While Brooklyn's Dawn of Midi shares the instrumental makeup of famous jazz aligments, their new album Dysnomia focuses on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it.

Dysnomia

The three guys in Brooklyn’s Dawn of Midi play a grand piano, an upright contrabass, and a drum kit-- the same instrumentation used in traditional jazz piano trios. But it’s tricky to say where Dawn of Midi's new album Dysnomia fits within the jazz pantheon, if it even fits in there at all. Unlike their minimalist free jazz debut First, Dawn of Midi meticulously scripted and scored Dysnomia. For 46 continuous minutes, the trio inverts free jazz into bound jazz, torturing their instruments by playing as few notes as humanly possible. They write barely-there melodies that chase their own tails. They establish mercurial rhythms that are confusingly simple -- three humans dovetailing instrumental loops into thousands of subtly different permutations. It sounds close to an acoustic Beak> session playing a Steve Reich composition, though even closer to something totally unprecedented.
There’s been plenty of jazz groups that tried to reach out to the rock kids in recent years-- The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau (both trios, incidentally) have shown up on the radar with covers of indie rock songs, though the covers feel more like like a bait and switch operations to get a wayward rockist into their more straight-ahead jazz charts. Unlike those groups, Dawn of Midi aren’t interested in coddling the uninitiated into the world of trading fours and Dmaj11 chords. On Dysnomia, they more interested in, or rather wholly focused on, rhythm. It's a new bridge out of traditional jazz to the rest of the world, and it's built with obsessive precision.
The pilgrimage begins with Aakaash Israni suggesting a tempo with two-note bass line. Then Amino Belyamani counters with one or two notes played with one hand while the other mutes the strings inside the body of the piano, making the piano melodies on Dysnomia sound more often like a thwack on a cymbal stand or some Eastern banjo. The polyrhythms of the bass and piano lap each other until Qasim Naqvi connects all the pulses on on the kit and, for a sustained moment, trio is in sync. And when they coalesce like this it’s so rewarding in that kind of pseudo-spiritual way, like when the tempo of the windshield wipers match up with the music in your car. But they all soon disengage and the three scatter off into new orbits at new speeds and prepare to align again.
This rubric that Dawn of Midi uses-- the lost and found, the tension and release-- has its closest cousins the digital world of Orbital, DJ Shadow, or Aphex Twin. The very real instruments on Dysnomia start to transform into breakbeats, ambient textures, a house hi-hat on “Nix”, all with gradual builds with a few “drops” here and there. With a sleek mix by Rusty Santos, who engineered Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs and mixed Owen Pallett’s Heartland, it also shares more with these avant indie albums that used looped acoustic instruments to create free-form dance music-- the "j-word" has little to do with it.
The ultimate irony of Dysnomia is that by playing with musical restraint, they discover whole new avenues of sound that's focused on rhythm, dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. And while it may be closest in spirit to ambient electronica or American minimalism, it retains the tenor of a human, organic quest for something spiritual and transformative. Who knew a grand piano, a contrabass, and a drum kit could actually get people nodding their heads the same way a DJ could? Dawn of Midi’s first triumph isn’t just a sleeker Can, or a more narcotic Battles, or a catnip for Radiohead fans who enjoy arguing whether or not “Pyramid Song” is in 4/4. It’s not just a piano trio that’s subverting the tenets of jazz, either. It’s a missing link for two camps that have been diametrically opposed for years, speaking different musical languages and mostly failing to communicate. Guess no one ever thought to try to get the kids dancing.


As gentle as cherry blossoms on a spring breeze, the Minnesota musicians’ lush compositions for saxophone, piano, and synthesizer convey a wealth of feeling.

Lynn Avery / Cole Pulice: To Live & Die in Space & Time

To Live & Die in Space & Time

To Live & Die in Space & Time is Lynn Avery and Cole Pulice’s debut album as a duo, but the Minneapolis musicians have been making music in parallel, and occasionally together, for some time. Recording since 2017 under the alias Iceblink, Avery first developed a cozy, playful style of hypnagogic pop. The tape-warped psychedelia of her early releases hinted at Broadcast and Boards of Canada, and on 2020’s Carpet Cocoon, she folded new age, folk, and jazz into the mix, adding Pulice and fellow Minnesotan Mitch Stahlmann on saxophone and flute. Pulice concentrated their 2020 solo debut, Gloam, on the meditative sounds of tenor saxophone and softly glowing electronics; recording live without overdubs, they traded Avery’s lilting chord changes and lysergic easy listening for drone-based minimalism and airy soundscaping. Avery, Pulice, and Stahlmann also made a trio record together in 2020, stretching woodwinds and synths into gauzy abstractions reminiscent of Visible Cloaks. But on To Live & Die in Space & Time, Avery and Pulice tighten their focus, striking a careful balance between melody and mood.
Like almost everything they have done together, To Live & Die in Space & Time is as gentle as cherry blossoms on a spring breeze. Pulice plays saxophone and wind synthesizer, Avery plays piano and synthesizer, and both are credited with additional electronics, which they tend to daub on in translucent background layers. The music is too lush to be called minimal, at least by the term’s more austerely digital connotations, but they keep their tools simple, their tempos slow, and their playing unfussy. Channeling a mix of whimsy and wide-eyed wonder, they come off a little bit like contemporary heirs of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a Brian Eno-produced group that spun bits of folk, jazz, and classical into a loose ambient weave; another reference point might be the new-age jazz of the British group Dif Juz’s 1985 album Extractions and their Elizabeth Fraser collaboration “Love Insane.”
It’s a short record, just 27 minutes, and it opens with the shortest of the four songs: “Belt of Venus,” setting Pulice’s circular melodies over a muted, lazy spiral of arpeggiated synth. Their playing is so lyrical that it practically takes on the qualities of verse. The initial phrase, searching and higher in pitch, voices a question; a second, half an octave down, offers a contemplative answer. Despite the music’s tranquility, it’s not as simple as it seems: Bursts of delay occasionally resemble hammering woodpeckers, and the background is a perpetually shifting moiré of dynamic colors and textures. Not much longer, “Plantwood (Day)” is similar in form and feel, with Pulice’s saxophone gracefully garlanding a watery, waltz-time arpeggio. This time it’s Avery’s piano that assumes the center of the frame. Patiently, she lays down soft yet blocky chords, then lets them fade, until you’d almost forgotten there was a piano in the room at all. She changes the voicing almost every time, shifting the tonal center almost imperceptibly; like Ryuichi Sakamoto, she conveys a wealth of feeling out of the smallest gestures.
On “Stained Glass Sauna,” they sink deeper into their invented soundworld. Pulice’s synthesized flute lends an unmistakably pastoral air; a gently propulsive synth pattern suggests dub techno played on a deep-sea marimba. The sense of immersion becomes total on “The Sunken Cabin (Night),” a melancholy, 13-minute fantasia that recalls Nala Sinephro’s brooding “Space 8,” and marks the dreamy outer limit of the album’s ambient new-age excursions. Over soft, sustained synthesizer pads, Avery and Pulice engage in a relaxed improvisational exchange. Though the saxophone is typically a lead instrument, given its range and its cutting timbre, it doesn’t dominate here; Pulice leaves ample space for Avery’s piano, and vice versa. Their mutual give and take feels both natural and exploratory. Avery begins by mulling over a single chord but gradually moves outward, as though mapping unknown territory.
To Live & Die in Space & Time often feels like overhearing a conversation between two close friends, and listening to “The Sunken Cabin (Night),” can seem like eavesdropping on their most intimate thoughts. An air of mystery abides, and there are occasional intimations of darkness: Occasionally, Pulice will bend a note on their saxophone, hinting at unspoken pain. New age and ambient alike can sometimes fall prey to the facile or the saccharine, but not here. By tempering sunny idyll with passing shadows, Avery and Pulice achieve a depth of expression that’s hard to quantify but easy to recognize: It simply feels true.


On their fourth album, the visionary English experimenters conjure a sinister and beguiling new world.

Inside the Rose

What if the Knife had peaked in the heyday of MTV Unplugged? What if James Blake and Scott Walker co-produced an Oliver Sim solo album? What if someone slipped a Nine Inch Nails CD to those singing monks from the ’90s? Such are the undreamed-of questions answered, at various times, by Inside the Rose, the fourth studio album by Essex shape-shifters These New Puritans, whose website summary describes them, with maddening understatement, as “an English experimental music group whose music is not easily categorized.”
Still, attempts have been made. Twin brothers Jack and George Barnett—now the group’s sole members, following a decade of periodic collaboration with Thomas Hein, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, and a 35-piece orchestra—started by exorcising their most evident influences: twitchy UK post-rave acts like Aphex Twin, itchy UK post-punk bands like the Fall, and caressing UK post-rockers like Bark Psychosis. (The latter’s Graham Sutton has been helping produce TNPs records since their second album Hidden, where the guitars of post-punk revival subsided behind subby EDM and new-music bassoons.) This inventory of early influences highlights two enduring qualities of a mercurial group: They live in spaces where conventional genre descriptions fall short, and they’re very, very English.
As These New Puritans evolved into a visionary post-classical pop group, their music became marked by the whisper of war, a bellicose current their first great song made overt. Inside the Rose opener “Infinity Vibraphones” is swept with evil-armada strings and battlefield snares, even as it spills imperceptibly from something adjacent to “Carol of the Bells” into silky vibraphone jazz. On “Into the Fire,” an adrenalized electronic scribble scrambles through a fortress of piano chords pounded by drums. Yet the group render warlike tropes so gently, with such containment and poise, that they seem to dramatize figurative battles of the heart rather than literal ones.
Putting aside musical intricacies, Inside the Rose just sounds amazing, conjuring a lustrous, lucid world shaken by distant explosions. The drones of strings, pianos, and electronics are offset by bright accents of tuned percussion, sustaining an atmosphere of anticipation and wonder. Jack Barnett’s voice is a heavy syrup, flowing without friction through crevices in capacious compositions. On each song, a few spare elements are blown up huge and then riveted down in a way that ought to feel airless, but instead pulses with energy. “Anti-Gravity” makes a trap kit sound like a concert timpani, as a phrase that seems to flicker between “never give up” and “never get up” steps down through an arrangement like winding stairs.
These New Puritans have developed a sound that is at once unusually specific and unusually vague, matching music and lyrics in a mode of soft, insistent questioning that opens and opens without ever disclosing its cloistered center. “Isn’t life a funny thing?/All these words and they say nothing,” Barnett intones as “Beyond Black Suns” shivers toward its operatic conclusion. This kind of diffident eloquence pervades an album that realizes more vividly than ever before the bewitching world These New Puritans discovered after they went off the map: One where sound communicates more than speech, serenity is sinister, and obscurity is less like a solid wall than an abstract door to possibility.


The Psalm Zero frontman and Zs alum reckons with the rise of fascism—and his internal struggle against its insidious appeal—on a debut solo album of unusually confrontational modern classical music.

Simple Answers

Six years ago, New York-based multi-instrumentalist Charlie Looker began composing his debut solo record, Simple Answers, as a meditation on the rise of fascism in the West. Although its genesis (but not its recording, a process facilitated by a Kickstarter campaign last year) predates the current presidential administration, and critics can easily overstate that regime’s influence on individual works of art, there’s no divorcing the album from where America is at now. “When the wound is fresh and open, bad ideas find their way in,” Looker chants on closing track “Puppet.” “And when our state is broke and trembling, we want answers—simple answers.” But in 2018, our wounds aren’t fresh anymore, the answers are often far from simple, and the distance between what we crave and what we have makes Simple Answers a powerful piece of modern classical music.
Informed in parts by the sounds of Looker’s industrial metal band, Psalm Zero, the album is inspired by the work of French philosopher and writer Julia Kristeva, as well as late comedian Patrice O’Neal. Kristeva speaks of fascism as an internal energy to be sublimated rather than an external force that can be defeated, and Looker sees those ideas mirrored in O’Neal’s standup, which is sampled on the crucial track “Fascist Moments”: “The promise of me being better than you makes my fucking whole life,” the comedian says. “I made a decision to be quote-unquote a good guy. My natural instincts stop.” The sentences are deliberately taken out of context, turning humor into horror. Through O’Neal, Looker is doing more than just passively observing the seductive power “might makes right” politics have over the Proud Boys who co-opted Looker’s beloved Fred Perry polos—he’s acknowledging his own susceptibility to their appeal.
There’s plenty of bombast to mirror such temptation on the album. Many of Looker’s roaring compositions could soundtrack marches if ripped from their context. “What Dawn Is This? (Overture)” is an ominous choral passage that foreshadows the overarching mood of Answers, if not to the mess of sounds that follow the string-heavy prelude. Kelly Moran, a New York pianist who also performed on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, loops with dexterity throughout “Golden Flesh.” Her performance is blissful yet tense, keeping Looker on his toes.
These sweeping gestures don’t ultimately resonate as celebrations of fascism; they demonstrate the dangers lurking behind its allure. Psalm Zero’s drum machines and electronics disrupt the majestic swagger of Answers, weighing down and gleefully perverting the music, as though Looker is spitting in the face of people who confuse their own flailing mediocrity with “the West is best” heroics. (As he once said, “I hate racism, and I love classical music.”) “Ritual Fire” is the closest the album gets to a Psalm Zero track, throbbing with bass undercurrents, pounding bass drum, and an anxious string climax that soundtracks Looker’s scream: “Gas my lungs to hell, gas my lungs to hell!” It’s a dark reference to his Jewish heritage couched in a deliberate provocation.
Although it rarely sounds this confrontational, the modern classical form allows Looker to achieve a visceral sound without any hulking guitars. “Puppet” opens with staccato horns over bumping drum machine, then homes in on Looker’s tender voice, which has long been the core of his projects. As the piece continues, the repetitive sing-song of his voice, the loosening of the drum-machine beats, and the rising strings all coalesce in a wave of helplessness. This is not an admission of defeat—it’s a realistic acknowledgment that, for all the introspection Answers encourages, the internal and external battles with fascism rage on.
Looker, whose work in Extra Life, Zs, and Seaven Teares has made him a fixture of avant-garde music, introduced himself to a metal audience with Psalm Zero. Although Simple Answers is not a metal record, it’s in conversation with the genre’s foundational themes. Metal celebrates power and dominance through brute, masculine force. This energy is not inherently negative—inspiration to take control of your own life can be a good thing—but it can be toxic in the wrong hands. (There may even be some pointed critique of this strain of metal in the electronics on “Fascist Moments,” which resemble those on Burzum’s ambient piece “Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte.”) Looker contemplates the fascism lying dormant within him and rejects it, defying genre borders by bringing elements from pop and New York’s longstanding experimental traditions to the ostensibly stodgy world of classical. His honesty is a more effective weapon in the war we’re all fighting than moral grandstanding could ever be.


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 hard-fought third album by the D.C. hardcore icons who played faster and better than everyone else.

I Against I

The hand-drawn cover of Bad Brains’ 1982 self-titled cassette featured a gigantic lightning bolt blowing the 15,000-pound Statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol building to bits. Mississippi Senator and later President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis oversaw the statue’s 1863 installation, ensuring that it met every design specification except for one: Davis, a slaveholder, removed the statue’s liberty cap—a Roman symbol of an emancipated slave.
With the self-titled cassette and 1983’s Rock for Light album under their belts, the four Black members of Bad Brains had become highly respected outliers playing punk rock in a sea of their white peers. Singer H.R., his brother and the band’s drummer Earl Hudson, guitarist Dr. Know, and bassist Darryl Jenifer toured relentlessly in a van they named “The Slave Ship.” Revered for their skilled musicianship, their ability to play at breakneck speed, and H.R.’s flamboyantly shape-shifting voice and persona, Bad Brains were a force, a phenomenon. If punk was the snotty, irreverent response to the pretentious and bloated rock of the 1970s, Bad Brains were a lightning bolt sent to blow up punk.
In November 1986, after a three-year absence, Bad Brains released I Against I—a gripping, heavy, futuristic rock album that left some fans missing the lightspeed precision and spiritual enlightenment that had become the band’s signatures. Bad Brains’ music had always included elements of reggae and dub, but I Against I was their least punk and least reggae album. In the same year that Janet Jackson injected club culture into Control, Run-D.M.C. desegregated rap and rock on Raising Hell, and Metallica introduced refined thrash metal to the mainstream with Master of Puppets, Bad Brains released an equally groundbreaking album. But while I Against I’s legacy is far-reaching, Bad Brains remain relegated to underground hero status.
Formed as teenagers in the Washington, D.C. area in the late ’70s, Bad Brains drew inspiration from accomplished jazz fusion artists like Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra, but when they discovered bands like Dead Boys and Sex Pistols in a friend’s record collection, they were consumed by the energy of punk. They found similar inspiration at a Bob Marley concert, where they began to embrace Rastafarianism and Africanism. Bad Brains connected with the shared ideals in these seemingly contradictory styles: Freedom, unity, and self-expression.
In the 2012 documentary Bad Brains: A Band in D.C., guitarist Dr. Know described the band’s early vision: “We were going to play faster and more technical[ly] than the Ramones, and be more chaotic than The Damned.” By 1980, after H.R.’s father gave him a copy of the self-improvement manual Think and Grow Rich, Bad Brains had also become obsessed with the concept of P.M.A., or “positive mental attitude.” Their early songs were two-minute-ish blasts of kinetic energy that shared punk rock’s themes of rebellion but preached a more positive message. As the repetitive lyrics of “Attitude” state, “Don’t care what they may say. We got that attitude! Don’t care what they may do. We got that attitude! Hey, we got that P.M.A.!”
Bad Brains’ P.M.A. was evident in H.R.’s warm, melodic sneer, which was the band’s focal point. He could scream and howl intensely, but when H.R. sang, it was with an unusual sweetness that felt fresh and uplifting against the backdrop of the ferocious Bad Brains. During early live shows, H.R. often performed backflips between explosions of lyrics. He might spend more time moshing in the audience than on the stage.
The band quickly gained a local following in D.C., including Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and a pre-Black Flag Henry Rollins, who recalled in the same documentary, “It was the summer of 1979. Word was that there was an all-Black punk rock band in Washington, D.C. Never seen one of those before.” When Bad Brains relocated to New York City later that year, they became an anomaly once again in the burgeoning hardcore scene—four Black men who played faster and better than everyone else at the mostly white CBGB. H.R. never screamed, “Black Power!”; Bad Brains simply embodied it.
Born Paul Hudson in Liverpool, England in 1956, H.R.’s family moved to Jamaica (where he discovered reggae at age 3), Texas, Alabama, and New York before settling in D.C. He demonstrated early athletic prowess as a swimmer and a pole vaulter, skills he later used in his band. But Bad Brains’ fearless, thrashing frontman could also be erratic. H.R. arrived late for shows and occasionally missed them altogether. Onstage he sometimes replaced his storied backflips with long periods of stillness, during which he didn’t sing at all. Rumors swirled of everything from drug use to schizophrenia. It took years of this confusing behavior to discover that H.R. suffered from a rare neurological disorder called SUNCT, and it wasn’t until 2017 that he finally underwent successful brain surgery for the condition.
Both of Bad Brains’ early albums featured a few markedly slow, bass-heavy, sun-drenched songs that serve as moments of respite between all-out sprints. H.R. wanted to move further into reggae but other members resisted, so after the Rock for Light tour, he and Earl left the band. H.R. released the first of many solo albums, It’s About Luv, in 1985.
H.R.’s time away cooled things temporarily, and H.R. and Earl rejoined Bad Brains to play two New York shows in July 1985. The rehearsals became the writing sessions for I Against I. Unlike many of their hardcore peers, Bad Brains weren’t concerned with “selling out”—not only did P.M.A. apply to every aspect of life, but it pushed them to strive for success. Though they’d fielded interest from major record labels since their early days, H.R. was hesitant to sign a  long-term contract. In any case, he often managed to foil those conversations—in one meeting, he allegedly threatened the A&R man who’d signed Mötley Crüe for attempting to disparage Rasta. In the absence of a major label deal, Bad Brains’ next album would be released by the independent powerhouse SST and produced by Ron Saint Germain, a big-name rock producer who had worked with Jimi Hendrix and would record the album in three days for the relatively small sum of $5,000.
After a commanding minute of sludge on “Intro,” I Against I’s title track—a song Bad Brains first recorded in 1980—offers the security of the band’s classic speed. But while the album maintains intensity and grit, it never returns to that pace. Instead, the band who’d already reinvented a musical movement by speeding up digs in and slows down. Dr. Know had spent the band’s hiatus listening to increasing amounts of hard rock and metal, and I Against I is Bad Brains’ most guitar-driven album. His influence is most evident on the closing “Return to Heaven,” where an opening guitar rev-up and Sunset Strip chug recalls early Van Halen. The guitar solo—a faux pas in punk rock—was omnipresent in Bad Brains’ music from the outset and I Against I is no exception: More than half of its songs feature guitar solos. “You like something and your peers don’t like it, so what?” Dr. Know would explain in a 2011 interview. “You’ve got to keep an open mind.”
Bad Brains had recovered from a breakup and they’d navigated their frontman’s health issues, but a new, unforeseen roadblock would emerge before I Against I’s completion. During the recording sessions, Saint Germain captured several takes of the band, but in order to protect H.R.’s voice, the producer hadn’t yet recorded his vocals. Just before H.R. was set to sing, he casually informed Saint Germain that he had to leave the rural Massachusetts studio and report to prison the following day to serve out a marijuana conviction.
“We had two hours so I basically said, ‘Give me two takes on each song,’” Saint Germain recalled in A Band in D.C. “I finished the recording with H.R. and then he had to go serve three or four months. And I had the one song which wasn’t finished, ‘Sacred Love.’”
The eight songs H.R. recorded in those two hours are among his most impassioned performances in Bad Brains. His imminent incarceration feels almost physical. “House of Suffering” conveys the urgency with stuttering, rhythmic shifts. H.R.’s rant in the final verse is an album high point: “In this house of suffering, don’t want but just one thing, got to have my origin, in this house of suffering.” Each phrase relies upon H.R.’s delivery, abandoning his cool vibrato in favor of a desperate fit augmented with indiscernible rhythmic scats. With “Let Me Help,” he offers a plea to remain positive in times of spiritual trial. The song’s final lyrics—“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life”—are among the most potent illustrations of the album’s intended message: Positivity, self-assurance, tremendous respect. The themes deeply embedded in Bad Brains’ music have never been articulated so well and delivered with such heft.
Weeks later, while imprisoned at the Lorton Reformatory in Laurel Hill, Virginia, H.R. got a job sweeping the floors, which allowed him access to a pay phone. He then called the studio and sang the unfinished song, “Sacred Love,” into the receiver. “I could barely hear the music,” H.R. recalled in a 2010 interview. “But it was in my heart to sing that song.” His naturally distorted vocals are his most serene and melodic on the album.
Were it not for H.R.’s empathetic vocals, I Against I’s bombastic drums and percussive, muted guitars might mark it as metal. Upbeat tracks like “She’s Calling You” and “Hired Gun” come off as innocent dance-rock segues until they reveal the sharpness of their teeth. On nearly every track, the band exhibits patience, restraint, and groove. Despite the obstacles that impeded the album’s creation, with I Against I, Bad Brains architected what Jane’s Addiction later achieved with Nothing’s Shocking and what Nirvana eventually got credit for with Nevermind: They blurred the lines between punks, new wavers, and metalheads, conceptualizing a new musical landscape less defined by genre.
By the end of 1987, H.R. and Earl would leave the band again, only to rejoin just in time to record 1989’s Quickness. “The Bad Brains function on vibes,” H.R. said of his propensity to leave and return to his band in a 1989 interview. “So when the vibes are right, then we come together. And when they’re not right then we decide to wait until they are.”
By 1990, H.R. and Earl had left the band for a third time when guitarist Dr. Know and bassist Darryl Jenifer appeared on MTV to promote Quickness. On the alternative show 120 Minutes, stoic host Dave Kendall asked with the tact of an awkward record store clerk: “Do you think, uh, that Black rock music is making headway?” And on the metal show Headbangers Ball, a frizzy-haired Riki Rachtman introduced Bad Brains’ video with a disarmingly defensive tone: “I like this song. It’s definitely... Definitely you guys are unique.” Bad Brains perennially endured questions and judgements about their place as a Black band in a white musical universe. That Bad Brains appeared on either 120 Minutes or Headbangers Ball—both shows featured almost exclusively white artists—was unusual; that they appeared on both was nearly impossible. It was a testament to their ability to defy both racial and musical boundaries.
In the wake of I Against I, the door opened just a little bit more for Black rock bands like Fishbone, who drowned out their ska roots with guitars on 1988’s Truth and Soul, and Living Colour, the first Black alternative rock band to achieve mainstream success and significant MTV airplay with “Cult of Personality” that same year. It’s easy to think that Bad Brains should have been there alongside them, but the band’s demons never allowed them equal footing with their contemporaries or their successors—many of whom also had the backing of major record labels. Instead Bad Brains seemed eternally plagued to pave the road for them.
I Against I was Bad Brains’ most successful album, but it never rivaled those of their most vocal admirers. Beastie Boys and Deftones each took Bad Brains on separate tours in 1995, both rife with altercations between H.R. and fans. Jeff Buckley covered “I Against I” and Sublime covered “House of Suffering.” The sticky riff of “Re-Ignition” is the basis of a Lil Jon Crunk Rock Remix, and although it’s not a cover, the title track of Deftones’ 1997 album Around the Fur is an obvious homage. Bad Brains are a classic “band’s band”—cited as legendary by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters—but without a tune that the average person could hum.
No roster of famous admirers gets at what makes Bad Brains important, because they relied little upon external forces to push their message forward. Instead its members were happy to embody their self-defined P.M.A. I Against I marks a high point in the decades-long career of a band who was sometimes on the verge of stardom, often on the brink of total combustion, and always at the nexus of social and political change.

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Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump captures a CD-length slice of diversity, taking in nearly as many styles as it has tracks to offer a brilliant panorama of the country's popular music in the 1970s, with a bit of bleed into the two adjacent decades.

Various Artists: Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump, Original Heavyweight Afrobeat, Highlife & Afro-Funk

Nigeria is a huge and diverse country. Expertly, thrillingly, Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump captures a CD-length slice of that diversity, taking in nearly as many styles as it has tracks to offer a brilliant panorama of the country's popular music in the 1970s, with a bit of bleed into the two adjacent decades. The compilation isn't so much an attempt to provide a cross-section or a road map to the music, though, as it is a simply great pass through the tens of thousands of LPs and 45s that were cut in Nigeria's many cities from about 1968 to 1981. Compiler Duncan Brooker and liner notes scribe Quinton Scott aren't writing a textbook, they're telling bits of a story that we in the West had largely not heard until the recent explosion in releases that chronicle the music of the era.
Both men have an admirable history with the music. Brooker was responsible for the dynamite Afro Rock compilation on his own Kona imprint in 2002, while Scott's Strut label has a solid history itself as the source of the Disco Not Disco compilations, the two Club Africa volumes, Tony Allen, Segun Bucknor, Peter King and Orlando Julius reissues, and the original Nigeria 70 compilation, which was one of the first to cast light on the incredible well of great music waiting to be discovered in Africa's most populous country. Over the course of 16 tracks, you get hard funk, Afrobeat, juju, highlife, reggae, rock, psychedelia, blues, ballads, jazz, and simple, sentimental pop, not to mention fusions of all those things.
Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars open the compilation with a seven minute juju-funk blast called "Yabis" that features a slow but relentless groove built around a constantly repeated guitar phrase and thundering percussion that features a deep, variable-pitch drum. It's naturally heavy music that features a witty lead vocal poking fun at Africans with Western pretensions. If Peters' music is naturally heavy, its polar opposite might be the Peacocks Guitar Band's "Eddie Quansa", a lilting, weightless tribute to a Ghanaian highlife great. The guitars on the song scarcely repeat a phrase, intertwining in a constant melodic dance as the rhythm bounces and the vocals thread through, moving between solo verses and harmonized choruses.
"Eddie Quansa" is just one of a handful of intensely beautiful songs on the disc. Rex Williams' poppy "You Are My Heart" is a bright and disarmingly direct love song, sung in English with great chorus harmonies and an infectious circular guitar riff that sets up an impeccably phrased solo. This song was a deserving hit and is the first of a final trio that take the listener out on a gentle note-- the organ that swells unexpectedly throughout Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestroes' "Dododo (Ekassa No. 1)" raised some serious goosebumps the first time I heard it, and the arrangement deftly crescendos by nicking a common early rock'n'roll chord progression. Ifeanyi Eddie Okwedy & His Maymores Dance Band take us out with "Happy Survival", a dark-toned, even ethereal song that stays grounded through its sharp and loud drums.
In this respect, the compilation is sequenced in much the same way a good DJ would sequence his set, pulling the listener (who, for many of these songs, may also be a dancer). Peter's King's awesome jazz-funk track "African Dialects", which features ghostly vocals, Rhodes piano, and muted horns, sets a chilled-out table for Dynamic Africana's "Igbehin Lalayo Nta", which slowly constructs an elaborate Afrobeat groove and patiently holds back the vocals until the four-minute mark. Likewise, the Immortals' cranking, brief garage rock track "Hot Tears" is a great come down from the 10-minute Afrobeat groove and spoken narrative of Eric "Showboy" Akaeze & His Royal Ericos' "Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham".
If you're like me and will never get enough of vintage African pop music, this is another in a bountiful 2008 harvest of great compilations with a very distinctive feel and approach. It sits perfectly on the shelf next to Sound Way's Nigeria Special compilations and Analog Africa's African Scream Contest, not to mention Strut's own original Nigeria 70 compilation. I only hope the floodgates stay open permanently, because I can always use more discs like this.


The Baltimore rapper-producer’s sprawling project seesaws across genres, from emo rap to drum’n’bass to indie rock, with mad-scientist abandon.

Self Hate Wraith

There’s no point trying to classify Ghostie’s music. A Venn diagram of the Baltimore rapper-producer’s influences would look like a Rorschach test. It’s best described using signifiers: an infernal sludge, a stuffy studio apartment, a deep-fried meme that reveals more about humanity than any painting in a museum could. This is the work of an artist whose biggest stated inspiration is System of a Down, whose SoundCloud-based group Anti-World is credited with inventing something called Trap Metal and absolutely hates the distinction, whose daily life for the past presidential administration has consisted of nothing but furiously recording and absorbing music of all flavors like an overheating machine, input and output meters peaking well past the red.
This is also the work of a human: a father, a renter, a former alcoholic, a stressed and anxious city-dweller. Nowhere is that humanity more apparent than on his latest album Self Hate Wraith. Thanks to Ghostie’s improved writing and continued refinement of his wide-ranging palette, it’s his strongest release to date.
Ghostie is an outsider. He maintains an enigmatic presence—you’ll only find a few interviews with him online—and his music is noisy and challenging. But part of the thrill of his work comes from not knowing what the track playing through your headphones will sound like in the next 45 seconds. The loud, clipping choruses congeal into towering pop hooks that feel more in the spirit of Panic! At The Disco than anything from rap’s last decade (in “Eshuned,” one of the best moments on Self Hate Wraith, Ghostie indulgently interpolates “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off”). Ghostie is daring and unpredictable in the manner of his friend and collaborator JPEGMAFIA. Every album is overwhelming, every song is a calculated risk.
On Self Hate Wraith, he continues his scorched-earth campaign against rap norms. Drum’n’bass, synth pop, emo rap, and indie rock are among the countless genres he mines across these 24 self-produced songs. For the most part, this is experimentation done right; the genres all feel lived-in, not beamed in, and Ghostie’s production is top-flight. The album opens with a searing three-song run that quickly covers three genres while laying out the thesis. “Why must I try? Why must I work?” Ghostie croons on “Crazy,” a pounding pop rap track that splits the difference between WorkingOnDying and early-2010s Kid Cudi. The change-ups can be blinding, especially for listeners primed for traditional rap, but the longer you spend with them, the more they click into place.
Ghostie has grown into an impressive bluesman, flipping simple phrases into glowing screeds with his powerful, heavily processed vocals. He writes about the realities that millions of Americans face on a daily basis: feeling alone, fearing eviction,  love and loss and drinking and dinner tonight. Listen to how he repeats a single line—“No matter how much hurt, sing your song you’ll be all right”—on “Shame,” turning it into a numbing chant you might hear during the graveyard shift on an asteroid mining plant. “Think Bout It All The Time” is another exercise in repetition, this time over four-on-the-floor synthpop: “I think ’bout it all the time, it won’t go away.” Ghostie’s writing has a strong populist streak: You don’t need to know what he’s thinking about to know that you’ve probably thought about it, too.
It’s the moments of catharsis that shine brightest. On the brash centerpiece of the album “Sizzle (I’m In Hell),” Ghostie growls something about oranges and potatoes from Blue’s Clues before delving into some of his most harrowing thoughts: isolation, getting kicked out on the 31st, guzzling whiskey and tequila and Sprite. Then another Blue’s Clues chorus, and then the second verse, a stumbling freestyle. It’s messy and brilliant, weirder and more honest than any of the rap music clogging Spotify’s paid-placement arteries.
The more traditional cuts like “Hard Soft Taco” and “Hatsu” pale in comparison to the experiments. They’re awkwardly sandwiched together in the tracklist, revealing a sequencing issue that turns the album bloated in the second half. But Ghostie records are sprawling by design, and you’re not here for a tightly wound opus. You’re here to put yourself in the hands of Baltimore’s premier mad scientist, and the payoffs are well worth the risks.


The Brooklyn composer injects the ambient wash of her past work with flashes of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between reflective contemplation and the ego-melting thrills of a warehouse party.

Heaven Come Crashing

Rachika Nayar doesn’t just spew out a little fog before her live show, she stretches the venue’s fire code to its limit. Before the guitarist walks onstage, the entire performance space is clouded, red exit signs barely visible, until you can barely see your hand in front of your face. The effect on the audience is immediate: Conversations dull to a whisper and friends drift carefully towards each other to reunite before the music starts, tiptoeing across a shadowy maze of bodies as they take on a heightened awareness of their own.
It’s the perfect environment to experience Nayar’s music. Interviewed on the heels of her 2021 debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, she championed the “totally obliterating” power of a rave’s atmosphere, and spoke of her desire to create a similar environment, ones that “simultaneously takes you out of yourself, and submerges you deep within yourself.” Our Hands did this by constructing misty ambient labyrinths out of processed guitar, revealing Nayar’s ability to sculpt the instrument’s earthy twang into unpredictable alien timbres and shift them back to familiar shapes at a moment’s notice. When Nayar debuted tracks from her astonishing second album, Heaven Come Crashing, at the Brooklyn venue Public Records, strobes flashed violently and unexpected floods of drums crashed into the crowd. Egos melted away as the crowd breathed in a wave of ecstatic release.
Heaven Come Crashing injects the ambient wash of Nayar’s past work with flashes of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between reflective contemplation and the ego-melting thrills of a warehouse party. On the stunning title track, she traces the arc of her musical transformation in miniature. Slices of granulated guitar gently refract into the frame, and for a few seconds, the song could be a holdover from the swooning sentimentality of Our Hands. But she soldiers on, backed by unearthly guest vocals from fellow guitarist and songwriter Maria BC that swell from airy wisps into a supercharged choir. Suddenly, a trap door unhinges and you’re ripped into a punishingly beautiful beat drop. It’s a scene of catharsis surrounded by a squealing guitar solo and the cascading cymbal crashes of a drum’n’bass beat. “Heaven Come Crashing” lifts you up with shameless melodrama and pure affirmation: It was all worth it.
Nayar deploys these moments of tension and release with the sixth sense of a veteran after-hours DJ, keenly aware that floor-filling emotional highs are earned through careful pacing. “Tetramorph,” the album’s longest and most satisfying song, weaves through a series of false stops and starts that perfectly read the pulse of the crowd. Chattering hi-hats come in at full volume, emerging from pin-drop silence in a quick hit of stimulation. They fizzle out but the effects cling to your body, propping you up as you navigate a maze of buzzing drones that build into a waltzing post-rock climax. The effect is startling, but as Nayar rocks out in the coda, you easily recall every part of the meticulously arranged journey, awe-struck at how seamlessly she blended it all together.
Other tracks use compositional sleight-of-hand to leave you dangling off the edge of a cliff, ending on deliciously maddening chords that make you lean into the speaker, trying to manifest a neat resolution by sheer force of imagination. “The Price of Serenity” rides dueling motifs—a steadily rising clean piano arpeggio and a squelching synthesizer lead—to a crunchy four-on-the-floor stomp, disguising a jarring left turn into oblivion with a pulse-pounding bass drum stutter. In a show of supreme confidence, she resurrects the formula on the next track, “Our Wretched Fate,” crashing from nocturnal ecstasy into sober daylight in half the time. Unexpected power surges back into your feet, only for the house lights to come up.
In this metamorphosis from ambient composer to dancefloor mystic, Nayar meets her mirror image in UK producer Loraine James. Where Nayar has folded her impressionistic collages into body-breaking narrative arcs, James has done the opposite, smoothing out the gritty IDM of 2021’s Reflection to reemerge this year with ambient side-project Whatever the Weather. But although they take new form, traces of the past and beloved compositional tools linger. Just as James can’t help but blow the dust off her drum machine, Nayar uses her guitar for soothing interludes that provide a dynamic counterpoint to Heaven Come Crashing’s barn-burning anthems.

Nayar’s new guitar experiments light the path with flickering details. A rhythm that sounds as if it were tapped out on her thigh, off-the-cuff, gives “Gayatri” a strange kind of propulsion. And the combination of bass synth and the brief glimmer of a corresponding lead line roots the searching motif of “Death & Limerence” in the assurance of a heaven-bound trajectory. It’s a dazzling recalibration, lifting Nayar up and over the darkness of her previous work. The answers aren’t quite pieced together, but the questions grow deeper and more satisfying.


Lionel Williams’ fourth album brings new melodic clarity to his kaleidoscopic variations on soft-focus psych pop, pushing his songs into the realm of pure, escapist pleasure.

Opal

Trends are hard to suss out amid the diversity of contemporary indie rock, but it sure feels like there’s a lot of good psychedelic music out there lately. From MGMT’s doomy, atomic pop and the motorik fantasias of Hookworms to the variegated loveliness of Beach House’s 7 and the knotty micro-prog of Melody’s Echo Chamber, 2018 has offered an embarrassment of trippy riches. A fair amount of this music has come from Toro Y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick’s Carpark imprint Company Records, including mind-bending releases from San Francisco guitar stylist Tanukichan and the post-rock dream maker who records as Astronauts, etc., among others.
The latest noteworthy psych album to emerge from this milieu is former Company signee Vinyl Williams’ Opal. The fourth record from the hazy LA pop project masterminded by Lionel Williams (grandson to legendary film composer John Williams) represents a massive leap forward from what came before it. Since his full-length debut, 2012’s Leminiscate, Williams has followed his messy muse wherever it’s taken him, situating patches of streamlined songwriting next to side-long instrumental indulgences adorned with titles like “Mercurial Vestiges.” Although Opal’s tracklist still betrays a predilection for extravagant language (a personal fave: “Florian Veridiciton”), there’s a new clarity to his work here; songs spin through kaleidoscopic variations on soft-focus pop without losing their melodic grounding, even at their weirdest moments.
The album bears some resemblance to Tame Impala’s 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, and to Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s warped rock. But it has a more obscure forerunner in the music of the now-defunct Colorado hippie collagists Candy Claws, whose first full-length, 2010’s Hidden Lands, is all heavenly, hushed whispers and mossy keyboard reveries. Opal has a similarly dreamy aura, with spun-sugar melodic passages anchored by Williams’ gossamer vocals and a thumping low end—but it adds an intense rhythmic pulse, in percussion flourishes that range from the high-speed cymbal rush of “Sanctuary Spells” to the tricky fills underlying “None With Other.” There’s never been any doubt that Williams is an adept musician, but his newfound skills as a songwriter and arranger push the album into the realm of pure pleasure.
The lyrics on Opal are—literally—a real trip. “Lessons of LSD/Light could illuminate me,” Williams sings on the driving closer “Millennial Ballroom,” hammering home that this is music made for (and likely by) black-light enthusiasts prone to binge-watching Alejandro Jodorowsky films. There’s talk of fictional planets and the astral plane, floating houses, aliens, and other cosmic ephemera. The heavy processing around Williams' vocals makes most of these brain-melting musings unintelligible, but you can hear him loud and clear in the jaunty chorus of “Noumena”: “All of everything outside of our head/Opens the doors where we can fall right in.”
For all of its paeans to psychedelics, however, the hermetic and colorful world of Opal also illustrates that “head music” needn’t always be associated with substances. The best psych pop often functions as a guided meditation for its listeners—a way to escape, for a little while, from the horrors of the world or the drudgery of everyday life. (As Tame Impala’s “Music to Walk Home By” suggests, this stuff thrives on solitude.) With Opal, Williams offers an entryway into his own private sanctuary. Once overstuffed with ideas, the place has become an inviting, well-lit haven for daydreamers who could use a vacation from reality.


A gentle, mostly wordless collection of ambient pop, Michelle Zauner’s soundtrack for the indie exploration game is a streamlined glimpse into her versatility as a narrative artist.

Japanese Breakfast: Sable (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Sable (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Michelle Zauner has spent this year in an intensely personal state of mind. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H-Mart centered on her Korean-American identity and the loss of her mother at a formative age, while her latest album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee, discussed complex interpersonal relationships while attempting to move beyond grief. Her latest project is a soundtrack for Shedworks’ indie exploration game Sable, and it provides an opportunity to shift the focus.
The music is situated around the coming-of-age journey of the titular young girl. Creatively, Sable reveals a more purely melodic element of Zauner’s work; her halcyon instrumentation retreats from her usual indie rock influences, bubbling into an electronic backdrop for the burnished visuals of sprawling deserts and glowing alien insects. With hints of the sampled experiments of Japanese Breakfast tracks like “Machinist” and “2042,” the score is a streamlined glimpse into Zauner’s versatility as a narrative artist.
Zauner’s voice greets you as soon as you open the game—“Found a way/Found a sun,” she intones like a lullaby—but for the most part, the gameplay is backed by wordless, delicate ambient pop. The tracks are always gentle on the ear, meshing and fading in the background as you send Sable leaping against the solitude of cel-shaded dunes and Metabolist-inspired ruins. For the most part, the tactile, shoegaze dreaminess that permeated so much of Zauner’s previous releases has dissolved. Songs like “Better the Mask” are primarily voice-and-piano affairs. Her location-based score, split between the swift, smooth in-game cycle of night and day, reflects a colorful subtlety. “The Ewer (Day)” hums in soothing, lambent tones, while “The Ewer (Night)” slows like a heartbeat.
Though the playfulness of Zauner’s work is woven into the fabric of these songs, the majority of Sable doesn’t necessarily invite active listening. Instead, it retreats into the background of the gameplay. There’s a brusqueness to the ambience that recalls Boards of Canada circa In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. “Beetle Detour” chirps like chelicerae; “Abandoned Grounds” reverberates in low, polar tones; “Machinist’s Theme” hums mechanically and matter-of-factly. Not so much an album as the nerve system of a narrative, Sable is best experienced alongside the physical act of in-game exploration.
Above all, the soundtrack’s heart is attuned to Sable’s pilgrimage. Shortly after leaving her home, Sable meets a nomadic guard who asks what this great journey feels like. She can answer with bravado or self-deprecation, or she can admit, prosaically, “The world is big and I feel very small.” “Glider,” the soundtrack’s crown jewel, immortalizes this sensation with  soaring harmonies. It’s one of the few songs with sung words,  a sweetly grand anthem that swells as Sable departs her now-empty home, gliding out of a canyon into the remote landscape. Hopeful synths rise as Zauner empathizes, “I’m caught between the wind and parts of the unknown,” with her voice textured like granulated sugar. “Every particle in sync,” she sings as if projecting her voice across the planes of the desert. She yearns for freedom while making peace with the unease of that wide world ahead of her.

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With a mixture of shoegaze and dream pop, the Philadelphia band offers a dramatic soundtrack to dark introspection.

Animal Drowning

When TJ Strohmer started Knifeplay in 2015 as a solo bedroom project, it was an outlet for self-discovery and a way to dodge the college-to-soulless-desk-job pipeline. “We’re not being nurtured to discover ourselves in any type of way,” he would later explain of his desire to opt out of the system. Eventually, Strohmer expanded Knifeplay into a five-piece—with bassist Alex Stackhouse, guitarist John Klein, keyboardist Max Black, and drummer John Sciortino—fusing shoegaze and dream pop. On the Philadelphia band’s second album, Animal Drowning, Knifeplay balance dark introspection—untangling experiences of grief, abuse, and self-loathing—with empathy and patience.
On Animal Drowning, Knifeplay explore a sound not too distant from that of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: gloomy guitar drones, thundering percussion, and foreboding orchestral strings that quiver on the periphery. They tapped a number of collaborators to flesh out their vision, adding cello, violin, piano, and additional guitar throughout. And like the Canadian post-rockers, Knifeplay do their best to guide listeners past calamity toward the warm glow of hope. In “Nobody,” a strummed acoustic guitar persists despite the tower of fuzz crashing down; in “Cold Rain,” a full-bodied choir pushes back against guitar feedback, defiant in its stance. During the eight-minute “Untitled,” a handful of passages speak to perseverance amid turmoil, like Strohmer’s even-keeled falsettos during the loudest crescendos or the bright guitar that overtakes the drums during the song’s conclusion. These moments of tension are Knifeplay’s reminder that with enough friction, a match will eventually yield light.
While this textural songwriting style offers Animal Drowning its worn sandpaper feel, Strohmer’s lyrics give the music its weight. With the eternal wisdom of Tony Soprano as his guiding light, Strohmer sardonically tackles his conservative upbringing in rural Maryland on standout single “Promise”: “You’re born into this shit/And you are what you are.” His words float like airy soliloquies, contradicting the blown-out, almost doom-metal guitar behind him. Producer Jeff Ziegler further exaggerates these extremes, filtering them through a gauzy lens similar to the one he brought to A Sunny Day in Glasgow and the War on Drugs.
Each of the album’s 10 tracks explores a difficult moment in Strohmer’s life, however cryptic. He often utilizes repetition as a means of diluting his traumas, uttering phrases again and again until they begin to sound unfamiliar. Elsewhere, he omits backstory entirely in favor of focusing on one specific detail, as though reiterating its unimportance until he believes it himself. On the piano ballad “Ryan Song,” he creates his own shorthand for the oft-quoted aphorism, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”: “Failure held its mirror up and teased you.” Strohmer’s through with letting his old wounds debilitate him, and these songs suggest you do the same.
Animal Drowning intertwines these grand crescendos and lyrics of self-growth into an emotional reckoning that intends to overwhelm. At one moment, someone’s screaming while a saxophone wails in the background. At another, a brisk piano melody is overpowered by distorted guitars that verge on apocalyptic. Listening to the album can feel like cave diving: It’s a series of narrow paths and dark, water-filled rooms that are as gorgeous as they are dangerous. The album’s most claustrophobic songs—“Promise,” “Hearts,” “Cold Rain”—are its most rewarding listens. Knifeplay are pushing the shoegaze revival to embrace the jagged textures of experimental rock, the earnestness of emo, and the delicacy of string compositions without any pretension. If Knifeplay began as an outlet for self-discovery, Animal Drowning renders interiority in vivid, four-dimensional terms.


Sufjan Stevens reaches his saturation point with this 75-minute, 21-track companion album to last year's acclaimed Illinois.

The Avalanche

Unless the liner notes are lying, that really is Sufjan Stevens playing a dizzy, disjointed guitar solo on "Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair". When the man known for his gentle falsetto and baroque music fetish picks up an electric guitar, he stumbles and lurches like he's been hit in the head. Shambling and off-kilter, he coughs up odd phrases instead of weaving in countermelodies.
You'll find plenty of small but head-turning moments like that on The Avalanche. You'll also find a disc full of stuff that sounds a lot like last year's Illinois-- and that's the point. This is the outtakes and B-sides album from last year's magnum opus, and Stevens himself calls them also-rans. In his recent Pitchfork interview, Stevens said he considered just giving these songs away on the web, which wouldn't have been a bad idea; he could have dripped the best cuts to mp3 blogs and anthologies, like he's done for the past few months, to stay on the radar while he finishes his next proper album.
As it is, The Avalanche is not just a B-sides record; it's actually a mirror image, with 21 tracks that loosely follow *Illinois-- * including the suspenseful intro, the fast, pulsing second track, the quizzical segues, the interminable song titles, and the gradual instrumental send-off. The mood is gentler and more acoustic; the title track harkens back to the banjo-led introspection of Seven Swans, and the last ballad, "Pittsfield", has the cozy tunefulness of a chicken soup jingle. But for most of the disc, Stevens brings back the statewide namechecks and the "Illinoisemakers" marching band arrangements.
Call it burnout or backlash if you have to, but it's hard not to compare the two albums and find this one wanting; even the best songs, which are quite good, wouldn't bump anything off of Illinois. ("The Mistress Witch From McClure" comes closest, but "Casimir Pulaski Day" already took its slot.) The Avalanche would have been engaging at half the length, but at 75 minutes, let's just say that if you have a saturation point for Stevens, you're gonna reach it.
Still, The Avalanche isn't "Sufjan's latest album" so much as Sufjan's sketchbook: If you want to study how he operates and catch new facets of his work, you'll be satisfied. We get that shambolic guitar, the spacy analog synth on "For Clyde Tombaugh" (named for the guy who discovered Pluto), and most of all, three new versions of "Chicago" (subtitled "Acoustic Version", "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version", and best of all, the beats-and-jitters arrangement of "Multiple Personality Disorder Version"). By including three alternate arrangements of his biggest song to date (per the Last.fm charts, anyway), Sufjan shakes up his image as a new hero of adult contemporary songwriting.
Stevens considers himself a serious composer and a craftsman who wants his songs to stand on their own with no autobiographical or sentimental crutches; personal stories litter the material, but he doesn't use the backstory to sell the songs. Yet in spite of this, his voice and singer-songwriting tempt us to believe that every time we hear his falsetto crack, we're seeing into his soul. People who emote like Stevens are supposed to be "authentic." Just like on Lifetime, everything has to be a true story, and you only write about a friend who dies of cancer if you've just come back from the funeral. Some have even criticized Illinois, and now The Avalanche, because the whole thing was-- to quote Ryan Irvine at Goodhodgkins.com-- a "cold and calculated research project."
On a gut level, I understand that reaction. But critically, it doesn't make sense. Stevens is less a Nick Drake than a maverick craftsman like John Fahey. He'll never come to our houses and weep on our shoulders-- but he'll write songs about coming to our houses and weeping on our shoulders. And this sensitive yet askew set is a reminder that great music comes from the head more than the heart-- and it leaves plenty of mistakes, strange jokes, near-misses, and useless flashes of brilliance along the way.


Persuasion, a new three-song EP by New York City-based duo Blondes, turns their massive live show inside out and reconstructs it in a studio setting. It serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun.

Persuasion EP

With the current mainstream status and Coachellification of American techno, it's sometimes hard to remember the origins of the genre. It was created not by pasty knob-noodlers or bros in culturally-appropriative headgear, but a multiethnic, pansexual community of revelers interested in an almost spiritual loss of self, an out-of-body escapism that could only be achieved through electronics, dancing, and the occasional hit of very potent psychedelics. Good techno, inherently, does not forget that heritage. Persuasion, a new three-song EP by New York City-based duo Blondes, is good techno.
Their newest offering since a one-off collage and 2013's gangly soundscape Swisher, Persuasion sees Blondes turning their massive live show inside out and reconstructing it in a studio setting. It's more visceral and immediate than what they've been releasing in the past few years, condensing their more pensive moments into 25 minutes of purified dance. Title track "Persuasion" starts off with a shuffleboard beat and a synth blip that sounds almost exactly like the default iPhone text message alert tone, until the main synthesizer loop tickles its way in and the rest of the track bubbles over an eight-minute build. It's what Blondes do best: expertly guide their audience to that place beyond the dancefloor, grabbing their cerebrums with sound and forcibly lifting them to the heavens, or at the very least to the top of the DJ booth.
"Son" is centered around a runaway timpani chased by swirling synth stabs, landing only a few thumps short of Afrobeat in the process. A third of the way through, reverberated and outstretched vocals punctuate the mix. It's a daring touch that pays off, imbuing the track with an element both human and distinctly alien. As "Son" slows down and comes to a close, the kettledrum finally loses its steam and a lone hi-hat struggles past the finish line—a witty fake-out, as it happens, as third and final track "Inner Motive" gears up in a swell of muted beats and modulated synths. This is the closest the EP comes to customary Blondes, a pulsating, multi-layered beat accompanied by a multitude of overlapping squiggles. Much like the techno of yore, Persuasion serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun—all qualifiers that many of Blondes' compatriots could learn a thing or two about.


On their debut album, the quartet applies noise-rock chops and jazz-versed drumming to a wild set of songs with a gastrointestinal fixation.

Nothing Valley

When it comes to song building, Melkbelly are, more precisely, song demolishers. They tear the wallpaper off of traditional structures, take sledgehammers to the joists and excavators to the foundations, then giddily sift through the rubble and reassemble the debris into something that in no way resembles a normal structure. Just don’t try telling them that. When Miranda Winters sings about “traditional circles in the woods” on the final track of the adventurous four-piece’s formal debut LP, Nothing Valley, she’s out for blood. Exactly what she has in mind is anyone’s guess, but this moment from “Helloween” offers a telling taste of the fuel in the noisy rockers’ frenetic, overheated motor.
Like steel wool on brushed metal, Nothing Valley reconciles the affability of Winters’ scattershot words with a thunderously heavy, sometimes doom-suggestive atmosphere. “Concrete is raw, concrete is cold/This slouch is weighted, too,” she sings softly on “R.O.R.O.B.,” her voice a feather adrift over the city. Later, the song slams the brakes into a two-minute coda of deep, labored instrumental wheezing—inhaling with a faint but silence-piercing guitar screech, exhaling with concrete-cracking release.
It’s not the first sudden shift on Nothing Valley—not even the first on that particular song. Where many indie-rock bands approach jump cuts in tempo or key like a watercolorist might a flamethrower, Melkbelly chuck wrench after wrench into the album’s traction and still end up with engaging arcs. “Petrified” starts as a solo cover of an imagined Black Sabbath song and finishes with the whole band mimicking a hyperventilating security alarm squealing pulselessly by the end. Despite the crashing pace, dynamics, or melodic trajectory of most tracks, Melkbelly flex an innate sense of balance.
Nothing Valley enters suddenly and in panic. Opener “Off the Lot” jumps in at full-throttle physicality rather than easing in and ramping up: If Winters, guitarist Bart Winters, and bassist Liam Winters conjure an electrical storm, James Wetzel’s breakneck drumming tosses about like wayward hailstones. After, they about-face into “Kid Kreative,” a savory single that literally shouts out breakfast food while sonically spoon-crushing granola into a bowl of honey. As they did on their 2014 EP Pennsylvania, Melkbelly hint at an obsession with food and human digestive functions. Nothing Valley’s gastric and gastronomic imagery gets outright, proudly silly; there’s even a line about drinking ketchup water. It’s not hard to picture the band writing while stomping grapes together, barefoot and plugged in, sparked by squishy sounds and sticky sensations.
Melkbelly’s kinship to peak-grating Sonic Youth goes beyond Nothing Valley’s captioned-frame cover art; experimentation runs through the creative backgrounds of each member. Miranda and Bart’s prior project Coffin Ships featured the duo writing sweeter-flavored pop while gamely indulging risks like Miranda performing on drums and keys simultaneously with one hand each. Meanwhile, the drumming of the jazz-versed Wetzel, whose snare whacks are perfectly maxed out with help from producer Dave Vettraino, applies advanced mathematics to their finger-paint sensibilities. On Nothing Valley—the first release from Wax Nine, a Carpark Records subsidiary launched by Speedy Ortiz bandleader Sadie Dupuis—Melkbelly reach their hands into pink slime and somehow pull out real nourishment, along the way finding square footing for a mutual next step.


On an album with the musical charms of British art-rock, the Indigenous writer and scholar uses our connections with water to explore the revolutionary power of community.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Theory of Ice

Theory of Ice

Willie Dunn’s 1971 song “I Pity the Country” remains one of North America’s most stirring protest standards. The Indigenous singer and activist canters through a litany of grievances with Canada’s so-called civil society—power-grabbing politicians, money-hungry people, bull-headed police, and all the pollution, subjugation, and suffering that ensue. But Dunn’s philippic is less remarkable for what it lambastes than what it lifts up: the notion that these seemingly mighty folks are the wretched and the woeful, because they’re too busy with themselves to notice there’s an easier way to live. Who wants to be, as Dunn puts it so incisively, “a man who thrives on hate”?
Fifty years later, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her own phosphorescent rendition of “I Pity the Country” the centerpiece of her singular new album, Theory of Ice. Like Dunn, Simpson is of mixed Scottish and Indigenous ancestry—she is a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people, native to southern Ontario. The novelist, poet, singer, and scholar has emerged as one of the most ardent voices for an intersectional understanding of North America’s Indigenous populations. Theory of Ice is an inviting manifestation of that work, turning seven of Simpson’s poems about water and our inborn relationship to it into sophisticated folk-pop that twinkles like the Clientele and Talk Talk. Simpson poignantly surveys the damage done and, like Dunn, suggests there’s another way forward.
Theory of Ice hinges on Simpson’s version of “I Pity the Country,” with a wash of echoing guitars and astral harmonies anchored by militant drums that would feel at home behind PJ Harvey or Nick Cave. Dunn’s acoustic rendition was the lament of one man, something you would sit and dutifully absorb. Simpson’s electric surge, however, offers both a communal outcry and a velvet-gloved demand that, if you can hear her, you join her in reimagining your relationship to the people and places that keep you alive. Dunn’s stern words become Simpson’s full cri de coeur.
The rest of Theory of Ice is not so explicit—its revelations are small, its calls for revolution more subtle. Simpson alternates between her plaintive, reserved speaking voice and a gentle singing tone, as if always trying to deliver hard news as softly as possible. She begins, for instance, with a pair of spellbinding songs about what changes when the ice above a river or lake melts with Spring’s arrival. That fundamental shift has profound consequences, she notes, from food supplies to shelter systems. Simpson invokes the Anishinaabe concept of “aabawe,” a term that implies that we adapt alongside the world, loosening up and breaking free like the ice.
At least until we can’t anymore. During the tragic but gorgeous ballad “Failure of Melting,” Simpson looks on as the ice collapses too much and too soon. “The caribou sit measuring emptiness/The fish study giving up,” she sings, her voice striking the same bittersweet tone as Kimya Dawson. Simpson alludes to decades of protests and warnings from Indigenous northerners about the deleterious effects of their southern neighbors’ environmental disregard, how it’s melting their very foundations. Above the lullaby-like guitars of “The Wake,” Simpson mourns the ways we’ve pushed natural cycles of life and death into unsustainable overdrive. “Everything we tried/To grow this year has died,” she sings, suggesting there’s a point when you’ve sown so many problems there is nothing left to reap.
A precise thinker but impressionistic writer, Simpson webs together concrete images and ideas into clouds, their intriguing shapes never entirely fixed. At one point, she namechecks the temperature at which water is most dense—39 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning it sinks—and makes this basic fact feel as enigmatic as lines about how “the sky is falling up.” The elliptical playing and production on Theory of Ice reinforce that feeling of discovery, from Tanner Pare’s circuitous drumming during “Surface Tension” to the refracted neon synthesizers of “Viscosity.” There’s always enough motion here to grab your attention but enough blank space for the songs to seem mysterious and enchanting, like there’s something left to learn.
“I Pity the Country” doesn’t leave you hanging—it offers an alternative of revolution, kindness, and real community. Likewise, remedying our problems, or at least trying, feels as important to Simpson as documenting them. As “Viscosity” throbs, she suggests putting down our phones and resisting the urge to engage in “feeding fish to insecurities.” Instead, she gathers with her friends on the beach, reveling in the air and the opportunity to sit silently in one another’s company. She returns to the fire for closer “Head of the Lake,” a powerful ode to the atavistic necessity of connection in a world mitigated by unimaginable convenience. “The smoke did the things we couldn’t,” she says as if with a reserved smile. “I hold your hand without touching it.” It’s hard to imagine a better sentiment for a time when an unnatural disaster has broken our sense of shared spaces—or for the limited time we have left not to repeat the same mistakes.

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The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer draws from jazz, Hindustani classical, and folk to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance.

Vulture Prince

Arooj Aftab had a very different record in mind when she started writing Vulture Prince, the follow-up to 2018’s dreamy, ambient Siren Islands. The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer envisioned an “edgier” and “more fun” update on the fragile soundscapes of her second record, as she recently told NPR. But while she was still in the middle of writing, Aftab’s world was buffeted by tragedy. At home, she lost her younger brother Maher, to whom the new album is dedicated. Outside, a world already embattled with a rising tide of hate and conflict was now struggling to grapple with a global pandemic.
To cope, Aftab reached for the familiar Urdu ghazals and poetry that populated her genre-defying 2015 debut Bird Under Water. The closest thing South Asia has to the blues, the ghazal is a musical form steeped in loss and longing—a subcontinental language of love both mortal and divine. On Vulture Prince, Aftab fuses the ghazal’s existential yearning with minimal compositions that draw from jazz, Hindustani classical, folk and—on one song—reggae to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance.
Intended as a second chapter to her debut album, Vulture Prince takes the airy minimalism and virtuosity of Bird Under Water and strips it down even further. Five of the seven songs here lack any form of percussion, propelled instead by the soft intensity of Aftab’s voice and the delicate cadence of strings and keys. Gone too is the traditional Pakistani instrumentation, replaced by a filigree of gentle violin, harp, double bass, and synths. At the center of it all is Aftab’s powerful voice, suffused in a sorrow so deep that it seeps into your bones.
As if to make this connection—and divergence—explicit, Aftab opens the album with a new interpretation of “Baghon Main,” a mahiya folk song that she first tackled on Bird Under Water. Her original rendition was cavernous in scale, a vast space washed by layers of accordion swells, drum flares, and plaintive guitar. This version is much more intimate. Harp, violin, and double bass brush lightly against each other as Aftab sings of love unfulfilled, a melancholy captured in its opening imagery of empty swings swinging in a garden breeze.
“Diya Hai,” the last song Aftab ever performed for her brother, plunges further into pathos. Over Badi Assad’s arpeggiated guitar, bolstered by the elegiac strings of the Rootstock Republic, Aftab dives into a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the subcontinent’s most revered Urdu and Persian poets. Ghalib’s poetry was often obsessed with suffering and loss, a reflection of not only personal tragedy but the political, social, and religious turbulence of his time. Aftab taps into a similar mystic vein of spiritual existentialism, stretching her syllables as if to make space for the overwhelming intensity of her grief.
Aftab’s voice is often compared with Abida Parveen, the transcendent Pakistani “Queen of Sufi Music.” And while that comparison is justified (Aftab herself cites Parveen as an influence), her singing on this record also bears a close similarity to the Hindustani classical vocal stylings of Sulk Station’s Tanvi Rao. It’s not just that they both eschew the taan—a specific pattern of vocal modulation common in ghazals—in favor of a disconsolate elasticity. They both share a very different vision of musical fusion, one that is also evident in the new-age musings of fellow New Yorker Priya Darshini and the Hindustani-classical-jazz-hip-hop mashup of Lahore band Jaubi. Rather than attempt to bridge Eastern and Western music, with all the ideological and historical baggage baked into the notion, they draw from an organic amalgamation of the diverse influences they can call their own. Educated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Aftab has as much of a claim to the Western traditions of jazz and experimental electronica as to the folk and classical music of her native homeland. She mixes and matches these traditions not with the awkward, respectful hesitancy of an outsider, but with the casual intimacy of an initiate.
This point is reinforced by the surprise reggae turn on “Last Night,” its offbeat rhythms and skank chords setting the stage for Aftab’s rendition of a translated Rumi poem. “Last night my beloved was like the moon/So beautiful” she sings, evoking the long tradition of the moon as a symbol of divinity and transcendence in Islamic and Sufi poetry. Draped in shadowy echo, Aftab’s voice drips with a passion at once sacred and sensual.
The album’s centerpiece is “Mohabbat,” a ghazal originally written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. Aftab transforms it into a slow-burn exploration of the pain of separation. Gyan Riley’s fingers pluck and pull at the guitar strings with restrained elegance, in lockstep with Jamey Haddad’s velvet-touched percussion. “Zamāne bhar ke ġham yā ik tirā ġham (this sadness equals all the sadness in the world),” Aftab sings, her voice afloat in grief so expansive that it seems to encompass the world, and whatever realms lie beyond.
Despite Aftab’s devotion to minimalism, this is a deeply layered and multi-faceted album, each sparse note and repeated motif building upon the emotional resonance of the last, creating little knots of musical tension that find release in the subtle shifts of a long-drawn-out syllable. Aftab takes the nostalgic melancholia of the ghazal form—heavy with the memory of generations of subcontinental trauma—and repurposes it to grapple with the psychic wounds of a new generation. Vulture Prince becomes a lament for people she has loved and lost, but also for an imagined future where love—for the self, for the divine, for all of humanity—wins out over the politics of difference and resentment that are tearing apart both her native and adopted homelands. Cloaked in the gloom of dusk, it is an incandescent love letter to the light.

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The Majical Cloudz alum trades electronic pop for guitar, piano, and strings on an unflinchingly candid debut solo album that sets his singular voice free to preen, wander, and soar.

Dream Songs

For a songwriter who’s always been fixated on ephemerality and change, Devon Welsh didn’t seem especially bothered by the demise of his own band. In a nonchalant, almost cheerful statement announcing the breakup of his Montreal electronic duo Majical Cloudz in 2016, the singer voiced no regrets or anxieties, only appreciation and the promise of more music to come. “The band was an opportunity for us to grow into the kinds of people and the kinds of artists we wanted to become,” he wrote. “We both feel it to be the completion of something very positive.”
Perhaps he saw that this particular breakup wasn’t really an ending. Like Morrissey or David Byrne, Welsh has one of those voices that ensure a certain consistency across projects; no matter how different the music is, anything he sings is likely to sound a good deal like Majical Cloudz. And so it is with his proper solo debut, Dream Songs, which he recorded with producer Austin Tufts of Braids, using a palette of mostly traditional instruments like guitars, piano, and strings. On paper that may sound like a rebuke to Majical Cloudz’s impressionist electronic pop, but in practice the effect is the same: a backdrop of lovely, spacious music that grants Welsh’s pliable voice full freedom to preen, wander, and soar.
An air of formality hangs over the whole record, which stages its songs like the lush sets of Golden Age Hollywood films. On “Dreams Have Pushed You Around,” an orchestral track that twinkles under the glow of moonlight, Welsh performs as if clad in a top hat and tails. He’s singing clearer and louder than ever, though the extra attention he calls to his voice doesn’t prevent him from exploring its boundaries. On “Vision,” the vibrations of his tenor summon a cascade of rippling synths. That moment is paralleled in “Chances,” when he hits an outright ugly note—a flat, phlegmy neigh that he just lets ride. Strings swell around it in celebration, as if cheering his bravery.
Welsh’s worldview doesn’t allow room for failure. Dream Songs is a safe space where beautiful outcomes and mere effort are rewarded in equal measure, with reassuring music that underscores lyrics about personal growth and self-actualization. “I’ll build the wings on both our shoulders, and I won’t even mention all of the reasons why I fear to fly,” he vows on “Over the Sky.” He presents his most memorable proposal for becoming a better person in the album’s opening line: “When you see an insect, don’t try to squash it.”
Dream Songs is bound to be more polarizing than anything Majical Cloudz recorded because it leaves less room for interpretation. On any given listen, there are moments when I’m awed by its radiance and others when I’m irritated by the sheer obviousness of it all, though the exact trigger points vary from replay to replay. What’s missing is the sense of mystery and otherness that Majical Cloudz so delicately conjured. Welsh’s former bandmate Matthew Otto created music for the frontman to play against, but the swooning accompaniments on his solo debut put a gilded frame around his already prominent voice. At times, it can feel like too much: Welsh is too front and center, too exposed. But it’s all in the spirit of candor. From the get-go, Dream Songs banks on fearless sincerity, and it never once second guesses that choice.


Yo La Tengo have finally reached the upper echelon of society: yuppies! Amidst our flaring economy, the cash-obsessed, egocentric 'elite ...

Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Yo La Tengo have finally reached the upper echelon of society: yuppies! Amidst our flaring economy, the cash-obsessed, egocentric 'elite' have more cash to blow than ever before, and you know what that means: they're hip! Especially in major American cities, these wealthy professionals are flocking to upscale outlets such as Borders, Barnes & Noble and other places with lots of fancy faux-oak shelving to purchase their copies of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.
But if there's anything we've learned about these socially, culturally, economically, and apparently now, musically conscious individuals is that they'll only flock to something for one of three reasons: 1) the hype is overwhelming; 2) it's the biggest, most expensive, highest-quality item of its kind; 3) Eric, the office trendsetter, recommended it. My question is, where does Yo La Tengo fit into this picture? A conspiracy theorist might conclude that some high-ranking Matador executive slipped a few copies of Inside-Out into the offices of large mortgage companies, advertising firms, and stockbrokers. Sadly, it's probably much simpler than that.
For years, Yo La Tengo have cranked out incredibly diverse albums with songs ranging from gentle western twang, to noise-fueled indie anthems, to lengthy, distortion-soaked instrumental epics. But here, Yo La Tengo have eliminated the noise they built their name on. 'Upbeat' is no longer an accurate descriptor for the trio's music. Rather, this is an album filled with songs in the vein of I Can Hear the Heart's "Shadows", Electr-O-Pura's "The Hour Grows Late", and the droning seven-minute version of "Big Day Coming" off Painful. And nothing else.
So it makes sense when you consider the music-buying trends of the upper class. In the early 90s, they were all over Enigma, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Steely Dan. While bland VH-1 genericism still rules over the majority of rich, white folks, they have been catching on of late-- The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Beck's Mutations, and Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs have all become big sellers in their demographic. Of course, this doesn't mean the underground can't enjoy it, too. Oh, sure, we're used to a slightly different Yo La Tengo-- one that once burned through rockers like "From a Motel 6," "False Alarm," and "Sugarcube," and kept it loud even during the quiet tracks.
Among Inside-Out's sea of gentle lullabies, it's easy to long for the stunning diversity this band is known for. However, it's clear they were shooting for something different this time around. The album's cover depicts quiet dusk in a common outer suburb. Electrical wires stretch over a standard one-story home. The backyard is crowded with pine trees. To the far right, a man stands at the end of the driveway, a spot of light beaming down around him from the darkening sky above. It's a traditional image of alien abduction that encapsulates the peaceful ringing of the record's gently picked electric guitars and serene vocals. The cover speaks to the band's intentions behind the music: a dreamlike state, lulling, serene, tranquil.
Despite Inside-Out's tendency to fade to background music during the first couple of listens, the album features few songs in need of omission. Only the album's later material seems less inspired. "Madeline," at times, recalls the melody of the album's only driving, uptempo rock track, "Cherry Chapstick." The rhythmic instrumental "Tired Hippo," while an excellent fit on this record, could have been better served as a b-side. And of course, everyone's biggest gripe, the 17 minute-long closing track, "Night Falls on Hoboken," is pretty lacking when compared with their past epics.
Regardless, the first three-quarters of Inside-Out contains some of Yo La Tengo's best work to date. As a whole, however, it may be one of their less ear-catching records. If recorded by an aspiring young band, Inside-Out would be deemed the next big thing by all music press. However, people are used to Ira Kaplan's masterful electric assaults and the broad range of sounds that generally appear in spades on Yo La Tengo's LPs. Still, this record is among the best I've heard so far this year, and will likely remain that way.


On the sequel to last year’s Eat My Pussy, the Chicago rapper’s songwriting is at times more brazen and at others more introspective.

Eat My Pussy Again

Queen Key is not about subtleties. Last year, when the Chicago rapper born Ke’Asha McClure released her bold and brash mixtape Eat My Pussy, the title alone caught plenty of attention. It was an exhibition of Key’s raw talent, particularly her knack for party-rap hooks and her star-making sense of humor. The premise for its follow-up is simple. “You ate my pussy once. It was good… so eat it again,” Key told a “Vice Live” interviewer, beaming as she explained her latest choice of title. Her new album, Eat My Pussy Again, is a clear progression of Key’s songwriting, at times more brazen and at others more introspective.
Key’s prime asset, and the main way she gets jokes off, is her deadpan delivery. Her idea of a punchline is to casually point out, “I don’t like people/I smack niggas,” in a laidback and assured drawl, as if she’d hit the recording booth after smoking a blunt or two. She may not be a rapid-fire spitter like Megan Thee Stallion or as outrageously raunchy as CupcakKe, but Key’s superpower is to inject the most unbothered energy into the fewest possible words. On “Ratchett,” she raps, “I got cash on flash/If he ask, I don’t have it/Nigga tragic,” releasing the last word with the withering disdain of someone who’s just shared a screenshot of your private texts to the group chat.
Key is at her best when she’s riding a hard beat. Eat My Pussy Again’s standout tracks are modeled off current trends in Texas rap, where songs like 10k.Caash’s “Aloha” or Megan’s “Sex Talk” are constructed of monstrous bass, claps, and not much else. In January, a questionably authorized version of “Ratchett” appeared with the bass cranked all the way up, sounding like a distorted fart from a shitty car speaker. Mistake or not, the crunchy, unprofessional production worked with the song’s hook (“Make these hoes get ratchet”), and the idea of turning a “bass-boosted” edit into a studio version suited Key’s brash humor. The first “Ratchett” was scraped from the internet, presumably to make room for the newly mixed album version, where you can actually hear Key’s ridiculous punchlines (“Got head from a nerd, I knock off that nigga glasses”). But if Eat My Pussy Again has a failing, it’s that it tries to present a polished version of Key, who thrives when she’s uninhibited.
Still, Eat My Pussy Again proves Key isn’t only a party girl. On “I Like Me Better” and “Ms. Understood,” she rattles off anxieties about her rising popularity and distrust of others over jazzy, lyrical beats, more Mick Jenkins than Chief Keef. “My heart telling me that this is all where it begins/So don’t lose myself becoming one those who lose and win,” she cautions. “Misunderstood, but it’s all good,” she chants on the hook, as though convincing herself that she’s going to be OK. While her commitment to keeping it 100 usually manifests as comedy, “I Like Me Better” explores the idea earnestly, revealing that it’s part of her larger goal for self-improvement. “I like me better when I listen/I like me better when I learn,” she raps. When she’s rowdy and audacious, Queen Key is exhilarating. But her jokey swagger and hard persona is almost like a setup for the true pay-off: when Key bares her heart.


Pairing experimental sound design with varied rap and R&B features, the Detroit producer’s hyperpop-tinged LP doubles as a tribute to the spirit of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator.

Cheetah Bend

Before he was old enough to attend clubs as a punter, Detroit’s Jimmy Edgar was cupping headphones to his ears behind the decks, DJing shoulder to shoulder with hometown heroes like Juan Atkins. In the 17 years since he signed to Warp as a teenager, his style has grown alongside his voracious tastes, encompassing IDM, mutated synth funk, and, most recently, hip-hop. Edgar channels that lifetime of songwriting and sound manipulation into his fourth album, Cheetah Bend. The veteran electronic producer’s take on the genre-clashing freneticism of hyperpop, it doubles as a celebration of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator, to whom the album is dedicated and whose influence abounds.
Where Edgar’s last solo album, 2012’s Majenta, mostly dealt in sweaty, hedonistic dance music, Cheetah Bend is a more eclectic mix that leans heavily on collaboration, bringing a new featured artist to nearly every song. This reflects his own shifting circumstances; the onetime Berlin resident moved back to the United States some years ago, setting up shop in Los Angeles and holding additional recording sessions in Atlanta and Detroit. Just like other club mavens who became rap producers, like Brodinski before him, Edgar took himself out of his techno comfort zone to immerse himself in the music scenes that inspired him. He put away his modular rig and hung up the patch cables, locking himself away in the studio for years in an effort to learn how to apply his musical talents to more mainstream genres.
The marriage of Edgar’s unbridled experimental production sensibilities with guest turns from rising rappers and R&B singers is rarely transcendent, but it manages to stay interesting throughout. From Atlanta rap star 24hrs’ verses on the bouncy highlight “NOTICE” to relative unknowns like the mysterious Messer, who lends an exhilarating, euphoric counterweight to the otherwise menacing “READY2DIE,” the features best define this new pop-friendly era of Jimmy Edgar. Not every collaboration is so seamless—on “GET UP,” fellow Detroiter Danny Brown’s self-help mantras teeter awkwardly atop a trundling beat—but for the most part, Edgar understands that the best electronic “producer albums” strike a fine balance with their arrangements so that guest vocalists don’t end up feeling like interlopers. He knows when to pull back to austere minimalism in order to accommodate them, and he knows when to flex his sound-design chops to boost them to the next level.
The guests here who have released music with Edgar in the past seem to have the best idea of the world he’s trying to build with his music. Rochelle Jordan, who previously graced Edgar and Machinedrum’s joint J-E-T-S album ZOOSPA in 2019, lends a sultry breathiness to the low-light synths and slo-mo breaks of “CRANK.” B La B, another Atlanta artist who Edgar released an entire mixtape with last year, delivers Cheetah Bend’s most memorable rap feature on “TURN,” a hurtling bass-bin rattler whose metallic, squiggly percussion evokes SOPHIE’s early singles.
SOPHIE’s presence is intimately felt across these songs, in more ways that one. “METAL,” a collaboration between the two artists, sounds like it’s been lifted directly from the PRODUCT era, perhaps retrofitted from an early version that leaked online several years back. Similar sound-design techniques distinguish “ZIGZAG,” the Millie Go Lightly collaboration “BE WITH YOU,” and the back half of “CHEETAH” This should come as no surprise: The two producers were longtime friends who first bonded in the early 2010s over their shared love of the Elektron Monomachine, the hardware synthesizer/sequencer used to summon the squelching, alien sounds that would become the late artist’s sonic signature. It was SOPHIE who introduced Edgar to Vince Staples, which resulted in one of Big Fish Theory’s best songs (“745”) and opened the door a bit wider for Edgar as a rap producer in his own right.
It’s a testament to the long-standing creative relationship between the two, as well as Edgar’s own unique sensibilities, that his new work is so clearly influenced by SOPHIE yet never feels like he’s biting the Scottish producer’s style. SOPHIE always believed that electronic music—even in its harshest, most challenging forms—could break through to the mainstream and make pop weirder, fresher, and better than ever. Edgar carries that torch forward in his attempt to bridge the gap between the underground rave and the strip joint, the avant-garde and the crowd-pleasers. Cheetah Bend doesn’t always hit the mark, but when it does, it evokes a thrilling future of club music without borders.

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The Toronto songwriter returns with a brief and lovely alt-folk record, vivid and unmoored from place and time.

Charlotte Cornfield: Could Have Done Anything

Could Have Done Anything

Who is Charlotte Cornfield? The video for “Cut and Dry,” a single from her new album Could Have Done Anything, answers the question with a lifelong collage of home video footage. She begins in a children’s choir, sporting a halo of blonde curls, dimpled cheeks, and a nose so buttony it belongs on a teddy bear’s sweater. We watch her grow up, get glasses, chop those curls. She leaves the choir behind and begins to noodle on an electric guitar. She shows off records by the Beatles, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. By the conclusion, she is eight months pregnant and surrounded on a small stage by a band in all black.
It’s clear that Cornfield knows herself, even as the rest of the world is still coming to know her. Her last album, the spry and witty Highs in the Minuses, garnered enough attention that the Toronto-based artist was able to embark on her first U.S. tour. She recorded Could Have Done Anything with producer Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman, her first time extending the creative process beyond her tight-knit community of friends. Still, even with a broader audience and a new collaborator, her work retains the cozily homemade feel of the earlier music.
Could Have Done Anything is an alt-folk record unmoored from place and time. “You and Me” begins at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson Airport, traverses three states in a Subaru, and winds up in the Rocky Mountains. Summer sunsets in Phoenix share time with a playground laid bare by winter. She goes to see the Magnetic Fields in Montreal; she wonders whether to paint her walls “white or Los Angeles blue.” And it’s never clear whether she loved the subjects of her love songs 10 years or two days ago. Youthful imagery like bike helmets and ice cream cones dance alongside car crashes and epitaphs.
The stories Cornfield tells are slippery, non-linear. When she scores tickets to that sold-out Magnetic Fields show, she sings, slyly, “That gave me points with you/That I went on to use,” and holds her date’s hand as the band gets onstage. But then, the song seems to spiral out: She feels sick and wants to be alone; she’ll never get over the relationship; she asks her partner to leave; she says the guy is evil then regrets it. What really happened? Anything, anywhere, at any time: Cornfield doesn’t need, or want, us to know the specifics.
Sometimes, this spare quality works against the album. Could Have Done Anything is not even a half-hour long—so brief it resists being held. No sooner is the listener in Cornfield’s thrall than the record is over and her spell is broken. Still, Cornfield’s words linger long after the record is over, thanks in part to her lovely and understated vocal delivery: a capacious alto, generously raspy, the influence of Lucinda Williams plain. She’s also clever as all hell, given to musical wordplay. On “Nowhere,” she plays a solitary game of call and response—“Nowhere! Nowhere! Nothing! Nothing!”—to amplify her loneliness. “In From the Rain” underscores her impatience with a fickle lover: “Waiting fooooor you to say something,” she sings, holding the note for aeons. A snare sizzles under the anaphora of opener “Gentle Like the Drugs.” The choice to repeat “I see… I see… I see…” rather than describe the images outright creates distance between Cornfield and her listener. But then, that’s the point. Her visions, already compelling on the page, throw off sparks when she conjures them aloud.