Assuming his old handle for the first time in 15 years, David Bazan digs into his desert childhood to make amends with the people he hurt—especially himself.

Phoenix

David Bazan has a rich history of self-sabotage. As the last century slid into this one, Bazan’s recording project, Pedro the Lion, seemed of a piece with an indie rock tide drifting toward crossover success. Over songs that flirted with emo and slowcore and flitted between acoustic lamentation and electrified frustration, he asked hard questions of religion, love, industry, and economy, snarling in a burly monotone. Still, it was catchy enough to be a close cousin of several ascendant Pacific Northwestern peers, and, as George W. Bush entered the White House, Bazan’s concerns about Christianity’s place within supposedly progressive spheres were painfully relevant. Pedro the Lion felt forever on the verge of a real breakthrough.
Then, in 2005, Bazan scrapped Pedro the Lion to spend the next 14 years releasing records under his own name. Former bandmates rose to fame with the likes of Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes, and the Shins, but he pressed ahead alone, the sour traces of those early songs curdling into words that could feel like blame games. On Pedro the Lion’s presciently titled farewell, Achilles Heel, he lampooned the careerism of “bands with managers [who] are going places.” By and large, even as those solo records hinged on some of his sharpest writing, he wasn’t.
Bazan has finally taken up the Pedro the Lion handle again, drafting a new rhythm section to play parts he wrote for another rock trio record, Phoenix. The revival began when he spent the night at his grandparents’ home in Arizona during a particularly despondent stretch of solo touring along lonely desert roads. Realizing that, almost 30 years since leaving Phoenix, he still toted around unpacked baggage from that period of his childhood, he decided Pedro the Lion was the platform for addressing those hang-ups. He was right.
These 13 new songs at least scan like the old ones—a few distorted chords and some hard truths, barbed lines suspended between a baritone mumble and a broken tenor. But on Phoenix, Bazan turns the mirror on himself in ways he never has, scouring a childhood spent in the Sonoran desert for a real understanding of his deepest flaws and most fundamental beliefs.
“Quietest Friend” reflects on an important relationship he betrayed in a momentary bid for acceptance by his school’s coolest kids. He sings this very late confession through a scrim of shame, asking for an apology but understanding he may not deserve it. In perhaps the most empathetic song of his career, he at least wants to acknowledge his adolescent impulse, how it hurt someone else, and how he can get better from here. “We could write me some reminders/I’d memorize them,” he pleas in the climb to the coda. “I could put them on a record about my hometown/Sitting here with pen and paper/I’m listening now.”
From end to end, he exposes old memories to new light, turning them around and around to understand how they built or corroded his core. During “Black Canyon,” he considers a family fable about his paramedic uncle arriving at the scene of a gruesome suicide and the surreal episode that followed. In retrospect, it’s a testament to the fact that life can hurt, whether you’re trying to kill yourself by stepping into traffic or simply existing in a world that doesn’t welcome your type. You can imagine Bazan recalling the story and, decades later, swallowing his own problems, denying himself pity.
In “Circle K” and “Model Homes,” he considers the origins of a lifetime spent believing he’s never had enough, whether lamenting his parents’ haggard house or wasting his savings on the fleeting luxury of convenience-store candy. He first spots that restlessness—that sense of self-sabotage that saw him scrap a great band 15 years ago—the day he got a bike for Christmas and headed anywhere but home. Bazan even pins his perennial complications with Christianity on himself, at least in part. He allowed others to set the parameters for his ethics and enjoyment, he announces during “Powerful Taboo,” following instructions instead of his own instincts.
Bazan sings better than he ever has on Phoenix, his voice round and worn with intricacy from years of use, like a hiking stick toted in the same hand for a thousand miles. During “Tracing the Grid,” where he revisits his childhood haunts and highways, he leavens the memories with sweetness and warmth. When he recounts Sundays spent asking his parents go to the open houses of “Model Homes,” his voice cracks with the perfect echo of pubescence and curls with the desire of a hopeful plea. But, Bazan excepted, this is an entirely new version of Pedro the Lion, and the trio mostly steps on and off the accelerator of elemental indie rock, until these 44 minutes merge into an extended smear. Between Pedro the Lion albums, Bazan flirted with synths, drum machines, hypnotic drones, and acoustic drift. Rather than fold those excursions into this return, he steps back into a familiar pattern, looking over his shoulder musically just as he does lyrically.
Phoenix makes an easy mark for cynicism, supported by the idea that Bazan is either succumbing to nostalgia or cashing in as best he can as the world spins away from this brand of embittered, androgenic indie rock. But, much like Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird, these songs are a corrective to nostalgia, or of longing for a rose-colored history that never actually happened. In reckoning with who he was and who he has become, Bazan is squaring off with the past and asking hard questions of it and himself.
If that reads as sheer self-absorption in an era of terrifying international turmoil, fair enough. But after two decades of blaming God, capitalism, family, friends, and the hoi polloi for his vexation and bluster, Bazan now understands he must confront his own issues before he can help take on the world’s. Phoenix unfolds like an invitation for you to do the same. “Clean up, and we all might get there together,” he sings in a contagious chorus that transmutes domestic duties into a survivalist mantra for this harsh world. Sure, maybe that’s wishful thinking, but at least it’s a restart.


On his third album, the former Speedy Ortiz guitarist continues to carve out space for Black perspectives in indie rock while expanding his musical range.

Dark Matters

After parting ways with Speedy Ortiz in 2017, Brooklyn-based musician Devin McKnight adopted the moniker Maneka to experiment with genres beyond his indie-rock roots and explore spaces not overpopulated by white dudes. On Is You Is, McKnight began wrestling with his sense of identity in a scene that, even after 20 years of progress, can still feel exclusionary of BIPOC musicians. McKnight came into his own on Devin in 2019, and he cranked his energy up to 11 by blending heavy metal and noise-punk with hip hop and jazz. On Dark Matter, McKnight continues to ask what it means to be Black in the indie scene while expanding his musical range in surprising ways.
McKnight likens America’s racist history to dark matter—an invisible force that binds the country together. “America has this really dark energy. How has it been this fucked up for so long and no one’s done anything about it?” he has said. On Dark Matters, he confronts that energy directly, writing lyrics that attack racism at its roots. On “Winners Circle,” an unusual fusion of trap drums, shoegaze guitars, and a double-time hardcore outro, he plays on the theory that Beethoven might have been a person of color who lightened his skin to pass in his own scene, singing, “Don’t paint a smile in the place where that shame hid/Play that brand new shit/That No. 9 shit.” On “The Glow Up,” he grapples with generations of racism—“And how do you explain this?/The seat in the back is meant for me?/And how do you explain this?/The ones we lost hanging from the trees”—over syrupy electric bass and guitar. And on the psychedelic “Runaway,” over dueling electric and acoustic guitars, he comes brutally to the point: “Stored in the bones/Is the feeling/You don’t belong here.”
Dark Matter’s twists and turns can be unusual, even unsettling. That’s intentional. When a musician like Alex G pivots genres on his records, they can make for a fun, experimental detour on the road to melodic indie rock. But McKnight seems determined to never let you get too comfortable, and he changes the mood from track to track. The synth-laden intro to the album pulsates like the theme song to a PBS documentary from the early 1980s, then cuts immediately into the spaced-out shoegaze of “Zipline.” The first of two brief improvisational jazz tracks featuring Chicago musician Nnamdi Ogbonnaya on drums is sandwiched between the experimental trap beat of “Winner’s Circle” and the jangly bedroom pop of “The Glow Up”; the other sits between the synth-driven grunge anthem “On Her Own” and the mellow post-rock of “Maintain.” McKnight uses these deliberate genre switches to reinforce the idea that indie rock can speak to those who don’t always see themselves reflected in the bands at the forefront of the scene. But the unfortunate side effect of the constant shifts is that they occasionally prevent the album from feeling entirely cohesive.
Dark Matters rarely thrashes as hard as Maneka’s earlier work, but McKnight’s songwriting sounds more purposeful than ever. He says volumes in this cool, innovative half hour of music. In a year that has given us double albums from Big Thief and Beach House, Dark Matters’ inspiring, genre-bending songs offer a breath of fresh air: In place of sprawl, McKnight cuts to the chase by offering an unflinching look at his own truth.


The Chicago-based band sheds its psychedelic garage-pop for intrepid experiments in reggaeton, synth pop, and club music, an undertaking that lands with mixed success.

Last Spa on Earth

Like many artists at the height of the pandemic, Divino Niño found solace in the unfamiliar. The Chicago-based quintet, who have roots across Latin America, set out on a voyage, entering a 10-day lockdown in a Wisconsin cabin with only booze and barely fleshed-out ideas for new material in tow. “It felt so apocalyptic, what we were experiencing in that cabin,” guitarist and vocalist Camilo Medina said in a recent interview. The rest of the band also had doomsday dread on the mind; the unease allowed them to embrace a flood of new influences, like a journal stacked with sometimes illegible stream-of-consciousness reflections.
The result is far from the psychedelic garage-pop of their debut album Foam. On the group’s second record, Last Spa On Earth, they harness high doses of electro-house, hyperpop, and—most importantly—experimental reggaeton. Not every Latine indie band could execute this mission effectively, but Divino Niño aren’t afraid to take risks. The record is a bold statement on artistic freedom and the complexity of cultural identity, one that displays the creative promise of emancipating yourself from imagined limits of all kinds. It’s not easy, nor is it always done cohesively, but the mere attempt makes it a worthwhile challenge.
This time around, Divino Niño record almost entirely in their native tongue, a choice that allows this offbeat union of sounds and stories to feel somewhat more consistent. On “XO,” a subtle, slow-building synth line wanes as booming dembow riddims send you directly to the dance floor. The influence of reggaeton fully takes shape on “Tu Tonto,” which borrows the punk grit of neoperreo, a woman-led subgenre piloted by rebels Tomasa del Real and Ms Nina. It’s a colorful manifestation of how synth pop and neoperreo can harmoniously coexist.
On “Miami,” the reggaeton recedes and the band leverages snappy, ’80s-inspired synth pop production over Auto-Tuned vocals, a transition that feels a little rushed. Midway through, edgy vaporwave tones cut the song like a knife, and the lyrics get lost in the shadows. The overuse of club music tempos, the kind you might hear at 3 a.m. in the streets of Bogotá, don’t necessarily match the rest of the multidimensional sounds the band collects here, and the clashing combination is tough to ignore.
Yet the passionately intimate songs make up for the sporadic use of these genres—“Ecstasy” conjures a melancholy kind of sparkle over a twinkling synth-pop production. And while not everything feels divinely connected from start to finish, there’s a sense of self-awareness here, a dedication to seek renewal in the unknown that allows Divino Niño to buck any preconceptions of cultural identity.


Three decades into her career, Sheryl Crow is arguably a genre unto herself. Her new album sometimes makes her singular appeal feel generic.

Evolution

By the time Sheryl Crow’s 1996 self-titled album went triple platinum, she was a staple of cross-country road trips and 35-minute commutes. Her career is arguably the definitive crossover success of that decade—the rare safe bet for multiple radio formats, as pop as she is rock’n’roll, arguably a genre unto herself. Still, like other artists of her generation, Crow’s influence waned as CD players started to disappear from cars. Citing the pressures of the streaming economy, along with a growing family, she claimed that 2019’s Threads, her star-studded duets album, would be her last full-length LP. Then, over the past few years, she recorded enough singles to release a whole new album—a classic songwriter’s happy accident.
If there’s a noteworthy evolution to Evolution, it’s that Crow decided to give up her role as a producer on her music. “There’s a point where you get tired of what you do, you recognize your tricks, you despair of them,” she said in a press release. She’s handed the reins off to super-producer Mike Elizondo, the guy who, depending on who you ask, elevated “In Da Club” to greatness or yanked Extraordinary Machine down from it. (He also, some 10 years ago, played bass in Crow’s band.) Here his pop sensibilities are utilitarian, pushing the songs to radio-friendly completion without getting in the way of Crow’s hallmarks; there’s still plenty of funky guitar hooks and live percussion, even if Crow’s voice is occasionally overproduced.
When you remember that most of Evolution’s songs were intended as standalone singles, they do start to resemble archetypes of the Sheryl Crow playbook. You want the churning blues-rock number fit for a Chevy Silverado ad? Check out “Do It Again.” What about the rhythmic blend of acoustic guitar, bass, and handclaps that’ll work for both a campfire singalong and a festival encore? “Love Life” is your guy. Crow is, to her credit, tongue-in-cheek about her SoCal sensibilities. On opener “Alarm Clock,” she crafts an elaborate dream sequence, poking fun at how one might imagine an average day in the life of Sheryl Crow: blowing off work, flirting with Hollywood bartenders that look “like Chalamet,” cruising down to Malibu. It’s fun and frothy and has the best lyric about a surfboard since “Drunk in Love.”
Crow’s songs have long described self-proclaimed gurus with a raised eyebrow, but three decades into her career, she seems more comfortable being the one to dish out wisdom. She does shrooms now, apparently, but the soul-searching is digestible, on the level of a microdose rather than ego death. One too many of these motivational uplifts drag Evolution into monotony—“You Can’t Change the Weather” and “Waiting in the Wings” may as well be the same song—and her attempt at broad social commentary, on “Where?”, doesn’t fare much better. And then there’s the entirely out-of-place Peter Gabriel cover “Digging in the Dirt,” surely a Threads cast-off, that inexplicably shows up on the deluxe version.
Part of Crow’s charm has always been that even her most righteous kiss-offs play a little retro, reflecting the voice of someone who learned to write songs around a cadre of boomer session players. Maybe that’s why her attempts at social media slang on “Broken Record” (“Anger sucks but at least your brand’s trending,” “Well, we were buds but now I’m unfriending”) feel so forced. Or maybe it’s because Sheryl Crow, of all people, has no reason to pay the haters any mind. Though her music has, at its darkest, explored the loneliness and violence of American life, the qualities that draw you back to Crow’s work are sun-kissed familiarity and off-the-cuff wit. At her best, she comes across as both a trusted friend and the smartest roadie at the bar—a combination that’s deceptively difficult to pull off, much as her imitators have tried.
Coincidentally, the most interesting thing Crow says on Evolution is all about her lasting impact: “Turned on the radio and there it was/A song that sounded like something I wrote,” she sings in the opening lines of the title track. “The voice and melody were hauntingly/So familiar that I thought it was a joke.” Crow uses this moment as a jumping-off point to muse about the greater meaning of the universe, but still, the thought sticks with you. It’s true that Crow is an institution, an influence that artists from Maren Morris to Haim now wear proudly. In that respect, Evolution’s fatal flaw is conflating being ubiquitous and being generic.


The Stooges / Fun House

James Osterburg was a man you might not look at twice on the street. Iggy Pop was his animal soul, and when Iggy got loose on a stage just about anything could happen. With the Stooges he was the mesmerizing center of a maelstrom that helped to invent a whole host of rock's musical clichés, a group that spun primal fury and young adult frustration into some of the ugliest, most brutal, most alive music of its era.
There were other subversive, confrontational rock acts before the Stooges—the cover of the band's eponymous debut even subtly references the Doors' own self-titled album—but nobody before them had the good sense to take it as far over the top as they did. Even the band's sturdiest compositions have a feeling of instability about them, like they might collapse or fly asunder at any moment, and there are moments when Iggy can't help screaming and grunting as if he's trying to challenge Ron Asheton's guitar to some nihilistic duel. In the middle of the hippie era, their grimy, depraved, and violent take on love and life had no natural place, which is perhaps why it holds up so well.
The Stooges' first two albums are a case study in a band marking its territory with a debut and then systematically destroying that territory and everything in it on their second. As rough and abrasive as The Stooges is, it sounds positively genteel next to the apocalyptic garage meltdown of Fun House. The debut was produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, an art-conscious violist who worked hard to get the Stooges a crisp, muscular sound that highlighted the bleakness of their vision but made them perhaps less threatening on record than they were on stage. For Fun House, the band got Don Gallucci, whose previous claim to rock trivia fame was as the guy going "duh duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh" on the keyboards on the Kingsmen's epochal "Louie Louie". Gallucci essentially recorded Fun House as though it were a live album, letting the band simply attack the songs in take after exhausting take, and though the recording is less than perfect from a technical standpoint, it shoves the Stooges at the peak of their powers right in your face.
Rhino's reissues do a fine job of shoving them even further, benefitting from improved mastering that highlights the gut-punch rhythm section of Dave Alexander and Scott Asheton, who never get enough credit for being the band's pounding heart and tortured soul. Alexander's bass keeps things grounded in blues and psychedelia, rumbling low and solid in the mix as Ron Asheton's lava guitar flows around it and Dave Asheton pummels out the most basic and accordingly perfect beats possible. The raging caveman groove they lay down on "1969" to open the debut is still one of the greatest undercarriages a rock song has ever had.
The first album also contains the classic "I Wanna Be Your Dog", notable almost as much for its inclusion of piano and sleigh bell in a grinding rock arrangement as it is for its then-controversial refrain. The record also has two songs notable mostly for the fact that they show the band going in a direction they never again pursued: "We Will Fall", audaciously sequenced at track three, is a droning, 10-minute dirge featuring a backing chant and Iggy's harrowing narration of a night in a lonely hotel room. The way he sings, "Then I lay right down/ On my back/ On my bed/ In my hotel" makes what looks insanely mundane on paper sound like the last existential gasps of a dying mind. Less oppressive but no more upbeat is "Ann", which is sort of the album's ballad if you wanted to stretch and call it that. Iggy wails for a lost lover and Ron Asheton reels off a sickeningly fuzzed-out guitar solo that anticipates the most unhinged moments of Fun House.
Unhinged is too weak a word for the wildest moments of Fun House, especially closer "L.A. Blues", a fiery freakout that's more heroin than LSD and makes no pretense of song structure. Saxophonist Steven Mackay adds a nasty edge to the album's second side, blazing right along with the rest of the band to create a texture that sounds exactly like the album cover—Iggy tossed in a flaming sea, possibly hell. The record's first half is somewhat tamer, with the heavy boogie of "Down on the Street" and the paranoid snarl of "T.V. Eye", where the band plays with deadly efficiency behind Iggy's demented vocal. Iggy actually captures the feel of the whole record in the opening line of "1970": "Out of my mind on a Saturday night."
The reissues each add a whole disc of rarities, though hardcore fans will already know the Fun House extras from the 1970 boxed set, which is now out of print. On Stooges, it's basically alternate mixes and extended versions, while on Fun House it's primarily outtakes, but given the volatility of the material on that album, there's quite a bit of variation from version to version. That said, none of the out-takes are particularly revelatory outside a twisted, distended, sax-soaked version of "1970", and most casual listeners will probably not spin disc two of either set more than once or twice. Fun House does include two songs that didn't make the album, but it's hard to see where either the ravaged blues of "Slide (Slidin' the Blues)" or "Lost in the Future" would have fit without destroying the record's momentum. That said, both songs offer a chance to hear more of Mackay's sax playing and give a glimpse toward what the band might have sounded like if a lineup had solidified with him in it.
It should go without saying that these are two of the most important signposts on the way to the punk explosion, and that any rock fan with a sense of history owes it to themselves to check them out if they haven't already. What's often lost as we place them in the canon, though, is the fact that both albums sound incredibly good today on their own terms, raw and immediate and dripping with an aggression that's rarely been rivaled.


The latest solo album from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio was inspired by Bowie, Brexit, Trump, and climate change, but his synth pop sound doesn’t match those high stakes.

Man of the World

In the little more than four years since the last Vampire Weekend album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, the entire gang of bookish indie rockers haven’t struggled to keep busy. Leader Ezra Koenig hosts his own Beats 1 radio show “Time Crisis” and co-wrote with Beyoncé on Lemonade, all while spending time crafting songs for the next Vampire Weekend LP. Rostam Batmanglij released a series of well-received solo singles, eventually leaving the band to dive headfirst into his own career—first with the collaborative album with Hamilton Leithauser and next with a debut album under his own name due this fall. Even drummer Chris Tomson found time to release his own music, this year’s messy Dams of the West record Youngish American.
And then there’s Chris Baio. Like Tomson, Baio occupies the space in Vampire Weekend outside of the core songwriting pair, and his solo career has had little to do with his main source of income. Still, the long VW break has given Baio time for a pair of solo releases. Baio’s 2015 album The Names lacked consistency, touching upon techno and pop, referencing DeLillo and Dostoyevsky, singing like Bowie and Ferry. It was an album that told us a lot about what Baio liked without directly carving a niche of his own. For his second full-length, Man of the World, the scope has narrowed and focused. Baio is finally sure of his sound, and he included an artist statement with the record to put his endeavor in context.
Baio cites several specific events for Man of the World’s inspiration: the death of his favorite artist David Bowie, Brexit, the Trump presidency, and climate change. And he is fully aware of his perspective—that of a rich, white American living abroad—while delving into these topics, addressing them directly on the album’s penultimate song: “I know Iʼm deeply privileged/To be losing just my mind/Iʼm fearful for the bodies/Of the vulnerable and kind/Iʼve got shame in my name.” Still, Man of the World delivers 41 minutes of Baio wrestling with the weight of the world, all while singing in the pantomimed voice of his hero. Where the rest of us have the occasional Twitter meltdown, Baio has gone a huge step further and set his political angst to boisterous synth pop.
The contrast is often jarring. Tonal juxtapositions aren’t too unexpected when Baio’s enunciating within spitting distance of Morrissey, but with the stakes so high, there is something unsettling at play here. For example, on the album opening “Vin Mariani,” Baio follows a line like “Learning to live with a decision/When the consequence is rather grave” with a triumphant blast of trumpets and hand-clap percussion. The consequences couldn’t sound less grave. The closest Baio comes to sounding serious is on “DANGEROUE ANAMAL”—Baio’s all-caps reflection on his own hypocrisy when it comes to climate change. The song pulses and sleeks with misguided sensuality, more seductive than anything else on the album (even if the line “I still eat meat” is not a euphemism).
That’s often the trouble with Man of the World. There is rarely nuance to Baio’s lyrics, and everything is offered up with little in the way of poetry or insight. The best moments manage to forget this is a “message” album and ease the Bowie-aping into just a vaguely British baritone. The whimsical “The Key Is Under the Mat” steps confidently closer to Vampire Weekend than any of his previous solo work, while “Sensitive Guy” winks with sly humor to match its four-on-the-floor rhythm and jubilant conclusion. But when Baio asks, “Can’t you see my aim is true?” on the title track, the album argues the opposite, and it fails to capture the wariness for the world that he’s desperate to comment on.


I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”—but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes.

I'm Up

Young Thug's scattershot release strategy is a refreshing change of pace from the painstaking, calculated approaches of an entire generation of legacy builders and self-mythologizers, guys pining after their place on rap’s coveted (and entirely subjective) Mt. Rushmore. But it can be a nightmare for those seeking continuity from the virtuoso, both inside and outside of his camp. When he isn’t sending thinly veiled shots at Future on social media or planning to smack Plies on the radio, he’s releasing music rapidly and without regard for quality control; Slime Season and Slime Season 2, a pair of hour-plus long mixtapes, were filled with promise, but undoubtedly packed with filler.
The new nine-song mixtape I’m Up, meanwhile, was meant to be Slime Season 3 until days before its release,  and was even on Spotify as SS3 for a day (Thug has since announced that a SS3 is still on the way.) These antics make Young Thug who he is, a dynamic free spirit who isn’t beholden to much outside his immediate brotherhood; as he raps on “Hercules”: “Okay first of all, I was doing this shit 'fore I was rich/ I don't care at all, I'll go do a dolphin for my clique.” He revels in the mayhem, and leaves others to pick up the pieces left in his wake. As Lyor Cohen, head of Thug’s label, 300 Entertainment, once explained while trying to rationalize the disappearance of the missing HY!£UN35 album (and the cancellation of the corresponding tour): “What makes Thug such an interesting artist is his lack of predictability and if I knew, I'd be happy to tell you.”
It’s that chaotic energy that makes Young Thug such an unmistakably bright personality fit for a camera crew, a skilled performer on par with Ric Flair: “I’m Rey Mysterio, my life on HBO,” he squeals gleefully on opener “F Cancer” (a song that, in typical Thug fashion, isn’t even remotely about cancer). But with I’m Up, he is more than a stylist treating individual songs as sonic catwalks; he strings together thoughts, ideas, and concepts in arcs over the course of the project. Amid calls for an armistice and shots at police corruption, there is a pervasive theme: nurturing support systems. There's the ode to a fallen comrade who was gunned down last year on "King TROUP" with a near-whimpering hook. Songs about a fraternal sense of loyalty are lumped together (“My Boys,” “For My People,” “Ridin”). “My Boys” is essentially a treatise on brotherhood with rapper Ralo, who admitted he once tried to shoot and kill Thug. The closer, “Family,” features Thug’s sisters, Dora and Dolly. If there's any central message, it seems to be honor those you love and those you've lost.
It all makes for a less thrilling listen, but a stronger, more complete experience. I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”— but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes: his knack for zingers, his impish demeanor, and his ability to slink through productions of all shapes and sizes. The production comes courtesy of Mike Will, Metro Boomin, and Thug’s in-house producer Wheezy, among others, and it is a diverse array of sounds with nods to the dark and distant productions of Barter 6 ("Ridin" is the fraternal twin of "Never Had It") and Atlanta's minimalist wave ("Special"). There's everything from a steady 808 chug ("Bread Winners") to church organ soul ("Family"), and Thug twists and contorts to find interesting ways to fit into them. He’s engaged throughout, making the most of each opportunity. The rapper seems to be venturing toward a more sustainable mode of operation, one that won’t burn him out before his talent can receive the attention it deserves. But, really, at this point, who could guess?


The debut EP from Cibo Matto veteran Miho Hatori builds on her former band’s experimental pop aesthetic while dialing down their quirky tendencies and moving into more mature subject matter.

Amazon to LeFrak EP

When Cibo Matto called it a day for the second time, in December 2017, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda framed the decision not as a breakup, but as the duo moving into “a new phase.” In an optimistic (if mysterious) Facebook post, they assured fans, “Our band is over but we are not going away.”
That may sound like the kind of it’s-not-you-it’s-me language we’ve come to expect from bands who are sick of living with each other’s laundry, but Amazon to LeFrak, the debut EP from Hatori’s New Optimism project, gives real meaning to their words. It is both very Cibo Matto and impressively evolved, a continuation of Hatori and Honda’s eclectic pop sound that retains the band’s stylistic experimentation while dialing down their occasionally quirky tendencies.
The diverse musical elements that made Cibo Matto a cult favorite—one that appeared on cult hit “Buffy,” no less—are all here on Amazon to LeFrak. Its sounds recreate the duo’s sonic food fight of hip-hop, jazz, funk, lounge, and soul, while Hatori’s vocals retain the dazed panache that both confused and delighted in her Cibo Matto days. But the EP casts its net even wider, adding touches of dancehall and trap to create a composite sound that is detailed without ever getting bogged down. One of the most exciting things about this release is the way in which even the smallest sounds count, be it Hatori sporadically dropping an open hi-hat into “Dr.My-Ho” or Rostam Batmanglij burying tabla drums in the mix on “Howling.” Amazon to LeFrak is the kind of record you can enjoy as a whole or endlessly pick apart as you deliberate over your favorite bassline. (Mine underlines the chorus to “Dr.My-Ho.”)
At its best, the EP rivals anything in the Cibo Matto catalog for pop-art audaciousness. “Jet Setters” is a swaggering pop song that suggests early M.I.A., but with a sense of humor, while “King of Monsters” balances tribal house rhythms with Peter Hook-esque bass lines. “Dr.My-Ho” is the standout, though, its exquisite instrumental release equal to that of Cibo Matto’s near-hit “Sugar Water” and its twinkling chorus (think Air’s “J'ai Dormi Sous L’eau” on caffeinated water) as welcoming as a cool pool water on a summer’s day. Even Amazon to Le Frak’s lesser songs are compelling: The beat on “Howling” recalls the digital groan of an MP3 glitching, while “Invisible Tan” has a synth line that stretches like chewing gum on a warm handrail.
Perhaps most importantly, for listeners who sensed a lingering whiff of novelty around her former band’s best-known songs, New Optimism’s debut is more mature and considered than Hatori’s past work. Her vocals sit snugly within the mix, rather than intruding on it, while the songs deal with adult themes like globality versus globalization (on “Jet Setters”) and ill health (on “Dr.My-Ho”). And the EP gives the overall impression that time has caught up with Hatori, as an artist and as a human. Far from being a downer, however, Amazon to LeFrak is vibrant with life and emotion—making it the perfect sing-along mix for fans ready to reckon with reality.


After last year's underwhelming Caracal, the Disclosure brothers' surprise-dropped EP shows that thrill isn’t quite gone, but it’s definitely not the same.

Moog for Love

Coachella can be a little bit like high school—there are the cool kids, the rich kids, the nerds, the outsiders, the stoners, the bros, all splitting off to head bang at Rancid, pinball at Jack Ü or snake dance to Christine and the Queens. But this year, Disclosure was a magnet, drawing all the cliques together into one nation under a virtual disco ball: Goodwill greased and festival irritability eased by the molly caps swallowed an hour earlier with $13 beers, the pulsating throng was united in its love for Howard and Guy Lawrence’s expert blend of sleek pop and those big, warm and happy belted house hooks of the ‘90s.
If Moog for Love, the three-song EP the brothers surprise-dropped last week, is any indication, the thrill isn’t quite gone, but it’s definitely not the same. Granted, that’s putting a lot of pressure on a project that clocks in under 16 minutes, but on the heels of the somewhat-underwhelming, Caracal, I expected Disclosure to aim a little higher than the serviceable stuff piped into the pool area on a weekday afternoon at the W in Hollywood.
Swirling together bright, blissed-out yacht-party synths and sampled, accelerated vocals from George Benson that flirt with *Motownphilly, *the tropical title track is the clear standout on Moog. Submerging the vocals midway through the track, you can almost hear waves cresting and, consequently, feel the surf foaming around your feet, so who cares if it sounds a little like Now That’s What I Call Ibiza: 2001?
“Boss” is darker, cooler and more elegant, yet there’s nothing so special about it. It certainly doesn’t compare to the sexiness of the similarly slinky “F For You.” Still, the real problem on the EP is “Feel Like I Do,” which samples Al Green’s “I’m Still in Love With You.”
Last summer in an L.A. Times profile, Guy yawned, “The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it.” Careful throwing shade—“I’m Still in Love With You” is a beautiful song, but it’s overplayed, and way too overplayed to be sampled in such a straightforward way. Apparently, Guy just discovered the record, but the littlest bit of Googling should’ve revealed that it’s one of the most popular soul records of all time. As it stands, “Feel Like I Do” simply speeds up a snippet of Green’s vocals and shuffles along without any real purpose. What’s the point?
The same could be said for the whole EP, which simply feels uninspired. Nothing is immediate or necessary, and that’s a strange thing to say when talking about Disclosure, the guys who released Settle, one of the best dance albums of the decade. It's well-appointed, but mediocre, like the kind of person who gets invited to Puff’s white party: no longer a trendsetter, just rich.


On a collaboration between Austin’s More Eaze and Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham, the music’s frequent rests and lacunae lend its jazz-tinged electroacoustic mesh a stony, severe quality.

The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid

There is a certain genre of image, popular on lonely, neurotic networks like Twitter and Reddit, called “liminal space.” These pictures show links between one hub of activity and another, places designed to dissolve from memory: an empty hotel hallway between bustling conference rooms, a clean road arcing through a blank suburb, an isolated gas station spilling fluorescent light onto midwinter snow. They are uncanny because they force you to focus on something meant to be ignorable; they sweep the edge into the center, upsetting the usual weight of things.
The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, a new album by Seth Graham (co-founder of the experimentally minded Ohio label Orange Milk) and More Eaze (a.k.a. Mari Maurice, the Austin-based artist who’s recently collaborated with claire rousay and Dntel) working together as ---__--___, plays with a similar reframing. The music’s frequent rests and lacunae lend its jazz-tinged electroacoustic mesh a stony, severe quality. What’s not there holds impossible weight. This music is not so much about emptiness as it is about the point at which emptiness becomes substance—where, in an inverted transubstantiation, blood thins out into chemically dyed sugar water.
Voices like the ones that streak Kool-Aid tend to appear more often among busier sound environments. The hard, crystallizing Auto-Tune, the pitch-shifting, the distortion—these mutations usually spew from a pressure cooker of sensory overload made from hyper-compressed guitars, sawtooth synthesizers, breakbeats, and other chaos. It’s rarer for them to hover over environments as unpopulated as the ones dreamed here, to unfurl unhurriedly into expansive, drained space.
Severing these voices from their usual anxious churn exposes their fragility. The processing effects used here render the voice brittle and oblique; lyrics break off into largely unintelligible shards that only cohere at key moments. On “Sadness, infinite America ... shit,” More Eaze’s garbled syllables dance against bleats of saxophone and slashes of cello, instruments whose warm acoustic resonance amplifies the lostness of an Auto-Tuned voice set adrift. The arrangement also reveals the beauty in treating voices this way, how an artificial crack in a voice can trigger the same sympathetic response as a voice that cracks purely in the throat. The ear believes the feeling behind the quaver in each gesture; it might even believe the digitized break more.
At the album’s emotional crux, “In Memory of Simon Kingston,” an elegy for the 21-year-old musician who died in New York last November, three different voices glance off of each other. The track features the Ohio-based artist recovery girl as a guest vocalist, but it’s not always clear which voice belongs to which name, a confusion that deepens the album’s melancholic bewilderment. There is a high, concatenating chirp that flickers electric over the song’s largely acoustic base of piano, celesta, and violin; there are occasional bursts of enraged growls that sound like they’ve been shaved off a metal song and abandoned here; and there is More Eaze’s wistful, languid voice, the one that winds through much of the album as a whole. At a few points in the song, the voices converge as if holding each other in the emptiness, the friction between them softening. “I just wanted to be close to you,” More Eaze sings, her voice fracturing in its machinery but holding together just enough to preserve the language it carries.
A spoken-word sequence from the Ohio artist proxy.exe grounds the album in narrative near its midway point. With direct, unprocessed vocals set against washes of organ, “rock bottom ohio” offers a meditation on failure and resurgence, on splintering apart and then finding a way to love yourself enough to haul the fragments you can salvage into the days ahead. Even if those days are shrouded in absence so thick it suffocates, even if grief splits them open like a chasm, you pull the loose threads of mercy you can find from them. You gather yourself and go on.

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The 88-year-old country icon has created a loving tribute to herself that spans generations, proving there's still vitality and relevance in her work.

Still Woman Enough

Loretta Lynn is country music incarnate, and that’s not even a point worth arguing. Her 50th studio album, Still Woman Enough, marks her first new project since 2016’s Full Circle, which trafficked heavily in the traditional and takes a similar approach: part time-capsule, part declaration of her legacy, and a little bit of “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!” attitude. This time, she’s brought some younger friends along for the ride and declared this record a “celebration of women in country music.”
For a new album, though, the material is mostly old—some dating back nearly a century. On opening number “Coal Miner’s Daughter (Recitation),” Lynn recites the lyrics to her most famous song—the one that launched her into the country music spotlight—accompanied by a few sparse banjo strings. Her memories of her own life and career loom large throughout. The overall effect is that of a beloved, banged-up scrapbook stuffed with lyrics, song fragments, and love letters. Aided by her own kin—her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash co-produced—Lynn has created a loving tribute to herself. Still Woman Enough is a pleasant, nostalgic, occasionally brilliant collection that fits neatly into the country legend’s catalog and introduces her to younger fans who love Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves but haven’t yet found their way back to Lynn and Kitty Wells.
The songs flow like smooth Tennessee whiskey, but Lynn shines brightest on the oldies. She charms on a sweet, simple rendition of the sprightly hymn-inspired classic “Keep on the Sunny Side,” a song first immortalized by the Carter Family in 1928 and then reintroduced to a more contemporary audience via the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. “Honky Tonk Girl” sees her revisiting her very first single (then titled “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”); in 1960, the song ushered in phase one of Lynn’s success and was a hard-earned hit. Before it took off, she and her husband had spent countless hours driving to country radio stations across the U.S. to beg them to play the record. This hopeful, madcap DIY promotion campaign has become an integral piece of Loretta Lynn lore, and the song itself holds up just fine.
It’s hard to improve on a classic, and this latest version of “Honky Tonk Girl” dials down the original’s saucy swagger for a more knowing, genial tone; it cleans up the barroom pathos in favor of a jauntier approach, and, expectedly, adds improved audio quality. That honky tonk girl has grown up and seen some things along the way. Lynn’s deep, lived-in familiarity with her old songs gives her an incredible edge and makes even her less predictable choices feel less risky. Her take on the traditional folk song “I Don’t Feel At Home Anymore” is a joy despite its downtrodden lyrics, and the gently rollicking “Old Kentucky Home” is pure ear candy; meanwhile, her cover of Hank Williams’ country gospel ode “I Saw the Light” is downright happy. She even puts a little swing on it in contrast to Williams’ piously po-faced original.
While her trademark nasal twang has mellowed out a bit over the decades, updated mainstays like this one illustrate the staying power of her once-in-several-generations voice and show what can happen when technology finally catches up to an artist’s vision. Still Woman Enough is a study in sunny, lush arrangements and positively drips with strings—cello, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, upright bass, fiddle, banjo, and mandolin, the latter of which makes a winsome appearance on the saccharine 1968 ballad “My Love.” It’s a marked contrast to 1971’s “I Wanna Be Free,” which revives the feisty spirit that’s remained a defining feature of her best work; ballads are nice, but anyone can write a love song.
Only Loretta Lynn could’ve written tunes that once felt as transgressive as “One’s On the Way,” which now deftly chronicles the drudgery and frustration of working-class motherhood (and how the women’s liberation movement left those women behind), with help from a clear-voiced Margo Price; or “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” a kicky warning to those who dare cast a wandering eye upon her husband. The latter may as well be seen as Lynn’s answer to “Jolene,” Dolly Parton’s iconic plea to a flame-haired interloper; where Parton begged for mercy, a flinty-edged Lynn happily promised to send any comers straight to fist city—and the addition of outlaw country legend Tanya Tucker on this remake only ups the stakes for those who’d dare disturb that wedded bliss. A new tune, “Still Woman Enough,” featuring Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire, follows in those rebellious footsteps, with its unabashed nods to aging, sexuality, and hardship; one gets the impression that Lynn may be almost 90 years old, but she’d still pick a switch and hand out a whooping if need be.
It makes sense for her to release an album like this now: a partial retrospective that feels safe and familiar but adds youthful sparkle from a new generation that Lynn can comfortably say she’s inspired. There’s a clear throughline from Lynn to Tucker and McEntire, to Price and Underwood—they’re very different women from different eras, but without Lynn to blaze that trail with honesty and grit in the first place, their paths would’ve been that much thornier. And if Lynn hadn’t weathered all those slings and arrows decades before, who’s to say today’s feminist country artists would’ve found their way at all.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On an album blending downtempo beats and ambient textures, many of the strongest moments skew toward the Canadian producer’s softer side, with slight arrangements that meditate on a single mood.

Finds You Well

For Dylan Khotin-Foote, house music has long been a vehicle for careful studies of ambient tone and texture. On his 2014 debut album, Hello World, the Canadian producer used hardware synths and drum machines to craft muted compositions that traded the bleary-eyed psychedelia of the Orb and the KLF for a playful impressionism with little interest in historical continuity. The album became a touchstone for a generation of lo-fi house producers who slathered their recordings with reverb and tape hiss. Unlike many of his peers, Khotin mostly abandoned the kick drum, honing his focus on vivid soundscapes with albums like New Tab and Beautiful You. Finds You Well, his first album under the alias in two years, pairs his skill as an ambient musician with a newfound interest in spacious downtempo production, expanding the scope of the project without compromising what made his earlier work so special.
Like his early experiments with house music, Khotin’s use of warped and pitch-shifted breakbeats serves mostly to complement his foundation in ambient composition. Tracks like “Ivory Tower” and “Heavyball” feature breezy melodies and coarse drums loops in equal parts, building intricate collages that feel intentional in new ways. With its dial-tone arpeggios and warbling tape-deck stutter, “WEM Lagoon Jump” invites comparisons to ’90s IDM icons Boards of Canada, finding a soothing equanimity in the rolling current of its effect-ridden snares. Beyond their immediate rhythmic similarities, the two acts share an affinity for wistful samples and field recordings; “Groove 32” explores the percussive potential of short vocal clips doused in radio static, while “Outside in the Light” turns distant voicemails from family members into something warm and dreamlike.
As much as the album benefits from a renewed interest in rhythm, many of its strongest moments skew toward the softer side of the producer’s palette, with slight arrangements that meditate on a single mood. On “Lucky Egg,” a steady loop of pitched toms and synth pads blooms into a poignant snapshot of a snowy landscape, as a single crystalline keyboard floats like lens flare across its surface. The shortest track on the album, as well as one of its sparsest, it sets the tone for a stretch of delicate compositions that wring heartbreak from the upright piano. “Your Favorite Building” calls to mind the rosy miniatures of Blithe Field and Ricky Eat Acid at their most affecting; like these contemporaries, Khotin seems content to set a few well-placed elements in motion, stepping back to watch their smoldering glow from a distance instead of fidgeting with any single detail up close.
In its final moments, the album recedes even further into heartfelt solitude. With little more than a few skeletal piano chords struck at distant intervals, “Shopping List” finds a sublime beauty in the near-silent space between tones, sculpting excess reverb into a wintery jetstream that might otherwise be categorized as background noise. Less about the sound itself than the strategic use of its absence, it’s a moment that might go unnoticed on another record, but one that feels like a transformative reset in Khotin’s hands. What might sound ordinary in isolation can feel transcendent with the right frame of reference, and as Finds You Well shows, sometimes it’s the smallest details that can reshape your entire perspective.


Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to somewhat mixed effect.

lately I feel EVERYTHING

Willow Smith wants to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study physics. She wants to learn about the “beautiful mystery” of the unseeable, she says. But all that’s apparently five years away. In the meantime, she’s written an unofficial honors thesis on a different imperceptible force: anxiety, and the sentiments that come with it. Just before the pandemic lockdown last year, she and her creative collaborator (and alleged beau) Tyler Cole rented space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where they locked themselves in a box for 24 hours to perform the “eight stages of anxiety.” Songs from the duo’s recent album, fittingly titled The Anxiety, played on loop. This ambitious project left unanswered questions: She and Cole scribbled “Why Are We Here?” and “What Inspires You?” onto MOCA’s walls, without an apparent reply. Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to express joy and fear, pride, and paranoia. Or as the record’s title puts it, lately I feel EVERYTHING.
Willow’s pivot to snot-nosed power chords and down-tuned riffs might raise eyebrows after a three-album run of smooth R&B twinged with folksy mysticism. But her fascination with the harsher sounds of rock feels like a natural progression, one that marries her family’s musical history with her self-professed love for the genre. Willow grew up watching her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, perform as a rare nu-metal frontwoman with her band Wicked Wisdom. She easily rattles off her musical inspirations—My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Fefe Dobson—and, perhaps because of her mother’s musical past, feels comfortable with the finer points of hard rock subgenres: She covered Wicked Wisdom for the Red Table for this past Mother’s Day, but in interviews, she’s careful to distinguish that sound from the more “youthful” bent of Zumiez rock.

On lately I feel EVERYTHING, she and her co-producer Cole expand on their capabilities as rock composers and musicians. Both are passionate guitarists, something they hinted at with bluesy riffs on previous albums. But from the opening measures of “Transparent Soul,” the guitar is paramount—it’s filtered and faded on the pummeling intro of “Gaslight,” swirling and reverberated on “naïve,” slow-burning and brassy on “Come Home” and “¡BREAKOUT!” It’s also a markedly louder backdrop for her vocals—on songs like “Gaslight” and “Lipstick,” she belts with impressive control, shouting tonelessly one moment and gliding across several notes in one syllable the next. The marriage of disparate rock subgenres works because her instrumentation shares a common early 2000s perspective: the echoing guitars on “XTRA” recall the disaffected pop-rock of Pink’s Missundaztood or early Kelly Clarkson. And in a nod to the legacy of the ribald ringleaders of Warped Tour’s past, she throws in “Fuck You,” a predictably explicit 30-second interlude, as if to show that she knows evoking this particular era of rock requires a flippant sense of humor.
Where previous albums were often weighed down by Willow’s heady spiritual preoccupations and heavy-handed musical idolatry, lately I feel EVERYTHING succeeds when it examines human feelings. Willow writes skillfully about the experience of anxiety: The desire to push away loved ones on “don’t SAVE ME,” the painful self-awareness of “naïve,” and the need for connection paired with fear of codependency on “Come Home” all ring painfully true and impressively nuanced. She has a knack for knowing when her words might be stronger on someone else’s tongue, too—on “Grow,” one of several Travis Barker collaborations that feel at home on the Fueled by Ramen roster, she recruits sneer queen Avril Lavigne, her nasally alto coming in like a warm, fingerless-gloved hug from pop-punk’s past. Like many of the genre’s biggest hits, it’s so saturated with hooks that it succeeds in spite of its slightly facile writing; more importantly, at just over two minutes, it lays everything on the table and gets out before the melodies get old.
Still, there’s a hollowness at the core of her pop-punk explorations. Perhaps it’s harder to relate to her struggles with sycophants and stupendous fame on “Transparent Soul” than, say, the pains of unrequited love or the frustrations of adolescence. Her messages about the power of self-love on songs like “Gaslight” feel too enthusiastically optimistic, like a motivational speaker signed to Hopeless Records. And, as with many of the pop-punk revivalists who’ve been taken under Barker’s wing, her songs with him sound a bit prefab, as if Barker was simply flipping between presets on the Blink-182 machine. Though he likely means well, Barker’s influence on current mainstream pop-punk has overwhelmingly flattened the genre, reducing it to his undoubtedly impressive drum solos and a few shiny power chords. Willow succeeds where Barker’s other prodigies—Jxdn, Machine Gun Kelly, Yungblud—falter because she, similar to Olivia Rodrigo, uses pop-punk as a spice, rather than her album’s main ingredient.
Willow also shares her contemporaries’ lack of awareness about what’s happening elsewhere in pop-punk, claiming that she wants to bring back the sounds of her youth without acknowledging that, in plenty of local scenes, they never went away. In multiple interviews, she’s talked about the importance of being a rare Black woman in rock: “[Dobson, Pinkett Smith, and Alexis Brown of Straight Line Stitch] were the only three Black rock singers that I knew of, so really I just wanted to make this album as an ode to them,” she told SPIN. Willow’s foray into pop-punk undoubtedly raises the profile of Black female vocalists, who have been shut out of a scene with a history of racism and sexism. But her enthusiasm also neglects the work of plenty of pop-punk vocalists who are women of color, like those of Pinkshift and Meet Me @ the Altar, who’ve carved their lanes without the help of TikTok stardom or famous parents. It’s just simpler for stars like Willow, Lil Huddy, and The Kid Laroi to “revive” pop-punk if they ignore the grassroots groups who’ve kept it alive since its LiveJournal days.
And so lately I feel EVERYTHING ends up stuck between its intent and its effect. She uses the genre to work through her struggles with mental illness, but her songs still sound unwaveringly optimistic, as if she knows her every move is still under a microscope. Her ambitions are bold, but the album has a sense of polished remove that prevents it from scaling real emotional heights. Willow shines in her darker, introspective songs, when wistfulness tinges her voice and the guitars are washed in melancholy. She might not be trapped in a literal box, as she was at MOCA last year. But metaphorically it’s still there; she still seems too worried about self-presentation to excavate those anxious questions she scrawled on the museum walls.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Building on the success of their early singles and EP, the UK's Bloc Party draw from the darker end of their homeland's 1980s indie pop canon to create a powerful debut LP. The silly bandname may bely their sober and resolute sound, but it's of little consequence in the shadow of this record's charismatic sophistication and outstanding songwriting that emphasizes substance-over-style, contrasting with their peers in Interpol and Franz Ferdinand.

Silent Alarm

The English live on an island, have national radio, and they had the Smiths and the Stone Roses. As a result, they're less embarrassed than Americans to dream of indie guitar bands commanding decent audiences. That's part of what Bloc Party frontman Kele Okerere seems to have in mind when he describes this album as "Technicolor." He means it has big sound, big hooks, energetic performances, ambition-- all the things that make rock bands sound skilled and confident. He means no messing around, no interludes or experiments. He means the kind of guitar record where every song wants to be as tight as the singles; the kind that wants to be worth every penny any lawn-mowing pre-teen might spend on it. Because according to him, nobody makes that kind of record anymore.
That isn't true-- and the last thing anyone wants is for U2 to try harder-- but he has a point; it's no accident that there are people who think Radiohead haven't really delivered since The Bends. Put it like that, and what Bloc Party actually sound like drops pretty low on the list of things you need to know about Silent Alarm. What perhaps matters most is that they're trying to make one of those clean, consistent, ambitious Popular Guitar Rock albums-- and depending on how much stock you put in that kind of thing, they've done a great job of it. This is a solid, intelligent album that a lot of people will love-- one that'll slot onto indie-crossover CD racks right beside the debuts from Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads.
Lead single "Banquet" is wonderfully tight and energetic-- the same kind of spiffy half-dancing rock as Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" or Duran Duran's "Planet Earth". That's easy to pull off when you've got a drummer this good, and a bassist that locks in with him so neatly, whether it's for rock charge or disco hustle. That, in fact, has been Bloc Party's main selling point, apart from the whole Remarkably Competent thing: When the rhythm section stretches its limbs, they leap a good distance away from the straight-ahead eighth-note riffing of the others in this game. Filter in their timely post-punk moves, Bunnymen gestures, and pop ambitions, and you start to feel like this is what it might have been like to listen to the Police or XTC in the early 80s; the sound of a straight-up rock band just a shade more sophisticated, and a little more interested in rhythm, than most of their peers.
And of course the opener, "Like Eating Glass", is even grander and snappier than "Banquet", as if to promise from the start that these guys take your purchase seriously. The songwriting is simple in style (forward rhythm, tidy hooks, guitars) but smart in detail-- all stops and starts, bridges and breakdowns, firework flourishes and tasteful studio tweaks. Even more striking are the precision and sheer good taste of the performances: It's not so easy to show off within the confines of songs this focused, but these guys seem to manage just fine.
So you get all the usual scrubbed-up gifts: the slower song, the slower song that turns into a faster one, the one with the studio effects, the one with the handclaps. A lot of this material is surprisingly scripted, as if someone spent whole nights in the practice space trying to get a two-bar guitar transition to work Just So. Okerere has a voice that's weirdly similar to the singer from the long-forgotten Adorable, with whom Bloc Party share a hell of a lot more than an appreciation for the Bunnymen: It's a vaguely-strangled back-of-throat thing that lets him moan and shout with refreshing gusto when the band gets going. (Typically ambitious topics of moaning: other people, culture war, girls and society and stuff.) The voice weakens a bit when he needs to croon, but crooning isn't really the point here. Bloc Party can be pretty, even sappy, but they're never looking to be atmospheric; they can rock, but they're never looking to whip up dark drama. This album charges happily down the center-- it shakes its hips now and then, and it whispers here and there, but it always seems to come back to tight and bouncy.
People will love this record. And so, inevitably, the people who don't love it will start complaining. And when they complain, they'll point out that this is just a regular-old rock album, full of all the current stylish rock-album tricks. And they'll be absolutely right; at worst, Bloc Party are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like. But really, a complaint like that misses something: Being a good ol' unchallenging rock band is this outfit's whole point-- and their biggest strength.


The sixth album from Loke Rahbek’s experimental industrial project is his most cohesive to date, dissecting pop for parts and refiguring melodic elements into something truly other.

Isa

Loke Rahbek’s multitudes have long been multiplying. A decade ago, the Danish producer was singing in a black metal band called Sexdrome when he named his brutal noise label, Posh Isolation, after a 1998 lyric of the Glaswegian twee-pop band Belle and Sebastian: “Anything’s better than posh isolation.” His oeuvre has ranged from the absurdist power electronics/performance art of Damien Dubrovnik to faithful new wave in Lust for Youth. Guiding all of Rahbek’s disparate work is an inquiry into what might constitute the underground music of today. His ambient electronic project Croatian Amor is its gentlest answer.
Isa, named after the Muslim Arabic word for Jesus, is his most cohesive project to date. His self-described “bubblegum industrial” has only traces of sugar left, but he still lets in plenty of light and air. It’s an understated electronic collage that seems as spiritually akin to the gothic electronics of Arca as the terror of Throbbing Gristle, but Rahbek also seems fascinated by pop—with dissecting pop for parts and refiguring melodic elements into something truly other. In 2016, Rahbek said he had listened to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak for the first time on a plane while the aircraft broke down and made an emergency landing. Isa sounds like that, too: pop actively deconstructing, adding a sleek AutoTune and rattle to its nonlinear shape.
The album feels more like a series of waves than a collection of songs. It crests on relative bangers such as the heart-tugging “Point Reflex Blue” and a minimal club track, “Dark Cut,” both coming into circuitous but muscular rhythms. Rahbek’s beats seem to go forward and backward at the same time, as if the air is hissing out of a balloon. Though Isa busily accrues new ideas at every turn, it is slow and palliative, and sometimes it is hard to discern whether the calm is serene or disquieting or just blank. Extremities are presented with concrete language, like a guttural scream or a robotic refrain of “all angels meet again”—invoking an afterlife and necessarily implying death.
When vocals appear—from the likes of Danish synthesis-philosopher Soho Rezanejad and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish—they are both pretty and unsettled. Typically spoken through robotic augmentation, the lyric-monologues bring an existential edge to this feather-light music, especially the alien-like voices of automation that recur. “Enhance photo to reveal a picture of Bird caught mid-flight,” one goes, “enhance again, the bird has a human face screaming.” There seem to be oblique critiques laced throughout. “Brutality makes us feel safe […] The gentle appearance makes us feel safe,” a voice slowly intones on “In Alarm Light,” a clear comment on the illusion of safety. By the final track, “In World Cell,” as the entire album seems to collapse onto itself, Isa ends with a hope that shakes you, a childlike voice proclaiming through static, “I believe that things still can be changed.”
Still, Isa is never more ominous than on its two interstitials, “Eden 1.1” and “Eden 1.2,” featuring Rahbek’s previous collaborators and vanguard noisemakers, Puce Mary and Yves Tumor. Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise—sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.
As a teenager, Rahbek was a painter, but he gave it up in favor of noise music after being disillusioned by what galleries did to art. Maybe it is ironic that his poised new music evokes nothing more than the wide-open walls of a gallery space. Maybe it is proof that creativity is a circle—and that the past, when we least expect it, can emerge new, telling us about the future.


Only a band as inscrutable as Oneida would attempt a 3xCD in 2009; only a band brimming with this many ideas could pull it off.

Rated O

Even three decades beyond the punk era, there's still a lingering urge to scoff at the supposed bloat and indulgence of the double album. Concision is often held as a virtue for many modern indie bands, and, let's face it, there are scant few double albums in rock that really have the ideas and vision to sustain their runtime. Save for prolific geniuses like Frank Zappa or Prince, the even-rarer triple album is more common for weighty anthologies, or documenting the live shows of acts with drooling fan bases, from the Grateful Dead to Pearl Jam. Sure, the Clash brought us a rare triple triple album of original material at the peak of their critical capital, but even that was reviled in certain circles. So... why on earth would any band release a triple album now?
Maybe you've never met Oneida. When so inclined, they'll fill a whole side of vinyl with one long track, one whole CD's running time with two or three-- and if you haven't seen them on the festival circuit lately, it's because they went ahead and started their own. The reason they can do this (aside from keeping their dayjobs) is that their fans-- being open-minded enough to absorb the many permutations of repetitive, inexhaustible rhythms, and stinging vintage organ and guitar over 10 years-- eat it right up. Those fans won't be surprised by the behemoth Rated O-- some have been waiting for it ever since it was planned and then scrapped before 2006's Happy New Year.
Before putting the idea of a 3xCD set aside, Drummer Kid Millions told an interviewer the project was "the stone tablets of Onieda." Given how hard it is to nail the band down to one sound, figuring out what those tablets could be remained a mystery. The good news: Between beat-heavy studio workouts, some of their loosest instrumental jams, and their most liberal use of "O"-related puns in song titles, Oneida were considerate enough to build it all around lean, no-frills rock on par with the best of their earlier work. Rated O contains the band's wildest experiments while still covering most of their previous sonic tentpoles.
The first disc introduces the band as beat-hungry, dub-obsessed studio scientists, where at least 10 minutes go by before any sound resembling a guitar is discernible. While opener "Brownout in Lagos" is ostensibly inspired by dancehall, its rubbery and distorted beat sounds only remotely like that genre or any of Oneida's previous work. It features bona-fide toasting from Dad-Ali Ziai, but the guest is another texture in a very strange soup of radar blips, tin cans, and faraway explosions. "What's Up, Jackal?" begins with echoing drums and a hiccupping Eastern tone, before leading into muffled screaming and a dizzy studio collage that sounds like the aural equivalent of a strobe light, with that hiccup being the only constant. The first minute of 10 on "10:30 at the Oasis" has a similar fakeout before emerging into a more delirious and layered version of the sleek jams that Trans Am were later known for (which makes sense, as Trans Am's Phil Manley/Double Rainbow contributes here, alongside former Onieda axeman Papa Crazee). This first disc is new for band, fans, and unacquainted listeners alike, and there aren't a whole lot of hooks to guide anyone. As with much of Oneida's work, it starts and ends on the beat, leading listeners through percussive whirlwinds of psychedelic sound.
The middle disc is closer to the band's live sound with few overdubs, and is an exemplary document of the hell the band can raise as an honest-to-god rock outfit. "The River" starts from Oneida's familiar monotone patter before uniting on a simple but massive-sounding theme, showing more melodic certainty and fearless classic-rock worship than they have in a while. Proto-metal riffs power spacey but insistent workouts like "I Will Haunt You" and "Ghost in the Room", while more exotic rhythms push "The Life You Preferred"; these tracks sprint and shimmy and drone without ever losing momentum. As the sluggish chant of "Luxury Travel" slows to a halt, the most stretched-out part of the three-disc set begins with disc C: "O" is an anchorless sitar-laden haze until minute five, when the rhythm builds and the guitars coagulate around brief, hypnotic tones. "End of Time" is a formless, nervous drone (smoke break!) that leads into the 20-minute "Folk Wisdom". Make no mistake: The band is jamming.
But Oneida's version of jamming tends to be a more pulsing, atmospheric, moody affair than the scale-fingering aimlessness the word probably calls to mind, and the tracks on the third disc are no exception. They don't have the same layers or utilize the studio in quite the same way as last year's instrumental Preteen Weaponry did, but marathon sessions like "Folk Wisdom" maintain their anxious, yearning edge while revealing the intuition and chemistry of the band through its many subtle shifts and turns. The last section of Rated O may feel like work to some, but at this point in the record (and their careers), it also feels earned.
While it's not quite three discs of all killer and no filler-- the plodding anguish of "The Human Factor" is difficult enough the first time through-- Rated O could stand easily as three discrete records, with each of them meriting their own release. Putting them all together is what makes it a statement: In an era when easy availability of music makes attention spans dwindle, it's an audacious listen the first time around, not to mention the repeated listens that Oneida records often reward. And as music gets increasingly reduced to a "niche interest" (shudder) and focuses more on the novelty of the physical package, the triple-gatefold Rated O is undoubtedly a beautiful package.
More than anything, Rated O is part and parcel of the band's long-standing and always-increasing ambition--don't forget this massive slab is part of a triptych of albums, with the third installment yet to come. Few bands push themselves this far from their comfort zone, fewer still this late in their career-- and that slice of the pie chart gets even smaller when considering what little attention the band has received, even in indie circles, while they've continued to innovate and sweat. Maybe you've got some other Brooklyn band pegged as your creative north star-- and that's cool, this year has some contenders-- but Oneida are the only band running that I could tell a listener with a straight face, yes, it's worth three discs, and it's worth your time.


James Murphy offers his second multi-track album as LCD Soundsystem, and it's as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.

Sound of Silver

James Murphy started releasing dance music some time between "B.O.B." and "Get Ur Freak On". It was a golden age for modern pop, a period during which a lot of personal aesthetics crumbled. Indie wasn't a dirty word, but it was a meaningless one. Pop, though, wasn't just more meaningless, it was more everything. And for the first time in a long while, pop also had its evangelicals; people who could argue convincingly in its favor, and who knew how to contextualize it interestingly. That turnover period was an exciting time; the ideological tension, the feeling that something was at stake, the exuberance of redrawing your bounds. The habitual mixtape maker in your life probably remembers it well.
Despite eventually remixing Britney Spears and N.E.R.D., Murphy never had a hands-on relationship with pop. Nonetheless, his transition out of punk and into dance music ran concurrent with this modest revolution, and it's pretty much impossible to separate his epiphanies from ours. That early LCD tracks like "Losing My Edge" used to feature in playlists alongside, say, "Work It" or "...Baby One More Time" only reinforces the link. So it's fitting that the finest work of Murphy's career is an album that sits squarely at the intersection of all those careening ideologies. Sound of Silver, his second as LCD Soundsystem, is as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.
These days, there isn't as much to talk about. It feels like less is up for grabs, as if music fans are gripped by a general fatigue. I'm not sure if you rapidly skim the same articles as I do, but apparently 72% of the internet is now made up of free mp3s, while another 14% is accompanying blurbs. Sometimes, I don't know how you guys do it. We're besieged and stupefied enough by downloads and mixes and remixes and mashups and collections of songs masquerading as albums that an album that feels like an album strikes me as positively ideal right now. Thankfully, Murphy-- a self-confessed 1970s rock nerd who grew up in the heyday of art-rock and albums as Statements-- unapologetically sets out to make dance records that breathe like proper albums.
In that respect, Sound of Silver isn't far removed from LCD Soundsystem's eponymous 2005 debut, which ultimately tried to do the same thing but fell slightly short. While Sound of Silver makes no bones about Murphy's well-known appreciation of Brian Eno's pop vocal affectations ("Get Innocuous", "Sound of Silver"), the Velvet Underground ("New York I Love You"), or new-wave ("Watch the Tapes"), it never feels like a paste job, but rather just the well-considered work of someone connecting the dots between the past and the present.
There's not a single weak track here, and many more already feel classic. "Sound of Silver" is a seven-minute suite that morphs from a rumbling, ice-cold, no-wave groove into a liquefied jumble of kalimbas, pianos, and fizzy synths. "All My Friends" begins with a piano riff that sounds not unlike a speeding train (or, at least, Steve Reich's approximation of one) and rolls downhill into fireworks. And then there's the song that precedes it, and with which it combines to form the record's center. A sleek, delicate, and effortlessly melodic sliver of electro, "Someone Great" is my favorite song of the year so far, and constitutes new ground for Murphy both in terms of prettiness and poignancy. It's about loss, but the lyric remains tantalizingly ambiguous. As with most great songs, its best lines buzz around the edges of the story: "The worst is all the lovely weather/ I'm stunned it's not raining/ The coffee isn't even bitter/ Because, what's the difference."
Murphy used to court spontaneity by refusing to pre-write any of his lyrics before going into the vocal booth, claiming in interviews that they were all ad-libbed. It's a strategy he's evidently abandoned on Sound of Silver, and the record is much better for it. On "All My Friends", for instance, he tackles a favorite subject (getting older) from the wrong end of an all-nighter: "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again." On "North American Scum", he tackles continental divide with straight deadpan: "Well I don't know, I don't know where to begin/ we are North American/ And for those of you who still think we're from England / we're like... 'No.'"
When it's all said and done, Murphy's real legacy to dance music will be his production sense. He's an analog obsessive with a general aversion to software, and Sound of Silver reflects that. Far removed from the compressed, trebly, and overmastered paradigm that's gripped electronic music in the last decade, Sound of Silver sounds deep, spacious, and full-blooded. (Like, um, an old rock record.) It's an absolute joy to listen to, for every possible reason, not the least of which is because, these days, those epiphanies feel like they're coming fewer and farther between.


Despite guest spots from the likes of Jay-Z, André 3000, and Dr. Dre, the victory lap crowning Rick Ross' four-year rise to dominance still feels depressingly earthbound.

God Forgives, I Don't

God Forgives, I Don't doesn't feel good enough, or big enough, to be what it is: The victory lap crowning Rick Ross' four-year rise to dominance, beginning with 2009's Deeper Than Rap. Part of what made Ross' Big Leap possible, now that it's over, was the fact that he was allowed to do it on his own bizarre terms: Deeper Than Rap's street single, "Mafia Music", swatted 50 Cent, unprovoked, at the exact moment that Ross' own reputation was most fragile. It had no chorus, just four minutes of Ross huffing about Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, and how the dope in his trunk made the car "smell like blue cheese." The album itself was overstuffed for a summer-radio takeover that Ross was in no position to reasonably expect. Teflon Don, just one year later, shortened its running time to an equally absurd 11 songs, as if Ross felt the next logical move was to remind rap fans of Illmatic. Both succeeded because they were fired by the flames of Ross' outrageous self-belief. He built a self-contained, no-reality-allowed planet, and spending time there was good for the soul.
God Forgives, I Don’t, by comparison, feels depressingly earthbound. The entire rap industry now worships Ross: At last May's Maybach Music Group conference, Lyor Cohen, Diddy, Swizz Beatz, and others showed up to shower ridiculous accolades on Ross (Diddy: "I think Rick Ross will go down in history as one of the great record men." Lyor: "Having a conversation with Ross is like having a conversation with Nas or Hova." Swizz Beatz: "Rick is also a painter, an artist; he understands Basquiat"). He is no longer the former punchline defying gravity: He is the center of gravity, and God Forgives is the first project of his to bend under the weight of rap-industry expectation.
In fact, L.A.Reid himself shows up on "Maybach Music IV", muttering about how "it takes a boss to recognize a boss." Reid's presence is unforgivable, not even by God: It's like having your party crashed by your high school principal. The moment may be more viscerally unappealing than picturing Ross taking advantage of the $24,000 toilet he brags about on "Hold Me Back". The only other guest on "Maybach Music IV", the latest installment of a series that has featured guest appearances by Jay-Z, Kanye West, T.I., and Erykah Badu, is... Ne-Yo, i.e., The Guy Who Sings On Your Def Jam Album When You No Longer Have Any Control Over Your Own Commercial Destiny. Even the beat is a tired jazz-fusion retread of "Maybach Music III".
God Forgives is an unsteady vehicle like that, the kind of misfortune-plagued summer blockbuster with visible seams: All that money invested, and they didn't fix that one shot where the spaceship looks like a sticker? How did a song called "Diced Pineapples" end up on the album still called "Diced Pineapples", and why did they let Wale kick it off telling a woman he intends to figure out how deep her birth canal is?  When Ross shows up on "Hold Me Back", he is painfully, jarringly out of time with the track, panting after the beat like a winded fat uncle trying, and failing, to tag his 10-year-old nephew "it." You can almost see him bent over, his hands resting on his knees, while the downbeat speeds away from him.
The "biggest" moments, like "Maybach Music IV", are the most leaden: "3 Kings" is the big-event track, with verses from Dr. Dre and Jay-Z. All three verses can be summed up in a single line. For Dre, it is "YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS BEAT THROUGH MY HEADPHONES!" For Jay, it is "Niggas couldn't walk in my daughters' socks/ Banksy, bitches, Basquiats." For Ross, it is the clanging, charmless "Come and suck a dick for a millionaire!" All three bring their C game, and the result is lethal. The beat bears the name of Jake One, a producer who usually graces his music with analog warmth, but Dre's surgical-gloves mixing vacuums out every trace of humanity. Deep into his Detox oblivion, Dre's production has  come to sound the way George Lucas' Star Wars prequels look-- sterilized, molded-plastic, and soulless.
There is still some great music on God Forgives, but it is somewhat overshadowed by these higher-profile misfires. "Sixteen" brings André 3000 into Ross' orbit, and Three Stacks obliges, like he does every few years, with a casually mind-melting verse. The Cool- and Dre-produced "Ashamed" is built on a great Wilson Pickett sample; "Ashamed" is a solid example of Ross' plush luxury rap done well. "Ten Jesus Pieces", the rare "reflective Bawse" moment, finds Ross barking about pulling prayers from his "archive" (even the guy's prayers are stored somewhere expensive-sounding) over Jeffrey Osborne's lovestruck "Baby". "911" sounds like it was recorded during the same time as the far-superior material on last winter's Rich Forever, and is therefore excellent. The project is too big to completely fail, and it doesn't. But Planet Boss just became a much less fun place to visit.


The Florida teenager Chester Watson is a rapper in the mold of Earl Sweatshirt or MF DOOM. His latest cassette-only release works a similar mood: It's all cracked psychedelia, off-kilter weirdness, and a dedication to a lifestyle with time built in for Saturday morning cartoons, cereal, and pontificating about the world through blunt smoke.

Past Cloaks

Underground rap suffered a bad patch for awhile there in the mid-'00s. It was hard to have fun listening to music that didn’t even sound like it was remotely fun to make, and so much of it felt like attending a lecture that you immediately knew you didn’t want to be at. Besides, it’s an insular world, built on obsessive minutiae and indecipherable jokes, and is usually defined by a focus on lyrics over song structure. If you have ever cared about underground rap, you have not only thrown the word "lyricism" around with abandon, you’ve also debated what it really means for 27 years of your life, even if you are only 16. It’s a commitment so heavy that it transcends space and time.
In recent years, though, that’s changed. Thank Earl Sweatshirt. Or thank Kendrick Lamar. Or the new generation of ears trained on MF DOOM's every move. Let’s thank Madlib, too, while we’re at it. The perma-stoned Oxnard producer has been tirelessly working with obscure samples for years, pushing them away from their source material so they take on strange new lives. He’s been a guiding light for a whole new wave of rappers and producers, directly and indirectly helping them shake off the arbitrary rules of a genre that thrives on breaking them.
Enter Chester Watson, a Florida teenager who sits so comfortably and skillfully amongst his influences that he already feels like their peer. His latest release, Past Cloaks, from a new label called POW Records—a project of Pitchfork contributor Jeff Weiss—is an actual cassette, which means that the more you play it, the more it’ll degrade, before eventually breaking down entirely.
But you’ll probably stream this somewhere—I’m streaming it right now—and the beauty is that you don’t lose much of the crust and murk when you listen to it digitally. That’s largely thanks to the production: a hodgepodge of repurposed beats, some done by Watson himself, and some done by a crew of in-house producers like Psymun, Art Vandelay, DRWN, and a bunch more. They’re all working within similar parameters: cracked psychedelia, off-kilter weirdness, and a dedication to a lifestyle with time built in for Saturday morning cartoons, cereal, and pontificating about the world through blunt smoke.
Past Cloaks is, in a way, a very necessary compilation tape. True to underground rap fashion, Watson’s discography is already daunting, but by pulling together material he’s recorded over the past few years—unreleased or otherwise—he’s dialed in on the mythology that he’s been building, focusing it in an unexpectedly breezy 19-track sequence that pulls warbly samples from damaged-beyond-repair records and snatches of TV dialogue, flipping them into compositions that fit together like melted puzzle pieces.
Watson is a formidable rapper, and wastes no time making sure we know that. On opening track "Phantom," his blunted voice bounces like a half-deflated basketball over keys that sound like they’re being played through an inch of dust. He’s a stream of consciousness rapper, letting vivid moments emerge and then quickly disappear. The entire tape feels like a casual studio session, with guests occasionally flitting in and out, and Watson holding court next to a stack of paperbacks, rapping about the virtues of getting stoned and seeing the world in sepia. It’s the kind of unbridled creativity that feels somehow untampered with.
Watson’s still in the early stages of what will hopefully be a long career. Which means that sometimes, like on "Purple Leaves," he sounds so much like Earl Sweatshirt that it’s a little distracting. But he’ll continue to develop, and there’s so much promise and endlessly re-playable material here that even the overly referential stuff is a pleasure to listen to. Besides, Watson could do a lot worse than look to Earl for inspiration—especially when he casually drops lyrical gems like "sippin' syrup in my room and all my clothes are out." This is the kind of mundane-yet-telling detail that feels bound to cultivate a loyal fanbase.
Speaking of loyal fanbases: There’s another thing you can do with tapes besides listen to them degrade. You can pass them around. Pocket them. Lend them to people. Make dubs of dubs until the original takes on a near-mystical quality. Past Cloaks isn’t perfect enough to be canonized, but it’s strong enough to form a small cult around.


Tranquil and reverberant, the North Carolina folk songwriter’s new album finds relief and resolution in the circadian rhythms of the natural world.

Every Acre

H.C. McEntire has made a career complicating the music of her youth. A child of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, McEntire began life on a family farm, her days soundtracked by the local country radio station. On Sundays, she’d attend church, the heavenward hymns lifting her out of her weekday twang. These influences have informed McEntire’s own reverent folk songs, whose gospel inflections and bucolic imagery reflect deep psychogeographic connections to the land where she grew up.
Sense of place remains the cornerstone of McEntire’s songwriting on Every Acre, an album that finds relief and resolution in the circadian rhythms of the natural world. Where 2018’s Lionheart and 2020’s Eno Axis imagined the land as a site of memory, from which McEntire tried to reconcile her queerness with her religious upbringing, Every Acre reconfigures the Southern setting as a scene of potential rejuvenation and regeneration: a place from which to begin the sluggish walk towards recovery. “It ain’t the easy kind of healing/When you’re down on your knees, clawing at the garden,” she sings in a viscid drone on “Rows of Clover.”
Slowness, and an appreciation for the long drag of time, is the album’s guiding aesthetic principle. McEntire’s world comes steadily and languidly into focus: The sound of croaking night frogs fills the hazy frame, while McEntire outlines a landscape of flowing rivers, stacked logs, ripe onions. She grounds herself in these details, attempting to lodge a restless and drifting mind into unerring, observable environmental fact. The songs’ tranquil pulse lends them a therapeutic quality that recalls the woozy and warm psychedelic tones of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and the soniferous romance of Tammy Wynette’s We Sure Can Love Each Other.
It’s a peaceful contrast to the central preoccupation of McEntire’s lyrics, which concern  self-effacement, sublimation, grief, and the singer’s ongoing struggle with depression. McEntire takes all of these subjects gently by the hand, befriending them. Her voice dances a dawdling waltz with itself: melismatic, drawling, half-drunk on sleep. Her guitar offers an even more languid counterpoint, as McEntire hammers off and on at the unhurried pace of a dipping bird. Slowness acts as a salve and a cure. Every Acre travels at the pace of healing, however long it takes a scab to suture a wound.
McEntire, a creative writing graduate, proved herself a deft and diligent lyricist on previous albums. Every Acre takes even greater advantage of the space where language fails and only music can fill the lapse. “Time ain’t always kind,” she repeats on “Turpentine,” delighting more in how the phrase sounds in song than how it reads as verse. On Every Acre, McEntire’s patient observations of the land provide her with a new footing: one full of possibility and promise. It’s in the commitment to stasis that McEntire finds the fortitude to begin anew.


On the first proper Sparks album in nearly a decade, the Mael brothers let existential anxiety into their bouncy music more overtly than usual.

Hippopotamus

Few bands will ever reach the half-century mark, and fewer still could manage that looking so blasé as Sparks. They watch time pass with wry distance, adopting musical fashions like visitors from a parallel dimension. The Brothers Mael got the first of their occasional hits during the 1970s glam era, but their affect owed more to vaudeville than rock theater: urbane, contrived, pushing formulas to absurd ends, with Russell an antic pile of hair and Ron a severe, unmoving mustache. (He’s said that he grew it in tribute to Charlie Chaplin.) Sparks’ breakthrough single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us,” released in 1974, was all prancing swagger, but its lyrics mocked male posturing, a favorite Mael target: “Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat/You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants, and tacky tigers.” One could easily miss the sheer number of words Russell piles up, or how the melody seems to dart for cover. It takes a lot of care to sound that ridiculous.
Sparks started working with Giorgio Moroder as the ’70s ended, shedding the shell of their band. No other synth-pop group had yet achieved the same balance of irony and sentiment, at least not until Pet Shop Boys came along a few years later. Their camp could give form to something inexpressible: “I never feel like garbage when I’m with you/I almost feel normal when I’m with you.” Later Sparks albums stuck with that electronic template, but the Maels have found new ways to amuse themselves. 2002’s Lil’ Beethoven used orchestral arrangements, while 2015’s FFS enlisted Franz Ferdinand as a perverse backing band. So the title track of Hippopotamus, the first Sparks qua Sparks record in nearly a decade, would naturally be a bouncy aria, one they rhyme with “anonymous,” “Hieronymus,” “abacus,” “microbus,” and “Titus Andronicus.”
More surprising is just how well Russell Mael’s voice holds up, especially given his tendency towards falsetto, stealing away phrases like an eagle with a tortoise. He’s still got the range, but age has softened his highest register—Mael floats above himself in overdubs, a sprite strumming along to mortal folly. “Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me)” invokes her “Je ne regrette rien” only to politely demur (“Pretty song, but not intended for me”), as the narrator describes a life untouched by danger or sin: “There were no smoky dives/Few amours, fous or not/There were no petty crimes/Foreign substances bought.” The music swells in melodramatic counterpoint. It’s impossible to tell which direction the joke is even aimed towards. I laughed.
The risk here is that listening to three or four minutes of unfunny satire feels agonizing. (Roy Scheider in All That Jazz, dying and delirious, to God: “What’s the matter, don’t you like musical comedy?”) Sparks’ wit does fail them with a couple of Hippopotamus tracks: “Giddy Giddy” repeats a thin conceit at irritating length, and “The Amazing Mr. Repeat” apparently exists to justify its vocal contortions. But Ron Mael’s arrangements can estrange the silliest premise. “When You’re a French Director” features actual French director Leos Carax cackling about auteurism, the lurching brass and accordion forever entertaining some demonic bistro. “Unaware” addresses a baby in the womb, listing off news and trivia she’ll remain happily ignorant of. The production smothers Russell’s voice with guitar feedback, as if he were seeding her subconscious.
The Sparks catalog does not lack for unpleasant characters or situations, but existential anxiety rarely comes through this overtly. “Probably Nothing” seems like a trifle at first, until you realize it’s a meta joke about memory loss and the fear of dementia. Elsewhere the duo laments how dreary it is giving half-ignored funeral speeches (“All of them prattle on/Even your widow yawns”), a task that must be coming up more and more often. “It’s a—,” Russell begins, pausing in solemn caricature, before another voice completes the thought: “—bummer.” Mael also talks about quoting Shakespeare; I thought of Yorick, and the grin Death steals from every jester.