chill-out room—another relic of ’90s dance culture that one suspects SW. would like to bring back. The half-speed “Untitled B2” recalls the moody downbeat of Urban Tribe’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, an oft-overlooked Detroit touchstone from 1998. The drum-free “Untitled C3,” all eddying arpeggios and swirling delay, is reminiscent of Vainqueur’s dub techno on the Chain Reaction label. And “Untitled C2,” one of the record’s understated highlights, evokes the spacey frequencies of Ken Ishii’s early-’90s ambient-techno records—also released, fittingly enough, on Apollo.
SW. has come a long way from the kind of music he was making five or six years ago. Where his contributions to SUE001 and SUE002 are dry, lo-fi drum tracks, The Album is rich, enveloping, and unusually dynamic. No brick walls here: Turn it up loud on a proper rig, and you’re treated to a dizzying array of detail, as drums and synths and samples tumble like a kaleidoscope’s transparent baubles. His tracks don’t develop much: Each one is essentially a long, wide plateau angled, at most, a few degrees upward. But drop the needle wherever you like, and no two points of any given song will sound quite the same. SW. and his SUED colleagues have a reputation for recording their music in free-form jam sessions, and you can hear the influence of that approach across this record: With filters and faders always in motion, the landscape is constantly shifting, yet you’re rarely made aware of any one musical event—say, a new sound entering the mix, or a particularly dominant melody line. Instead, you’re wrapped up in the totality of it all. Hypnotic and immersive, The Album is easy to get lost in. It’s a place that doesn’t require much in the way of words, because all of the essential signposts only point deeper into the music itself.


On these five mostly instrumental recordings from between 2000 and 2010, Sonic Youth dig in and stretch out.

In/Out/In

“I want to tour with Phish,” declared Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore in 1998. “The kind of music we make is more in tune with their aesthetic than it is with any K-Rock or Geffen rock aesthetic. So it’s only fair to us, and to that audience. We deserve each other.” Fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo later claimed that Moore “has probably never even heard Phish… Ninety percent of that is just him bullshitting.” But Moore had a point. Sonic Youth had always had a proclivity for long, improv-leaning songs, from their self-titled debut’s “The Good and the Bad” to EVOL’s “Xpressway to Yr Skull” to Washing Machine’s “Diamond Sea.” If there was any space for that kind of rock experimentation in the mainstream, it was what Moore called “the arena that the [Grateful] Dead created, and that Phish have bit into. We want in.”
Sonic Youth never really entered into that circuit, but the posthumous, nearly-all-instrumental In/Out/In shows the New York band to be spiritual kin with the post-Dead tradition that has held remarkably steady since the 1990s. Taken from various recordings made between 2000 and 2010, the five tracks here could be called “jams,” though Ranaldo (an avowed longtime Dead fan) recently demurred, preferring to label them “extrapolations.” That’s fair, since these sometimes repetitive, often solo-less pieces owe more to Glenn Branca’s forward-driving guitar symphonies than to the Dead’s spacier excursions.
Still, these songs revel in their freedom, and the first decade of the millennium was an especially free time for Sonic Youth. They settled into their Geffen contract, without much pressure to score hits; they owned a studio, Echo Canyon, built with Lollapalooza headliner money, so they could record anything they played; and they ran their own label, SYR, through which they could release music that might not fit on major-label albums. That all explains not only why the tracks on In/Out/In exist at all, but also why they sound so coherent together despite being recorded in different years, locations, and situations. Having room to explore—or simply just to do what they wanted—helped Sonic Youth deepen their distinctive sound.
Hence the floating, Kim Gordon-hummed “In & Out,” recorded in 2010 at a soundcheck in California and the band’s New Jersey studio, sounds like a dream version of the more nightmarish “Out & In,” recorded a decade earlier at Echo Canyon. (Both tracks appeared on Three Lobed’s 2010 compilation Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them, for which I wrote liner notes.) In turn, “Machine,” an outtake from 2009’s The Eternal, plays like a condensed version of “Out & In,” with Ranaldo and Moore’s chopping chords punching through drummer Steve Shelley’s beats like they’re dodging traffic. In/Out/In’s best track is opener “Basement Contender,” an escalating journey that recalls prime Velvet Underground outtakes, and—no doubt because it was made at Moore and Gordon’s Massachusetts home—exudes a mood of happy playing with no goal other than to play happily.
In fact, much of In/Out/In’s charm comes from the feeling that you’re hanging out in Sonic Youth’s practice room, watching them improvise the day away. The band’s demise was surprising, leaving no chance for a farewell album or tour. Ranaldo and Shelley have diligently tended to their archives, and Shelley mentioned recently that there’s not much studio material left, so it’s possible that this will be their last non-live full-length. If so, it’s an apt one. Sonic Youth were always a very social band—supporting fellow musicians, self-releasing records with fans in mind, and generally making people feel part of an informal club that the four members provided a soundtrack for. In that sense, In/Out/In is as Sonic Youth as it gets.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the UK duo’s second album, a groundbreaking avant-garde pop collage from the early years of the AIDS epidemic that grapples with the nature of death.

Horse Rotorvator

Pier Paolo Pasolini had reason to believe that he might be murdered. The gay Italian filmmaker and writer was a breathlessly outspoken critic of Catholicism and his country’s post-war economic boom, an undying champion of the impoverished teenagers and young people that Italy duped with dreams of capitalist abbondanza. He was also hounded by sexual scandals and the ire of political reactionaries. In 1975, weeks before the premiere of his antifascist epic of eroticism and abuse, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini was slain on the beach in the Roman district of Ostia. The assailant, a 17-year-old sex worker Pasolini solicited while he cruised town in his Alfa Romeo GT, used the sportscar to run over the 53-year-old after he crushed his testicles with a metal bar.
Pasolini’s 1959 novel, Una Vita Violenta, eerily foreshadowed these events: The book mentions Ostia and features scenes of adolescents who target horny older gay guys for violent robbery. His fellow director Michelangelo Antonioni called him “the victim of his own characters.” In fact, he was probably the victim of a political assassination carried out by a few goons and a scared, blackmailed kid. The trial was a circus; the culprit recanted his confession decades after he finished serving his sentence. Today, it’s widely acknowledged that Pasolini’s prolonged torture and slaughter were premeditated and motivated by grander aims.
Coil vocalist John Balance pointed toward the cosmic character of this homicide on “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” a highlight of his band’s second album, Horse Rotorvator. Balance fixated on the idea that Pasolini anticipated his own demise in his art: Had he come to terms with it, and might he even have wanted to die this way? The song came out in 1986, when AIDS was massacring Balance’s milieu, and he searched for ways to make heads or, more likely, tails of the carnage. “Killed to keep the world turning,” Balance sang in a world-weary croon that seemed to offer Pasolini up to the great churning gears of humankind as it plowed forth at all costs, like the rumbling rotavator of his record’s title.
Coil braid the track with field recordings that Balance’s musical and romantic partner, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, made at Chichén Itzá, an ancient Mayan city whose inhabitants ritually sacrificed their young. While Coil claimed to resent political music, an activist energy suffused their decision to openly mourn in a society intent on shrinking from disease. Splicing ancient custom and contemporary tragedy, “Ostia” feels like tears poured into civilization’s motor—if the dead were going to be used as fuel, then the grief of the living would give this reckless vehicle some really bad engine problems.
Coil avoided politics, but they were politicized anyway. Balance and Sleazy were perhaps the first queer couple in the wider world of pop to speak frankly about their sexual desires and fantasies. They exemplified candor during a hypocritical era when straight bands donned fetish hats, leather harnesses, and other flamboyant garb on stage, enjoying sexual ambiguity’s frisson, while even the period’s many successful gay male singers either sang love songs to the fairer sex or remained carnally evasive.
From the start, Coil were inspired by the thrill of rattling the establishment’s bars. Born to an academic family (his father, Sir Derman Christopherson, OBE, was a master at Magdalene College, Cambridge), Sleazy came to the United States in the early 1970s to study at SUNY Buffalo, an avant-garde haven. There, he became obsessed with Robert Mapplethorpe and produced a photographic portfolio of boys with ghastly injuries he fabricated himself. Legendary British design firm Hipgnosis hired him when he dropped out: The photos were well lit and, according to the firm’s co-founder Storm Thorgerson, he offered a “sexuality” and a “phallic,” “moody” quality that the company lacked. Sleazy was one of the first photographers to capture the Sex Pistols—Malcolm McLaren deemed his shoot, which took place in a public restroom, too disturbing and homoerotic.
As a designer of LP sleeves, Sleazy became a musical Zelig of the 20th century’s final quarter, sprinkling his poison fairy dust all over the business. He worked on some of the most striking album covers in rock history, such as Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Led Zeppelin’s Presence, and simultaneously all but invented industrial music as a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, a group so iconoclastic that even the punks found them offensive. Sleazy was among the earliest musicians to work with a sampler, which he designed and built with band member Chris Carter. It was during this ascendant phase of his career that he met 17-year-old Geoffrey Rushton.
Rushton, who would change his name to John Balance (and sometimes spell it Jhonn), was the son of a farmer in Nottinghamshire. In his book of collected interviews, Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil, writer Nick Soulsby cautions against trusting all of Balance’s childhood tales, but his background was clearly miles away from Christopherson’s. Balance was a troubled dreamer who developed a precocious diet of psychedelic drugs at a young age, purportedly taking mushrooms constantly, at school, from 11 to 18. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia and he spent time in a mental hospital. Though Sleazy never responded to any of Balance’s bountiful fanmail, they became romantically involved when the younger man was 19. Soon after, both joined the cultish collective Psychic TV with former Throbbing Gristle frontperson Genesis P-Orridge.
The relationship between Balance and Sleazy was one of complementary opposites. Balance, Sleazy’s junior by seven years, was a poetic lyricist and an intuitive musician, wielding a Chapman Stick like a wizard’s staff. Sleazy was a kitchen-sink alchemist, rigging a rudimentary Fairlight digital synth into a sequencer on the groundbreaking Horse Rotorvator. Both experimented with psychedelics and amphetamines while composing, but Balance always ventured farther out, using liquor to reel himself back from desolate, spaced-out mornings. Sleazy crafted their music videos, including the heartbreaking clip for their 1984 cover of “Tainted Love,” set in a man’s hospital room, which ends with a title card informing viewers that the song’s proceeds all went to the Terrence Higgins AIDS Trust—a charity that still goes strong today. The film was one of the first times the music industry made significant mention of the virus. Balance and Sleazy signaled the future of HIV activist art by using their dais to impart an agitprop message, and with a public donation of their own money, they also lit a beacon for concerned peers.
Sleazy was Coil’s anchor, and eventually seemed to play the role of Balance’s caretaker. More even-keeled than his significant other, he funded both their lives and their outré collaborations with his day job directing TV advertisements for global clients like Nike and Pan Am and music videos for mainstream acts, among them kindred spirits Nine Inch Nails and polar opposites Hanson.
Coil offered the two men common ground: a moonlit lair of sex and gloom, papered by woozy tape experiments, ordered by the lockstep beats of emergent dance music and thrumming with a deep mutual desire to upend social mores. Horse Rotorvator’s pummeling opener and single “The Anal Staircase,” like the band’s debut LP, Scatology, was banned in major retailers across their native United Kingdom because it references butt sex. The song contrasts erotic joy with found recordings of a little boy giggling and a backwards, pitch-shifted loop of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This fricative soundscape elicits uncomfortable jolts of static electricity from individually gleeful elements. Coil sought out juxtapositions so sharp they sliced away pop surfaces and revealed queasy cores, hand-carved for queer listeners—just like their contemporary, the novelist Dennis Cooper. The Christmas fanfare on “Herald,” the drag show-style intro of “Circles of Mania,” and guest Marc Almond’s operatic backing vocals on “Slur” and “Who By Fire” are high camp when considered in their own right. Yet Horse Rotorvator paints a defiantly post-camp tableau by setting these qualities against solemn melodies and Balance’s theatrical sprechgesang. It’s as though the costume ball just ended and the attendees were all found dead on the dancefloor.
The album benefits from a New Order-sized budget and no pressure to produce hooks or hits: Their label, Some Bizarre, was famous for securing chart-climbers like Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire huge advances from major record companies after bankrolling the recording sessions themselves. Coil later accused the label of stealing the royalties from their early work, but Some Bizarre had both the sensibility and the capital to finance a weirdo outing like Horse Rotorvator.
These funds pay off spectacularly on the widescreen “Penetralia,” which also happens to be the album’s most direct interrogation of the nascent pandemic. “In the future you’ll learn that survival depends on how much, or how little, you leave to chance,” Balance intones, hardly audible underneath a tumult of programmed drums. He alludes to a “kiss that kills” and free-associates two devastating noun phrases in succession: “Funeral music” and “gay bar.” The song’s bruising percussion benefits from the brass whimpers of Stephen Thrower, who joined Coil in 1984 as more of a supercharger than a third wheel and kept powering the band until 1993. Thrower’s horn pulls krautrock into the age of Thatcher and Reagan, positioning “Penetralia” as a clamorous precursor of Radiohead’s “The National Anthem,” but desperate rather than disaffected.
Sandwiched between the stratospheric highs of “The Anal Staircase” and centerpiece “Penetralia” are a series of quieter tracks, a melange of field recordings and finespun orchestrations.“Babylero” is named for a 12-year-old child Coil met in Acapulco, who sings a snatch of a song by the Spanish group Los Payos, while the diaphanous strings on “Ostia” have unexpected echoes of George Martin. The organization of the disc’s first half mirrors the composition of many of the individual cuts. Layered, often thunderous beginnings part for delicate middle thirds, only to resume their march at the end.
The B-side disperses into electroacoustic experiments that leave us profoundly in the dark about what exactly we’re taking in: the timpani pulses of “Ravenous,” for example, or the reptilian bleats of closer “The First Five Minutes After Death,” which sound like some mystery creature you hear through the brush at night in a rainforest. The Leonard Cohen cover “Who by Fire” draws out a harsher depression beneath the original’s melancholy. Rattling off means of perishing in his Robert Wyatt-indebted deadpan, Balance highlights how Horse Rotorvator is an urgent speculation on the very phenomenon of dying, and the varied ways that cultures across the world tell this universal tale.
His concept culminates in “The Golden Section,” a spoken threnody that attempts to answer the enduring, often weaponized, question of whether the circumstances of death have any existential meaning. The song centers on anarchist thinker Peter Wilson’s writing about Rumi, as read by television personality Paul Vaughan. Was Coil acknowledging, by filtering a world-famous Sufi poet through the scrim of a British narrator, their lives of spiritual as well as narcotic tourism? “We are told that Azrael, Death,” Vaughan recites, “Appears to our spirit in a form determined by our beliefs, actions, and dispositions during life.” He describes how the “soul” is smitten by this so-called Angel of Death who “great prophets” witness in “corporeal form.” This notion—that the nature of a life determines its demise, which might arrive in the guise of a desirable person—feels like a potential rationalization for the cruelty of a lethal STI. Of course HIV is irrational and random, despite the traumatized suspicion among queer people, particularly those who lived through the ’80s and ’90s, that they will inevitably be punished by a higher power for their sexual transgressions.
Throughout their foreshortened lifetimes, the members of Coil received letters from AIDS sufferers and their caretakers, thanking them for making a record that attempted to address the isolation, doubt, fear, social rejection, and pain of their predicament. Meanwhile, Balance never stopped exploring death’s mysteries. Coil kept shape-shifting, from 1991’s acid-house flirtation Love’s Secret Domain to 1999’s ambient landmark Musick to Play in the Dark, and his lyrics sporadically settled on one specific method of dying: by falling. “Ostia” itself uses the image of a beach to connect Pasolini’s end to a friend who threw himself from the cliffs of the English seaside town of Dover. A 1992 non-album track, “Who’ll Fall,” features lyrics lifted from a voicemail message left by another friend. “One day, you know, you’re gonna fall,” the voice on Coil’s answering machine warns us. “Or I’m gonna fall, or something’s gonna happen.”
People who wish to moralize the lives of artists might consider these pals to be Azrael, signaling the finale of Balance’s mortal existence. He and Christopherson split up in the late ’90s, not as a musical duo, and certainly not as friends, but merely as lovers, concluding a romance that spanned nearly 20 years when the virus was all but a terminal sentence. As Balance’s lifelong bouts with alcoholism ballooned, he hooked up with a new boyfriend, the artist and Coil collaborator Ian Johnstone (1967-2015); meanwhile he and Christopherson continued to compose, record, and, somehow for the first time, tour as Coil. Sleazy was watching TV at Balance’s place in 2004 when Balance drunkenly plummeted from a 12-foot landing, only to die in the hospital after his ex-paramour and eternal buddy managed to get him help.
Sleazy subsequently moved to Thailand, where he completed some unfinished Coil recordings, kickstarted a Throbbing Gristle reunion, and immersed himself in a propulsive, dancey project, the Threshold HouseBoys Choir, inflected with the sounds of his new home. In 2008, two years before Christopherson died in his sleep, he made a video for “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” a song that continued to figure heavily into Coil’s mythology. The clip turns away from his late beloved’s uncanny fixations, toward another tragedy from the 1970s: the Khmer Rouge and their heinous reign over Cambodia, focusing in particular on the Tuol Sleng Interrogation Camp where children were often tortured and murdered, sometimes by guards who were themselves kids. A wizened Sleazy found an affection, perhaps enabled by the second act he was afforded in life, for the young who were imprinted with the awful understanding that they were vectors for death. It’s not your fault, he seems to comfort Pasolini’s accused killer, Balance, himself, and all of the queer and afflicted people who stumbled upon his art: You are not the operator at the helm of this evil world.


The-Dream crafted an absolutely exquisite album for his 2007 solo debut. It is a defining moment for the collision of rap and R&B and a pillar of technical songwriting and soulful expression.

Love/Hate

It was Terius Nash’s mother who taught him to feel music: Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Michael Jackson, of course—“Man in the Mirror” was the one he’d always come back to. Some fans had never considered MJ’s mortality until the day he died; but for Nash, that was exactly his appeal. “I’d completely seen all the stars, growing up, as human beings,” he remembered in a career retrospective last year, “and the first person I made human to me was Michael Jackson. If I would have ever seen him, I knew in my heart that I would treat him like a person.” Artists, to Nash, were not untouchable beings whose lives were confined to the stage or the screen; where would the soul fit in all that? It was not Michael’s death, but his mother’s—in 1992, when Nash was 15—which drove that point home. “That just kinda changes your idea about human beings an just living, period: and what you can touch, and what you can’t,” he said. “I’m never going to get her back, the same way we can never get Michael back... These are people.”
Nash had never really dreamed of being the star himself; he just wanted to write perfect songs. He did that best with Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, an already-established writer and producer Nash had met through his brother, Laney—a ’90s R&B veteran who’d worked closely with Babyface, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis. Laney had given Nash his first publishing deal in 2003 when Nash was 26 years old, but it was Tricky who taught him how to produce, how to use an MPC, how to do everything himself. Throughout the early 2000s, the two developed a signature style that, by the end of the decade, would dominate a significant chunk of pop radio.
Most music fans would consider “Umbrella” the essential work Nash (and Tricky) released in 2007, and through the lens of cultural relevance, they’d be right. The song redefined Rihanna as an icon in the making; it spent seven straight weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 (and ten on the UK Singles Chart), had the biggest debut in iTunes history, won a Grammy. All this from a prefab GarageBand loop—“Vintage Funk Kit 03,” which immediately implanted in Nash’s conscious a single word: “umbrella”—and some “ella”s and “ayy”s, “the most insidiously catchy string of nonsense syllables this side of a-wop-boppa-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom,” according to Blender’s 2007 “Song of the Year” designation. Those strangely endearing ad-libs would become the signature of Nash’s search-engine-optimized stage name that he would soon create: The-Dream.
The best thing about “Umbrella,” though, was that its commercial triumph finally gave Nash the freedom to develop his vision—start to finish—through a new outlet. He was tired of the process of shopping his songs around and creating strictly in the context of singles, so he met with L.A. Reid to float the idea of The-Dream as a solo artist. Two days later, Nash was signed to Def Jam; “Shawty Is a 10,” his debut single, was on the radio within a week, and, according to Nash, he’d completely written and recorded his first solo album Love/Hate in just nine days.
“Shawty Is a 10” is the polite name, but in spirit, Nash’s first single—and Love/Hate’s opening track—belongs wholly to its uncensored title, “Shawty Is Da Shit!” Perhaps Nash’s solo turn seemed like a quick post-“Umbrella” spotlight-grab; as if to preemptively squash that idea, the song immediately launches into a charmingly dorky Fabolous verse, with Nash merely providing a safety net of background “ayy”s. (These trademark ad-libs play different roles, depending on how Nash sings them: here, they come in punctuative little bursts—“eh, eh”—and screwed-down, stretched-out layers— “ayyyy!”—) Still, it’s a thorough introduction to Nash’s aesthetic: that plinky, two-note doo-wop piano and the sweet, approachable falsetto. His voice is by no means what you’d call “powerful” like R. Kelly’s; rather, it is a luxury vehicle for his purposefully replicable melodies to which most listeners could easily sing along.
But the most charming part of “Shawty Is Da Shit!”—and the most essentially “The-Dream”—is Nash’s built-in meta-commentary on his own writing process. The hopeless romantic’s answer to JAY-Z’s “No Hook,” Nash’s chorus goes the Magritte route: “Man, I don’t need no hook for this shit!/‘Cause shawty right there is the shit!” It’s my favorite recurring theme in Nash’s writing: these winking gestures that direct a song’s themes reflexively back towards the song itself. It’s a glimpse into Nash’s worldview, a dissolution of boundaries between life and art, where writing a melody is as intuitive as falling in love, and great sex is its own creative triumph. (Moments on Love/Hate remind me of a passage from Eve Babitz’s memoir Slow Days, Fast Company, where she invites a date to a notoriously vibey restaurant: “I thought that going there with Shawn with the rain outside would be an opportunity for high art, if you believe, as I do, that sex is art.”) And in that sense, songwriting isn’t something relegated to the background so that the entertainer might better entertain; to Nash, the presentation is glued to the process.
If Nash’s earliest musical influences were his mother’s soul and R&B records, by the mid-’90s he’d come to idolize Tupac and Biggie for their wit more than anything else. And he’d taken note when Jodeci’s lead songwriter, DeVante Swing, produced Pac’s “No More Pain”, a song that sounded nothing like New Jack Swing—it sounded gangster. Not that the second track “I Luv Your Girl” sounds particularly gangster, with its wispy finger-snap percussion and tender Rhodes chords. But it’s a song that captures, even in its delicate form, the essence of the rap in Nash’s hometown of Atlanta in 2007: an impressionist take on snap&B, straight out of Bankhead. And while the melodies on “I Luv Your Girl” sound angelic, Nash’s lyrics grow more out-of-pocket with every Patrón shot—and more hilarious too. “Part of me feels so bad, but (oo-oooh) not that bad!” he hums to himself as he strolls out of the club, hand-in-hand with your girl. On her birthday, no less.
There’s another seemingly simple line on “I Luv Your Girl” that gestures towards Nash’s broader convictions. Eyes locked with another man’s girlfriend from across the club, he exclaims, in half-rapped melodies: “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing.” You could read that as a straightforward reinforcement of Love/Hate’s blend of R&B and hip-hop, in form and attitude—a development that was still a few years ahead of the game, T-Pain aside. 2007, bear in mind, was a strange year for both genres, sandwiched between the mid-’00s run of hyper-regional ringtone rap breakthroughs and that retrospectively cringey late-00s phase of blog-era electro-pop hybrids (think “Low,” “Lollipop,” and one million Akon features). Like Timbaland or the Neptunes before him, Nash felt completely of this moment in spirit while standing apart from it in sound, coyly incorporating what was happening on the charts in a way that felt built to last—it took me a decade to hear the hints of Yung Joc in his “I Luv Your Girl” delivery.
However, using “influence” as a value metric—placing the focus not on the point of innovation, but the after-effects—can obscure what made the original work so special. In the case of this hugely influential album, it was not just the merging of classic R&B with Atlanta rap, but the way Nash did it—thoughtfully, with constant consideration towards what each form brought to the table. When he raps, it is to set a tone; the rapped third verse of “She Needs My Love” is a defensive squaring of his posture. When he sings, his voice is a piano, hitting notes with the perfect clarity of an idea brought precisely into reality.
In 2013, the Grammys introduced the Best Urban Contemporary Album category to the awards; it’s a purposely vague title, but it’s also a way to make room for records that follow in the wake of Love/Hate—records that sound like what modern R&B sounds like. Although, as Love/Hate’s influence has bled into the fabric of popular R&B, a bit of its thoughtfulness has been lost. “The gatekeepers now don’t know the difference between what R&B is and what rap is—that’s my disservice,” Nash has said. “Every night out the week can’t be fucking hip-hop night at every club.” And so “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing” becomes more than just a fusionist manifesto: It is a testament to the distinct meanings behind both forms, corresponsive but never interchangeable. It may be thanks to Nash’s influence that today’s rap and R&B overlap to an indistinguishable degree.
But it might be Love/Hate’s sense of ambition, more than anything, that’s had the most profound effect on what R&B sounds like today. “I Luv Your Girl” kicks off a fully integrated five-song run—each song transitioning seamlessly into the next. These transitions were by no means afterthoughts; they’re a function of Nash’s writing process that forms a unified composite. As if to further delineate his songwriter résumé from his solo artist ambitions, The-Dream was here to bring you a full-on, carefully curated album experience. “I Luv Your Girl” fades into the sounds of dusk—evening crickets, stilettos clicking down a driveway, the engine rev of a little red Corvette—and we are launched into “Fast Car,” the most brazen Prince pastiche in Nash’s catalog to date. For Nash, creative influences are points of pride—something to honor, to wear on your sleeve: synthesized within his work is the quick wit of Atlanta rap, the heady sensuality of Prince, the melodic precision of MJ.
As “Fast Car” wanes into “Nikki,” its harmonies shift from euphoric to desperate; Love/Hate’s opening suite of fun, sexy bops has ended, and shit has gotten real. After three years of marriage, Nash left his wife Nivea, whose third album he’d executive produced; she filed for separation the day before Love/Hate’s release. On “Nikki” (another unsubtle Prince nod), Nash’s melodies slant downwards, the kick drums land with angsty thuds, and he is insistent that he’s totally over the breakup and has moved on. The tempestuous layers of sound suggest otherwise. “You’ve died in my heart, so g’on ’head and live in his arms,” he spits, hardened. “She Needs My Love” continues the icy mood, even in the bloom of new romance. Territorially defending his relationship against interlopers, the hook’s Jodeci-style vocal harmonies are scuzzed up by martial drums and synths covered in static, and Nash’s allegedly love-sprung lyrics land as paranoid. It’s a post-breakup song whether or not Nash intended it to be—a vulnerable document of navigating the world with your heart smashed.
The final piece of Love/Hate’s breathless five-song run might be the most essential. “Falsetto,” on paper, is a straightforward sex jam—simpler in composition than the dense songs that precede it. But it’s also the slyest example of Nash’s reflexive mode of songwriting, where love and sex and music blur indistinguishably. The song’s basic concept—that Nash’s stroke game can make his partner hit high notes—isn’t exactly groundbreaking creative territory. But the brilliance lies in the interplay between the lyrical themes, formal structure, and the way Nash delivers it all: his ability to make his girl hit a falsetto is as much a hook construct as it is a callback to his own vocal register, which he modulates on the fly to emulate a gently-exaggerated female tone, playing his own voice like an infinitely variable instrument. “It’s all over now, you can come back down, we can talk in this key right here,” he sings playfully on the outro in a satisfied lower register. Stuff like this could easily come off as deal-breakingly cheesy—as could “Luv Songs,” later on the album, an R. Kelly homage that presents its “sex as songwriting” concept with surprising grace. “Let me get that 808 (ayyy!), then a snare, then a kick, then a cymbal,” Nash coyly requests, mid-sex session, and as he does, those elements come stuttering into the track itself. He pulls it off wholeheartedly—a holistic celebration of passion.
Love/Hate’s intensity fades a bit for a pair of cute, crisp love songs, Atlanta-centric and pro-woman: “Playin’ in Her Hair,” a mid-tempo homie/lover/friend anthem that sounds like something Nash might write for Ciara, and “Purple Kisses,” which essentially goes: “You look bomb without makeup, but when you put that M.A.C. lipstick on…” The most fascinating part of Nash’s songwriting career has been his uncanny ability to write not just capably but empathetically from a woman’s perspective. He’s better at it than he is at writing songs for men (see: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”; Mariah’s “H.A.T.E.U.”; Kelly Rowland’s “Dirty Laundry,” a song that relives, in painful detail, a physically abusive relationship.) It’s a perspective Nash didn’t know he was capable of until he started writing songs, but in retrospect, he knows where it came from. “My mother gave birth to me when she was 19,” Nash described. “All her friends, were there at the house, talking about women problems—with men, usually. But I was just previewed to a lot of conversations and a lot of sensitive points, from a woman’s standpoint.” But his desire to understand more fully how a woman might see the world goes beyond growing up surrounded by women. “I felt like I lost my best friend, in one way,” he said of losing his mother so young. “In another way, that was the love of my life.”
After 11 tracks of love, lust, and heartbreak, Love/Hate closes with a tribute to Nash’s late mother. “Mama” is not just a necessary element of Nash’s debut but the album’s emotional core. “This is an interpretation of what a mother tells her son—her only one,” Nash sings on the piano ballad’s intro, his voice aggressively modulated unlike anywhere else on the album, an effect that sounds like being choked by tears. (It’s just ahead of the 808s & Heartbreak curve, stylistically and spiritually.) He sings from the perspective of a mother to her child, echoing his own words with his human reverb: “Sometimes, this road will bear no signs of direction, so rely on your heart to lead the way.” This is the crux of his creative empathy, the driving force behind his songwriting ethos at large: through music, he is trying to remember his mother, to speak through her, to speak to her, in the language she first taught him.
In the voice of his mother, Nash tells himself: “You know that it will be okay. Don’t wander off.” And he tells her back, speaking as himself now, singing through tears: “I wanna let you know how I’ve been thinking of you. Always thinking of you.” And then: “If I could bring you back, I’d do it in a split second.” But in that moment, he already has.