In the early ’90s, B12 were the best example of Detroit’s influence on IDM, and the reissue of Electro-Soma alongside a new compilation is a fearsomely beautiful work of electronic head music.

Electro-Soma I + II

It may not be immediately apparent from the latter-day rhythmical mazes of Squarepusher, Autechre, Aphex Twin, et al., but the futuristic classicism of Detroit techno was one of the key inspirations for IDM as the genre emerged from the wobbly shadows of the rave era. B12, aka British production duo Mike Golding and Steve Rutter, were probably the best example of Detroit’s influence on IDM. The pair were inspired by Detroit originators Juan Atkins and Derrick May and early releases on their B12 label displayed a huge debt to the steel-brazed melodies that emanated from the Motor City in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
In 2017, such an approach would probably consign B12 to a life on the techno circuit. But in Britain during the early ’90s, when electronic music had yet to be ushered into sharp stylistic lines, Golding and Rutter found unlikely bedfellows in Aphex Twin, whose Rephlex label included two of their tracks on its 1992 compilation The Philosophy Of Sound And Machine, and Sheffield bleep techno dons Warp Records, which put “Telefone 529” and “Preminition” on its seminal Artificial Intelligence compilation, an album that would birth the idea of electronic listening music and eventually IDM. Golding and Rutter subsequently signed to Warp and in 1993 the label released Electro-Soma, one of a series of artist albums under the Artificial Intelligence name that helped to define the IDM sound.
Electro-Soma, which is being reissued alongside the new Electro-Soma II compilation, may not have the same historical legacy as Artificial Intelligence releases from Autechre and Aphex Twin but it remains a fearsomely beautiful work of electronic head music. Some 24 years on, the 10 tracks here—a mixture of personal favorites picked by late Warp Records founder Rob Mitchell from early B12 releases and new work made specifically for the project—feel wonderfully timeless, sitting somewhere between the classically inclined melodies of Kraftwerk, LFO’s cold Northern English bleeps, and Derrick May’s artful techno with just a hint of rave theatrics (see the dramatic opening chords and acid lead of “Metropolis”). Album opener “Soundtrack Of Space,” for example, could fit comfortably onto Kraftwerk’s 1978 long player The Man-Machine, second wave Detroit techno producer Carl Craig’s 1995 album Landcruising, or the 2017 roster of Nina Kraviz’s трип label.
Electro-Soma may not have sounded as shockingly new as other Artificial Intelligence releases but it more than makes up for this thanks to B12’s brilliant melodic instincts and inclination for clarity. “Basic Emotion” has a gloriously atmospheric melody that shines like a bright winter’s day; “Hall of Mirrors” takes Derrick May’s jazzy synth inclinations into lingering astral orbit and “Obsessed” uses a whispered hook and steely LFO-esque chords to devastating pop effect. The result is an album that fulfills Warp’s vision of electronic listening music by fitting in enough hooks, detail, and structure to delight the armchair fan. It’s flab-free too, making its point over ten tracks and 55 glorious minutes on the original vinyl release (which this re-release copies).
Such conciseness, while very welcome in the world of sagging electronic music albums, makes Electro-Soma II a harder sell. The new compilation collects a dozen B12 tracks from the Electro-Soma era and is intended to give further insight into one of Warp’s more elusive artists. That’s all very well in theory but for the newcomer, there is little here that wasn’t said with more melodic style and technical precision on the original Electro-Soma album. “Ecliptic,” for example, is a decent enough take on the airy side of Detroit techno but lacks the glassy elegance of “Hall of Mirrors,” while “Fear of Expression” has some of “Metropolis”’s rave urgency, without that track’s rush of cold emotion.
That’s not to say Electro-Soma II isn’t worth your time, just that it has big boots to fill. “Ming” is a wonderfully creepy crawly example of lolloping, late-night fog, while “Bubbles” uses the kind of aquatic synth rush that Drexicya would later make their own, the two tracks giving an indication of avenues B12 might have explored further had they not gone on hiatus from 1998 to 2005. Meanwhile, album highlight “Eilya” is a fantastic example of lush “Basic Emotion” ambience that would have slotted right onto the original Electro-Soma release.
What the new compilation really demonstrates, perhaps despite itself, is how well Rob Mitchell did when compiling the first Electro-Soma album, paring away B12’s more rambling tendencies to find the 10 essential songs within, on what remains the classic B12 release. Take Electro-Soma alone, then, for a direct hit of melodic IDM grandeur or pair it with Electro-Soma II for a more sustained, if diluted, approach. But whatever the case, do let B12 permeate your blood stream.


The Indiana musician Kevin Krauter makes sunny, nostalgic shoegaze with some pleasing arrangements but not a lot of specificity.

Full Hand

Kevin Krauter makes soft, well-worn shoegaze music, kind of like that old sweater from high school you still keep around. The Indiana musician and Hoops bassist’s second album, Full Hand, is first and foremost a spring record; it makes for nice background noise as the sun stays out longer and the grass gets greener. The 12 songs are breezy and genteel, with very little brewing below the surface. Krauter doesn’t make sweeping statements in the lyrics or arrangements. Instead, what we hear is weightless and bucolic, even blissful.
Full Hand cherry-picks and subverts elements of ’70s soft-rock and R&B. Where it would feel obvious to have live drums, Krauter will play with drum machines. When it would make more sense for a song to fade out quietly, Krauter will write an off-kilter synthesizer arrangement. Take “Opportunity,” a honey-coated song about the light coming in from his bedroom window. Resonant keys linger gently, and a drum machine shuffles like a bike on an unpaved road. The song unfolds methodically until the end, where Krauter shakes things up with a left-of-center, vaguely baroque keyboard part. If not for that quiet bait-and-switch at the end, this song would be innocuous: lovely, but not particularly memorable.
It’s easy to miss Krauter’s compelling and complicated arrangements; the record is subdued almost to a fault. You have to put in work to feel drawn into Krauter’s world. A song like “Kept”  feels more aligned with Swedish dream-pop bands like the Radio Dept than it does with polished indie rock from the early 2010s that feels like its more obvious analog. What at first seems like chilled-out disaffection is actually closer to pure melancholy. When he writes about his experiences, he almost always does so cryptically, taking great care to keep things out of view as he sees fit.
The title track is the album’s most fully realized. It sounds like an  AM-radio gold supercut, guitars building to a pool of noise you want to float atop forever over a tight drum groove. Krauter is at his best when he writes these sunny, nostalgic arrangements. A stellar groove doesn’t make an album, though. Krauter writes pretty, deceptively complex melodies, but offers very little substance. Full Hand is a house with no insulation: nice on the outside, but not really a place to call home.

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The fifth album from Adam Granduciel and co. chips away some of their hazier edges in favor of sharper melodies, broadening the borders of the meticulous yet joyously simple sound he has perfected.

The War on Drugs: I Don’t Live Here Anymore

I Don’t Live Here Anymore

The songs of the War on Drugs exist in a world between knuckle tattoos: love, hurt; home, away; dark, lght. They usually begin in medias res, with our hero, the tressy and lovelorn Adam Granduciel, wandering the empty plains of grief with a guitar strapped to his back. He’s down bad; he’s rudderless; he’s desperately trying to find his way out of the rain or pain or chains. Heartbreak is behind him but hope is always just ahead, a pin-light through the clouds in the shape of a mythological figure known only as “babe.”
Granduciel’s continuing romantic odyssey—a long and possibly endless journey—is so emotionally grand, so preposterously epic that even though his lyrics are borderline cliché, it functions more like the shoegaze bands the War on Drugs were once likened to on their first couple of records. Instead of sitting at the front of the music, Grandcuiel’s words drape over his songs like a thin film so that they essentially disappear. You can only hear him sing the words “dream” or “memory” or “lost” or “found” so many times before they lose their meaning and slip into the ocean of music around it. Inside a song, you are neither here nor there, a liminal feeling that evokes so much of our time in life languishing in the middle. Call it meta-heartland rock, but perhaps this is why they have grown from a small Philadelphia indie-rock concern to arena headliners over the last decade: The War on Drugs want to occupy the space between it all, and there is so, so much of it.
On I Don’t Live Here Anymore, the band’s fifth album, Granduciel is determined to arrive...somewhere. It doesn’t matter when or where, for now, just any old spot in space in time: A pyramid in which he was born, a Bob Dylan concert where he danced, an old par-3 golf course where he can work on his short game. It’s a start! This sense of place in the lyrics grounds the songs more, making them less wafty and more permanent. It goes hand in hand with Granduciel’s vocals, newly sharpened and melodic. There are barely any sung notes that end with that kind of adenoidal Dylan slide-whistle fall, nor is there any hooting and hollering at the climaxes of songs, a fond calling card of Granduciel’s greatest hits. Every musical element from vintage synthesizers to even-more vintage guitars is honed and cut clean, chipping off some of the hazier edges of the band without losing the methodical and gorgeous production that Granduciel and his co-producer, Shawn Everett, have mastered.
Admittedly, I Don’t Live Here Anymore doesn’t sound that different from 2017’s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding. Most songs still carry the band’s signature feel: a steady backbeat, the bass and kick-drum almost always in unison, and waves of guitars and synths folding in and over each other. But the War on Drugs’ recording process includes hours of layering, tinkering, and turning of knobs until the balance is just so. The shifts are incremental, and each of the hundreds of choices here feels especially considered this time around. Granduciel puts such a primacy on simple pop melodies—the main element that’d categorize this band as “classic rock”—that the album is gluttonous with simple hooks: this acoustic guitar motif halfway through “Harmonia’s Dream,” that piano riff that towers over “Victim,” that staccato vocal take on “Change.” Take A Deeper Understanding and make it a little smaller and denser; I Don’t Live Here Anymore has more to see and less time to see it.
There’s also the fact that, like A Deeper Understanding, I Don’t Live Here Anymore sounds like one of the biggest, most luxurious records this side of Steely Dan’s Gaucho. The album feels so spatially and texturally interesting, which is difficult to do because Granduciel limits his palette to the primary colors of rock’n’roll (including, according to the liner notes, a bass once owned by Walter Becker). This isn’t “real” music like some errant YouTube comment might suggest, but it’s transparent music, a more direct ratio of instrument to sound, where every guitar and snare and synth coming through the mix sounds exemplary. This is the simple trick of the War on Drugs: It’s easy to ignore the daffy mythopoetics of Granduciel’s songwriting and just listen to the alchemy this band has perfected, a complex machine that produces something joyously simple.
And while you could put on I Don’t Live Here Anymore and take comfort knowing that the War on Drugs have Beach House’d their way to another terrific record by simply refining what works, there are a few songs that test the borders of the band’s classic little world. The confluence of sound and vision comes on “Victim,” an absolute blaster on amphetamines that stands among the best things Granduciel has ever written. You know how “Strangest Thing” had that slow and unforgettable seven-note riff? “Victim” does the same thing much quicker in four notes with a colossal piano riff on a Juno synth. It also shows a more knowing, acidic side of Granduciel’s songwriting. There’s no self-pity or walking through a vale of tears: He’s arrived at a place of knowing one thing about yourself and throwing it in someone else’s face: “Honey I’m a victim of my own desire/Who are you?”
Granduciel has said this record is about change, as he told Vanity Fair, about “growing up, getting older, but also growing out of yourself and into something new.” He steps cautiously into newness, smudging songs with just a little more certainty and specificity. A faint thread of astrology glides over the album (who doesn’t have an astrology phase); he opens a song with a direct quote from Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm”; his old skin is “peeling away.” It’s subtle, because if you ctrl-f the lyric sheet it’s still six results for “dream,” six for “lost,” and three for “memory”—the mirepoix of any War on Drugs album. And yet: Destinations appear, a few answers reveal themselves, a new feeling becomes articulated, and the majority of it happens on the closing track, “Occasional Rain.”
The song is small in sound and scope, a little like intimate U2, maybe even a little like Beach House with all the vibey arpeggiated guitars. If many War on Drugs songs sound like Granduciel softly running his hand alongside a wheat field, here’s one that’s just a little sprout of green. This is the one where, charmingly, he says he’s living down by an old par-3. As the song rolls ahead without a chorus, Granduciel reaches the climax harmonizing with himself like he rarely has done before. “Ain’t the sky just shades of grey/Until you’ve seen it from the other side?/Oh, if loving you’s the same/It’s only some occasional rain.” Maybe this moment is enough, and real change comes not by wanderin’ around looking for it but when you finally decide to stop.

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This lovingly curated posthumous album collects a decade’s worth of unreleased ambient compositions by the late Women guitarist.

Hello People

It’s been a busy season for the former members of the much-loved but short-lived Calgary indie-rock act Women. The band’s singer, Patrick Flegel, recently stepped out with their avant-pop drag queen alter ego, Cindy Lee. In March, their bassist brother, Matt, and drummer Mike Wallace released an album with their intense post-punk outfit Preoccupations. The final member of Women, guitarist Chris Reimer, went to bed one night in February 2012 and never woke up—but he, too, has a new record out this spring.
There were many shocking facets to Reimer’s death from heart complications at 26: its suddenness; his young, prime-of-life age; the fact that it came just as he was forging a path forward after Women’s infamous onstage break-up by joining indie-folk stompers the Dodos. Reimer’s sister Nikki coped by making the mourning process communal, launching a memorial blog that quickly transformed into a digital storehouse of photos, live performances, and articles about Reimer. That outpouring coincided with the establishment of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society, a group of family and friends that has created a digital catalog of his multidisciplinary work, commissioned animated short-film tributes to Reimer, and donated money in his name to support young people studying music and dance.
Now, the group that has been instrumental in preserving his legacy is helping to unveil a new dimension of it, with Hello People. For the better part of a decade, Reimer had been stockpiling ambient compositions that he never got around to releasing. Some of these appeared on a limited-edition 2012 cassette fundraiser for the Legacy Fund, titled The Chad Tape and recorded with musician and producer Chad VanGaalen shortly before Reimer’s passing. But Hello People offers a more thorough representation of the breadth of these private recordings, spreading 15 very different pieces over 65 minutes and four sides of vinyl. Delicate and playful at times, dark and foreboding at others, the collection forms a collaged portrait of an artist who was always seeking new pathways to access the most elemental emotions, from joy to dread.
Some of these recordings may have been rough sketches that Reimer intended to elaborate on later. “Hongdi,” one of the few tracks that features drums, is a desolate, windswept apparition of Slintian post-rock that dissolves just as it seems to be coalescing, while the brief snippet “Mustard Gas” could be a Women song stripped down to nothing but Reimer’s tense electric-guitar curlicues. Even this collection’s lone traditionally structured song, “About,” emphasizes a sense of absence: Over a percolating guitar refrain, Reimer lays down an acoustic melody and a whispered vocal that’s barely audible above the strums. On its own terms, the song is a poignant foray into Elliott Smith-style melancholia; in light of Reimer’s passing, it’s devastating to hear his voice fade into the ether.
More than simply showcasing Reimer’s unreleased experiments, Hello People puts us right there beside him. This is a record where tape hiss, ambient room sounds, muffled background dialogue, and fidgeting equipment play as big a role as any proper instrument. But on the album’s trio of captivating extended pieces, Reimer explores variations on a theme until all sense of time and place is lost: The mesmerizing fog of “Beneluxx” conjures the same weightless, uneasy sensation as Boards of Canada’s early ambient pieces; by contrast, “Wallpaper 6 (extenze edit)” is a warm, churchly organ drone that feels like the build-up to a Spiritualized epic. In a perfect world, some hip entrepreneur would license the analog-synth starbursts of the hypnotic “Arpeg” and program them into a sound machine to soothe crying babies.
It isn’t just the recordings that sprawl beyond the 10-minute mark that strike a deep emotional chord. The brief track “French Death” opens Hello People with the pluck of an acoustic-guitar string, suggesting that some stripped-down, folky instrumental will follow. But Reimer immediately pulls back the dusty curtain to reveal a gorgeous 3D soundscape, its eye-socket-swelling synth texture bleeding like a red sky at sunset. It may be impossible to distill a life into 66 seconds of sound, but this succinct track embodies Reimer’s defining qualities: It’s welcoming, industrious, full of surprises, and gone far too soon.


With a menacing sound and bleak but playful lyrics, the Norwegian noise-rock trio stands out from the pack on its debut EP.

Jumping/Dancing/Fighting EP

Browse the tourism website for Oslo, Norway and the capital presents itself as a vibrant panorama of pastel storefronts, fjordside dining, and sleek modern architecture nestled between snow-capped mountains. In the eyes of local noise rock trio Hammok, though, the city takes on a gloomy facade–a contrast long documented by the country’s black metal starter pack. Jumping/Dancing/Fighting, their debut EP, suggests the best way to get through the woods is by throwing punches and busting moves, no matter how idyllic the scenery around you is. In just under 20 minutes, Hammok present their case for nihilism as peace of mind, letting searing guitars riffs and combative drumming replicate the sensation; the louder the wall of sound, the less there is to feel.
Singer-guitarist Tobias Osland and drummer Ferdinand Aasheim are childhood friends who spent the past decade playing in numerous projects together. They started Hammok during lockdown in early 2020 at the age of 22. Alongside bassist Ole Benjamin Thomassen, they snuck off to their studio for daily songwriting sessions to cope with the isolation. While an eerie silence enveloped the world, Hammok defined their own menacing sound as a band raging from within: needling guitar runs anchored by foreboding power chords, basslines pummeling the very fuzz pedals they’re filtered through, and kick drum that triples in speed only to be swallowed by crashing cymbals and tom fills. The fury on display in Jumping/Dancing/Fighting brings to mind the sheer volume of Unsane and the tonal sprightliness of the Fall of Troy.
What makes Hammok’s debut EP stand out among the relatively straightforward field of noise rock is their clever interplay between music and lyrics. The band elevates the genre as a vehicle for lending weight to confessional thoughts by also offering solutions, however bleak they may be. “It’s okay to be dead inside/Just feel around,” Osland yells on “J/D/F,” as if the secret to beating depression is finding a cozy spot to curl up in its endless caverns. Come the song’s end, he snakes a new guitar riff through reverb, its major chord relief offering a tangible sense of hope. On “Contrapoint,” Hammok deliver a pop commandment—dance the pain away—with cathartic, blood-curdling screams. “It’s the only point for me to prove/That it’s all for nothing,” growls Osland, his clean enunciation and surprising pitch echoing that of Touché Amoré singer Jeremy Bolm. Even the disjointed piano notes that open “Smile,” a comparatively tame number about the pitfalls of social media, act as a centering point when the whirr of stressors in the lyrics overwhelm. These moments indicate how Hammok reach beyond the genre’s simple formula—write the heaviest riffs possible, turn up the distortion, play loud—in search of a more memorable and haunting effect.
With all but two of its songs clocking in around the two-minute mark, Jumping/Dancing/Fighting is a robust, unified collection that flies by, in part thanks to the band’s own Osland juggling producer duties with a keen eye for clarity and tension. On first listen, it almost feels like a fever dream: a sudden, chaotic spiral that clouds your view before abruptly dissipating with “Outro.” In reality, Jumping/Dancing/Fighting is a polished introduction that posits Hammok not merely as noise-rock newcomers, but also erudite students of the genre who hit the ground running.


Famed singer-songwriter enlists Brian Eno to create the sort of newfangled electronica-meets-classic-rock album that Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton attempted last decade.

Surprise

Here's to the noughties, Mrs. Robinson. Or should I say the 1990s: Paul Simon has arrived at his rock 'n' roll contemporaries' midlife crisis a decade or so late, and not in the good, fashionable way. As the 20th century wound down, elder statesmen such as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton dabbled in newfangled electronica-- and whippersnapper David Gray sold six million before Bob Dylan could contemplate following suit. At the time, Simon was busy flopping a musical, 1997's The Capeman, and prepping 2000 safety-move You're the One. On Surprise, Simon & Garfunkel's better half signs up an, ahem, hot young knob-twiddler-- 57-year-old Brian Eno-- to handle "sonic landscape" (haw haw actual liner note!) on half-formed tone poems that live down to the self-absorbed, vapidly mystic, utterly clueless conception of Baby Boomers one sees in TV commercials.
It appears Simon is still narcissistic after all these years. While that's not inherently bad, here it's ill-advised. Surprise drowns in signifiers of experimentalism-- wobbly U2 electric guitars, drones, whizzes, and oh-em-gee programmed beats-- that already sounded stale when "electro-folk" was actually a fad. Meanwhile, when Simon isn't probing the mysteries of aging, he's singing about his own writer's block. "Locked in a struggle for the right combination of words in a melody line," he begins on "Everything About It Is a Love Song". On "Sure Don't Feel Like Love", Simon waxes even more meta-- "Thing about the second line?"-- but clunky thing about it really is that "the poet" just rhymed "school" and "fool" in two straight songs, and his one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting. Even Simon's welcome bursts of wry humor are self-centered: "I'm paintin' my hair the color of mud," he Jason Mraz drawl-raps on outrageously unfunky "Outrageous". Eno is Simon's Just for Men.
Narcissism, it turns out, is just the metaphysical underpinning for a bunch of post-hippie New Age nonsense. "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?" Simon repeats on "Outrageous". The answer? God. Oh. Raga-like "Beautiful" describes adopting children from Bangladesh, China, and Kosovo. They're beautiful. Proggy "Wartime Prayers" goes mealy-mouthed political, its gussied-up choir a weak contrast to Neil Young's impassioned legions on the recent Living With War, while "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean" shows off Simon's knack for huge, simple metaphors before stumbling on adolescent wordplay: "Nothing is different, but everything has changed". Wait, wasn't that a Ben Lee electro-folk song? Opener "Why Do You Live in the Northeast" says we're all the same, even if some of us eat rice, and poses another rhetorical Q: "If the answer is infinite light, why do we live in the dark?" Here I'm still trying to figure out if the theater's really dead.
Given how much recent indie pop owes to Simon, he probably coulda cleaned up with a Rick Rubin nostalgia treatment. It'd be kinda neat that he didn't-- if the results weren't so vainglorious. "I don't pretend that I'm a mastermind with a genius marketing plan," Simon sermonizes. Closer "Father and Daughter" is the most conventionally light-jazzy thing here-- the only track without an Eno-scape, it originally appeared on The Wild Thornberrys soundtrack. And while it's better than, say, Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses" it won't replace "Daughters" as daddy/daughter wedding dance. Still, pulsating runaway tale "Another Galaxy", with the album's finest melody, shows Simon's compass hasn't totally slip-slid yet.
Contractually mandated "surprise" pun: In the end, Eno really isn't one. Talking Heads' 1980 Remain in Light owed as much to African polyrhythms as Simon's wildly successful Graceland did six years later. Moreover, Simon has always changed trappings from album to album, bringing on Nile Rodgers and Philip Glass for 1983's underrated Hearts and Bones and looking to Brazil for 1990's Rhythm of the Saints. But while a trendy folk-rock arrangement initially made "The Sound of Silence" a hit, memorable songs made Simon & Garfunkel worthwhile. On Surprise, Simon neglects his strengths, and the record's Plastic Eno Band mud paint can't bring them back.


Paring her sound back to little more than her skillful guitar-playing and deep, husky voice, the London songwriter explores the aftermath of a breakup with confidence and repose.

Lianne La Havas

Lianne La Havas’ first two albums were lush blends of pop-R&B, rock, and folk music, steeped in her six-string acoustic guitar and warm, lilting voice. On 2015’s Blood, the London-born songwriter explored her Jamaican and Greek heritage alongside meditations on love, displaying her ear for winding melodies and a fondness for dreamily poetic lyrics. On La Havas’ earthy self-titled third album, however, she pares her sound back entirely for a folk-soul style filigreed with little more than her skillful guitar-playing and deep, husky voice. The approach serves a breakup album that excavates a failed relationship with bracing vulnerability, in the process revealing a statement of purpose and artistry that La Havas has worked toward for years.
Lianne La Havas is about the singer’s whirlwind relationship with a musician in Los Angeles, and a breakup that spurred a move home to London to piece together the music she’d been working on and take stock of her own personal growth. It’s a theme that she’s touched on before—portioning an ex’s thoughtlessness into heartbreaking parts is some of her bread and butter—but here it comes into focus through sparse instrumentation and a complicated rendering of the mental flux that comes with realizing it’s time to move on. “Knowing my head from my tail isn’t easy for me,” she admits on “Please Don’t Make Me Cry,” an ambling highlight that features Nick Hakim playing the record’s only electric guitar. Later, on the beatific “Sour Flower,” La Havas offers a thesis: “I’m done settling for so much less than I knew I deserved.”
Yet for as much as the album is about separation—from a person, a place, or disruptive thought processes—there’s never an air of crisis. La Havas is in repose throughout, confident in her needs and desires. “Could make a baby tonight/Throw my life away,” she sings off-the-cuff on “Read My Mind,” a breezy tropicália-inspired song that coasts on sauntering drums. Her melodies evoke the rush of new romance, a theme that perfumes the first half of the album with sensuality. She also took a break from smoking and drinking around the time she started recording, resulting in a clarity to the grain of her voice that shades her admissions with intense candor.
Lianne La Havas streamlines her impulse to blend styles, while still taking the time to nod toward pioneers. On “Bittersweet,” she lifts a guitar line from Isaac Hayes’ 1971 medley “Ike’s Rap Part III/Your Love Is So Doggone Good” and braids it with hummed vocal melodies: “Now my sun’s going down,” she muses, rounding out the last word with knowing acceptance, “telling me something isn’t right.” La Havas sounds stronger for the doubt, trusting her inner voice to see her through. On a cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes,” her smoky range reveals itself as a natural conduit for Thom Yorke’s mental discord. She slows the stuttering drums of the original song to a resounding heartbeat and accents it with vocoder and keys, revealing new wrinkles by adhering to her determined simplicity. By the time La Havas arrives at the crescendo, voice cracking over handclaps and multi-tracked backing vocals, the song becomes as much hers as it is theirs.
La Havas’ featherlight guitar work is informed by jazz (she taught herself how to play through YouTube tutorials as a teenager), but she leans into knotty folk melodies with equal dexterity. Joni Mitchell’s Hejira is a touchstone here, evident in the meandering turns on “Can’t Fight” and “Green Papaya,” both detailed with delicately fingerpicked notes that trail after each other like ellipses. Her deft skill on guitar famously caught the attention of Prince, who became a mentor and champion of her work before his death in 2016. His loss is among several that La Havas endured while writing the album, something she nods to obliquely with the closing “Sour Flower,” named for a phrase her late great-grandmother used to describe a personal hardship. But the song’s outro manifests La Havas’ sense of overcoming, commingling double bass, piano, and guitar into an exuberant jam session. Throughout the album, each supplementary instrument—a spare flute here, a cello and viola there—lends the music texture and depth.
La Havas’ most profound moment appears on “Paper Thin,” the album’s crushing centerpiece. “It’s your life, but you’re not the only one who’s suffering,” she sings, laying out in generous terms why the relationship no longer serves her. “I know you’re made of better stuff.” Her voice sounds on the verge of tears, tremulous and rich with vibrato. Filled out with guitar, drums, and a low bassline, “Paper Thin” is one of La Havas’ most spare and plainspoken songs, yet it’s a showstopper. Free of expectations and radiating self-assurance, La Havas lets each unvarnished moment stand powerfully on its own.

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On its debut album, the UK duo spins deadpan tales about the mundanities of existence over a desolate, desert backdrop recalling PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.

King Hannah: I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me

I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me

King Hannah are a band from Liverpool, but that’s not to say they’re a Liverpool band. The duo—comprising life-long local Craig Whittle and Welsh expat Hannah Merrick—feels less a product of the city’s storied rock’n’roll lineage than of its geographic significance: As a port city, Liverpool historically served as the waystation through which American roots music was imported into the UK and absorbed into the British bloodstream. King Hannah’s debut album, I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, presents a group whose hearts belong to the American South, projecting their songs onto a desolate desert backdrop of broken-down blues and voodoo grooves. But their heads are very much stuck in their home lives, as they ponder the peculiarities and mundanities of existence with equal doses of weariness and absurdist humor.
King Hannah songs typically begin with an ominous rumble before gradually erupting into spark-shooting discord, following a similar path from the swamp to the scrapyard as Nick Cave and PJ Harvey before them, while coasting on a dirty-dub undercurrent that suggests a truckstop Portishead. But Merrick and Whittle are no southern-gothic cosplayers or film-noir fetishists. They may be embarking on a hellbound Route 66 road trip that many have traveled before, but their preferred topics of conversation include Steve Carell, go-karts, bedwetting, and fantasizing about your ex choking on dumplings.
As legend has it, Whittle first spotted Merrick singing in at an open-mic night and was instantly inspired to make music with her, but the two didn’t formally meet until two years later when, by pure happenstance, they found themselves employed at the same pub. You can understand why he was so taken with her: Merrick is a fascinating frontwoman who both embodies and upends the femme-fatale archetype. Her voice rarely rises above a smoke-ringed sigh even as the mix creeps into the red, her Welsh accent adding enigmatic inflections to the most common phrases. And that no-fucks-given nonchalance just makes her words feel that much more withering. On the prowling “Big Big Baby,” she dresses down an ex-lover with a single killer couplet: “I heard you got a lady pregnant/Well, I can only wish her well/Cuz soon you’ll have a bigger baby in the family than yourself.” But in that same dead-cool voice, she fesses up to her childhood enuresis—and the embarrassing nurse visits that resulted—on “All Being Fine,” suggesting that she’s, if not outright traumatized, then at least humbled by the memory.
For much of the record, Whittle gamely plays the silent partner, using his guitar like a weather vane that summons the inevitable storms. The seven-minute centerpiece “The Moods That I Get In” starts out as King Hannah’s “On the Beach” and ends up being their “Cortez the Killer,” as Whittle slowly piles on the feedback shards, serrated twang, and gut-wrenching solos. But in those rare moments when Whittle and Merrick do share the mic, we get charming glimpses of two misfits bonding over their eccentricities. The title track is a winsome stoner-country duet that recalls the quirky, self-effacing conversations between Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile on Lotta Sea Lice. And on “It’s Me and You, Kid,” they effectively turn their own origin story into a curtain-closing musical number: “I thank god the day we met in the gross bar/We’re doing it, so that we can live our whole lives just doing this,” Merrick reveals, before the song’s exultant chorus crashes in like an avalanche of confetti. It’s a rare moment of sing-along celebration from a duo that otherwise speaks in disquieting tones and deadpan one-liners, and it’s a deserved one: King Hannah’s music may initially conjure journeys down America’s lost highways, but they’re well on their way to building a world all their own.


The album Sam Ray envisioned as his last begs close listening, but punctuated with impenetrable harshness, it is almost prohibitively scattered.

Fucking Bliss

Death has a way of magnifying an artist’s life. Suddenly, there’s a cliff where their output ends; absent new work, fans and critics are left to analyze and dissect what’s left, and to begin to define some sort of legacy. Some artists, aware of their imminent demise, may try to get out in front of the posthumous obsession. David Bowie, secretly suffering from liver cancer, created the complex and beautiful Blackstar as a “parting gift,” and died just two days after its release. The French artist and writer Édouard Levé had similar foresight, drafting a novel about suicide 10 days before taking his own life in 2007. “Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life,” he wrote, pondering the nature of his own remembrance.
It is Levé who inspired Sam Ray to record fucking bliss, his own last will and testament, over the span of nine days in 2015 during “a horrifying, awful time” when he felt certain he would be dead before the release of his next record. Thankfully, Ray lived to see that record, Teen Suicide’s final release It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot. He is happily married, irreverently tweeting, and touring with his band, now renamed American Pleasure Club. fucking bliss, then, is a sort of memento mori, a brief, dense peek into Ray’s mind as he imagined his own mortality.
A set of photographs included with the record recall the nature shots Ray posted on the band’s Tumblr around the same period, but these are interlaced with trauma: A picture of a lake at sunset is followed by a hand covered in blood. Sandwiched between a lyric sheet and band biography is a photograph of a man, face blacked out with Sharpie marker, injecting himself with a needle.
At its worst moments, fucking bliss can feel similarly jarring. Album opener “the miserable vision” pairs Ray’s breathy vocals with plaintive, simple piano. The facade begins to crack after a minute, when a booming voice cuts in with the force of a bass drop at a poetry reading. Things return to normal for another minute or so before the song makes an emergency landing—suddenly, it’s a pounding dance number played through an amplifier from hell, feedback sputtering like sparks flying from a power saw. Devoid of context, it can feel like Ray is trolling, or testing the listener: “Can you handle it?” the song asks, eyebrows raised. Five tracks in, the jittering, anxious synths of “ban this book” are punctuated by walls of harsh noise, as if to say, “Are you sure?”
Ray’s eclectic output ranges from IDM as Ricky Eat Acid to emo rock as Teen Suicide and Julia Brown, but fucking bliss most clearly focuses on his electronic work. “hello grace,” a halting, candy-coated track featuring soft female vocals and a punchy drum machine, is reminiscent of “In my dreams we’re almost touching,” the beautifully weird, Drake-sampling number from Ricky Eat Acid’s Three Love Songs. “it’s everything to me,” rich with warped, shimmering strings, shares the sonic universe of Ray’s warbly EP am i happy, singing_. But as the album concludes with “faith,” Ray blends the muted guitar of his earlier work with his dark brand of deconstructed pop. Over an acoustic guitar played so limply one fears he’s falling asleep, Ray’s Auto-Tuned vocals barely mask their own desolation. It is the same bleakness found on Teen Suicide tracks like “grim reaper” or “bad vibes forever.”
Each of these songs is uniquely glum, but together, they fail to coalesce into a greater whole. Ostensibly meant as messages left behind, they feel too dense, too layered, too rich with signifiers. What could the crashing drums on “what kind of love?” have meant to Ray’s fractured mind? What about the trap beat mixed with cheery piano on “dragged around the lawn”? No explanation is offered in the lyrics, which are barely audible, pitched down or mixed too low to be meaningful to the human ear. As a concept, the album begs close listening, but punctuated with impenetrable harshness, it is almost prohibitively scattered. Perhaps Ray, whose career as a musician has been defined by bratty immaturity interspersed with moments of beauty, created exactly the impression he would have wanted to leave.


Jessy Lanza leans into low-lit club pop (and picks up a saxophone) on an album whose breezy mood feels inspired by her new home of Los Angeles.

Love Hallucination

Jessy Lanza’s music carries an air of indelible, charged intimacy. The Ontario-born producer likes to lock into a yearning sweet spot by way of suggestive lyrics delivered in a whispering falsetto and snaking, rhythmic bass that pumps like blood. Her light touch gained sinewy confidence on 2020’s playful All the Time, traipsing between vulnerable confessions and whimsical asides over an energetic, shapeshifting backdrop. On her fourth album, Love Hallucination, Lanza leans into her vision of low-lit club-pop, R&B, and footwork with even greater assurance, finding value in both unbridled lust and complicated heartbreak against a collage of steely, hypnotic electro-pop.
As with All the Time, Love Hallucination marks another period of change in Lanza’s itinerant life. Following a move from New York to San Francisco, she’s now settled in Los Angeles, a locale that informs the new album’s breezy, limber mood. She brings an observant lens to heady desire, pairing her findings with straightforward, instantly appealing pop hooks. “I’m not good at saying no,” she admits on the upbeat standout “Limbo,” a co-production with German DJ Tensnake that channels the rush of an irresistible fling into an elastic bassline and sugary backing vocals. The chorus exemplifies Lanza’s vivid, hopscotch phrasing, spelling out the title in a cheerleader chant that becomes a wistful plea by the time she elongates that final, breathy “oh.” “Midnight Ontario,” an R&B ballad featuring co-production by Jacques Greene, circles a two-step beat until its full-screen, hypnagogic chorus. It bears out the album’s success in joining Lanza’s laid-back style with fellow producers eager to bend club influences to fit her featherlight presence.
Janet Jackson has long been one of Lanza’s north stars, but the comparison is especially salient across Love Hallucination. She draws on the superstar’s frisky sensuality more than ever on “Marathon,” a spangled, finger-snapping standout originally written as a demo for another artist. Lanza transforms it into something buoyant and outwardly lustful; the sultry workout peaks with an ecstatic, surprising sax solo she played herself. (“Show me you can run it like a marathon,” sung in a sweet melody, ranks among Lanza’s most memorable refrains.) On the dreamy “Casino Niagara,” she channels Jackson over a delayed beat and nodding bass that keep uneven pace behind lyrics about a fraught relationship. “When you’re close it makes me feel like/I just wanna burn it down,” she murmurs.
Across Love Hallucination, uncertainty and self-doubt play against sneaky self-confidence. Opener “Don’t Leave Me Now,” inspired by Lanza’s experience of nearly being struck by a car in L.A., rattles at a gently accelerating pace as Lanza intones her anxieties, never settling long before the beat switches. She reaches a true stride on “Don’t Cry on My Pillow,” a kiss-off haloed by chirping background vocals. “Don’t call my mom/… Don’t play my Rhodes,” she seethes to an ex, capping a salty list of “don’ts” with a revelation of strength: “Don’t tell me I’m too soft on myself or anyone.” Quiet humor and personal resilience are common threads, even in the album’s more oblique moments; the billowy synth ballad “I Hate Myself” cribs a self-deprecating lyric from a Prefab Sprout song (“I hate myself/You’re so cool”) and twists it into a bittersweet, chilled-out mantra. It’s a respite with irreverent flair and subtle production wrinkles, like when she drops the occasional filtered cough into the mix.
Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all. On closer “Double Time,” the drums land in aqueous slow motion, submerged in reverb that insulates Lanza’s delayed vocals. “Still I want you/Double time,” she sings, winking to the lazy tempo, as if to say, Just because it goes by fast, doesn’t mean it can’t feel slow. Like the rest of Love Hallucination’s eclectic, bolder approach, it’s a slight pivot that rewards in full.


This Trent Reznor-produced record is following the In Rainbows price model, but just as importantly is the work of one of the few artists who can pull off the hip-hop/rock interchange.

Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!

There's two novel ideas at work behind this album, but only one of them's getting much attention. Trent Reznor has been pretty upfront recently about his general disdain with the way the music industry works, encouraging concertgoers to share his music and going public with his irritation at the cost of his own CDs. It became apparent once Reznor parted ways with Interscope that he'd be looking for a new business plan that would circumvent your garden-variety industry bullshit. All it took to set a solid-enough precedent was Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows-- after that, the "try it for free; pay $5 if you like it and you get to download higher-quality audio files" plan for the new Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! was enough to get some attention all by itself.
But the other novel idea, being overlooked in lieu of the distribution plan, is the album's stylistic approach. Saul Williams, despite being more of a straight-up poet than an MC, is one of those rare artists who justifies the notion of a hip-hop/rock interchange in a post-nu-metal world. His aggression is focused, pointed, and self-aware enough to avoid falling into temper-tantrum emptiness, and it's backed by music that focuses on the aesthetic slipperiness of heavy rock's capabilities. After 2001's Rick Rubin-produced Amethyst Rock Star and his self-titled 2004 record (featuring guest spots from Zack de la Rocha and Serj Tankian), it isn't a shock that Williams paired up with Reznor for this new album-- especially considering Saul's opened for Nine Inch Nails on more than one tour over the last couple of years. But to hear Williams' firebrand rhetoric about black identity delivered over an album filled with punk and industrial undercurrents-- and to hear Reznor infuse those undercurrents with moments of hip-hop inspiration ranging from Southern bounce to straight-up Public Enemy tributes-- is eye-opening.
As for whether it results in an entertaining record, well, that probably depends on whether you like to be less comfortable going out of an album than you are coming in. There's plenty about the production for NiggyTardust! that makes it initially accessible-- opening track "Black History Month" makes like a drumline facing off against skyscraper subwoofers; there's a touch of Timbaland gone malicious in the supple but abrasive electro-bounce of tracks like "The Ritual" and "Break"; there's even a semi-faithful cover of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" stripped down to the rhythm and augmented with flashes of buzzing synth. But those moments don't sustain or define the album as much as the anxious, creeping-tension moments do; apparently Trent put together the bulk of NiggyTardust!'s beats with the ingredients he left out of Year Zero for not being immediate enough. The slow-grower songs, like the Boards of Canada soundalike "No One Ever Does", the sleepy, minimalist, dying-808 pulse of "Raw" and its clangy, semi-organic counterpart "Skin of a Drum", mostly act as rhythms for Williams' voice to ricochet off. And even when the production gets intense (the post-rock-vs.-Neptunes clamor of "Convict Colony"; the classic Downward Spiral-isms of dirge "Raised to be Lowered"), Saul's voice still acts as the dominant instrument-- wailing, murmuring, jousting sneeringly with his own overdubbed voice, and even veering fascinatingly close to Reznor's own stylings; credits notwithstanding I'm still not 100% convinced it's not actually Trent singing on "Banged and Blown Through", which attests to Williams' versatility as a singer.
In a sort of simultaneous downside and necessity, Williams' lyrics tend to be a bit opaque and evasive, dodging the straightforwardness that many of his ideas demand even if his voice shapes them into something heavier. Sometimes, they're too busy asking questions to account for all the possible answers: PE homage "Tr(n)igger" brings up a familiar but crucially unnerving theory ("would Jesus Christ come back American/ What if he's Iraqi and here again?") only to drop it after a disorienting barrage of unclear "where will you be when the revolution starts" rhetoric.
Then there's tracks like "Black History Month" ("I'm taking my spot, nigga, I ain't afraid to be me/ Sometimes I find it very hard to be/ Who? Me") and "Scared Money" ("I swear, I used to pray to change back the year/ When niggas spoke of motherships with space helmets for hair/ Well, now what have we here? Thugs and poets, ah yeah/ What we seem to have in common is we're common as air") which address the need to find a place for the foreign and the unreal in a hip-hop culture concerned with regionalism and realism. The songs, however, have so many layers of language that the core message is a bit hard to grasp. Yet making the listener work doesn't necessarily make for a bad record, just a challenging one, and since NiggyTardust opts to leave the easy answers in the margins, its more resonant lines skew toward the kinds of uncomfortable accusations and introspective examinations that are both difficult and important to mull over. Yeah, the pricing's fair, but it's not the five bucks you have to worry about-- it's your full attention. It might be harder to focus on this record than it is to actually put down money for it; but to get anything out of it, you've got to pay into it.


On the first full album in seven years from the softly psychedelic British band, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the essence of the Clientele.

The Clientele: Music for the Age of Miracles

Music for the Age of Miracles

Alasdair MacLean closes Music for the Age of Miracles with what can be called a confession: “Lately I’ve been living like I’m so far away/Like I’m somebody else, in some other place,” he sings during the chorus of the record’s last and best song, “The Age of Miracles,” a beautiful reflection on adjusting to the effects of age and the arc of time. MacLean’s voice peaks just past its usual reverb-trailed whisper, a bit of urgency suggesting he’s now got something to do, somewhere to be. It is a moment of sudden self-recognition on the first full album from his softly psychedelic British band the Clientele in seven years, an act of blinking awake after a late-afternoon nap or an idle year in comfort and complacency. And it is, unfortunately, an apt analogy for most of Miracles, a twelve-track exercise in mannerism that omits an essential element of what long made the Clientele so captivating. His wake-up call from pleasantry arrives too late to make much of Miracles.
For a few years, the Clientele seemed to be finished. In the summer of 2011, they announced an indefinite hiatus, nearly two years after releasing Bonfires on the Heath, an exquisite record that would have bid an appropriate adieu. But over the next several years, occasional shows, a batch of odds-and-ends, a reissue, and sporadic singles burbled up. The Clientele, it seemed, had simply shifted to a secondary concern for MacLean, who turned his attention to a beguiling nylon-stringed duo called Amor de Días.
During the break, the Clientele seems to have grown or evolved very little. Many of the trademarks that earned the band a cult following remain for Miracles: MacLean is still a wonderfully ponderous lyricist, capturing scenes of sylvan twilight and urban ennui with a painter’s eye for detail and a novelist’s knack for symbolism. And he delivers them in a wonderfully reverb-dressed voice, which seems always to sigh out his secrets. The rhythm section—bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen—remains one of indie rock’s most subtly brilliant supports, with small, tricky shifts in time and tone that test the structural limits of the twinkling tunes they shape.
For the Clientele’s return, however, MacLean favors his new nylon-stringed instrument to its electric predecessor, picking out pretty, luxuriant lines from start to finish. At their best, the Clientele’s twinkling songs countered austere beauty with gripping tension, be it an electric guitar that jolted the soft landscape or a hiss of dissonance that introduced welcome frisson. But here, they just add layer after layer of lovely, from strings and horns and harmonies to Mary Lattimore’s percolating harp or the low-focus vocals of MacLean’s Amor de Días partner, Lupe Núñez-Fernández. Most any loudness, dissonance, or abrasion is a feint, a bump that’s apologized for with a quick retreat toward the baseline. “The Neighbour,” “Falling Asleep,” “Everyone You Meet”: The bulk of Music for the Age of Miracles is simply evidence that the Clientele can still sound like the Clientele, albeit one tempered and softened by age. This is a pair of old slacks, slipped on for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
There are moments buried within these dozen tracks that suggest that this needn’t be the Clientele’s end, that intriguing ideas and directions still linger at the core trio’s periphery. “The Circus,” for instance, hints at the sort of pastoral unease Pentangle pioneered nearly half a century ago, with riverine acoustic guitar and prismatic harmonies conjuring their British predecessor’s haunted atmospherics. And during “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself,” they make a concession to the changes that have come to its own genre since its last album. MacLean first sings above gently backlit electronics, his voice floating and then flying above the beat. This is the most complicated, amorphous, and loud track on the record, swelling and receding and altogether surprising. It’s the sound of a band still trying to define its sound after nearly a quarter-century. But on a record that feels largely redundant and listless, no matter how welcome the Clientele’s return may seem, it is pure anomaly.
For years, the Clientele has been concerned with time, the shifting of the seasons, and the ways in which people become shadows or mutations of their former selves. A de facto reunion album on which they appear somehow reduced by time seems inevitable and appropriate, then, a linear if lamentable and ironic progression. In essence, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the Clientele. It is the sort of scenario MacLean might document in one of the spoken-word tone poems that often mark the back half of Clientele albums. During the waltzing “The Museum of Fog,” he even describes a night of lonely drinking in which he finds himself in a rock club, watching a mysterious rock band that conjures the sound and energy and ambition of his sixteen-year-old self. He tries to track down the masked singer, only to see him slip away in a crowded car of kids. “I stood in the night,” MacLean says solemnly at the end, “and I wondered what had been taken from me.” You can hear him chasing and missing that same spirit during Music for the Age of Miracles. At least he sounds good doing it.


In the 1960s and ’70s, Bruce Haack led a double life. By day, he made children’s music. By night, demonic electronica. This reissue presents his most accomplished work in all its end-times glory.

The Electric Lucifer

Whenever a serial killer is arrested, there’s the inevitable doorstep interview on the nightly news with the incredulous neighbor who can’t believe such a nice, shy, quiet person could do something so evil. Bruce Haack was the musical embodiment of that double-life dichotomy.
Throughout the 1960s, the Canadian composer was as ubiquitous on children’s and variety shows as were exotic animals from the San Diego Zoo. But he wasn’t there to perform so much as demonstrate. Back then, electronic music wasn’t a genre; it was a scientific discipline, and Haack was among its most fervent early adopters. In his formative compositions for theatre and ballet, he had experimented with tape loops and musique concrète techniques; by the early ’60s, he wasn’t just playing around with electronic sounds, but also making the very gizmos that generated them.
As a guest on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Haack wowed kids with his Musical Computer—a homemade contraption built from a suitcase and cutlery drawer that was part synthesizer, part Theremin, part Clapper. Another invention, dubbed the Dermatron—showcased on The Tonight Show and The Mike Douglas Show—was a heat-sensitive synthesizer pad strapped onto a willing subject’s face. The novelty of these innovations coincided nicely with a ’60s-era appetite for space-age futurism, and, by day, Haack would eke out a living as a composer for commercials and a series of instructive, interactive children’s records made with collaborator Esther Nelson. But by night, Haack was making music that was decidedly adults-only.
Originally released in 1970, The Electric Lucifer was Haack’s first work pitched to a contemporary rock audience, released by Columbia Records in the dying days of a post-hippie moment when bizarro outsider-psych could still find a home on a major label. If it was not the first rock record to feature electronics, it was certainly among the first to give them a starring role—both musically and conceptually. For Haack, the advent of computerized technology represented not just a cool innovation; it was a turning point in the evolution of the human race, investing us mere mortals with the power to play God. And so The Electric Lucifer was envisioned as an ominous concept album consumed with religiosity and apocalypse, where the fate of humanity is determined by an epic battle between good and evil, love and hate, Mother Earth and modernity. It’s like a Henry Darger painting rendered in pixels.
Not surprisingly, this exceedingly strange record flopped upon release. But its commercial failure didn’t deter Haack from further exploration of the dark arts. While he continued to crank out children’s records through the ’70s, he also made increasingly primitive and profane exercises in avant-electronica—including an Electric Lucifer sequel and the infamous Haackula—that would go unreleased for decades. And in the years leading up to his death from heart failure in 1988, Haack’s outré experiments had begun to dovetail with the contemporaneous rise of hip-hop and electro, resulting in an oddball collaboration with future Def Jam don Russell Simmons on the 1982 single “Party Machine.” Since then, Haack's quirky kids’ records have curried enough favor with crate-diggers to spawn an all-star tribute record, while his post-1970 catalog has been subject to a Stones Throw overview. But this reissue of The Electric Lucifer (via Toronto art-punk label Telephone Explosion) presents us with an opportunity to experience Haack’s most accomplished work in all its paranoia-stricken, end-times glory.
As much as The Electric Lucifer was ahead of its time, the album was also very much a product of it. You get a pretty good sense of the kind of rock music that Haack was drawn to, namely the organ-powered poetry of the Doors and the Dada-esque mayhem of the Mothers of Invention. To modern ears, parts of the record may initially scan as downright goofy—the opening “Electric to Me Turn” sounds like nothing so much an android hockey-arena organist going on the fritz. But even that silly introduction betrays what makes the album unique.
Much early electronic pop music—from “Telstar” all the way to Kraftwerk—projected a utopian quality that announced itself as the sound of the future, with clean, bright synth tones prepping us for the oncoming age of flying cars and interplanetary travel. But on The Electric Lucifer, Haack uses his hardware to foretell our demise. This is a thoroughly unsettled record, full of fidgety bleeps and bloops that envision a world choking on wires; vocoderized voices devoid of emotion; and sudden structural shifts that feel like the Earth’s crust being split open. On the sound-collage splatter of “War,” Haack subjects baroque-classical and marching-band melodies to synth-blasted shock treatment; they emerge distorted and decayed, faded remnants of our society for aliens to discover thousands of years from now.
The Electric Lucifer is split evenly between these sort of free-form interludes and proper songs, and the record actually gets stranger the more it leans on the latter. Haack enlisted a revolving cast of guest singers—including friend-turned-manager Chris Kachulis—to serve as The Electric Lucifer’s de facto narrators, investing expository tracks like “Cherubic Hymn” with a melodramatic gusto worthy of the Gilligan’s Island theme. (They’re also prone to disturbing spoken-word outbursts that channel Jim Morrison at his “Soft Parade” batshit craziest.) Where that song revels in the jarring contrast between its valorous vocal delivery and short-circuiting sound design, The Electric Lucifer’s man/machine dialectic manifests itself in more insidious ways. “Song of the Death Machine” is a seemingly innocent sing-along modeled after “You Are My Sunshine,” before it’s slowly debased by disintegrating sonics and Haack’s unnervingly demonic vocal. And while “Word Game” at first sounds like a throwaway, free-associative exercise in proto-fridge-magnet-poetry, things take a turn for the sinister when Haack’s cold, roboticized voice starts lingering on the eerie confluences and contradictions that exist in our everyday vocabulary: “Death/Breath/Earth/Birth/Life/L-I-V-E/Live/E-V-I-L/Evil/Lived/L-I-V-E-D/D-E-V-I-L/Devil/Divine…”
The Electric Lucifer climaxes with the foreboding majesty of “Super Nova,” whose intensifying oscillations and creepy, whispered incantations point the way to krautrock and the cryogenic chill of Suicide. But The Electric Lucifer’s great prophecies were as much philosophical as musical. On “Program Me,” Haack fashions a gospel spiritual for the dawn of the digital age: “My heart beats/Electrically/My brain computes/Program me!” With its subliminal synthetic-drum loop and urgent bass pulse, “Program Me” is one of the rare moments on The Electric Lucifer where the rhythm builds into a hypnotic groove. But Haack’s technophilia didn’t so much anticipate the rise of EDM as a modern world where computers can write Beatles songs and God has been forsaken for gadgets.


With live instrumentation and a hard-won sense of optimism, the GothBoiClique artist’s official debut makes a case for itself in the pop-punk lineage.

Cold Hart / YAWNS: Good Morning Cruel World

Good Morning Cruel World

Cold Hart, born Jerick “Jay” Quilisadio, is a founding member of GothBoiClique, the internet-based emo-rap crew that includes YAWNS, former Tigers Jaw vocalist Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Lil Tracy, Horse Head, fish narc, and, most famously, the late Lil Peep. Merging pop-punk, trap, and SoundCloud rap, GothboiClique’s infectious, knowingly bratty songs tackle serious topics: depression, drugs, tormented relationships, and self-destruction. As with MySpace-era emo rock, much current emo rap (with the exception of Peep) is as reviled by critics as it is adored by the young, sad, and extremely online. But with live instrumentation and a hard-won sense of optimism, Cold Hart’s official debut Good Morning Cruel World makes a case for itself in the pop-punk lineage.
Quilisadio bills the album as a makeover. “It’s more about illustrating emotions instead of wanting to be depressed and numb,” he told i-D. “It’s also about leaving toxic relationships and waking up, even though you know the world is shitty.” On past EPs and one-off singles like “Spyro” or “Thru the Screen,” Coldy (as he’s affectionately known) sounded typically downtempo and downhearted. There’s plenty of that on Cruel World too, especially in the second half, but it’s the open-hearted moments that shine brightest.
The sentiment is best captured on “EYES,” with its driving guitar riff, handclap hi-hats, and alive-again chorus: “Eyes wide shut, screaming, ‘I’m not afraid of loving’/Fuck me up ’cause I’m so used to feeling nothing.” The video sends Cold Hart and collaborator Rawksa on a nighttime cruise, alternately hanging out of a sunroof and hanging out on a stairwell. Like so many legendary nights, it’s somehow both kinetic and ordinary.
GothBoiClique has long used samples to honor influences: the Microphones on Lil Peep’s “Beamer Boy,” Senses Fail on Lil Lotus’ “Bodybag.” Cold Hart’s new direction finds him transitioning to the live-band sound explored on 2018’s Wish Me Well EP, but his references are no less overt. “You know that I want you in the worst way/Taking Back Sunday on a Thursday,” he sings on the upbeat single “Hot Pink Lighter,” before borrowing a TBS lyric for the hooky, beat-driven “Leo Szn.” Playing live eliminates sample-clearance headaches, and it fleshes out Cold Hart’s sound, allowing him to inhabit his world more fully. In videos for “Nick Cave In” and “Hot Pink Lighter,” you could almost mistake him for a star of MTV2 circa 2003—until a closer look reveals that all members of his backing band are played by YAWNS.
If the third-wave emo affect is bitterness—life is a letdown and your ex-lover is to blame—the pop-punk call to mosh comes from a wonder at the heart’s capacity. Cold Hart never participates in the misogyny that an unfortunate amount of emo rap shares with its third-wave predecessors. Instead, like Blink-182 or Simple Plan, his enthusiasm crests in moments of lovestruck weightlessness, buoyed by the easy charm of the Long Beach skater scene he grew up in. He’s fond of heart imagery and, fittingly, Cruel World ends on its own sort of beaming heart-emoji sendoff: a cover of Sarina Paris’ proto-nightcore club banger “Look at Us.” Celebratory, nostalgic, and a little absurd, it’s the sound of an artist ready to embrace joy alongside pain.


The Brooklyn-based musician’s long-percolating debut is a collection of small dream-pop ditties that only feel cheery on the outside.

i'll show you stronger

Pronoun’s Alyse Vellturo has a backstory so earnest and precious it seems impossible to hate. The Brooklyn-based musician attended Berklee College of Music, got spooked by how talented her classmates were, and then retreated into the shadows for a decade until she finally gained the confidence to give music another shot. Now Vellturo is 30, and she’s finally released her debut, i’ll show you stronger, a record of small dream-pop ditties largely about heartbreak. The record is a labor of love, albeit a not entirely realized one.
Vellturo knows her way around reverb-heavy guitar parts, emo-inflected vocals, and pop-punk percussion, but i’ll show you stronger doesn’t fit easily into any of those columns. She has no brand allegiance to a specific sound, which for the most part lends itself to compelling results. Take “you didn’t even make the bed,” a song that’s coated in Sunny D on the outside and oozes anguish from within. Here, Vellturo plays a tenderly picked guitar line that gets rejiggered and muddled up by competing vocal lines and incandescent production flourishes. Then come the lyrics, which are some of the record’s most candid: “I said talk to someone your own age/Not fuck a 45-year-old/Who’s expired,” she sings, sounding like an emo Victoria Legrand who chews on consonants and doesn’t quite have the necessary breath control. It’s a painfully intimate scene that she keys us into, making a point early on that i’ll show you stronger is written for Vellturo and Vellturo alone.
“Stay” has a similarly cheery exterior, while the lyrics compare falling out of love with getting run over by an 18-wheeler. Both the song and the experience it depicts feel kind of unresolved, unfinished, and messy around the edges. You still might get weepy, though. On the following track, “Sadie,” Vellturo addresses the person making her miserable. “So Sadie, don’t act like I’m the problem/When you ran out of money and sought out your rock bottom,” she sings, with a fixed gaze. Vellturo is raw, and her pain isn’t fleshed out yet. Neither is the song.
A lot of music attempts the happy-on-the-outside, sad-as-all-hell-on-the-inside sort of thing; Robyn has made a career of dancefloor bops that make you want to bawl your eyes out. This is the kind of company Vellturo’s music aspires toward, and there are moments on the album that come really close. If she never quite finds those bombastic sweet spots that turn a good song into an anthem—well, that’s ok. It may have taken a decade, but it’s a debut. Vellutro hasn’t quite figured out what function her art will serve. She’s nervously dipped her toes into the water, and wrote her truth into existence. That’s more than enough to get started.


On their ninth album, the Pacific Northwest mainstays push past their folksy twee inclinations towards the avant experimentations of early Stereolab.

Roundelay

Since forming in Olympia in 2005, the Washington indie pop group LAKE have carved a niche for themselves as enduring purveyors of good vibes. Along the way, they became Pacific Northwest mainstays, releasing albums on regional bastion K Records and serving as the backup band of Anacortes icon Karl Blau. It feels felicitous that one of their gentle tunes served as the closing theme for the whimsical but quietly devastating animated show Adventure Time.
But LAKE have ripened with age. On their ninth record, Roundelay, the band push past their folksy twee inclinations towards the avant experimentations of early Stereolab, who themselves had roots in jangle pop. Early hypnotic highlight “She Plays One Chord” sounds like a lost Peng! cut in all the best ways: jazzy strings, cascading synthesizers, and abstract lyrics refracted through Ashley Eriksson’s dreamy warble. The self-titled opener, perhaps the brightest song to ever namedrop punk gremlin GG Allin (in addition to Mork & Mindy and Cyndi Lauper) plays with unusual time signatures and kaleidoscopic organ humming. Later on “Bubble,” the band mimics the movement of a pressure gauge, their tone shifting from droning to ebullient as they describe water erupting through the ground.
LAKE is now a trio composed of Eriksson, Eli Moore, and Andrew Dorsett—each share various instrumental duties—and their music emits a steady sense of tenderhearted introspection. A glowing cover of Bert Jansch’s “Tell Me What Is True Love” snuggles right into the album’s theme of growth. On “Resolution,” a blissful tune built off a simple chord progression, Moore sings of being fulfilled by companionship, but also the occasional distance that results in growth: “It was so many days/To be away from you/But it gave us a chance/To find out who is who.” “Forgiveness” is similarly contemplative, as Eriksson wonders: “Look in your heart, what do you hold?/Do you hold on too hard to hold?” Though its tempo never drifts above a pleasant amble, “Forgiveness” incorporates horns, Vocoder distortion, and a rumbling bassline with a playfulness that recalls like-minded peers Mega Bog or Iji.
Near its middle, Roundelay can feel a bit one-note, its pleasantry blurring together. The nursery-rhyming of “Don’t Pray for Me” borders on sophomoric, especially compared to the thoughtfulness of other tracks. But Roundelay picks up towards its end. “The Hanged Man” pairs ethical ponderings with ’70s AM-radio sunshine. Unlike the minimalist verses of earlier songs, “Talons & Feathers” contains an assemblage of vivid details and inside jokes—soaring eagles, overflowing wine, and matadors. But what cuts through this melange is a poignant depiction of remove: “Just like house guests/You are there, I am here/On the couch with my problems.” Roundelay can slip into languor, but the understated poeticism of moments like this prevails.


Cold Cave continue to tap into the emotional space of 1980s new wave as they fully transform themselves into a big, bold, goth-pop group.

Cherish the Light Years

To be an American fan of UK new wave in the 1980s was to acknowledge that your homegrown culture wasn't giving you what you needed. New Order, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees made broadly appealing pop music but also made sense to outcast kids in the U.S. because they clearly came from somewhere else. Drop any of them into your average American town and they would be mocked; the straight world would make fun of their haircuts and clothing and make-up. That was part of what drew people to them. They were theatrical and sensitive. They were singing about feelings. They were androgynous. Those drawn to this music at the time articulated a cluster of associations and feelings around these qualities that endures two decades later.
Cold Cave's 2009 full-length debut, Love Comes Close, tapped into the emotional space of 80s new wave. It wasn't just that the group sounded like bands from that decade, though that was certainly part of it. But like Peter Murphy, Ian Curtis, or Robert Smith, Cold Cave leader Wesley Eisold has a voice that's both strong and vulnerable, a low croon with a deeply embedded ache. And when used with basslines and spiky guitars that sound lifted from some lost band on Factory, his voice perfectly conveyed the drama of being a teenage outsider.
That feeling continues on Cherish the Light Years, but here everything has been blown up to a degree that borders on absurdity. From opening cut "The Great Pan Is Dead", Cherish feels like a John Hughes film projected in an IMAX theater-- guitars wail, synths scream, and the whole thing is loud, loud, loud. And Eisold responds in kind, his voice rippling with a new desperation-- he'll come running as stars explode, hearts break, and we all yearn for salvation. It's a bracing and brilliant album opener, stating in no uncertain terms, "This is now a different band." Just a few short years ago, Cold Cave were a home-recording project beholden to the sound of early industrial and minimal synth. The throbbing murk in that music made you think something was wrong with your stereo-- many tracks barely qualified as noise, forget about songs. But on Cherish, Cold Cave sound like they're storming the gates of the mainstream, ready to appeal to anyone with an ear for big, bold, goth-pop.
And they succeed. All nine tracks are well crafted and memorable, with sections that poke out on first listen and worm their way into your consciousness with further plays. "Underworld USA" begins with a dark synth thump and a lonely guitar but quickly explodes into a raging anthem for the disaffected. Eisold wants to dream and cry and let the night pass him by-- he sings of the meek inheriting the earth and rhymes "missionary" with "cemetery." And then "Confetti" is subtler, opening with a delicate synth line and a gorgeous reverb-laden guitar that sounds lifted from a 4AD record circa 1986. "I feel so good on the outside," Eisold sings-- when you're feeling miserable, you'll take what you can get. These songs are tuneful and empathetic studded with sharp observations; it's the kind of music that makes you wish your life would fall apart a little bit, just so that you could wallow in it.
But the songs never stay in one place. The contrast between "Alchemy Around You", which adds a trumpet and thickens the production further, and the following "Burning Sage", a bleak and bass-heavy tune with synth from noise-master and CC member Dominick Fernow that hearkens back to the band's industrial origins, brings to mind the eclectic experimentation of Kiss Me-era Cure. These guys are ready to fold anything into their aesthetic. It all gets a little claustrophobic at points, and when that happens the vocals of Caralee McElroy, who contributed to Love Comes Close, are missed. But if Cherish finds Cold Cave going for it and trying their hand at new wave pop anthems, they're still sweating the details. These songs and arrangements are like catnip for those who crave the bleak romantic end of new wave.
There is one issue that keeps Cherish from being an unqualified home run: The mix and mastering job are brickwalled to the extreme, squashing all the production detail and rendering this 40-minute LP tiring to listen to as a whole. It was a strange choice to make this record so incredibly loud and compressed; this music wants to bring you closer, but the monolithic sonics have a way of keeping you at arm's length. Not to mention that this kind of ultra-loud mastering brings to mind albums that touch on some of the same sounds and feelings but in a heavy-handed way-- Bloc Party's Intimacy or the Killers' Day & Age, say. Considering how much care went into the songwriting and overall conception, we have to assume that Cold Cave have their reasons for wanting the album to sound like this. But to my ears, this music deserved better. Even so, taken as a whole, Cherish has the feel of a breakthrough, and Wes Eisold comes across as an artist with a vision that will resonate with a larger audience.


The Virginia band takes the drama of screamo and black metal to grandiose new heights.

Obsidian Wreath

What kind of music best suits an era of sociopolitical upheaval? While Obsidian Wreath is playing, blackened screamo seems like the only acceptable answer. Infant Island’s third album is yet another broad-gesturing statement about these times in an era overflowing with like-minded music, but Obsidian Wreath embodies the chaos more than it chastises about it. The sense of drama is sky-high, from the desperate-sounding clean strums and roll of rim clicks that open “Another Cycle” to the self-immolating coda that ignites just when closer “Vestygian” seems like it’s dying out. This isn’t the angriest skramz album, nor is it the prettiest, but there’s a good chance that it’s the most tempestuous.
Infant Island already married black metal’s massive scale with screamo’s purple hues on 2020’s Beneath and Sepulcher EP, but both feel icy and brittle in comparison to Obsidian Wreath’s warm, heaving textures. Alongside the baked-in Virginia skramz ancestry, the band singles out Panopticon and Deafheaven as chief influences: The former’s penchant for folk and bowed instruments and the latter’s lush guitar tones provide a roadmap for evolution. Even if you reduced Obsidian Wreath to a standard guitar-bass-drums setup, it would feel baroque and grandiose. Alexander Rudenshiold and Winston Givler’s guitars sound beyond multi-tracked; it’s as if there’s a few rows of players all shredding to sheet music. The tremolo-heavy style of picking in many songs almost replicates the buzz of a string section. Drummer Austin O’Rourke conducts the maelstrom both literally—he is additionally credited with piano, cello, accordion, mandolin, and orchestral arrangement—and figuratively, as his stickwork guides the music between unexpected movements that nevertheless hit all of the marks.
The album opens with the furiously paced “Another Cycle” and “Fulfilled,” which both eventually deliver varied takes on the never-tired “bring back the nasty riff but slower” trope. From there, Infant Island begin to flex their extracurricular talents. “Found Hand” is an eerie noise piece akin to those on Beneath and Sepulcher. The mid-album suite of “Veil” and “Amaranthine” moves between uplifting, anthemic gang vocals, a delicate acoustic passage, and bookending peaks. “Kindling,” featuring Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of the doomgaze band Greet Death, spends its first half as a slowcore song. It’s not as if Infant Island need these deviations to freshen up their sound—their screamo base is already tempered by black metal, which is in turn undercut by a grindcore-esque rhythmic creativity that avoids the fatigue of constant blastbeats. But Obsidian Wreath’s softest moments add to its overall heft, the rising and falling actions lending more weight than an end-to-end sonic assault would.
Written in 2020, Obsidian Wreath is, according to the press release, yet another “pandemic record.” The band cites the United States’ “apathy towards social health,” along with the ongoing crises of climate and capitalism, as the primary targets of Rudenshiold and lead vocalist Daniel Kost’s lyrics. Cut-and-dry sentiments like “How could you spare to inconvenience your comfort?” share space with characteristic screamo abstractions like “Eternity weaved over your lavender grave.” Of course, you’d need a lyric sheet to grasp Infant Island’s politics, but Obsidian Wreath’s visceral churn is a natural fit for the looming specters determining the fate of the planet. While their music has never seemed more suited for apocalypse, the future of Infant Island feels newly limitless.


The prolific Chicago rapper’s recent project is his loosest, funniest, and most invigorating to date, full of hard left turns and sly wit.

Chris Crack: Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans

Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans

Chris Crack is so prolific this isn’t even his most recent project. Over the past eleven months, the Chicago MC has somehow released seven albums, each filled with short songs showcasing his acuity and wordplay. His song titles tell their own little stories—“Hug Me Till I Smell Like You,” “Real is a Handicap,” “Explanation Kills Art”—and his raps dance lightly around them. Clocking in at only 16 minutes long, Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is his loosest and funniest project yet, full of hard lefts and sly wit.
Somewhere along the line, maybe after last year’s Being Woke Ain’t Fun, Crack realized that less was more: His raps thinned out, and the breathing spaces began to open up in his work. He’s been following this wayward path ever since—2018’s Just Gimme A Minute consisted of minute-long snapshots, 2019’s This Will All Make Sense Later a series of madcap detours. All of the songs on Crackheads are under two and a half minutes long, but other than that, there is no obvious blueprint. A surprise waits around every corner—there are digressions, untagged interludes, audio cues, speech snippets. Uncredited guests requisition entire songs.
As with Just Gimme A Minute, the bedrock of Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is ‘90s R&B and hip hop soul, sometimes merely tracing its edges and sometimes transfiguring it. “Goals Only Exist in Soccer” takes the same “Any Time, Any Place” sample used for Kendrick Lamar’s “Poetic Justice” but Janet’s vocals bend around Crack’s and not vice versa, as if live. He also flips Mary J. Blige’s “I Can Love You” and 702’s “Get It Together,” on “Repair for Character” and “Bitches Don’t Deserve Me” respectively, and his songs expand on the mood of the source material, as if he’s in conversation with them.
In the cracks, the grooves within the grooves, Crack raps as if emptying himself out. “Always needed something pleasant, was the first one with the gold Tesla/Watch your back around the soul catchers,” he raps on “Black People Can’t Be Racist.” By turns, he’s funny, cynical, deadpan and sly: On the closer “My Ex Was a Garden Tool,” he opts out of depression and vows to “Make her pick her jaw up/When she see you in that Lexus.” Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is brief, but it brims with so much personality it’s almost like an absurdist sitcom, its offbeat cast of characters shuffling in and out of the frame around its star. From his sudden denouncement of Papa John’s in the opening moment to the distorted R&B harmonies at the close, Chris Crack makes something out of every second. There’s no filler and there are no boundaries.


Five years after the original issue of Robyn, the Swedish singer still has a knack for memorable pop gems.

Body Talk Pt. 1

"I'm always going to feel like this person on the outside looking in," Robyn recently told Popjustice. The Swedish singer and songwriter has no fear of pop: A platinum seller in her own country, Robyn cracked the Billboard top 10 in the late 1990s working with famed teen-pop producer Max Martin. As the daughter of a couple who ran an independent theater company, however, Robin Miriam Carlsson is also a woman who enjoys doing things her own way.
Robyn, first released in Scandinavia five years ago on the newly liberated singer's own Konichiwa label, ultimately led to a UK #1 hit, a tour with Madonna, and Snoop Dogg remix spots. Major labels turned out to be a necessary evil, but the deal's on Robyn's terms now. "It's pop music, you know?" she told us earlier this year. "It's entertainment and at the same time it has to mean something to me. I like dealing with that balance."
With Body Talk Pt. 1, the first of a potential three new albums tentatively scheduled for 2010, Robyn doesn't just walk the line between what she has called the "commercial" and "tastemaker" realms. She obliterates it. Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time. Like most of Robyn's best tracks, though, from mid-90s teen-pop hit "Show Me Love" to "With Every Heartbeat" a decade later, Body Talk Pt. 1 is capable of not only appealing to many different people, but also touching them emotionally.
"Play me some kind of new sound/ Something true and sincere," Robyn begs on "None of Dem", a dark, tense, early-morning type of dance track featuring Norwegian electropop duo Röyksopp. She's not being hypocritical. Opener "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", a talky electro-house tirade against electro-age anxieties, really isn't like anything else in the singer's discography. "Dancehall Queen", her so-wrong-it's-right collaboration with tastemaking Philadelphia DJ/producer Diplo, may have purists grumbling at its 1980s dancehall synths, subwoofer wobble, and "Sleng Teng" shoutout-- the title's sideways allusion to ABBA appears to have gone generally overlooked-- but "I came to dance, not to socialize." It's here, dancing, with a chorus that Santigold and Gwen Stefani might kill for, that Robyn is free from all the worries that are "killing" her at the album's start.
Robyn reintroduced Robyn as a Missy Elliott-loving badass. Body Talk Pt. 1 texts that persona into the 2010s. Most similar to songs like "Konichiwa Bitches", "Cobrastyle", and "Curriculum Vitae" is first preview "Fembot", a Klas Åhlund co-write that flips the script on Robyn's track for Röyksopp's 2009 Junior. On "The Girl and the Robot", Robyn was the neglected lover "asleep again in front of MTV." Here, to wonderful effect, she's a "scientifically advanced hot mama."
But Robyn seems most comfortable watching from afar as somebody else goes home with her prize. Dancing, the narrator's escape on "Dancehall Queen", becomes a prison of her own making on the album's emotional peak, "Dancing on My Own"-- a clear descendant of Robyn's girl-loses-boy, boy-ties-Ms.-Whatshername's-laces classic, "Be Mine!". With unadorned piano and strings, "Hang With Me (Acoustic Version)" is closer to "Be Mine! (Ballad Version)" and hits similar emotional notes: You say you're just friends, well that's OK, but don't you dare "fall recklessly, headlessly in love with" her. If she's sitting on a killer dancefloor version of this one, good luck.
In an album full of songs that manage to be both specific and universal, "Cry When You Get Older" might prove to be the most enduring: a prom song, a graduation song, an end-of-summer-camp-PowerPoint song. Dudes like Max Martin and Peter Bjorn & John meet at parties and brag about what great melodies they've written, Robyn told us a couple of years ago; this is one worth bragging about. The lyrics are conversational, the synths respond, and there's a Prince reference to go with a Smashing Pumpkins' "1979"-like perspective on teenage ennui. Everybody in the back, quote it: "I lost all my faith in science/ So I put my faith in me."
Body Talk Pt. 1 ends painfully soon, but at least it ends with a pair of tracks focusing on Robyn's soulful voice. In addition to "Hang With Me", there's "Jag Vet En Dejilg Rosa", a Swedish traditional song the singer performed over Björn Yttling's piano accompaniment in a 2007 tsunami memorial. Here she's backed by bells, and her touch is lighter. Robyn's vocals aren't only about singing; they're also about untranscribeable details like the little flutter when she sort of smiles at herself on this slow song, or her goofy ad libs between lyrics on faster songs. Above all, Robyn puts herself on the line-- loses her cool for the sake of emotional connection-- like few other contemporary vocalists.
In 2000, a guy I know e-mailed Robyn about singing technique. In her reply, she gave detailed advice about maintaining his jaw muscles, hips, back, tongue, and vocal chords. "But the most important thing," she wrote, "is to be happy, and I don't mean that you always should be in a good mood. Because all the emotional stress that you feel is reflected in your body and can easily affect your voice-- which is a good thing if you take care of it. Because it is a tool that will help you get to know yourself and remind you when it's time for you to look inside for answers." Head and hips are both important, but the heart is still the strongest muscle. Bring it, Body Talk Pt. 2.


Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Listening to the music without context, though, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes.

Move to Pain

Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Eustis started using the name Sons of Magdalene in 2007 after his father contracted cancer, then recorded some of the record's songs not long before his musical partner Charlie Cooper died suddenly in 2009. Eustis finished the album in 2010 and put it on the shelf until now. Perhaps unfairly, this backstory sets up expectations for a certain kind of record—an emotionally bared and demonstratively tormented one where the artist emerges transfigured by grief.
But while listening to the music featured on Move to Pain without context, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes. Created while Eustis was learning to work without his longtime partner, Move to Pain sounds understandably tentative and cautious; taking his former band's sound to unaccustomedly poppy places, it's agreeable but innocuous. Dreamy dance-pop, driving atmospheric ligature, and threads of sinuously clipped IDM, with 808-style claps and blocky arp bass slathered everywhere, are all blended into one simple, unassuming consistency.
Telefon Tel Aviv traded in chill, jazzy electronic music with lots of samples, glitches, clicks, and cuts. At best, they cobbled tough, supple rhythms and fine, gummy tones into shuddering structures that felt bulky but delicately detailed—sonic objects you could feel in your ribcage as well as abstractly admire. At worst, they could be numbingly polite, like something sleek but ignorable you’d half-hear in a coffee shop, and the featured vocals often sounded dreary. Those inconsistencies also hold true for Sons of Magdalene; the best tracks balance the formidable and the fragile, making sub-bass fluctuations and slanted sequences feel blown up under a microscope. "Crows on the Eaves of My Father's House" is a particularly compelling look, with gulping vocal cut-ups that recall Andy Stott's "Numb". But that close focus slips on the more traditional songs, which range from functional but unimaginative to almost rote.
As a singer, Eustis gets the job done without frills, but he seems hesitant about letting us hear his voice and lyrics. He claims the foreground in opening track "Hold On Hold Still for a Second", maneuvering a pretty, watery melody through a rubbery sheath of thrumming arps, drilling claps, and plunging synth toms. He scores his most mobile and charismatic vocal performance on "A Strange Sound", a sea breeze of electro-pop (rendered just slightly strange by the skippy pitches in the harmonies) that builds to a rewarding Panda Bear-like conclusion. Less successful is his stab at a louche electro style on the haunted dub of "The Whip", which lands somewhere between Matthew Dear and Trans Am. But more often, we can barely hear him, as on his timid dance-diva take on the title track or his shy coloring of the oily bass music braid "O Death".
Move to Pain is most noticably held back by its rudimentary tones and structures, which are surprising from someone who's proven capable at cultivating complexity and detail. The songs either crescendo like opening funnels or orbit through sequenced arpeggios, contrasting counterpoint and drifting harmonies with dead-predictable dynamics. In either case, they feel overly straight and preordained, not taking us very far from beginning to end.
The music is simple, but not enough to be sublime; it's active, but not enough to find transcendence. And it doesn't render commonplace technology personal and alive—there's not much here that a savvy amateur couldn't do with GarageBand, a low bar to clear when grid-based composition with soft synths is so accessible. The results that Move to Pain yields are pleasantly neutral, with nothing going spectacularly right or wrong.


On their first album in four years, the married electro duo curate a highly collaborative record that is richer and stranger than anything they've done before. It's unusually electrifying.

Detroit House Guests

ADULT.’s Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller have always had a hermetic aesthetic. Their synthesizers sound like museum pieces; their post-punk production reeks like a leaky dungeon. And their dry sense of humor keeps the listener perpetually off balance, the same way that their creepy cover art steadfastly refuses to meet the viewer’s gaze. You never see a pair of eyes on the duo’s record sleeves—just covered faces, gloved hands, and ambiguously slumped poses, markers of contemporary alienation raised to the level of high art. If you were to describe their music in architectural terms, it would be part hall of mirrors, part Winchester Mystery House.
For Detroit House Guests, their first album in four years, the married duo—both are visual artists and filmmakers as well as musicians—went the opposite route: Assisted by a $40,000 Knight Foundation grant, they threw open the doors of their 4,000-square-foot compound in Detroit’s New Center neighborhood, inviting a handpicked succession of artists to live and work with them. Some, like Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy, they had known for years. The Austrian Thereminist Dorit Chrysler, on the other hand, had only a passing acquaintance with the duo before her residency. It was an “intense” process, Kuperus has said: “Because you’re living together, you’re having breakfast together, and when you’re done with the studio you’re watching Netflix together.” That kind of intimacy is palpable across the album. While there’s no mistaking ADULT.’s wiry signature, their collaborators’ input is largely indistinguishable from their own, leading to a record that is richer and stranger than anything the duo has done before.
All of their usual hallmarks are here: spring-loaded drum programming, clammy reverb, brittle synths that clink like wind chimes in an ice storm. Classic electro remains a driving force, and on “Stop (and Start Again),” featuring Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess bellowing over a flanged, high-necked bassline, they return to the hair-raising goth of 2005’s Gimme Trouble. But a majority of the album’s tracks find them foraging far beyond their usual stomping grounds. The opening “P rts M ss ng,” with Lichens’ Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, is slow and methodical, its modular synthesizers twitching like metal shavings under a magnet. “Breathe On,” with Swans’ Michael Gira, extends the meditative mood; Gira’s basso purr verges on ASMR territory, and the same could be said of the woozy third track, “Into the Drum,” with its disorienting soup of whispers and vocal fry.
In fact, they don’t unleash their usual body-moving assault until the fourth song, “We Are a Mirror,” a chilly slab of death disco enlivened by Kuperus and McCarthy’s call-and-response vocals. Just like his hosts, McCarthy sounds like he’s ventured far from his comfort zone. Neither of his songs bear obvious traces of Nitzer Ebb’s abrasive legacy; instead, he seems determined to twist his formidable baritone into the most unexpected shapes. Ironically, it falls to Funchess to deliver the album’s best Nitzer Ebb impersonation: Her “We Chase the Sound” is a dead ringer for the EBM pioneers’ scorched-earth funk.
Throughout, ADULT.’s synthetic sound world is unusually electrifying. On “Inexhaustible,” abetted by Chrysler’s Theremin, they conjure a mercurial fusion of Morton Subotnick and early Depeche Mode. And on “Uncomfortable Positions,” the conceptual textile artist Lun*na Menoh performs on a modified sewing machine whose darting needle wobbles like a quarter spinning down. Strangest of all is “This Situation,” which sounds like an eight-minute tribute to the Beatles’ notorious musique concrète experiment “Revolution 9.” Over rumbling abstractions, two snippets of Kuperus’ voice loop in parallel. “Forgive me if I change the usual order of the menu,” runs one; “This situation can’t go on indefinitely,” goes the other, more or less indefinitely.
The album’s most fascinating aspect is the way it affords a glimpse behind the duo's masks. The closing “As You Dream,” in which Michael Gira does his best Tibetan monk impersonation, is a damn-near liturgical take on drone techno—not so much hermetic as immersive, a rising tide spilling out their front door and subsuming everything in its path. ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.