In conjunction with a hardcover collection of his lyrics, the singer-songwriter reimagines his classics and obscurities as intimate, acoustic tales.

Songs of Love and Horror

Near the end of a recent show in Brooklyn, Will Oldham brought the room to silence. He stepped to the foot of the stage to sing “Careless Love,” a nearly a cappella track from 2001’s Ease Down the Road. Now played with a seven-piece band but sung without a microphone, what was once a hushed prayer became powerful enough to fill the theater. The moment captured what, nearly three decades into his career, might have become Oldham’s defining quality: He can really sing. It’s as clear onstage as it is in his recent work, as he’s become perhaps the genre’s most hotly requested guest vocalist, making him an heir apparent to Emmylou Harris or Drag City’s own bearded, mystic Ty Dolla $ign. Oldham hasn’t released a complete set of new solo songs since 2013, but that voice keeps finding new territory for reinventing itself.
Just as it once would have been difficult to imagine Oldham—the guy from Louisville with the creaky whisper, the inscrutable lyrics, and the half-dozen pseudonyms—belting from the footlights, he also never seemed like the type of artist to solidify his songbook into one of those fancy hardcover books. But the 304-page Songs of Love and Horror spans his vast discography and includes a few tunes that even Palace lifers will have to Google; a gorgeous book, it is also uncommonly thoughtful and funny. (“So strong a love gurgling in the stomach that even the regurge is something beautiful,” reads the annotation to “Raining in Darling.”) To coincide with the book, Oldham has issued a new album of the same name, featuring solo acoustic renditions of 10 songs from his catalog, plus a cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Strange Affair” and an appended archival recording that suggests just how much he has grown into his voice.
Unlike similar releases in his catalog—say, the country facelift of 2004’s Greatest Palace Music—none of these new takes on old songs are reinventions. If anything, the songs sound less melodic and more conversational here. Stripped of Dawn McCarthy’s gorgeous backing vocals, “Wai” wobbles slightly, like Oldham’s just re-remembering the melody as he sings it. Elsewhere, the verses in “New Partner,” one of his first great songs, emerge as one escalating plea, swiftly sung in an almost distracted cadence. Compared to Mark Kozelek’s stripped cover of the same number, Oldham’s version here seems almost tossed-off. As with this set’s reliably beautiful redo of “I See a Darkness,” it won’t replace the original, but it highlights the endless malleability of Oldham’s work, ripe for discovering and reinterpreting.
Offering more than mere updates of classics, Songs of Love and Horror also showcases the depth of Oldham’s catalog through obscure tracks like the slow, haunted “Most People” and the previously unreleased “Party With Marty (Abstract Blues).” The latter track was recorded in 1997 (and not re-recorded here), but its breezy storytelling fits into the set with such ease that, were it not for the fidelity difference, you might not notice the two-decade leap. It’s a magic trick Oldham plays, finding wisdom in his earliest compositions and reworking recent songs so they sound more like those old records. Lovable and intimate, it’s the type of album that could have been conceived in the 40 minutes it took him to play it. On any given day, it might have been a completely different set of tracks, radiating with a completely different mood. “Every song is built with the idea that it will be repeated,” he writes in the book. “Again and again and again.” This record acts as another quiet testament to that mission.


Following last year’s mesmerizing Stadium, this three-track EP is as spacious and richly textured as experimental percussion gets.

Empire EP

The work of percussionist and composer Eli Keszler often feels like a tug of war between movement and stasis. On 2011’s Cold Pin, tiny, rapid-fire details massed into vast sheets of solid sound, like minuscule shells compressed to form enormous limestone cliffs. On 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, Keszler’s intricate runs and fills scuttled with the energy of a foraging squirrel, though drones tamped down the music’s volatile edges. Last year’s Stadium was his most groove-oriented release to date, its rippling cadences often reminiscent of drum ’n’ bass or hip-hop but smoothed by muted techno-jazz keys. Even when snare rolls rained down like soft avalanches, there was a sense of things coming to rest.
On Empire, a three-track follow-up to Stadium, Keszler moves even more toward what might be described as proper songs. As on Stadium, the theme running through this short, cohesive EP, Keszler says, is “the illusion of order during declines.” That may account for the songs’ relatively restrained kinetic energy: A familiar feeling of exhaustion oozes from the music’s pores. “Enter the Bristle Strum” is built atop a brooding, half-speed drumbeat—almost a shadow of one, really, just a lurching series of kicks and low toms fleshed out with faint detail. For once, all the focus is what’s happening tonally, as quiet, searching chord progressions blossom into Rhodes licks. It might be as close as Keszler has ever come to a ballad.
“Corrosion Kingdom” is even more lyrical. The drums here are all but an afterthought, with brushed snares hissing like a quick inhalation. The tonal field is awash in vibraphones and other glassy sounds; as an elegiac piano melody rises from the mist, echoes of Tortoise at their most diffuse appear. Turn it up enough, and it becomes apparent that there’s a gray layer of static draped over everything, like a crystal chandelier swaddled in a moving blanket. It’s an unknown shape lurking in the mix, as intentional as his pin-pricked cymbal taps. This is as spacious and richly textured as experimental percussion records get.
Part of this sense of space derives from Keszler’s unusual toolkit. Along with the vibraphone and the similar Vibracelesta, he has worked with several sample-based instruments of his own creation, the Violoskapa and the Amarelion. These, he explains, allow him to take environmental recordings from urban locations and compress them into “split second strikes… a way of collapsing long distances and large spaces into actions on an instrument, weaving these sounds and spaces around each other.” What exactly that means in practice may be hard to visualize, but it helps explain the music’s unusually charged atmosphere, as though it harbors unknown dimensions within its folds.
Only with the closing “The Tenth Part of a Featured World” do the flickering sticks of Keszler’s previous work come to the fore. The same slow mallets once again set the pace and pensive mood. There’s a hint of new age here—wind chimes, flutes, and voice-like synthesizer pads. Where new age leans into calming consonance, though, Keszler’s tones bristle with dissonance. That harmonic complexity serves as the springboard for his drumming: small, explosive fills that sound like knitting needles against a flat metal surface. It’s a remarkable array of textures and conflicting impulses, and as the piece builds—chords swelling, layers accreting, drum patterns tangling into tighter and tighter knots—it takes on an unusually expressive character for music so abstracted.
Keszler describes both Stadium and Empire as attempts to capture his impressions of modern American cities, especially the glassy sheen of their metallic surfaces, and tie that back to a sense of political and cultural malaise. What comes across in the music isn’t so much the illusion of order as the personal search, through sound, for a meaningful path forward.


Over the span of their first five albums, the Roadside Graves were quintessential, New Jersey roots-rock storytellers, with songs full of empathetic third-person narratives. On their fifth album, and first for the esteemed Don Giovanni label, they are ready to tell their own. At its best, Acne/Ears unassumingly places itself within reach of New Jersey's A-list of confessional indie rockers.

Acne/Ears

Over the span of their first five albums, the Roadside Graves were quintessential, New Jersey roots-rock storytellers, with songs full of empathetic third-person narratives. On the title track of Acne/Ears, they're ready to tell their own. It's as unflattering as you'd expect from a song called "Acne/Ears", two facial features that seem to exist for the sole purpose of causing adolescent embarrassment. "Some boys are filled with piss and vinegar/ Some boys are filled with just pus and blood," John Gleason sings, recalling the days when his breakouts were so profuse, he didn't even bother going to school. It's similar to Strand of Oaks' breakthrough single "Goshen '97", in which a sullen teen finds relief by singing terribly in the mirror even when he could hardly bear to look at himself.
As Gleason inventories his musical, physical, and spiritual failings throughout Acne/Ears, he becomes an avatar for an easily identifiable nowhere man—the guy who trudges through high school without much distinction or even the dignity afforded by being a true weirdo, starts a band, gets a job, and never gets quite far enough away from his origins to forget his past life as a pockmarked loner. On the album centerpiece "Donna (Reno)", Gleason thinks back on every book he's read and forgot, every show he was too drunk to remember, and shrinks from the laughter of construction workers and a middle finger from a bus full of schoolchildren. His only wish is to be cremated and baked into the highway, "so you can say I helped build something." But otherwise, Gleason tries to turn his liabilities into assets on Acne/Ears—misery as an opportunity for character building, introspection as a bullshit detector.
At its best, Acne/Ears unassumingly places itself within reach of New Jersey's A-list of confessional indie rockers. But it lacks a true sense of stakes—Gleason's take on romance occasionally bears the startling bite of the Wrens on The Meadowlands, but otherwise his insights pass after a brief sting, like those kids on the school bus. Nor do Roadside Graves have the youthful brass or ambition to impose its will on naysayers like Titus Andronicus or Cymbals Eat Guitars. The lack of urgency can sometimes show just in the inescapable fact that this took four years to make. There are questionable binaries in "Surfin'" that feel at least that many years behind the cultural conversation, and the rousing coda of "Acne/Ears" is sunk by archaic gendering of what true rock'n'roll means—"Somebody please wake up those girls in the back on their phones/ Ears are meant to be destroyed by boys in basements making noise."
Though they're now signed to the esteemed Don Giovanni label, Gleason works as a second-grade teacher and the rest of the band is spread out across the country; "no big tours planned now but hopefully one day!" reads a post on their Facebook page. Gleason spends a stray thought in "Donna (Reno)" dreaming of getting married, moving in with his cousins back in Jersey, and quitting Roadside Graves. It's unclear whether he sees any of that as progress or resignation, but for the time being, he finds a way to live in the moment by expressing disarming sincerity on the title track—"I'm just happy you're listening."


The Atlanta star’s third solo album balances a new level of celebrity and the icy realism that’s long been his signature.

American Dream

One of 21 Savage’s earliest forays into letter-writing came on the penultimate track of 2018’s i am > i was, where he penned an apologetic and appreciative tribute to his mother, Heather Carmillia Joseph, for dealing with his teenage mischief. It wasn’t the first time that he’d revealed such an interior window—all over the album he posited himself as a tormented agent of the macabre, unable to shake the traumatic memories while also enjoying the spoils of his riches—but it signified a unique willingness to go long on personal soliloquy. On his latest release, american dream, his mom returns the favor, opening the album with a spoken-word dedication that alludes to the countless sacrifices she undertook to help him achieve his wildest dreams. Instead of nestling the emotional weight away in the corner, 21 uses it as a battering ram, bursting through the door to begin to try to paint the full picture of who he has become.
And it’s a tall task. 21’s profile has grown in recent years, with a collaborative album and tour with Drake, humanitarian initiatives that made him a community leader in Atlanta—hell, even the teaser “trailer” credits for american dream read like an Emmy after-party invite list. His third solo album attempts to balance reveling in his newfound elevated celebrity and retaining the tortured persona that relishes in recounting the gruesome details of his journey. This produces some missteps, but the 31 year old cuts through the glossy excess with clarity and lyrical self-assuredness, producing enough sterling moments to show that he’s still a star worthy of fanfare.
The line between inventive use of samples and cynical nostalgia-bait is thin; maybe 21 learned from the disastrous hijacking of Daft Punk on Her Loss’ “Circo Loco.” The crack team of producers on american dream—including Metro Boomin, Cardo, Coupe, London on da Track, and OG Parker—attempt to string together more moments of harmony between 21’s reserved register and the production landscape, rather than taking big swings at grandiosity. Rose Royce lead singer Gwen Dickey’s lilting voice echoes in the background of “all of me,” creating a morose arena in which 21 dwells upon the violence and backstabbing he survived to reach this stage of his life. The album’s crate-digging finds (like Brazilian singer Elza Laranjeira’s angelic crooning from “Serenata do Adeus” on “redrum”) mesh better than the easily recognizable tributes (Faith Evans and K-Ci loops on “prove it” and “should’ve wore a bonnet”), but the overall cohesion of the production is a welcome sign.
Understatement has suited 21 for years. His effectiveness stems from minute tweaks, mutating his low register and delivery to imbue emotion and variance into his stone-faced raps. The drawn-out distribution of his murderous wordplay on “redrum” makes it feel as though he’s almost veering off the tracks. A heightened version of his whisper flow arises on the hook of “sneaky,” before returning to truncated one-liners about Flipmode squad and sneaky links that hit like prizefighter jabs. “Head so good, she could eat ice cream with a straw/I’m too fertile to be goin’ in you raw,” he raps, over a Coupe-produced trap beat that leaves you bouncing your shoulders without even noticing.
It’s not high-profile moves that make 21 great. As much as he’s trying to capture the essence of those R&B classics he cherishes on Instagram, the Summer Walker-assisted “prove it” falls short of the intrinsic charisma produced by the likes of a Busta Rhymes and Mariah Carey collaboration: 21’s materialistically vapid bars are washed away by Walker’s runs, which feel as though they belong to one of her emotionally charged ballads. Celebrity guests Burna Boy and Travis Scott register as vestigial appendages—a sharp contrast with the gratifyingly grimy murkiness of Young Thug’s brief cameo and the aloof whispers emanating from Doja Cat. The attempt at a cinematic pop-rap track with Tommy Stewart and Mikky Ekko on “red sky” lands like a forgettable deep cut from the Furious 7 soundtrack.
As 21’s status has shifted, he puts the realistic contradictions of his existence on display with a steely neutrality. He can oscillate between acknowledging the devil on his shoulder, memorializing his fallen loved ones, and executing an enemy in his own backyard in consecutive breaths. He can lament the fatal ramifications of “standing on business” while slandering those who turn witness for their own self-protection. On the closing “dark days,” he reflects on the merits of his self-improvement, doling out wisdom like “stay in school” and “put the guns down” to teenagers who run the streets. It’s a sensitive affirmation that unravels the violent persona he’s created, an honest assessment fueled by confidence in who he’s become and what he wants to do. It is the crux of the freedom that his mother strived for from the beginning.


On their first album in 7 years, the blackgaze innovators lighten up their sound with bountiful hooks and life-drunk enthusiasm.

Wildhund

Lantlôs, a project led by German multi-instrumentalist Markus Siegenhort, were adventurous from the jump, combining icy black metal with post-rock and jazz in the late 2000s. While their sound has softened since then, their creativity has not. It’s been a full seven years since they did away almost entirely with screams and blastbeats on the epic suite Melting Sun. Its long-awaited follow-up, Wildhund, nixes longform compositions for a punchier sound. And while plenty of metal bands have gone shoegaze over the past decade, this music smashes those familiar tropes into a million kaleidoscopic pieces.
Wildhund’s aesthetic is as distinctive as it is lurid: Its swirl of thick riffs is held aloft by zero-gravity drumming, and its melodies are buoyant enough to support a tricky array of grooves. Shoegaze, in part, stuck as a genre tag because of the slouched posture needed to monitor a multitude of effects pedals onstage. Lantlôs deliver those same heavily treated wallops of guitar with a hooky earnestness that’s directly at odds with that brooding stereotype. Wildhund’s closest forebears are probably Hum and Deftones, bands whose hi-fi takes on shoegaze led the genre far from its origins. But even those bands’ most ebullient moments—say, the former’s “Stars” and the latter’s “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”—seem dour in the face of Wildhund’s life-drunk enthusiasm.
As much as Lantlôs diverge from shoegaze norms—as on the giddy, souped-up “Magnolia”—they stray even further from black metal. Siegenhort, alongside his former bandmate and Alcest frontman Neige, is considered one of the forefathers of the blackgaze subgenre, having helped to establish the sound in its pre-Sunbather wilderness period. In particular, the band’s 2010 album, .neon, which features Neige on vocals, stands as an early touchstone, its infusion of jazzy chords and loose drumming exploring a direction that few contemporaries have been able to replicate. While Melting Sky pushed the band toward post-rock grandeur, Wildhund is even more divorced from that era’s abrasiveness.
Across the album, the band only sparingly incorporates screaming and double bass drum beatdowns. On songs like “Home,” “The Bubble,” and “Amber,” these touchstones of extreme music are used as punctuation marks rather than cathartic climaxes. Drummer Felix Wylezik and Siegenhort, who handles the remainder of the instrumentation, keep the energy cranked with little time for build-ups or crescendos. They hit the ground running and rarely let up, save for a breathy, ambient interlude (“Cloud Inhaler”), and they keep things catchy but structurally engaging with earwormy mini-breakdowns. These flourishes, such as the crushing two-beat motif in opener “Lake Fantasy,” the jerky breakdown that opens and recurs throughout “Home,” and the abrupt switches in and out of triplets on “The Bubble,” freshen up songs that, if delivered in more straightforward fashion, would already be outstanding alt-rock cuts. Augmented by Lantlôs’ rhythmic dexterity and prismatic guitar tones, the sparkling Wildhund offers thrills beyond immediate catchiness while also raising a question why everything so musically impressive can’t be this catchy.
A potent mix of black metal’s bombast and shoegaze’s smeared beauty, Melting Sun was a daring album, but years down the road, Wildhund takes its experimentation even farther. It’s not just Lantlôs’ continued pursuit of genre-mashing—Siegenhort’s vocal approach is so wide-eyed that it almost moves the album out of the blackgaze conversation entirely. The genre is no stranger to colorful artwork (see r/blackgaze’s header collage of album artwork) but with lyrics about “pastel coated bubble blower[s],” “supersonic swirl[s] of azure nectar,” and in a particularly Owl City moment, “100 million butterflies,” Siegenhort brings that palette to life. Were he shrieking so raggedly that his words’ true nature was revealed only in lyric booklets—the ultimate act of black metal introversion—the album might sound more bracing, and therefore more challenging. But at this stage in Siegenhort’s career, delivering his words in such a clear voice with his chest puffed out feels like the more radical act.
If the melodies weren’t so catchy, the song structures so dizzying, and the production so gleaming, Wildhund might crumble under the weight of its own outsized ambition. But amid a sea of metal artists breaking free from stifling genre confines only to land on a self-propelled treadmill of equally tired and gloomy signifiers, Lantlôs’ embrace of hooks and lysergic imagery is refreshing. At a climactic moment on “The Bubble,” Siegenhort sings, “Elevate me, make me feel again.” Within the trajectory of his music—and blackgaze as a whole—that is exactly what Wildhund seeks to do.

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The tempestuous debut by producer and vocalist Felicia Chen is an emotionally tense album that whips between violent outcries and quiet pockets of respite

PURGE

Felicia Chen is usually associated with spinning intense electronic DJ sets under the guise of Dis Fig. At one point during the recording of her debut album PURGE, Chen conveyed to her label boss, Geng, who runs the New York City-based PTP, that the vibe of the music was like anguished Portishead meeting the bass swamped tendencies of the Bug.
Contextualizing music in a referential way like this happens a lot when you listen to PTP releases: The label was originally named Purple Tape Pedigree in honor of purple-colored cassette copies of Raekwon's 1995 hip-hop standard-bearer Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., but you won't find much in the way of ’90s-influenced raps allied to dusty soul samples in the vault. Instead, PTP's mission seems to be to annihilate genre boundaries and revel in the brilliant debris—like releasing a musing on the REM sleep cycle that flashes between moments of serene sci-fi ambience and pummeling video game techno (Nima Aghiani's REMS), presenting a noise-rock workout to invoke trance-like feelings of healing (Among The Rocks And Roots' Raga), or running tapestries of percussion and field recordings from Tehran through an echo-chamber as commentary on chemical attacks in Iraq (Saint Abdullah’s Stars Have Eyes).
Dis Fig's PURGE fits snugly into the PTP credo: The record wavers between Chen’s scorched vocals battling to be heard over brutal, electronic production and luminous, minimalist moments where her words resonate as tender pleas. Along the way, the album nods to trip-hop, techno, noise, punk and soul influences. But despite its progressive production, its emotional heart challenges the listener to empathize why Chen whips between violent outbursts and quiet pockets of respite.
The album opens with "Drum Fife Bugle,” where glitchy electronic jabs are paired with what sounds like a fanfare of panpipes, before being joined by sampled panting and buzzsaw motor-blades. The track has a frantic quality, conjuring images of Chen escaping through wild overgrowth, phosphorescent alien lands, or an emotional battlefield. It’s followed by "Alive," where Chen sounds caged: Her distressed vocals—“I came to see if you're alive”—are suppressed by waves of murmuring bass and digital volcanic ash sputtering around. After the intensity of “Alive” comes the revitalizing “Watering,” a ghostly quiet storm of a song consisting of lapping waves of digital noise. This vertiginous setup continues, with the maelstrom of vocals and electronic production typifying songs like “U Said U Were” and “Unleash” soothed by the hymnal solitude of “The Hermit” and the confessional digi-soul of “WHY.”
The ebb and flow between drama and reflection define PURGE’s topography. Her words are often repressed by the production, but she isn’t crying out in vain—she’s feeling for tears in a fabric of her own creation. This comes to a head between “Purge” and “WHY” via a 30-second interlude where she’s heard listening to a tinny Cantopop song while puttering around her home. There’s something shocking in the domesticity of it all and it unlocks PURGE. As PURGE ends with the relative instrumental calm of “I Am the Tree,” you realize all of Chen’s self-induced emotional pain and unstinting soul-searching has been a mechanism to just, simply, feel secure.


The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre.

Blue Rev

Why has no one thought to better organize the institution of power pop? Ever since Big Star chimed in with their #1 Record, bands of all stripes—the pop group with a shreddy guitarist, the pivoting mid-career punks, the shoegaze band going sober—have gathered loosely under this jubilant banner to pay tribute to broken hearts through hooks and harmonies. At some point, an intrepid fan could have borrowed from the various committees that oversee ska and emo and split power pop into waves, or at the very least adopted a post- or a nü- prefix along the way to divide a genre that’s collected bands since the Nixon era, from the Raspberries to the Go-Gos to Superchunk to the New Pornographers.
So let’s hang a sign over Alvvays and their astonishingly great album Blue Rev as the sound of the genre today. Call it dream-power pop, power pop-gaze, nü-power pop, it doesn’t matter—it’s just one Toronto band absorbing its spirit, mastering its construction, and making it all their own. While singer-songwriter Molly Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley had started writing Blue Rev back in 2017, a series of unfortunate events—floods, thefts, visa issues, a global pandemic—delayed the recording of the album until last year, when the band finally entered the studio with veteran producer Shawn Everett. Armed with a new rhythm section and the one producer you hire when you want to “level up” in the indie world, Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan. It is a deep dive through the history of pop and rock, down into the abyss of what its future might look like.
Alvvays knew the mechanics of a song inside and out on their second album, Antisocialites, but now they are masters of their craft. Blue Rev is absolutely lousy with bridges and middle-8s that give even the album cuts a sense of stakes and momentum. They’ll do the Pixies’ quiet-loud-quiet thing, then a big gaudy key change straight out of a country tune, then bring in some of Kevin Shields’ famous “glide guitar” technique, then Rankin will belt out a note like it’s Adele karaoke night, then the band will bring it down to do a synth-led psychedelic song about a reply-guy in your mentions. This wide-ranging, recombinant style is less about genre-hopping and more about the construction of the songs themselves—there’s so much care over when the chorus needs to go up the octave, when the guitar solo needs to come screaming in, when the key needs to modulate, when the rhythm section needs to drop out. Any band can borrow a style, but when Alvvays builds these songs from the treasured blueprints of bands like Lush and the Lilys, they feel monumental from the very first listen.
What separates Blue Rev from all the teenage-kicks albums before it is Rankin’s subconscious, hyperreal songwriting, which runs counter to the current mode of stark diaristic pop songwriting where singers follow an emotion or idea without detour. Rankin, on the other hand, is all detours and off-ramps, asides and parentheses, bushwhacking through the undignified mess of life. She only gestures at a feeling, allowing the band and her blockbuster vocal lines to take the listener the rest of the way. In her world, the worst thing is not running into your ex, but running into your ex’s sister at a pharmacy who will casually offer that he has that “new love glow” about him. Murder, She Wrote and a Belinda Carlisle song make memorable cameos. Proust had his little cookies; Rankin has Blue Rev, a nuclear-blue malt beverage that is swilled behind a skating rink on “Belinda Says” like one last dizzying teenage reverie before early-onset adulthood.
From the band’s first single, the HOF indie rock jam “Archie, Marry Me” to now, Rankin’s literary flair has never been pretentious, only wise. When she’s helpless, she’s “an assistant to the way life’s shaking out”; if she wants to leave, she will “egress”; she’s not single, she’s “riding the pine.” Near the end of the album, on “Lottery Noises,” Rankin sings one of the most crushing lines about a breakup, foregrounding good fortune in the face of total destruction: “I’ll always be looking for ways to remember the sound of the lottery noises that I can’t believe rang for me.” Like the sound of Blue Rev, the sentiment is so layered and dreamy the real pain underneath is basically invisible.
One more great Rankin line, that opens the triumphant “Easy on Your Own?”: “I dropped out/College education’s a dull knife/If you don’t believe in the lettered life/Then maybe this is our only try.” It gets at the diffuse themes of Blue Rev: escaping and returning, stasis and change, how difficult it is to tell the difference between the two. It’s not the gnarly stuff of high-school hallways, but the soft fear of matriculation. Maybe this liminal, shoegazian state resonates with you, or maybe it’s O’Hanley’s guitar solo at the end of the big rave-up “Pomeranian Spinster.” Blue Rev careens between the sublime and the extremely sick, soothing one moment and whipping you back against your seat the next. It is cool and righteous, it makes you feel cool and righteous, you hope that when other people hear it they feel cool and righteous. This is the old currency of pop music, and Blue Rev makes it feel new again.


Four years after her genre-blending debut, Santigold offers a polished assortment of global pop tunes produced by the likes of Q-Tip, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Boys Noize, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner.

Master of My Make-Believe

Four years ago, when lines between the struggling fringe artists and moneyed pop favorites were drawn more cleanly, Santi White-- then known as Santogold-- played an important role representing the underdogs and the outcasts. "Brooklyn, we go hard/ We on the look for the advantage, we work hard," she sang on "Shove It", the outer-borough banger that Jay-Z eventually rapped over. Part A&R rep (she'd worked at Epic Records and once wrote material for singers like Lily Allen and Ashlee Simpson) and part punk (she fronted a new-wave grunge act from Philly called Stiffed), she wanted the corporate pop machine she mingled with to know she was batting for the creative underclass. Her debut was chock full of declarations of authenticity like, "That shit must hurt real bad/ Fakin' what you wish you had." But what happens when your creative underclass hops in bed with the corporate pop machine on its own accord?
This is the dilemma White faces four years removed from her genre-blending debut. Four years that have blurred indie/corpo, authentic/fake, pop/rock dichotomies to the point of irrelevance. White's long-time producer Switch, for example, started out shaping the sound of the global underground as one half of Major Lazer and wound up repurposing it for none other than Beyoncé. "I remember when Switch went to work on Beyoncé's record," White said in a recent interview. "I had actually... played Beyoncé Major Lazer's 'Pon de Floor' and she was like, 'That's amazing.'" It was only a matter of time before that beat found itself on 4's lead single "Run the World (Girls)" and the accompanying music video racked up 133 million YouTube views. "I was working with Switch at the time and I was like, 'OK, Switch, we're working tomorrow?'" White explained. "And he was like, 'Actually, I'm working with Beyoncé.'"
Perhaps realizing words like, "Taint my mind but not my soul/ Tell you I got fire/ I won't sell it for no payroll" would ring hollow, White has switched the overarching message to something a bit more personal this time around: Don't put me in a box, I'm in control, and I can be as many different things at the same time as I want to be. On the Kehinde Wiley-designed cover she appears as three different characters-- a valiant Napoleonic type next to a horse in a painting, a man perched arrogantly in a chair in a suit, and a sex kitten/warrior woman figure in a lamé one-piece. Unfortunately, the record doesn't deliver on the bold promise to explore a fantastical assortment of characters. Instead it offers a polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.
A telling moment arrives on "Freak Like Me", a thorny, gyrating standout that jolts you from the record's lull. After a few listens you realize why: The track repurposes the tune of "Rich Girl", the adaptation of a Fiddler on the Roof song popularized by Louchie Lou & Michie One in the 1990s and then by Gwen Stefani and Eve in 2004 (come to think of it, Santigold's ear for the crossover potential of ska, dub, and punk-pop shares more with Stefani than it does with M.I.A., someone to whom she's constantly compared). It doesn't spell good things for the rest of the album that one of its boldest-sounding songs grabs at familiar low-hanging fruit.
Despite the star-studded grab-bag of a production roster that includes Q-Tip, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Boys Noize, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, the record flattens into a glossy collection of effortless dub-tronica that's oddly lacking in texture. The closest White plays to actual make-believe is on "Look at These Hoes", a diss track with a lurking throttle of a beat over which Santi appropriates a snide rap persona, spitting "Look at me/ Then look at these hoes/ These bitches ain't fuckin' with me." The tension between earnestly pissed and mockingly caustic makes for the record's most engaging track. The remainder is primed for play in, say, the dressing rooms at a hip clothing chain or downtown hotel bar-- a fate that almost seems tragic given White's allegiance to opposing ideologies and aesthetic decisions.
At this point it's difficult to discern whether Master of My Make-Believe is disappointingly inert because it's actually unadventurous or because the rest of the world has simply caught up with White. Would the fusion of twinkling electronic dub with shreddier undertones on the anthemic "Disparate Youth" be more interesting if we didn't have bands like Sleigh Bells melting bubblegum sensibilities into punishing guitar shriek? Or if each week didn't bring a ceaseless wave of remixes pairing artists who never would have appeared in the same mp3 tag three years ago? They're questions White herself is yearning to answer, and struggling. She acknowledges it on the appropriately titled ballad "The Riot's Gone", singing: "I've been searching for an angle/ For a cause I can't defend." She'll admit she knows better than anyone that fight music is hard to make when you can't figure out what you're fighting against.


Drakeo’s second project of all-new material since being released from prison is more relaxed and less bitter than his first. There’s a subtext to every flex; he’s been through the wringer, and this is his time to celebrate.

The Truth Hurts

In the early 2010s, Los Angeles rap was in a transitional period, moving from the underground haven of Blu & Exile to the album-length narratives of YG and Kendrick Lamar. Drakeo the Ruler sailed in and upended all of that. He came to prominence on his 2015 mixtape I Am Mr. Mosley, which created waves for its unique slang like “Silly billy really want to try me for my pieces/bullets bodying for pints, yeah bitch it’s that easy.’’ Drakeo didn’t make albums with Spike Lee or John Singleton-like narratives in them; he reached his peak with minimalist drums, a Ghostface-like capacity to develop new slang at a single moment (Who ever heard of “flu flamming’’ before Drakeo said it?), and a 2Pac-like ability to combine different moods and feelings in one verse.
Hearing him rap is like eavesdropping on an illicit conversation between street heads, full of mumbled phrases and lingo for fear of anyone decoding what they're talking about: “Do I got to get tactical?/Start grabbing dracos off mattresses,” he mutters on “Intro,” the standout first statement on his new album, The Truth Hurts. This is his second project of all-new material since the deal that he struck on November 4th granted his freedom. The first, We Know the Truth, celebrated his freedom with a tinge of bitterness: “Twelve jurors, not guilty, nigga beat it,” he spat on “20 Pieces.” The Truth Hurts is more relaxed. Sure, everyone knows the subtext to when he laughs at his enemies, but there are no specific details about his case or his time spent locked up. He’s mostly flexing here, which is more in line with his work previous to the LASD’s scheme. At the same time, he is triumphant. There’s a subtext to everything: On “Exclusive,’’ he spits “The police asked me what's my name?/I told ‘em So Icy, I had to blind ‘em, they almost found the pole by me.” He’s been through the wringer; this is his time to celebrate.
His delivery might be in the descending tree of Bay Area legend E-40, but Drakeo only sounds like Drakeo. Where E-40 sounds like a drunk uncle, Drakeo is your playful and intense cousin. He has five different ways to describe a gun; it’s “heavy metal’’ on “Too Icey,” and a ”meat cleaver’’ on “10.’’ He’s also becoming a great songwriter. “It’s Sum Shit On Me’’ recreates the smoothness of Fabolous’ “Make Me Better,’’ but with the trademark ironclad monotone that has made Drakeo the best rapper of his region for the past three years. Drake is on the last song, “Talk to Me,” and they make a good duo.  Drakeo gives Drake the ability to talk about sliding down on enemies in the club. Drake gives Drakeo the ability to spit game. There’s never a feature (except perhaps the Don Toliver one), that sounds like it is out of place in Drakeo’s world. “Pow Right in the Kisser,” which sounds like a Timbaland beat that drank lean, features fellow Stinc Team member Ketchy the Great in rare form. Drakeo lurks in the background adding “pow right in the kisser” after every Ketchy bar. The song is audaciously weird, and only gets more so as it goes on, like it’s daring you to complain about it.
Ketchy is on four songs on this album. On February 15th, Drakeo confirmed that Ketchy had sadly passed away the day in a car accident. Unfortunately, this loss is still something that Drakeo knows all too well being a Black man from South Central. Even when Drakeo achieves greatness, there’s going to be something trying to bring him down. With The Truth Hurts, this is now his fourth project that counts as the best rap music coming out of the West Coast. It keeps in line with the pared-down street production that JoogSZN and Ron-Ron have created, which is running the West Coast right now, while expanding on the songwriting and lyrical skills that made Drakeo a household name. If that wasn’t enough, his songs have now become the soundtrack to a movement. The LASD detectives are upset. They used song lyrics, rap beef, and his trademark slang to try to paint Drakeo and The Stinc Team as criminals. Now those same lyrics are making him a rap superstar.

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High Life, the second collaboration between Brian Eno and Karl Hyde of Underworld in the last four months, is a genuine surprise. Filled with energy, rich harmonies, and sideways references to various strands of global music, it's Eno's best vocal-centric album in years.

High Life

In 2010, the announcement that Brian Eno had signed to Warp Records was an event. His decades-long history of groundbreaking electronic music had a lot to do with Warp even existing at all, so the fact he was going to be working with the imprint known for taking the torch in the 1990s and 2000s brought dreams of great things. Lost in the excitement was the memory that Eno had for a number of years been making low-key records that made little impact outside of his cult. Another Day on Earth from 2005, his first song-based solo album in many years, had some memorable songs, and his 2008 pairing with David Byrne, Everything Happens Today, found an audience. But ’90s and ’00s instrumental releases like Drawn From Life, The Drop, Neroli, and The Shutov Assembly didn’t come close to entering his canon. The Warp signing obscured the fact that Eno always had more than his share of uneven records, in part because he’s never been the sort of artist interested in perfection. So the fact that four of the records and collaborations released on Warp have ranged from a lovely retread of familiar ground (2012’s Lux) to eminently forgettable collaborations (the two records with poet Rick Holland, and the first with Underworld’s Karl Hyde) should surprise nobody.
High Life, though, is a genuine surprise. As the second meeting between Eno and Hyde in the last four months, it would have been reasonable to expect outtakes, another set of OK half-songs to accompany the ones released earlier this year. But High Life—recorded in just five days, with much of it played and processed live—is something else altogether. This is Eno’s best vocal album in 25 years, since his 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. It’s interesting to go back that far because High Life has a few things in common with that record, most prominently the elements inspired by pop music from the African continent. Yes, this is a recurring obsession of Eno’s, dating back at least to his first co-billed collaboration with David Byrne, 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But on High Life it’s again made explicit, from the title (Highlife is a broad genre of jazz-inflected West African pop music that emerged late in the last century) on down.
That said, many of the references are less musical and more textural, and guitars are the first thing you notice. The opening “Return” is nine minutes of drone-guitar bliss, as Karl Hyde strums two chords furiously with the sort of pinched, trebly, delay-heavy tone that evokes both West African styles and the Edge circa The Unforgettable Fire. The tension of pivoting between those two chords without resolution is softened by Eno’s voice, which he layers into sturdy central melody softened by billowing harmonies. It’s the kind of blindingly simple thing that nobody does better than Eno, and it points to why this record towers over much of his recent output—it sounds analog, like people in a room playing who could make mistakes. Despite his technological pedigree, Eno has always been most inspired by the place where abstract mathematics meet the messiness of nature. His earlier collaborative efforts on Warp, as well as Small Craft on a Milk Sea, felt like records where meaning was carved from endless possibility; High Life shows how much more he can wring out of just a handful of ideas.
If I’m leaning heavily toward Eno’s contributions here, it’s because so many of his songwriting and production signatures are in the foreground. Hyde is the guitarist throughout the record, but Eno’s fingerprints are all over his approach. “DBF” is a relatively upbeat track with a chicken scratch-funk feel that makes me think of Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches”, while the slow and dreamy line in “Time to Waste It” brings to mind an ’80s interpretation of King Sunny Ade. But we’re talking about something more than just a collection of global music signifiers here—influences are stripped down, transformed, and often turned into something disorienting and strange through Eno’s processing. “Time to Waste It” has pinched, warped, and ultimately very weird vocals of uncertain origin which seem to be singing lead from different songs with each new line. “Lilac”’s overlapping guitar lines have the frenetic pulse of classical minimalism, with odd bleeps and squawks mixing in with the chords, and they’re contrasted with the richly harmonized vocals, which remind us how in tune he is with the pure joy of singing.
That big-hearted spirit is embedded into the record as a whole. I count one dud among the six tracks, the just-OK “Moulded Life”, which has some nice sounds but feels a bit like processing-for-processing’s-sake. But that is more than redeemed by the elegiac closer “Cells & Bells”, where grinding Fennesz-like electronics are set against a mass of voices singing a dark but faintly hopeful prayer. It’s a moving end to a startling and inspiring record. Eno’s been involved with quite a few of those in the past, but it’s especially nice to experience a new one that reaches us in the present moment.


With a newfound emphasis on dynamics and space, the Brooklyn group evolves from its gritty post-punk origins into a proudly outrageous jam band.

3D Country

Geese learned their lesson: New York City is so whatever. While their much-hyped 2021 debut, Projector, struggled to stand out among every other Brooklyn band doing Talking Heads and Television, 3D Country is a pivot out of CBGB and into indie rock’s Day of the Dead era. Traces of jittery post-punk are still present, but this time, the band lightens things up with sunnier and proggier hues. It turns out Geese are more inspiring as a glamping jam band than a slick post-punk outfit: They sound bright, colorful, and at ease, with their goofiness now on full display.
From the opening “2122,” vocalist Cameron Winter immediately sounds liberated—and ridiculous. Like a horny shaman yelling at the Grand Canyon, he summons an ecstatic bellow to call upon idols from Ancient Egypt (Osiris, lord of death and rebirth), a questionable blend of Hinduism and Slavic folklore (“Voodoo Balarama Baba Yaga”), and Norse mythology (Jörmungandr, the World Serpent). Instead of boxing in their more expressive singer, the rest of the band rises to his level. Guitarists Gus Green and Foster Hudson throw dueling “War Pigs” riffs and a banjo into the mix. Bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin provide the needed consistency and structure. Rather than projecting a united front, Geese are now a band of distinct voices racing against each other, resulting in an album full of gleeful chaos.
Geese still make intricate rock music, but there’s a newfound emphasis on dynamics, space, and, most crucially, melody. The first half of the record is especially strong. “3D Country” slows the tempo and allows listeners to catch their breath, and the addition of background vocals and piano adds some much-welcome depth. “Cowboy Nudes” is effortlessly carried by melodies that anyone could sing along to. Later, “Tomorrow’s Crusades” incorporates wedding-ceremony strings and Winter’s falsetto—“Where would I ever be without you?” he sings in a rare moment of straightforwardness—to earn the distinction of being the first Geese song that can be called pretty.
Things fizzle out around the middle. By the time we get to “Undoer” and “Crusades,” two slow burns that forget to burn into anything, Geese revert to noodling. Their comfort zone speaks to the jam-friendly pivot: the built-in understanding that most of these songs will probably sound better live than in the studio. “Maybe the last record was our teenage angst and 3D Country is our newfound twenty-something arrogance,” Winter suggests in the press material, where he also claims that 3D Country is about modern doom, climate change, and perseverance through ambient dread—themes that will only be apparent from a close and generous read through the lyrics. While their influences are all over the map, it’s encouraging to hear Geese getting more comfortable sounding like themselves.


The new album from producers Sam Shackleton and Vengeance Tenfold foregoes traditional structures for byzantine, suite-like movements full of headtrip spoken word and drifting pads.

Shackleton / Vengeance Tenfold: Sferic Ghost Transmits

Sferic Ghost Transmits

Among club artists as well as experimental composers, Sam Shackleton has few peers. Since his Skull Disco label closed shop in 2008, he has continually broken down and reformed his template of North African percussion, paranoid atmospheres, and crushing sub bass, drifting beyond the outer-reaches of the dubstep galaxy that tangentially gave him his start. The sound that has emerged, especially on his more recent Woe to the Septic Heart! label, places him in a legacy of UK artists adept at pulling from jarringly disparate corners of music to create an evocative, dour, strangely mystical body of work that transcends the sum of its parts.
The specters of two such groups—Coil and This Heat—loom large on Sferic Ghost Transmits, the outstanding new album from Shackleton and on-again-off-again collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. Coil’s sense of tense foreboding, cultish incantations, and slithering sensuality are mirrored in the album’s headtrip spoken word and Shackleton’s drifting pads. Meanwhile, Vengeance’s occasionally glum vocal melodies, and the grim sense of survival amid a collapsing neoliberal hellscape, could be cribbed directly from This Heat’s playbook. What these groups have in common is a fluid sense of experimentation that channels technical virtuosity into raw, punk gestures, startling textures, and hypnotic grooves rather than flash.
Still, the music on Sferic Ghost Transmits firmly establishes its own space. The album opens with twisting gamelan percussion and builds layers of oozing drones, choral pads, and lithe percussion figures into a sprawling voyage. Shackleton’s compositions of late have foregone traditional structures, swerving instead through byzantine, suite-like movements. Except for the closer “The Prophet Sequence,” these tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, can go as long as 16, and are built with the intricacy of a puzzle box.
The cover art Shackleton has favored since the beginning telegraphs something critical, too: this is stoner music of the highest order. The intonations on “Seven Virgins” could pass for a lost archival recording of a sea shanty jammed through a flanger. Vengeance sounds quietly epic while Shackleton lays back, focusing mostly on setting thick, opium den moods for over seven minutes. Then a burned synth rips a gnarly solo, occasioning perhaps the first air guitar moment in his extensive discography.
Equally druggy is the way the tracks bleed together. In using a largely consistent sonic palette from song to song, Shackleton has written an album that can wash over you if you’re not listening closely. The tracks demand your attention, but they also reward it. Check for the fidgety organ motif buried in the back of “Sferic Ghost Transmits/Fear the Crown,” tucked beneath Vengeance’s throat singing, or the opening gong of “Five Demiurgic Options”; each moment of this album drips with mood. This is the kind of record that can appeal widely, and may actually find more detractors among its intended audience of electronic music heads precisely because of its lack of traditional club touchstones. Speaking with Resident Advisor in 2010, Shackleton expressed a certain exasperation. “I just make [music] until it sounds right and that’s as simple as it is,” he said. “I know some people say, ‘You can’t fucking dance to that shit.’ When I’m making something, I’m imagining myself dancing to it and I get off on that.”


On her second album, the Gambian-Swedish musician sings movingly about grief and otherness, but her rich voice too often gets lost in busy, formulaic pop production.

I’m a Dream

Released in 2014, Seinabo Sey’s “Younger” was one of those hits that bubble up every week or so from the cauldron of PR and algorithms, but it was one of the good ones. The gimmick that got it streaming was clear—the singsong pitch-warping on Sey’s repeated “younger”s—but what made it work as a song were the Gambian-Swedish musician’s robust voice and probing lyrics, plus a euphoric string breakdown that whirls its way through the last third. Streamed over 150 million times on Spotify, “Younger” sounds every bit as career-making as it was. The singer’s 2015 debut, Pretend, reached No. 4 on the Swedish charts.
Her second album, I’m a Dream, offers much of the same. Sey’s voice is rich, adept with fluting falsetto and a rich lower register that recalls the underrated Heather Headley. Sometimes, both of Sey’s signatures appear in the same song: “I Owe You Nothing” is a brash, fuck-off statement of independence delivered with a roar, bolstered by gospel choirs, and closed with a near-operatic cod. But beneath the brashness lies an assertion of interiority. Her voice is forceful, upfront, and—unlike the voices of her streaming-bolstered peers—mostly unhindered by features. The only guest vocalist on the album is British soul singer Jacob Banks, whose weary rasp is substantially more robust than most and well-matched to Sey’s. Their duet, “Remember,” feels mature and lived-in.
But euphoric this album is not, for plenty of reasons. Sey, the daughter of Gambian musician Maudo Sey, lost her father in 2013. She dedicated a 2015 EP to him, and I’m a Dream includes “Never Get Used To,” a song about how grief hollows out everything around the mourner, from inside out. “I sing because you told me to, and then I stop because it sounds just like you,” she sings, and you really do hear their shared cadences.
Her pain isn’t just personal but societal; she’s talked about how, as a biracial woman, growing up in Sweden stifled her. In her defiant 2016 Swedish Grammis performance, she stared down the crowd amid a phalanx of women of color. The number was compared to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show, but to Sey it was as bittersweet as it was triumphant. “[The performance] kind of cemented that feeling that I think about a lot but don’t often talk about: I’m very different than Sweden, than Swedish music,” she told The New York Times. “Breathe,” written on a sabbatical in Senegal, expresses that same thought: “I love it here, ‘cause I don't have to explain to them why I’m beautiful,” she sings. “Back home they’re so scared of me, that I became scared of me.” There’s grit to her voice and heft to the string arrangement. What could have been a rote inspirational track feels hard-earned.
Living in Sweden has worked against her professional ambitions, too: The industry can seem to eat people and breathe hits. “[In] the Swedish music industry, [we’re] looking for a formula to do things, because that’s the way that Denniz PoP and Max Martin did things,” Sey told Billboard. To GQ, she explained that, “Having a hit song is not working for me in my brain.… I want to study with people that I admire and get out of my Sweden bubble.”
But the bubble encircled her anyway. “Younger” got big partly due to a Kygo remix. Another Sey single, “Hard Time,” was snapped up for a Galantis track. And whether it’s due to producer Magnus Lidehäll—who is Sey’s longtime collaborator but whose credits also include Katy Perry’s Prism and David Guetta’s “Bang My Head”—or just a concession to the all-important algorithm, formula finds its way into I’m a Dream. “I Love You” and “Never Get Used To” are full of squiggly, snippetized vocals sliced off the Kygo/Calvin/Guetta EDM amoeba. The latter, in particular, is a heartbreaking song about grief, but it’s set to a stiff, static track that sounds like it’s two instrumental parts away from becoming a Maroon 5 demo. Every time Sey conveys genuine pathos—through her words, through an unmoored piano line, or through vocal murmur—it's clobbered by lite-disco.
Far more cohesive are the piano balladry of “Truth” and the gospel uplift of “Breathe” and “Hold Me As I Land,” which don't innovate much but don't need to. And far more interesting are the pensive, understated “My Eye,” with its sinuous, Sade-like vocal runs and bass burbles, as well as “Good in You,” a whirl of twinkly keys, DJ Mustard “hey”s, and palpable Janet influence that combines come-on and uplift into a burst of joy. “I be myself and I ain’t fronting,” Sey sings on “I Owe You Nothing.” Her music works best when it allows her to do that.


On their most compelling album in more than a decade, the discursive metal trio folds their broad musical interests into a relentless series of hardcore oddities.

NO

The first quarter-century of recordings by the Japanese trio Boris plays like a guide to heavy music’s assorted possibilities. Since the mid-’90s, they have pivoted from curdled psych-rock to blown-out doom, from snarling thrash to blissful shoegaze, from chaotic improv to manicured pop, scurrying like a cornered animal looking for a spring from a waiting stylistic trap. Can you imagine any other band recording with Merzbow and the Cult’s Ian Astbury? That remarkable versatility has made Boris a lodestar for collapsing subgenre walls, within metal and beyond—if Boris were having so much fun digging through and temporarily donning metal’s various garbs, especially on stage, shouldn’t you?
But Boris’ albums have often suffered from that discursive zeal, as the band methodically moved among their obsessions in a way that could feel academic or clinical. They’d build momentum just to squander it, put you in trance just to interrupt it. All that whiplash could get tiring—on last year’s tedious LφVE & EVφL, their studio debut for Third Man, even Boris sounded over it. Not now, however: The remarkable NO—self-recorded during quarantine starting in late March and self-released in a digital rush—is a gloriously claustrophobic crucible full of all the sounds Boris make best, heated by indignation with our time of closed borders and extreme international turmoil.
Boris squeeze almost everything they’ve ever done and loved into these breathless 40 minutes—hardcore tirades and harsh-noise onslaughts, doom-metal riffs and droning tones, rock’n’roll hooks and reverb-shrouded murmurs. NO may be the most compelling and singular album they’ve made since their stateside 2005 breakthrough, Pink. But it’s a complete inversion of those thrashing party jams and hazy anthems—this is Boris, mad as fuck, screaming at the world about the feeling. It is fun and, as they correctly note in an accompanying essay, “extreme healing music.”
NO is rooted in the explosive power of punk-metal crossover. Put it on in the background as you go about your day, and you’ll mostly notice the wonderful belligerence of these short, riotous tunes. “Anti-Gone” feels like Motörhead imploring the crowd to cut loose. “Kikinoue” manages to lumber like doom and lunge like hardcore, like the best of Cloud Rat or even Integrity. They barrel through a relentless, noise-spiked cover of “Fundamental Error,” by cantankerous Japanese hardcore band Gudon. Katsumi Sugahara, who’s played in several such groups since the mid-’80s, adds splenetic guitar to this euphoric tantrum, a testament to the domestic inspiration.
The most remarkable thing about NO, though, is what’s often hidden in its recesses, whether  buried beneath the songs’ pummeling beats and hoarse screams or wedged between the tracks like musical bookends. “Non Blood Lore” might scan like a simple D-beat sortie, but it sports a hook ready for classic-rock radio. “HxCxHxC -Parforation Line-” lets hardcore and shoegaze dissolve into one another until they form a chimera. It’s one of Boris’ most ingenious moves ever, a perfect fusion of their preferred extremes.
These songs often fade out of or into some seemingly unrelated motif, like the Sabbath-sized chords that end “Loveless” or the writhing circuitry that starts “Lust.” The album mirrors that structure, too. Boris begin with the instrumental doom march “Genesis,” the riff circling the rhythm like aircraft surveying a target, and end with “Interlude,” a ghostly ballad so vaporous it conjures cirrus clouds. They’re all reminders of how much experience Boris funnel into NO, how many ideas are at play within songs that may seem simple.
White-hot rage and long-simmering frustration bind all these sounds together. You don’t need a translated lyrics sheet to sense that—the music is visceral, the feelings palpable. The words, howled and grunted, consider the loss of love as an extinction event and position music as an outlet for anxiety. Punk is a historically reliable outlet for such invective, of course, a cross-cultural language of discontent whose urgency can’t be mistaken. But in returning to that atavistic expression for NO, Boris didn’t cordon off these songs from the rest of their musical lives. The resulting sense of chaos redoubles Boris’ wrath and gives it a welcome depth, the sense that it’s here to stay because it’s been here all along.

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Toronto country artist releases his sophomore album, featuring guest work from Leslie Feist and the Band's Garth Hudson.

Constant Companion

For years Doug Paisley gigged around Toronto covering classic country songs in a series of curiously named acts such as Live Country Music and the Stanley Brothers: A Loving Tribute. After spending some time as one half of Russian Literature, he opened for Bonnie "Prince" Billy as Dark Hand and Lamplight, which involved playing acoustic songs while an artist displayed paintings behind him. Already he's had a storied career, so it's odd to think of his 2008 self-titled album as his debut and even harder to think of Constant Companion as only his second release. Both sound effortless and insightful, full of songs that draw you in with their peaceful, easy surface and then dump a big load of hurt on you.
Country remains Paisley's foundation, providing both a subject (relationships in various states of disrepair) and a musical approach that favors straightforward arrangements and spare instrumentation. But the twang in his voice has softened into a gentle burr that recalls the 1970s heyday of outdoorsy singer-songwriters, without putting too fine a point on the nostalgia. He's neither quite country nor folk anymore, but something in between, something that tends to get dismissed as sonic wallpaper by those who aren't willing to dig beyond the surface of the music. In that regard, Constant Companion exceeds Doug Paisley in terms of both the serenity of the surface and the hard truths lurking just beneath, drawing out more hummable melodies as well as more stinging observations. The pedal steel that helped define his debut's sense of isolation is gone, replaced this time by Garth Hudson on keys. The former Band member's counterintuitive piano and organ riffs enliven "No One But You" and "End of the Day", alternately taunting and consoling as he acts as a foil for Paisley-- a gremlin in the works. Subtle harmonies by Leslie Feist, Jennifer Castle, and Julie Faught of the Pining alleviate the loneliness only minimally.
Death and departure loom over Constant Companion, infusing even the smallest moments with a sense of loss and dread. "At the end of the long, long day/ Come go with me in the blue and the gray," he sings on "End of the Day". It sounds like a warm invitation until his real meaning sinks in: "There's no up there's no down/ And there's no way around." Those metaphysics-minded lines don't amount to a suicide pact necessarily, but they do comprise a chilling acknowledgement that every relationship inevitably ends, whether in tears or in death. All you have is yourself, that quietly disturbing album cover attests (seriously, take another look at it). And yet, Paisley's mood isn't woe-is-me dejection, but rather a stoic resignation to the fact that you're ultimately your own constant companion, for better or for worse.


Bored by the status quo and excited by everything he hasn’t tried yet, the Queens rapper is unafraid to take risks and get weird on his latest EP.

Anjelitu EP

When it comes to rapping, Homeboy Sandman shares much in common with Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do, a martial arts philosophy that sees no way as a way and having no limitations as a limitation. While Sand is a prolific, technically gifted MC, it’s difficult to draw a throughline between his dozens of releases; and after 10 years in the rap game, it’s apparent that it’s a feature, not a bug. Like Lee, his form is no form. Infinitely adaptable and stylistically unpredictable, he’s hard to pin down as an artist but also sometimes tough to follow. Perhaps this is why commercial success—even at a modest, independent level comparable to his contemporary and frequent collaborator Aesop Rock—continues to evade him.
Sandman seems quite aware of this, and on his latest EP, Anjelitu, he places himself at a crossroads. In a statement shared with the project, he said he wrote half of its songs “when my energy was either headed in the wrong direction or already there.” The EP’s title is a portmanteau of his childhood nickname Angelito (he was born Angel Del Villar II) and the taijitu, the famous Chinese symbol for yin and yang. The adversarial relationship between the songs on the record—and broadly, his discography—helps illuminate this inward-gazing perspective. Bored by the status quo and excited by everything he hasn’t tried yet, Sand is unafraid to take risks and get weird, with understandably mixed results.
At his best, Sandman revels in forcing listeners to confront uncomfortable truths. “No Beef,” a veganism screed that presents a compelling argument against eating red meat, exemplifies this. The wordplay is more direct than clever, but Sand wields a remarkable internal metronome, jumping in and out of the pocket for effect without ever losing the beat. He’s armed with a different flow on almost every track. “Go Hard” sports a nimble start-stop stutter that would twist the tongues of lesser rappers, and Sand’s rapid-fire delivery on “West Coast” presses each new bar up against the last, barely coming up for air yet always in control. He’s still capable of dropping absurd one-liners (“Raving and ranting, I’m like Fred Hampton/Chewing on rattlesnake plantain,” he raps on “Go Hard”) and of effortlessly switching rhyme schemes, but it’s the delivery here that’s most impressive.
Aesop Rock, Sand’s collaborator and producer of all of Anjelitu’s six tracks—together known as Lice—brings consistency and levity to the admittedly dualistic project. The first five tracks are crafted using a similar palette, built around bare drums, guitars, and bass, peppered with analog electronics and keys. And while the sparse compositions offer a solid base for Sand to experiment stylistically, when juxtaposed with the lush production of the EP’s final track, “Lice Team, Baby,” they’re somewhat lacking. The song features a verse from Aes and would sound more at home on any of the Lice EPs than here. But it’s also evidence of how his collaborations with Aes bring out the best in Sand. Some of the strongest verses in his catalog come with Aes on the track; homed in on their target, they’re focused but unafraid to be silly, with wit as sharp as their skill.

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Deantoni Parks has collaborated with John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, and Flying Lotus. His latest solo album is above all else a showcase for what he can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands.

Technoself

In the mid-'00s, a combination of Dilla’s Donuts, easy-to-use digital production technology like Fruity Loops, and websites like SoundCloud gave aspiring producers of instrumental rap a muse, a method, and a destination. The beat music ecosystem exploded; Donuts was a record that launched 10,000 loopers, a globalized corps of dedicated amateurs, some of whom—Shungu, Teebs, Lee, Knxwledge—have been able to break out ahead of the pack.
But the SoundCloud universe isn’t necessarily kind to aspiring producers with no formal sense of what they’re doing behind the boards. Some of the stronger beat albums of the past decade have come from knowledgeable studio musicians, people like Karriem Riggins, who cut his teeth playing behind some of the biggest names in the world (Paul McCartney, Diana Krall). Deantoni Parks has a comparably decorated background: He’s collaborated with canonical progressive acts of several different decades (John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, Flying Lotus) and is an astounding technical musician, as evidenced by his tenure teaching at the Berklee College of Music, or, if you prefer, this Nike ad.
Parks’ latest solo, Technoself, is above all else a showcase for what the Georgia native can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands. (He only has two.) Every track here is a live recording, an astounding feat given the percussive complexity present on something like "Graphite", which with its surround-sound distortion and riffage feels as if it were carefully engineered over the course of a month of lab work. Frequently, the aggression of the drumming itself is a thrill. "Automatic" is a fantastic pump-up track, with the same wall-to-wall excitement as Eminem’s "Til I Collapse" (and none of the yelling.)
The ambition on Technoself is staggering, particularly given the technical limits that Parks has imposed on himself. Album opener "Black Axioms" uses alternating samples and BPMs to deliver a crash course on modern African-American music, hinting at different eras and genres (blues, house, hip-hop, footwork) by use of speed and musical association. Another track, "Fosse in the Grass", manages to deal cleverly (and wordlessly!) with the issue of appropriation, as it references the choreographer Bob Fosse, and Michael Jackson’s famous borrowing of his moves for "Billie Jean". (Beyoncé was also accused of stealing from Fosse for the "Single Ladies" dance, worth noting given Parks’ connection to the queen through his work with producer Boots.)
And yet, when building upon those two sturdy legs of musicianship and conceptual heft, Parks is sometimes guilty of leaving the third leg of the tripod unstable. Several of the tracks here are not all that much fun to listen to, and it can seem as if Parks values astounding his audience over engaging them. Try watching the video for the track "Bombay" and then simply listening to the instrumental. When you can see what Parks is doing with his set-up, you can’t help but to be impressed. But the track alone isn't even half as compelling. As an exercise in musicianship and high-level conceptual art, Technoself is masterful. But over the course of an entire album, it becomes overwhelming and just a little bit masturbatory.


The Staten Island artist’s debut full-length collects dreamy R&B and punchy pop rap, chronicling stories of heartbreak and hookups with a cool, crowd-pleasing ease.

Valentino

The emergence of New York City’s sexy drill movement couldn’t have come at a better time for Staten Island native wolfacejoeyy. Though he’d already begun to hash out the particulars of his sound by the time Cash Cobain and Chow Lee dropped their pioneering 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy mixtape in 2022, joeyy was undergoing artistic growing pains. For the past few years, he’d been chopping it up in group chats with the underground’s then-buzziest upstarts, like SoFaygo, Slump6s, and Yung Fazo, exploring the moment’s pastel-streaked, melodic trap sound. Though he had a knack for writing the sticky, falsetto-laden choruses favored by his peers, joeyy’s more ambitious output indicated a desire to break from SoundCloud rap’s superficial and often overstimulating conventions.
The best of his early cuts were refreshingly organic, backed by baroque string arrangements and mixed with comparatively subtle vocal processing chains. Those effects allowed joeyy to flex his impressive singing chops, while accenting the youthful idiosyncrasies in his voice. After notching a minor TikTok hit with the Jersey club-inspired “buku,” he joined Cash and Chow in the studio to record “weekend,” a gritty R&B track that foreshadowed the rawer sound of his more recent body of work. Trading prurient bars over disintegrated sub-bass and keyboard arpeggios straight out of a platformer video game’s aquatic level, joeyy was finally in his element: His starry-eyed idealism was the perfect foil for his collaborators’ endearing sleaze.
“Weekend” appeared on last summer’s 22Joeyy EP, but seems to have catalyzed the aesthetic of Valentino, his first full-length album. Its beats center on quasi-acoustic timbres that suggest a “live” feel, instead of the synth-driven wizardry that has defined the recent wave of DIY pop rap. Jazzy piano chords creak and echo. Backing vocalists weave rich harmonies on “don’t be dishonest.” Fingerpicked guitars underscore interludes. This pursuit of intimacy also extends to joeyy’s pen. Wistfully recalling hookups in triplet flows and licentious detail, he tends to offer songcraft that is more story-driven and cohesive than the horny punchlines that have defined the subgenre thus far.
Opener “stop trippin bout girls u don’t know” follows the trajectory of a short-lived situationship—from initial flirtation to the inevitable fallout that occurs when joeyy can’t commit. The track leaves out kicks and 808 pulses almost entirely, paring the production down to chirping hats, droning bass, and elegant synth brass layers. The roominess allows joeyy to experiment more easily: He makes short leaps into higher octaves and imbues the exchange between him and his love interest with voice-cracking intensity. The music may be dreamy ear candy, but the depth and structure of joeyy’s craft puts him a rung above his peers.
On “solar,” he takes Valentino’s strangest beat—springy, bitcrushed bass drums and wacky samples that conjure images of a footrace between Looney Tunes characters—and flips the screwball vibe on its head, inviting listeners to follow him as he tries to numb fresh heartbreak in the middle of a rowdy function. As he’s contemplating the strangely dissociative effects of his weed, joeyy disappears from the track entirely, letting the instrumental ride out for a full minute. It’s an unconventional decision, but it works well within Valentino’s loose narrative, which transitions from an initial stretch of gloomy songs to its ecstatic middle portion. A lesser artist dipping out on the track like this might read as a case of poor editing, but joeyy is charismatic and detail-oriented enough to land the stunt.
Halfway through Valentino, joeyy plays to his greatest strengths, ping-ponging between blown-out Jersey club stomps and impressionist keys. On “cake,” he’s head over heels as he volleys pickup lines with his crush—so in the zone, he’s practically panting between bars like a tennis pro. Lines like, “I told her she sexy, she said ‘period purr,’” and “My pockets blue like Sonic and her pussy pink like Amy” might seem like a tough sell, but they’re delivered with such sincerity that you’ll want them custom-printed on candy hearts. “don’t be dishonest” features gorgeous multi-part backing harmonies performed by London R&B songwriter Moses Ideka, lending joeyy’s delivery a religious fervor as he offers healing to a potential partner. Only “double tap,” a quirky club tune that resembles the synth-funk inspired bounce of Ice Spice’s “Think U the Shit (Fart)” or Lunchbox’s New Jazz mixtape slows the momentum, its busy topline forcing joeyy to rein in his melodic impulses.
Now that he’s finally old enough to frequent the clubs he makes music for, wolfacejoeyy has migrated from the realm of bedroom producers and Discord servers into the real world. He’s benefiting from more developed song structures and writing his most mature, evocative songs yet. His hooks are still unshakeable, but the tiny details and ingenious melodic flourishes that surround them make each listen feel like a small adventure. Valentino hits like downing a flat white when you really should be sleeping: It’s a jolt of restless euphoria that’ll have you ready to leave the house at all costs, wandering in search of anyone’s company—or anything to do.


The Chennai quartet are indie-rock revival survivors making an overdue play for international recognition. Their latest EP is packed with sunlit synths, neon grooves, and upbeat pop melodies.

The F16s: Is It Time to Eat the Rich Yet?

Is It Time to Eat the Rich Yet?

The indie-rock revival of the early 2000s took a few years to hit Indian shores, where bands had spent much of the decade still flogging the corpses of grunge and ’90s alternative. It wasn’t until 2011 or so when a new crop of acts—inspired by the post-punk retromania of the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, as well as the new ubiquity of YouTube and high-speed broadband—found new reservoirs of hitherto-untapped inspiration. This “new wave”—including bands like high-octane garage rockers the Lightyears Explode, cabaret-jazz punks Peter Cat Recording Co., and post-punk revivalists the F16s—arrived at a rare moment of optimism in the Indian rock underground. Rock bands were headlining some of the country’s biggest festivals, making their presence felt on Bollywood film soundtracks, and even catching the eye of international rock publications. (Both Rolling Stone and NME launched Indian editions around this time.)
The optimism was short-lived. Having opened the door for independent music to enter the national mainstream, rock was pushed aside by EDM and hip-hop, eventually finding itself back on the fringes of the industry. The little space left for guitar music was quickly occupied by bland and inoffensive singer-songwriters hoping for a lucrative sync deal. But while many of their contemporaries disbanded or reinvented themselves as bedroom producers, the F16s persevered. Across two EPs, one full-length (2016’s Triggerpunkte), and a series of singles, the band honed their sound—a nostalgic melange of the last four decades of indie rock—into dense, danceable alt-pop. In the process, they hit all the heights available to a rock band in India which, by their own admission, aren’t many. With their new EP, Is It Time To Eat the Rich Yet?, the F16s make their long-delayed play for international recognition.
Taking a step back from the Tame Impala fanboyism of 2019’s WKND FRNDS—a collection of woozy, synth-driven heartache ballads—Is It Time To Eat the Rich Yet? returns to the F16s’ post-punk roots, now complemented by a healthy dose of G-funk synths and neo-soul melodies. Frontman Joshua Fernandez remains obsessed with the impermanence of contemporary romance and his own imperfections (both consistent themes), but there’s a darker political edge to his lyrics as he confronts India’s growing authoritarianism and cultural revanchism. The F16s’ rock’n’roll intransigence has always been at odds with the conservative mainstream: When Fernandez smashed a guitar onstage at a music festival in 2016, he was met with howls of outrage. But the events of the last few years—communal riots, arbitrary arrests of dissenting voices, online mobs of right-wing trolls—have driven home the existential nature of India’s ongoing socio-political crisis. Ironic detachment is no longer an option.
But despite what the title suggests, this is not a record of political polemic. In fact, the music is decidedly celebratory, packed with sunlit synths, neon grooves, and upbeat pop melodies. It’s only when you pay closer attention to the lyrics—which Fernandez delivers in cheeky pitch-shifted falsetto and expansive chamber-pop baritone—that you realize you’re, as one band member put it, “dancing to (y)our doom.” Opener “I’m on Holiday” blends classic doo-wop, psych rock, new wave, and Afro-pop into a summery tropical cocktail, imagining lockdown-induced separation from loved ones as a jangly vacation ditty. Never have the words “I’m on holiday, forever” sounded as sinister. Driven by Abhinav Krishnaswamy’s guitar and a brass section, “Trouble in Paradise” breathes new life into the alt-rock trope of the self-identified misanthrope. “Easy Bake Easy Wake” opens with a submerged synth line that, in its mixture of AM gold and psychedelia, is basically a ready-made Avalanches sample. It also features the terrific line “She fucks me like the government”—delivered with a straight face.
“Sucks to Be Human” is all maximalist synth and disco rhythm, a halogen-lit retro-futuristic tour of alienation, planetary destruction, and billionaire space-escape fantasies. It’s the first of two tracks on the record that look beyond Fernandez’s emotional universe to the world around him. The other is closer “The Apocalypse,” an ode for nihilistic eco-millenarianism: “SOS! Don’t panic,” goes the falsetto chorus, “Bless our death, we’ve doomed our planet.” There is something audacious about this ecstatic invocation of self-annihilation. Perhaps that’s why they end the track with a slight reprieve: “We’re all gonna be fine,” Fernandez sings. Will we? The F16s aren’t the first band to hide ominous messaging under outwardly joyous melodies, and sometimes they wear their influences on their sleeve too openly. But the instant familiarity is balanced by their technical and songwriting chops. Just grab a drink and dance your way to extinction.

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Polly Jean Harvey has never made the same album twice, and neither has she ever made an album as bleak as White Chalk, which finds her trading guitar for piano and haunting her own house.

White Chalk

If there's been a constant in Polly Jean Harvey's 15-year career it's that she seems uncomfortable in her own skin-- which may explain why she sheds it so often. Harvey has a penchant for self-correction, to an almost compulsive degree: After To Bring You My Love made her a marquee act, Harvey released the dark, more atmospheric Is This Desire? When her 2000 album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea accidentally captured the tenor of the times (its songs had an eerily prescient relationship to post-9/11 paranoia), Harvey responded with the stripped-down and studiously raw Uh Huh Her. In recent years, reports even swirled that Harvey was considering retiring, and in at least one regard she temporarily has: White Chalk-- Harvey's most radical self-correction to date-- finds her setting aside the guitar and the blues touches that marked past releases in favor of chamber-gloom, a ghostly piano her tool of choice.
In Uh Huh Her's liner notes, there's a scribbled note from Harvey which reads, "TOO NORMAL? TOO P J H?" On White Chalk, there might be more Polly Jean Harvey than we've ever heard before-- if not quite enough of what traditionally falls under the "PJ Harvey" moniker. One problem is that Harvey isn't nearly as creative a pianist as she is a guitarist. However, the instrument switch has forced her to alter the way she composes as well as the way she sings. From opener "The Devil" on down, she's singing almost exclusively near the top of her range, using the piano as much as for percussion as melody. There are very few distracting trills on "Dear Darkness" or "Grow Grow Grow", where every note rings with loneliness, and the simple repetitive pattern that gently drives "When Under Ether" drips with menace.
The rest of the album's instrumentation is equally spare and strictly old-fashioned, with such mood-setters as broken harp fleshing out (ahem) "Broken Harp"; when some (fake) brass enters the song, it's somber and subdued. Even the scant use of drums is largely intended to accent the songs. While there's probably more room than usual for Jim White, only "The Piano" finds him playing with any force.
Lyrically, White Chalk is oppressively bleak. Harvey's songs never seem as if they come easily; they instead sound like the product of much effort, rigor, and even some pain. Her music is so raw it's a far cry from fun, even when she's trying to be funny; when she commanded Robert De Niro to "sit on my face" in 1993's "Reeling", she made it sound part dare, part threat. But there are no chuckles to be had on White Chalk, which is dark and austere, the songs striking an uneasy balance between indulgence and confrontation.
Despite the presence of regular collaborators John Parish, Captain Beefheart alum Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood, White Chalk sounds as lonely and isolated as any album Harvey has made. There is a rich history of depressing British folk that Harvey taps into here, but without a hint of catharsis, much of White Chalk's miserablism just hangs in the air like a noose. On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world.


The reggaeton of the Colombian pop star meets the reggae of Jamaica on a short and sleek album that, as far as cross-cultural projects go, just barely skims the surface.

#7DJ (7 Días En Jamaica)

Though reggaeton’s popularity has offered some artists a dependable ride to global stardom, the genre’s non-stop commercial expansion has meant that even its top ambassadors have had to find ways to avoid monotony. For Maluma, this has been tricky. Innovation isn’t quite his thing; the Colombian singer has been more interested in nailing formulas that produce massively successful hits—and he’s good at it. He’s tweaked the ratios over time, dialing up his lecherous side in early songs like “Cuatro Babys”' and switching on the gooey sensitivity for 11:111’s syrupy ballads. His penchant for sliding in and out of characters has resulted in a few unexpected fusions, including collaborations with Brazilian artists Anitta and Nego de Bordel and traces of salsa on last summer’s Papi Juancho. But his surprise visual EP #7DJ is one of his most pronounced creative attempts and direct experiments with cross-cultural sounds yet.
In January 2020, before the pandemic began, Maluma took a week-long vacation to Jamaica and returned home inspired by reggae and dancehall traditions. The focus on Jamaica carries a specific weight: Workers from the island—who migrated to Panama alongside thousands of Caribbean laborers to build the Panama Canal among other infrastructure projects—shaped reggae en español, which is the backbone of reggaeton. Songs such as Farruko and Bad Bunny’s “La Cartera” and J Balvin’s “Ambiente” have hinted at these diasporic connections, and Maluma is aware of at least some of the music’s history. “We wouldn't have Urban Latino music without Africa and the contributions of the Black community in Latin American and here in the U.S.,” he said recently. “This album is a small way to show my love for Jamaica and for Black culture.” Such a statement is a rare and overdue acknowledgment of the Black and Caribbean erasure that occurs in the Spanish-speaking music industry.
Still, this is reggae made in the image of Maluma, which is to say it’s sleek and commercially minded. Flashes of authenticity appear in certain details, such as the Jamaican musicians and live instruments blended into the production, and the seven videos that premiered alongside the album celebrate locals and quotidian life on the island. However, these visuals also operate like a Maluma vacation lookbook, particularly in scenes where he chases after his co-star, former Miss Jamaica Davina Bennett. The music is benign and unobtrusive as the two splash on crystal beaches and grind on dancefloors in a never-ending spiral of prettiness. Even tracks that boast the co-signs of reggae legends—the brassy “Tonika” features Ziggy Marley and Charly Black lends vocals to the laidback melodies of “Love”—are lacquered in a high-sheen gloss designed for feel-good radio play. Though Maluma seems to appreciate Jamaican sounds, the album isn’t a deep interrogation or absorption of the styles he’s using. There’s a clear strategy involved in the decision to keep things light: It’s what works best for the singer’s brand and for his spumy delivery. “Agua de Jamaica” and “Desayun Arte,” in fact, are some of the record’s best vocal performances precisely because of their breeziness.
Maluma doesn’t dive too far into Jamaican culture. Instead, he floats on the surface of the music and focuses on churning out a tidy, marketable compendium that, despite its limits, manages to broaden his range. And while he passes on the chance to do anything radical or cutting-edge, there is one flicker of inventiveness on “La Burbuja,” a slinky sliver of dancehall that trades the project’s mellow vibes for smoky clubbiness. The moment doesn’t last long though, and #7DJ ends without becoming more than a quick, seven-day dip into the island.

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The Los Angeles techno producer’s second album is sharp and focused. Maymind does a lot with very little to make gratifying soundscapes that are easy to sink into.

Cheap Storage

The first solo material Leo Maymind released, in 2016, was torn between two competing impulses. On the one hand were rich layers of synths, sampled voices, and delay, all stretched and twisted like blown glass; on the other, muscular drum programming informed by techno and bass music. The record, a three-track EP for Adam Marshall’s New Kanada label, showcased a bold, burly sound, and one starkly at odds with what followed it: On last year’s Illumina, Maymind’s debut album, the Los Angeles producer opted to strip back, deliberately restricting himself to a modest tabletop setup of synths, drum machines, and effects, all run into a handheld recorder. It turns out that by imposing limitations, he opened up new avenues. The spacious Illumina patiently mapped ambient and broken techno landscapes in ways that weren’t always easy to follow, but all the more intriguing for it: indistinct outlines, foggy terrain, disappearing ink. Now, on the follow-up, he continues that line of investigation across eight tracks of an even more exploratory bent.
Where Illumina sometimes felt tentative and amorphous, Cheap Storage is sharper and more focused. The drums often took a backseat on last year’s album, but they’re more prominent here. That doesn’t mean straight techno—well, save for the opening “K Density,” in which thudding kick drums and a single, syncopated synth tone summon echo-soaked memories of warehouse raves. Maymind’s drums tend to be distant and echoing: “Loneliness and a Kick Drum” is held together with a steady clanking reminiscent of old radiators; “No Headlights, One Glove” rolls a single weathered snare sound out into the velvety dark. Its downbeat, wrapping slowed-down breakbeats in echoing synths, recalls Urban Tribe’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, an expressive beat-music touchstone from 1998; the tinny, loping “Loneliness and a Kick Drum” takes after the minimalist synth bleats that Antipop Consortium brought to underground hip-hop in the early 2000s. Those aren’t the only faintly throwback sounds here: The whirring, chirping noise at the center of “Cheap Storage” is a dead ringer for Garbage-era Autechre.
Like Illumina, Cheap Storage was made with limited materials, taking shape in improvised takes on MPC, synths, and an inexpensive vocal mic. Those conditions are often apparent in the music. Maymind’s jams don’t always do much—there’s not a lot of compositional complexity here; “Continuous Spectrum” merely paints woozy synth pads over slinky electro drums for nearly seven minutes—but they’re gratifying soundscapes to sink into, particularly when he layers overlapping rhythmic patterns in such a way that the downbeat disappears in a shifting, wrongfooted groove.
“From the Rooftop We Could See the Skyline,” a swirling, 150-BPM dub-techno cut, shows how small variations can go a long way. Synth parts subtly fade in and out; a few minutes in, the hi-hats rise in volume, doubled by delay, and what at first seems placid turns more strained as a distant, high-pitched voice pulls the track’s edges taut, the energy rising and falling in slow waves. In terms of intensity, the head-nodding “No Headlights, One Glove” falls at the opposite end of the spectrum, but its graceful, real-time arc is similar. Its unchanging boom-bap rolls on like a nighttime drive through empty streets, and, two-thirds of the way through, when a fistful of organ chords flares up, it makes for a moment of subtle but unmistakable drama, like brake lights splashed suddenly across a rain-slicked windshield.
Though Maymind never spells it out, I suspect there’s a creative philosophy tucked into the album’s title. Hard drives these days are voluminous and inexpensive; unlike the era of tape, there’s virtually no cost involved in capturing a musical idea, so might as well just keep the recorder running. Writers have a saying: “Write drunk, edit sober.” Even teetotalers can find a kernel of truth here: First, strip away all inhibitions, then go back with a critical eye and refine. Balancing freeform spontaneity with spotlit detail, Cheap Storage shows the merits of such an approach.


Kansas City indie pop trio Shy Boys' self-titled debut is a triumph of ramshackle aesthetics and homespun hooks. Instrumentally, Shy Boys is far from dazzling, but that doesn't seem to hold the group back.

Shy Boys

Forget that Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours" rap for a second—sometimes, you're better off going in cold. Take, for instance, Kansas City trio Shy Boys. Brothers Collin and Kyle Rausch and roommate Konnor Ervin formed the band before they'd ever picked up their instruments, and from the ramshackle sound of their self-titled debut, they haven't lost much sleep staying up late to work on their scales. Unabashed amateurishness can cut both ways; certain groups cut through the rough patches with enough youthful exuberance or ingrained pop sensibility, but for others, the incompetency's more than the songs can bear. Instrumentally, Shy Boys is far from dazzling: tentative one minute, roughshod the next. But these limitations don't seem to be holding Shy Boys' songcraft back. From these rickety arrangements, they've carved out the kind of sly, spiny, instinctive hooks any seasoned band would be lucky to stumble upon.
The Shy Boys have dubbed their jangly indie-pop "landlocked surf music," which, as self-styled descriptors go, isn't half-bad. Rumbling staccato riffs and candied Beach Boys harmonies form the foundation of many of these songs, and there's a late-afternoon haze hanging over even the least sunstroked numbers. There's no shortage of turn-of-the-60s pop in the DNA of these songs, from doo-wop to teen-heartthrob crooner-types; the syrupy, slightly unsettling "Heart is Mine" is Frankie Avalon by way of the first Smith Westerns LP, while the late-LP twofer "Fireworks" and "Trim" are one spiked punchbowl away from closing out a Sadie Hawkins dance. But, while certain touchstones echo throughout these songs, their unschooled approach to songcraft mostly keeps mere imitation at bay. Shy Boys is a short album—ten songs in barely 24 minutes—and songs don't waste a lot of time getting to the point. Hooks are shoved front-and-center, pesky things like bridges fall by the wayside, and instrumental flourishes are few and far between. It's a risk, but it pays off; by eliminating the distance between you and these homespun hooks, they burrow their way into your head that much quicker.
Though singer/guitarist Collin Rausch's lyrics all-too-often get swept up in a sea of reverb, he's in sweet, tender voice throughout Shy Boys, singing with a delicacy that carries his message through the thick coating of Vaseline. The swirling, Shins-gone-surf "Bully Fight"—inspired by YouTube-infamous meanie Richard Gale—finds Rausch throwing his charmingly thin voice around like a guy with some experience with getting picked on, while the jittery "And I Am Nervous" pretty much reviews itself. That nervous energy's a big reason for Shy Boys' success; getting through these songs in one piece lends these songs an urgency that leaves slowpoke ballad "Submarine" feeling woozy, waterlogged. From a structural standpoint, these songs never seem more than a couple bum notes from falling apart. But, between that verge-of-collapse sound and unforced, plucked-from-the-air hooks, Shy Boys operates with a kind of spluttering grace. These unforced, unfussy, unshakably catchy songs are awfully easy to like, and their precarious presentation's just gauzy and peculiar enough to hold together after the dozenth listen.
In a few short years, Ervin and the Rausches haven't just learned how to put a couple chords together; they've figured out how to build songs around their encumbrances, giving their tottering hooks proper space and all but dispensing with the rest. Proficiency's nice, but it isn't everything, and plenty of veteran bands go to great lengths to unlearn enough to write a song as sharp and spontaneous as the swift, stuttering "Postcard". Shy Boys still have a few things to figure out, but for now, what they don't know isn't hurting them any.