The new album from L.A. producer Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, is more open-ended than usual, bringing collaborators like Zuri Marley, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and Steve Spacek into the fray.

Parallels

Los Angeles electronic producer Jason Chung was never necessarily a loner, but he’s spent the last few years using his Nosaj Thing moniker as a way to try on an extroverted lifestyle. For the first time in his career, Chung has said he decided to become more sociable, and his fourth album, Parallels, captures that change. The Parallels sessions were a chance to make opposites attract: beauty and dissonance, love and regret, soul and machine.
With opener “Nowhere,” that means partnering meditative piano with a rushed phone call. The voice, presumably belonging to Chung, discusses the album title, but fittingly, the audio sounds more like a voicemail, one of the few forms of audible speech that allows someone to converse without actually interacting in real time. Few of the album’s other conjoined thematic proxies come across as clearly.
Chung’s usual trademarks—savvy collaborations with indie rockers like Blonde Redhead, austere dance beats, and a distinct, personable anxiousness—are still present, but he stops centering songs around them. Instead, he tries new sounds, many of which latch onto vocalists to find their groove, like the bass-heavy pop gloss of “Way We Were” and the brooding soul of “All Points Back to U.” The prior features Zuri Marley, who Chung met while singing backup vocals during a Blood Orange show, which might explain the mellow keyboards and flirtatious tone. The latter features UK electronica artist Steve Spacek, and Chung spins the song into a dizzying soul groove with 4/4 kick drum that centers around Spacek’s neo-soul delivery. Even the collaboration with Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino on “How We Do” sees Chung mixing opposite flavors, dropping trap-like synth behind her raspy whispers.
On Parallels, Chung sounds less concerned with deciphering his own musical identity than letting collaborators help steer him. Just look at his “Light” series—a collection of numbered tracks, ranging from “Light #1” to “Light #5,”  that appeared on all three of his previous albums—which comes to a sudden halt on Parallels. In the past, this series served as a measuring stick for Chung’s stylistic growth from glitch hop to electronic minimalism.
In the place of “Light,” Chung inserts a handful of subdued pieces that float aimlessly. “TM,” a muted flash of bright synth, whirrs peacefully in no particular direction. “Get Like” is primed for a rap remix, but without lyrics over it, the sobering instrumental plays out like a faceless SoundCloud beat. The malleable nature of these songs could be a plus for DJs who want a flexible album. But when Chung takes a stance, like he does with the bite-sized vocal samples used on “U G,” he can offer melodic layers to rival the flow of Caribou’s darkest dance numbers. When looking at the reserved tracks spread across Nosaj Thing’s albums, it becomes clear that the vocalists on 2013’s Home pushed Chung towards his softest songwriting, whereas the vocalists on Parallels remind Chung to up his edge—something Parallels could admittedly benefit from more of.
When Chung takes the time to really carve out grand, hook-free minimalism with mesmerizing detail, it can pay off: The pitched, breathy exhales on “Sister” make it sound like a Holly Herndon B-side. But across Parallels, he seems so committed to the possibility of an open-ended project that he gets lost in the mix—where once he was a maestro of controlling space. Still, these subtle and intentional shifts suggest Chung could make a more focused album in the future, if only because it will be coming from a clearer headspace.


A departure from his recent work with Gorillaz and Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Damon Albarn wrote for director Rufus Norris.

Dr Dee

There was a very specific moment in Damon Albarn's career when he decided to think of England for a living. The year was 1992, and Blur were touring the U.S. in support of their underperforming debut, Leisure, a relatively tepid guitar-pop record of vague lyrics and the occasional explosive hook. Missing his homeland and repulsed by the self-serious, omnipresent grunge sound, he returned to England two months later with the intention of making music that was proudly, flagrantly British. It proved to be a good look for the band: with the release of their next two albums, the solid Modern Life is Rubbish in 1993 and the sparkling Parklife in 1994, Blur transformed their image from late-era Madchester tag-alongs to pop's most incisive inquisitors of the British way of life. This was in great part thanks to Albarn's character-driven lyrics: Rubbish's no-name 20th-Century Boy and 20th-Century Girl and Parklife's Tracy Jacks (a sad sack civil servant who cracks one Tuesday morning and bulldozes his own house) warned of what could happen without the promise of tomorrows, the thrill of spontaneity, and a belief in a rather optimistic strain of anarchy it was not off base to call magic.
Two decades later, Albarn is exploring the idea of Britshness through a character and a form that's decidedly less modern. A departure from his most recent work with Gorillaz and the afro-inspired Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Albarn wrote for theater director Rufus Norris. Dr Dee had a brief preliminary run in Manchester last year and will run again during the Cultural Olympiad this summer, but in the meantime Albarn-- never one for a second of downtime-- holed up with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded the tracks for what's being nominally presented as a solo album.
As far as British anti-heroes go, John Dee is a good deal more spectacular and complex than, say, Tracy Jacks. Dee was a brilliant, controversial visionary of the Elizabethan era, a gifted mathematician with an unerring belief in magic. Throughout his long life he fell in and out of favor with the court; at one point during Mary's reign he was arrested for charting the queen's horoscopes, while three years later Queen Elizabeth appointed him her scientific advisor and asked him to choose her coronation date based on her star chart. A firm believer in the occult who late in his life made attempts to communicate with angels, Dee's life was a combination of prestige, failure, and misunderstandings, and the tone of Dr Dee makes it clear that Albarn finds luxuriant depths of melancholy in his character. On the lush, downcast "The Moon Exalted", he is accompanied by the porcupine-bristle of a harpsicord as he sings, "It's a powerful thing/ The morning I awoke to find you'd gone/ The moon was rising higher than the sun." In recent years, Albarn's retired the bratty stacatto that characterized his Britpop hits, and his voice has taken on this wonderfully droopy, lead-balloon quality. With nary an upbeat moment over the soundtrack's 50-minute run, Dr Dee makes use of this stylistic evolution; it's without a doubt the biggest bummer of a record he's made since 13.
Like the large majority of Dr Dee listeners, I have not seen the opera. It garnered pretty good reviews over its first run, but the most common criticism seemed to be that it was a tad impenetrable; viewers who went expecting a clear, linear narrative found Albarn's collection of impressionistic tableaus hard to follow. And if those were the complaints of people who actually had a visual element to guide them, you can imagine that listening blindly to the soundtrack is not exactly a cake walk, comprehension-wise. Still, there's some enjoyment in getting lost in Albarn's gloomy melodies and the occasional immersive scene (the fluttering voices of "Coronation" in particular), if you are content to let go your hopes of any kind of narrative mastery. To me, oddly enough, the closest pop analog to Dr Dee is a (much more sedate) Frog Eyes record-- the frenzied, King Lear-inspired pantomime Paul's Tomb: A Triumph is never entirely subsumed by the fact that I have no idea what the hell is going on. I could say the same for most of Dr Dee.
But therein lies the problem: Presented apart from its visual component, what is the Dr Dee soundtrack, exactly? There are pop elements to Albarn's compositions here, but they won't be quite enough to hold the attention spans of his less patient fans. And on the other side of the coin, Albarn's pop-star background keeps Dr Dee from scaling more operatic heights. In the end, the Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography. A Renaissance man to a point that occasionally confounds his less adventurous listeners, it should be no great mystery why Albarn finds Dee-- who was, after all, the man who coined the term "Britannia" in the first place-- a worthy subject.


Having scored a U.S. Top 10 hit, and performed at Prince William's wedding reception and Barack Obama's Christimas tree-lighting ceremony, the release of Ellie Goulding's second album, Halcyon, couldn't be timelier-- nor more varied a collection.

Halcyon

"This is quite cool. But it's a bit late!" So said British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding in The New York Times earlier this month, after being told that her single "Lights" had become a hit in the States. It's taken two years-- years during which Goulding has been constantly, fervently touted as the next big UK breakout-- for the London pop star to catch a break on these shores. "Lights", a bonus track from the debut album of the same name, follows a string of five not-quite-crossovers.
It's increasingly common for bonus tracks to become sleeper hits, thereby resuscitating albums and digging artists out of their midchart quagmires. (Nicki Minaj's crossover was largely the doing of bonus track "Super Bass" from 2010's Pink Friday.) "Lights", co-written by Biff Stannard, who penned many a hit for the Spice Girls, was also issued as a single. That release came with the featherweight original, a wobbly Bassnectar remix, and a Fernando Garibay dance mix that sounded a lot like his last big project, Lady Gaga's Born This Way. All styles sounded perfectly plausible, and all received airplay. Radio-ready dance-pop? She'd be neither the first nor last to make that pivot. Dubstep? She likes it enough to hang with Skrillex, as anything written about Goulding in 2012 inevitably mentions. Polite folktronica? It worked for Beth Orton. Her po-faced cover of Elton John's "Your Song"? It worked for, um, Birdy. Rebloggable covers of Active Child and the Weeknd? Why the hell not?
The charitable interpretation of this is that Goulding's got a lot of ideas to play with. The cynical interpretation is that she's being opportunist, flinging herself into five potential genres in the hopes that one will take root. This isn't to say Ellie Goulding's music is anonymous. She has an instantly identifiable voice that can flip from soprano trills to scrappy yarls within a single verse, and she never sounds, like some of her peers, over-anxious to pass a BRIT School vocal jury. Sometimes she leaves her voice more or less alone, but more often she tweaks it, chops it up into snippets, loops it.
And so we've arrived at a place where Ellie Goulding has scored a Stateside hit, performed at Prince William's wedding reception and Barack Obama's Christmas-tree lighting ceremony, and has now dropped this perfectly timed album, Halcyon. She's calling Halcyon a breakup album in interviews, but the guy whose dumping really matters is Starsmith, who produced most of Lights. Apart from a few bonus tracks, he appears here just once, on the aptly titled "Dead in the Water". His best substitute here is Jim Eliot of Kish Mauve; he's no Stannard, but he's gone the rounds: stately dance for Kylie Minogue, angstful electro for Ladyhawke, assembly-line hits for "Pop Idol" winners.
"Anything Could Happen" is essentially a Passion Pit song without the emotional torment, from the stadium balcony-high synths down to the earnestness. ("After the war, we said we'd fight together/ I guess we thought that's just what humans do.") The claps and stomps and pleading of "My Blood" and "Only You" are clearly trying to emulate fellow Brit Adele, but if that experiment doesn't work, Goulding's got plenty of others. "Figure 8" and "Hanging On" are the pop-step songs, the ones that sound like they come from the same musical universe as Chase and Status. If those are too niche, a bonus track and likely single brings in Calvin Harris, sounding exactly like he always does.
These songs work better than the more traditional folk-leaning tracks, at least. Those underpinnings always existed beneath the club lights in Goulding's music, but mostly, her ballads are somnolent and give too much rein to her drippier lyrical impulses: "I feel a lump in my throat, and this is far from joy," for example, or rhyming "houses" and "rouses" on the title track. She's better off when her voice and sonics take the forefront: the choral swells throughout the otherwise straightforward "Explosions", the way "Don't Say a Word" churns up drama around mostly repeated lyrics, or the whistle-register baubles strewn throughout "Atlantis". Goulding can certainly inhabit a soundscape. Her next step is to inhabit just one.


The veteran guitarist has created an effortlessly detailed album, full of tradition and experimentation that spans generations. It lives at the vanguard of new jazz music.

Suite for Max Brown

Jeff Parker always writes parts that sound unassuming at first listen and unavoidable by the fifth. It’s the X-factor that the guitarist and master collaborator has brought to every project on his long and still-growing list of projects, jazz or rock or otherwise: Tortoise, Isotope 217, the recently reunited Chicago Underground Quartet, his solo work as a bandleader, his work as a soloist, and his supporting contributions for countless others. Despite his ability to do backflips with a guitar, his best-known lick from Tortoise’s 1998 song “TNT” is more like a heel-click—an easy, humble gesture, perfectly timed and placed.
It’s a preternatural thing, of course, but it’s also a skill that he’s cultivated by changing up his scenery and embracing the unfamiliar. A few years ago, while splitting his time between his longtime home of Chicago and his new home of Los Angeles, Parker connected with the players at International Anthem, a new collective of jazz-raised, boundary-challenging musicians based in Chicago. Some of them were exploring the intersection of live improvisation and modern digital recording—loops, samples, beats—which was an area that had fascinated Parker ever since Madlib’s jazz-ensemble project Yesterdays New Quintet blew his mind over a decade ago. Parker had been messing around with these elements for years during occasional DJ sets, thinking about how they could apply to his own playing, and had accumulated several hours of experiments. With this new label, he saw the right opportunity to formally release those results. He turned them into his 2016 album The New Breed, some of the most soulful and beat-driven music he’d ever put out under his own name and his first release for International Anthem.
What Parker tapped into on The New Breed, he blows wide open on Suite for Max Brown, a mesmerizing follow-up and informal companion piece. While his electric guitar remains a highlight, Parker builds out a fast-slashing range of ideas using dozens of other sounds and instruments, most of which he plays himself. They’re disparate in color and texture, pronounced and often short, each one elbowing or sliding its way in front of the one before it, impatient to steal the show. As a player and composer, Parker shines throughout. As an arranger, he catches fire.
Suite for Max Brown is a place where a 26-second, Dilla-indebted loop of an Otis Redding sample and 10 minutes of a jazz quintet weaving around what sounds like someone stacking plastic cups can share a tracklist; each is equally meaningful. He’s less of a specialist and more open to breadth than ever before. “Del Rio” opens with vintage-Korg cloud cover, which parts to reveal an easy-stepping melody that Parker plays on the African mbira—which in turn tees up a warm gust of wind in the form of a big, swooping guitar lick. That last move is one that Parker makes a few times on Suite: entering on guitar at just the right, unexpected moment of a tune. It’s as smooth and elegant as calligraphy; it sounds like he’s literally signing these new ideas with his signature instrument.
“3 for L” is a slow swing soaked in L.A. sunlight and leans closer to Parker’s more traditional jazz-bandleader side, but the crafty, mysterious percussion work of Jay Bellerose adds an extra dimension. Bellerose sounds like he’s fixing a bicycle in slow motion, assessing the clicks and clacks of its gears shifting up and down while Parker sits off to the side, narrating the process with his electric. It sets the table for the casual shiver of “Go Away,” the album’s turn-it-up moment, which inconspicuously lifts the bassline from an earlier song and reframes it with a different, more driving energy. Zero in on any one element in the mix here—like the light, instantly combusting pop of the handclaps, which hide in plain sight like they’re part of a selective-attention experiment—and the song suddenly becomes an entirely different thing. It’s like looking at a photo mosaic from several feet away, then putting your face right up to it.
His inspiration, however, runs deeper than adventure. Parker’s father, Ernie, passed away while he was making The New Breed, which was named after a clothing store that Ernie owned and featured on its cover a photo of him outside of it, smiling. (The New Breed is now also the name for the group of supporting musicians here, which, in addition to Bellerose, includes old friends Makaya McCraven on drums and Rob Mazurek on piccolo trumpet.) Parker decided to dedicate this next one to his mother, whose maiden name is Maxine Brown and whose portrait graces the cover here. This folds in an extra layer of emotion to every odd pluck, rattle, or whoosh, knowing that the album is essentially a hand-crafted gift of appreciation for his mom. Parker’s sweetly interpreted cover of a jazz piece from her generation, John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” feels especially baked with love. It has no beat or time; it just glows for a little while, gratitude spilling out from his fingertips and through his amplifier.
That familial thread ties Suite to its predecessor in one more graceful way. Parker’s daughter, Ruby, who sang the last track of The New Breed, “Cliche,” also sings on the opener here—the only lyrics on either album. Her words on “Build a Nest” pledge allegiance to appreciating the process of creation as its own reward, and not just as a means to a destination. “Everyone moves like they’ve someplace to go/Build a nest and watch the world go by slow,” she sings as Jeff slowly drums alongside her, his kick beats dragging like they’re attached to a parachute. He drops in some piano plinks and some muffled backing vocals. And together, with the help of some friends, they build a nest from which to watch the world.

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The dense and complex follow-up to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once.

To Pimp a Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar’s major-label albums play out like Spike Lee films in miniature. In both artists’ worlds, the stakes are unbearably high, the characters’ motives are unclear, and morality is knotty, but there is a central force you can feel steering every moment. The “Good and Bad Hair” musical routine from Lee’s 1988 feature School Daze depicted Black women grappling with colorism and exclusionary standards of American beauty. Mookie’s climactic window smash in 1989’s Do the Right Thing plunged its characters into fiery bedlam, quietly prophesying the coming L.A. riots in the process. In these moments, you could feel the director speaking to you directly through his characters and their trajectories. Lamar’s records, while crowded with conflicting ideas and arguing voices, have a similar sense of a guiding hand at work.
Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like Good Kid, M.A.A.D City did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse. The opener, “Wesley’s Theory,” turns the downfall of action-star-turned-convicted-tax-dodger Wesley Snipes into a kind of Faustian parable. Snoop drops by on “Institutionalized”; Dre himself phones in on “Wesley.” The mood is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once: On “For Free? (Interlude)” an impatient woman ticks off a laundry list of material demands before Kendrick snaps back that “This dick ain’t free!” and thunders through a history of Black oppression, spoken-word style, as if to say, “This money you crave, it’s blood money.” The album is dotted with surreal grace notes, like a parable: God appears in the guise of a homeless man in “How Much a Dollar Cost,” and closer “Mortal Man” ends on a lengthy, unnerving fever-dream interview with the ghost of 2Pac.
The music, meanwhile, follows a long line of genre-busting freakouts (The Roots’ Phrenology, Common’s Electric Circus, Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract, André 3000’s The Love Below) in kicking at the confines of rap music presentation. There’s half a jazz band present at all times; pianist Robert Glasper, producer/sax player Terrace Martin and bass wizard Thundercat give Butterfly a loose, fluid undertow every bit as tempestuous and unpredictable as the army of flows at Kendrick’s disposal. The rapper’s branching out, too, exploding into spastic slam poetry on “For Free?,” switching from shouty gymnastics to drunken sobs on “U” and even effecting the lilt of a caring mother on “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Momma Said).” It turns out Kendrick’s new direction was every direction at once.
Despite all this, he’s still toying with a narrative on the sly: Just beneath the surface lies a messianic yarn about avoiding the wiles of a sultry girl named Lucy who’s secretly a physical manifestation of the devil. Kendrick refuses to dole out blame without accepting any, however, and on the chaotic free jazz excursion “U” he turns a mirror on himself, screaming, “Loving you is complicated!” and suggesting his fame hasn’t helped his loved ones back home. Kendrick’s criticisms, as they did on Good Kid, come with powerful, self-imposed challenges. As Bilal quips on the chorus to “Institutionalized”: “Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass, nigga.”
Kendrick’s principle of personal responsibility has treaded dangerously close to respectability politics lately, especially after a prickly remark about the Mike Brown shooting in a recent Billboard interview that seemed to pin the death on the victim, but To Pimp a Butterfly avoids that trap. (Mostly.) “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” is a tender note of appreciation for women of all skin tones with help from North Carolina rapper Rapsody (whose slickly referential guest verse contains a nod to “Good and Bad Hair”). This is an album about tiny quality of life improvements to be made in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It might not be the message we want in a year where systemic police and judicial inequality have cost many the ultimate price, but that doesn’t bankrupt it of value.
To Pimp a Butterfly pivots on the polarizing lead single, “I.” Upon release last autumn, the sunny soul pep talk came off lightweight and glib. When it appears deep in the back end of Butterfly, though, “I” plays less like the jingle we heard last year and more like the beating heart of the matter. To push the point, the album opts for a live-sounding mix that ditches out midway through, giving way to a speech from the rapper himself. In tone, the speech is not unlike the legendary 1968 concert where James Brown waved off security and personally held off a Boston audience’s fury after news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. “How many niggas we done lost, bro?” Kendrick shouts over the crowd. “It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life we got left.” Underneath the tragedy and adversity, To Pimp a Butterfly is a celebration of the audacity to wake up each morning to try to be better, knowing it could all end in a second, for no reason at all.

Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope


On her debut album, the American musician works entirely with recordings of her own voice, processing and layering largely non-verbal sounds to explore the very fiber of her being.

Fountain

When Lyra Pramuk was a child, her parents insisted she go to two different churches every Sunday. It made for a long day and so, as she explained on a recent podcast, she joined a choir at one of them as a way to kill time. Singing soon grew into a way of life and, as she got older, led her to classical training. At university, however, she felt conflicted by the expectation to pursue a traditional operatic or choral career path; inspired by the pop artists she listened to outside of class (Björk, M.I.A., Missy Elliott), she was interested in using her voice as an instrument in more experimental ways. Looking back at her time in children’s choirs, she realized that the archetype of the prepubescent child with a voice as pure as “a bell” represents a “fetishized sound.” On Fountain, the composer and producer’s debut album, Pramuk explores her voice—and her spirituality—with a considerably more holistic outlook.
Each and every sound on Fountain sprang from the same source: Pramuk’s voice. The rhythms, the melodies, the textures—it’s all her, even the bits that don’t sound like her, or even human. Along with using recognizable performance techniques like vibrato and humming, Pramuk heavily processed many of her largely non-verbal vocals, manipulating and layering them to create an orchestra of herself—a technological excavation of her own body’s resonant possibilities inside a tender vision of a post-human future. On occasion, Pramuk leans toward the wistful meandering of Arthur Russell, albeit wordlessly (for example, in the warm glow of lead single “Tendril”); at other times, she evokes the primal world-making of Anna Homler, who devised her own non-verbal vocal technique that involved “exploring the body like a cave.”
The voice, like the self, is fluid, not fixed. Depending on the time of day, the weather, your age, hormone levels, the amount of sleep you got, how you’re feeling, and countless other variables, your voice can sound different—sometimes marginally so, sometimes radically. Pramuk’s extensive vocal recordings and reimaginings, then, weave a spectrum of situational factors into the fabric of Fountain, rendering it the most personal of documents. The line “You say it best when you say nothing at all” comes to mind, a phrase that illuminates the emotional fluency of Pramuk’s often wordless vocals.
“Xeno” sounds like a folktale. It builds from a vulnerable mew (like that of a young creature trying to feel its way through a new world) to a vibrating wall of sound; unscalable and ambiguous. On the austere yet grounding “Cradle,” Pramuk casts herself as a cello, using her computer to stretch her voice into the shape of a bow soberly meeting its strings. It’s the closest she gets to a chamber choir on the album, anchoring her creative progression in her musical beginnings. “Gossip,” on the other hand, feels like a playful tribute to her adopted home of Berlin. Dozens of vocal bits and bytes arrange themselves in crosshatch, creating a scene of harmony and happenings, of exchange and excitement. In spirit rather than sound, “Gossip” makes me think of Pramuk’s longtime collaborator Colin Self and his 2018 song “Quorum,” which features artists Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily enacting the exhilaration of a video chat with a close friend. Gossip is a bonding agent. It’s not only the information that knits people together, but the way it is shared: with laughter and in the kind of intimate tones reserved for one’s nearest and dearest.
Not that anyone needs to be told that the voices of loved ones buoy the spirit. Or that spirituality is deeply rooted in one’s own being and experience. In form and in practice, Pramuk’s debut album generously looks inward to illuminate the multiplicity of the self. Fountain is too rich in scope and meaning to be reduced to just a salve, but there’s no doubt it’s an oh-so-timely reminder that the body is a site of infinite possibility.

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Sam Gendel’s smoothly psychedelic debut is dominated by the guitarist and saxophonist’s tip-toed melodies and hushed voice.

4444

Sam Gendel was a saxophonist first and guitarist second. “My heart belongs to the saxophone, but guitar is my secret lover,” he told an interviewer a couple years ago. With both instruments at his side, he works primarily in a psychedelic jazz trio alongside drummer Kevin Yokota and guitarist Adam Ratner. Under Gendel’s direction, the group performed as Inga until recently, when they began releasing music under Gendel’s given name. Separately, Gendel plays support in Moses Sumney’s trio, and has just recently released his own wholly solo material of one-take live recordings of saxophone and wavedrum loops preserved to his iPhone voice memo app. Gendel has spent the last couple years as a searching musician, and his debut full-length for Terrible Records, 4444, sounds exploratory but sure of itself.
It wasn’t until some later Inga recordings that Gendel began singing, and he’s extended the effort on 4444, a smoothly psychedelic record dominated by hushed voice. Gendel barely plays the saxophone here, instead streamlining a guitar style he’s been developing over the years. In that way, 4444 feels like a simultaneous exploration of a pair of tones. Most every moment and accompanying sound on the album pays service to his settling into both.
Gendel sings quietly and at a pattering pace reminiscent of his guitar playing, where his muted staccato attack sounds like tiptoeing over the fretboard in socks. He sometimes sings in unison with his guitar for a silvery effect, and Yokota’s percussion seems to double instead of define his trajectory. All of this sounds smooth but dense, wrinkled with a passionate and meditative meticulousness instead of a detached technicality.
If the playing is grounded, Gendel’s lyrics tend toward floaty, guileless pietism. On “No Place For This” he sings, “Anger is not an answer,” his voice lifting upwards and more loudly at the end of the phrase. At the end of the album, a hidden track begins with a withered home recording of a child belting out lines from Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s famous children book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Gendel carries forward the lyrical device of trading perspectives, trying to see the world through other eyes as a sort of radical awareness. At another point, he borrows lines from the Native American poet-activist John Trudell, channeling the late artist’s existential exasperation. “Look at us, we are healing/Look at them, their medicine is patented,” Gendel sings. On “DAVE” he instead sounds dire and a little corny in his ruminations. “The drones are reigning hellfire on the Dalai Lama/As English majors have a fight about the Oxford comma,” he bites, and later, “The aliens were gonna visit but they’re gonna wait.”
That song is also the album’s funkiest fusion, plodding along at a start-stop pace that eventually gives way to the album’s dizziest and busiest moment, Gendel’s sax panting circles in the background. Elsewhere, it sounds like Ratner that plays a gliding solo of elongated single notes on “Lof” while Gendel doodles a mantra in the background. Similarly, the open strumming on “Portrait Orchid Gun” by Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento at the end of the album feels like an abrupt program change. These small moments position Gendel’s muted tone as the centerpiece from which things deviate.
Gendel channels a spiritual mysticism in both his music and the way he talks about it. His lyrics shape a vague, flower-child politics and his sounds are cerebral and psychedelic. For 4444, he encourages listening to the record in reverse tracklist order as a sort of secondary study. Doing so doesn’t flesh out a conceptual revelation from the lyrics, but restaging the tracks does reposition the album’s pace and sense of direction. In reverse order, instead of expanding outward, Gendel’s music starts expansive and then narrows in, drilling down meditatively. It’s a strange effect that playing 4444 backwards sounds even more like an artist settling into their voice.


My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad ...

PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad with the good." More and more, though, I'm beginning to wonder if there aren't some holes in that philosophy. Good and bad are, by definition, polar opposites, but whoever first penned this motto forgot to mention the center of the spectrum: things that are neither good, nor bad, just... there. Do you have to take that as well?
After hours of internal deliberation, I've decided you don't. Bland, middling music can often be more offensive than something genuinely awful. If you're hearing something bad, at least emotions and feelings are evoked. Average music, though, just fades into the background. You feel nothing, so you virtually hear nothing; the frequencies are wasted on your ears. You could have used that time to hear something that at least causes some kind of reaction.
With each album, Polly Jean Harvey moves gradually from the barrage of passion of her previous work into the central category. 1993's Rid of Me captured her in her raw environment, setting fires and creating primal rhythms with just her electric guitar. On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.
As inspiration for this album, Harvey spent six months in New York, fully shedding her old wolf's skin for a more stylish, expensive wool-lined jacket. The record begins with "Big Exit," a track that shows Harvey posing as a bored Patti Smith. Granted, the chorus hook is one of her best in recent memory, but even that moment emits a vague feeling of by-product familiarity. "Good Fortune" sustains a similar but even more banal pop sound, with Harvey distinctly recalling Chrissie Hynde, both musically and vocally. And "A Place Like Home" and "We Float" further the tepid attitude, replacing the live drums of the first two tracks with cheap, glossy programmed beats that would feel right at home on a Des'ree record.
The lyrics on Stories from the City are just as average as the music-- so average, perhaps, as to seem much worse than they actually are. On "Big Exit," Harvey feels intimidated by this crazy world, singing, "I want a pistol in my hand/ I want to go to another land." On "This is Love," she barely elaborates on the already mundane title, adding this seemingly non-sequiturial commentary: "Does it have to be a life full of dread?/ Wanna chase you 'round the table, wanna touch your head." Most of the rest of her prose is similarly culled from an elementary rhyming dictionary.
Stories from the City does have a couple of songs interesting enough to almost save it from the desert of mediocrity. "One Line" provides a pleasant musical backdrop for once, with rhythmic muted guitar, a sustained vibraphone, and ethereal background vocals by Thom Yorke. Yorke then takes a gorgeous turn at lead vocals in "This Mess We're In," continuing with a similar cadence, with Harvey singing the chorus over Yorke's wordless crooning. And "Kamikaze" has enough actual aggression and feeling to make it the record's only real standout, featuring a live duplication of a frantic, jazzy jungle beat, rough guitars, and a vocal performance that comes her closest to resembling passion since To Bring You My Love.
But three good songs do not a record make. In the end, Stories from the City ends up just slightly to the right of the dead middle ground. A shame, too, since Harvey once used space and dynamic to make exciting music. Now, more often than not, she uses music to make empty space. Optimistic as I am, though, I'd like to look at it this way: as far between as the moments of enjoyment may be, they're still there, which proves Harvey still has a little bit of the knack left. She may now appreciate style over substance, but she surely still loves making music, even if her sense of conviction is less powerful than it used to be.


All across his 10th album, the more things change, the more Eminem stays the same.

Kamikaze

Released without prior announcement, only a tweet from the rapper saying that he “tried not 2 overthink this 1,” Kamikaze stands in one sense as a no-bullshit return to basics after the pop-minded bloat of last year’s lackluster Revival. It’s also the endlessly self-mythologizing star’s latest excoriation of journalists, perceived rivals, and just about anyone else who thinks his music sucks now. His career has become an exhausting feedback loop, and Kamikaze flies straight into that downward spiral.
Ever since his bedrock trilogy of albums—1999’s The Slim Shady LP, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP and 2002’s The Eminem Show—vaulted the battle-tested Detroit MC to a Grammy-winning commercial juggernaut, Eminem has alternated between gritty boom-bap reboots and slick crossover plays as his cultural impact has waned. Like 2009’s grisly Relapse after 2004’s solipsistic Encore, or 2013’s violently recidivistic The Marshall Mathers LP 2 after 2010’s clumsily motivational Recovery, Kamikaze is Eminem’s latest act of stubbornness in the face of change. Though Kamikaze might part ways with the polish and Beyoncé-grade guests of Revival, it’s yet another empty, intermittently tone-deaf onslaught of technical rap prowess and humorless juvenilia from an artist who once controlled the zeitgeist with ease.
If rap more closely resembled a purely athletic contest, Eminem would still be an Olympian. As a deployer of internal rhyme schemes and sly vocal deliveries, he continues to operate on a rarefied plane, whether spitting in frenetic double-time or sending up today’s sing-songy approaches. “Get this fuckin’ audio out my Audi yo, adios,” he declares on opener “The Ringer,” stringing together something textually clever but utterly meaningless. And when Eminem repeatedly insists he writes his own lyrics, well, what an accomplishment. If what happened with Jay-Z’s likewise-crotchety “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” back in 2009 is any guide, Eminem’s hyper-articulate attacks on mumble-rap might mark not the death of a trendy style as much as its inescapable takeover. When Eminem compares himself to Muhammad Ali, on a joylessly bludgeoning track titled, yes, “Greatest,” the breathless wordplay sounds like it would be a lot of work to duplicate, but he seems to miss out on what’s remarkable about both Ali and, at its best, music. Eminem doesn’t do transcendence.
While Eminem’s verbal dexterity has remained intact, his shortcomings have grown more glaring with the passage of time. When he isn’t unleashing his id, he has, at times, veered toward power-ballad treacle, and “Stepping Stone,” a maudlin tribute to his former group D12, is the prime offender here. When the demons do emerge, the songs aren’t memorable enough to overcome the latest tinges of homophobia and misogyny from a 45-year-old who either knows better or is outrage-trolling for the attention he doesn’t need. Instead of trying to evolve with the culture, he’d rather Make Rap Great Again. On the execrable “Fall,” which has already been disowned by guest vocalist Justin Vernon, Eminem carelessly lobs an anti-gay slur at Tyler, the Creator. Multiple references to domestic violence, on two separate tracks, fail to earn their jokey presence. And while Eminem has long delighted in being impish, the many times Kamikaze presents the idea of someone having a dick in their mouth as the ultimate insult is not only socially dubious but artistically bankrupt and above all: boring. No-holds-barred wordplay is part of hip-hop’s DNA, but this isn’t a reissue from another era or grassroots subcultural expression; it’s a rich and famous and not coincidentally white, straight man in 2018, asserting that he’s about to “rape the alphabet.”
When Eminem complains in one breath about how he wasn’t duly rewarded for an anti-Trump freestyle he did last year, and in the next takes the Trump-like step of labeling the media as his enemy, it’s hard to tell whether his obtuseness is willful or just clueless. In one skit, he goes so far as to intimate that he’s driving to a critic’s house, which isn’t really funny anymore, either. For all of Marshall Mathers’ perpetual outsider posturing, Kamikaze is a tie-in with the upcoming movie Venom, an offshoot of the multibillion-dollar Spider-Man franchise. “Venom,” the closing track, is a rousing-enough recap of Eminem’s career arc, with appropriately slithery rhyme patterns, told through the Marvel story’s device of an alien entity that can enter someone’s bloodstream and become a part of them forever. It hints at how much Eminem might have to gain if he could stop being defensive about his legacy and settle into becoming a legacy act. Ditch the new songs with their schtick and it’d be a perfect late-career highlight to include in a Super Bowl halftime show we might one day endure or a Las Vegas residency he might one day settle for.


Produced entirely by Kanye West, the spare and serrated solo album from Pusha-T is a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus.

Daytona

Sometimes the conveyor belt of hype and rumor slows down long enough to spit out something fully formed. Daytona appears as the long-awaited Pusha-T album we’d all been told to anticipate; his last full-length, 2015’s Darkest Before Dawn, was meant as a teaser to this, the major work. It’s unclear whether there are remnants from early drafts of the album that’s been delayed year after year, or if these songs sprung entirely from the Wyoming of Kanye West’s imagination.
In either case, Daytona is Pusha’s best work as a solo artist, a tightly wound record that doesn’t recapture the highs of peak Clipse, but finally makes ideal use of the now middle-aged rapper’s considerable skills. At just seven songs and 21 minutes, it shirks the bloat and radio concessions of Darkest Before Dawn and, to a greater extent, his 2013 solo debut, My Name Is My Name. The beats—sample-heavy and produced entirely by Kanye—are uniformly excellent and let you see the seams: It’s like an album full of “Bound 2”s, without the sentimentality. And while the slew of G.O.O.D. releases slated for June threatens to swallow everything else alive, Push included, the spare and serrated Daytona should hold up as a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus.
The business has shifted several times since the rapper’s heyday with Clipse and the Neptunes in the mid-2000s—rapping about coke is no longer the shortest route to the genre’s cutting edge—but the memory of that second Bush term gives Pusha’s wheelhouse a certain highbrow appeal; JAY-Z knew he needed to tap into something similar on 2007’s American Gangster to correct for a disastrous, buttoned-up comeback album.
But unlike Mr. Carter, Pusha-T does not have an expansive list of topics, nemeses, styles, and tics. He raps, sometimes wittily and sometimes gravely, about: selling drugs and buying luxurious things with the profits; the peril and paranoia that comes with selling drugs; guilt; and, sometimes, his grudges against Lil Wayne and Drake.
This leaves Pusha open to charges of being one-dimensional, but, really, he’s a specialist: His writing has as much stylistic and syntactical variety as most of his peers, and few are operating at anything close to a comparable level more than two decades into their careers. It’s simply enthralling to hear him twist his tongue around passages like, “Angel on my shoulder, what should we do?/Devil on the other, what would Meek do?/Pop a wheelie, tell the judge to Akinyele/Middle fingers out the ghost, screaming ’Makaveli’”; whether the subject matter is played out is beside the point.
Pusha has made a career being an outlet for celebrated producers’ weirdest beats. There’s nothing on Daytona as avant-garde as the synth-drenched “Trill,” but the tracks here skew grim and steely, luring him into custom-fitted pockets. (Daytona comes out nearly 13 years to the day after Common’s Be, where Kanye pushed his Chicago mentor into lusher, more soulful spaces that were similarly ideal.) Kanye’s involvement in the album comes with its drawbacks: He reportedly paid $85,000 for a last-minute cover art change to a macabre and misguided picture from the late Whitney Houston’s bathroom and drops a MAGA-hatted verse that asks if he’s “too complex for ComplexCon”—unlike most of Pusha’s raps, Ye’s is so tethered to the news cycle that it yanks you out of the illusion. But their musical chemistry is undeniable. The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.
As creatively in-sync with Kanye as Pusha seems to be, he defaults more than once into Jay’s lyrics. On “The Games We Play,” Pusha lapses into Reasonable Doubt, specifically that run from “Politics as Usual”: “Ain’t no stoppin’ the champagne from poppin’/The drawers from droppin’, the law from watchin’.” On that JAY-Z song from more than 20 years ago, the next line is a curt and disgusted “I hate ’em.” Pusha doesn’t end his verse there; he locks back in and nods to his producer: “With ’Ye back choppin’...” “Politics as Usual” was Jay playing the coolheaded hustler, the one who could barely be bothered to come to the studio. But the next time Pusha quotes Jay is on Daytona’s closing song, “Infrared,” and by that point, he’s channeling Jay in weary, skeptical industry observer mode. The song opens with the same line (“The game’s fucked up, nigga’s beats is banging/Nigga, your hooks did it”) that Jay used to open Kingdom Come. It’s clear how Pusha sees himself: yanked from hustling into the record industry but uncompromised in his ethics.
Pusha wastes little time on “Infrared” before diving back into his shots at Drake; there’s a Quentin Miller reference and at least one other jab about ghostwriters, and in context, the anecdote about Jay needing that Annie sample to match Grammys with Will Smith seems pointed.
The real venom is saved for Baby and Wayne, though. Pusha thanks Rick Ross—who appears earlier on Daytona—for holding Baby’s feet to the fire for his alleged exploitation of Cash Money artists: “Salute Ross ’cause the message was pure/He see what I see when you see Wayne on tour/Flash without the fire/Another multi-platinum rapper trapped and can’t retire.” It’s withering, and while it’s likely rooted in fact (the details of Wayne’s lawsuit against Cash Money were unbelievably bleak), it serves primarily to cast Pusha as the savvy one, the one who could face boardroom or back-alley obstacles and come away unscathed. That’s not the whole story, of course. But what Pusha has done is carve out his own corner of rap where he can reign as king for as long as he wants.


A year after Street Halo, the London producer returns with another three-track EP, and this collection pretty much breaks every Burial precedent there is.

Kindred EP

When last year's Street Halo came out, it was met with the same breathless hysteria that has greeted every new morsel of Burial music since Untrue. But you couldn't help but feel that the ghostly two-step master had become a little predictable. Even as the producer experimented with house music on the title track (which he had done previously on "Raver" and "Versus"), it felt as if he were re-using the same sounds and effects. A year later, and with still no sign of a third album, we're treated to another three-track EP. But unlike Street Halo, Kindred, currently available digitally only, breaks nearly every Burial precedent there is, from the 12-minute-long tracks to an new sound design that feels consummately richer than the genius of his earlier work.
Of the three, "Kindred" (12-minute symphony No. 1) will be the most recognizable to Burial die-hards, featuring that same clanking metal-on-metal garage skip-and-swing. But this time something just feels heavier, harder, more devastating. Burial's been credited since the beginning as a prophet tying together UK genres old and new, but there's never been a better argument than "Kindred", which hints at the agility of jungle with the lead-footed heft of dubstep as seen through elliptical garage beats. They tumble and timestretch like vintage Metalheadz underneath smouldering Reese basslines, and the vocals lack Burial's usual phrases, instead choking out syllables smothered by the aural ash and soot that seems to soak the recording in a humongous, unearthly rumbling. As a whole "Kindred" sounds bigger than anything he's done before, an infinitely detailed behemoth that lumbers and shakes the ground beneath it with every little stroke of movement.
"Kindred" is basically a suite in itself, a new kind of tumult that only heightens Burial's usual wrenching sorrow, an ambitious new venture repeated in Kindred's other two tracks. "Loner" outdoes the sad-sack ecstacy of Untrue's similarly housey "Raver"-- for one thing, it's a lot faster-- but it's coated in MDMA residue, its chugging kick-and-snare pattern and almost prog-house pumping chord progression drowning in gloss. That chemical energy lends its fatalism an almost heroic sense of momentum, moving and moving and never quite getting anywhere but into the same empty, desperate silence that swallowed "Kindred". It's a well-timed track, navigating the same obsession with house and techno that's gripping the entire bass music world and turning it into something distinctly Burial, perverting house's speedy metronome (and prog house's politics of bliss) into profound, otherworldly sadness.
But as impressive as those two tracks are, there's no real way to prepare for "Ashtray Wasp", also built on a broken house lope. This time it's overloaded with funereal synths and arpeggios that twirl frantically in anguish as if they had nowhere else to go, saturating the cloudy soundscape with particulate matter so intricate it's a wonder all this sound data can be contained in a single mp3, nevermind a groove in wax. The fluttering effects are only further confused by the bleary smudge of it all, cinematic and grand but stuck in Burial's world of canned frequencies: The locust-swarm effect of the filters is impossibly stirring, far more visceral than perfect clarity ever could have been. It falls apart about seven minutes in before reconstructing into an even more decayed beat, violently wedged apart by static-- recalling the most challenging work of the Caretaker and his vinyl experiments. "Ashtray Wasp" suggests a structural intricacy and awe-inspiring execution from one of electronic music's mopiest producers, and the result might be his definitive track.
It's hard to talk about Kindred-- whether in the context of electronic dance music or just in the Burial discography itself-- without resorting to superlative terms, because it really is just that impressive. It's easy enough to take a talent such as Burial for granted, but Kindred is like a convenient slap in the face, a wake up call. Never before has his music possessed this much majesty, this much command, this much power: The pathos here has moved from sympathetic to completely domineering. The amount of dialog around Burial can be a little hard to swallow sometimes, especially when the guy himself seems so resistant-- or at least indifferent-- to the ongoing intellectualization of his music. But what we get on Kindred isn't some loner unknowingly making genius out of samples from Metal Gear Solid on his Playstation. You might not think of refinement when you think of Burial's productions, but just try to imagine it, and you'll get an idea of the kind of glory that Kindred carries. It still might not be the follow-up to Untrue that everyone's been waiting for, but format feels completely irrelevant. When those beats fall into place on the title track, nothing else matters for the next 30 minutes, until the crackle and fizz of "Ashtray Wasps" finally fades away. Then you put it on again. And again. And again.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the gnarly, psychedelic, and insurrectionary sound of the Portland punk band’s best album.

Youth of America

When Greg Sage roars “it’s no fair” midway through Youth of America, the vowels long and colicky, it’s not exactly a noble moment. Complaining about unfairness rarely is, because even if it’s accurate, it’s still a badge of comfort. “No fair” are petulant words, stagnant words, the conclusion of people who have set up camp in their perceived burdens. “No fair” is not a phrase of a revolution, because fairness is built on shifting sands; it’s not as steely a protest as “unjust” or “wrong.” And the people to whom life truly has been cruelest don’t have the time to complain about it; they’re too busy trying to outmaneuver the system that failed them. Now that’s no fair.
Ronald Reagan talked about fairness a lot. When he wasn’t dismantling corporate accountability, scorning the AIDS crisis, or staging pre-Trumpian dog-whistling rallies, he loved to harangue his audience about what was truly fair. “With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength,” he intoned in his January 1981 inaugural address, “we can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.” In his second inaugural address, in 1985, he talked with a sepia-toned sentimentality about generals dying at Valley Forge, Lincoln pacing the White House, and a lonesome Wild West settler singing the song of America, one “hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair.”
When Portland’s Wipers released their second album in May 1981, the shadow of Reagan’s conservatism was only beginning to spread. But the writing was on the wall: He’d spent his first 100 days shoving through so many revisions to tax policy and restrictions on federal power, he was accused of effectively squashing the concept of an activist government full stop. The sense of selfishness was demoralizing. An anticipatory static filled the air; the specter of “no future,” that familiar credo of punk, wore a Windsor knot.
By this time, also, the “youth” in question had already heard plenty of punk—enough for its most stinging, mutinous qualities to have calcified into a formula. Punk, while still radical in its political messaging, was moving decisively in one direction: shorter, faster. Not everyone was pushing out 21 songs in 35 minutes, like the overachievers in Wire, but bands were doggedly dispatching songs quicker than the punk class before them; this included Wipers’ 1980 debut, Is This Real?, which followed all the spiny punk tropes and, upon release, sank without a ripple. Down in Los Angeles, a movement was brewing around Black Flag, who were about to shift the median with their debut album, Damaged, and its songs barely over the 3-minute mark.
It didn’t take a Rimbaud scholar to see that gloomy, 10-minute, Krautrock-inspired songs would be a tough sell in the early-’80s punk economy. But Sage, a scientific-minded contrarian—he’d started building recording equipment and playing guitar in the third grade after seeing a movie about Thomas Edison—tested his hypothesis anyway. And on Youth of America, Wipers all but acknowledge the absurdity of their approach. You hear every roll of the dice, and the slight inhale of disbelief after they land; it builds the train while it’s already in motion, laying each link of track just before derailment.
Punk had never quite shown its seams like this before, its questioning of itself and its construction; it had never felt like such a righteous search for answers that was more concerned with asking the questions. The simultaneously thriving post-punk and no wave scenes had also taken mallets to the conventions of punk, but they’d had no problem casting aside the politics and guitars, as well. In Youth of America’s six grim, unhurried songs, Sage is weighed by his own dilemmas and asks them overtly: How can he change? What of this world is worth saving, and what possible advice can be wrung from that stone for the next generation? What can be said of this violent country as it enters a new era of turning that contempt inward? Why did he take on this role, anyway, and when will he finally cross the rubicon where his listeners need to save themselves by rebelling against him, already a geriatric punk at 29 years old?
Mirroring Sage’s outlier status: Portland itself. Far removed from the switchboards of American punk—New York, D.C., L.A.—the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t become a rock destination for another decade. Until a Wipers superfan named Kurt Cobain threw a baby into a swimming pool (and copied Sage’s penchant for flannel), the scene was off the grid; it was filled with D.I.Y. savants like Sage who disdained conformity and showed it with clever, cutting music they had no intention to scale. (When the Seattle scene exploded in the early ’90s, and A&R execs descended on seemingly every band in a 200-mile radius, Sage still refused to follow the “grunge” slipstream, famously turning down an opening tour slot for Nirvana.) It was truly a place of creativity for purpose, not product.
To understand Youth of America, it’s best to start at the conclusion. “When It’s Over”—a clear mission statement on the album across a blasphemous six minutes—is, in many ways, the most insurrectionist track on the album: It opens with over three minutes of an anxious, abrasive instrumental. Sage’s guitar wields full narrative reign—his chords open brashly, in the type of rapid churn that Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers mastered. But then, in a surprising upheaval, he adds longer, musing tones that challenge the air over Dave Koupal’s bass and Brad Naish’s drums; soon the guitar has its own wandering spirit, its own melodic refrain, building its power in a direct nod to motorik momentum. The instrument is a clearly defined character, demanding its own experience.
Hearing it feels like opening a window and letting cool air rush in—there was space in punk songs for this, all along? For a full single’s worth of exploratory eloquence from a lead guitar? And for all its wandering, the guitar’s thick, tetchy distortion never wobbles; Sage built his own recording equipment to achieve that steadiness, including his own vacuum tube direct boxes.
Minutes into “When It’s Over,” when the guitar cedes to Sage’s voice, the transition is abrupt enough to almost feel bashful, a second-guessing of the kind of ego that allowed that irreverent open; piano supports his low, Bauhaus-worthy gothic grumble, so deep the ear must strain to make out his laments. “In the land of dreams, I find myself sober/Wonder when it’ll all be over,” he moans. When the guitar skitters back in, it’s at first noisy yet deferential to the words, clanging back on its first motif with tinny, sinister restraint; it feels like a dramatic battle between instrument and vocalist, a battle for the soul of the track—and perhaps the listener’s, too. The stakes rise and never resolve; Naish adds a clawing, claustrophobic pulse. The guitar ultimately regains its full audacity—mirroring Sage’s voice while it also gains intensity, screaming, “Will you be laughing when it’s over?”—and the song ends on its miserable questions, asked at a fever pitch. Nothing is solved. Tensions end flared.
Of the available ways to convey numb detachment from society—many already explored by the inaugural ’77 punk class, from self-identified brothers from Queens to trussed-up hucksters from London—the exhausted disdain in Sage’s voice stands apart. His words on the comparatively poppy “Taking Too Long” offer more of a quiet, paternal disappointment than a scolding. “What was coming from the sky?” Sage demands. Missile or omen, the result is immutable: “You never, ever change your mind.” It’s almost graceful at times in its sour melody, a pinch of sugar dissolving into acid. Throughout the song, it feels like some active condemnation will follow—what was the point of punk if not to call out hypocrites overtly?—but it never comes.
Of course, posting questions and passing judgments alone can backfire. Sage seems to acknowledge this on “Pushing the Extreme,” which has a taunting, declaratory quality absent from much of Youth of America. It’s macabre in a slightly cartoonish way, and makes its most obvious overtures to fully igniting a class war. “Through your mirror there is such vanity/Through the light, it broke to me,” Sage sings, scolding some Patrick Bateman wannabe over ghostly percussive mixing that shoots cymbals around like shrapnel. The sentiment is mirrored with even more gothic intonation in the unapologetically bratty “No Fair,” in which Sage mutters at the rising ruling class—“Take a piece of our lives, didn’t think we’d care?”—over Koupal’s bleeding basslines. In 1981, all the ascendant yuppies—their avarice, selfishness, and pinstripe suits—were prescient targets. This was well before the era would earn its “Decade of Greed” shorthand for its many braided strains of gluttony. And the approach also cuts succinctly into Sage, Koupal, and Naish’s overriding ethos of Youth of America: Rise up now or face your doom.
There’d been many hollow promises of better futures by the ’80s, but the decade’s problems demanded swift and decisive rebellion. In Youth of America’s title track, Sage yells to a generation, his voice raw and unaltered, “The walls are coming down/The walls are crumbling down on you.” It’s somehow simultaneously modest and hubristic to suggest his most useful role is at a lectern, that he is the one who must awaken that fury in others. Amid the deep, convulsing distortion of bass and guitar, he adds a stark political science lesson: “They attack you from the right side/Down the left side.” But that distance quickly collapses: “It is time we rectify this now/ We've got to heal it now.”
The track likewise threatens to collapse on itself midway, in spirals of funhouse feedback and ghostly echoes of melody that suggest psychotropics and exhaustion in equal measure. The post-punk freefall stretches and seethes for nearly two indulgent minutes before the floor drops out, leaving only minimal bass and guitar; Sage stomps back to the mic to intone more civics: “The rich get richer and the poorer get poorer. Now there’s no place to go,” he mutters dourly. The track’s remaining five minutes are an inversion of the kraut- and psych-rock leanings from earlier in the record, when repetition bred power. In “Youth of America,” pointedly, repetition only underscores the futility of inaction: What could these kids expect, if they did nothing? More of the same diminishing returns: Sage groans the title, and his guitar sputters out strangled, pitiful half-lives of the previously robust melody. Koupal and Naish’s rhythm section’s stevedore bass section falters. The third act crumbles exactly as the narrator predicted, leaving the audience to stew in their own complicity. It’s a frantic prophecy of undoing that simply wouldn’t translate to brevity; “Youth of America” defends every moment of its 10 minutes and 27 seconds, maintaining its fearsome intensity and leaving an ominous chill in its wake.
For all of Youth of America’s vigor, its informed despair and pleas for action, the plundering decade ahead continued apace. Wipers’ refusal to follow the punk tides came at a cost; audiences slept on the album in America and most of Europe, despite John Peel’s ardent support; Sage moved to Arizona for no other reason than he liked how it looked from the freeway. Moored in the still-sleepy Pacific Northwest scene, ahead of its time and removed from any notions of commercial viability, it would take years for the record’s now-devoted cult to assemble. But then, sparking widespread, telegenic insurrection isn’t exactly a fair rubric for an album; revolution can be less an eruption than a lighthouse beacon, shining in every direction until it exposes those brave enough to make the journey. The liberation from dark authority Sage begs for isn’t owed; it must be achieved through hardship. Listening to Youth of America today, it still feels like the roar of incoming unrest, of the better world that will have space to rise once we refuse to bow to undeserved power. And each of us must ask ourselves: Are we still young enough to challenge the old guard?

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her fifth solo album, the Stereolab principal highlights the contradictions at the heart of her music, pairing deceptively sweet arrangements with unsparing socio-political critique.

Rooting for Love

Laetitia Sadier is a master of deceptive sweetness, smuggling unflinching politics into an indie-rock landscape not known for its ethical fortitude. In Stereolab she wrapped lyrics about war, capitalist collapse, and fascism into soaringly groovy pop songs, while Little Tornados, her group with filmmaker David Thayer, tackled exploitative economic systems over honeyed guitar licks. Her juxtapositions have never sounded more jarring—or uncomfortable—than they do on Rooting for Love, Sadier’s fifth solo album and first since Stereolab reunited in 2019.
“Don’t Forget You’re Mine” exemplifies the record’s subversive audacity. It is, ostensibly, a gentle pop song; its dulcet melody, bright chord changes, and lush strings are reminiscent of the lounge music and ’60s pop that were among Stereolab’s myriad influences. But the lyrics—written by Véronique Vincent, of veteran Belgian experimentalists Aksak Maboul—paint a sickening portrait of femicide, leading to the stomach-churning line “A good slap is what you need/A good slap is what you want/Take that, take that/Get up, get up, babe.” The contrast between musical mood, lyrical darkness, and Sadier’s almost standoffish tone—a model of cool, melodic mystery—is genuinely unsettling, a reminder of the singer’s long history as a politically charged disruptive force in modern music.
This isn’t the only moment that recalls Sadier’s storied past. Stereolab covered so much ground over their two-decade recording career—try to name a genre that the band didn’t dabble in—and Sadier, as the band’s singer, songwriter, lyricist, and co-founder, was so integral to their sound that trying to move her solo work from under Stereolab’s shadow feels like an awkward parlor game. Perhaps realizing this, Sadier leans into her history on Rooting for Love: The album’s palette of humming synths, wandering bass, gentle vibraphone clatter, and intricate backing vocals suggest Stereolab with the guitars turned down.
“Panser L’inacceptable” hints at the space-age Gallic pop of Mars Audiac Quintet; “La Nageuse Nue” reflects the jazz-influenced dreaminess of Dots and Loops, and “Une Autre Attente” assimilates Margerine Eclipse’s wounded drive. Straying further afield, “Who + What” has a modish trip-hop beat not atypical of Stereolab, exactly, but not quintessential either, while “The Inner Smile” rides out on a thrilling flute freak that suggests (very) early Kraftwerk, rather than Stereolab’s more typical kosmische influences Neu! and Can.
The songwriting is distinguished by its bite and brevity. “New Moon” boasts a chorus as sharp as biting down on a lemon, while the gorgeous about-faces of the shifting chord changes of “Une Autre Attente” suggest the twists and turns of a classic Hitchcock film morphed into a perfect pop package.
What leaves a lasting impression, though, is the quiet fury of an ideologically engaged, masterful pop dramatist who understands the power of understatement and artful contrast. “Cloud 6,” the album’s closer, has a similar force to “Don’t Forget You’re Mine.” A gently cycling keyboard melody serves as a base for vibraphone, strings, and a coiled circle of backing vocals, as Sadier sings about power and pocket knives, before killing the song—and the album—stone dead with the venomous closing line “I’m not fucking around/You’re halfway dead.” It’s a magisterial mic drop by an artist who never lost faith in the power of pop to shock and delight.


Algiers mix the soul-powered activism of early '70s Motown with the proto-punk fury of the MC5, the synth primitivism of Suicide, and the Biblically charged drama of the Bad Seeds. On their Matador debut, they project the righteous indignation required of all great protest music.

Algiers

Algiers are a heavy band, though not so much in sound as in effect—they’re getting shit off their chest and piling it directly onto yours. Raised in the American South, they personify the foot-stomped physicality, call-and-response communiques, and outsized oration of the church, but their music is the anti-gospel. Rather than promote uplift, out-of-body ecstasy, and communion with the heavens, Algiers weigh you down with the burden of American history, a despair born of centuries of systemic oppression, and the soul-crushing futility of hoping for a change that never comes. Though they project the righteous indignation required of all great protest music, their music doesn’t so much represent a raised fist as a shoulder aching from the stress of trying to keep it aloft.
On their website, Algiers present a crazy quilt of musical and philosophical touchstones, which include everyone from Malcolm X and Angela Davis to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Basquiat to Public Enemy and Ian Svenonius. Their music is likewise a pastiche of transgressive rock signifiers: the soul-powered activism of early '70s Motown, the proto-punk fury of the MC5, the synth primitivism of Suicide, the biblically charged drama of the Bad Seeds. But if the 11 songs on Algiers’ self-titled debut draw from familiar record-collector reference points, they’re radicalized by the context in which they’re being presented. Algiers are hardly the first biracial band to emerge from the indie-rock industrial complex, however, they are distinguished by their eagerness to make discussions of race the foundation of their ideological agenda, the gasoline-soaked fuse that sets their songs alight. For Algiers, signing to Matador isn’t just a means to reach more people; it’s an opportunity to thrust the modern African-American experience in the faces of an audience who rarely have to grapple with it.
Though steeped in Southern tradition, Algiers could not exist without all mod cons: with frontman Franklin James Fisher now based in New York, and guitarist Lee Tesche and bassist Ryan Mahan situated in London, the trio pieced the album together through transatlantic file swaps, atop bed tracks built through programmed beats or their own hyperactive hands and feet. But while the band have taken the somewhat inevitable step of recruiting a proper drummer—Bloc Party’s Matt Tong—for their current North American tour, the songs on Algiers hardly feel like rough sketches begging for full-band embellishment. The brittle beats are crucial to establishing the album’s often suffocating atmosphere: on the mournful opener "Remains", a chain-gang stomp provides a none-too-subtle evocation of America’s slave-trading past, while Fisher’s anti-television invective highlights the modern form of captivity that’s replaced it; the we-shan’t-overcome dejection of "Blood" is chillingly framed by a tambourine rattle and handclap that feel like lashes from a whip. "Four hundred years of torture, four hundred years a slave," Fisher seethes on the latter song, as Tesche’s spasmodic guitar squeals emit sparks. But the noise ultimately relents, and the beat goes on, all while Fisher ruefully repeats the line "all my blood’s in vain."
Though Algiers’ debut is dropping in the midst of a flashpoint in American race relations, Fisher’s lyrics avoid ripped-from-the-headlines reportage for a more existential angst. These songs were written before Ferguson and Baltimore, but they ultimately exist to remind us that such flare-ups aren’t the shocking aberrations that news networks make them out to be, but the inevitable, recurring spillover of a frustration that’s been simmering for centuries and will continue to in perpetuity. Accordingly, the savvily sequenced Algiers ebbs and flows between moments of gritted-teeth tension and furious release, its solemn, confession-booth ruminations offset by heart-racing, steeple-toppling rave-ups—like "And When You Fall", "Old Girl", and the planet-rockin’ "Irony. Utility. Pretext."—that fulfill the prophecy of a power-music electric revival anticipated by some fellow Atlantans 15 years ago. While their messaging can sometimes be overshadowed by pulpit-thrashing theatrics (see: the provocatively titled but erratic "Black Eunuch"), Algiers can also harness their jittery energy to sublime effect: the piano-powered dub strut "But She Was Not Flying" contrasts the album’s most relaxed, easy-going rhythm with Fisher’s most incendiary, exasperated vocal performance, representing the mid-album peak where Algiers truly find their groove.
Despite their gravely serious demeanor and fierce intellect—this band doesn’t so much give interviews as present thesis defenses—Algiers ultimately value accessibility: from the participatory hand-clapped hysterics to their callback-ready refrains to their conflation of church congregations and circle pits, these songs beg for audience engagement and strength-in-numbers support. And if the album proves unrelentingly pessimistic in its worldview, Algiers do at least leave us with the faintest of silver linings. As the closing untitled instrumental takes the form of a thick, disorienting ambient fog, an early-'70s sample of Chicago pastor T.L. Barrett leading his Youth for Christ choir in an exultant chorus gradually fades into the mix and eventually overwhelms the track, as if to chase away the album’s dense, dark cloud cover with a ray of light. Algiers are never so naive as to assure us that a change is gonna come but, as that brief denouement suggests, in their hardened hearts, they haven’t completely given up on the possibility.


Where 2021’s Half God was a farewell to the Manhattan of Wiki’s youth, the follow-up lacks that record’s deliberate agenda, channeling its freewheeling energy into a free-associative writing style.

Cold Cuts

The most enigmatic element of Wiki’s raps, dating back to his teenaged years with the New York revival outfit Ratking, is a sleight of hand bordering on caginess. As a narrator, Wiki proudly personifies his hometown; as in the work of earlier Downtown fixtures Joseph Mitchell and Lucy Sante, it can be unclear whether he’s testifying for himself or on behalf of his nine million neighbors. It goes beyond his inflection, his hyper-local references, his day-in-the-life chronicles and not-in-my-backyard territorialism. On his most vibrant outing, 2017’s No Mountains in Manhattan, these cohered into a kinetic panorama, a bustling cityscape of sights, sounds, and scents. When he reduces his scope, it can be difficult to separate Wiki from his environs: Even if he’s the loudest, most animated man on the street, he’s still a man on the street.
A half-Irish, half-Nuyorican man raised on the Upper West Side, Wiki attended prep school in Brooklyn before settling in Chinatown; his most introspective raps probe the contradictions of home and identity, though his habit of evoking New York via aesthetic touchstones—the clatter of the F train, the gooey melt of a bacon, egg, and cheese—can feel reductive, especially given the insular spaces he occupies. If 2021’s Half God was a farewell to the Manhattan of his youth, the album’s tension lay in its bitterness, Wiki’s abiding wish to wrest back the city from gentrifying arrivistes. The follow-up, Cold Cuts, is both a concession and a step forward in which Wiki and producer Subjxct 5 cut a path through the rubble of de Blasio’s New York.
Half God was a difficult record not so much for its anger as for its politics. Surveying the city’s ferocious churn, Wiki defaulted into wary nativism, voicing a decades-late plea for authenticity. Cold Cuts lacks its predecessor’s deliberate agenda, channeling its freewheeling energy into a free-associative writing style. Its structure is an inversion of Telephone Booth’s minute-long snapshots: Unbroken by hooks, Wiki’s long-winded monologues are shaped by internal rhyme schemes rather than narrative trajectories. On “Jersey Sub,” a half-remembered NBA broadcast frames Wiki and Subjxct’s origin story; around the four-minute mark, Wiki reverts to more familiar territory, expounding on Northeastern weather patterns and Keith Murray’s Jive catalog.
Even the most straightforward tracks are suffused with kaleidoscopic dissonance. Where “Butta Leather” is on its surface an earnest ballad, its pivots reveal a squalid underbelly, volleying between intimate confessions and graphic sex fantasies. On “The Fonz,” Wiki’s gnarled verses unfold like oral history, careening asides disclosing his characters’ uneasy alliances. There’s a Kendrick-esque wistfulness to Wiki’s adolescent flashbacks—grade-school pals inevitably diverge into shitty adulthoods—but the song’s lived-in quality is a function of its visual referents. His cooked Wallabees are “butter-colored, prob’ly smothered, stained wine on the sides”; an old neighbor “went from the sloppy little jit to papi with the lisp, gold poppin’ out his lip.”
Like all of Wiki’s music, Cold Cuts drifts through a hazy past, yet its collaborations avoid rose-tinted melancholy. Subjxct 5 approaches Swizz Beatz and Dame Grease’s turn-of-the-century production with academic reverence, emulating their synths and bass drums on “Bones” and “Evergreen.” While Subjxct is an adept mimic of their imposing tempos and glossy instrumentals, his mixes lack their digitized precision, playing like DIY tributes to New York’s blockbuster era. “Ricky” recalls the Neptunes’ stuttering guitars on “Luv U Better”; “One More Chance” follows the “Hard Knock Life” formula with a choppy snare and choral sample. Subjxct barks interstitial ad-libs like a young Kay Slay, further rooting his arrangements in the early 2000s.
In spite of the shotgun approach, Wiki takes the occasion to document New York’s ongoing desecration. Although “Come Home” is a rigorous municipal dispatch, it’s burdened by the weary ambassador schtick. After stilted attempts to interrogate his own ambivalence, Wiki arrives at a diagnosis of spiritual decline: “This city, it brings the most pretentious, we all feel we got the most perspective, but is it so?/Could be broke, no diploma, still walk around with our nose up, like we know something y’all don’t.” He imagines the city through an immigrant’s eyes, then bemoans the proliferation of $20 avocado toast. His grievances land with a sullen flatness—but mostly, his attempts to condense New York’s essence into four-minute rap songs feel increasingly futile.
Wiki’s autobiographical material goes down easier than his man-of-the-people raps, although the stream-of-consciousness creates a glancing effect. “My Life” features some of Cold Cuts’ most intricate rhymes, recalling youthful indiscretions and his indoctrination into rap music (“It was Biggie, it was Christopher, that got me through high school/‘Suicidal Thoughts’ got me, I was suicidal”). The memoiristic fragments are piercing, his distinctive language delivered with a casual matter-of-factness. But they’re pieced together like a mosaic, relayed in jittery narrative leaps like a stand-up doing crowdwork. Across six and a half minutes, the gut-punch climax never materializes; as ever, it’s tough to distinguish Wiki from his surroundings and influences.
As tethered as Cold Cuts is to the Y2K era, its supporting cast places it on the cutting edge. In place of his usual collaborators—wordy old souls like Your Old Droog, Lansky Jones, and Remy Banks—a roster of abstract performers embellishes Wiki’s idiosyncrasies. The preternaturally breezy YL floats through the opening verse of “Ricky”; a muttering Big Ouee all but ignores Subjxct’s drum pattern on “Phone Calls.” On “Silent Meeting,” Wiki trades road stories with DJ Lucas, an erratic rapper from rural Massachusetts. Their frenetic back-and-forth is enrapturing, and it’s humbling—after all these years—to hear Wiki play the straight man.
Tri-state rap evolves in cycles of fragmentation and recombination: today, scenes coalesce around affinity as opposed to neighborhoods or traditions. Ambassador that he is, Wiki is happy to meet Papo2oo4 and Hunnaloe on their turf, nerding out over long-extinct designer brands and unsung DatPiff triumphs. More flamboyant and less technical than Wiki, these rappers have adopted his eccentricities—unpretentious nostalgia, quixotic seediness, feverish grins belying latent gloom—and pushed them in bolder, weirder directions. This is where New York’s headed; Wiki is wise to tag along.


The ferocious 21-year-old shapeshifter comes through with one of the hardest rap records of the year.

Nasty

Rico Nasty is happy to try on different skins in order to become comfortable in her own. Like Eminem, Nicki Minaj, or MF DOOM, she compartmentalizes aspects of her personality—her softer side, her anxious side, and her unapologetically brusque side—as a coping mechanism, playing different roles wherever necessary: mostly the pop-trap femme Tacobella and the nu metal rap rager Trap Lavigne. Through these characters, she explores a greater range of sounds, dabbling in bedroom pop, melodic trap, and a bruising style of forechecking rap, drawing inspiration from Grimes, Rihanna, and Slipknot. Her sixth mixtape and first under Atlantic Records, Nasty, is her most complete performance yet, an unrelenting, elbow-throwing mosh-rap record about defending your turf.
Trap Lavigne’s punk edge dominates Nasty, but the tape offers a head-spinning mix of singsong escapades and violent thrasher anthems. It aggregates her personas to present a clearer self-portrait; it feels like a conscious decision to sequence the delicate “Why Oh Why,” her most bashful song, and the growler “Rage,” her most unflappable one, back to back. After four years on the mixtape circuit, she finally achieves equilibrium here, balancing her light and dark sides, at various points self-conscious, thoughtful, humbled, combative, fearless, audacious, and vitriolic.
Rico likes to use her raps to pummel her foes into submission, and it’s impossible to ignore the sheer force she can muster. But the real heaviness comes from the way her writing complements her cadences as she constantly shifts the weight of her flows. She can bark like a drill sergeant or expand into a caricature, but the emphasis is dictated by the dynamism of her rhyme schemes, as on this passage from “Rage”: “I don’t seek shit for a reaction, want action, I’m snappin’/Stop with the racket, Balenciaga my fashion,” each phonetic sound snapping into the next. It’d be all for naught if her lyrics didn’t facilitate these sort of performances; Rico is as precise in her writing as she is a commanding presence. On “Hockey,” she delivers pragmatic advice through staccato phrases stressing each word: “Make sure that you be careful, ’cause somebody’s always watching/You’ll be surprised what people do when they ain’t got no options.”
Rico’s songs are often about proximity. This can be literal (people invading her space, guys attempting—and usually failing—to get at her) or figurative (window shoppers watching her pockets, the widening gap between her and her competitors). A song like “Trust Issues,” makes apparent her desire to keep people at arm’s length. “If you lookin’ for me, I be everywhere you can’t go,” she raps, later adding, “I got trust issues, don’t nobody get too close.” She has a self-described “sixth sense” for fake bitches and broke niggas. She is usually thinking about or attempting to figure out where others are positioned in relation to where she is, and she often navigates these spaces with either a brolic sense of indestructibility or a shrugging nonchalance. These frequent negotiations of space are exhilarating, like watching an apex predator discovering its place in the food chain.
Her wig-splitting flows are only bolstered by Kenny Beats, who produced nearly half the mixtape. His work can vary, incorporating everything from scuzzy guitars to playful synths, all with hi-hat-heavy seismic drum kits that quake beneath Rico’s rumbling voice. On the opener, “Bitch I’m Nasty,” Rico surges into the space vacated by his whirring noises. “Countin’ Up” transposes and interpolates Noreaga’s “Superthug,” darkening the original Neptunes synths to accommodate Rico’s snarled barbs. Elsewhere, the beats provide a splash of color. “Pressing Me” feels slick enough to be right at home on Rae Sremmurd’s latest. As it buzzes in an out of focus in her rearview, Rico seems only moderately inconvenienced by the parade of her rivals’ exes and boyfriends presenting themselves before her.
Rico’s style is punchy but there are more than jabs; while many of Nasty’s best moments are its, well, nastiest, it can also be sweet and sassy. On “Oreo” she slips in and out of Auto-Tune: “Before you cross a bad bitch, boy you better look both ways,” she warns. The Chipmunk hook on “Won’t Change” is reminiscent of Nicki’s lively Barbie turns. On “Ice Cream,” she compares thirsty dudes in her mentions to kids at an ice cream truck, ignoring their advances unless they can “sponsor” her. Carefree and brazen, the song opens with all-time impudence: “With some white bitches screaming YOLO/Lemonade for the shade, Jesus saves, I don’t.”
But Nasty’s most vulnerable song comes toward the end: “Why Oh Why” is a sugar trap confection that encourages people to pursue their dreams while wondering aloud if that pursuit is really worth it. “I been havin’ mood swings, sayin’ shit that I can’t take back/I got all this money but I wanna go back,” she sings on the track, wary of the lurking fame monster but resigned to her path. “They keep on askin’ where the old me at/For the last time, she ain’t never comin’ back.” It’s a moment that shows personal growth often comes at a price. But across these 14 songs, Rico Nasty shakes off haters—and her own self-doubt—by refusing to settle for less.


The former Wild Beasts singer embarks on a new direction on his soul-searching solo debut, stripping back his songwriting to a reverent hush.

Diviner

The British singer-songwriter Hayden Thorpe released “Diviner” in late February 2019, just a year after the final performance of his band Wild Beasts. From its stark opening chords and breathy first line—“I’m a keeper of secrets, pray do tell”—the song sounded markedly personal. With little more than his stately countertenor and humble piano, Thorpe harnessed the energy of quiet solitude and proceeded to pitch that emotion skyward until the music felt bathed in a dim light. After more than a decade with Wild Beasts, “Diviner” pointed to a different direction for Thorpe.
That eponymous single opens Thorpe’s debut solo album, which is fitting not just because it was the first song he wrote after Wild Beasts announced their split; it is the central thesis and shining example of his solo music. This 10-song collection was written largely at home on his own piano, which he’s referred to as a “totem.” But you could also think of the instrument as his anchor.
Diviner is wholly rooted in stripped-down songwriting and reverent hush; its tonal range is decidedly limited. Thorpe and producer/collaborator Leo Abrahams do flesh out some of the piano pieces with muted guitar, drums, and electronics, in an attempt to break Diviner out of its two dimensions: “Straight Lines” adds an understated funk to what’s essentially an elegy for the inevitable end of all relationships. But the layering of contrasts doesn’t always work. Songs like “Earthly Needs” and “Love Crimes” varnish Thorpe’s piano with the kind of disco-pop patina that marked 2016’s Boy King, yet there’s nothing quite so brash or ornate here, so instead we get what sounds like a hopelessly introspective Boy George singing about “emotional jujitsu” and “living a life of love crime.” Chalk it up to the pitfalls of unabashedly baring one’s interior life while writing a pop album.
Thorpe makes up for his more dubious sojourns when he lets his anchor steady him. The second half of Diviner ditches the opening half’s attempts at levity and delivers some of the record’s most impactful music. The conviction of “In My Name” is audible in its ringing chords and whispers. His unusually expressive vocal melody brings depth to “Anywhen,” while the piano suggests the rippling pulse of a Nils Frahm performance. Such standouts aren’t entirely devoid of their own small shortcomings, like the awkward line, “Now when I think of us, I pretty much self combust.” But there’s a charm to these lyrics that’s distinctly Thorpe’s; even a loaded word like “collusion,” sung with a kind of dejected swagger, is freed from its obvious overtones.
Diviner is concerned with the passage of time and reckoning with the past, and parts of it are rooted quite deeply in Thorpe's own history. His 2013 cover of “Goodbye Horses” and Wild Beasts’ Boy King closer “Dreamliner” are early incarnations of the sound he explores here. The idea for a solo album came to him while playing the piano at his father's house, which he'd learned on as a boy; the fluttering ambient piece “Spherical Time” dates back to a composition he started at the age of 16. “A world is waiting for us outside,” Thorpe sings at the album’s end, on “Impossible Object,” as if acknowledging that he’s spent too long cooped up in his head. He has spoken of Diviner as “a self-help album,” and to that end, some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize.


The English folk maven sounds spry as ever, leading a light-footed exploration of traditional forms that also tips toward classic psychedelia.

Heart’s Ease

Shirley Collins celebrated her 85th birthday on July 5, and even during the COVID-19 pandemic, her neighbors unrolled a polite but lively celebration of their local heroine. Circled by onlookers, an accordionist, and Morris dancers outfitted in bells and traditional garb, Collins sat in a shaded doorway, applauding the scene with enthusiasm. It was a fitting tribute to a woman who has dedicated her life to preserving English folk culture.
This convivial spirit reverberates across Collins’ new record, Heart’s Ease, her second after a break from music that lasted for nearly 40 years. Her absence was marked by the heartbreak of infidelity, but after reclaiming confidence in her voice, she returned in 2016 with Lodestar. On Heart’s Ease, Collins is spry as ever, leading a light-footed exploration of English folk traditions that also tilts toward classic psychedelia.
Heart’s Ease is soft but crisp, like freshly laundered sheets stretched along a line. Collins sounds at ease across the album, a typical hodge-podge of English folk styles: a traditional favorite (“Barbara Allen”), a working song (“Canadee-I-O”), a cheery dance number (“Orange in Bloom”). But Collins’ liner notes shape an autobiographical arc. She sang a version of “Rolling in the Dew” as a schoolgirl, and she learned opener “Merry Golden Tree” from Almeda Riddle while assisting Alan Lomax on his field-recording trip through the American South in 1959 and 1960. She adapted “Whitsun Dance” from a poem by record producer Austin John Marshall, inspired by his empathy for the elderly widows who gathered to dance at the Cecil Sharp House, the English folk music preservation organization where she often performed. In using Heart’s Ease to transmit other semi-forgotten bits of history, Collins covertly tells her own.
Heart’s Ease is beautifully rendered, presenting Collins’ voice in reverent focus amid acoustic guitars, mandolin, and the occasional fiddle. “Sweet Greens and Blues,” an exemplary number about savoring a quiet and happy life, gets a playful lift from a touch of slide guitar in the background. Picking in his typical rolling style, guest guitarist Nathan Salsburg adds another sylvan layer. Collins sings the frosty “Locked in Ice” with such somber clarity as to make the song sound autobiographical. The tune’s backing drifts of whispery cymbals and spacey electric guitar recall the haze of old memories, giving the song a slight psychedelic wriggle.
Britfolk aficionados have enthusiastically embraced Collins’ return to the public field, and the relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here. Having spent her life preserving the who-when-why of songs from history’s further reaches, she uses Heart’s Ease to apply that scrutinizing lens to herself. The impression she leaves is rich: Collins waits until the end of the album to stretch out with “Crowlink,” inspired by her own seaside ruminations. The piece recalls the woolier corners of 1971’s No Roses, her marvelous psych-rock foray with the Albion Country Band (an outfit that included her former husband). Her voice emerges amid the sounds of seabirds, crashing surf, and hurdy-gurdy and harmonium drone, winking at a sense of adventure undiminished by advanced years.

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After roughly a decade of slowly built, home-studio sonics, this well-liked band rides off into the Modesto sunset with the release of this album.

Just Like the Fambly Cat

For the latest and apparently lastest in Grandaddy's catalog of creatively spelled album titles, frontman Jason Lytle turned to Ma Joad. "We was always one thing-- we was the fambly-- kinda whole and clear," says The Grapes of Wrath matriarch. "An' now we ain't clear no more." Modesto, Calif.-based Grandaddy, hailing from the same illusory promised land barely endured by John Steinbeck's Okies, retravel their signature space-pop terrain on fourth and final album, Just Like the Fambly Cat, demanding and often rewarding attention like so many prose poems about goddamn turtles.
Throughout Fambly Cat, Lytle's slow-build home-studio sonics offer subtle textures, whether the sad-eyed Atari beeps and Books-ish spoken-word samples of opener "What Happened..." or the dolorous opera singer pledging never to return in bittersweet finale "Shangri La (Outro)". Wherever there's a man inventing a guitar-based crunchy cereal, Lytle'll be there. Wherever a starchild's strumming acoustic and Peter's robbing Paul to pay Korg, you'll see Lytle's formerly bearded mug.
It's all vaguely familiar, but Lytle's fine-grained production pops a freshmaker or two into the mix. Tracks fold and refold onto themselves, sprouting unexpected codas, like the "Wicked Game" acoustic-guitar noodles at the end of energetic teenage-dream slapstick (and first single) "Jeez Louise", or the growl'n'yawp pet sounds at the end of the hazy "The Animal World". Four songs clock in at over six minutes, each featuring leisurely escalating swoonscapes rather than proggish movement changes or noodly improv. So the honeyed verses of "Where I'm Anymore" melt into a lush, 1970s AM-pop "meow-meow" chorus, which in turn eddies into surging guitar.
Lyrically, there's some endearing nonsense about the journey of a lost cat, but clearly it's Grandaddy that's really moving on. In his sweetened, beatific falsetto, Lytle describes faded summers, ironic ice cream trucks, fear of failure, and a prodigal son's love for his mother, once dipping into the dark void ("Nothing rad/ Nothing right/ Nothing I'll feel tonight") of pathological intoxication. Sometimes it's as if Lytle is singing out of nostalgia for a future that never came true: A world where Grandaddy ironed out its inessential bits and made an album comprising solely the band's many moments of glossy low-key bedazzlement-- where Pete Yorn and Saves the Day opened for them.
"I don't wanna be the story of the guy who tried," Lytle sighs flatly on "Guide Down Denied", the turning point of the album. From here on, the songs find silver linings and beguiling hooks. Simple truths come hard-earned, given depth by Lytle's luminous instrumental touches: "You don't have to be alone anymore," he suggests on "Campershell Dreams", and it's like a fucking revelation. Energetic "Disconnecty" looks ambiguously at solo flight, while "This Is How It Always Starts" shimmers into whiskey oblivion, before doom-laden "Shangri-La (Outro)" confirms, dude's never coming back.
No grapes, no wrath, but, like Steinbeck's lil' novel, Just Like the Fambly Cat is a quest for hope. On the disc's catchiest song, perky "Elevate Myself", Lytle finally ceases his self-torture, eschewing the pop conveyor belt in favor of self-actualization: "I'd rather make an honest sound/ And watch it fly around/ And then be on my way." It's not how the world ends, but it's how a fambly-- of men, of fans, and of robots-- quietly crumbles. No more false Shangri-La: Like any self-respecting technophobe savant, Lytle's moving to Montana.