Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the breakthrough LP from a pair of proud eccentrics whose arcane preoccupations and clever songwriting made them unlikely stars.

Flood

What did it mean to be a rock star in 1990? Whatever the answer might be, They Might Be Giants were decidedly not it. The Brooklyn duo’s style was more turtlenecks than leather, their voices nasal and not especially alluring, their erratic dance moves more like the mechanics of wind-up toys. One of them played the accordion. On their first record, they gave a famous Who lyric a sincere moralistic spin: “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die.” Yet those same uncool qualities were the exact things that made They Might Be Giants total rock stars. Their ability to grab listeners with sharp, catchy songwriting was never more evident than on 1990’s Flood, where their expansive imagination was matched by major label money. The underdogs always find a way.
John Flansburgh and John Linnell had both come of age in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a cozy Boston suburb close enough to Walden Pond that Thoreau could hear the ringing of the town’s church bells during his afternoon meditations. As high schoolers, the pair worked together on the school newspaper and bonded over a mutual interest in comics books, the Ramones, and experimenting with Flansburgh’s tape machine. In 1981, the two Johns reconnected as young adults after moving into the same Brooklyn apartment—Flansburgh was there to study printmaking at Pratt, and Linnell was playing keys in a band called the Mundanes. The limitlessness of punk had blossomed into the brightness of new wave, and the pair’s quirky preoccupations made them natural bedfellows within a burgeoning New York City scene.
At the time, New York was just emerging from the economic stagnation and crime surge that battered the city in the 1970s; 1981 would turn out to be one of its most violent years. But there was potential in the disintegration. The Johns began working on music together in earnest, with Flansburgh on guitar, Linnell on accordion, and a drum machine. The absence of a formal rhythm section was liberating: While they might not have been able to afford an orchestra, they could program one on a computer. (Besides, lugging an organ to gigs was exhausting, as they found out at their first show: a Sandinista rally in Central Park.)
Over in the East Village, performers as eclectic as feminist artist Karen Finley—known for intense monologues about the politics of the female body over pounding disco beats—and Steve Buscemi’s comedy duo could find an audience. In between day jobs as a graphic designer and a darkroom technician, They Might Be Giants began honing their own act, which often included homemade props—like a massive stick with a microphone attached to one end, which Flansburgh would pound for percussion. But equally intriguing were the Giants’ offstage practices. In the early ’80s, after Flansburgh’s equipment was stolen from his apartment and Linnell broke his wrist while working as a bike messenger, the pair began recording songs to Flansburgh’s answering machine. They shared this material not by seeking out a label, but by placing ads for what they called Dial-a-Song—named after the Christian hotline Dial-a-Prayer—in The Village Voice classifieds section. Long before music was readily available online, the duo leveraged a landline to release new songs daily and play them directly to listeners in and beyond New York.
This underground momentum eventually landed the Giants their first major press notice in the pages of People—yes, the celebrity rag—where their 1985 demo cassette received a glowing review. “These guys should definitely change their name,” quipped writer Michael Small. “It won’t be long before they really are giants.” It was a prescient prediction. Soon after, They Might Be Giants released their self-titled debut, a hyperactive collection that bounced from punk to polka as it folded in references to the off-kilter ephemera that filled the two Johns’ real lives: the 1954 Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz film The Long, Long Trailer, a coworker with Elephant Man disease, Burt Bacharach. But the album’s incisive core saved it from collapsing into novelty. “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful,” goes the infectious “Don’t Let’s Start.” “Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.”
Around this time, the Giants started working with a young Nickelodeon director named Adam Bernstein. Their video for “Don’t Let’s Start” captures the band’s oddball showmanship: They perform a jerky, synchronized dance routine alongside props like chimney flue hats and cutouts of progressive newspaper editor William Allen White (the two former high school newspaper staffers would adopt his cheery visage as their group’s unofficial mascot). Inexplicably, “Don’t Let’s Start” entered regular rotation on MTV and the band’s album sales skyrocketed. It was a sudden, fantastical leap, but as one TV executive suggested, the Giants’ outsized visual presence made them “the ultimate MTV band.” Their next record, 1988’s Lincoln, pushed them further into the mainstream with the chart-climbing single “Ana Ng,” a love song to a woman who lives halfway around the world. By the time they signed to Elektra in 1989, “we weren’t just weirdos, we were weirdos who’d sold some records,” Flansburgh remarked later. Still, the label was reluctant to let them self-produce their third record, encouraging the band to collaborate with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, known for their work with Elvis Costello & the Attractions. Eventually the parties reached a compromise: Langer and Winstanley would produce the album’s four proposed singles, which ended up consuming two-thirds of the recording budget.
From that disproportionate division of funds to its 19-track length, Flood embraces overflow. The album begins with a 30-second choral theme that asks grandiose questions about the roots of joy (“Why is the world in love again?”) and doom (“Why are the ocean levels rising up?”). The Giants don’t have the answers, but they can offer “a brand new record for 1990…Flood!” In its own earnest weirdness, Flood was a beacon of modernity—an attempt to explore existential quandaries with playfulness.
While a handful of songs used live drums, Flood is indebted to the Casio FZ-1 sampler, which made a huge impression on the Giants when they heard De La Soul deploy it on 1989’s groundbreaking 3 Feet High and Rising. The two Johns used this synthetic genie to record everything from clinking kitchen utensils (“Hot Cha”) to the whiplash of a wet towel (“Minimum Wage”) to a vacuum cleaner (“Hearing Aid,” which also features a guitar solo from no wave icon Arto Lindsay). The sampler was especially heroic in the Giants’ reimagining of the Four Lads’ post-war novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as a fast-paced romp. The Giants treated “Istanbul” as a tutorial for their new machine, and the song is almost entirely constructed of cobbled-together sounds, including the heavy whistle of blowing on a Coke bottle.
On their first two records, the Giants pulled from a vast stockpile of songs they had written throughout the mid-’80s. But Flood is composed almost entirely of new material that allows ideas to unspool in peculiar, organic ways. On “Whistling in the Dark,” Linnell sinks into his baritone range and spins an absurdist parable about independent thinking. The cartoonishly simple “Particle Man” explores the injustice of natural law through elemental characters and wordplay (“When he’s underwater does he get wet?/Or does the water get him instead?”). Other songs take a more straightforward route: “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” shakes its fist at life’s minor annoyances; “Minimum Wage” conveys its disdain for capitalism in under a minute using only a yodel, a whip crack, and an arrangement that borrows from Sinatra’s version of “Downtown”; the power-chord laden “Your Racist Friend” unambiguously condemns ironic racism (“Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding”).
Nowhere is their imagination more profound than on the album’s whimsical hit, “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” written from the standpoint of a night light. Atop a steady snare and a jangly arrangement heavily inspired by the Lovin’ Spoonful, this luminous narrator pours out a stream-of-consciousness ramble about, among other things, its family tree. “Though I respect that a lot, I’d be fired if that were my job,” it says to its lighthouse ancestor—“after killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts.” Though the bouncy melody is outwardly chipper, there’s something subtly menacing about “Birdhouse,” from the acerbic trumpet solo to its wavering bridge: “I’m your only friend/I’m not your only friend/But I’m a little glowing friend/But really I’m not actually your friend/But I am.” It’s brilliant, it’s breathless, and boy is it bizarre.
Robert Christgau once described They Might Be Giants’ debut as “an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance.” There is indeed something maddening about the band’s ceaseless inventiveness, especially on Flood. What neurons are required to conceive a song about reincarnation told from the perspective of a bag of groceries? How does a rock with a piece of string tied around it become a metaphor for man’s search for meaning? And who the hell thinks to rhyme “infinite” with “Longines Symphonette”? Whimsy was inherent in the band’s name, which makes reference to Don Quixote’s insistence that distant windmills were, in fact, giants. But the pair knew that wit can easily tip into irritation: “Being considered smart alecks is a negativity and we don’t want that,” Linnell told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. So Flood remains humble in spite of its eccentricities. “I can’t understand the appeal of bands that pretend they have the meaning of life on tap,” he once remarked. “We’re the opposite of that confessional school of songwriting; there’s no all-nude revue portion of our show.”
To this point, Flood offers very little insight into its creators beyond their obvious talents. Only one moment toes a biographical line: “John, I’ve been bad/And they’re coming after me,” the pair warble in harmony on “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love.” “Done someone wrong and I fear that it was me.” In spite of this emotional distance, fans eagerly latched on to the band’s strange tales. Was a line like “Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads” a metaphor for conformity, or a sly reference to silicon implants used by sumo wrestlers to meet height requirements? “We’re not really into writing songs with secret meanings or coded messages,” Linnell once clarified. Absurdity is in the eye of the beholder.
Flood was a huge success by the band’s standards, reaching No. 75 on the Billboard 200 and eventually receiving a platinum certification. The songs were blasted across television for all ages: Kids got animated music videos for “Particle Man” and “Istanbul” on the Looney Tunes spin-off Tiny Toon Adventures; teens saw the surrealist “Birdhouse in Your Soul” video on MTV; The Tonight Show treated adults to a zippy live rendition of “Birdhouse.” After years running a shoestring live setup that the Giants themselves parodied as a rhythm section want ad, they finally enlisted a live backing band in support of their next album, 1992’s Apollo 18. The response was immediate: Their shows became “full-out, stage-diving, moshing, party celebrations.” The duo would record all subsequent albums with a full band.
By the mid-’90s alternative music had become big business. After Flood, They Might Be Giants became known as the not-so-elder statesmen of the burgeoning subgenre of geek rock. Though they’ve long resisted the label, their success undeniably opened doors for bands that were not traditionally “cool,” like Ween, Fountains of Wayne, and Weezer; Flood’s surf-rock breakup song “Twisting” could have been a Blue Album B-side. But all bubbles must burst, and the Giants were among the alt-rock bands that found themselves shortchanged in Elektra’s eventual corporate reshuffle. “If something breaks, they don’t see an opportunity to get something going,” Flansburgh said later. “They want to focus on the new record by the Cure.” They Might Be Giants departed Elektra in 1996 and spent the latter half of the decade touring and releasing a handful of compilations and live records. Meanwhile, the band’s cult following kept beating the drum. The Giants were early adopters of the internet, communicating with fans via mailing list and starting a website. In 1998, their coordinated web army rigged People’s annual online reader poll of the world’s most beautiful people, and Linnell landed in the top 10 alongside Madonna and Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio. (He subsequently wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times.)
In the late 1990s, Flansburgh and Linnell began writing and performing for music and television, winning a Grammy for “Boss of Me,” their theme song for the Fox sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. This work paved the way for They Might Be Giants to enter the lucrative world of children’s music. They’d long penned songs about historical figures like 11th American president James K. Polk and “Belgium’s famous painter” James Ensor; in 2002, they released No!, a record geared specifically towards “the entire family.” Children, it turned out, were the perfect audience for strange songs about a man with superhuman taste buds, or the uncertain origins of balloons, and the Giants have pursued this path while continuing to make more adult-oriented albums.
But whether making music for children or their parents, They Might Be Giants have stayed true to the innovative spirit that shines so brightly on Flood. “I’ve often been told that you only can do/What you know how to do well,” Linnell sings on “Whistling in the Dark.” “And that’s be you/Be what you’re like/Be like yourself.” Flood proved they didn’t know any other way.


Blending triumphant jams with the mind-bending repetition of minimalism, the instrumental outfit offers a leaderless, collective shout of defiance.

Music Is Victory Over Time

As of late 2023, there are at least eight images of the Kool-Aid Man scattered across Sunwatchers’ Bandcamp page. He’s an unlikely mascot for an anti-capitalist experimental rock band, but ever since he appeared on the cover of the group’s 2019 album Illegal Moves in full-on Braveheart regalia standing triumphant over a mutilated corpse of Uncle Sam, his presence within the band’s own cheeky branding has been ubiquitous. Naming their 2020 follow-up Oh Yeah? was a not so subtle nod in his direction. The group’s tongues are shoved firmly into their cheeks, and the blatant IP theft aligns with their anarchist-leaning politics. But the exuberant, barrier-breaking energy of their appropriated brand ambassador is mirrored in the unchecked jubilation at the heart of the band’s music.
Sunwatchers exist in a lineage of musicians and performers creating politically radical work that cherishes the spirit of invention and is charged with hopeful defiance. Like the Bread and Puppet Theater, they construct a homegrown spectacle that is viscerally entertaining; like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, they use jazz as the groundwater that feeds a holistic practice of playfully and provocatively challenging artistic norms. As an instrumental band, Sunwatchers convey all of this through sound alone, countering their triumphant melodies with blasts of saxophone skronk and the time-bending repetition of minimalism. Think of it as solidarity fuel: a jolt of revelry to replenish the spirit of those engaged in the daily struggle of existence and resistance.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Sunwatchers have been notably less prolific than over the previous half-decade. Music Is Victory Over Time is the quartet’s first album in over three years, and their approach has shifted in subtle ways. The valleys are now just as potent as the peaks, and the darkness at the margins is more apparent, if still largely kept at bay. The relatively understated “Foams” plays out like the first moments of the jam section of the Grateful Dead’s “Playing in the Band” expanded into a shimmering ebb and flow of electric guitar arpeggios. Closer “Song for the Gone” punctuates the album with a wistful tribute to lost friends that climaxes in a three-chord refrain—a rare retreat into traditional song form.
The group sounds most dialed in when they focus on a single musical phrase and push it to a breaking point. The opening melody to “World People” feels cribbed from a game show (or perhaps an ’80s Ornette Coleman record with Prime Time) until it begins to contract and expand simultaneously, a short arpeggiated phrase building in intensity until it explodes into a glorious two-chord blowout. The wide-eyed, flowing triplets played by saxophonist Jeff Tobias on “Tumulus” become full-cheeked bleats by the song’s end. It’s in listening to these shifting, evolving pieces that the album’s title begins to come into focus: While being swept up in the music, listening closely to the way it moves from points A to B to Q, the slippery, untamed flow of time seems dictated by the pliable swirl of sounds rather than the unflinching tick of the clock. Music Is Victory Over Time, like so much of the Sunwatchers catalog, creates the mindset in which revolutionary impulses and ideas can flourish—one driven by patience and passion in equal measure. Their music is a leaderless, collective shout of defiance, each element working in tandem to rethink how music moves and how it moves the listener.


Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth hopscotch between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. On their eccentric new album, the only constant is stylistic inconsistency.

Big Day

Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth entered into existence as an item on one woman’s bucket list. In the summer of 2013, Larissa Sapko, the group’s eventual bassist, took it upon herself to enlist her friends in a rock group that “sounded like Yo La Tengo,” as she admitted to Nylon. Four years, two releases, and a host of line-up changes later, Loose Tooth have amassed a reputation as one of the rowdiest, most unpredictable bands in the Philly underground, hopscotching between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. That the band’s delirious din now bears little resemblance to Yo La Tengo’s music is a blessing in disguise; overt fan-service only gets you so far in such a glutted scene.
Loose Tooth do right by eccentricity on their sophomore full-length Big Day, a nine-track joyride where the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. In its 24 minute runtime, the band covers a remarkable amount of ground. Peppy buzz-bin choruses explode into thorny breakdowns; red-meat grunge morphs into math rock, recedes into an ambient interlude, then circles back to punk. And that’s just the first four tracks. The album’s B-side proves just as wide-reaching, albeit noticeably sunnier. The bubbly “Dog Year” recalls Pinback, and the midtempo ballad “Day Old Glory” is a collaboration with showstopping vocalist and fellow Philadelphian Abi Reimold. But the storm clouds come rushing back in for “Fish Boy,” the crunchy, seething closer.
Vocalist and guitarist Kian Sorouri soothes his bandmates’ queasy racket somewhat with plainly-sung melodies, delivered in his lazy, nasal tenor, occasionally punctuated by a deadpan joke or a full-throated yelp. Still, the frontman’s lyrics are anything but pedestrian. “Garlic Soup” frames the conflict between self-control and catharsis as a literal stomach-churner: “Remain totally in control of the things you spew/Releasing totally unconsciously/Feel the shame you spew.” The chorus ramps up the gross-out further, zooming in on an image of the speaker going for a dip in “a river made of [their] own waste” and transmogrifying it into a stomping sing-along, all sweeping chords and roiling bass.
Whether intentional or not, every aspect of Big Day—its brisk pacing, its disjointed arrangements, its thematic frisson—hinges on the undertow of its creators’ stream-of-consciousness. That makes for a potentially tenuous listen, considering the fine line between endearing quirkiness and directionless excess. Barring the occasional missteps—like the underwhelming opener “Sleep With the State Concept,” which buckles under the weight of its lumbering parts—Loose Tooth fall into the former camp. For a band with seemingly limitless ideas, they’re notably disciplined, but on Big Day, less proves to be more.


Peppered with Star Trek references, meme humor, and lyrics generated by an AI trained on Beowulf and 4Chan, the English band’s sixth album is its nerdiest yet.

Raw Data Feel

Everything Everything want you to believe that they are clever cultural critics. They costume themselves in Devo-inspired utilitarian fashion, almost always sporting navy blue boiler suits; they deliver emotion with a distanced and cerebral irony. The apocalypse interests them, as do computers, and on their records they’ve positioned themselves as outcast philosophers inquiring into subjects as broad as “the human condition,” “technology,” and “society.” On their latest album, Raw Data Feel, the band’s grandiosely empty, teenager-on-weed musings make a mockery of that haughty stature.
Raw Data Feel is Everything Everything’s nerdiest record yet. With its pew-pew synths, Star Trek references, and long since played-out meme humor (there’s a song called “Shark Week”), the band’s sixth album feels like music for a Minecraft convention. The biggest talking point has been the use of AI software to produce some of its lyrics: Lead vocalist Jonathan Higgs reportedly input posts from 4Chan, verses from Beowulf, and language from LinkedIn’s terms and conditions agreement. But what came out is indistinguishable from Higgs’ usual mix of boilerplate platitudes and garbled literary nonsense, especially since he won’t reveal which lyrics were AI-generated. The AI has no tangible presence, except as a reason to talk about this album at all.
Still an experimental technology, AI has been used in music by the likes of Brian Eno and Holly Herndon; Herndon, a scholar of machine learning, incorporated it into her 2019 album PROTO as a counter-narrative to the prevailing anxiety that AI might someday write humans out of the artistic process. Raw Data Feel offers no such critique or commentary. Instead, AI is a gimmick at best, and at worst a crutch, a way for Higgs to do less of the labor. This, to be fair, does play into the album’s main theme: Higgs’ desire to abandon the human brain and its capacity for holding pain altogether, to convert raw feeling into data by offloading his trauma onto a machine.
“Bad Friday,” the album’s best song, is about exactly this. Accompanied by brazen chanting and gung-ho grooves, Higgs describes a terrible violence inflicted upon him, rendering the incident with murky shards of detail. “How did I get this blood all over me?/I got the pictures here on my phone/I can’t remember,” Higgs sings, incongruously, over a chipper funk-rock groove. The song’s sustained and insistent beat sounds as though it’s chasing Higgs; he breaks out into an invertebrate whimper in the pre-chorus, a minor and melancholy refrain that tonally mirrors the song’s traumatic subject matter, before the band reestablish the absurd contrast between its violent nighttime content and jittery nightclub atmosphere. The trauma that bedrocks the song is quickly glossed over: The sound of a Windows 95 error message bonking after the choruses repeatedly disrupts any abiding sense of humanity.
The album’s production, helmed by guitarist Alex Robertshaw, is at least immaculate. Every sound is treated as delicately as in minimal techno, as though each was made to stand out on it own; the littlest synth line sparks, and the guitars gleam like a galaxy made of candy. Higgs’ vocals are clean and processed, his emotion as raw as a 3D-printed steak. It’s one of the only elements that really nails the band’s man-meets-machine brief.
“Jennifer,” with a wiggly, romantic New Order guitar line, is a particular highlight. In the verses, Higgs presents his protagonist: Jennifer, a suicidal woman and possible victim of domestic violence, who longs for an escape while all the exits appear sealed off. The despondency of the verses is balanced with a hopeful refrain, as Higgs encourages her to keep looking for a way out. With no brainy modular synths or cyborgian conceits involved, it’s one of the few songs that isn’t overwrought, and, incidentally, the only one that confronts trauma with a human heart.
Yet there’s no saving the album’s second half. “Metroland,” a sci-fi-meets-country track, keeps you at a barge pole’s distance with its kitschy schmaltz and nonsense lyrics: “Kevin can you imagine it?/The escalator breathing in a hydra bowl,” Higgs sings. Then there’s “Shark Week,” which contains frankly unforgivable lines like “He’s Obama in the streets but he thinks he’s Osama in the sheets.” You’d hope that these were the work of the AI. Perhaps they’re just an excuse to bring in some sort of interesting gadgets: Higgs told Apple Music that Robertshaw suggested that he write a song using certain chords, “because he had this special synth that did cool stuff with chords that had four notes in them.” Higgs tries to balance the zaniness of the verses with seemingly heartfelt refrains (“Do you think you got everyone under your control? When you haven’t got anyone, anyone at all”), but the sticky-sweet choruses merely curdle amid all that would-be acid wit.
Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies—believing in his ability to impart Earth-shattering truths, despite not really saying much at all. That guy can be endearing; he’s energetic and has an infectious interest in technology’s effects on the human spirit. But when it comes to expressing his ideas, much less his own emotions, he’s got a long way to go—not unlike the neural net Higgs used to write his lyrics.


Connecting disparate styles, eras, and moods, the London DJ’s mix tells a story of black dance music from both sides of the Atlantic, an ongoing dialogue that transcends genres and borders.

Josey in Space

Dance music is steeped in mythology. The U.S. has Chicago, Detroit, Frankie Knuckles, the Belleville Three, Ron Hardy, Larry Heard, and countless tales of young artists—many of them black, brown, and/or queer—cooking up house, techno, electro, and other genres that would go on to transform dancefloors around the globe. Over in the UK, there’s a similar reverence for the country’s so-called “hardcore continuum,” which has roots in imported Caribbean soundsystem culture and runs through hardcore, jungle, drum’n’bass, garage, grime, dubstep, and a myriad of other low-end-heavy dancefloor sounds.
There are innumerable points of overlap between these two spheres, and the exchange has gone both ways. In 1988, early house music from the U.S. helped inspire UK rave culture and the country’s Second Summer of Love. Twenty-five years later, Chicago producer DJ Rashad reinvigorated the distinctly American sound of footwork by injecting it with UK jungle rhythms. There’s an ongoing dialogue, particularly among black artists, yet U.S. and UK dance music are often portrayed as completely separate worlds, parallel entities rather than two pieces of a larger conversation.
Perhaps Josey Rebelle can help change the narrative. A North London native with Caribbean roots, she started DJing at age 13, became a hardcore and jungle fanatic before she’d even finished high school, and is now arguably best known for her work on seminal radio station Rinse FM, where she’s been on the air since 2011. In many ways, her biography is quintessentially British, but her artistic vision extends well beyond the borders of the UK.
Josey in Space is Rebelle’s first official mix album—and only the second installment of the Beats in Space-curated mix series, following last year’s excellent Powder in Space—and it arrives just months after she was awarded BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix of the Year and subsequently landed on the cover of DJ Mag. DJing is her calling card—Rebelle doesn’t produce—and she’s developed a reputation as an eclectic, highly knowledgeable selector who’s just as comfortable playing moody jazz, blues, and soul as she is dropping blistering acid and thundering drum’n’ bass. Although she reins that in slightly on Josey in Space, the mix is a far cry from the rigid genre exercises that many official mix series tend to offer.
It’s telling that so much of the Josey in Space tracklist is populated by black artists, British and American alike. Midwestern house veterans like Andrés, Hieroglyphic Being, and Reggie Dokes sit alongside experimental producer Loraine James and bass upstart Afrodeutsche. Rebelle may not be an overtly political artist—having grown up in a community whose relationships with police and authority were fraught and full of mistrust, she describes herself as “political by default”—but this mix is very much rooted in notions of blackness, a point that’s underscored by early selection “I Dream So Loud,” in which Bay Area poets Tenesha the Wordsmith and Daniel B. Summerhill riff on social justice and identity while referencing Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and a litany of horrors that have been visited upon black Americans over the years.
From there, Rebelle lets the music do the talking. The bubbling acid of Fotomachine’s “BBoy”—one of a handful of new tracks exclusive to Josey in Space—kicks off an extended excursion through a variety of drum-machine workouts, including a couple of siren-filled hardcore screamers from 1991. Along the way are grotty stormers, wiggly house cuts, and deep house strutters (like Nwachukwu’s remix of Uschi Classen’s “Open Your Eyes,” a clear standout that features the iconic voice of Chicago house legend Robert Owens).
Josey in Space runs nearly 72 minutes, and though the energy level peaks around the 40-minute mark with Rum & Black’s bonkers “Zombies at Dawn,” it’s during the mix’s final half hour that Rebelle flexes the breadth of her repertoire. Seamlessly moving between genres, moods, and eras, she weaves together catwalk-ready sass, dubby broken beat, swirly Afro-Latin rhythms, Balearic bliss, soulful drum’n’bass, and heads-down hip-hop. On paper, that sort of journey sounds like a jarring, confusing mess, but in Rebelle’s hands, it’s a gloriously winding road, a soul-drenched comedown after a wild bit of raving.
As a DJ, Rebelle is a storyteller, and while Josey in Space is certainly good for a dance, it goes significantly deeper than the average mix. It’s a story of black excellence and black struggle, of endless creativity and innovation in the face of systemic and societal aggression and discrimination. That story transcends borders, and is also responsible for revolutionizing dance music in the U.S., UK, and beyond. It’s a different sort of dance music mythology, and with artists like Rebelle at the helm, a better and more accurate one.

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Tracing the Beach Boys’ long road back to the spotlight, this five-disc set showcases a complicated era and a creative peak.

The Beach Boys: Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971

As the 1960s came to a close, even the Beach Boys knew it wasn’t cool to be a Beach Boy anymore. Brian Wilson floated the idea of simplifying their name to “The Beach,” arguing, “We’re not ‘boys’ anymore, right? We’re men!” The rest of the band rejected the notion. They brought their past with them whenever they performed on stage, still dressed in the matching surfer uniforms from before the psychedelic epiphany of 1966’s “Good Vibrations.” The hits dried up, and the downturn coincided with Brian Wilson’s breakdown during the 1967 sessions for Smile, his abandoned project intended as the sequel to Pet Sounds. Left rudderless without their leader, the Beach Boys stumbled through the remainder of their contract with Capitol Records, often making good music while slipping further away from the center of public consciousness.
Documenting this complicated era, Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 is a five-disc box set featuring augmented remasters of the band's first two albums for their new label Reprise alongside unreleased songs, alternate versions, live tracks, session highlights, and a cappella tracks. This music traces the group’s long road back to the spotlight. It was not an easy journey. Embroiled in an ugly divorce from Capitol, the Beach Boys searched for a new label home and discovered that most companies were reluctant to sign them due to concerns about Brian’s health. While the labels and press were focused on their primary songwriter, his brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston kept themselves busy on the road and in the studio, figuring out how to be a band without Brian. When it came time to record their first album for Reprise, they had a surplus of material ready to go—more than could possibly fit on a single album.
Feel Flows  illustrates just how fruitful this period was for the Beach Boys as a collective. Sequenced within the unreleased material are songs that would become highlights on subsequent albums, fascinating variations on familiar songs, and oddities and castaways that highlight in particular the growth of Dennis Wilson as a songwriter and Carl Wilson as a bandleader. Much of this progression was evident on 1970’s Sunflower, an album whose cover pointedly depicted the Beach Boys as “Beach Men” surrounded by children they’d fathered. A highlight in their discography, it also showcases the band’s evolution from AM pop to FM rock. Dennis adds some grit to  “Slip on Through” and “Got to Know the Woman,” and the band matches his urgency on “It’s About Time.” Dennis also contributes the gorgeous, shimmering “Forever,” a song that finds a counterpart in “Our Sweet Love,” a collaboration between Brian, Carl, and Jardine, graced by a soaring lead vocal from Carl.
As good as it was, Sunflower flopped. Audiences couldn’t be bothered paying attention to an oldies act, so the Beach Boys decided to revamp their image. Enter Jack Rieley, a radio DJ who frequented the Radiant Radish, a health food store owned by Brian Wilson. Rieley got the Beach Boys to ditch their old-fashioned stage clothes and perform for hip audiences at the 1970 Big Sur Folk Festival and the Fillmore East, prestigious gigs that helped change the band’s public perception. By the time they released Surf’s Up in 1971, the audience was primed to accept that the Beach Boys were making relevant music again; where Sunflower peaked at 151 on Billboard’s Top 200, Surf’s Up went all the way to 29.
It helped that Rieley encouraged the group to write topical material. With assistance from Jardine, Love wrote the pro-ecology “Don't Go Near the Water,” and he reworked Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller’s R&B chestnut “Riot in Cell Black 9” as “Student Demonstration Time,” a protest song against protesters. “Student Demonstration Time” isn't the only indication of a conservative streak: Johnston’s wistful remembrance “Disney Girls (1957)” offers a bit of honeyed nostalgia. These breezes from bygone days forecast how the Beach Boys would struggle to shake their past and move forward. Even if Carl and Dennis were coming into their own—Carl’s dreamy “Feel Flows” stands proudly alongside his older brother’s mind-expanding psychedelia—Brian remained the marketable star, so much so that Reprise required a certain number of his compositions on the tracklist. Brian delivered the exceedingly odd tone poem “A Day in the Life of a Tree” and the exquisite “‘Til I Die,” but it was up to Carl to dredge up “Surf’s Up” from the Smile sessions, editing together old tapes to give it the illusion of being completed.
The excavation of "Surf’s Up" underscores how much music the Beach Boys left behind in the studio—a point which the very heft of Feel Flows proves with ease. The box set includes multiple attempts at songs that would surface later: The rambling rocker “Back Home” would be re-recorded for 15 Big Ones, while Love’s gorgeous “Big Sur,” a sparkling revery for the West Coast which ranks among the best songs he ever wrote, found a home on 1973’s Holland. Compilation producers Mark Linett and Alan Boyd expand the timeline further with live renditions of Surf’s Up material from as late as 1993. Focusing on the era at large, the sequencing muddies distinctions between the albums and the outtakes: The proper albums are expanded with bonus tracks and presented in succession, then followed by session tapes and outtakes. On the vinyl edition, the bonus tracks are tacked onto the ends of LP sides, disrupting the flow of the original albums.
Part of the joy of listening to Sunflower and Surf’s Up is hearing the Beach Boys’ perspectives intertwine, and Feel Flows shows how those records merely skimmed the surface of their dynamic during this vibrant period. Brian looms over the proceedings but he’s not at the center. When he does surface, his goals are often diametrically opposed to the rest of the group: Witness his monster movie shtick on the genuinely strange “My Solution,” or how he forces Love to sing about enemas on the ode to health food, “H.E.L.P.” Where the comparable Pet Sounds and Smile box sets placed Brian directly in the spotlight, here the attention is drawn to Dennis and Carl, with Love, Jardine, and Johnston providing compelling grace notes. With each member given ample room for individual showcases, and each coming up with indelible songs and melodies, Feel Flows offers new insight into a creative peak.

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The distinctive sound of Wild Beasts—the dueling voices of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming, a sleek and supple rhythm section, immaculate production—remains on the new Present Tense, but there's a marked shift in lyrical tone. This is on the surface a more domesticated Wild Beasts, but they've lost none of their skill for sharp observation.

Present Tense

Hayden Thorpe sneers "Don't confuse with me someone who gives a fuck" on the first track of Present Tense, as if Wild Beasts could ever be the victims of mistaken identity. The inimitable interplay between Thorpe’s keening alto and Tom Fleming’s rich lower registers, the sleek and supple rhythm section, the immaculate production that provides quiet storm R&B’s high-thread count and funk’s pinpoint precision: you can’t really approach this sound without ripping them off outright, so no one even tries. Much has been made about how Wild Beasts have drastically reduced the musical drama since their swashbuckling, chandelier-swinging debut Limbo, Panto. Present Tense doesn’t reverse that trend, but without much left to discard sonically, Wild Beasts make their most radical and daring subtraction: emotional drama.
As unique as they’ve been musically, Wild Beasts' candid carnality has made them far more rare in the boy’s club of rock music than you’d been led to believe. Uncoupling masculinity from cartoon machismo, indie slackerdom, teenage neediness, and brooding distance, Wild Beasts presented modern man as a libidinous creature burdened by expectations and failed by his body, both hunter-aggressor and prey to their own insecurities and embarrassments. Thorpe sang “I know I'm not any kind of heart-throb/ But at the same time, I'm not any sort of slob” on Smother’s “Plaything” and that was about the size of it.
Things are a lot healthier on Present Tense, and Wild Beasts' dueling vocalists own up to past mistakes. Thorpe sums it up on “Past Perfect”: “Man did fuck up/ And then he learnt.” Lurid and obscenely limber, “Mecca” presents sexual compatibility as nothing short of god’s will and eternal truth. The same goes for the “Sweet Spot”, its title signifying “A godly state/ Where the real and the dream may consummate.” You’ve got the gist of it by the time “A Simple Beautiful Truth” comes around, and it’s Wild Beasts’ most locked-in, fluid performance, barely two minutes of gorgeous and curvaceous R&B. These add ballast to the plainspoken and plainly pretty pop songs that define Wild Beasts’ new romantic fulfillment. “Palace” and “Pregnant Pause” come awfully close to treacle outside of context, but balanced by the loinclothed swagger of “Nature Boy” and the apocalyptic retribution that “Daughters” foretells, contentment feels earned rather than seen as entitlement.
Still, Present Tense is incrementally more dense and foreboding than Smother or Two Dancers. This is largely due to the implementation of synthesizers, arranged by Leo Abrahams (amongst other things, co-writer of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Strange Overtones”) and Lexxx, whose previous, blunt-force stadium-status charges (Arcade Fire, the Killers, Madonna and Keane amongst them) are about the exact opposite of Wild Beasts. And yet, even with all of this expert musicianship and hired talent, the added sounds are soft and welcoming. The lo-fi, rigid beats of “Wanderlust” and “Daughters” and the Hounds of Love-style Linn rolls that ramp up the chorus of “Mecca” push against Chris Talbot, a drummer who’s never played a standard rock beat and still hasn’t; he’s at his most emotive on Present Tense, as “Nature Boy” skulks with primitive menace, while the sadness of “A Dog’s Life” is conveyed by an inventive trick that makes his kit sound like it’s deflating.
Though dealt with indirectly, class struggle has always pervaded Wild Beasts' lyrics and they’ve always empathized with the outsider for good reason. They came on the scene at a time when the Arctic Monkeys ensured that lad-rock would continue to constitute the UK’s musical ruling class, and so their early, theatrical scene-chewing was seen as the epitome of drama club elitism. And while they’ve relocated from northern farming town Kendal to London and occupy their own sweet spot between the top of the pops and the basement, Wild Beasts still side with the have-nots without condescending. “Nature Boy” plays off a common artistic trope—here’s a wild man that will do things to your woman that your white-collar, Victorian ass can’t even imagine and she’s really into it. That sort of thing is right within Fleming’s wheelhouse, but that dynamic seems a little too simplistic for Wild Beasts. You might miss the money quote courtesy of Jake “The Snake” Roberts (“A little fun for me/ And none for you”), but the title is indeed a Ric Flair reference, and so the and so the caricatured imagery of “Nature Boy” makes the song as a whole a laugh at how complexities of class, masculinity, and sex can often be reduced to the heel/babyface duality of pro wrestling.
A similar skewering occurs on “Wanderlust”, which thankfully doesn’t aspire to be another pat, “Common People”-style rant about the rich kids fetishizing artistic “authenticity.” Instead, Thorpe questions the reductionism that goes on in both sides and the self-obsession that goes into any artistic pursuit. "In the mother tongue/ What's the verb 'to suck?'", Thorpe taunts, a subliminal at some fellow UK band getting a little too obvious in their Americanization. It also makes you wonder if “Nature Boy” might be a metaphor for how Wild Beasts compare to some of their more accommodating and popular peers. So what is “Wanderlust” doing as the opener on a record that focuses so much on domestic satisfaction? Get to the closer “Palace” and Thorpe bookends it by singing, “Baby there’s have alls and there are have nots/ I’m happy with what I got”. Both songs speak on the futility of trying to attain any sort of real happiness trying to be someone else. Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.


Sometimes I think I'm really missing things. It's not that I'm unobservant or a fuckwit or\n ...

The Great Eastern

Sometimes I think I'm really missing things. It's not that I'm unobservant or a fuckwit or anything. But sometimes events pass me by as I'm gazing, no doubt, at something far less exciting. For instance, I found out the best place to score drugs in my neighborhood isn't the street corner (as HBO would have you believe) but rather the upscale hair salon. Yes, hidden behind the Paul Mitchell hair care products, there are baggies galore of all your pharmaceutical faves.
When I was growing up, the barber (my town enforced a strict "no hair stylist" policy) might mutter as he was buzz-cutting the little annoying hairs on your neck, "Anything for the weekend, sir?" By this, he did not mean a few twists of whizz or a coupla tabs. Nope, he meant rubbers. In fact, his crazy prophylactics were displayed on a cardboard dispenser. The dispenser had wee hooks on it which held aloft the johnnies. Printed on the cards were a really fast car and some woman in a bikini (0 to last base in 9 seconds or less-- not the image of the unselfish lover that might have been portrayed). You could gauge whether my town's male population was getting horny by how much of the image had been revealed since you last sat in the barber's chair. No one missed a thing back then.
But somehow I missed the Delgados' transition from record label-owning stars-in-their-own-right to record label-owning prog-rock wannabes. The Delgados, as well as providing shelter for the immensely boozed-up talents of Arab Strap, Suckle and Mogwai with their aptly-titled Chemikal Underground Records, released a delicate wisp of Scottish indie-pop entitled Peloton. That album nearly gave itself a double hernia with all the imaginative songs and production sleights it gamely bore.
Now the band follows up the greatest Scottish record since the Nectarine No. 9's A Sea with Three Stars with the ponderously self-conscious, woefully proggy The Great Eastern. Remember how disappointed you were when Belle and Sebastian followed up If You're Feeling Sinister with The Boy with the Arab Strap? Well, here's the reprise.
In flagrant disobedience to the teachings contained in The Urban Buddhist's Handbook, I do not seek out disappointment. It's quite happy seeking me out, truth be told. The Great Eastern is the teeth-gnashing, lip-biting sound of a talented band reveling in studio time and awkward time signature changes. At this point, I'd like to let it be known that I've never divined the so-called appeal of Steely Dan. The Delgados probably love the quirky jazz changes that Fagan and Becker whack off in. Me, if it's got guitars in it, it'd better be in the style of either Iggy & the Stooges' Raw Power or Love's Forever Changes.
To be fair, The Great Eastern doesn't show off in 15/8 compound time, though there are enough jarring transitions from 4/4 to waltzing \xBE. But one has to wonder why the band felt compelled to create some highly-wrought art when the simple directness of Peloton endeared itself limpit-like to my heart. Did the band members marry each other and turn their thoughts to creating immortal representations of their late thirty-something selves? Did they think they could out-wank Sonic Youth? Could be.
Or maybe they bought hook-line-and-sinker the critics' fawning adoration and decided to give back real music with real musical significance. Sadly, this entails empty, platitudinous support of innovations such as speed garage and techstep drum-n-bass. For crying out loud, people, that's the only reason the Pastels exist-- so that NME and Magnet can drone on that real musicians remain unrecognized and tirelessly bemoan that the public adores stringy ginger-bearded geekatrons with PowerBooks running FuckmeElectro Version 7.46.
Which is pretty much the reason why The Great Eastern doesn't execute well. It works too damn hard. The most seductive indie pop fluffers have been the Smiths' The Queen is Dead, Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk, and the Stone Roses' self-titled album. James, Inspiral Carpets, and the Manic Street Preachers have fallen by the wayside, and with good reason.
Unhinged from the huge Abacab-era Phil Collins drum sound, The Great Eastern's opening track, "The Past That Suits You Best," would sound as pretty as a Spring rainfall on a Scottish glen. The band overburdens the simple beauty of "Accused of Stealing" with jarring time changes. On "American Trilogy," however, the band captures the right blend of gently strummed guitars and overblown symphonic strings with tubular bells. The middle section even hints at the fey end of grunge, which is echoed in the line, "No one can depress me more than I can." "Reasons for Silence (Ed's Song)" showcases Emma Pollock's dreamy, pastoral vocals in a song that Nick Drake might have recognized from his Bryter Layter album.
Pollack duets with Alun Woodward on "Thirteen Gliding Principles" as they trade half lines ("Lock the door/ Wash the floors/ Shine the shine") until Metallica-esque heavy riffing and orchestral accompaniment barge their way into the domestic arrangements. Fortunately, that track is followed by the subdued piano figures and mournful cello of "No Danger." Woodward lullabies, "Now I've got to choose/ Who from you is gonna lose and who is going through." The responsibility weighs on him: "We don't know we're strong enough and now we're singing out of tune." After a brief reprise of the opening tranquillity, the band's rock tendencies steam in to rip up the peace. Pity.
I understand that the band didn't want to release Peloton II. Nonetheless, it sounds like the Delgados threw their charming, sweetly laughing baby out with the bathwater and replaced it with all manner of musical flummery. Absurdly, they've gilded (or steel-girdered) a fragile lily. I hope I don't allow any stripped-down version to pass me by.


The expansive spirit of Mike Hadreas’ terrific new album conjures and reimagines a mode of experimental pop music that is ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer.

Ugly Season

As Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas straddles the line between storyteller and composer. His music suggests narrative threads—an abusive grandfather, a sick body, a hateful world—that he dissolves into impressionistic lyrics and orchestral soundscapes. Hadreas’ restless style keeps him at the vanguard of pop where a twinkle of piano might sound as queer as an intimate disclosure. Shapeshifting becomes its own act of defiance, a shirking of the simplified labels of the straight world.
Yet rather than just mystifying his fans, Hadreas has seemed to age alongside them, first confessing adolescent traumas, then slyly signaling a watershed era of LGBTQ+ rights. By 2020’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, he had matured into a grown-and-sexy crooner, relating intimacy in the present tense and anecdotes of youthful gay struggle from a taller perch that comes with growing older. “Half of my whole life is gone,” he sang at the album’s start, sounding not just resigned, but satisfied: Life’s second act might actually be better than its first.
On his latest, the eerie and gorgeous Ugly Season, the 40-year-old makes a dramatic yet natural shift. Decentering his angelic voice and direct lyrics, Ugly Season favors the experiments that always lurked on the outskirts of his songs. A master of tone-setting opening lines, Hadreas starts the album with a statement of purpose. “No pattern,” he deadpans, under treatments so heavy they smother his words. Ugly Season incorporates chimes, Mellotron, celeste, guitarrón, reggae pulses, and song structures loose enough that they seem to swell operatically, or, in the case of the thrilling “Eye in the Wall,” stretch into an extended disco mix. A pop-star-turned-composer’s record akin to Kid A and Low, Ugly Season nonetheless feels more like an act of generosity than a wrench thrown in expectations. The album’s expansive spirit recalls a long line of artists who rejected the classical establishment in order to show composition’s potential to be ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer—luminaries such as Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and Merce Cunningham.
Appropriately, Hadreas wrote these songs to score his dive into modern dance. In 2019, he co-directed and performed in Kate Wallich’s piece The Sun Still Burns Here, touring his collaborator and longtime beau Alan Wyffels with Wallich’s company the YC. Though the movement-based cues are audible, Perfume Genius’ abstract music has more sinister ambiguities than the Seattle choreographer’s bewitching, sex-positive routines. It creeps and writhes with its own logic, suggesting a grimness that the sparkling surfaces of his last couple of records had seemed to leave behind. He nonetheless celebrates community through his musical collaborators, who leave bold thumbprints on the songs: Wyffels, who sits in on a number of instruments; megaproducer Blake Mills; engineer Joseph Lorge; inveterate session drummer Matt Chamberlain; and Sam Gendel, whose doctored saxophone provides Ugly Season with a bevy of uncharted timbres.
The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience. Mills’ harmonium on “Herem” bubbles with dread from the song’s swirling brew before programmed drums carry the arrangement to a cathartic finish; clarinet swells offer an immense moment of bliss on “Teeth”; Hadreas’ sighing vocals on “Pop Song” turn to playful coos when chimes and percussion bang into the mix. Compared to previous albums, such rousing peaks are less immediate, on tracks that stretch past the seven-minute mark and leave choruses in the dust. Spend time with this music, though, and its glimmers of hooky beauty leave a profound impression, like watching a peacock preen and flash its magnificent plumage for a moment at a time.
At points, Ugly Season reminds me of Prince’s 1986 album Parade, another score that outgrew its source material, balancing forward-thinking highs with a casual, elusive, disjunctive structure. In place of Prince’s buoyant eroticism, Perfume Genius’ stylistic smorgasbord treats sex like a languid affair, one that befits the record’s other preoccupation: sadness. Formally, the album seems to crumble in its middle. “Scherzo,” an unadorned piano composition by Wyffels, serves as a melancholic comedown after the first suite of songs. This strange bit of sequencing sutures the wound in Ugly Season’s middle, as though Hadreas wants you to see the stitches.
Less narrative than ever, his lyrics shine with a symbolic vocabulary rooted in gay culture. He often compares bodies to plants and fruits: “Stretched out like a reed,” he sings on “Herem,” and on “Pop Song,” he commands us to “harvest the pit/And spit out the rest.” He views sex as a magic ritual on a couple of tracks, and on “Teeth” he harkens back to the same 19th-century context in which a homosexual identity began coalescing in the West. “A fading garland,” he describes: “A skull set on a plate.” For the first time, Perfume Genius sings in still-lifes, and formally, the album reflects this same focus—wordless closer “Cenote” echoes the first track’s opening notes on a simpler setup of solo piano, like a gallery displaying the study of a work alongside its finished canvas.
Ugly Season does have a single narrative gem, among the greatest Hadreas has cut. “Hellbent” reprises the character of Jason, the casual lover of a confused narrator, from the eponymous highlight of Perfume Genius’ last album. “They took my phone,” the speaker intones, perhaps because he just escaped from rehab. Alone on the roadside, bleeding from his arm (because of a boozy fall, we imagine), he clings desperately to the heartbreaking belief that he can charm his hookup into offering him help. “First car to stop/Just took one look and drove,” he spits, and tells us several minutes later, “If I make it to Jason’s and put on a show/Maybe he’ll soften and give me a loan.”
Here, Perfume Genius channels the empathy that drew us to his tunes in the first place, chronicling his character’s chaos by balancing a first-person sneer with the lucidity of distance and maturity. Hadreas, who jump-started his music career after he became sober in his late twenties, has already mastered this sort of songwriting. Yet the effect feels newly urgent on the atmospheric Ugly Season, like a buried, hurtful memory that starts pulsing again through the haze of time. Pop music tends to offer the lozenge of amnesia to just about everyone, allowing even homophobes and gay people to blot out their differences, if only for three minutes at a time. Hadreas refuses to manufacture such pills for his fans. His sprawling post-pop draws our attention to the many ways in which changing ourselves can never resolve our memories of the past, posing an implicit question: Can we truly leave behind the people we’ve been, or have we merely learned to keep our eyes fixed on the promise of self-reinvention?


Hercules and Love Affair's mission has remained consistent throughout: to breathe new life into the sounds and structures of early dance music, particularly the interplay between producer and vocalist that underpinned the genre’s formative years. The project's third album transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience.

Hercules and Love Affair: The Feast of the Broken Heart

The Feast of the Broken Heart

Hercules and Love Affair is an amorphous project with a roster that, aside from the group’s mastermind and artistic director Andy Butler, has turned over completely with each of its three albums so far. But its mission has remained consistent throughout: to breathe new life into the sounds and structures of early dance music, particularly the interplay between producer and vocalist that underpinned the genre’s formative years. On the group’s first two records, 2008’s self-titled debut and 2011’s Blue Songs, they accomplished that goal by exploding the tropes of early house music while simultaneously paying fealty to them, resulting in tracks like the quasi-operatic, Antony-led “Blind” that reincarnated the style into ambitiously strange shapes.
For The Feast of the Broken Heart, Butler and his team (which this time around includes Viennese house-and-techno revivalists Haze Factory and industrial music stalwart Mark Pistel) color inside the lines a little more than before. If the first two Hercules records were tributes to the dawning era of dance music thirty or so years ago, Feast is more of a flat-out homage. The sounds, the structures, and the entire approach more closely resembles the source material—the propulsive, hard-edged descendant of disco that pioneers like Larry Levan were spinning in the '70s and '80s. Having spent years deconstructing old house music, Butler's now become a considerably more faithful and accurate emulator.
There are drawbacks to any artistic undertaking with an explicit retro-revivalist agenda, and Feast suffers accordingly—in particular, there's the subtle but ever-present sensation that, for all the excitement that the music generates, it’s still an echo of someone else’s good time that happened decades ago. Butler and company mitigate much of that feeling by giving their influences a sonic touch-up, dirtying and tweaking out the vintage drum machine and synthesizer sounds they’re working with (check the noisy synth that puts an intriguing wrinkle into the smooth lines of “My Offence”), in the process infusing them with a wily energy that more fastidious retro reproductions can’t manage. Hercules and Love Affair give these tracks more room to breathe than the sometimes claustrophobically compact arrangements on older house records.
To some extent, The Feast of the Broken Heart bounces back against those drawbacks because of the nature of the style Hercules and Love Affair working in. Compared to the other major pop genres, dance music has historically been immune to the effects of nostalgia because it’s spent so much of its existence, at least in America, as a subcultural style with an audience that’s been removed from the mainstream (partly because it’s been so relentlessly forward-looking from the genre's beginnings). The recent arrival of younger rave revivalists and old-school house fanatics, however, has caused the genre as a whole to take a good look at its past and try, in earnest, to replicate it.
Like Hercules’s first two records, Feast transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience. Butler is both a gifted producer and a crafty A&R, and throughout the album he fits an unexpected cast of singers to songs based on criteria much more subtle and significant than their vocal range. The stage performer Rouge Mary imparts disco-diva uplift to the self-realization anthem “5:43 to Freedom”, elevating a hokey line like “Be yourself/ Like there ain’t nobody” into something that could genuinely inspire a dancefloor epiphany. On “My Offence”, singer-songwriter Krystle Warren, whose own work normally leans towards rootsy chamber pop, brings a raspy low range and gleaming high range with the same kind of casual fuck-you attitude that's similarly animated other statement-of-identity house tracks offering spiritual solace to several generations of club-going social misfits.
The album’s emotional and musical peak comes with “I Try to Talk to You”, featuring alt-folk singer and former Czars front man John Grant. It’s about Grant’s experience finding out he’s H.I.V. positive, and knowing that about the song can make it a gutting listen, especially on the choruses where he crooningly pleads, “I don’t understand, help me please.” But instead of backing him up with a dirge, Butler and his crew give him a raucous, thumping floor-filler. To some, combining lyrics about a potentially life-threatening illness with the gaudy synthesized orchestral stabs the track’s festooned with might seem crass, but it’s exactly this refusal to bow to tragedy that kept the original house music scene alive through the ravages of the AIDS crisis. With it, Hercules & Love Affair tap into an essential part of house music’s history that’s far more profound than just the music.


On her debut album, the Toronto-based singer radiates anxiety and yearning about love, offering an unadulterated document of a fluid creative process and truly weird, impulsive thoughts.

19 Masters

Saya Gray writes her songs in what she describes as a flow state: She “blacks out,” moving from concept to finished song within an hour. The process is bodily and intuitive, resulting in music that pops like bubble wrap. Funny quips peek through guitar work that’s alternately finger-plucked and distorted; slippery synths coat dense wordplay (“Told my temper that tampons tamper with temptation” on “Saving Grace”) that provides more texture than literal meaning. The breadth and chaos of these songs can be overwhelming at times, but the ultimate appeal is the authenticity: There’s a real pleasure in getting such an unadulterated document of someone’s creative process and truly weird, impulsive thoughts.
Her debut album, 19 Masters, radiates anxiety and yearning about love, which Gray spends the entire record running from. She’s consumed by a self-destructive impulse to leave someone before they leave her, she conceives of intimacy as a prelude to abandonment, and she loves people who can’t handle the affection she has to offer. Gray’s self-awareness about her negative romantic impulses is devastating on songs like album highlight “EMPATHY 4 BETHANY” where she sings, “Honestly we’ll get too close, I’ll go ghost, you’ll have my clothes in hopes you remember [me],” made especially poignant by an amber-toned trumpet and piano solo that meanders behind her. You feel the intensity of the love Gray experiences, and the wistfulness that she feels in knowing she will lose it.
Often, the tension in Gray’s relationships and in her own self-appraisal comes from her perception that other people are conforming too much to unnamed societal pressures. On “LEECHES ON MY THESIS!” she’s upset that someone she loved used her to network; on “TOOO LOUD!” someone lets her down because they’re “part of the machine.” “Saya you don’t need to conform, place your knees on the ceiling and the ceiling will turn into the floor,” she reminds herself on the latter. And on “S.H.T.” she criticizes someone for hating “the imitation game” yet “echoing everything the players say.” It’s fitting that an artist who makes such esoteric music is so concerned with preserving her individuality, but the anti-conformity is more a broad sentiment than a fully fleshed idea.
In general, Gray’s technical skill sometimes supersedes her intention. As a musician who has been playing music professionally since she was 13, she’s able to quickly construct complex sounds and intricate wordplay, but it’s not always clear how they coalesce. Listening to this album, I’m reminded of reading Eye Spy books as a kid, partly because of the childlike exploration of these arrangements, and also because I find myself excavating through a mass of gorgeous baubles searching for something specific: a single thread of meaning, a moment of clarity. “SAVING GRACE,” for example, is a lovely collage of eerie synth sounds, Gray’s gauzy falsetto, and heady lyricism: “We looked up at the night, held the sky with our minds.” It’s vivid and captivating, but almost impossible to follow what’s happening in the song, even after many listens.
That approach to songwriting is intentional. Gray said she prefers to use her music to communicate “a straight passage in frequency rather than trying to decipher in words then trying to convey THAT to another human.” She uses her words to convey sounds and impulses rather than narrative arcs. Without many articulated messages or overarching sentiments, the meaning comes in flashes. It can be a disorienting listening experience, one that asks you to find pleasure in cacophony and still-developing ideas.
There’s also so much secondhand joy that comes from the conviction with which she presents her inner world. She treats all of her ideas, whether they are passing thoughts, poetic observations, or crushing feelings, with the utmost respect and care. And in the moments when all the moving pieces of a song come together just right, the results are devastating and illuminating. On “CERVICAL CEDRIC,” Gray sings with resolution, her voice emerging from a whirlwind of bubbling synth and grating guitar. She elevates a straightforward sentiment—“You said you could handle my love”—into a whirlwind of rage and disappointment. There are moments when the emotions feel familiar, but mostly Gray’s thoughts belong to her alone. So you leave this album determined to trust your impulse, and find beauty in your messiest moments.


The former members of Krill return with a slower pace and a heavy political conscience. The effect is one of careful deliberation in place of what once seemed to come so naturally.

Knot

Of the many Brooklyn DIY bands to fizzle out in the last decade, Krill left perhaps the biggest void. The Boston transplants brought a sprawling, wide-eyed mythology to their brand of grungy lo-fi power-pop, writing songs about tigers, twigs, and phantoms that were covert studies in phenomenological perception. Early recordings like “Self-Hate Will Be the Death of Youth Culture” almost anticipated their eventual breakup, with frontman Jonah Furman singing about his commitment to brevity and lightness in the face of punk-rock fatalism. Krill called it quits in 2015, with drummer Ian Becker pursuing a graduate degree in urban planning, guitarist Aaron Ratoff finding work with legal aid and tenants’ rights organizations, and Furman moving to Washington, D.C. as a labor organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign. “When I was 20, I thought that making art was an important part of making a better world,” Furman recently told Fader. “[Now] I think there's more important things to be doing. Also, you get it out of your system.”
Yet the band made the complicated decision to reunite under the name Knot, easing back into indie rock with a relatively unassuming collection of new tracks. Ostensibly picking up where Krill left off, Knot’s self-titled release marks a conscious departure from the racing, anthemic arrangements that defined their earlier material; here, they slow things down, emphasizing their weight. Where the tight guitar and basslines on Krill albums like Lucky Leaves and A Distant Fist Unclenching held close to a central lightness, Knot is defined by incongruence, with a rigid austerity that wouldn’t feel out of place on an early post-punk record. While some of this could be attributed to their changing lineup—Furman swaps his bass for rhythm guitar, Ratoff fills in on both guitar and bass, and newcomer Joe DeManuelle-Hall joins as second guitarist—the general effect is one of careful deliberation in place of what once seemed to come so naturally.
Much of what made Krill great was bound up in their lyrics, and the new album returns to a similar headspace, looking to the natural world to explain their own psyches. “Foam” confronts the feeling of impending doom that can accompany even the smallest glimpse of sky or ocean at a time when rising temperatures threaten to destroy the planet, as Furman’s narrator struggles to speak to the people around him. Butting heads with his dad over their conflicting worldviews, he disputes the claim that people are inherently “evil motherfuckers,” only to end up doubting himself. “I believe in people’s power, but not at this late hour personally,” Furman sings with a bitterness unheard of in his former band.
Furman has long been invested in questions of individual morality, and his latest songs train a clear-eyed gaze on the dark hearts of oppressors everywhere. Songs like “Justice” and “I Live in Fear” address the necessity of locating power within individual actors and institutions, even as it operates at a larger scale. “And if we take our boot off their neck, how much justice will they want?” he sings on the latter track, voicing the class anxieties of a gun-toting vigilante in a moment of crisis. Other songs, though, recognize that power lies with everyone, expressed through even the smallest gestures of solidarity.
It’s easy to dismiss music with political aspirations as didactic, but Knot sidestep this characterization by focusing on the transformative potential of interpersonal struggle. Rather than rehash historical events or whine myopically about Trump, Furman remains committed to exploring the implicitly political aspects of everyday life, like taking care of a pet, or peeling an orange for your partner in the morning. This kind of political gesture is preceded by an orientation to the world that leaves space for compassion, and it’s here that the band returns with newfound depth. In a time of rapid change, sometimes the best you can do is keep moving.

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On her fourth album, the pop superstar finds a more unifying sound but struggles to come up with lyrics that aren't plain cringe-worthy.

Witness

Six years ago, when Teenage Dream tied the chart record set by Michael Jackson’s Bad with five No. 1 hits off one album, Katy Perry became the modern paragon of the singles artist. Armed with Max Martin and Dr. Luke’s calculated approach to ear-wormery, Perry dominated pop radio more than anyone else for the first few years of the decade. Since then, the format wars have shifted towards streaming, and with it, more pop superstars have tried to make the shift to album artist. Prism, Perry’s 2013 album, was a small step in this direction, but it suffered from classic Pop Album Syndrome: trend-hopping around genres and tempos with nary a thought of cohesion. But as cloying as the piano line in “Roar” has become, the big singles saved Prism from flop status. Besides, as Luke himself once said of Perry’s first two albums, “If you can make huge first and second records, if you have a third record that sucks, you can still do a fourth record, no problem.”
So what happens when your fourth record kinda sucks, too?
Katy Perry now finds herself in this position, and the reason is twofold. Her attention to detail pales next to that of album-minded peers like Beyoncé, Drake, and Lorde, and her poorly chosen singles often rely on eye-rolling gimmicks, even for someone who used a large poop emoji as a live prop. Not thoughtful enough to be album pop, not catchy enough to be singles pop: there is no real way to root for Witness—tone-deaf PR campaign included. (Seriously: I got a press release about watching Perry’s “shockingly honest” therapy session, the canned nature of which made her 2012 doc Part of Me resemble Don’t Look Back.)
To her credit, Perry’s sound is more consistent and tasteful here than it has ever been, as she explores the midtempo via atmospheric electronics and bleeding-heart pianos. For as omnipresent as executive producer Max Martin is, the hooks just don’t sink in the way they used to. Or perhaps it's that as soon as you get into a groove, Perry goes and says something truly cringe-worthy to pull you right out. It’s bad enough to put up with her constant hokeyness, her clichés and mangled metaphors, but when she takes an audible breath and tearily declares her decision to… save the email as a draft on the Lorde-jacking power-ballad “Save As Draft,” you will question her ability to separate modern mundanity from actual depth. The world does not need a hoary sequel to “Email My Heart” lest Perry double down and joke about how she’s “setting an out-of-office reply” for love, but instead she shrugs one of the record’s worst, most inscrutable lines: “I don’t fuck with change, but lately I’ve been flipping coins a lot.”
The bar is low when it comes to pop lyrics (Perry, specifically), but with Witness’ premise lying in “real” talk, the talking part seems pretty important. Instead, the album’s turns of phrase make Carly Rae Jepsen look like Yeats, with Perry and co. fumbling even the most obvious opportunities for verbal flourish. Teaming up with Nicki Minaj for a diss track aimed at mutual foe and burgeoning pop pariah Taylor Swift, Perry had built-in narratives on her side—all she had to do was bring the barbs. Instead, she softballs, over Eurodance beats that sounded fresher three years ago, “You're ’bout as cute as an old coupon expired,” like the “Drag Race” queen who talks a big game then bombs the reading challenge. If you’re going to do something as tired as fueling this beef, at least give us the satisfaction of making it deliciously shady.
Occasionally, Perry doesn’t put her foot in her mouth. Witness’ best track (and one of three she co-wrote with Purity Ring’s Megan James and Corin Roddick) “Miss You More,” where her piano balladry perfectly meets the record’s electronic production, swirls and snaps its way to a sweeping crescendo with a few glints of lyrical hope. “I miss you more than I loved you,” goes the chorus, playing with the passage of time like that great “Call Me Maybe” line (“Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad”). “We were a match, but not a fit,” she laments later, with a hint of the depth she so badly wants to project. It is the one time on Witness where Perry is actually subtle. The other time she comes close, on the Hot Chip co-write “Into Me You See,” gets muddled in the wordplay: bad nautical metaphors mixed with earnest usage of the phrase “open sesame,” and a chorus whose elision of “into me you see” into “intimacy” comes out awkwardly enough to warrant a double take. The funny thing about these lyrical clunkers: Her vocal performance on the piano ballad is perhaps one of her loveliest on record to date—understated but stronger than her voice used to sound.
Perry needs strength for what she’s trying to do, too. Her stated goal of making woke pop is, depending on how cynical you are, either admirable or shameless (or both), but either way, it’s not terribly effective. One-third of the 15 tracks have vaguely empowered themes, the best of which—“Power”—approximates feminism by politicizing a personal struggle for control. With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days. We all know it’s near-impossible for pop this focus-tested to drop truth bombs about America’s fractured state, but Perry’s efforts to finally transcend Top 40 confectionary with a cohesive album leaves her in a tough spot. She aimed for pop-game Chipotle, complete with enlightened prose on the cups. She landed at sad fast-food-chain salad. Nevertheless, she persisted: Bon appétit, baby.


The Iowa City doom trio’s latest streamlines their approach. It lacks the subtleties that distinguished their previous work.

Hopes of Failure

Though Aseethe identify as a doom act, the prominent noise samples on 2011 debut Reverent Burden showed that the Iowa City trio was trying to do more than just sludgeon its audience into submission. Aseethe have since recorded an improv album, a suite of re-worked riffs by avant-doom duo Barn Owl, an EP featuring synth accompaniment, and a rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Rat Salad” stretched and slowed beyond recognition. Across that entire body of work, Aseethe maintained an atmosphere and textures verging on ambient drone.
On Hopes of Failure, Aseethe shed their sound’s flaky outer layers in favor of ultra-dense riffs that creep by like boiling molasses. True, they built Reverent Burden on similarly solid riffing, but this time they offer less in the way of sonic detail. The new album—four tunes ranging from eight-and-a-half to 14 minutes—drones on without the subtleties that distinguished Aseethe in the first place. And because it lacks the space and sweep of their previous work, Hopes of Failure marginalizes the industrial-metal gloom furnished by drummer Eric Diercks’ samples.
The new material doesn’t reward the patience of letting the songs unfold nearly as effectively as this band always has. Diehard doom aficionados will likely appreciate Hopes of Failure as a purposeful trimming of extraneous fat. But it’s puzzling that Aseethe would choose to recast themselves as something of a conventional doom band at this stage, after repeatedly demonstrating that there’s more to what they do.
It would be one thing if the fidelity of the recording could approximate the sensation of standing in front of amplifier cabinets, having your chest rattled by the sheer density of sound. But that’s not the case. It’s not that the recording is necessarily flat, but Hopes of Failure doesn’t say anything we haven’t already heard after decades’ worth of tone-obsessed artists getting better and better at capturing on mic the way speaker cones move air through a room. Compared to 2014’s Burdens II, it’s almost shocking how little Hopes of Failure conveys a sense of the band in a physical setting.
At times, the album does hint at the wrinkles Aseethe have added to doom. “Barren Soil,” for example, begins with a Danny Barr bassline so deep it seems to dip toward subsonic frequencies. That said, every note is audible and you can actually hum along to the melody—no small feat when you’re dealing with timbres that tend to smother pitch. And in a dramatic departure for the band, Barr also sings a clean verse on closing track “Into the Sun.” After Barr and his brother, guitarist and founder Brian Barr, have spent a half hour barking, the shift to relatively melodic vocals enhances the album’s acerbic mood.
But the band opts not to emphasize these features. Stripped of its usual dimension, Aseethe’s music consigns the Barr brothers’ lyrics to the realm of unremarkable negativity. Clearly, Aseethe have made a concerted effort to streamline their approach, but Hopes of Failure only underscores how much better off they are when they stick to their guns. As such, it functions best as a gateway to a more colorful back catalog.


On an ambitious new album, the Pennsylvania death metal band moves in nimble, surprising directions while honing its psychedelically brutal sound.

Infinite Psychic Depths

Death metal is music of eternal descent. The guitars are the muck into which the drums pound, while the vocalist growls amidst it all like a drowning beast. It’s a fitting style to be pioneered in Florida, a state that has a head start on other coastal areas in the U.S. in sinking into the ocean. A lot of classic death metal glories in that queasy sinking feeling, but the Pennsylvania band Outer Heaven take their cues from groups like Gorguts and Demilich who have fun imagining what the music would sound like if it were trying to get out.
On their excellent second album, Infinite Psychic Depths, the riffs and guitar tones are as soupy and viscous as ever. But the quintet pushes against that downward force with an arsenal of arrangement choices—chord changes, tempo switches, technical guitar leads, high-up-on-the-neck melodic bass lines. Alongside reigning death metal champs like Blood Incantation and Tomb Mold (whose guitarist Derrick Vella makes an appearance here), Outer Heaven are experimenting with the subgenre in ways that never takes the music away from its core action verbs: Gurgle. Pound. Churn. “We just like to play heavy music with a little bit of technicality” is how Haines put it in an interview, taking great and amusing pains to avoid invoking the subgenre tag “technical death metal.” It is music of brutal determination and iron will, the sound of the beast struggling to escape the swamp.
Frontman Austin Haines, working with guitarists Jon Kunz and Zak Carter, fashions a sound thick enough to pull under a bison, but the band still manages to move in nimble, surprising directions. On “Starcrusher,” sonorous bits of doom metal riffing and frenetic little melodeath guitar lines surface like swamp bubbles. Halfway through “Unspeakable Aura,” female vocalists break through the din, singing in eerie pentatonic harmony and sending shafts of light into the murk. And a minute into album highlight “Rotting Stone/D.M.T.,” sublimely cheesy harmonized twin guitars soar like F-150s over a county fair.
Infinite Psychic Descent comes positioned as a “prequel” to the band’s also-great 2018 debut, Realms of Eternal Decay. That album, Haines explained, told the story of a virus that led to an outbreak of cannibalism: To further elaborate, he shared what he called his “Stoned Ape Theory,” which speculates on the role that hallucinogens and other mind-altering substances may have played in the evolution of human speech and creativity. This album, Haines said, fills in the backstory to that first album, an idea so invested that the last track of this album, “From Nothingness to Eternity,” fades into the first track of the debut, and when you lay out the gatefolds of the two records together, they make one splash-page-styled piece of art. It’s just about the perfect concept-album fodder: cool to think about, theoretically plausible, entirely superfluous.
How would you know about any of this, outside of reading Haines’ press statement about it? That’s simple: You wouldn’t. Death metal needs about as much backstory as a burp. But even without a single intelligible lyric between them, I can report from field studies that the albums, sequenced together as Haines suggests, melt together nicely in one long, organic, wet roar. You can nearly smell the music’s textures: wet leaves, damp moss, fresh manure. By the time the opening track of Realm of Eternal Decay rolls around, you’ve briefly forgotten other styles of music exist.


Chance’s sprawling, 77-minute “debut” is an exuberant and often wonderful celebration of love and family that struggles to bring depth to his newlywed dad-raps.

The Big Day

In the fall of 2015, about a year before Chance the Rapper became the biggest independent rapper on Earth, he released a song with his band, the Social Experiment, about transitioning into a family man. The song, a rendition of Kanye West’s “Family Business” called “Family Matters,” named after the sitcom about a black middle-class Chicago household, warned that things were changing. “In this part of my life, I’m growing up and I wanna do this the right way … grow out of it, in the best way possible,” he said, as cautiously optimistic as ever. His daughter was born the month before. With fatherhood ahead of him, he plotted a new course and in the years since, he has pivoted from a carefree yet careful boy to a God-fearing man of the house.
Chance’s new album, The Big Day, pegged as his “debut” after three studio mixtapes, is a preordained coming-of-age spectacle. It’s full-fledged, 401k rap, a snapshot of the moment where the future starts approaching so fast it begins to look like now. “They don’t take teenage angst at no banks,” he raps on “We Go High,” invoking Michelle Obama’s famous line about what to do when “they” go low. It’s a flavor of righteousness that pervades the entire 77-minute album.
Though less thematic than his previous albums, the day in question revolves primarily around his wedding to longtime sweetheart Kirsten Corley. “The whole album has been inspired by the day I got married and how I was dancing that day,” he told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “Everything in it is all the different styles of music that make me want to dance and remind me of that day.” In an attempt to take the rap auteur baton from his mentor Kanye, Chance has curated these festivities to be eclectic yet holistic, emblematic of the guy who remixed the theme song to TV’s beloved “Arthur” and sampled the indie darlings Beirut. There’s an expansive list of guests: En Vogue and SWV, CocoRosie and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, John Legend and gospel singer Kiki Sheard, Randy Newman and Shawn Mendes. For the most part, he wrangles them into a collective indicative of the Chance experience (the rapper co-produced every song on this project). There’s nothing that suggests he’s breaking character.
It’s just that this 22-track sprawl amounts to everything and nothing at the same time. God, marriage, fatherhood, children, adulthood, the future: all heavy things that feel weightless and inflatable in Chance’s hands. In trying to honor all the love and music that moves him, Chance becomes an ill-advised master of ceremonies for an uneven reception. The songs are infectious and exuberant until they become stilted and underwritten. After reclaiming the maligned subgenre of gospel rap on Coloring Book, Chance is trying to one-up himself by bringing perky, newlywed dad-rap back to the zeitgeist. Somewhere on that dancefloor, or perhaps before, he lost his edge.
On the surface, Chance hasn’t really strayed too far from his high-spirited wheelhouse, which presents opportunities for him to find his signature stuff. As the Pi’erre Bourne beat wails and shatters on “Slide Around,” he bounces singsongy nursery rhyme melodies off a more than game Lil Durk and Nicki Minaj, who match his breezy flows and Grammy-speak. There are enough glimpses of genius, like the thoughtful living trust he bestows during “Sun Come Down,” to serve as reminders of why Chance has earned all this fanfare, but not enough to sustain an otherwise middling effort.
His failures here are, if nothing else, in good faith. Bringing his family together in holy matrimony under the banner of God is clearly very important to him. It’s also a means to get his life on the right track. “My daughter mother double-ringed up/Finger look like jean cuffs, or two lean cups/Used to have an obsession with the 27 club/Now I’m turning 27, wanna make it to the 2070 club,” he raps on the Ben Gibbard-assisted “Do You Remember.” But songs like “I Got You (Forever and Always)” and “Found a Good One (Single No More)” never reach any level of introspection beyond the enthusiasm of their titles. Through all the celebration, there isn’t much consideration for what being a husband and dad actually means.
It takes a lot to make the sheer honeymoon joy of a new marriage sound labored or awkward, but Chance is nearly bursting a vein rapping and singing and squawking about how great things are. His wife and child are his muses but they almost never manifest as humans beyond his awestruck fascination with them. The true history of wives is one in service to the legacy of patriarchs. In Chance’s songs, this marriage exists solely as a symbolic vehicle for his maturation. There are moments where he seems to understand this (“For every small increment liberated, our women waited/And all they privacy been invaded,” he raps on “Zanies and Fools”), but he never interrogates it.
One of Chance’s great powers has been balancing a childlike wonder with a world-weary pragmatism. His endearing corniness was a coping mechanism for seeing and knowing too much too soon. Now, as he continues to check off boxes—rich, famous, philanthropic, award-winning, married with kids—it’s as if he’s conquered the game and all that’s left is searing self-congratulation. The charms of his cartoonish performances don’t translate well when he raps about the mundanity of adulthood or his Christian homilies.
Coloring Book made piety seem as sublime as an acid trip with heady, expanding verses. Chance was guided by his faith but never blinded by its light; his rapping not just precise but breathtakingly eloquent. It was personalized but still far-reaching, steadfast but non-denominational. Kanye’s self-proclaimed best prodigy, “pre-currency, post-language, anti-label, yet pro-famous,” had brought the secular world of rap an invocation even more profound than “Jesus Walks.”
In contrast, The Big Day, which is often just as prayerful, feels closed-off. These raps aren’t just duller and more rigid in motion, they’re dogmatic. He loves his girl, he loves his God, he loves his kid, and anyone who doesn’t share that love is a dissenter. He is so tenacious in his worship that it can feel contrived. “They prop up statues and stones, try to make a new God/I don’t need a EGOT, as long as I got you, God,” he raps, demonizing the same awards he champions elsewhere on the album as marks of progress.
The album can become a slog, almost oppressively upbeat, but The Big Day isn’t without wonders. Chance is still one of the most talented rappers working, and there are signs of that latent brilliance across about a dozen songs. There are instances where his assorted taste shines, flipping Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down” into a hip-house jam with Shawn Mendes or getting CalBoy to rap over a chipmunk’d James Taylor sample for “Get a Bag.” The fierce Nicki Minaj verse on “Zanies and Fools” that closes the album is her best in recent memory, and the most memorable among a slew of rap guest spots (DaBaby, Megan Thee Stallion, Gucci Mane, even his kid brother Taylor) that make the quirkier ones all but forgettable. Still, The Big Day rises and falls on Chance's vows. Even on the dancefloor, his hopefulness can feel like a beacon.


The Baltimore-based noise-punk quartet uses pedals, loops, and off-kilter rhythms to pummel its teenage heroes into blurry abstraction on its debut album.

Nupping

Dope Body are one of the only underground bands in existence brave enough to claim Rage Against the Machine as a formative influence. The Baltimore-based noise-punk quartet embraces the signature sounds of the alternative nation, but uses pedals, loops, and off-kilter rhythms to pummel its teenage heroes into blurry abstraction. Borrowing from punk-funk and nu-metal as much as spazz-core and pigfuck, the group plays Dr. Moreau with a decade's worth of MTV buzz clips. It's telling that Dope Body's debut album, Nupping, has a song called "The Shape of Grunge to Come."
Bro-rock and Boredoms mash up better than you might think. Live, Dope Body are a mosh-worthy mess of sweat and blast beats. Frontman Andrew Laumann alternates between punker grunts and animalistic yelps, his shirt rarely staying on his chest for an entire performance, while guitarist Zach Utz makes hairpin turns between stoner chugging and modem noise. Nupping does an admirable job of capturing the band's spastic onstage energy.
Album opener "Enemy Outta Me" wiggles to life with the band playing around an off-time loop, but it quickly makes a left turn into scorching riff-rock. Utz pulls double duty, answering each of his chugging stoner riffs with a bevy of electronic gurgles. When it's time for the big guitar solo, he instead opts for some balloon-on-hair squelches. "Bangers & Yos" pogos around on a rubber-band riff that's just far enough removed from "Bulls on Parade" that Rage's lawyers won't have grounds to sue.
Like Philly sludge-punkers Pissed Jeans, Dope Body have a special gift for draining the air from muscle-head music. Pissed Jeans do this mainly through lyrics, imbuing early 80s hardcore with a narrative of manly anguish. Dope Body pull at the sounds of dude-rock like taffy-- tugging guitars out of key, building up big walls of heavy rhythm only to belch in the face of fist-pumping catharsis. Utz's expansive pedal board and glitchy deconstruction of Tom Morello riffs may hint at arty pretensions, but Dope Body still smell punk.


The A-list dance-pop duo returns to the club on a new record that’s fresher and more fun than the brothers have sounded in ages.

Alchemy

“The mix should represent where we’re at now,” Disclosure said of their DJ-Kicks mix in 2021. “And where we’re at now is clubby.” Two years since Guy and Howard Lawrence turned in that seamlessly blended selection of opalescent deep house and fleet-footed garage—a set notably free of the kinds of big, belting, attention-grabbing vocals that they built their reputation on—their attitude doesn’t appear to have changed. The brothers have spent the past 13 years zigzagging between insidery dance music and big-tent pop, with mixed results. Alchemy, their first release since the conclusion of their major-label contract, is clearly meant as a reboot, repositioning them as dance artists who happen to make hits, rather than chart aspirants dabbling in club tropes.
Though there are vocals here, the grooves come first: fast-paced, winkingly contemporary takes on house and garage where the kick drums flutter and the filters fizz. They’ve made the shift in focus an explicit selling point: Alchemy is billed as their first album with no features and no samples. That’s a pronouncement presumably meant to get the attention of dance scenesters who may have lost interest in Disclosure around the time they started working with people like Lorde and the Weeknd. It’s a gambit with some intrigue (even if, for many acts, announcing a dance album with no features would be like unveiling a fish with no bicycle). But, beyond the jockeying for scene cred, the main takeaway is that Alchemy is fresher and more fun than Disclosure have sounded in ages.
On 2020’s Ecstasy EP and again on 2021’s Never Enough, Disclosure briefly canted away from the vocal-heavy pop that had become their bread and butter, but Alchemy marks the first time in a long time that they’ve dedicated themselves so thoroughly to pure dance music. Where those EPs jumped between Afropop edits, disco samples, and garage throwbacks, the new LP is held together by a sleekly unified palette. Reflecting the speedy tempos currently in vogue across dance-music subcultures, the grooves trundle away at a rollicking clip; save for two brief, beatless interludes, nothing dips below 135 BPM, and a couple are much faster. The drum programming emphasizes a sense of forward motion driven by skipping syncopations and a slippery sense of swing. The opening “Looking for Love” draws on the rushing cadence of vintage speed garage. “Simply Won’t Do,” which plays a killer bassline off silky vocal chops, sounds like an updated Basement Jaxx with a little bit of French touch thrown in and the pitch fader glued to +8. “Higher Than Ever Before” is like a counterfactual thought experiment: What might a golden-age jungle remix of Tame Impala sound like? And “A Little Bit,” which closes out a strong four-track opening stretch, is an irresistibly syrupy, sentimental trance-house banger that sinks its hooks deeper with every twist of the chord progression.
Disclosure have always had a strong ear for nuance, and it’s the details that really make Alchemy sing. Rather than hitting you over the head with a drop, they might mute the kick drum right when you expect it to hit, making its sudden reappearance that much more delightful. They favor vibrant organ-like patches which, when combined with their richly augmented chords, lend an unusually enveloping cast to the synths. And they flesh out Auto-Tune with thick, vocoder-like processing, pouring harmonies on top of harmonies until they feel like cascading rainbows.
There are occasional missteps. “Go the Distance,” the only song that pushes the vocals to the front of the mix, reverts to a forgettably bluesy hook that tries too hard to be cool and sexy, particularly given lyrics that read more like motivational hashtags: “Fuck resistance/We’ll go the distance,” “When there’s nowhere left to hide/How do you want to die,” etc. (Then again, this is a group that kicked off its debut album with a song built around a big, honking sample of a self-help guru.) They do better when they strip their lyrics back to a single refrain—like the endearingly dopey hook of “Higher Than Ever Before”—or sink them like marshmallows into the Jell-O of their digital processing.
Those moments of gelatinous concord—where synths, drums, and vocals come together in a supersaturated blend—exemplify Alchemy at its best. One song, the reverberant 45-second a cappella “Someday…,” sounds like they’ve been listening to Duval Timothy’s intricate harmonic pivots. And on “Sun Showers,” they channel decades of dance tropes—flickering trance gates, wiggly bassline, finely diced coos and sighs—into one of the most effortlessly propulsive floor-fillers of their career. In moments like these, Alchemy taps into a sense of lightness buoying one particularly inventive strain of dance anthem right now—a bubbly, spirited style plied by artists like Two Shell, Overmono, and Pangaea. It sounds good on Disclosure. For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.