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 devastating and sublime debut from one of the most outstanding voices and songwriters in country music.

Infamous Angel

When Iris DeMent was a baby, her father staged a wildcat strike—meaning a strike without the backing or safety of a union—at the Emerson Electric plant in Arkansas. He stood for a year on the picket line before the whole thing collapsed in 1964, sending his family of 16 scrambling for a new home. They packed up everything they had and hastily relocated to Buena Park, California, and then Sacramento. Iris’ father found work as a gardener and a janitor, and her mother raised the family in extreme hardship. When things grew unbearably difficult, as they often did, Iris’ mother Flora Mae sat down at the piano to sing.
Iris’ childhood was Pentecostal, which meant church, stark moral lines, and lots of gospel. Music was ever-present: It was a connection to the Arkansas Delta they’d left behind and a vent for repressed feelings. Her older sisters formed a gospel group known as the DeMent Sisters and recorded one album. Her father played fiddle at dances and in church and her family passed the hymnal book around every week and harmonized. The first secular voices Iris heard were Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, but not until she was 5 years old. Before then, it was just her own voice, her mother’s, and the hymnal book. “She told me, before she died, singing is praying,” DeMent said of her mother, who died in 2011. “I find that songwriting is praying, too.”
DeMent didn’t begin writing her own songs or recording them until she was in her twenties. By then, she was living in Topeka, Kansas, cleaning houses and waitressing. Once in a while, to make extra money, she sang at nightclubs and bars. It stirred something in her, a nameless desire that she finally put a name to when she signed up for a creative writing course at Washburn College. She had always been intensely shy, even bashful, but, as she told Terry Gross in 2015, “when the songs started coming to me, I felt I didn’t have the option to hide.” She wanted to be a singer and a songwriter, and she wanted her music in the world. She would write her own songs and record them, no matter if no one liked them, no matter if everyone laughed. So she borrowed her brother’s guitar and sat down to write “Our Town.”
Nearly 30 years later, the song’s been passed around like a church plate—you could hear it on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” on the series finale of Northern Exposure. DeMent writes from the perspective of a woman watching her small town dwindle and slip into the past. It’s not a novel lens—Americana and country music are full of the regrets of the small-towners who feel left behind, who understand that the bustle and business of living is something happening elsewhere, that they are the supporting characters of their own lives.
But DeMent’s version of this old trope stands out in part because of its unsentimental bleakness. The first line of the song—“And you know the sun’s setting fast”—plunges us mid-sentence into a world where death is swiftly approaching. DeMent’s verses are simple and spare, like all of her writing. She stops to note when she had her babies and where her parents are buried, takes a glance at the bar where she met her lover “on one hot summer night,” and moves on. It could be any small town in America in the past 60 years, which is precisely the point. By the song’s end, the narrator has set off for parts unknown (“but I don’t wanna go”) and the sense of desolation is overwhelming.
The other reason, of course, that people were spooked to attention by “Our Town” was DeMent’s voice. It is a tremulous wail, a disruptive vibration that shakes and rattles the spaces that attempt to contain it. When she sings, she often contorts her face into a comical grimace, like a small girl scolding her doll. People have described her voice as “childlike,” but the wisdom in her delivery is far too grave, too matter-of-fact to ascribe to a child. It is the clarion voice of someone who has been singing to survive unimaginable hardship since they were little and who has never stopped to consider, even once, how they might sound to others.
When DeMent’s career began, listeners often assumed she had been raised in some Appalachian holler or on a dirt farm instead of an Orange County suburb. In this confusion, she was like many artists associated with American roots music: John Fogerty, for example, from Berkeley, or Buck Owens from Bakersfield; Dwight Yoakam from Los Angeles, or Gillian Welch from Manhattan. Like those artists, DeMent’s connection was more spiritual than geographical. She might have moved hundreds of miles away, but she only had to open her mouth for everyone to hear the Pentecostal Arkansas Delta living inside her.
Things moved fairly quickly for DeMent once she decided on singing. In 1988, she moved to Nashville; the folk label Rounder handed her a record contract shortly after. Her debut Infamous Angel was released in 1992 to universal acclaim, and less than a year later, someone played a demo for Lenny Waronker at Warner Brothers, who just as promptly bought her out of her Rounder contract. DeMent has been touring and releasing records at a steady clip ever since, save for a dry spell in the 2000s when she got married, battled depression, and emerged with 2012’s stunning Sing the Delta.
DeMent’s story—in its simple turns and clean lines—shares a little with John Prine’s, an artist with whom she will forever be linked. Like Prine, DeMent wrote some of her most indelible and beloved songs on her very first try. DeMent’s first two songs on Infamous Angel were “Our Town” and then “Let the Mystery Be.” If it is a cliché to note when an artist arrives “fully formed,” it is nonetheless still a shock when a brand-new artist steps to a stage, clears their throat, and then seems to say with their first words precisely what they’ve been waiting a lifetime to say.
“Let the Mystery Be” is an astonishing, sui generis accomplishment—a breezy song about not knowing where you go after you die. At first, DeMent sets out the terms of the great beyond in the simplest and folksiest imaginable language—“Everybody’s wondering what and where they all came from”—before considering the various options before her. In her patience, she sounds like she’s refereeing a particularly intractable family argument. She touches lightly on atheism (“Some say once you’re gone, you’re gone forever”) and on animism (“Some say that they’re coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas”) before returning, again and again, to the serenity of not knowing. “I think I’ll just let the mystery be,” she sings, the sweet shrug audible in her voice.
Among countless other things, the song also offers a plainspoken accounting for her own Pentecostal childhood, a way of sifting through what she will keep and what she’s leaving behind. Over the years, she’s repeatedly expressed gratitude for that culture, for the exposure to gospel and the deep spiritual well that nourished her, but she has spoken just as often of learning to leave behind its dogma. On “Let the Mystery Be,” she dispenses with damnation and purgatory and parses out the kernel she knows she will treasure (“I believe in love and I live my life accordingly”). It’s like watching someone discover their guiding philosophy in real time every time you play it.
She revisited this territory on 2012’s “The Night I Learned How Not to Pray,” which retold with harrowing simplicity the death of her friend’s baby brother. “I was sure if I prayed hard enough that God would make it right,” she sings. When her efforts are unsuccessful (“I knew that it was over when my sister slammed that phone against the wall”) she learns a hard lesson, one she keeps from her family: “God does what he wants to anyway.”
Irreconcilable loss is DeMent’s great theme, and it resounds across Infamous Angel. On “These Hills,” a nostalgic visit to the countryside of the narrator’s youth quickly becomes a deathbed vision of paradise lying just beyond. Unlike Johnny Cash, she doesn’t raise the fear of hellfire. On her cover of the Depression-era standard “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” heaven is just some place where you’ll finally get space to yourself. In her writing, death is nothing special, just another place humans go.
But there is also nothing storybook about her writing. DeMent’s best songs lean into the crippling heartache of loss with the same sobriety with which they examine the mysteries of the afterlife. “After You’re Gone” feels like the flip side to the serenity of “Let the Mystery Be”—the dead may not have much left to worry about, or to feel, wherever they’re headed. But those of us left on earth must walk in the wilderness, and DeMent’s writing leads us through it, cutting a new path with each line.
“There’ll be laughter even after you’re gone/I’ll find reasons to face that empty dawn”—in just one couplet, DeMent encompasses grief in all its platitudinous truths and ugly realities. Scan the YouTube comments for one of these songs and visit a wailing wall of lost relatives, brothers, sisters, spouses. It is clear these songs have soundtracked countless funerals, induced communal waves of compulsive sobbing. There is a moment, in the brittle numbness of fresh grief, when you yearn for something, anything to reach through to the raw mess of nerves and viscera underneath. You are awaiting—dreading, craving—the gut punch. And Iris DeMent songs gently provide it.
The penultimate song on Infamous Angel revisits the wellspring of all of DeMent’s music, the reason for the purity of her singing and the clarity of her vision. It is called “Mama’s Opry,” and it tells in loving detail of watching her mother sing country songs to herself under her breath. The indelible image, which lingers over the album, is of young Iris noticing the private sparkle in her mother’s eyes as she hums Jimmie Rodgers, pinning clothes on the line: “I’d be playing in the grass/To her what might’ve seemed obliviously/But there ain’t no doubt about it, she sure made her mark on me.”
The snapshot is both intimate and clear, and in just two lines, it delivers us back to a vanished world. This deliverance has always been the promise of Americana—premised on the idea that the world it depicted was gone, and had perhaps never existed outside of fleeting moments of the imagination. But the message living within it only grows more powerful as we make our way through successive seasons of loss. Your childhood home, your family, and your entire way of life may disappear. Whatever you can offer in this contingent world is whatever is left inside of you when all else is gone, and what comes out of you when you open your mouth.

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Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist ...

Jerusalem

Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist, pushing 50, has), I'll "get" Steve Earle, or be able to get excited by him, because from where I'm sitting, his albums consistently sound like the kind of stuff that folks over 35 find "edgy" or "raw." Lucinda Williams, 50 this year, would be his female counterpart. Having heard the best moments of, say, Will Oldham and Cat Power (for all their melodrama and actorly distance), I am loathe to describe the Earle/Williams catalog as "haunting" or "intimate." Though some of their work is stunning (2-3 songs per album), one has to adjust to the borderline overproduction and to the straightjacket of trad-songcraft. I'm willing to bet you an illiterate folk artist's lucky paintstick that some of the Earle/Williams praise comes by default, because they use elements of country in ways that are exponentially more interesting than their competition (the committee-written popaganda leaking from the bowels of whatever lunkhead cowboy or smiley slutloaf got corralled into sing-slinging it), the same way the dithering, blah Democrats can seem noble next to Ashcroft's Army.
That political analogy is apt, too, if one compares, say, Ford truck pitchman Alan Jackson's (complete with requisite parenthetical) "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" to Earle's "John Walker's Blues". Jackson's 9/11 song is a predictable piece of vaguely Christian know-nothingism, with the very telling line, "I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you/ The difference in Iraq and Iran." (I immediately thought of an acquaintance who has lectured me on the Bible, but who asked, when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan, "Is Israel Islam?") Earle's song is an agenda-less character study of a confused everyteen with a martyr complex on a search for meaning beyond "MTV" and "the soda pop ads." Where Jackson's gesture required only Nashville greed-sap gumption, Earle's song took cojones, especially if you remember the climate into which the song was released, a phase of kneejerk "No Muslims Allowed" nationalism that some of us in 2003 look back on laughingly, like unfortunate bangs captured in a yearbook photo or a Stevie B. cassingle under the bed, as if our flaggery was an odd fad in which we goofily got caught up. For all the bluster over "John Walker's Blues", the song merely aims to humanize an enemy/unpopular perspective, down to its chant fade-out.
But we Americans often just want to perceive our enemies as they're presented in Independence Day, as alien and cultureless insect-like villains, just black circles to shoot out of the sky (see WWII portrayals of the Japanese, etc). So Earle risked bristling the reactionary segment of his audience, an audience he has fostered over the course of a slew of albums on which he has been a "progressive," but Nascar-twangy version of the Midwest's Mellencamp, the Northeast's Springsteen, or the South's-but-he-doesn't-flaunt-it Tom Petty. His audience expanded particularly after The Mountain, his all-bluegrass album (only hinted at by the sinister banjo of this record's song "for" the wrongly-convicted West Memphis 3, "The Truth"). Webboard damnations of Jerusalem aren't hard to find, and even Amazon customer reviews contain someone spooked by "Satanic" and "demonic" vocal effects ("Ashes to Ashes" is tuff-Earle, sounding campier than Vincent Price) and someone abandoning Earle due to the "liberal agenda fest" of his "social commentary."
Yes, seven of this album's eleven tracks qualify as commentary, but except for bassline-driven "America v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)", which is a kind of "Like a Rolling Stone" account of complacent former activists, most of the critiquin' is done so allegorically or abstractly that it could qualify as storytelling. That means four of the songs are standard singer/songwriter fare, catchy love-ditties (such as the duet with Emmylou Harris, "I Remember You") or fuzzy mythmaking (such as "Shadowland"). The closer, and title track is an ambitiously optimistic but ultimately frustrating song that tries to apply the ain't-we-all-god's-chilluns syncretism of "John Walker's Blues" to the Middle East. The song also borrows "I may be a dreamer" logic from John Lennon's blues, "Imagine". But "Imagine" was an atheist utopian fantasy, whereas Earle's "Jerusalem" pines for a peace that will come from "the children of Abraham" on "the ground where Jesus stood." Though Earle admits he sounds like a "fool" and sings of "looking into his heart" instead of subscribing to the defeatist attitude of the "man on TV," the song is dang hard to take seriously because, even when you strip away the situation's socioeconomic muck and the occupation debate, you get, fundamentally: groups of racists chosen specially by their respective gods, murdering each other over the gods' specially chosen dirt. Earle's "peace together" is just too long a shot.
You may have noticed how this review has been yammering almost exclusively about Earle's lyrics. That's not just because his narratives are abubble with big ideas, or because I assume you know his gruff-to-nasal voice, but because, aside from the occasional Eastern touch, or smoking blues-harp solo, or Gary Numan-esque keyboard trill, the album's music is what you'd expect: Three minutes of radio-ready guitar-and-drum arrangements. Of the tone experiments, one really works (the Doug Sahm-ish zydecali-texmex immigrant's plea "What's a Simple Man to Do?") and one fails horribly (the female call-and-responders of "Conspiracy Theory"). While Earle could be commended for his tireless examination of the death-penalty or for distributing, on his label, the great what-if-Costello-led-a-cowpunk-bar-band Six String Drag, I can only say that his new album is "good, for what it is," and that is still a great concession for ears honed to more expansive sonic approaches.
So if you ever had a fusion snob successfully argue to you that The Replacements were just overrated bash-n-pop (I mean, look at Westerberg now, and Tommy Stinson's next band was even called Bash & Pop), you won't find anything of value in Jerusalem's music. These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false. Though Earle comes off as more a son of Dylan than Jakob, Bob at 60 writes much fresher songs, songs that one doesn't have to be weathered to enjoy.


The 18-year-old singer-songwriter moves away from hyperpop and digicore on his debut album, sharpening his pop instincts as he unpacks the chaotic intensity of teenage emotions.

glaive: i care so much that i dont care at all

i care so much that i dont care at all

In glaive’s overwhelming pop songs, every setback feels like the end of the world. The narrators of the 18-year-old singer-songwriter’s music are desperate and distressed, living life at the end of their rope while detailing commonplace problems like romantic dissolution, small-town loneliness, and adolescent rage. It’s how the world appears when you’re young, still finding your place, falling in and out of love; each second is saturated with intense meaning. glaive captures this surfeit of feeling with conviction and unselfconsciousness on his debut full-length, the title of which, i care so much that i dont care at all, sums up his whole approach. He feels every moment with the wide-eyed wonder of someone who’s learning what it means to be a person: rapturously, sincerely, despairingly.
Like many kids stuck at home in 2020, the artist born Ash Gutierrez, then 15, started making songs in his bedroom with help from friends he met on the internet. His bruised ballads resonated, and songs like the fragile “Astrid” quickly became important texts for a new generation of always-online pop musicians and fans. From his earliest, overstuffed productions, which recalled several generations of internet music at once—distorted emo rap, Drain Gang’s heavy-lidded pop euphoria, the Adderall-addled club music brewing on SoundCloud in the wake of PC Music—he demonstrated a knack for making songs whose unstable sonics echoed the unsteady feelings in his lyrics. Swooning, glitch-scoured singles like “Pissed” sounded like they might collapse in on themselves in a pile of digital detritus.
These experiments led glaive—along with fellow pop mutants brakence and ericdoa—to be lumped into the then-nascent scenes of hyperpop and digicore. But there was “nothing hyper” about much of his music, he told The New York Times in 2020. In the years since, he has signaled his increasing interest in making pop songs without glitches or distortion. He tried recording simpler songs on transitional works like the 2021 EP all dogs go to heaven and then i’ll be happy, a collaboration with ericdoa. But i care so much that i don’t care at all is the first time that he sounds truly comfortable making more straightforward and decidedly less “hyper” pop songs. The ease with which he spins up sugar-rushing harmonies on songs like “the prom” is evidence of a songwriter with a deft knowledge of the pop toolkit. And the clarity and confidence of his arrangements in turn allow him to express deeper, more complex emotions. Every lightning bolt of teenaged revelation strikes even more precisely.
“the car,” for example, is built around an uncomplicated arrangement that recalls several decades’ worth of guitar-led pop, from Ric Ocasek’s emotional anthems to Third Eye Blind’s blurry dramas to the brittle edge of mid-’00s radio emo. But it also shows a songwriter willing to navigate confusing headspaces, bitterly spitting out a story about infidelity, substance abuse, and broken promises. glaive even spares a moment of tenderness for a man who, until that moment, seemed to be the song’s villain. “I’d be lying to your face if I said I didn’t feel for him,” he sings. “He’s doing way more than I did for ya.” He demonstrates a new comfort in unpacking complicated emotions—which he does especially impressively on lead single “as if,” a gnarled song about trying to leave behind old friends while not quite being able to let them go, a cutting sentiment for anyone who’s ever forged a relationship out of convenience.
Aided by a host of producers and songwriters—including returning collaborators Jeff Hazin and Ralph Castelli, as well as fellow moody songwriters like Alexander 23 and underscores—i care so much that i dont care at all gleams with an unprecedented polish. Together glaive and his collaborators favor grand gestures (vocal harmonies stacked heavenward, dramatic stop-start dynamics, samples of Timothée Chalamet monologues) that suit the bleeding-heart songwriting and mile-a-minute delivery. Straining at the limits of his upper range, he crams every yelped line full of stray thoughts and syllables.
But some moments feel naive or overly simplistic. One notable misstep is “all i do is try my best,” in which he contemplates killing himself upon learning how much he owes on his taxes. That tossed-off admission is an uneasy—and glib—echo of the record’s opener, “oh are you bipolar one or two?,” in which he unpacks suicidal ideation in more vivid, and chilling, detail. He sings of the touch of “metal to skin,” and takes a deep look at his emotional volatility—an empathetic and surprisingly mature sentiment in a song that opens with him grabbing a gun and writing a note to all his friends and family. It’s dramatic, no doubt, but affecting. At its best, i care so much that i dont care at all captures the ecstatic, uncomfortable intensity of the joy and turmoil of being young. And if it ever feels awkward or fumbling, well, that’s an essential part of being a teenager too.


On their Epitaph debut, the Grand Rapids post-hardcore band ruminates on the small stuff—death, grief, life, love.

Panorama

There is no middle ground between diehard fans of La Dispute and people who decide after five seconds it sounds like Fugazi doing books on tape. Over the past decade, La Dispute’s peers in the New Wave of Post-Hardcore (or just “The Wave”) have increasingly leaned into their underlying populist aspects—Touche Amore emerged as populist firebrands, the early screamo of Pianos Become the Teeth has burnished into silvery mope-rock, mewithoutYou’s folky mysticism has veered uncannily close to R.E.M.—but from the beginning, the Grand Rapids quintet have been the most demanding and divisive band in a fanatical subgenre. Their faithful read the Grand Rapids post-hardcore band’s music as prophetic, dazzling, beyond mere songcraft—to be treated like literature rather than music.
Panorama comes five years after La Dispute’s most recent record. Having already fulfilled one New Wave rite of passage (being produced by Will Yip), they complete another by signing to Epitaph. But while Panorama is their most user-friendly release, it’s the one that asks most of all to be engaged with like a book—with undivided attention and without any expectation of immediate gratification, to linger on and to be footnoted for later discussion and rumination.
Like their peers, La Dispute have determinedly whittled away at their extremities. Their 2008 debut Somewhere At the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair remains one of the most unique hardcore albums of the century—Jordan Dreyer mumbled, hectored and caterwauled anachronistic lyrics informed by Annabel Lee, Joanna Newsom, Kurt Vonnegut, and Japanese folklore, while the band dabbled in jazz, screamo, prog-rock and spoken word. Both wildly pretentious and guileless, it’s a rare document of a band with no expectations, no precedents, and unchecked ambition. Dreyer has expressed guilt over how the bombast of early fan favorites could obscure and distort their intentions; listeners could gloss over the thoughtful survey of race and retribution in his fictionalized eyewitness account of a failed drive-by shooting 2011’s “King Park” and just zone out during the big crescendo. Their approach on 2014’s Rooms of the House was more muted, but even a fabricated breakup album still has fairly traditional moments of emotional release.
Panorama skillfully and subtly creeps towards resonance rather than catharsis, an approach that can make even their own colleagues sound like they’re trying to cheat towards the big release. Even when La Dispute rock, they do so like they’re trying to tiptoe on a frozen pond. “Anxiety Panorama” and “View From Our Bedroom Window” are too plaintive to whip up a circle pit. The guitars are nearly silent throughout the frostbitten “In Northern Michigan,” until they seep through the silence like car exhaust in a closed garage. The chorus of “Footsteps at the Pond” finds Dreyer’s vocals drowning in guitar midrange, one of the many times where his lyrics become obscured or buried in the mix—a curious decision for a band who relies so heavily on Dreyer’s words, but a rewarding one, evoking half-remembered car conversations, murmured dream states, panicked awakenings.
Panorama finds Dreyer ruminating on the relatively tragedy-free 31 years of his life and asking how he can provide support to someone who’s experienced far worse. “Could I even be half of what you need?” he begs on “Fulton Street I.” Without guidance, Dreyer moves forward with good intentions and a crippling fear of making matters worse. “We keep her picture on the fridge/I keep a rabbit toy for kids/You gave me strength to fix myself/I gave you tokens, toys and gifts,” Dreyer offers on “Rhodonite and Grief.”  With its slinky, diminished jazz chords and mournful horns, it’s a possible sequel to Rooms of the House’s “Woman (in mirror)”—it’s an album about death and grief, but also about the inability to communicate.
“You said ‘kill me by surprise’ again/‘I don’t want to stay alive’/To watch the words go first like hers,” Dreyer moans, writing from the perspective of his real-life partner. “If we could choose the way we leave/Fill out circles on a ballot sheet/Vote the way we’ll go...What would we do?,” Dreyer asks on the lengthy, awe-inspiring closer “You Ascendant,” cycling through heavenly and humdrum ways to die before realizing the crushing truth that someone’s going to have to go first.  Perhaps the only solution to avoiding this grief is passing together, or at least, living in the possibility that it might not have to end at all. “Or can we live forever here? Be buried in our best memories,” he asks, thinking over drunken good times, an intimate road trip, everything that makes “life too beautiful, too sweet, despite everything.” In the end, Panorama is a love story—you just need to read between the lines.


The Twin Cities artist Lizzo is a triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality. On her new album, she comes off like an already-minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she’s already stepped over, laughing.

Big GRRRL Small World

Twin Cities artist Lizzo seems to have fans and collaborators in just about every pocket of the music world: Sleater-Kinney invited her to open for their reunion tour; fellow Minneapolitan Prince featured Lizzo and bandmate Sophia Eris on last year's PLECTRUMELECTRUM; Ryan Olson produced much of her debut LIZZOBANGERS. She's a true triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality and an unstoppable force on record, as amply proven with single "Batches and Cookies" (and its buttered-up hunkfest of a video) and with previous groups GRRRL PARTY and the Chalice. Big GRRRL Small World comes off as the work of an already minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she's already stepped over, laughing.
Big GRRRL Small World—named for a line on LIZZOBANGERS, and Lizzo's label BGSW, on which she released the album—finds her reckoning with her sudden fame, and also the things that plague it: white culture vultures, terrible dudes (consigned on "Ride" to the "Support Group for Men Without Lizzo," a demolishingly hilarious couple of bars), people who need her references RapGenius'd clear for them, needy people, misogynists. It's all delivered with sheer glee, and some of it is among the most wicked fun committed to record in 2015.
It also sounds gorgeous; largely produced by BJ Burton (Low, Sylvan Esso, Poliça), the album is full of unexpected turns and immaculate codas. Lizzo bends each track to her will, twisting them until they're anything but obvious. "Ain't I", the closest thing here to a LIZZOBANGER, begins with references to reparations and Russian czars but ends with a distant, slightly untuned piano interlude and distorted guitar squeals. The ballads speak the language of vulnerability but twist R&B tropes to different ends. Standout single "Humanize" begins as a shimmering post-coital reverie sung in feather-soft voice and ends smothering and alone, with a voice like the feather's sharp end.
Lizzo's lyrics on "Humanize" complicate everything, full of reversals ("your skin is warm—it keeps me up though I am tired") and pinprick-perfect lines: "No, you can't lay on my shoulder, there are spikes and scales and your cheek would just press them in." It's an exhausted, near-existential sigh: one of yearning for connection but unable to find it, particularly when the ones you're supposed to connect with are the aforementioned terrible dudes. "En Love" begins as another sumptuous soul piece, Lizzo's besotten cooing resting upon beds of '90s synth pads, until Lizzo drops the punchline—"with myself!"—and turns the track into a trap jam. Lizzo's force of personality prevents the switch up from being mere gimmick, as does her generosity; she dedicates a verse to her best friend, and to her listeners.
Indeed, the most straightforward tracks on Big GRRRL Small World, such as empowerment ballad "My Skin", are explicitly about and for everyone who looks like and looks up to her. This—not only her indie friends, or her crystalline production, and especially not her place in any made-up taxonomy of female rappers she's been placed into—is largely responsible for her whirlwind success, and Lizzo knows it. "I love that because I am a woman and because I rap and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me," Lizzo told Billboard. "I get to speak to these people who did not get spoken for in this genre." Big GRRRL Small World succeeds because it's just that: a showcase for the small world, a keepsake for the big grrrls.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Bon Iver's Justin Vernon produced LIZZOBANGERS.


The landmark debut by Trent Reznor's band is reissued, with new mastering overseen by Reznor and longtime engineer Tom Baker and an additional B-side.

Pretty Hate Machine

For reasons I won't get into here, my little brother spent the first couple weeks of ninth grade in a Baltimore psych ward. While he was in there, he desperately wanted one of his tapes, and that tape was Pretty Hate Machine, an album already a few years old at that point. Rather than bringing it to him, my dad decided to listen to it, making it about 90 seconds in-- to the first "Bow down before the one you serve/ You're going to get what you deserve" bit on "Head Like a Hole"-- before deciding the album was Satanic and throwing it in the trash. I tried arguing the point with him ("No, dad, he's talking about money! Listen to it!"), but he didn't budge. For much of the 1990s, Pretty Hate Machine was that type of album: One that could inspire fervent, devotional need and absolute revulsion, largely depending on the age of the person hearing it. And that's even more impressive when you consider that it's basically a synth-pop album.
The greatest trick Trent Reznor ever pulled was convincing the world he was the devil. With his biblical-phallic band name, his reportedly furious early live shows, his fishnets worn as sleeves, Reznor staked out a position for himself on the Alice Cooper shock-rock continuum. Reznor certainly talked a big game about his industrial influences, even taking part in the Wax Trax! collective Pigface, but it wasn't the punishing megaphone-addled arm of industrial that most informed Reznor's debut album; it was the genre's nascent new-wave period. Scene kings Ministry, after all, started out as floppy-haired New Romantics. And so, for that matter, did Reznor himself; Google Exotic Birds sometime.
Reznor would progress further into scraping roar not long later; 1992's "Wish" was certainly no Depeche Mode song. But Pretty Hate Machine is haunted, synthetic dance-pop through and through. The beats have muscle, but it's not metal muscle or pigfuck muscle or even post-punk muscle. "Head Like a Hole", the big hit, is probably the most rock thing on the whole album, but even that song opens with "Heart of Glass"-esque percussion ripples before the drum machine thunder and weird hooting noises come in. "Terrible Lie" is built on synth-scrapes that, in less distorted form, could've shown up on a New Order single, and "Sin" likewise has a whole lot of "Blue Monday" in its DNA. Whenever a verse ends during "Kinda I Want To", we get a quick little reptilian disco synth-fight. Glacial new-age keyboard tones abound, and big nasty guitars really don't. And Reznor knew how to mine this form for all the emotional catharsis it was worth, which was a lot.
But Reznor still stood out as a rock star, maybe the rock star of the time. Largely, that's a credit to his absolutely magnificent rock-star voice, one of the finest of his generation. On Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor sounds tough but also strained and vulnerable. There's a huge, frustrated mall-kid aspect to his voice, to the way it goes from defeated mutter to impotent yowl in no time flat. It's like he knows how petty he can sound, but he can't help himself. There's plenty of rancor on Pretty Hate Machine, too, much of it directed at some unspecific "you" that made his frustration all the more relatable: "I gave you my purity, and my purity you stole." On "Terrible Lie", he never bothers to specify what the lie in question is; does it matter? "Why am I seething with this animosity?" he asks, like even he doesn't know and can't justify it.
Much of Pretty Hate Machine concerns a simple scenario: Being young but feeling that your life is already over, that your best days are already behind you. On "Down in It": "I used to be somebody." On "That's What I Get": "How can you turn me into this/ After you just taught me how to kiss... you?" (On that extended pause, Reznor sounds like he's 12, like that "you" will never arrive and he's just admitted that he never made out with anyone before.) And on the time-stopping album centerpiece "Something I Can Never Have": "Everywhere I look, you're all I see/ Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be." "Something I Can Never Have" is where Reznor's vulnerability really becomes his greatest asset. His scream gone, his voice turns to pure bottomless dejection. He's carefully considered every aspect of his life, and nothing looks good. In the words of decade-later imitators Linkin Park, he sounds like he's about to break. Or like he's already broken.
"Something I Can Never Have" also shows an absolute mastery which would blossom soon after into something like genius, and which was already pretty far along in 1989. Starting with nothing but a haunted, minimal piano figure and a few hushed synth tones, the track slowly lets in sputtering static, faraway door-slam drums, and quiet little counter-melodies. Guitar never shows up; it'd break the spell. When NIN would do this track live, you could practically hear the collective intake of breath at those first piano notes. As far as I'm concerned, it's probably the single finest song Reznor ever wrote.
In later years, Reznor would push all the ideas on Pretty Hate Machine even further-- into a sputtering maelstrom, depressive stillness, zoned-out trance-states, and terrible beauty. But the ideas are all there already, contained in a 10-song capsule that ends quickly enough that everything lingers. Most of the songs on Pretty Hate Machine are fairly long, but no time is wasted. This new reissue doesn't much alter that original experience. The remaster job doesn't sound much different from the original article, and the sole bonus track, a sexed-up B-side cover of Queen's "Get Down Make Love", sort of misses the point; this was, in a lot of ways, an album about not getting laid. So the real reason to revisit the album is the album itself, nothing else. Now that Reznor has retired the NIN touring institution and become a sort of Internet-friendly cool-uncle figure, it's pretty striking to go back to that seismic first strike and re-feel all the stuff we first felt hearing this thing.


On their best album, this fascinating “philosophy jam band” begins with indie rock touchstones and then explores the fringes of those ideas.

Young Jesus: The Whole Thing Is Just There

The Whole Thing Is Just There

Young Jesus leader John Rossiter writes essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books about viewing the NBA as a socioeconomic metaphor. In interviews, he talks about Crass and the non-narcotic uses of mushrooms. He works at a celebrated California bookstore, and only camp counselors seem more excited about their jobs. Maybe that all seems as imposing as Young Jesus’ new album, The Whole Thing Is Just There—six songs, 49 minutes, sprees of knotty improvisations within rock tunes. But there’s an endearing transparency to Young Jesus’ competing personality quirks. They’re the grad student at a Big Ten university who reads books about jazz improvisation while manning a DSA table on campus before getting drunk at the five-act indie rock house show. A sort of philosophy jam band that riffs on ideology and politics instead of actual solos, Young Jesus are audacious but accessible, instantly likable even at their most esoteric.
Except the last Young Jesus album, 2017’s S/T, there’s nothing else really like The Whole Thing Is Just There around. Even that one was far removed from the albums made by the Chicago-based version of Young Jesus, a Midwestern crossbreed suited for anyone who wanted the Hold Steady to lead an emo revival. S/T was the first work Rossiter finished in Los Angeles, and it sounded absolutely nothing like its surroundings. Pivoting into post-rock landscapes both beautiful and barren, it was as cold as the desert at night or warm as the sun glaring off the frozen tundra.
But Young Jesus hadn’t quite unraveled the paradox of how to be intentional about its improvisation, so S/T came in uneven segments. On The Whole Thing Is Just There, the separation between the songs and the jams is mostly gone. Putting aside the 21-minute closer “Gulf,” the preceding half-hour is evenly split among five tracks, which doesn’t radically alter Young Jesus’ songwriting process. They’re just doing everything with more volume and confidence.
Signing to Saddle Creek for the re-release of S/T and the release of The Whole Thing Is Just There is a realization of Rossiter’s drunken 20-something dreams. While Young Jesus are more likely to reference Bill Orcutt and Albert Ayler than Conor Oberst these days, they haven’t forfeited the perpetually yearning quality of landlocked emo. Regardless of wave or variant, the Midwestern stuff is music for searchers, channeling the impossibility of true fulfillment through imperfect voices striving for a note always out of reach. That is here, as is a dose of self-deprecation. Young Jesus recognize the potential for unintentional humor when name-dropping Very Serious Art. “Saganism vs. Buddhism” surveys the assumed dissonance between science and spirituality and begins with a third-eye lyric. It risks turning into Live or Ab-Soul before Rossiter sighs in a deader-than-deadpan lilt, “I have begun contacting various mystics/I have begun buying rocks in stores.”
While it’s easy to focus on Young Jesus’ long songs or high concepts, “For Nana” should combat any assumptions that these pieces are inaccessible or overly challenging. Rossiter brought it into the studio as a wisp of an idea written after watching his grandmother die. “When you leave the room/I wonder how a heart exists beyond the beat,” Rossiter moans over tentative, gauzy guitars, coos outlining his question. Young Jesus spend the improv section trying to imagine a soul leaving its body.
Rossiter leads a current events workshop at Skylight Books and I imagine most of the discussions take on a similar trajectory to the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There.  They start with a welcoming remark and an introduction to a monolithic subject, establishing a conversational flow that honors everyone’s ideas and risks pure entropy before bringing it to a harmonious closure. During the first and final minute of any song here, Young Jesus suggest conventional indie rock. The mordant piano intro of “Saganism vs. Buddhism” could pass for the National. Over a doom-metal churn, “Deterritory” matches their half-twee, half-anarcho-punk philosophy of resisting cynicism by holding hands and raising fists. After a spry midsection of double-time drums and escalating yells, Rossiter returns to the opening theme of “Deterritory,” yelling, “It’s not enough to hate the world we live in!” A cymbal crash brings the song to a startling halt. It is as mesmerizing as watching a stadium implode in slow motion, as affirming as replacing it with a community center.
The feeling of S/T and The Whole Thing Are Just There inspire references to similarly uncompromising slabs of post-rock: Spiderland, Perfect From Now On, early Modest Mouse, and late Talk Talk, reflecting a nostalgia for a time when indie felt less beholden to fashion and narrative and more to mere ideas. The Whole Thing Is Just There is not an album from which Young Jesus can “level up” or whatever, because that would require forgoing the stream-of-consciousness improv of “Fourth Zone of Gaits” or the making of “Gulf,” a song Rossiter joked will be listened to in full by maybe five people. (He didn’t say if the four members of Young Jesus were included.)
A six-minute song that expanded into more than 20 while Young Jesus were in the studio, “Gulf” is Rossiter’s lament for “a century moving much too quickly.” It followed a writing-and-recording process that grappled with the same issues as basically every other indie rock band in 2018: Is playing my music a worthwhile pursuit in this political moment? Does my art and presence take up an unnecessary amount of space? Should I be making any kind of art when there’s so much more to be done? Not every single second of “Gulf” feels completely essential, but the entirety is. Young Jesus ask themselves thousands of questions, and they have the only proven solution—the release of pervasive self-doubt and anxiety is in the doing, the creating.


RL Grimes is the grittier, more ominous alter-ego of 22-year-old producer Henry Steinway, who makes big-room EDM as Clockwork. His new EP also showcases one of the producer’s greatest talents: his ability to restructure songs entirely without losing the drama of soaring dance melodies.

High Beams EP

Henry Steinway is a modern day Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to his electronic dance potions. His day-glo personality is called Clockwork; a 22-year-old with big-room, mega-club house bangers like his jacked remix of Avicii’s “Levels” that hat-tips the fusion dance genre of moombahton while shoveling in heaps of electro to sidestep along the way. As Clockwork, Steinway has pulled production aesthetics from and played alongside house staples (like Avicii or Afrojack) while mining through indie-hip EDM scenes fostered by A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold and Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak imprint. He embraces trancy synth build-ups and uses chainsaw revs and electro-burping tech-house that’s fistpump ready even if it’s made with mosh-pits in mind. RL Grime, however, is a totally different animal.
It’s easiest to present RL Grime as Steinway’s grittier, more ominous alter-ego. One with trap prowess, catering more to stomps than pumps. And RL Grime really is all about that life; he fiddles with the bass and messes with tightly-wound beats, pulling away from the explosive, emotionally manipulative pandering of his EDM counterpart. But the mega-club mentality hasn’t completely escaped him. With his remix of Benny Benassi’s chart-topping hit “Satisfaction” last year, the producer wound down the shrill, whining melody to use as fodder for frantic bass blips and sexily sauntering snares. The idea of mimicking overbearing pop melodies with syncopated horns and strategically placed beats flips the song on its head. It also represents one of the producer’s greatest talents: his ability to restructure songs entirely without losing the drama of soaring dance melodies.
And so High Beams*’* strongest points showcase the ease in which Steinway can use this technique crossover to straight rap production. Last year’s “Mercy” remix with Salva immediately comes to mind upon hearing “CliqCliq”, the duo’s collaboration for this EP. Like “Mercy”, the hit-sampled track is catchy, clappy, and sinister. Pitchy synths wail over staticy beats and a loopy, buzzing drone that could easily drive a person insane was it not complemented with the menacing, echoing thuds of static that push the song forward. “Secondary” features Compton based rapper Problem for what turns out to be the most complete, radio-ready track on the EP; a testament of where RL Grime could head if he was so inclined.
Elements from Clockwork remain as well. “Pockets,” the album’s intro, tempers his hip-hop instrumentation with lush laser-like synths that pan over ping-pong drum-rim rhythms and bouncing MPC beats. “Shells” gives in a little more to the tropes, becoming a moonbounce of elastic synths that wind up, scream out, and boomerang around the song.  As with Baauer-- a recent tour-mate and fellow Fool’s Gold/Mad Decent affiliate-- this balance of rap’s bump-n-grind groove and EDM’s flashiness helps prevent an artist from getting swallowed by the glut of the recent trap craze. But where Baauer is putting in work to show that he can also do house (by stripping down Disclosure’s “You & Me”) and ravey festival show-stoppers (his collab with Just Blaze for the Jay Z sampled “Higher”), Steinway has no need. In turn the producer’s High Beams EP serves not only as RL Grime’s debut EP on Fool's Gold but as a window into where RL Grime and Clockwork meet.


The band’s new live double LP is an exceptionally accomplished and generous look back at their evolution from shy indie darlings to touring powerhouse.

Belle and Sebastian: What to Look for in Summer

What to Look for in Summer

It's been 24 years since Belle and Sebastian emerged from the Glasgow underground, clutching a surfeit of near-perfect songs. Their classic first and second LPs, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, established frontman and principal songwriter Stuart Murdoch as a generational talent, a writer who intuitively wedded the forensic character studies of Joni Mitchell to the chamber music of early John Cale, lending a Dylan-esque sophistication to the Sarah Records bands that were his sonic progenitors.
Ever since then, they’ve endured personnel changes, sonic reinventions and on occasion, hurt feelings beyond repair. And yet they endure, having lasted a decade-and-a-half longer than the Beatles, Velvets, or Smiths. On the new double live LP What to Look for in Summer, some of it recorded over three days on a cruise ship in August of 2019, the group thrillingly undertakes the business of excavating their long, complicated history.
In their infancy, Belle and Sebastian shows were charming but anguished affairs: a studio creation fighting to meet the challenge of sound people, monitors, and audiences. What a difference half a lifetime makes. Any trace of that old anti-professionalism is the outlier here—lead guitarist Stevie Jackson’s playing is Mike Bloomfield-worthy, and longtime members Richard Colburn, Sarah Martin, Chris Geddes, and Bobby Kildea form a rock-solid unit operating at David Bowie levels of showmanship.
Following a traditional Scottish fanfare, What to Look for in Summer breaks out of the gate with a romp through the 1998 highlight “Dirty Dream Number Two” and a delightfully glammed-up take on the 2003 single “Step Into My Office, Baby.” Both convey a spirit that is nostalgic without being maudlin. Although the band has been making reliably good-to-great records up until this day, the bulk of the material centers on their early classics, as befits any band with a quarter-century legacy.
What to Look for in Summer consciously fashions itself after immersive, almost comically overstuffed concert albums like Neil Diamond’s 1972 Hot August Night or Thin Lizzy’s 1978 double set Live and Dangerous. At a time when attention spans are increasingly trained towards 20-second videos, imposing slabs of vinyl like these are increasingly artifacts of an earlier era. It may be a rearguard war, but throughout its one hour and forty-minute run-time, it’s an exceptionally accomplished and generous one.
A marvelous reading of the 2006 track “Funny Little Frog” sounds like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson fighting for a melody and lyric and ending in a double disqualification. “My Wandering Days Are Over”—dedicated to ex-bandmate Isobel Campbell—is a delicate wonder, actualizing the outlaw country impulses only hinted at in the studio version. There's also a great, cathartic rip-through the title track to The Boy With the Arab Strap, a symphony of Al Green grooves, recorder solos, and social realism that brings together all of Murdoch’s preoccupations into a tuneful eight-minute monologue on dancing, philosophy, public transportation, and sex toys: It’s the ‘90s indie “Tangled Up in Blue.”
It’s something of a cheerful paradox that for all of the surpassing intimacy of Belle and Sebastian’s deeply personal music, it has fostered a devoted fan base and a profound sense of community between group and followers. Most of all this is what to expect from What to Look for in Summer. The songs sound great, but the easy on-stage banter and joyful communion with the audience sounds even better. Shut-ins of the world, unite and take over.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With sharp DIY production and earnestly self-aware lyrics, Eric Reyes’ debut radiates familiar, understated emo-pop charm.

Suburban Indie Rock Star EP

Chicago singer-songwriter and filmmaker Eric Reyes knows he isn’t famous yet. “I thought I’d come so far/The world can make you feel small,” he sings on “to some i’m genius,” the opening track of suburban indie rock star, his debut EP as Snow Ellet. “Yeah, I guess I’m kinda cool/To some, I’m genius like I always knew,” he concludes, reminding himself that even the most self-assured among us sometimes require outside validation. After years of performing with fine-print Warped Tour bands and uploading one-off tracks to his SoundCloud, Reyes quietly released suburban indie rock star in March of this year. By late April, a handful of independent blogs, podcasts, and Twitter tastemakers had caught on to Snow Ellet’s understated emo-pop charm. Suddenly, “to some i’m genius” became more than just an aspiration.
suburban indie rock star’s radiant melodies and double-tracked vocals have garnered understandable comparisons to Oso Oso’s Jade Lilitri, who similarly weaves elements of contemporary emo and pop-punk with the familiar warmth of early indie rock. Reyes was a kid when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Enema of the State first hit shelves, and he’s referenced both as catalysts in his musical awakening. The crossroads of ’90s indie rock and emo is a well-worn path by now, but with Reyes’ myriad influences and sharp DIY production, the EP feels more like a future reference point for like-minded successors than an attempt to chase a trend.
Lyrically, suburban indie rock star is earnestly self-aware, pinpointing anxieties and personal foibles with wit: “It’s useless to panic blindly/I’m just as useless, to put it kindly,” goes a standout lyric on “in reverie.” “I wrote the book on honesty,” he sings on closer “casualty.” “I wrote the book on being second best and nothing less.” More than once, Reyes refers to himself as the “casualty,” casting a shadow across his subject matter. But a sense of personal victory comes through on “brick”: “Get out the window, I’ll throw a brick/And I’ll make the neighbors stare while I’m running out of there,” Reyes sings, perhaps a metaphor for the social burdens of calling attention to yourself; being perceived has never been more unnerving.
At five songs and less than 12 minutes, suburban indie rock star is a brief listen. But even with the pseudo-brash title, Reyes’ prudent humility stands out. Rock stardom, by his definition, doesn’t necessarily involve selling out arena tours or dating Hollywood elites; as far as suburban indie rock star is concerned, immortalization can come by way of low-key hangouts or packed car rides with trusted companions. Snow Ellet makes an appropriate soundtrack for those moments.

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The singer-songwriter aims for a bigger sound with her new EP, a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips.

Scout EP

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in To Kill a Mockingbird in which Scout, after meeting Boo Radley for the first and last time, walks home alone. “As I made my way home, I felt very old,” she narrates, “but when I looked at the top of my nose, I could see fine misty beads, but looking cross-eyed made me dizzy, so I quit.” It’s an uncharacteristically whimsical passage for its logical setup: the experience of seeing misty beads is not exclusive to youth, but Scout’s flitting attention—as well as the defiantly indirect admission that she is, in fact, crying—imply her persistent girlhood.
On her excellent 2020 debut, The Baby, Samia sought refuge in the same willful distraction. The cozy “Big Wheel” begins with a child’s litany (“I got bug bites on my legs/I got two friends who look alike/I got coffee in the morning/And my mama in the night”), slowly approaching the subject of a deceitful boyfriend; the narrator of “Waverly” painstakingly describes an East Village diner before alluding to her own heartbreak. Even if The Baby is ultimately about being a daughter, lover, and friend, its scatteredness lent an oblique lens to Samia’s adolescent blues, her shrugging honesty eschewing that oh-so-millennial earnestness.
The follow-up EP Scout is a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips. As a songwriter, Samia remains wary of melodrama; she still talks about her friends and parents in the interchangeable manner of an only child. If the result is a more ponderous record than its predecessor, that’s mainly due to Boone Wallace and Andy Seltzer’s production. Like a lost track from Now Now’s Saved, Scout’s centerpiece “Show Up” opens with melancholy piano chords and blooms into a warehouse-sized arrangement with an enrapturing chorus and a legit beat drop. Although The Baby flirted with electronic elements, it mostly stuck to an intimate indie-rock sound; in comparison, Scout sounds big.
At times, the synths and vocal effects leave Samia sounding a bit washed out. She’s got a pretty remarkable voice, yet her inflection is delicate, her default mode a narcotized listlessness punctuated with plaintive refrains. But for the most part, the engineering is deployed with purpose: where The Baby didn’t have much room for singalong anthems, Scout has several, including a faithful rendition of When in Rome’s “The Promise.” The cover makes for a curiously apropos finale—if you didn’t know better, you’d assume that the rushing chorus and beatific lyrics were Samia’s own.
Even the title of her debut, The Baby, functioned as both an apology and alibi, an admission of frivolity, and a promise to clean up her act. Scout suggests a more interesting trajectory and a more difficult one—there’s never any shortage of angst or longing when the irony runs out. With luck, Samia could be one of those perpetually coming-of-age figures like Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, and Carly Rae Jepsen, dwelling in the rapturous precipices, chasing sunsets and self-discovery no matter the cost.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two of rap’s biggest hitmakers team up for a sleek, vengeful project that somewhat successfully tries to recapture the feeling of an event album.

Future / Metro Boomin: WE DON’T TRUST YOU

WE DON’T TRUST YOU

Future and Metro Boomin are wistful for the days when rap regularly had moments, the kind of moments that had you FOMO-racing to your computer. Nothing was worse than being out of the loop. Remember when Nicki Minaj blacked out on “Monster”? When Funk Flex lost his mind during his premiere of Kanye and Jay-Z’s “Otis”? When Kendrick started a civil war with “Control”? When Drake and Meek Mill were at each other’s necks? When Future dropped his mixtape-run victory lap Dirty Sprite 2 and shot to the moon? Those days were fun. With their vengeful, event album We Don’t Trust You, Future and Metro seek to recapture that essence by creating a moment of their own.
And who better to orchestrate an event than two of rap’s essential hitmakers of the last decade teaming up for what is billed as their first official joint album—even if the heads know that it is really DS2. Just the sight of their names alongside each other is enough to bring back memories of “Radical,” “Thought It Was a Drought,” “Mask Off,” or any of their other smashes. Though, as far as Future’s collaborators go, I would have rather heard his album with Nard & B or DJ Spinz or Mike WiLL Made-It, producers who helped to shape his druggy trap blues but have never gotten the chance to flesh that out. A Future and Metro album has no choice other than to be a supernova, so We Don’t Trust You is much safer and more conservative than I imagine any of those would be. The only room to tread new ground is by going bigger and glitzier.
Metro has been headed down that path for a while, tinkering with the cinematic evolution of his Southern trap roots. There was the glossy 2022 solo album Heroes & Villains, which felt like his audition to curate the music of a superhero movie. Six months later he did exactly that with the heavily polished soundtrack for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That shine bleeds into the production of We Don’t Trust You; smooth and spotless and heavy on showy beat switch-ups and orchestral touches. For example, “Young Metro” builds up to a synth explosion that booms as pristinely as a Hans Zimmer score.
That’s fine for Hollywood music intended to blast from the loudspeakers at amusement parks, but with production that has a trap foundation, the blemishes, the kinks, the idiosyncrasies, even if purposeful, are everything. Metro was a hitmaker who always got weird with it: the fuzzy 808s on “I Serve the Base” hit like a firestorm, the synths on “Wesley Presley” are like alien transmissions. In fact, some of the coolest Atlanta rap of the last year, such as Ken Carson’s A Great Chaos, is rough, messy, and influenced by the controlled havoc of old Metro. Here, the beats aren’t drastically different from what he would have done eight or nine years ago—you could picture Slime Season Thug on “Slimed In” or Savage Mode-era 21 Savage on “GTA”—except for the fact that it feels like they’ve been hosed down with sanitizer.
At least Metro weaves in the extravagance way more naturally than the wannabe Kanye albums out there (hi, Utopia and 2093). The switch from slow and moody to uptempo and flashy in a snap on “Ice Attack” is fun enough, elevated by a showstopping Future verse where he’s bragging about his diamonds and throwing words like “banoodles” out there for the hell of it. The church-bell-driven roar of “Type Shit” is a standout, and the few seconds of Future and Playboi Carti trading slurred bars as the beat fades is transcendent. Strongest are unfussy deep cuts, like “Fried (She a Vibe),” one of those eerie strip club on a weekday afternoon joints Future and Metro are masters at. Or “Ain’t No Love,” where Zaytoven’s ominous church organs and flutes show up and you start wondering why this just isn’t Beast Mode 3.
For what it’s worth, Future sounds jazzed-up, which isn’t always the case nowadays. He’s not all Seven Dwarfs wrapped into one like he once was; throw on Hndrxx and he’s pissed off, sad, feeling himself, hating himself, flexing, melting down, at the same time, all the time. Now he’s less interested in the whys, though his life remains a self-indulgent blur of drugs and sex. Refreshingly We Don’t Trust You sheds the played-out supervillain act of I Never Liked You in exchange for decently vivid kingpin bars, even if I’d rather just go fire up Astronaut Status or Streetz Calling for that.
Pivotally, despite less singing and character work, Future still nails that sleazy, sinister atmosphere that only he can pull off. For instance, on the first half of “Magic Don Juan (Princess Diana)” he sounds like he’s on day three of a bender as he spits, “Got that sniff on me, that white shit like Tom Brady.” That seediness is injected in the album intro where he’s vaguely muttering in the shadows about fake friends like he’s about to go on a Charles Bronson-style revenge mission, as it slowly becomes more clear that he’s chatting shit about Drake.
The thing that is supposed to cement We Don’t Trust You as the kind of unforgettable, zeitgeist-defining rap moment that doesn’t happen anymore are the subliminals about Future and Metro’s breakup with Drake. (College campuses in 2016 would be heartbroken.) That seems to be the motivating force behind why Future’s tongue is more venomous than usual and the album is packed with bite-sized clips of a wrathful, heelish Prodigy monologue. Other than the intro, Future leaves the real grimy work to a sourpuss appearance from Kendrick. Over Metro’s solid flip of West Coast digital funk jam “Everlasting Bass,” Kendrick throws a few warm-up jabs at Drake (and J. Cole, much less important). “Motherfuck the big three, nigga, it’s just big me,” he yells, addressing Cole’s idea that the trio are the three pillars of modern rap. A declaration of a war of words and sass. But it’s hard to let go of the fact that I would have cared so much more about this hip-hop soap opera a decade ago, the last time it would have felt deeper than bored rich guys bickering for attention and streams. The timing is off.
The same goes for We Don’t Trust You. None of it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but why now? Maybe because nostalgia for the last two decades of Atlanta trap is on the uptick, as those who grew up with the groundbreaking subgenre look for comforting retreats from the uncertain and unpredictable and very online future of rap. In the last few years we’ve already seen Tyler, the Creator in his quest to prove his rap bona fides gesture toward the spirit of old Jeezy and T.I. mixtapes with DJ Drama tags; Westside Gunn, the ultimate hip-hop revivalist, toss DJ Trap-A-Holics drops on his last album. Even a pop star like Camila Cabello is on the hunt for some vintage cool points by interpolating Gucci Mane. Future and Metro don’t even seem so sure themselves of what the world wants from them—that could be why they’ve hedged with a second joint album that is weeks away. So instead with We Don’t Trust You they take the easy way out by evoking past memories rather than building new ones. Understandable because remembering the old days is pretty sweet, well, until it hits you that they’re gone.

Epic / Freebandz / Republic / Boominati Worldwide


Graveface band veers toward a mutant electronic version of sunny folk-pop that somehow also sounds claustrophobic, sickly, and a little bit damaged.

Dandelion Gum

Black Moth Super Rainbow apparently consists of a few pals with funny nicknames like Tobacco and Father Hummingbird, who dress strangely, occasionally wear masks, and make music together off in some isolated rural area near Pittsburgh. It all sounds suspiciously engineered to cultivate an image for the band as eccentric pop outsiders. Fortunately, the backstory doesn't matter much, because the first thing to do with a record like BMSR's latest, Dandelion Gum, is to forget about who made it: The music discourages any engagement with personality. For one thing, the album's vocals are warped beyond repair by vocoder, even when its tracks occasionally veer toward a mutant electronic version of sun-drenched folk-pop. Most of the time, you can't understand a thing being said, but here, that's not a problem: The meaning of the music comes through regardless.
As a band, Black Moth Super Rainbow, have been toiling away for a few years now, amassing several full-lengths, CD-Rs, and collaborations, most notably a 2006 split EP with the Octopus Project. But where the group's earlier records, when not traveling a purely instrumental path, incorporated more or less "regular" singing, Dandelion Gum takes a big risk: It relies on a single vocal filter throughout the course of the entire album. Typically, a processed voice so readily becomes the focus of a song that, without at least some change to the effect, a full record can seem samey or redundant. Luckily, Black Moth have an unusual enough mood going here that the uniformity becomes a strength. The vocals are playful but not played for laughs; to me they sound claustrophobic, almost sickly. It's not a voice that brings shiny singing robots to mind, but rather people who've spent so much time indoors that their bodies have begun to change in unhealthy ways. To that end, the vocoder gives the record a shade of darkness it wouldn't otherwise have.
The keyboards throughout sound vintage, with textures that bring to mind Mellotron and Moog, while the guitars are thin, trebly, and speckled with analog dust. The central pulsating riff of "Sun Lips" sounds an awful lot like the dream-channeled refrain of "Strawberry Fields Forever", even as it's used in service of what is ultimately a tremendously simple little pop tune. "We miss you in summertime," the singer (that would be Tobacco on the mic) intones through his machine, and since it seems kind of like a love song, the presence of "we" is a little odd. Does he have a mouse in his pocket? Maybe it's one of those songs that seems directed to a woman but is really about weed. Somehow, though, it works. Chalk it up to the world of this album.
If much of Dandelion Gum sounds like something recorded at home on the cheap, "Rollerdisco", which forms an impressive 1-2 punch after "Sun Lips", demonstrates that Black Moth gets the most out of their modest set-up. Like much of their past work, it comes over like a spry, airy, and tremendously evocative instrumental Boards of Canada interlude, from back when the Scottish duo still did that sort of thing. And the acoustic guitar loop in "Jump Into My Mouth and Breathe the Stardust" has the old-tape-found-under-a-tree-stump vibe that gave BoC's The Campfire Headphase an appealing sense of water-damaged psychedelia. Early Beck is even invoked on "Melt Me", which sounds an awful lot like what "Devil's Haircut" would have been had Carl Stephenson helped lay it down for Mellow Gold. Still, despite the occasionally folky melodic sensibility, Black Moth's aesthetic is always spacey-- they're more likely to be scoring a laser show at a planetarium than busking on a street corner.
Wherever these guys are holed up and whether or not they really call the drummer Iffernaut, Dandelion Gum is a nice surprise and a good example of why doing one thing very well is sometimes more than enough.


Talking Heads’ second album expanded their sound and took them to the dancefloor, marking the beginning of their career-defining collaborations with Brian Eno.

Talking Heads: More Songs About Buildings and Food

More Songs About Buildings and Food

When the Ramones and Talking Heads toured Europe in the spring of 1977, Johnny Ramone was annoyed by seemingly everything. The varieties of lettuce served abroad. Stonehenge (“a buncha rocks,” he called it, according to the excellent book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire). And of course, the James Brown tapes that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth played on the bus. Though the two bands frequently gigged together within the early New York punk scene, the Ramones were all about girl groups and surf rock, while their preppy-looking tourmates—particularly Weymouth and her soon-to-be husband, drummer Chris Frantz—were wild about funky R&B.
Toward the end of the tour, Talking Heads played a small solo show in London. Brian Eno, fresh off making Low with David Bowie, caught the gig and invited the band to lunch the next day, which turned into listening to records at his flat. The producer put on Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac and blew their minds. Afrobeat music (particularly West African polyrhythms) would become the next big influence on the members of Talking Heads, culminating in their magnum opus, 1980’s Remain in Light. But while that was still percolating, the group made an immediate connection with Eno. By the following spring, Talking Heads had kicked their original production team of disco pros to the curb and took up recording More Songs About Buildings and Food alongside Eno in the Bahamas.
Though many tracks on their second album were live staples dating back to 1975, the songs took on a more groove-oriented sound as Talking Heads progressed and played to their strengths. Incorporating disco rhythms separated them further from Television, their closest corollary in the CBGB scene. The tempos were slowed down and simmering, while the layers of instrumentation and effects were built up. You can hear Eno’s “studio as instrument” approach in all sorts of sonic details, like the loudspeaker-style vocals and reverb bouncing off the drums in “Warning Sign,” the curious clicks and dubby echoes punctuating “Stay Hungry,” or the faint twinkling between lines in the chorus of their heady cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” But these increasingly intricate aesthetics never threaten to overthrow the music’s pleasure center: an involuntary compulsion to move your body. On More Songs About Buildings and Food, Talking Heads were sorting out how to engage simultaneously with the mind and the soul (or at least the hips)—how to be both art-rock and dance music.
“Take Me to the River,” their first Top 40 hit, is ground zero for this duality. At the time, various white fools were reinterpreting Reverend Green’s 1974 album-cut-turned-Syl-Johnson-hit, ranging from the horrid (Foghat) to the decent (Levon Helm); none of them come near Talking Heads’ singular take. A soul song that walks the line between the sacred and the profane is not something you’d expect a singer who typically yelped quotidian paranoia to excel at, yet David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal phrasings—his pauses, his stretched-out crooning and strained falsetto, his “yayayayayaya” that sounds like it’s coming toward you—forever changed the way people hear “Take Me to the River.” And Byrne isn’t even the cover’s main power source, Weymouth is. Their version is one big, throbbing bass loop—the fastest, possibly only route to a sexy Talking Heads song.
Byrne spends much of his band’s most immediately danceable record not getting laid, though. He claims he’s just too busy for romance these days. When he demands, atop a frantic guitar jangle in “The Good Thing,” that you stop and watch him work, it could almost be the album’s thesis statement. But Byrne is not just a workaholic, he’s also humorously jaded: The girls, after all, are “getting into abstract analysis” instead of paying attention to him. The one clear relationship portrait he paints is completely absurd, centering around a couple that funnels their stupid fights into a hit TV show; cheekily, it’s called “Found a Job.” By and large, these songs are about being a young, ambitious artist in the city, an album where the age is forever 26 and the mood is raring to go.
Two songs that epitomize this outlook, “Artists Only” and “The Big Country,” are among the album’s most beautiful—the former for its interlocking parts, the latter for its swooning simplicity. An ode to the creative process, “Artists Only” is built from the kind of instrumental interplay that makes you want to dismantle it just so you can understand the source of its magic and mystery; is it the swirling organ melody, the chiming guitar riff, or the chugging bassline that produces this effect? (Like most things Talking Heads, the magic’s in the combinations.) Meanwhile, “The Big Country” is as lucid (and twangy) as Byrne gets: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” he pronounces outright in the surprisingly laidback chorus. He borrowed the phrase “the big country” from Roxy Music’s Country Life closer “Prairie Rose,” where it refers to Texas, but as far as Byrne’s concerned, it’s any place you’d fly over without feeling much curiosity. It’s a barbed judgement he sings with relative peace, like someone relieved they live amid the move and hustle of New York City instead of, y’know, America.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Bowles has the power to transform the sound of a banjo—and traditional folk music—into something transcendental, often bringing the spirit of Americana to new heights.

Whole & Cloven

Nathan Bowles may be best known as a banjo player, but he’s not just a banjo player. Aside from playing drums, piano, and organ in Steve Gunn’s touring band as well as supporting roles in Pelt and Black Twig Pickers, Bowles’ solo albums cover a wide terrain. On 2014’s Nansemond, guitarist Tom Carter nearly stole the show. His solos helped bring Bowles’ compositions—which recall both early American folk and more contemporary revivalists like Jack Rose—to thornier and heavier places. Nansemond positioned Bowles as a crucial force in folk music, showcasing his ability to interweave the genre’s communal spirit with chilling moments of ambient introspection.
The latter informs the most beautiful composition on Whole & Cloven, Bowles’ colorful, uplifting follow-up to Nansemond. Despite its on-the-nose title and extended runtime, the 11-minute “I Miss My Dog” is an exercise in subtlety, a gorgeous and impeccably paced elegy. Its slow-building structure touches on the darkness within Nansemond, but the song ascends with a feathery rhythm that serves as the album’s heartbeat. Remarkably, it uses traditional folk elements and instrumentation to reach something closer to New Age music.
In a recent interview, Bowles explained his attraction to the banjo "because it’s a drum with strings on it. I tend to play everything percussively.” He puts that sentiment into practice throughout his performances on Whole & Cloven. An earthy buzz created by an acoustic guitar echoes through the beatific “Words Spoken Aloud,” sounding at once like a jaw harp and a kazoo. The sunshower of keys in “Chiaroscuro,” meanwhile, suggests that he looks at the piano just like the banjo: an even bigger drum with strings on it. Playing all the instruments himself, Bowles transcends their primary sounds, reinventing them to better suit his compositions. Even his banjo playing, which is as rhythmic and virtuosic as always, more closely resembles a sitar in most songs. In “Gadarene Fugue,” the actual percussion flitters from his picking like sparks from a campfire.
After using something like an entire music store’s worth of instruments, in “Moonshine Is the Sunshine,” as on several Nansemond tracks, we get to hear Bowles' actual voice. He sings exactly like you’d imagine a guy with a banjo to sing: a lazy, gravely holler that sells the obscure folk song’s “Wouldn’t it be funny if all the fish dropped out of school?” cutesiness. It’s one of the only tracks on the album that scans immediately as standard folk music: the kind of song a traditionalist like Sam Amidon might color with sadness, or Gillian Welch might stretch out into a cavernous ballad. But Bowles just plays it straight, stomping his foot, and bellowing along. It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful. On an album that reshapes folk music into something boundless and new, “Moonshine” is a testament to how far he’s come.


The inscrutable shoegaze legends return with a towering reunion album, their first in 22 years. Unexpectedly, it is their most emotionally accessible music yet.

Inlet

Rumors of a fifth Hum album have been circulating since 2016, and there’s some poetry in its surprise drop coinciding with the 20th-anniversary celebration of Deftones’ White Pony, this century’s most influential vision for heavy melodic rock and something that wouldn’t exist without Hum. In the past decade, an entire galaxy of bands equally indebted to shoegaze, emo and alt-rock has emerged from the niche Hum occupied in their heyday—seen as intimidating older brothers by fellow bands on the upstart Polyvinyl label in their home base of Champaign-Urbana, overshadowed and unfairly likened to upstate neighbors/tour mates Smashing Pumpkins. Yet, Inlet doesn’t indicate a band awaiting a hero’s welcome or trying to connect with the world at large. Rather, the massive album presents an invitation to block out everything in existence and ponder the enormity of the universe.
Hum’s wanderlust for inner odysseys was evident in the titles of their two major-label albums: You’d Prefer an Astronaut, Downward is Heavenward. Inlet doesn’t evoke the same playful adventurousness; its heavily fortified exteriors are more reflective of their standoffish relationship with media attention; a decade before it soundtracked a Cadillac commercial, the modest success of “Stars” allowed Hum to terrorize the Howard Stern Show with glass-shattering volume and confound Matt Pinfield by wearing chicken suits on 120 Minutes. “Step Into You” is the only thing here that could possibly give Hum a second chance at the mainstream success they tried their hardest to avoid—mostly because it’s the only thing here less than five minutes, though the cyclical, deadpan melody, head-nodding midtempo groove and hair gel-slick guitar solo could’ve shared space on the alt-rock dial next to Collective Soul.
Hum’s legacy has largely been stewarded by acolytes like Greet Death, Narrow Head, and the Talbott-produced Cloakroom, all of whom have embraced their more funereal aspects and ignored their commercial flirtations. In that light, Inlet is essentially fan service. Talbott’s rhythm guitar, moves with the velocity of a mudslide or molten lava, while Tim Lash’s textured leads evoke water and air, replicating an algae bloom in “Waves” or a slow-motion geyser on the chorus of “Shapeshifter.” And the riffs—the riffs!—are Black Sabbath-slow and simple, like Hum really spent 22 years stockpiling and eliminating anything that couldn’t withstand at least six minutes of repetition or maintain its melodic thrust at the slowest possible tempos.
There are no strings, no Hum 2.0 electronic upgrades, not even post-rock crescendos — in fact, “Folding” does the opposite, stopping midway to bathe in beatless, infinite sustain. Half of the songs here are longer than eight minutes, so the “prog” tag they acquired from Downward is Heavenward will probably stick. It would’ve been enough if Hum had simply picked up where they left off, but Inlet pulls off something far more difficult—it could pass for the work of a band influenced by Hum, taking them in a more minimalist, esoteric direction: post-hardcore guitars played at stoner metal tempos.
Throughout the ’90s, Talbott grew increasingly inscrutable—if his lyrics had remained as legible as they were on “Stars,” Hum might have dealt with greater visibility. But for whatever reason—perhaps the threat of fluke success has faded, or age has eroded their contrarian defense mechanisms—Inlet is Hum’s most emotionally accessible album. Placed unexpectedly high and clear in the mix, Talbott’s vocals function as a lighthouse beacon for anyone trying to navigate the dark, misty and forbidding path surrounding it. While the song titles here are much less florid than, say, “Isle of the Cheetah” or “An Afternoon with the Axolotls,” they’re every bit as evocative, saying exactly what Hum are going to do before they do it. “Cloud City” creates an unforeseen nexus between Helmet and Ride, a monument suspended in air, and of course, Hum nails the sonics of “Waves.” More importantly, the guitars align with Talbott’s evocation of memory’s painful onset—“the dying landscape meets the water/and the waves of you roll over me again.” Hum are just as committed to the theme of “Shapeshifter,” with Talbott going on a Phil Elverum-esque naturalist tangent, imagining himself as a fawn and a bird soaring, “to heights unimagined, 'til loneliness turned back its hold.”
As with the comeback albums from Sleep, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and American Football, Inlet is inherently decadent—four people taking two decades to create about 50 minutes of outrageously luxurious guitars. But Hum has little interest in making an event out of their return, declining to do any press or even provide lyrics. The newfound clarity of their sound allows Inlet to answer any questions that it might raise, a world unto itself: after spanning the depths of the ocean, the expanse of the desert and the breadth of the sky, “Shapeshifter” returns to where Inlet began—“Suddenly me just here back on the land/Reaching for you and finding your hand.” This isn’t escapism, but a meditative retreat—give it an hour of your time and return to the material world more grounded than ever.

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A collection of radio sessions by 10 of Warp’s defining artists is an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s breadth of vision.

WXAXRXP Sessions

If you want to survive and thrive creatively in the music industry long-term, you could do worse than study Warp. The UK indie label got its start in the late 1980s with a bass-heavy regional dance sound known as bleep. By 2000, Warp had relocated from Sheffield to London, and led the rise of what it dubbed “electronic listening music” and others called, for better or worse, intelligent dance music. Over the past two decades, the label has expanded its horizons, dabbling everywhere from Los Angeles beat music to Brooklyn art-rock to chameleonic Detroit rapper Danny Brown. Last year’s Warp debut by Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love, felt like another future milestone.
So Warp has certainly earned a 30th-anniversary celebration. Less clear is what released form that should take in 2019, when the label’s groundbreaking studio work is only a couple of taps away, and previous anniversary compilations already exist. Large anthologies are crucial in Warp’s history, going back to 1992’s genre-defining IDM compilation Artificial Intelligence, which helped expose Aphex Twin and Autechre. WXAXRXP Sessions, available piecemeal or as a 10-disc vinyl box set, distinguishes itself by bringing together only radio sessions, including previously obscure or unreleased tracks.
There are 41 tracks here, from 10 of Warp’s defining artists, with recording dates spanning from 1990 to this summer. That’s more than three hours of music, and plenty of it is great: an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s impressive breadth of vision. But a collection of 10 radio sessions is still a collection of radio sessions. This buffet of material feels like it would once have been relegated to B-sides on import-only CD singles, to be cherished by the most diehard fans.
In a press release, guitarist Mark Clifford of Seefeel tells a story that seems emblematic of WXAXRXP Sessions. The electronic-leaning UK shoegaze innovators are represented here with a dubby 1994 radio session for beloved BBC radio host John Peel that includes two previously unreleased tracks. One of them, an aqueous, lurching beast that would make an incredible sample for a present-day rap song, the band apparently came up with on the spot. Clifford recalls that Peel announced the song by saying, “Rough for Radio, that’s exactly how we like it,” and the title stuck.
WXAXRXP Sessions offers the chance to hear some of the label’s more heavily mythologized artists in just this state, rough for radio. Aphex Twin is documented here in another Peel session, one of only two that Cornish synth wizard Richard D. James (among many other aliases) has ever done. This warm, playful set—highlighted by rarity “Slo Bird Whistle,” which sounds true to its name—is an inviting glimpse of James on the eve of his 1995 album ...I Care Because You Do. The 1998 Peel session by Boards of Canada, the Scottish electronic duo’s sole radio performance, loosens up a few tracks from their sublime album of the same year, Music Has the Right to Children, alongside a Peel-only curio: the glitchy, percussive “XYZ.” A previously unreleased 1990 Peel session by Leeds’ LFO accounts for Warp’s rave-era origins, though the haunting “Rob’s Nightmare” shows the duo was already thinking beyond the dancefloor.
More recent Warp radio sessions illuminate how the label has evolved while maintaining its forward-looking spirit. A four-song set by Flying Lotus, most of which originally aired on BBC Radio 1 in 2010, finds a top-notch band breathing new life into heady jazz-funk from that year’s Cosmogramma and 2007’s Reset EP, plus a sultry one-off called “Golden Axe.” Four songs recorded by Mount Kimbie during Warp’s takeover of London online radio station NTS this past June underline what a forceful live act the once primarily electronic duo has become, bolstered by scene-stealer Mica Levi’s beautifully slurred “Marilyn” guest vocal. New York composer Kelly Moran, whose session is the only one here that has never been broadcast, extends the Warp tradition of contemplative, deep-listening experiences into the less familiar realm of prepared piano.
As an excuse to expose new audiences to Warp’s formidable roster, WXAXRXP Sessions is fine, and piling all these sessions into a playlist and hitting shuffle is fascinating; they flow, despite their differences. But, unusually for the label, this seems less like the sound of tomorrow than a (lavishly assembled) completist novelty. There, too, Warp may be a harbinger of how to get by in the record business. Considering the richness of the scraps stitched together here, it’s hard to get too upset about whatever keeps the music playing.

Buy: Rough Trade (Mount Kimbie) (Bibio) (Kelly Moran)
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Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records.

A Letter Home

Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. From the looks of things, Pono seems to be the most practical application of Young's audio purism to date. He's been a loud critic of the mp3 and digital audio degradation for years, and he's embraced expensive and clunky listening formats to ensure that listeners are getting the best possible sound quality. His public persona in recent months has been that of "expert audio purist"—decrying "underwater listening" behind a desk, driving record executive Mo Ostin around to show off the capabilities of his new format, and so forth.
So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records. In fact, the sonic quality of Young's latest, A Letter Home, might be a little worse than its spiritual forebears: Young joined Jack White at his Third Man HQ in Nashville, where he posted up in a 1940s phone-booth-size studio with limited resources—his acoustic guitar, a harmonica, a piano, and White—to record a handful of covers direct to vinyl. It's pretty much the sonic opposite of, say, his early collaborations with Jack Nitzsche. You can hear the continuous scrape of the grooves, pops, and momentary warps—tiny flaw after tiny flaw. Vintage-sounding and created using White's toys, it has all the appearance of a record featuring the guy who encased Paramount's archives in an oak cabinet and gussied up old Charley Patton records.
Young introduces the album with a letter to his dead mother, telling her that she should talk to his dad (his parents divorced in 1961), asking her to relay a message to his late bandmate Ben Keith, and telling her about how the public turns on Al, the weatherman. It's a sweet, absurd bit of business that vaguely recalls his sense of humor from Human Highway, and it frames the album as a care package to the afterworld, with songs and messages sounding like they're being transmitted via string-connected aluminum cans. This context renders his subsequent performance of Phil Ochs' "Changes" heart-wrenching. His voice is quiet, his guitar is strummed tenderly, the song he sings is about aging and loss. "Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else, one last cup of wine we'll pour/ And I'll kiss you one more time, and leave you on the rolling river shores of changes." At one point in the song, he misses a chord change, which makes the performance feel incredibly human. After all, this is Neil Young, who's got an entire discography of impeccably recorded material. Those small flubs are like scratched out words on a page, and they make the record feel much more intimate.
For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home. The strongest moments on the album are the most delicate ones, which shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone who's spent any time with "Ambulance Blues" or Live at Canterbury House. The restrained material is also better suited for this recording format. His stripped down readings of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" and "Early Morning Rain" pares both songs back to their essentials—beautifully delivered acoustic rambles about being a long way from home and a pained look back at a relationship. On one of his two duets with White, a version of the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder if I Care as Much" that closes the album, their voices sound completely gorgeous together and neither White nor Young showboats. It's a loving, simple, well-done tribute.
Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content. Young's cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" is partially blown by warped sound to the point where the original version sounds more assertive and fully realized than Neil's cover. Occasionally, Young will blow the harmonica too hard and temporarily mar every other sound; elsewhere, he covers songs that flat-out sound bad in the audio format they're presented in. "Since I Met You Baby" is an unessential, bleary version of Ivory Joe Hunter's velvet R&B original, while "My Hometown", removed from the production of Born in the U.S.A., is repetitive and a bad fit for Young's voice. The cover of "On the Road Again" is just a slapdash mess; White's vocals somehow sound abrasive, and similar to the Springsteen cover, Neil's voice just isn't well-suited to tackle Willie Nelson's register.
Young said the songs he picked to cover were "songs that I love, songs that changed my life," and said behind the archaic recording quality was some "beautiful music". There's nothing more beautiful or potentially life-changing on A Letter Home than his take on Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death". It's a gorgeous, heartbreaking song about a heroin overdose—it's devastating and beautiful coming from Young, a longtime Jansch disciple who also lost friends to the needle (and wrote some of his best songs about it).
There's a video of Young performing the song, and at the end, White comes up and says, "That sounded good." Young replies, "That's a heavy song." He wasn't focused on how it sounded—he was thinking about what he was singing. In that way, A Letter Home doesn't contradict his work on Pono. Both projects, different as they are, stem from his deep love for the material. If anything, the crackling whistle that introduces "Needle of Death" speaks much more strongly to the life-changing power of music than any extra-musical project ever could.


The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album dilutes jangly reverb and pop-punk energy into a sound that’s chemically weather-treated for commercial appeal.

EKKSTACY

Browse some of the recent profiles of 21-year-old singer-songwriter Ekkstacy, and two details appear over and over: First, his biggest song, the airy “i walk this earth all by myself,” has a lot of streams. Second, although he began his career in high school making SoundCloud emo rap, he’s now proudly an indie rocker. Neither genre translates well on his new self-titled album, one of the most assertively generic releases in recent memory. These thickly shellacked songs lack the disaffected-but-exciting undercurrent that Ekkstacy’s influences share; they also ignore the elegance of his higher vocal register, which resonated on his early self-releases. The result is a clinically impersonal record that reveals nearly nothing about the artist for which it’s named.
Initially, Ekkstacy modeled his sound after the misty, arpeggiated ennui of late-2010s grunge rappers like XXXTentacion. His early releases—“the sadness in my smile” and “uncomparable”—achieve a tidy, if derivative, style reminiscent of the late Florida rapper’s 2017 album 17, while “broken/feelings 2” played with the drawn-out syllables and big hooks of predecessors like Juice WRLD and Chief Keef. A comment on one of Ekkstacy’s first SoundCloud tracks sums up the lovelorn resentment of that era of his sound: “showed him this now he play it for other bitches.”
When Ekkstacy took a familiar turn from emo rap towards rock, he did some homework, dutifully embracing a Misfits-lite sound and naming a bright, uncharacteristically energetic track on his 2022 album misery after ’80s goth rock pioneers Christian Death. His latest album is a set of underpowered, faintly grungy power-pop that washes up alongside mid-aughties beach bands like Wavves or Beach Fossils. Those tentpole inspirations stand on either side of a project that seems to exist at the expense of Ekkstacy himself, a young musician whose interests have been chemically weather-treated for commercial success.
At barely over 30 minutes long, EKKSTACY feels like a slog. The mood is one of vague sadness that drowns out his delicate voice both literally and figuratively. Cliché lyrics (“I don’t wanna smile/I just want to cry”) run together unconvincingly over foamy production from Deb Never collaborator Apob and the Contra Gang producer Manget$u. Their smooth touches only soften an environment that’s already desperate for some thrown elbows, out-of-nowhere synth breaks, or full-throated guitar solos.
Instead, every riff is dulled down until the details bleed together like a blurred Zoom meeting background. A Trippie Redd feature on the pretty earworm “problems” barely registers. The Kid Laroi, whose polished vocals provide a minor jolt to the otherwise forgettable “alright,” fares better. But it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint specific moments of interest before they’re quelled by the anonymous room tone of the album. A song about a nondescript but beautiful girl titled “bella” is not the antidote.
Ekkstacy does eke out some breathing room amid the suffocating same-old. The crashing two-part climax on “the headless horseman lost his way” achieves some gratifying catharsis on either side of its muted, bedroom-pop vocal loop. “fuck” is fun in a dopey way, probably because it involves a lot of yelling “fuck” with the occasional “yeah!” But these flashes of raw energy are swallowed by the surrounding chaff, and a jerky riff that thrilled for 20 seconds on TikTok fades into tedious wallpaper punk. EKKSTACY winds up feeling as diaristic as a cue card.