Todd Rundgren continues to play to extremes with two new records, solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans, made in collaboration with Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen. They couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, but they show an iconoclast continuing to indulge his every whim.

Todd Rundgren/Emil Nikolaisen/Hans-Peter Lindstrøm / Todd Rundgren: Runddans

Runddans

Todd Rundgren had mastered the art of writing the perfect pop song by the time he was 23—so he’s spent the next four decades trying out pretty much everything else. While his early-'70s chart success posited him as a stateside McCartney, his subsequent career more closely resembles that of an American Eno: a musician-cum-conceptualist who didn’t so much forsake rock stardom for the avant-garde as inhabit both worlds simultaneously. Rundgren is forever at the center of infinite extremes: proto-punk instigator and prog-rock architect, celebrity and cult hero, casino-circuit nostalgia act and remix-ready electronica enthusiast, autocratic auteur and promiscuous collaborator, bitter cynic and spiritual humanist, genius and jester. He’s the iconoclast revered by everyone from Daft Punk to Prince to Earl Sweatshirt; he’s also the guy arguably responsible for inventing Smash Mouth.
As he gets older, these internal contradictions have only become more pronounced—this spring sees the release of two albums that respectively play to his accessible and exploratory impulses. But while the song-oriented solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, they leave similar impressions: while it’s reassuring that Todd Rundgren is still with us in 2015 indulging his every whim, the batshit-bonkers music often misses the mark on "inspired irreverence" and lands directly in outright embarrassment.
Global is Rundgren’s small-u utopia album, dressing up his meditations on the environment, feminism, civil rights and community in synth-slicked rock and post-rave sonics, recalling 1993’s techno manifesto No World Order—albeit, mercifully, without the attempts at rapping. (And much like his tour for that album, Rundgren’s current stage set is more superclub throwdown than a rock show, with the singer flanked by Dâm-Funk and choreographed dancers.) But it’s an album where the timely, ripped-from-Twitter lyrics—complete with references to Miley Cyrus and Malala Yousafzai—clash awkwardly with the dated sound.
For a record so topically consumed with the here-and-now, Global feels like it could’ve come out over a quarter century ago: with its gated-reverb drums, robo-filtered vocal hooks, and arena-rock chug, the opening "Evrybody" recalls the Reagan-era moment when '60s veterans started lacquering up old standards with '80s production gloss. "Blind", meanwhile, rails against bible-thumping, climate change-denying Republicans over boudoir-summoning soft-rock, complete with a Sanbornian saxgasm. Perhaps Global’s anachronistic sound is Rundgren’s way of emphasizing that the issues he’s addressing were just as pressing three decades ago and we’re still no further ahead. But even more tasteful production couldn’t redeem the goofiness of "Earth Mother", a salute to famous female activists torpedoed by rote songcraft and hackneyed lyrics. ("We got a little bit too much testosterone/ Need a little more progesterone.")
Rundgren was the rare rocker of his vintage to embrace electronics early on (he was eagerly heralding the death of rock'n'roll as far back as 1975), but Global finds him trumpeting the music’s transformative, communal virtues like a neophyte who’s just come back from his first Burning Man, resulting in tracks (see: "Global Nation") that resemble advertising jingles for Euro-trance compilations. Likewise, the acid-house throb of "Flesh and Blood" doesn’t simply flaunt the influence of EDM, it’s about EDM; as Rundgren marvels at "the bang-bang-banging of a drum machine" and "the thunderous groove," he comes off like a glowstick-twirling Marv Albert doing play-by-play from the middle of a rave. When Rundgren dials down the bluster, Global yields moments of understated beauty: the addiction-themed "Fate" boasts a dreamily ascendant chorus, and the soft-focus "Soothe" has enough genuine ache to cut through its '80s movie-montage sheen. But for an album preaching a message of unity, Global just doesn’t hold together very well.
If Global overwhelms its four-minute songs with conflicting aesthetics, Runddans encounters the opposite problem: it unfurls across an IMAX-sized canvas, but struggles to stretch out its concept to fill the space. The product of a mutual-admiration society forged with Norwegian space-disco dynamo Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen, Runddans is a 39-minute album broken up into 12 tracks, meant to be experienced as a single continuous piece. Cleary modelled after the side-long cosmic-fusion suites Rundgren fashioned on 1975’s Initiation or with his contemporaneous art-rock ensemble Utopia, the album is an exciting proposition on paper. While Rundgren regularly communes with classic-rock peers—he’s a long-time member of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band and appeared on the ex-Beatle's recent solo album—Runddans marks a rare instance of working with younger spiritual kin less interested in his catalog of hits than his excursions into futurist psychedelia.
For its first half at least, Runddans lives up to its big-event billing. Its movements are arranged along a loose cycle-of-life narrative that conflates childbirth with spiritual awakening (sample title: "Liquid Joy From the Womb of Infinity"), with the scene set by an entrancing swirl of oscillating electronics, gong-crash eruptions, and wordless vocals. The moment of birth is marked by Rundgren’s first utterance of Runddans’ central lyric—"I have waited for this moment for what seems like nine lifetimes/ You will never be closer than you are now/ Put your arms around me"—like a parent casting his eyes upon his newborn for the first time; tears of joy spring forth in the form of a gushing guitar solo set atop a celestial disco groove.
But once it achieves lift-off 15 minutes in, Runddans must grapple with the same question all new parents face after the immediate thrill of birth wears off: What now? The trio’s answer is to instantly deconstruct what they’ve so carefully crafted, randomly fiddling with console levels and chopping up the beat to bring the piece crashing down. It’s not unlike the sudden tape-slice change-up Tortoise introduced 14 minutes into their own art-rock colossus, "Djed", violently disrupting the song at its hypnotic fever pitch. But rather than use the opportunity to open up Rundanns to new structural possibilities, the trio and their small orchestra of supporting players cycle through endless variations on the piece’s main melodic motif, dressing it up variously in space-age bachelor pad exotica, sci-fi Beach Boys harmonies and West African rhythms all while the throughline turns evermore hazy.
By the time Rundgren’s incessant vocal line slips out of sync with the Pompeii-scaled Pink Floyd lurch of "Wave of Heavy Red (Disko Nectar)", Rundanns starts to feel like the prog rock version of Too Many Cooks: one idea repeated and reformulated past the point of absurdity into the realm of insanity. And sadly, there are no great rewards for your endurance here: unsure of how to end the thing, the trio opt to build the penultimate house workout, "Ravende Gal (Full Circle)", around their phone conversations about how to end the thing. Maybe that outcome isn’t too surprising, given Rundgren’s long-standing fondness for breaking the fourth wall. But while Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.


For their third album, Ra Ra Riot enlisted producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello) and incorporated more keyboards and synthesizers to help them move away from the bittersweet violin and cello they felt had come to pigeonhole them since their first release in 2006.

Beta Love

Over the course of their seven-year career, Ra Ra Riot have, for better or worse, been known as the indie band with orchestral strings. It was a bit of a shock, then, when in 2010 the Antlers' Peter Silberman remixed short samples from their entire sophomore album, The Orchard, into a four-minute glitchy electronic track that by his admission sounded "pretty foreign from the source." He was actually remarkably prescient: for their third record, Beta Love, the quintet enlisted producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello) to help them move away from the bittersweet violin and cello they felt had come to pigeonhole them since their first release in 2006. Along with a lyrical focus inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, which the band had been reading before they made the album, Ra Ra Riot incorporated more keyboards and synthesizers into many of the songs on Beta Love. This new technology-informed attitude represents a necessary change for a band known mostly for one thing.
The group might have felt hemmed in by a formula, but it was one that worked for them. For instance  the deep cello moans that opened The Rhumb Line's "Ghost Under Rocks" are still viscerally affecting years and countless indie chamber-pop imitators later. The keyboards stabbing at Beta Love opener "Dance With Me" set the tone for the album's overall harder, faster tempos, which peaks during the machine-gun drums on "Binary Mind", one of the songs that speaks most directly to Ra Ra Riot's concern with Kurzweil's transhumanism: "Why, tell me why/ I want to read you with this binary mind/ 'Cause if I do/ I'm sure that we'll be complete." Later, "Angel, Please" picks up where that track's hi-NRG left off, bringing out singer Wesley Miles' similarity to Phil Collins in pitch, intonation, and the use of "angel" as romantic epithet (the tambourines and handclaps don't hurt, either). To his credit, Miles definitely pushes his vocal range higher on Beta Love, even if he strains it to Jemaine Clement levels of absurdity on the R&B-leaning slow jam "Wilderness". And Miles takes sexy too far on "What I Do For U", sinking his delicate vibrato behind bass hits so incongruously deep they sound poorly mixed.
Ra Ra Riot are best when they stick with what they wanted to get away from. "Is It Too Much" pulses with a metronome tick, a slight piano melody nestling between violinist Rebecca Zeller's judicious peals. The track would slot perfectly next to Discovery, Miles' electronic side project with Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij. "When I Dream", the album's haunting high point, provides a template for how Beta Love could have worked. Instead of overcrowding with layers of instrumentation, Ra Ra Riot play off a similarly minimal heartbeat pulse, filling the spaces between with single piano chords as opposed to a continually bursting synthesizers. When they do build to the subtle climaxes, Zeller's violin swells and the finger snaps click into place at precisely the right time. But the moment is lost on the rabid drum fills on follower "That Much", which returns to the bombast that relentlessly drives the rest of the album.
It's unclear where Ra Ra Riot will go from here. After some bad tours and the departure of cellist Alexandra Lawn, the brasher tracks on Beta Love come across  as cathartic, as though the band is doing a silly dance or yelling obscenities as a necessary release from a stagnant situation. If that is the case, then the album's understated moments are a reassuring reminder that Ra Ra Riot still have some of The Rhumb Line in them.


Cian Nugent is the type of guitarist who can dazzle with his attention to detail on the fretboard, but he is also content to ride out on one chord for several measures if the song calls for it. Each song on his third album (his first as a singer/songwriter) unwinds unhurried and his backing band, the Cosmos, take their time asserting their sound. This is patient music at its best.

Night Fiction

The key to understanding Cian Nugent is "Things Don't Change That Fast." That's the title of the first single from Night Fiction. To begin, the Irish guitarist delicately strums the same chord five times, one for each time he sings a word in the title, demonstrating quite plainly that no, things don't change that fast. This ethos applies to Nugent's career—Night Fiction is his third album, but his first as a singer/songwriter—as well as his technique. On his earlier instrumental releases, he sometimes let the spaces between notes breathe so long that you'd be likely to find yourself checking the headphone jack to make sure you hadn't somehow become disconnected. These spaces don't appear much on Night Fiction; instead each song unwinds unhurried and the members of his backing band, the Cosmos, take their time making their presence known.
Nugent is the type of guitarist who can dazzle with his attention to detail on the fretboard, as on the album's sole solo instrumental track, "Lucy," but he is also content to ride out on one chord for several measures if the song calls for it. At first, the guitar feels too high in the mix—it's appropriate that the leadoff track is called "Lost Your Way"—and the licks he plays sometimes feel like muscle-memory fills that could have come from the Jeff Healey Band, incongruous with the rest of the album. His voice is an "if Kurt Vile can do it, so can I" approximation, but Nugent makes braver and more inspired melodic choices. Even if his voice doesn't hit all of the right notes, there's an appealing warmth and conviction to his singing.
Nugent also makes up for those irritating suburban-blues licks with his exquisite chordings and inspired solos. It also helps that the Cosmos are an especially dynamic backing band, sounding alternately as ferocious as Dirty Three or as mellow as the Section. His subject matter seems mostly to be interpersonal strains, and his words are simple, but wise and wide open for interpretation. The aforementioned "Things Don't Change That Fast" could be a monologue a practicing addict delivers to a recovering addict: "There may be only one difference between the hopeless and the brave, one's too specific and the other's too vague," he sings.
As with Nugent's previous releases, many of the songs start in one style to become something else altogether. "Year of the Snake," the glorious final track on Night Fiction, spends its first minute with the guitar gradually uncoiling before the organ and viola eventually enter the fold. The cymbals and bass arrive by the third minute, and by minute four it has morphed into a "Sister Ray"-like rave-up. Nugent is singing out by the seven-minute mark, sounding more like Pete Shelley than the occasionally flat voice he uses on the rest of the record. This is the catharsis promised at the beginning of the album: Things don’t change that fast, but when they do, they change dramatically, and for the better.


The prolific Sacramento rapper’s latest has that bass and funk-heavy production but is deeply haunted by death. It unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun.

1 Up Top Ahk

Toward the end of Mozzy’s latest album, over a synth and sax-laced beat, he admits, “Day in, day out I would beg for this life/Lot of misfortune that came with this life.” In the moment, he sounds at once grim and grateful. After 30 years on this earth, he isn’t shameless about his misfortunes—some of which were carried out by his own hand—but he’s not apologetic either. It seems his only regret is that his life may have come at too high a cost, and on 1 Up Top Ahk, he offers the receipts.
It opens with a recorded message from a club owner attempting to shut down a performance at his venue. “I know most of them are thugs, but this dude’s got a problem with guns,” the owner says, insisting they return his call. Guns were part of the reason the Sacramento rapper found himself locked up in 2014, but that’s only one chapter of a story far more complex than the “thugs and guns” cliche gangster rappers (really, any rapper) are reduced to. 1 Up Top Ahk peels back the layers alongside a carefully selected cast of features from Boosie, Lil Durk, and Jay Rock. Though the features broaden the perspectives, the prolific Mozzy is the unequivocal star here.
Sparing no details, the album unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun. There’s a West Coast tinge to most of his production from his longtime collaborator June on the Beat, all bassy and funky, but there’s no audible sunshine here. This isn’t a man who needs sympathy—just an open ear as willing to listen without believing themselves a judge and jury. On “Sleep Walkin,” Mozzy confesses, “I miss my brother Deezy/Only if them bullets grazed ’em/Wasn’t no hatred in my heart until that happened/That’s what changed me.”
Rap has a way of humanizing those whom society has rendered deplorable or altogether invisible. Where others have chosen glorification as their mode of resisting—destructive trauma tucked beneath a club banger, sounding like a good time—Mozzy avoids that. Nothing on this record, not the production nor the tenderly sung hooks, overshadows what it is he has to say. He counts on his vulnerability to compel the album forward; his jagged voice and clear-eyed lyrics are pensive and pain-filled. He’s seen a lifetime’s worth of tragedy, and as the title of “Take It Up With God” suggests, sometimes the Lord feels like the only refuge in some of the worst storms life has to offer. Set to a harmonizing vocal and percussion, the hook and verses are as much a genuflection for mothers of the fallen as they are an attempt to come to terms with the fact their loved ones are never coming back.
“It’s like I’ve got a shoebox of obituaries, and they’re all young,” Mozzy told The Sacramento Bee last year. As the Reaper lurks in 1 Up Top Ahk’s shadows, Mozzy often appeals to a higher power. “Took a seat in church/My family told me it don’t hurt to try/It’s therapeutic for you baby/It don’t hurt to cry,” he raps on “M.I.P. Jacka,” an homage to the Bay Area rapper who was killed two years ago. The Jacka, himself, features as well over aptly somber, sparse production.
Death and religion become uneasy bedfellows in the streets, but as is the natural order, where something dies, something else is given life. In this way, there’s a restorative element to the album that makes it feel like the end of a troubled beginning. The artwork is the mugshot from Mozzy’s first case as an adult, a tribute to the trials that ultimately built up to this last trip to San Quentin and the one he says saved him. In between, he had a prolific run, dropping upwards of 26 projects over six years—12 of them last year alone. But he slowed it down (only two prior this year), and this slower pace pays off. No longer the villain, he’s become an anti-hero whose done all the wrong things for the right reasons finally ready to turn a corner, and it’s hard not to cheer him on. 1 Up Top Ahk elevates the stories from those who have been silenced. As much as the album deals with struggles in the streets and the trauma that comes with it, it’s also about loyalty and brotherhood and pride in a world that says you’re undeserving and the refusal to break. It’s about someone who made it to where many others didn’t—in rap or otherwise—and, as Mozzy says himself, someone who deserves to shine.


Usher and Zaytoven’s “collaborative project“ is a solid homage to the duo’s beloved Atlanta roots and the city’s sound that has permeated just about every corner of popular music.

“A”

In 1997, when he was still a baby-faced teen, Usher’s voice sounded like it had weathered the storms of a thousand failed relationships. His breakout album, My Way, cemented his place among then-peers who have since gone on to become legendary reminders of a bygone era of R&B. But Usher has played the long game by reinventing himself over and over, a heartbreaker balladeer turned mega pop star. Just shy of his 40th birthday, he found a new form, a splashy composite of youthful aesthetics.
“A”, his “collaborative project” with iconic producer Zaytoven, is an homage to their beloved Atlanta roots and the city’s sound that has permeated just about every corner of popular music. The pair first connected on the 2009 Raymond v Raymond single “Papers” for a smoldering elegy of a marriage turned sour. Back then, the singer was figuring out his crossover act while the producer was trying to cement himself outside of trap circles. Now, they have witnessed and inspired several eras of Atlanta-propelled music. (Consider that this year alone, Zaytoven has worked on several rap albums, a gospel album, and now, an R&B release; we’re a long way from “Icy.”) But longevity can be a bittersweet pill: fail to evolve and get phased out, adapt too much and nostalgia becomes the enemy. Usher has stared down the dilemma for over 20 years, but here, he sounds liberated from expectations and outcomes.
Opener “Stay At Home” presents a loosened-up Usher, less concerned with proper singing than channeling the blistering energy of the A. Future sounds right at home among Zaytoven’s racing hi-hats, but braggadocious Usher is jarring. It’s not so much that he sounds dated or inept; it’s that the teacher taking lessons from his students always feels like regression. The R&B coming out of Atlanta—6LACK’s hybrid soul, Jacquees’ referential crooning—is immediate. It may owe plenty to Usher, but it remains a more swaggered version of the genre that doesn’t exactly deal in tact or displays of raw vulnerability.
“Peace Sign” is a steamy sex song that finds him propositioning a lover over an astral synth line. The risque track—named for the position of his lady’s legs—is a logical progression from 2016’s “No Limit,” which featured another ATLien, Young Thug, and saw Usher leaning into more of a melodic sing-rap cadence. He deploys that style all across “A”: on the confident flirtation of “ATA,” the club-ready “Birthday,” and the Gunna-assisted “Gift Shop.” But occasionally, he does return to form. “You Decide” sounds like vintage Usher, ever convincing as he pleads for another chance. However, the production, which went well with the bravado, is a little too bright for his lyrics of atonement.
Ultimately, Zaytoven’s minimalist trap isn’t always the ideal match for Usher’s traditional R&B capabilities, but when they push both to their extreme, something magical happens. On the standout “Say What U Want,” Usher’s buttery voice floats between a cool falsetto and a warm tenor, sliding up and down a bed of dreamy keys. It’s here that the pair find the sweet spot. It’s Zaytoven’s most stripped beat and Usher’s most balletic vocal performance, a reminder that the two of them have plenty to offer outside of imitation.
Legacy artists folding in what’s hot right tend to make things uncomfortable because it forces us to take stock of what a genre has become. In Usher’s case, he’s up against the towering legacies of his 8701 and Confessions and a period of R&B that the new generation idolizes. The odds were never in his favor, but he masters the concept. Whatever “A”’s shortcomings, they are perhaps not an indictment of Usher or Zaytoven but of what R&B—or at least the perception of it—has lost along the way and only recently begun to correct.


Former Roxy Music singer-- long adept at transforming other people's material, e.g his fantastic take on Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"-- here attempts an entire record of Dylan covers.

Dylanesque

It's really not that tough to do a good Bob Dylan cover, which is one of the reasons he's been covered so well so often. His lyrics have lots of room for a singer to find a personal angle, and their melodies are durable enough to sound just fine no matter how far they're pushed-- the farther the better, really. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", which led off Bryan Ferry's 1974 solo debut These Foolish Things, is one of the most awesome Dylan covers ever, the kind of interpretation that leaves its source bruised, hung over and covered in Sharpied taunts. Ferry ripped apart Dylan's apocalyptic tapestry fiber by fiber and reconstructed it in Day-Glo plastic thread; his performance's deliberately affected mannerisms seem to have made an enduring impact on the young David Byrne.
Ferry's returned to the Dylan songbook a few times since then, including two tracks on 2002's Frantic, and the marketing hook for his tedious new record is that it's all Bob: 10 covers of the master, plus "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down", an oldie that Dylan learned from Eric von Schmidt. The chief joke of the album is that Dylanesque isn't particularly Dylanesque, aside from a couple of harmonica solos plunked in for symbolic purposes. Anything resembling a rough edge in the arrangements has been buffed away; Dylan's wicked vocal backspin has been replaced by Ferry's touch-my-velvet-dinner-jacket-baby default croon, sometimes backed up by characterless backup chicks. A Dylanesque choice of repertoire would've been perverse and deep-diving, maybe borderline inscrutable, but Ferry sticks to the hits.
He also hermetically seals the hits off from meaning. Ferry can be a subtle ironist when he feels like it--he's made a career out of blurring the line between romantic and "romantic"-- so maybe it's another joke that he treats the opening song here, the despondent "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", as if it were just an assemblage of syllables and notes like anything else he could rubber-stamp the "Bryan Ferry" brand onto. But compared to, say, Nina Simone's blood-in-the-bathwater rendition of the same song, it just seems lazy.
When he recycles the same blasé, prefabricated technique for virtually every other song here, it's not just lazy-- it's infuriating. The band isn't much help, either: They play polite, foursquare rock with the occasional "tasty" lick at the end of a line. "All Along the Watchtower" lifts the Jimi Hendrix arrangement, just like the version Dylan plays on stage almost every night, but Ferry and company amble through it as if its central line is "no reason to get excited."
There's something in Dylan that Ferry is attached to, obviously, but it's not clear what. He's talked about how interpreting these songs is like reading Shakespeare. That's true, in a way; bad actors perform Shakespeare as if the text were a jeweler's pillow to display their star presence to best advantage, and that's the way Ferry mostly sings Dylan now. He doesn't really address the songs on their own terms, or even wrestle with them the way he did with "Hard Rain". He just runs them through the Ferry-izer, treating them all like they're "Slave to Love". Which means that, as much as he tries to capitalize on his voice's suaveness and seductiveness and hauntingness, he can't sing "All I Really Want to Do" as suavely as the Byrds, or "If Not For You" as seductively as Olivia Newton-John (no, seriously!), or "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" as hauntingly as just about anyone else who's ever attempted it.
There's only one glimmer here of Ferry's old interpretive wit. He murmurs "Positively 4th Street" in a gently mournful tone, backed up by power-ballad piano and whooshing movie-soundtrack synthesizers. The song is one of the most vindictive, venomous kiss-offs Dylan's ever written; gentle mournfulness wouldn't seem to suit it. But Ferry phrases it as a regretful glance back at a relationship that somehow didn't work out, and keeps a straight face all the way up to the last line, "you'd know what a drag it is to see you"-- whereupon he gives "drag" the bitter snap he's been saving up. Thanks, Bryan; the feeling is mutual.


James Leyland Kirby, the British producer also known for his work as V/Vm, returns as Caretaker with a haunting and gorgeous series of edits from old 78s.

The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

An Empty Bliss Beyond This World sounds like a collection of edits of prewar parlor-room music because that's what it is. "This Caretaker album is built from layers of sampled 78s and albums," James Kirby told me in an email recently. "Things have been rearranged in places and other things brought in and out of focus. Surface noise"-- which is abundant-- "is from the original vinyls."
Kirby is an artist whose concepts are sometimes more fun to engage with than his music. As V/Vm-- a project he started in the early 1990s-- he made grotesque edits of soft-pop songs and released an entire 7" of the sounds of pigs feeding. His albums as the Caretaker have been comparatively more subdued, tending toward ambient music made from preexisting recordings.
Bliss was inspired by a 2010 study suggesting that Alzheimer's patients have an easier time remembering information when it's placed in the context of music. What makes it unique isn't that Kirby resuscitates old but vaguely familiar source material; it's how he edits it. Several of the tracks here take pretty, anodyne phrases and loop them mindlessly; several stop in what feels like mid-thought; several reach back and then jump forward. They never feel filled-in from start to finish, and they tend to linger on moments that feel especially comforting or conclusive: the last flourishes of a song, maybe, the pat on the shoulder, the part when we're assured everything is drawing to a close. Kirby isn't just making nostalgic music, he's making music that mimics the fragmented and inconclusive ways our memories work.
Unlike Kirby's last few albums, whether as the Caretaker or Leyland Kirby, Bliss isn't dissonant or heavy-handed. Nobody has to remind me that losing my memory is upsetting, or that I'm losing it as I type, or that the loss will probably accelerate as I get older, or that I'll probably spend my final hours sitting by a window repeating myself. What I like about Bliss is that, as the title suggests, there's something at least metaphorically beautiful-- even slightly funny-- about living inside a locked groove, dancing with nobody.
The last five years or so have been filled with music that feels haunted by an unresolved moment or looks at the past from a crooked perspective. The Ghost Box label has been consistently good at making jigsaw puzzles from cultural memories; Ariel Pink's grotesque soft-rock finally has an audience-- even music by a producer like Burial relies on the intrusion of a voice that sounds more part of history than the present, something reaching forward from a time we thought was gone. Kirby isn't unaware of what he's doing here-- everything he's put out in the past few years plays around with these ideas directly, down to his choice of titles (2009's Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was being the most impressively gymnastic). Even calling himself "The Caretaker"-- a reference to the endlessly recurring ballroom parties of The Shining-- feels like an effort to suss out the inherently psychedelic properties of memory.
Bliss reminds me of Ekkehard Ehlers' "Plays John Cassavetes 2" and Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", two pieces that transcend high-concept nostalgia. "Cassavetes" is a layered loop of the opening string figure from the Beatles' "Good Night", and the Bryars piece-- which was explored in a column here last year-- is a loop of a homeless man singing a hymn as an orchestra gradually builds behind him. In both cases, the actual amount of musical material is relatively small, and the "work" done on the part of the composer is minimal-- even Bryars' 30-minute build consists mostly of consonant drones.
Bryars' and Ehlers' conceptual leap was to wear their moments out as completely as possible. Repetitive music has a way of dissolving a listener's ability to pay attention to it: by the end, Ehlers' and Bryars' pieces sound different from the beginning, but there's no part I can point to in them and say, "here, here's where things change for good." They're constantly changing. They're also constantly returning. With Kirby, the effect is even more subtle and confusing. "Libet's Delay", sounds like it confuses its end for its beginning (or vice versa), and "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine" appears twice, with a two-minute song in-between: It's as though Kirby is trying to trick you into experiencing déjà vu. In all three cases, the source material is music designed not only to comfort, but to sound like it existed before you: hymns, love songs, lullabies. Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile.


Indie legends' first new album in four years-- widely tipped to be the group's return to a more guitar-centric sound-- is stylistically diverse and colored by distant, queasy prodcution.

The Flaming Lips: At War With the Mystics

At War With the Mystics

There's a moment in last year's documentary, The Fearless Freaks, where Wayne Coyne is playing a song he was writing during the time of the Clouds Taste Metallic sessions. With only his strumming to accompany him, Wayne sings, "Cats killing dogs, pigs eating rats..." The song is "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles", and on its way to actualization, it will acquire a weird intro and a stranger instrumental bridge, and will be puffed up large and colorful enough to suit the rest of that big, glowing album. But even as Coyne plays it alone on guitar, you can hear something special.
Listening to At War With the Mystics-- the Flaming Lips' first new album in almost four years, and the product of many months in the studio-- it's difficult to imagine a similarly inspiring glimpse into one of these songs' construction. Much of the record sounds like chords and melodies were written later, as an afterthought to flesh out production experiments. The goofy noises, glitches, and wafts of Wilsonian harmony in "Haven't Got a Clue", for example, seem to be more central to the track's focus than the melody (of which there is almost none) or the lyrics ("Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face"). But the sounds are certainly interesting.
At War With the Mystics has already been discussed as the band's Return to Rock or Return to the Weird, but I don't really hear those things. Some of this talk arose because among the first of these tracks to emerge was "The W.A.N.D.", a good song built on a gnarly guitar riff-- a combo we haven't heard from these guys for some time. It doesn't approach the force of, say, "Slow Nerve Action", but this is the best guitar rock they've produced since Clouds Taste Metallic. Still, it's not indicative of the record as a whole.
Instead, At War With the Mystics is a grab bag of musical styles, without ever seeming like a retread of any particular album or sound they've explored during the course of their 20-year career. Though the themes are cut from the same cloth as the last few records-- meditations on fear, death, love, one's place in the universe, and so on-- musically, the band is up for experimenting. The production is distant, queasy, fuzzier, and less direct than any of their recent outings; the vocals are often manipulated and toyed with-- Coyne goes from singing in a register so low you can hardly recognize him (the single "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song") to one so high that he sounds like Beck doing Prince ("Free Radicals"). Musical mastermind Steven Drozd even sings his first lead, on "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung", one of the record's better songs, a peculiar amalgamation of several strands of krautrock and Pink Floyd's "One of These Days".
While the band has always played around with a variety of sounds, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of songwriting, most of Mystics doesn't measure up. It's telling that their best melody since The Soft Bulletin was written by Cat Stevens, and when the Lips make more traditional song compositions their focus, the results here are rarely engaging. At War With the Mystics leaves me wondering whether making good records is really the point for the Flaming Lips at this juncture. With this album, I'm struck by the possibility that the Flaming Lips are an idea and a project as much of a band, and records are just one of the organization's many concerns. This doesn't seem like any great tragedy, and I've no question that many tens of thousands more people will get into them this year for the first time and find their lives enriched by what the Flaming Lips have to offer. But for the first time in more than 15 years they've made an album that is difficult to consider great, regardless of how it's approached.


The first compilation album from the Brooklyn beatmaker is an entertaining ride through the sounds of one of New York’s most underappreciated producers.

Hey Tony

The producer compilation album is a rite of passage within rap music. It’s one thing to create instrumental albums that stand on their own or collaborate on a project with a single artist, but the compilation album comes with a different set of requirements. Catering beats to different artists across one project requires sharp balancing skills that not every producer possesses, and great recent examples—like Metro Boomin’s 2018 album Not All Heroes Wear Capes or Black Noi$e’s 2020 effort Oblivion—use several voices and styles to create mosaics grander than the sum of their parts.
Brooklyn-raised producer Tony Seltzer has spent the last few years proving he’s worthy of the mantle. He started making beats for friends as a Meshuggah and J Dilla obsessed 16-year-old, and he spent the next decade establishing himself within New York’s rap underground. Though he’s recently spread his wings on collaborative albums with artists like D.C.’s WiFiGawd and Atlanta tastemaker Key!, he still retains a strong connection to the city that raised him. Hey Tony, named for his eponymous beat tag, is Seltzer’s first attempt at bringing a variety of artists together under his name. It’s an entertaining ride through the sounds of one of New York’s most underappreciated producers.
Seltzer brings a jagged approach to his compilation, purposely avoiding easy flowing transitions. Several tracks bleed into the next but unlike a typical DJ set, not every transition on Hey Tony is seamless. Opening track “Reloaded” featuring Cleveland rapper Zelly Ocho segues into the brooding Lucki-featuring “One Minute,” but the thread is cut before “Wyd,” a showcase for North Carolina rapper Mavi, can begin. This staggered flow splits the project into sections, neatly spacing out the staggering amount of talent across its 14 tracks.
Matching the unique nature of his production, Seltzer embraces a diversity of voices on the album, leaving equal room for vocalists and rappers of all stripes. There are regional stars who Seltzer’s worked with before like Key!, Virginia rapper-producer Lil Ugly Mane, and fellow New Yorker Wiki. There are up-and-comers like Mavi, Atlanta firebrand SlimeSito, and Inland Empire firestarter Hook. Formal vocalists like HAWA and Eartheater even get in on the action. Culling so many performers from across genres with different styles is a tall order, but Seltzer allows each one to breathe, utilizing each artist as a disparate building block as opposed to a symbol of his wide-ranging music taste. Seltzer’s beats definitively run the gamut without ever ceasing to be the framework of the piece.
Similar to New Jersey producer GRIMM Doza (who has a co-production credit on “Keep It Low”), Seltzer can adapt his sound to match a particular artist’s sensibilities without having his voice made indistinct. The chirpy synths and warbling drums of “Wyd” and “Dun Dun” gel with the muted thump of “New Drip” and “Keep It Low.” The wailing horn sample at the center of “Whatever” feels like it’s in conversation with the chopped guitar sample fueling “Blood Covered Tiles,” even though they’re split by the relatively sample-free but still raucous “Keep It Low.” I expect nothing less from someone who’s successfully made beats on the fly while sampling from video cassettes.
Though Hey Tony displays his curatorial powers and his sheer range as a producer, the project’s collaborative nature remains its strongest highlight. Seltzer has a sole production credit on only three tracks, giving room for friends and collaborators like A Lau, Capncrunch, and Vinny Fanta to flex their talents. He’s produced for everyone from Princess Nokia and Jay Critch to Ski Mask The Slump God and Rich The Kid, so it’s not exactly surprising that he was able to bring two dozen artists together on this album. Yet the fact that the end product does not run amorphously like a spilled Slurpee is proof that he is as cohesive as he is conceptual. It’s a testament to a vision that’s been eagerly awaiting its just due.
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The second album from Mary Timony's band suggests that the hard rock of debut Rips was no dalliance: This time, they mine the denim-clad AOR of Billy Squier and Foreigner.

It's Real

During her days leading indie-rock stalwarts Helium during the 1990s, Mary Timony specialized in oblique angles. Listen to “Superball,”  the single from 1995 breakthrough The Dirt of Luck: it drifts into focus as Helium studiously avoids a direct riff. This elusiveness meant that her sudden shift toward bold lines and primary colors came as something of a shock when she unveiled her power-trio Ex Hex in 2014. Named after her 2005 solo album, Ex Hex appeared to be tightly connected to Wild Flag, her 2011 collaboration with Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney—a record that kicked with a visceral rock’n’roll energy Timony only hinted at in her earlier music. This same spirit drove Ex Hex’s debut, Rips.
It’s Real, Ex Hex’s second album, suggests with its very name that this dalliance with hard rock is no passing phase. Reuniting with producer Jonah Takagi, the band doesn’t abandon the formula that fueled Rips, favoring heavy hooks and a cavernous big beat that conjures a neon-lit ’80s AOR fantasia. Ex Hex mine the areas of arena rock that have been forgotten to pop history, pledging allegiance to echo, overdrive, phasers and harmony, the very things that powered the airwaves in the days before MTV. Forget such stylish New Wave touchstones as Blondie or metal perennials as Van Halen: Ex Hex is all about the big beat of Billy Squier and the high-octane strut of Foreigner, the pounding hard rock that made thousands of burnouts raise their denim-clad fists in solidarity.
The key to Ex Hex’s success is that despite all these echoes, their music feels refreshingly free of both nostalgia and commercial calculation. The oversized, shiny sound of It’s Real has no imaginable antecedent in either mainstream or underground rock in 2019: its sheen is too bright for the latter and the guitars are too thick for the former. The songwriting resists big hooks, opting for a prickly and patient approach to big payoffs.
Part of this may lay in the fact that Timony is, by her own admission, “just not a pop person.” Melody isn’t alien to her, but the grand gestures she makes in Ex Hex don’t come naturally. They’re studied and conscious, the work of a musician who is making herself uncomfortable by writing her most accessible-sounding music. Timony has several skilled allies to assist her in this task, including Takagi, bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris. Wright, Takagi and Timony all picked up guitars, the producer also plays some bass, while Dave Christian is credited with some drums. These musical chairs suggests how Ex Hex opened up their formula, letting the music breathe without ever changing its classic rock core.
Back in the early ’80s, the era which It’s Real so often conjures, such stretching would often be assessed a sign of maturity, but arriving after the lean, fearless Rips, the album can sometimes seem a bit lax. Rips rushed through its 12 songs in 35 minutes, while It’s Real takes 40 minutes to get through 10. The first three songs—“Tough Enough,” “Rainbow Shiner,” and “Good Times”—are all longer than the longest songs on the debut, gaining their length through chunky vamps. They never move slowly, yet they rarely move fast.
It’s an odd sensation, listening to a raucous arena-rock album made by such straight-A students, but it’s ultimately a rewarding one. Everybody involved sculpted the songs of It’s Real with care, while also not losing sight that the album should sound immediate and bracing. Such sober reconstructions of beery frivolity can’t help but recall Rivers Cuomo, who dissected KISS and Oasis hits like so many biology-class frogs, trying to figure out what made them “work.” But Ex Hex’s work isn’t bloodless or stylized. Somehow, they’ve retained all the messy spirit of the vintage classic rock they venerate. That It’s Real feels so exciting and alive only shows how thoroughly they’ve absorbed the lessons they’ve learned.


The latest mixtape from Destiny Frasqueri pulls from her love of emo and alt-rock. It’s an underdeveloped but strangely addictive left-turn.

A Girl Cried Red

“Everybody wants to put on this façade that they all have it together,” Princess Nokia told fans during an Instagram Live chat this past January. “And I wanted to write a mixtape that was about falling apart and being a fucking mess.”
Enter A Girl Cried Red, an inchoate but strangely addictive 21 minutes of pure and messy emotions from the shape-shifting New York City rapper born Destiny Frasqueri. Having already covered lo-fi house, trip-hop, disco-soul, Erykah-meets-Lana-Americana, boom-bap-meets-trap, and many points in-between, Princess Nokia has now leaned into the formative sounds of her middle-school years to make an emo mixtape that doesn’t sound like emo or rap or even emo-rap. Rather, it’s as if pop-punk and cloud-rap got caught in a flash flood of melancholy and were forced to share an umbrella.
In the hands of another artist, A Girl Cried Red might seem like a gimmick, but Princess Nokia’s strongest currency has always been her realness—she’s the kind of performer who’d hop offstage to slap a heckler, the kind of straphanger who wouldn’t think twice about tossing soup at a subway racist, the kind of granddaughter who’d step upstairs to the roof for a smoke break and Instagram Live chat with her fans so as not to bother her Puerto Rican grandfather taking refuge in her apartment post-hurricane. So when she says that rock is her favorite genre, which she often has, you believe her.
She’s traded her signature stream-of-consciousness flow and honeyed-soul vocal stylings for a Midwestern monotone. It’s not a seamless transition: “Flowers and Rope” has the brevity of a punk song, leaving its ends frayed and waving into the next track rather than resolved and resonating from an explosion of angsty screams and cymbal crashes. Something’s missing, but maybe intentionally so—it’s a song about emptiness after all, and this is communicated effectively, both lyrically and aesthetically.
“Your Eyes Are Bleeding” is a bit more realized, awash in textures and sentiments of heartache and loneliness that bore into the brain like an earworm that’s all mood. “Look Up Kid” and “Little Angel” find Princess Nokia drawing from her own troubled past to connect with young fans that might be hurting in new but familiar ways with a message of hope and understanding. Both tracks make effective use of warm guitar tones melting in and out of icy beats.
A trio of less rock-driven songs feels more self-reflective, touching on how Frasqueri’s life has changed since last year’s reissue of her 2016 breakout mixtape 1992. The tidy production leaves room for her to lay bare the most tangled aspects of the “fucking mess” she finds herself in these days. In a way, they serve as a solid argument that money buys sadness: The heavily Auto-Tuned “For the Night” contains the mix’s most candid (and satisfyingly shout-along-able) line—“I make money to replace you/Used to love you, now I hate you.” The appropriately titled “Morphine” is the biggest downer, full of concrete cries for help like, “I’m an emo little boy and I want someone to hold me/Got my money like a blanket and I hold it when I’m lonely.” The glitchy “At the Top” finds the songwriter at her most self-assured but still on message—it’s lonely up there after all.
Considering the wide left turn this mixtape is taking—her fourth in a series of eclectic swerves from 2014’s Metallic Butterfly to 2015’s Honeysuckle to 2016’s 1992—it feels as if Princess Nokia is still in an experimental stage, hasn’t found her authentic voice. Perhaps “change” is her voice as much as it is punk, evidenced by an unwavering “girls to the front” ethos, bruja feminism, and independent spirit—not to mention the middle finger salute with a smile she’s serving on the cover of A Girl Cried Red.
Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.” But, then again, it’s inevitable that an emo-inspired mixtape would have fewer bops than one inspired by classic NYC hip-hop. And the enthusiasm with which she revisits the music that made her is contagious.


The 2015 documentary Rubble Kings depicts the truce between gangs in the Bronx in the 1970s as the catalyst for an artistic explosion that presaged the birth of hip-hop. The soundtrack was produced by Little Shalimar, splitting its time between instrumental tracks and rap cuts featuring Run the Jewels, Bun B,  Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, Ghostface Killah, and others.

Various Artists: Rubble Kings: The Album

Rubble Kings: The Album

The 2015 documentary Rubble Kings is one of many pieces of cultural ephemera about New York City in the '70s to emerge recently. It focuses on the chaos of the Boogie Down Bronx at a time when the borough was dealing with turbulence so intense that it was liable to burst into flame, but it avoids lazily conflating the chaos of the city and the beauty of the culture that emerged around the same period. Instead, it points to the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, a truce between gangs in the Bronx, as the catalyst for an artistic explosion that presaged the birth of hip-hop.
The soundtrack was produced by Little Shalimar, who scored the documentary and has worked as a producer with Run the Jewels among others. The music splits its time between rap tracks and instrumental music by Shalimar that take inspiration from various sonic flavors that were percolating through the Bronx in the '70s. Perhaps attempting to imitate the arc of the film, the album stumbles in the early going with the tough-talking track "Savage Habits," which, even though it features Killer Mike and Bun B, doesn’t quite pound in the way you might hope. (Also, it’s bullshit provincial homerism, but honestly: New Yorkers should open a New York album!)
But Little Shalimar makes several clever curatorial choices. Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire hasn’t never quite managed to echo the success of 2011’s Lost in Translation, but he sounds energized on "Warrior Thing," as do indispensable voices like Ka and Ghostface Killah, who show up on later tracks. For the most part, lyrically, the actual bars being spit here are less moving than the voices and vibe. That’s a credit to Shalimar, who has assembled worthwhile soundscapes for at least a couple of rappers who have had a below-average record in the booth in recent years. The Run the Jewels track "Rubble Kings Theme (Dynamite)" is the high point of the rap cuts, Killer Mike spitting steel-toed syllables over a concrete staircase of a beat, El-P gleefully playing with sibilants in the second verse.
The best moments come when Shalimar sticks to instrumentals. His work with the musician Jeremy Wilms (together, they call themselves King Mono) on "Bouncy 3" is a standout. "Partytime" is a tribute to the breaking culture of outdoor block parties, a mix of hard funk rythms and riffs, and snazzy ballpark synths that sound imported from a Dire Straits song.
The narrative arc of the album isn’t quite as arresting as that of the film, but Shalimar does make an effort to say something with the song structure here. That comes into play most notably at the album’s close, with the one-two punch of "The Piano District (Gentrification Boogie)" and "Phoenix." The first is an instrumental track, part lament, part testimonial to the inexorable movement of money into the Bronx. (That a borough with such a venerable nickname should be renamed so casually by developers is the kind of Gotham micro-tragedy to which city-dwellers are consistently subjected.)
"Phoenix" broadcasts its message through its name. The artists featured, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio and the singer/songwriter Roxiny (who sounds a little like early Santigold which is to say, amazing) sing an anthem of rebirth, a hopeful song that corresponds with the message of Rubble Kings. But here, as on the album as a whole, any kind of explicit statement has been wrested from a canvas of evocative sonic ideas. The music comes first every time, ably conjuring up the milieu that served as hip-hop’s cradle.


The baile funk artist known as MC Bin Laden is becoming a real-deal pop star in his native Brazil. His first U.S. release collects his biggest hits from the last three years, and shows why.

É Grau EP

Jefferson Cristian Dos Santos De Lima, the 23-year old baile funk artist known as MC Bin Laden, has over 3.5 million likes on Facebook. For perspective, that’s a larger following on the site than Chance the Rapper or Diplo. Dos Santos De Lima is likely one of the most popular funkeiros in Brazil (one of his videos have over 90 million views on YouTube). In his native São Paulo, Dos Santos De Lima is a real-deal pop star, who bears a striking look of two-toned dyed hair—half-black and half-blonde—and endearing braces.
Though his songs have percolated in North American clubs in the past few years, and he had enough crossover fame to perform with Skrillex and Diplo at last year’s Lollapalooza Brasil, he is only now becoming more known stateside. Unfortunately, the narrative that has surrounded Dos Santos De Lima has become one of controversy—in the last year he has been denied entry visas into the U.S. twice—which some of have pinned to his choice of name. But Dos Santos De Lima’s difficulties have more likely been due to the Brazilian government’s known distaste for the kind of baile funk that he is associated with, the sub genre funk proibido (“prohibited funk”). In reality, Dos Santos De Lima’s music is no more provocative than most of what’s on the radio nowadays. (His lyrics talk about sex, motorcycles, and partying—not all that controversial.) The É Grau EP is his first for a U.S. label, collecting his biggest hits from the last four years. It’s a wonderful sampler and glimpse into why Dos Santos De Lima’s music is so popular.
É Grau contains just six songs, and except the closer “Ombrinho com Romano,” the rest were released from a period of 2014-2016. The earliest, “BOLOLO HAHA,” was one of Dos Santos De Lima’s breakout hits, introducing his signature ad-lib (“bololo haha,” which has no translation in English) and his arresting sound. Even for a three-year-old song, the production Dos Santos De Lima chooses here is aggressively new—it’s a stripped down version of baile funk, with its touches of Miami bass and cumbia influences—injected with extreme industrial horsepower. Motorcycles revving, clanking machinery, and dissonant sirens are the leitmotifs in Dos Santos De Lima’s songs. His delivery, too, is both speedy and measured: his singing pushes the pace of these songs to the brink, but he delivers each syllable and phoneme carefully, making sure each vowel has the right amount of energy behind it.
There are also touches of lightheartedness, though. What sounds like a pan-flute comes midway through to add a dash of levity, and as in-your-face as the song is, there is a silly catchiness you can’t deny. “BOLOLO HAHA” is the archetype for the songs on the EP: hyperkinetic and propulsive, but fun and unserious. His songs make you feel like you’re riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle and going past the speed limit.
The EP also contains his most popular song to date, “Ta Tranquilo Ta Favorável” (“It’s calm, it’s favorable”). In the song’s music video, watched over 90 million times, Bin Laden, a goofy guy, is cavorting around a beach shirtless as he sings smoothly about being calm and enjoying life. It's a carefree message that reverberates throughout his music, and explains in part why he’s the fastest growing pop star in Brazil. In 2016, he was even able to perform this song on daytime television with the global soccer star Ronaldinho, showing just how far this guy has come since he emerged three years ago.
When I first heard Dos Santos De Lima’s songs last year in the middle of a DJ set in Ridgewood, Queens, I reached for my phone immediately, stuck my arm into the air, and hit the Shazam button to find out what it was. His songs were still unknown to me, and I couldn’t help but feel flabbergasted by how joyous they were. That feeling comes through again on É Grau.


Recorded in their parents’ basement, the second album by Long Island brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario is a musical about a monkey that features Todd Rundgren as the primate’s father.

Go to School

Go to School, the sophomore album by Long Island duo the Lemon Twigs, is a musical about a monkey, but there’s a twist: It’s actually about us. Like the cinephilic siblings of The Wolfpack and the precocious outcasts of “Home Movies,” the brothers in the Lemon Twigs—19-year-old Michael and 21-year-old Brian D’Addario—see the world most clearly when it’s filtered through their own charmingly warped lens. Listen to Go to School on a surface level, and you’ll get the tale of an adolescent chimp, raised by humans, who gets his dreams crushed and his heart broken before returning to nature in a symbolic blaze of freedom and destruction. Give the album your full attention, however, and you’ll hear two young musicians settling into their gifts as they challenge the rapidly expanding worldview they share.
There’s a frenzied, competitive energy to the D’Addarios’ songwriting, which cycles through melodies and moods at a hyperactive pace. Their debut album, 2016’s Do Hollywood, resembled a solid acting reel, showing glimpses of narrative without ever offering a full story: Their range was the point. They’ve been associated with revivalists like Whitney and Foxygen, but the charm of the Lemon Twigs is in the unabashed, theater-kid fun they have with their record collection, an energy that guides their work more than any particular style. It’s a whimsical take on what we categorize as “classic rock” that feels more akin to turn-of-the-millennium Elephant 6 acts—particularly Gay Parade-era of Montreal—than to the Lemon Twigs’ self-consciously serious peers on the festival circuit. They value costume changes over fancy light shows, bargain bin novelties over the Rolling Stone canon. They have five favorite Beatles songs, and all but one of them are pre-Revolver.
Following the Jonathan Rado-produced patchwork of Do Hollywood, Go to School plays like an exercise in conceptual and musical focus. The D’Addarios recorded the whole thing directly to tape in their family’s basement and enlisted both of their parents as collaborators. (Their father, songwriter and session musician Ronnie D’Addario, helped track the record; their mother, Susan Hall, voices the chimp’s mom.) The resulting album is less dynamic than Do Hollywood, but its scuzzier, live-band approach brings the Lemon Twigs’ sound closer to that of their heroes. “Queen of My School” could pass for an Alex Chilton solo trifle, while the swirling chorus of “The Student Becomes the Teacher” would be at home on an early Todd Rundgren LP. In fact, Rundgren and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens guest on the record, the former gamely assuming the role of the primate’s father. Their participation feels as much like a flex on the brothers’ part as a gesture toward authenticity: These are our peers, the D’Addarios imply, with devilish confidence.
Occasionally, the Lemon Twigs put too much emphasis on imitation. As evidenced by the connection Michael has cited between his burgeoning Neil Young fandom and his interest in army jackets, their influences can feel like superficial touchstones without a unifying inspiration to link them. And sometimes the brothers lose the plot. The pace of Go to School should be familiar to anybody who’s gotten too stoned with a friend and spent an hour riffing on the same joke: One moment you’re choking with laughter; then, suddenly, you’re sighing, inexplicably exhausted, unable to remember what you found so funny just a second ago. A stretch of songs in the middle of the record pairs familiar melodies with rote morality in a way that feels oddly detached for a band known for expressing its enthusiasm in sets studded with high kicks.
Whether the D’Addarios are indulging in pure plot exposition (“What a big mistake/My taking in an ape”) or twisting clichés to keep things interesting (a bully is surprisingly sentimental, a love scene humorously vulgar and nonsensical), individual tracks can suffer under the weight of the narrative. What’s more unfortunate than the monkey musical’s excessive length is that you might not find yourself humming any of the melodies after it’s over. Only when the Lemon Twigs go for broke do you hear what they’re capable of. The album’s climax arrives with “The Fire,” six minutes of proggy, theatrical Southern rock that feels distinctly heartfelt—a quality the duo often downplays throughout these songs.
Despite their new penchant for storytelling, the Lemon Twigs aren’t seeking wisdom in Go to School (and thank god for that). But there’s more going on here than initially meets the eye. Michael recently confessed his aversion to contemporary rock music, and you can hear why he might find less resonance in the genre’s current torchbearers than in its early underdogs—artists who weren’t made for their times but found a way to transcend them anyway. Go to School portrays the D’Addarios’ fellow human beings as sad, helpless, and, at their worst, brutally ignorant. In their lyrics, the brothers whiplash between cynicism and wonder, earnestness and absurdity. While the Lemon Twigs’ sound is far older than their years, this set of concerns is remarkably age-appropriate as they enter their 20s and look toward the future: Where is our place in the world? How do we find our way without losing our spirit? They raise these questions repeatedly, then answer them with a goofy solo and a joke about bananas. Sounds about right.


Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’ black-and-white photographs of clouds, the Canadian ambient musician reworks piano samples into one of the most monochromatic albums of his career.

Equivalents

Many of the dozen albums that Scott Morgan has produced over the past two decades utilize two volumes: quiet and quieter. Morgan’s music as Loscil is defined by subtlety and understatement: His records tend to recede from the foreground, enmeshing themselves in their surroundings without demanding much attention. He has a rich compositional style that is intricate and deliberate, as well as an ability to conjure immersive atmospheres whose surprising depth is hidden by the music’s supine, almost narcotic, qualities.
Equivalents, Loscil’s first album in three years, is remarkably monochromatic music, full of wispy high pitches that swirl around waves of pink noise and slowly moving tone clusters. Almost all of the sounds were created by heavily processing and layering samples of piano that were originally intended for a Glenn Gould tribute curated by Japanese ambient legend Ryuichi Sakamoto. By focusing so intently on one source, Morgan has made one of the most homogenous albums of his career. It’s easy to regard Equivalents as one long composition that moves through several distinct but related movements. It has a lulling effect that allows space for the mind to wander.
Yet what Morgan can do with that limited palette can be stunning. There are elusive melodic lines spread throughout the album, often so slow that they unfurl over the course of an entire track. “Equivalent 5” creates an effect similar to a Shepard tone, the buried melody, cloaked in hiss, rising but never quite reaching a climax before dissolving into nothingness. Each element seems purposefully placed, and sounds often ping between the left and right channels, such as the delicately pulsating static on the closer “Equivalent 4.” Morgan frequently juxtaposes blocks of sound shrouded in reverb with crisp, light tones that dance around the swirling mass.
Loscil’s albums typically draw inspiration from the environment (rain on Endless Falls, pollution and degradation of the natural world on Monument Builders), and Equivalents uses clouds as a conceptual nexus. The album takes its name from a series of the same title created by Alfred Stieglitz in the early 1920s, in which the photographer attempted to locate musical qualities in abstract forms found in nature. Stieglitz captured images of clouds mid-swirl, printing them in stark black and white, connecting their strange contours to his own “emotional and philosophical” states.
Like clouds, the music on Equivalents is in constant motion but appears to be caught in stasis. Unique and beautiful contours appear and disappear without fanfare, smeared into other sounds or pure silence. What seems simple on the surface is detailed and textured under close attention. Like Stieglitz’s photographs, the music evokes a calm melancholy and surprising emotional resonance.
Because of its indistinct nature, Equivalents feels infinitely deep, with details left undiscovered even after repeat listens. It is easy to get lost in its doldrums, and can sometimes feel inconspicuous to a fault. Brian Eno famously said that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” On Equivalents, Morgan’s careful attention to both those extremes continues to yield fresh ideas.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Blue Wave is the sound of Dan Boeckner and his latest band discovering the secret ingredient missing from so much of the music meant to reawaken the new wave sound of the 1980s: paranoia.

Blue Wave

It's ironic that Dan Boeckner sings so specifically about dreaming on four of the 10 songs that make up Operators' full-length debut. While Blue Wave showcases enough synth-centric production to meet all of the requirements to recreate a genre once widely referred to as dream pop, the songs on this album teem with such agitation that it could be the photo negative of that style: nightmare pop.
Operators is the latest act from a man who has played vital roles in Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits. With this project, Boeckner—along with bandmates Sam Brown and Devojka—has discovered the secret ingredient missing from so much of the music meant to reawaken the new wave sound of the 1980s: paranoia, at a peppy tempo. Between fear of Orwellian prophesies coming true in 1984 and the Cold War machine springing to life, there was plenty to be paranoid about in the 1980s, and the current political climate demands that more music be spiked with anxiety.
There's plenty of that to spare with Blue Wave. Throughout the album, Big Brother is watching as a pervasive "they": "They come to correct you" in "Control"; "They wanna see you moving underground" in "Cold Light"; and "While we were sleeping, dreaming in our beds they moved the Earth" in "Evil."  And like the best alarmist music of the Reagan era, this is all delivered with super danceable beats and synth sounds so fat and fizzy that they feel like the original analog instruments, rather than imitations by computer plug-ins. Boeckner's melodies are precise and the choruses show moments of bright clarity cutting through the foggy verses: not unlike fleeing a bleak reality to find asylum in a dream. He hasn't sounded this committed and angry since leading Atlas Strategic a decade and a half ago.
Boeckner captures a mood well, and his approach to the past is one of aggressive repurposing. Operators do à la carte shopping for 1983 tones and lyrical inspiration, boldly loading up at the buffet to get their money's worth. What could be a more fitting tribute to a decade of such excess? The title track borrows the flangey echo guitar of "I Ran," the chugging rhythm of "Major Tom (Coming Home)" and the ba-dada ba-dada sax punches of "Modern Love," a song from which Boeckner generously paraphrased lyrically on the single "Ecstasy at My House" last year. Boeckner has a history of brazenly overindulging on influences: with Handsome Furs' "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything," he borrowed so heavily that the need to legally clear a song with New Order reportedly delayed the Furs' second album. Speaking of New Order, Peter Hook's bass sound is all over Blue Wave too.
There are times when Boeckner's phrasing feels so stylized that it borders on unnatural: nobody really says "gown" in a way that rhymes with "phone." But this is what dedication sounds like. Towards the end of the album, Boeckner delivers a telling line in the song, "Nobody," when he sings, "I rip my life up and tear it apart/Before I start." This is his thing, violent reinvention, and he'll likely do it again with the upcoming Wolf Parade reunion. Here's hoping that he comes back to Operators, though if the last line of the album is any indication, it won't be for a while. "Wake up with me," he sings. And like that, the dream is over.


A collaboration between an improvising pianist and the ambient icon yields an unusual fusion of acoustic and electronic ideas—a meeting of minds that is full of rewarding surprises.

Finding Shore

Asked about the use of chance in his music, Brian Eno once perfectly summed up his nearly five decades of work as a performer and producer: “I’m going to set up something that can surprise me.” That simple idea can be applied to much of Eno’s art. The renowned Oblique Strategies cards, which Eno created with Peter Schmidt, feature ambiguous phrases and ideas meant to shake artists out of a creative rut. And he’s spent decades seeking out technology to produce “generative music,” a stream of ambient sound that “[is] there as long as you wanted it to be” and never plays the same thing twice.
Those attempts to astonish himself are one of the reasons why he gets second billing on Finding Shore. The principal composer and performer is the British pianist Tom Rogerson; the sound of his playing is further manipulated by Eno by way of an instrument called a Moog Piano Bar. Created by synth pioneers Don Buchla and Robert Moog in the early 2000s, it sits right above a piano’s keyboard, shining an infrared light on each of the 88 keys. When one is played, the beam gets interrupted and triggers a MIDI signal, which can in turn trigger all kinds of noises. In this case, as Rogerson improvised on the piano, Eno was messing about with the signals he was receiving. Finding Shore, the result of that collaboration, is a record that beautifully smears together modern classical, ambient, and jazz.
On some tracks, the producer doesn’t do much at all. The opulent “On-ness” is given only a light dusting of reverb, so as not to distract from the song’s Satie-like delicacy and emotion. And on album closer “Rest,” there are nearly two minutes of unadulterated piano before its melody and rhythm lines are echoed by synthesized chiming. When Rogerson hits his final chord, Eno completely takes over, dissolving the sound into a glossy decay, as though a Rothko painting were slowly fading to black. It’s the mirror image of the opening track, “Idea of Order at Kyson Point,” which begins with a slowly repeating batch of notes processed to sound like a slightly out-of-tune vibraphone. Eventually, the curtain is pulled aside to reveal the piano behind the noises, with Eno shifting tones just so.
A member of the explosive avant-rock group Three Trapped Tigers, Rogerson tends to favor space and openness that allow for the natural resonance of the piano to hang in the air. That leaves plenty of room for Eno to manipulate sounds on the fly. But throughout Finding Shore, there are sharp bursts that stir these dreamy tracks quickly awake. The bulbous low note that closes “March Away” is forcibly rent asunder by the shattering chords of “Eastern Stack.” There’s a strange Cecil Taylor-esque fury to that track that is eased only by Eno’s low simmering hues moving beneath it. The short, jagged “Red Slip,” on the other hand, is all energy, a seeming homage to the pulsing minimalism of Philip Glass given an acidic tang via tones that sound like a bad mobile phone connection.
By and large, the two musicians strike a balance on Finding Shore, fluidly intermingling the acoustic and the electronic. But some of the best tracks are those where Eno completely subsumes the sound of the piano. “Marsh Chorus” warps into focus to reveal bits of birdsong and a lovely drone intercut with jangling melodies reminiscent of Eno’s 1997 album The Drop; “The Gabbard” imagines a repeating four-chord sequence as the blinking eyes of a dozen androids while little flutters of electricity and long pulses flow through the room.
Putting his music in Eno’s hands and ears proves to be a wise decision by Rogerson—just as his own playing turns out to be the ideal raw material for Eno to sculpt with. Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous.


The 20-year-old rising star was the voice of Brooklyn drill when he died. On his debut album, executive-produced by 50 Cent, his voice shines through despite a raft of unnecessary features.

Pop Smoke: Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon

Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon

Nearly every New York neighborhood has a character like Pop Smoke: flashy, cocky, trash-talking while hitting a dance, all jokes until suddenly he’s deadly serious. Born Bashar Jackson in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Pop Smoke was raised among blocks so rich with Caribbean culture that his breakout music video was partially filmed at Peppa’s, a local Jamaican jerk chicken hotspot. During the year or so his career lasted, he was the centerpiece of the borough’s drill movement, a subgenre born and popularized in Chicago, and adopted and personalized by New York. By the time he was shot and killed at 20, Pop Smoke wasn’t just a rapper, he was the voice of Brooklyn drill.
In the winter of 2018, a teenage Pop Smoke arrived with one of his first-ever recordings, a thunderous remix of Sheff G’s “Panic Part 3.” By the summer, kids across the city were emulating his bellowing voice and signature dance, using any opportunity to shout the quotables off of his instant classic debut mixtape, Meet the Woo—“Bitch, I’m a thot, get me lit,” should replace “Fuhgeddaboudit” on the leaving Brooklyn sign. His breakthrough single, “Welcome to the Party,” was so hot that Nicki Minaj hopped on the remix to assure that Pop would bring Brooklyn drill to the masses. Soon enough, he was riding around the borough in a Bugatti with Travis Scott, in Paris with Virgil Abloh, and shutting down shows in the UK. When his second mixtape rolled around in February, he was a borderline superstar. He was dead less than two weeks later. It went so fast he never even got the chance to perform an official hometown show.
Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, Pop Smoke’s debut album, released posthumously, attempts to cement his legacy by expanding his world. Executive produced by his would-be mentor 50 Cent, it’s big, polished, versatile, feature-packed, and loaded with radio and playlist-friendly records. It’s the type of album that will boost streams, but it runs counter to what made Pop Smoke appealing in the first place. When “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” first began to play on the radio, it was like the airwaves had been hacked. There was no way this Canarsie rapper with the hulking voice, chanting on nightmarish UK drill beats, was supposed to be playing in between Drake and DaBaby, right? Yet there he was.
On Stars, Pop Smoke’s animated personality and charisma are drowned out. We didn’t need Pop Smoke’s wannabe Cali-strip-club anthem with Tyga and Mustard on “West Coast Shit.” Or a hollow Astroworld retread on “Aim for the Moon.” Or a forced Rap Caviar-bound marathon with Lil Baby and DaBaby on “For the Night.” Pop Smoke’s music came to life most when he made a couple of blocks in Canarsie seem like the only place that mattered—a subway ride to SoHo might as well have been a private jet to Bora Bora.
Buried under the fluff somewhere is a good album. “44 BullDog” is a return to Pop gliding on sinister drill beats, and it’s his sharpest song since his debut. Some of Pop’s risks pay off, too. “Something Special,” a flip of Fabolous and Tamia’s “Into You,” is the type of macho love song that hasn’t been done this well since 50 Cent’s “21 Questions”: Pop’s idea of romance is sneaking into his girlfriend’s crib when her parents are at work and letting her call him by his government name. And on “Make It Rain,” Pop unites with Brooklyn drill founding father Rowdy Rebel for a cinematic celebration between two rappers who had their moments unfairly stolen from them.
Crucially, Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon doesn’t take into consideration that Pop Smoke’s legacy was already cemented. He didn’t need this glossy, high-budget experience. But Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon ’s flaws become an afterthought, and the good moments here will outlast them. Having new Pop Smoke music to play at backyard BBQs and out of car windows is good enough. All the album needs is his voice, which will last forever.

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The second album by this Canadian electronic indie pop band finds vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark but in greater command of his elegant melodies, exquisite pacing, and marvellously tensile voice.

So This Is Goodbye

My first introduction to Junior Boys was in autumn 2003. I had taken half a year off to travel alone, and I'd just left London, where a friend had given me a copy of the Birthday EP. I'd heard the single once or twice in passing before, but my first meaningful interaction with it wasn't until later that week, on a nine-hour night train ride from Austria to Budapest. I listened to the whole EP on repeat that night, its brittle rhythms and gleaming synths coalescing with the dark shapes and city lights in constant renewal on the other side of my window, the unfamiliarity of my surroundings giving it all a further resonance.
There are special songs, and there are special memories, but if you're one of those nostalgia-bitten people for whom neither seem quite vivid enough on their own, nothing matches what happens when the two dovetail. The beauty of these moments is they refuse to be architected-- we can't force them any more than we can explain them. And while the Junior Boys aren't magicians, they speak the language of that magic as well as anyone making music today. (In the band's official bio, K-Punk blog's Mark Fisher writes that So This Is Goodbye is a "travel sick" record-- I'd go him one further and say that specific sensation of travel sickness is at stake every time they set out to make music.)
Just their second full-length overall, So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year. The first complete album made by vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark, it finds the Boys (now rounded out by onetime engineer Matthew Didemus) working within comparatively streamlined song structures, the rhythmic capriciousness that so strongly informed their debut all but erased from the whiteboard. And yet, despite this radical formal departure, Goodbye draws out so many of the same sensations and colors that it feels like a natural next step. If anything, the absence of those slippery rhythm tracks puts the focus even more squarely on Greenspan, who delivers with a record full of elegant melodies.
Beyond the glowing synthlines, frigid percussions, and Greenspan's marvellously tensile voice (imagine Ben Gibbard with much higher cheekbones), the Junior Boys' greatest weapon is space. With an economical 10 tracks spread out over nearly 49 minutes, the pop in So This Is Goodbye is hardly immediate; instead, its songs are allowed to percolate and unfurl. On paper, especially to the average thrillseeker, that might sound a bit offputting, but it's not like these are all ballads, either. Opener "Double Shadow" begins with a gentle pattering sequence of synth beads but blooms into a smartly melodic slice of electrohouse that Booka Shade would be proud to call their own. Elsewhere, with its serrated analog lead, gushy pads, skipping rhythms, and pressurized vocals, "The Equalizer" accounts for one of the album's finest arrangements, while the uptempo first single "In The Morning" finds Greenspan merging icy r&b with 4AD's warm guitar sounds to beautiful effect.
In the end, though, the biggest goosebumps come courtesy of the slowburners. The penultimate track "When No One Cares" recasts the Sinatra standard as a wobbly space ballad, closer "FM" crosses the finish line in an unhurried cloud of staccato arpeggios and warm harmonies, and standout "Count Souvenirs" marries liquefied synths and keening minor-key melodies with the album's starkest imagery ("Empty stalls and shopping malls that we'll never see again/ Hotel lobbies like painful hobbies that linger on"). Finally, the album’s title track finds Greenspan singing: "So this is goodbye, no need to lie/ This creature of pain, has found me again/ So this is goodbye," possibly in reference to Dark, or to his departed former label head Nick Kilroy, or to someone else entirely. It's the album's heartbeat, as well as one of its weightiest moments-- an acknowledgment that in times of despair the best course of action is often just to keep moving. Wanderlust never sounded so good.


Skilled though he may be, J. Cole’s surprise mixtape makes good on its promise to negate its relevance in real time.

Might Delete Later

Evidently, J. Cole is not the kind of rapper he would like to be. Since the beginning of his career at the peak of the blog era, the North Carolina native has staked his reputation on being an out-and-out, bar-for-bar rapper’s rapper, the model for the genre, the control in the experiment. Though a talented singer with a pliable voice, he’s always been reverent (sometimes to a fault) of legends from the 1990s and early 2000s, writing about his life in long, mythic arcs and dotting his albums with radio singles that are anchored by neuroses and character details seeded on his earliest mixtapes. He delivers all of this in a manner designed to clear space for determined bursts of setup-punchline showmanship—a magnetic mode if you can hack it. Cole often cannot.
Might Delete Later, released as a “mixtape” without warning last week, exists solely to underline this competitive streak in Cole’s music. How else are we to receive a record that, in lieu of a single, took shaky aim at Kendrick Lamar, who had very lightly jabbed at Cole on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” weeks before? But this past weekend, less than 48 hours after its release, Cole went on stage at his own Dreamville Festival in Raleigh and apologized to Kendrick for “7 Minute Drill” and its clot of repurposed Jay-Z bars and creaking metaphors (“Fly pebbles at your dome, we the Stone Temple Pilots”; “He still doing shows but fell off like the Simpsons”), calling it “the lamest shit I ever did in my fucking life.” Maybe! What’s certain is that Might Delete Later makes good on its dated title as a record that, for reasons apology-related and not, seems to negate itself in real time.
Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct: By the middle of “Huntin’ Wabbitz,” his flow has settled into a sleepy seesaw, and his boasts about being “too locked in” don’t read quite the way they’re intended.
And still, Might Delete Later has plenty of compelling elements—rhythmic, textural, even personal. Opener “Pricey” is weighed down by an unnecessarily frilly interlude and equally strained references to John Gotti and Rick and Morty. But its drums sound like they’re dragging themselves through quicksand, and Cole darts nimbly through them. A track later, on “Crocodile Tearz,” he’s rapping through his teeth in a way that makes him sound more composed and more menacing than nearly ever before; “H.Y.B.” is an exceedingly rare thing, a subtle integration of drill’s wobble into a less industrial sound palette. On “Stickz N Stonez,” The Alchemist provides the sort of irresistible hop that forces rappers to snap upright and find new pockets.
Which Cole does—sort of. His takes on “Stickz N Stonez” are animated, but the first verse is stuffed with so many syllables that it suffocates the swing and syncopation that makes the beat alone so memorable. On the Cam’ron-featuring “Ready ’24,” a sequel to the classic from Diplomatic Immunity, Cole begins by approximating Juelz Santana’s style (spare, epigrammatic), then ratchets up the pace and word count. There is an indelible quality to the best Juelz verses that few rappers could ever replicate, but this is one of Cole’s best showings on Might Delete Later—and recalls certain stretches of To Pimp a Butterfly, where Kendrick grafted more syllables onto airy P-funk beats than many of that style’s originators ever had. In each case, a studious rapper dug to the core of the music he loved, trying to find new nooks and crevices in which to carve his name.
This is why the apology Cole offered over the weekend is particularly deflating. Since Big’s death in 1997—and certainly with the almost unbelievable rash of rapper murders over the past several years—there have been frequent and persuasive calls for rap beef to stay on records, or to be tamped down entirely. But “Like That” is not “Hit ’Em Up,” and “7 Minute Drill” is not “The Takeover,” whatever the latter’s publishing splits say. These aren’t even really disses: They’re the kind of quasi-friendly sparring that has characterized rap since its beginnings. And so the frequent, pointed declarations of greatness, demands for respect, and nonspecific threats that litter Might Delete Later are rendered vacant and vaguely sad, gestures to an ethos that is nowhere to be found.


The hyperactive New York sibling duo embraces genuine presence and warmth on its second album of the year. It feels like a radical reinvention.

Hearth Room

Angel and Lulu Prost aren’t known for their light touch. Since joining forces as Frost Children, the siblings have embraced face-melting maximalism as a guiding principle, drawing inspiration from the least subtle strains of EDM, electro-punk, and hardstyle as much as they do Spongebob Squarepants. Their wildly unstable approach to hyperpop is equal parts sugar and spice and knees and elbows; a riot of cartoon violence designed to climax in 15-second bursts of shout-along chaos. What supposedly distinguished them from high-octane acts like 100 gecs or the Garden boiled down to their location (New York City), frame of reference (aughts pop), and a spate of trend pieces situating them at the intersection of indie sleaze and (depending who you asked) the death or rebirth of downtown nightlife. But the music alone was proof enough that the Prosts were talented producers whose many good ideas waged war fruitlessly against each other.
This spring’s SPEED RUN revealed Frost Children’s potential as hard-partying shit-starters while also highlighting the limits of their thinly drawn, attitude-heavy approach. But nestled among the pinging video game samples, shredded punk vocals, and Richter scale-moving drops were hints of a gentler and sweeter sound, one that swooned rather than sneered. You can hear flickers of it in the winsome Eurohouse beat of “All I Got” and the disarmingly romantic lyrics of the earlier “Worship U,” moments when the duo seemed to drop the act and grow a heart. Though recorded alongside SPEED RUN, Hearth Room is an infinitely more agreeable collection that introduces a new level of feeling to their work.
Hearth Room feels like a radical reinvention but it’s the product of brutally effective fine-tuning. Gone are the meme lyrics, the relentless dance beats, the bratty antagonism. The songs follow more conventional pop structures and don’t get derailed by verbal or musical non sequiturs. When “Birdsong” peaks with a screamo wail, it feels like a moment of loving surrender rather than random dissonance. The Prosts play to their strengths as rock musicians while using electronic flourishes sparingly and strategically. On the stuttering, agitated “Stare at the Sun,” the siblings take turns spitting out visceral romantic disillusionment, as Lulu’s guitar and Angel’s bass lock horns in a tricky math-rock melody. As the beat fades, a flurry of jagged synths enters the mix before shifting suddenly into a punishing breakdown.
Hearth Room reflects a set of influences that were not apparent from the sugar rush collage of SPEED RUN, specifically the windswept moodiness and passionate upsurges of Modest Mouse and Alex G. Much of the album concerns raw nerves and butterflies, the agony and ecstasy of longing for love and only fitfully getting it. Opening track “Lethal” bleeds out its dejection with bruising power chords before exhaling into the anguished couplet: “If I had a spine/You’d be mine.” The gentle synth-pop of “Marigold” sounds like a straightforward love song, and it peaks with Angel’s desperate plea: “Tell me lies, tell me lies/I believe you.”
Fortunately Frost Children haven’t sacrificed their sense of humor. On “Oats From a Mug” and “Got Me By the Tail,” they express tenderness as a non-stop flow of absurdist sweet nothings. And then there’s “Bob Dylan.” Over twinkling guitar, Frost Children eulogize the decrepit state of urban bohemia by narrating the Nobel laureate’s journey through the now-vapid and over-commercialized sites where he first became an artist. “Tribeca/Hudson Yards/Bedford Ave and 7th/Rue Charlot in the Marais/That canal that’s in East London,” Angel intones, as if narrating a bitterly nostalgic Adam Curtis supercut. When she pauses to take in a poster advertising a (fictional) Jack Harlow-branded salad from Sweetgreen, it’s funnier and sadder than anything in the duo’s catalog.
For years, hyperpop put on a shiny reflective front to baffle anyone who didn’t get the joke—if there even was one. But as a genre that once made such a play of flirting with capitalism gets subsumed by it, there’s never been a better time to prioritize emotional immediacy. With Hearth Room, Frost Children take a leap beyond ironic club-kid mischief to create a record that radiates genuine presence and warmth.


German deep-house technician Gunnar Wendel’s new album for the Workshop label clears away the murk of his early work, achieving disorienting effects with its oddly pristine palette.

workshop 32

Long before “lo-fi house” was blowing up play counts on YouTube, Kassem Mosse, aka Gunnar Wendel, was making hazy, low-visibility house jams that seemed to creep through a sooty midnight fog. Tarnished and corroded, betraying hints of line noise and vinyl hiss, his music sounded like he’d made it on machines that had lain buried for a decade in the dirt. It wasn’t just the omnipresent murk that made his tracks distinctive; it was the ominous, ungainly way they moved, skulking heavily around the edges of the dancefloor like a hunched beast lurking in the underbrush. At once sensual and sullen, it was a vision of club music charged with danger—a kind of inclement weather that could turn nasty at any minute.
Wendel was prolific in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but he slowed his output after 2016, around the same time that he began moving away from the dancefloor. That year’s Disclosure, for London label Honest Jon’s, was chilly and aloof, draping atonal synth loops over brittle machine beats. The following year’s Chilazon Gaiden, for his own Ominira imprint, was more energetic but nearly as forbidding; its speedy, spaced-out techno suggested an unheated warehouse rave in deep winter. workshop 32 is his first solo work as Kassem Mosse in six years, and it is his most immediate and enveloping release in ages. (Like all of his releases on Lowtec’s Workshop label, its catalog number doubles as its title.)
This isn’t the Kassem Mosse palette of yore. He’s vacuumed up the muck, swept away the cobwebs, and even air-dusted the faders on his mixing desk, from the sound of things. His synths have the airy quality of wind chimes, and his pristine, undistorted drums sit like islands in a sea of empty space; the stereo panning is so disconcertingly precise, a bat could echolocate each tom, snare, and clap. Still, barring the odd wash of warmly nostalgic pads, a sense of emotional blankness prevails. No matter how physically engaging these tracks may be, they maintain a stone-faced remove.
At times, the mood is downright unsettling. Competing polyrhythms resist parsing; the occasional burst of out-of-sync beats suggests a DJ losing control of the mix. Synths throw off icy dissonance. “D1” (as is typical for Workshop releases, all but one of the tracks are titled only by their position on the vinyl) is set against a high-pitched whine that rises and falls like wind whistling through the window frame.
Very little actually happens in these arrangements. Each track offers just a handful of sounds—truncated drum hits and ribbons of synth, but also scraps of background noise, speaking voices, and sourceless clatter—that spin as elegantly, and ceaselessly, as clockworks. There’s no development, no growth, barely any change to speak of. These are less songs than spaces, three-dimensional environments in which to wander for as long as Wendel deems necessary, and from the outside, the tracks’ lengths might as well be arbitrary. (What are the chances that he hit upon running times of 6:06, 7:07, and 9:09 by pure coincidence?) But while you’re immersed in it, the groove feels both infinite and unusually intricate.
Even in his scuzziest early years, Kassem Mosse’s music flickered like a candle flame, and the best tracks on workshop 32 are among the most propulsive in his catalog. The C- and D-side cuts are especially nimble, perpetually switching up the rhythm with ghost notes and stray bursts of keys or voice. There are echoes of Moodymann and Theo Parrish in his stubbornly soulful syncopations, and of Pépé Bradock in his gauzy weave of tones. Mostly though, he just sounds like Kassem Mosse, even if Kassem Mosse has never sounded quite like this before. In the closing “Provide Those Ends”—the only track to bear an actual title—a scrap of what sounds like film dialogue features a man muttering, “I’m trying, I’m working, I’m saving, I’m trying to do the best I can—provide those ends! I gotta work, you know what I mean?” Kassem Mosse is back on his grind, and he’s never sounded sharper.