Songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn and his publicity-shy Swedish muse resurrect Italo disco as a vehicle for deeply nostalgic and melancholic Swedish indie pop, resulting in a eloquent, auspicious debut album.

Disco Romance

A few dozen "2006: Year of You" think pieces later, we know a lot about "You": Web 2.0 has democratized the media, caught the eye of corporations from Silicon Valley to Detroit, and sparked new ways to call 'em as we see 'em. However, the rise of user-generated content has also accelerated the conversion of gestalt experience into symbolic form-- most basically, 1's and 0's-- and something usually gets lost in this translation. If I'm busy recording a moment, how can I be fully present in it? What most defines our lives nearly always defies documentation.
No wonder Sweden's Sally Shapiro prefers to keep her offline self to herself. Shapiro reputedly declines to be photographed by strangers, and she, like 1980s Italo disco singer Valerie Dore, records under an English pseudonym. (Shapiro hasn't told us her real name, and she doesn't do interviews-- if "she" exists at all.) Just six months ago, songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn started posting on message boards announcing her debut 12" "I'll Be By Your Side"-- Pitchfork's #27 track of 2006. Not since Tigermilk-era Belle and Sebastian has an artist gotten so much publicity from refusing to do publicity. Here, as then, such reticence befits the music, which speaks, sensitively and eloquently, for itself.
"I'll Be By Your Side" returns to open Shapiro's first full-length, Disco Romance. Like Tigermilk's "The State I Am In", it's an auspicious introduction to an, ohhh, introverted world. Agebjörn's Italo-inspired tracks build gradually, drop melodies that could melt whatever global warming leaves behind, and then hold on for dear life. Shapiro's guileless vocals put an angelic face on her producer's melancholy, but she, too, is clinging to the past. Disco Romance is deeply nostalgic. It's the nostalgia of someone who has loved and lost and knows damn well it was indeed "better"-- no matter how gnawing the present hurt.
Sure, Italo's comeback has been here for years. Just ask Morgan Geist, Alec DeRuggiero, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, or Mrs. Guy Ritchie. Fundamentally a modern indie pop album (dig the cover art's references to old Heavenly and Field Mice design schemes), Disco Romance uses its sonic heritage not so much as a blueprint as for thematic material. Though German label ZYX Music didn't coin the term until 1983, Italo disco began when the strings, horns, and sweaty glitz of the Village People, K.C. & the Sunshine Band, or "Disco Duck" gave way to something new: an electronic-based amalgam of throbbing bass lines, aching synth arpeggios, and low-tech drum thuds. Like 80s house or 90s lo-fi, the genre that sprang almost fully formed from Giorgio Moroder's knobs, via Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", was cheap and easy to imitate.
In Agebjörn's hands, Italo is also essentially sad: Perhaps the first dance music made in solitude. "I'll Be By Your Side" draws its emotional depth from the way the arrangement implicitly contradicts Shapiro's vows of eternal togetherness. Detouring into intergalactic lounge, "I Know" shows its lonely narrator's struggle to go on believing those promises. If Shapiro really knows, then why does she have to keep telling herself so-- why are those squiggly synth solos so tragic? "Just tell me how I can hold onto this moment for now," she asks. The key changes, bass dives, and our moment extends for another two minutes.
Back on paper, the album should be as giddy as it makes Pitchfork HQ. After all, Agebjörn's love-oriented songs mostly polish up the simple, frequently nonsensical lyrics of classic Italo. "Be mine in the sunshine," Shapiro sings on "Hold Me So Tight", but it's beneath a deluge of rainy-day synths. Even on "Anorak Christmas", a cover of Swedish twee-poppers Nixon, Shapiro sings the words "please don't go away" as if she doesn't plan to be heard. "Find My Soul" reaches out a trembling hand, and ambient lullaby "Sleep in My Arms" is as desolate as a Star Trek captain's log. Disco Romance turns the Smiths' happy-music-with-sad-lyrics formulation on its head-- and then you dance to it.
Yep, style is ephemeral. Agebjörn can't bring back vanished innocence by recreating the sounds of our youth any more than Shapiro can keep love alive just by saying the words. They can, however, control the emotional experience of anyone who has ears-- now, and as long as their songs remain available in some form. Disco Romance takes history's revision process into its own hands with two remixes, one a slick "Norwegian electrojazz" take on "Find My Soul" and the other Netherlands electro artist Rude66's vocoder-ghostly, acid-squelched "I'll Be By Your Side" revamp. They're not new songs, but they provide another means of prolonging the present.
The Web's cacophony privileges criticism. You won't find God in scriptural commentaries, or save any children watching Hotel Rwanda, but you can fall in love to "My Love" (in theory). If verbalization is inherently reductive, then writing about music is a way to encode the moment loss-free. The track always endures. In his book Air Guitar, MacArthur Fellowship-winning arts critic Dave Hickey explains: "Even though my writing about art might momentarily intervene between some object and its beholders, the words would wash away, and the writing, if it was written successfully into its historical instant, could never actually replace the work or banish it into the realm of knowledge." All that lasts is music; Shapiro and Agebjörn know.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Los Angeles band’s 1988 debut, which infused the nascent alt-rock movement with a surreal vision of Hollywood hedonism.

Nothing’s Shocking

Anyone who’d ever put a microphone in front of Perry Farrell should’ve known that the oral history of Jane’s Addiction couldn’t possibly be contained by a print magazine. Still, Brendan Mullen got the green light to cover the band’s 2003 reunion for Spin and went 10,000 words over the original assignment. Within two years, it turned into a 300-page book. Throughout Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, a large cast of disgruntled ex-bandmates and business partners credit the band’s 1988 debut Nothing’s Shocking as the first truly mainstream alternative rock album, though Farrell does acknowledge that he did not invent the concept. As the leader of pre-Jane’s goth outfit Psi Com and an ambassador of the mongrel Los Angeles post-punk scene that birthed Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he respected the ideological purity of America’s underground rock royalty. But none of them saw the big picture like Farrell, a product of New York privilege who reinvented himself as a motor-mouthed L.A. street hustler. Alternative rock was going to strange and exciting places with or without Jane’s Addiction, and Nothing’s Shocking made it go Hollywood.
Both prophetic and flying blind through the overlapping outgrowths of art-metal, proto-grunge and college rock that were formulating a legitimate alternative to MOR radio and MTV, Nothing’s Shocking is the sound of the ’90s arriving two years ahead of schedule. “Coming down the mountain/One of many children/Everybody has their own opinion,” Farrell yelped on “Mountain Song,” delivering alt-rock’s first mission statement like Moses on Mount Nebo, a vision of a promised land where the iconoclasts and idealists would reshape culture after years of toiling in obscurity. Note the message of the chorus: “Cash in now, honey.”
But in 1988, Nothing’s Shocking wasn’t intended as the constitution of Alternative Nation. Rather, it was a quintessential Los Angeles album. You know, L.A.—glitter and gutter, hippie hedonism fueled by heroin and Hollywood handshakes. The band’s origin myth is a history of grifts and sharp dealing: Jane’s Addiction boosted their local reputation by trashing and subsequently getting banned from influential venues, who would then make a pile of cash promoting the show where they were allowed back. Whores takes its name from an early song inspired by a sex worker named Bianca, who bankrolled those name-making gigs. Aside from bassist Eric Avery, her clientele mostly consisted of “toupeed Hollywood B-listers” and “wholesome married game show hosts,” according to Jane Bainter, the “first lady of the Wilton House,” an arts collective/crash pad started by Farrell. Its residents would often blame their escalating problems on her drug habit—“It’s all because of Jane’s addiction.” (This won over the proposed “Jane’s Heroin Experience” when it was time to pick a name.) During this period of early infamy, they ate expensive dinners with labels with whom they had no intention to sign and then ended up committing with Warner Bros.; Jane Addiction’s convinced their new label to allow a “fake indie release” of Jane’s Addiction on Triple X Records to maintain their street cred, a strategy they accused Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgarden of copying afterwards. By 1991, the band topped Billboard’s Alternative Singles chart and won an MTV Video Music Award with a song that viewed shoplifting as a victimless crime.
They were hardly the only band of their time speaking to Los Angeles’ eternal dualities. Decades of hearing “Jane Says” sandwiched between “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Under the Bridge” has retconned Jane’s Addiction as an artsier variant of Sunset Strip sleazeball rock. But the truth of where they stood in 1988 lies somewhere between how they saw themselves and how they were perceived by the local press—as “the next big thing,” but also an uncertain commercial proposition against the likes of Warrant and Damn Yankees and Kingdom Come. As much socialites as musicians, Jane’s Addiction were at least adjacent to the debaucherous nightlife scene memorialized by bands like Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat, and Mötley Crüe. But while those bands prowled notorious Hollywood rock’n’roll club the Cathouse, Jane’s were regulars at the influential goth- and industrial-leaning club Scream. “All the Cathouse guys looked like Bret Michaels from Poison and the chicks were slutty Tawny Kitaen types,” Scream founder Dayle Gloria explained. “At Scream, all the guys looked like Ian McCulloch and the girls were all Siouxsie clones.”
It’s unlikely that Farrell intended to merge these two worlds when he approached Avery about starting a new project. Avery appraised Psi Com thusly: “I think they blow.” Still, the two bonded over Joy Division, Flipper, and pasty British goths like Bauhaus, the Cult, and the Sisters of Mercy, who enjoyed a symbiotic fascination with tanned SoCal outcasts. The duo initially tried to fill Jane’s ranks with ringers from Farrell’s Psi Com days before Avery’s sister liaised a meeting with her recent prom date Stephen Perkins and his marching band pal, Navarro. Farrell and Avery were skeptical of the duo, seeing them as an embodiment of cornball Valley metal excess; Navarro’s previous band, Dizastre, drew crowds of several hundred at the Troubadour and sounded exactly like you’d expect. Farrell recalled Perkins showing up to his audition with “soft red boots and a bandana to hold his curls together…and an 18-piece drumkit.” But the things they had going for them were nearly impossible to find in Farrell’s extensive underground network: They were reliable, had mind-blowing chops, and no qualms whatsoever about being rock stars.
Peers and critics alike used some variation of “shamanistic” to describe Farrell as a frontman; a transfixing presence both snake and charmer, he’d first begun to develop his stage moves as a Mick Jagger and David Bowie impersonator. The term also speaks to Farrell’s navel-gazing spirituality. “I want to be as deep as the ocean,” he brays on “Ocean Size,” a “Misty Mountain Hop” transported to Point Dume. Minutes later, he pees on himself during “Standing in the Shower…Thinking” and opens a gateway to a higher power. On “Summertime Rolls,” shoelessness is next to godliness. Farrell’s garish personal appearance suggested both a perpetual quest for transcendence and a general lack of self-awareness: He wore green dreadlocks and eventually underwent an African scarification ritual, only to find out that the desired keloid effects are less pronounced on white skin.
Already a veteran of Hollywood’s art-punk trenches, Farrell was at least six years older than Perkins, Navarro, and Avery, a wildly creative and deeply troubled trio. Though everyone in Jane’s Addiction came from some measure of privilege, Perkins was the only one to escape catastrophic familial trauma and also the only member not to self-identify as a drug addict. Farrell’s mother died by suicide when he was 3; Navarro’s mother was murdered by an ex-boyfriend when he was 15; Avery discovered the identity of his biological father in high school and quickly spiraled towards his first stint in rehab. The group’s inner circle witnessed how Farrell’s magnetism worked on his bandmates. “He felt like he could mold them and they would forever do what he wanted,” according to Casey Niccoli, Farrell’s girlfriend, stylist, and creative partner throughout much of the band’s initial run. “Eventually, they’d grow up but by then, he’d have gotten what he needed out of them.” He also leveraged this imbalance into a garishly lopsided, take-it-or-leave-it publishing split that granted him 50 percent for the lyrics alone, with an extra 12 and half percent for his share of the music, despite being credited with only vocals and piano. More than their escalating drug use or codependent romantic relationships or constant fistfights, the publishing split ensured that Jane’s Addiction were operating on borrowed time.
Rejecting a list of proposed producers from Warner Bros.—including Mike Clink, fresh off his work with Jane’s “mortal enemies” on Appetite for Destruction—Farrell instead handpicked Dave Jerden, a perfect fit: His engineering credits with Talking Heads provided Farrell’s desired art-rock cred, but he had yet to be the lead producer on any album, let alone a major-label release. His trust in the band’s vision resulted in the dank, cavernous production that evoked both the sequined squalor of clubs like Scream and Power Tools and the 4AD and Factory albums played there. By the time the two parties reunited for 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual, their collective palette had burst into wild color and Jerden would soon shepherd Alice in Chains and Anthrax out of metal into the greener pastures of alt-rock. Play the first two Jane’s Addiction albums back-to-back, and the ’80s become the ’90s.
Nothing’s Shocking was structured as the band conceived playing it live, which explains about five minutes of regal scene-chewing before the first true riff drops. By the time Jerden arrived to produce, the album was already a veritable Greatest Hits, bolstered by a batch of songs honed over three years of relentless local grind—tight enough for a recording window that might shut on any given day if someone got too high. “Pigs in Zen” was updated with a new, mid-song Farrell soliloquy, tamer than many to come (“I know about PAIN! I still wanna fuck!” he informed an Atlanta crowd in 1989). And though newly bolstered with unforgettable steel drum pings, “Jane Says” honors its roots as the product of endless acoustic jam sessions at the Wilton House: G and A chords played over and over again as Farrell draws lyrical inspiration from the ambient gossip. Everything that happens to Bainter and Sergio in “Jane Says” is completely true, which goes a ways towards explaining how it’s one of the most poignant and empathetic songs about drug addiction ever written; that it’s also a staple of every classic rock radio playlist in existence feels miraculous.
It was apparent that Jane’s Addiction had chemistry, though I suppose a meth lab does too. Nothing’s Shocking is shot through with a volatile combination of awe and fear, reverence and resentment, four exceedingly headstrong artists vying for the direction of a song, never knowing if they’d get the chance to do it again. Navarro drew the metalheads, having forged his craft putting fellow Guitar Center lurkers to shame with front-to-back recitals of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums. Yet when Jane’s earned comparisons to Zeppelin, it was largely due to the acoustic light and shade he brought to “Ocean Size” and “Jane Says.” A professed Deadhead, Navarro also understood the value of interplay; there’s a time for shredding, like when “Mountain Song” and “Had a Dad” require an emotional pitch out of Farrell’s range, and a time to hold back. The two chords in “Jane Says” can be replicated by anyone with a week of guitar lessons, while the brilliantly boneheaded riff on “Mountain Song” was preordained for Beavis and Butt-Head’s approval.
In a band that often veered towards excess, Avery’s contributions were masterstrokes of efficiency. Many of Jane’s most beloved songs began from the germ of an Avery bass riff, and the ones on “Mountain Song” and “Up the Beach” were both instantly recognizable and sturdy enough to be repeated for the next five minutes. The aerobic funk-punk of “Idiots Rule” drafts off the momentum created by the Chili Peppers and Fishbone, bands better known at the time for their (literally) balls-out live shows than tight songwriting; with Chris Dowd and Flea contributing to horns, Avery described the track as a Fishbone song from which Farrell had “trimmed away…the fat.” “Had a Dad” stemmed from Avery’s revelation about his father, an event that Farrell reimagined as a falling-out with God and introduced like a 12-bar blues:

I had a dad
Big and strong
I turned around
I found my daddy gone
He was the one
Made me what I am today
It’s up to me now
My daddy has gone away…
Let’s rock!

This unironic “let’s rock!” spoke to why Jane’s were more likely to be compared to Zeppelin and the Doors than peers like Sonic Youth and the Pixies, who drew wryer wisdom from similar folds of America’s underbelly. Banned from most mass-market retailers for its cover art, Nothing’s Shocking nonetheless found success on college rock radio. But Jane’s Addiction was by no means a college rock band: There were no forays into the musical avant-garde, nothing standing between an average kid in Iowa and the scum of St. Andrews Place, the open-air drug market namedropped in “Jane Says.” If you thought the songs about drugs were about God or the songs about girls were about drugs, you’d probably be right. For anyone who fantasized about California, about getting high and getting laid, about finding some relief from parental conflict, “Summertime Rolls” makes all of that feel entirely possible: six minutes that encompass the most smog-free day of July and also lose track of time completely.
Conversely, Farrell can occasionally sound like the exact thing he was when Jane’s Addiction began, a jaded twenty-something luring the local kids with tall tales of vice and depravity. “Show me everybody/Naked and disfigured/Nothing’s shocking,” he yowls on “Ted, Just Admit It…,” a song inspired by the first serial killer to double as a proto-reality television star. Not surprisingly, most critics took issue with Farrell yelping “Sex! Is! Violent!” ad nauseam, not because it exposed some kind of unspeakable truth, but because it sounded like something Jim Morrison would say; see also the spoken-word psychobabble section of “Pigs in Zen,” easily the album’s weakest song. Yet that line is ruthlessly designed to capture the mind of someone who’s probably only experienced sex and violence from their television, i.e., teenagers.
Nearly everyone in Whores speaks in hushed tones about Farrell’s childlike aura, a boundless curiosity that he explains as a kind of whimsical survival mechanism. “I’m constantly warding off boredom,” he told Melody Maker. “Boredom’s a disease.” But if you believe the theory that trauma and addiction keeps people stuck at the age when they first experienced it, there’s likely a darker force that brought Jane’s together before it blew them apart. Even if the members of Jane’s Addiction underwent tremendous mental, physical, and emotional suffering for their art, things likely would have turned out worse if they’d never met at all.
Jane’s Addiction didn’t stick around to lead the revolution they started. On September 24, 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind; two days later, the first incarnation of Jane’s Addiction met an end pulled directly from Farrell’s id. He played their final gig in Hawaii completely naked, then proceeded to spend an undisclosed number of days on the island with a “ravishing, young hottie showing up with a doctor’s bag and a wink in her eye.” From that point forward, Farrell would live out the peak of his influence as the co-creator and public face of Lollapalooza, the traveling festival that codified “alternative rock” for suburbs across the United States and served as proof of concept for offshoots like Lilith Fair, Smokin’ Grooves, H.O.R.D.E., and Ozzfest.
It didn’t take long for the message to change from “cash in” to “cash out.” These days, it’s admittedly difficult to consider the legacy of Jane’s Addiction outside of Farrell and Navarro’s relentless brand ambassadorship over the years, not to mention the use of 2003’s “Superhero” as the theme song for Entourage, a live-action rendering of Maxim wish-fulfillment that went against everything the band once claimed to stand for. But even in its creators’ absence, Nothing’s Shocking felt like a rebuke of what alt-rock would soon become: If Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell often shunned pleasure and adulation, rejecting their sanctification as brooding sex symbols, Jane’s Addiction were funky, funny, and unrepentantly carnal. Even with all the baggage of prophecy and influence, Nothing’s Shocking lives as a poignant, almost quixotic work of Hollywood imagination—not a documentary, but a beautifully doomed vision of a ’90s that could’ve been.


Returning with a slightly darker and more ornate sound, the National remain masters of widescreen, emotionally engaging rock.

High Violet

The National became popular in a very traditional way: by releasing some really good albums, then touring the hell out of them. They're boilerplate indie, free of hot new genre tags or feature-ready backstories, which is something their detractors derive great joy from pointing out. If the National are important, rather than merely good, it's for writing about the type of lived-in moments that rock bands usually don't write about that well. The characters in National songs have real jobs, have uninteresting sex, get drunk, and lie to one another. They do so during the regular course of a workaday week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The National aren't "dad-rock" so much as "men's magazine rock": music chiefly interested in the complications of being a stable person expected to own certain things and dress certain ways.
On the National's fifth album, High Violet, those constraints are starting to wear on them, which makes a lot of sense: they wear on most people. In between patches of obtuse imagery, singer Matt Berninger sounds increasingly self-destructive. The record's upbeat numbers don't cheer him up so much as commiserate with him. All of this makes High Violet a dark affair, even for a band with a reputation for sad-bastard melodrama. The National have never sounded triumphant, but they can still be reassuring, with Berninger's lyrics acting as salves for our own neuroses. Six drinks in, tired of your coworkers, wishing you could just go home and laugh at sitcoms with someone? Maybe get laid? The National's got your back.
With an ever rising profile and plenty of indie-famous friends-- Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon guest here-- the National were afforded the opportunity to obsess over High Violet. They could've holed up and recorded an idiosyncratic, expectation-defying mess. Instead they produced an ornate, fussed-over record that sounds like no one other than themselves. Given the amount of flack they take for being a no-frills bore, simply refining their sound was arguably the braver option. They miss, occasionally-- the string-drenched closer, "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks", is too decadent for its own good-- but mostly, they construct gorgeous, structurally sound vignettes. There are few bands that could craft a song like "Sorrow"-- in which emotion acts as a character and the band turns Berninger's balladry into a well paced jog-- without stumbling over their own ambitions. The guitars on "Afraid of Everyone" actually sound nervous; "England" speaks of cathedrals over properly magisterial drums. These are triumphs of form.
Berninger is still, for the most part, a socially obsessed claustrophobe. He has upper-class guilt on "Lemonworld" ("Cousins and cousins somewhere overseas/ But it'll take a better war to kill a college man like me," "This pricey stuff makes me dizzy"). "Bloodbuzz Ohio"'s magnificent chorus ("I still owe money/ To the money/ To the money I owe") addresses the familiar, harrowing financial burdens of adulthood. He's best when he tones down the angst in favor of reflection or confusion. High Violet seems less likely to engender the personal connections of Boxer, but it's also bigger and more engaging-- a possibly offputting combination for a band following the footsteps of Echo and the Bunnymen, Wilco, and Arcade Fire. After all, eagerness often trumps execution, and the National aren't immune: For his part, Berninger looks increasingly like Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World, and his cryptic lyrics seem like an application for the title.
But the National rarely miss; when they aim for powerful or poetic, they get there. High Violet is the sound of a band taking a mandate to be a meaningful rock band seriously, and they play the part so fully that, to some, it may be off-putting. But these aren't mawkish, empty gestures; they're anxious, personal songs projected onto wide screens. Even if you don't consider yourself an upwardly mobile stiff with minor social anxiety, the National make it sound grand, confusing, and relatable.


The Oakland songwriter pairs abstract imagery with elegant arrangements on her dreamy, open-ended second album.

So Far So Good

Carly Bond, who records as Meernaa, describes her songwriting process as “psychedelic meditation,” an experience so immersive that when she gets into the flow, she forgets to eat. On her debut, 2019’s Heart Hunger, playful guitar solos and kaleidoscopic production lent the music that boundless exploratory feeling. Her follow-up, So Far So Good, is a more soulful, introspective collection of folk songs whose fingerpicked guitar, gauzy synth lines, and swooping string arrangements diffuse like smoke.
If meditation has a goal, it’s to be able to witness your emotions passing by rather than letting them overwhelm or control you. Bond’s lyrics adopt a similar perspective. They are full of yearning, but they maintain an observational stance. Bond rarely editorializes her feelings, instead collaging abstract imagery to gesture at them, so listening feels less like reading a dream journal than watching an experimental film interpretation of your own dreams. (I’m reminded of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which silently tells and retells a dream sequence, changing small details with each repetition.)
In her songwriting, Bond tends to pull from a recurring pool of phrases—“dreams,” “tenderness,” “the heart”—and pastes them together without much focus on narrative linearity. Rather than feeling disorienting or incomplete, the disparate images build into surprisingly poignant wholes. On “As Many Birds Flying,” Bond drifts through a chugging guitar riff and bandmate Rob Shelton’s ribbons of synth as she recalls water flowing, a sky turning lavender, and a lover’s voice echoing through a canyon. The scenes pass without much explanation, but together they establish a sense of outsized wonder at love she once experienced but can no longer access.
On “Mirror Heart,” Bond describes various aspects of someone’s face without using sight: Each feature is a stand-in for an emotion it evokes, from the tenderness in their eyes to the wildness in their smile. When love and longing are so intense and amorphous that language falls short, the writing on So Far So Good creates a constellation of tiny moments that speak to those grand feelings. Bond catches the glimmer in someone’s eye or watches them turn over a stone in their hands, then asks us to connect the dots with our own associations.
Her voice, too, conveys a wordless longing. On opener “On My Line,” she sings about anxiously awaiting a phone call, but decides to bury her feelings. A grinding guitar riff flares and percussionist Andrew Maguire’s drums simmer as Bond escalates from a cautious falsetto to a wail, using restraint and patience to relay a sense of barely contained frustration. “Bhuta Kala” is a plea to someone else to linger in a state of mutual reverie. Here, her singing meshes so seamlessly with the starry guitar and strings that it might feel like the sounds are emerging from the same instrument.
Throughout the album, Bond yearns for love but is rarely able to grasp it. There is no resolution, just a fog of memories and elliptical dream logic. But despite the intensity of the emotion, the symphonic, elegant arrangements make her words feel accessible and inviting. On So Far So Good, she provides a scaffolding of impressions upon which we are invited to impart our own narratives, making this music ours, too.


Modest Mouse have been working on their new album for longer than many bands have existed. After reports of bizarre guest spots, shifting producers, and the departure of founding bassist Eric Judy, Strangers to Ourselves betrays no signs of its troubled birth, for better and for worse.

Strangers to Ourselves

Modest Mouse have been working on their new album for longer than many bands have existed. The breadcrumb trail of news reports depicting their progress over the years—they were recording with Krist Novoselic and Big Boi; they were switching producers—gave the worrying impression of a band that maybe didn’t know what the hell they were doing. In 2013, they canceled a tour to hit the studio, and somewhere in there founding bassist Eric Judy quit the band. The process left in its wake some dropped singles and a few different release dates, along with a lingering sense that maybe this venerable indie institution’s creative motor was stuck in neutral.
Strangers to Ourselves finally sees the light of day this week, and to hear Brock tell it, we’re getting another album "as soon as legally possible." They are back, in other words, and vigorously making up for lost time. For better and for worse, the album betrays no signs of its troubled birth. They might have spent eight years in the wilderness, but what they have delivered is…a Modest Mouse album, one that sounds like it could have been released five years ago. There are no new directions or tweaks to their approach. "Lampshades on Fire", the first single, is a good example. It offers a sort of greatest-hits version of all the sounds Modest Mouse have become known for—"Here’s the hard-swinging backbeat! Here are a few of those eerie-sounding harmonic guitar bends, and  here are some tight, clipped 'bah bah bahs!'" Still, there’s satisfaction to be had, hearing this band of pros finding and hitting their marks so emphatically. They've been a touring juggernaut for years now, and you can imagine many of these songs exploding live.
Here and there some new flourishes pop up. The glimmering mallet percussion on "Ansel" is a nice touch, something we’ve never heard on a Modest Mouse record before. Opener "Strangers" is a patient and pretty ballad, featuring drowsy brush work by drummer Jeremiah Green, a prominent cello line, and Brock’s gentle, lilting midrange. The delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure in the beginning of "Coyotes" is also lovely, a bit of late-period Beatles. "The Best Room" may or may not be inspired by a UFO sighting, as Isaac Brock coyly hinted in a recent interview. But the song is an unruffled and sweet pop-rock number that hits a feeling Modest Mouse never bothered with in their earliest days: It is sunny, optimistic, relaxed. Not even "Float On", their massive hit and a teeth-gritted ode to positivity, had this easy sense of goodwill to it.
At times, the record feels labored, like you can hear every studio session that went into its creation. By the time the metal guitars have crashed into "Sugar Boats"—and the tubas enter in a moment later, doubling over them—the song has grown both overwhelming and boring. "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL. 1996)", meanwhile, is an overcooked, clattering mess, a sloppy retread of "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" that might be the worst song Brock has ever recorded. On these moments, you get the sense the band simply recorded for eight years until someone told them to stop.
What’s ultimately missing are new ideas, or a fresh spin on their old ones. The lyrics, which used to be a very good reason to listen to a Modest Mouse record, are no longer the draw. Brock’s voice remains remarkable, an exclamation point he can bend into attention-getting shapes—a Tourette’s-like yelp, a heartburn-belch, a rooster crow. So lines like "We’re the sexiest of all primates" ("The Best Room") are simply awkward, like a party quieting down just as you shout something particularly banal.
Any band that stays together for nearly 20 years, transitioning from indie to major label, losing and gaining members along the way, is going to change. A long time ago, Modest Mouse were known for volatile, destructive behavior and piercing insights, but their last two albums have positioned them as paragons of alt-rock professionalism, a band that takes their fans and their albums seriously and think hard about how to deliver on their expectations. Here they sound like they’ve settled into their status as a reliable indie rock institution. Strangers to Ourselves is a pleasant album, and one that completes their transition from "inspired" to "sturdy".


Untethered Moon is the first Built to Spill record Doug Martsch has released in six years, and its existence alone is a mild surprise. While the band has not altered its core sound, there are new moments and darker colors here if you listen closely for them.

Untethered Moon

Untethered Moon is the first Built to Spill record Doug Martsch has released in six years, and its existence alone is a mild surprise. His last LP, 2009’s There Is No Enemy, was quietly better and more focused than its two predecessors, but it didn’t get much attention from press or long-term fans. Martsch didn’t tour behind Enemy for three years, and when he spoke to Pitchfork in 2013 he admitted to feeling directionless. "It’s hard getting older, thinking maybe I’ve run my course," he said. In between then and now, another record was recorded and scrapped.
Built to Spill albums have themes, but they fit loosely, like the stretched-out tees and flannels Martsch wears onstage. Perfect from Now On was cosmic; Keep It Like a Secret explored miscommunication; There Is No Enemy seemed haunted by personal loss, unspecific but sharply painful. ("It doesn’t matter if you’re good or smart/ Goddamn it, things fall apart"). Untethered Moon also has a theme, and it’s one he spells out early: "I found a place where I know I’ll always be tethered/ And I knew, when I woke up, rock and roll will be here forever," he sings on "All Our Songs". On the modest arc traced on Moon’s 10 songs, a diffident soul finds his faith restored and his soul lifted by the music he’s loved his whole life.
This is the point to note that if you’ve loved Built to Spill’s music your whole life, Untethered Moon will have this same comforting, classic feel. In the mid-'90s, as his band and his vision took form, Martsch was a restless tinkerer, one who would throw together different versions of his band each time out, and for a while you never quite knew what shape or size or tone Built to Spill albums would take. There was something thrilling about that, and since the band settled into its current sound around the turn of the millennium, I’ve never quite stopped missing it.
Still, the familiarity of Built to Spill is a balm, and hearing Martsch fiddle with his main melodic ideas is like visiting cousins: everyone’s older, no one’s much different, someone’s hair is longer or shorter, someone’s brought a different girlfriend. Martsch is still messing around with unexpected ways to fit together guitar rock songs—on "All Our Songs", everything drops out for him to play a little three-note figure surrounded by silence, and then he brings the band back in with a pedal stomp. "Living Zoo" works an extended lyrical metaphor ("Being a human/ Being an animal, too"), as the tempo quickens and drags, the guitars twirling overhead like multicolored kites.
There are new moments and darker colors here if you listen closely for them. "On the Way" feels like a song form Martsch has never tried, with female backup singers, a walking bass line, and a cloudy sense of menace. The loosely dub-inflected "C.R.E.B." (Martsch was threatening a Built to Spill reggae album for a while last decade) is pained and even a little bleak, a welcome reminder that there are shadowy spots in the bright open spaces of his music. "I never meant to forget you/ I always forget people I really love/ If I haven’t seen them for a long time/ And I haven’t seen you for a long time," he sings, a moment where you can hear and feel some internalized regrets and emotions surface.
In general, the higher the emotional stakes, the better Martsch gets; you sense that he could jam out a passable Built to Spill album in a few weeks if he wanted to (and that’s exactly what it seemed like he did with 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future and 2005’s You In Reverse). There is even some audible self-deprecation creeping into his song titles: On There Is No Enemy, he offered us "another nowhere lullaby" ("Nowhere Lullaby") and on Untethered Moon he gives us "All Our Songs" and the shruggingly titled "Some Other Song". On "Another Day", he frets over "an obsolescence no one would plan." It sounds like a world-beating talent recognizing his own limitations, deciding whether or not to make something good or something great. There will always be flickers of the latter on Built to Spill’s albums, and if there are only four or five them here, they are bright enough to reassure that Martsch is probably not going anywhere, and that he’ll continue to grace us, every once in a while, with his unassuming, inscrutable presence.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the most ambitious albums in Brazilian history.

Milton Nascimento / Lô Borges: Clube Da Esquina

Clube Da Esquina

If you grew up in the rural area of Rio Grande de Cima back then, you probably knew the two boys as Tonho and Cacau. Whether they were playing football or marbles, swimming in the river or in one of the nearby waterfalls, they were inseparable. One afternoon, Tonho and Cacau were playing on a dirt hill when photographer Carlos da Silva Assunção Filho (better known as Cafi) drove past in a Volkswagen Bug. He braked, shouted to the boys and as the dust settled, snapped their picture. “It was like lightning,” recalls Cafi. “It’s a strong image. The face of Brazil. And it was at the time when several artists were in exile.”
Cafi didn’t catch either boys’ name that day, but when he later showed the photo to Brazilian musicians Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, the two knew they had their record cover for their 1972 double album, Clube Da Esquina. And for many years after the fact, people thought the photo was in fact Nascimento and Borges as young boys. For the next 40 years, the boys on the album cover were a mystery throughout Brazil, one requiring a manhunt of sorts to try and track the boys down. “Someone in the car shouted at me and I smiled,” Tonho recalled some 40 years later, as a reporter and photographer had finally tracked him and his childhood friend down, even recreating the iconic photo. “I was eating a piece of bread that someone had given me, because I was starving. And I was barefoot. But I never knew I was on the cover of a record. My mother will be thrilled. We never had a photo of me as a boy.”
While deep in the morass of a brutally repressive military regime, 1972 was a watershed moment for Brazilian pop music, or as it’s often called, MPB: Novos Baianos’ Acabou Chorare, Paulinho da Viola’s A Dança Da Solidão, the duo album from Nelson Angelo E Joyce, not to mention self-titled albums from Tim Maia, Jards Macalé, Tom Zé, and Elis Regina. And after years in exile, Tropicália heroes Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso returned home with career highlights in Expresso 2222 and Transa, respectively. Yet looming over them all is Clube Da Esquina, one of the most ambitious records in Brazilian music history, a double album that not only belongs in the same discussion with others in the Western canon—be it Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main Street—but one that is even more uplifting and mystifying.
The music of Milton Nascimento ranges from the earthy to the angelic, both mysterious and plainspoken, haunting and sublime. Eumir Deodato, who provided string arrangements for Clube Da Esquina and subsequently worked with Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, and Kool & the Gang, heard in Nascimento parallels to classical music, but admitted: “To date I have not managed to discover the rhythmic impulse he gives to his songs. It is something new, mysterious, intriguing and challenging. Few people have a deep understanding of what Milton Nascimento’s music is.”
Such extremes befit a man whose voice is one of the most profound in 20th-century music, one that entices and inspires his fellow countrymen as well as Paul Simon, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, and Animal Collective. It’s a voice resonant and well-deep yet able to soar upwards to an ethereal falsetto, one capable of shaking vibrato as well as sustaining pure tones, and wordless shrieks closer to tropical bird calls than the human voice. Or, as Elis Regina once put it: “If God sang, he would do it with Milton’s voice.”
Born in Rio in 1942, Nascimento’s mom died when he was still an infant and his adopted family relocated to Brazil’s Minas Gerais region when he was three. His adopted mother sang in a choir under iconic 20th-century composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and in the streets, Nascimento could hear church music, romantic toadas and folia de reis during Christmas season. Lingering from a 17th-century gold rush that brought in a flux of African slave labor to the Portuguese colony, the racial diversity of Minas Gerais yielded a rich spectrum of music (as well as racial tensions). As one of only a few black children in the small town of Três Pontas, Nascimento felt such intolerance daily. Yet he wholly absorbed the musical culture of his adoptive state of Minas Gerais and let it reverberate in his own songs throughout his long career.
Obsessed with music though he was, Nascimento relocated to the capital city of Belo Horizonte in 1963 to take an accounting job. But he paid his bills by gigging in clubs at night, where he forged a close friendship with the Borges brothers, Márcio and his kid brother, Lô. With Marcio, he caught Francois Truffaut’s nouvelle vague classic Jules et Jim, watching it again and again until the last showing. Nascimento was inspired to start writing his own songs with his friend that same night. “All my songs are like a movie—they’re all very cinematographic,” he said. And it was through Lô that Nascimento first heard the Beatles, realizing just how classical music and pop could be fused together.
Nascimento’s rise through the ranks of MPB was meteoric. A performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965 garnered notice and by ’69, he found himself booked at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in North New Jersey, recording with producer Creed Taylor and helming a band that included fellow Brazilian jazz stars Eumir Deodato and Airto Moreira as well as Herbie Hancock.
But it was when he was back home in Belo Horizonte, making small talk and jamming with his friends on a stretch of sidewalk at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza that their “corner club” was born. Neither a club nor a movement at the time (a popular music venue now stands at the intersection), their “corner club” twined together various loves: bossa nova, the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Western classical, indigenous South American music, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and more. In 1971, Nascimento and friends rented a house in Praia de Piratininga to the east of Rio to pull their songs together and Clube Da Esquina was released the next year.
A landmark of Brazilian pop, the success of the album confirmed Nascimento as a star of MPB but also launched the careers of Clube bassist Beto Guedes, guitarists Toninho Horta, Nelson Angelo and the younger Borges. And while Nascimento was by far the most prominent member of the club, his name isn’t on the cover and he shared credit with the then-20-year-old Lô Borges, who sings lead on six of the songs. Nor is Nascimento’s face easily seen; you have to hunt through the 150 photos in the gatefold to find a small photo of him. As MPB scholar Charles Perrone wrote: “Because of his extraordinary individual musical talents…the collective aspect of Nascimento’s repertory are often overlooked. Clube Da Esquina emphasizes the notion of encounter and the importance of gathering.”
The magic of Clube Da Esquina is that while one can discern all of Nascimento and friends’ influences, their alchemy elevates it all to vibrate at a higher frequency. Casual and inspired, studied and spontaneous, the album is Pet Sounds, Innervisions and The White Album all rolled into one and it remains beloved even for those who know just a few Brazilian albums.  And even for those who don’t speak or understand a lick of Portuguese, the vocal harmonies, hooks, and orchestrations slip the confines of language and strike at the heart.
So while you may not glean the lyrics of “Cais,” with its imagery of the sea, pier, and Nascimento’s plea for happiness, when the haunting ballad drops away at the 1:35 mark after singing about “launching myself,” a minor chord and his wordless harmonizing nevertheless conveys the bittersweet thrill of leaving the shore and drifting towards the unknown. You don’t need to translate the lyrics on “O Trem Azul” to feel the line about “the sun on your head,” so warm, languid, and tangible is its chorus. Same goes for the sensuous and ecstatic “Cravo E Canela,” which blends together sensations of caco honey and gypsy rain.
The album is full of such shifts, moments that act like a refreshing breeze across the skin on a sweltering day, a shaft of sun piercing the clouds, a kind gesture on a crowded bus, reflecting how in our own daily lives the smallest of movements can trigger a reverberation within. In the lyrics, in the subtle switching of a meter, a key shift or a pivot in instrumentation, each song sets you down in a space far different from where you began. That sense of movement is intentional, as trains, roads, and modes of transportation often figure into Nascimento’s writing, and he himself considered his music “a kind of oxcart, something that unrolls and develops.” There’s the burred guitar build-up at the end of the otherwise hushed “Dos Cruces,” the clamor of church bells that punctuate and illuminate “San Vicente,” the mournful cello and strings in the middle section of “Um Girassol Da Cor De Seu Cabelo” that launches into a redemptive chorus about “a sunflower the color of your hair.”
On the spare piano ballad “Um Gosto de Sol,” Nascimento moves through a half-forgotten dream, a stranger smiling in a foreign city, a river that falls to sleep, the sweet flesh of a pear, all of it tactile yet also ineffable. And then the minor key motif from “Cais” return, this time as a string quartet rather than piano and voice. It’s a surreal moment on the album, one worthy of Luis Buñuel, that image of the boat drifting from the pier now juxtaposed with a pear in a fruit bowl, the most poignant string section this side of “Eleanor Rigby” now reveals an underlying melancholy and sense of estrangement to the surface.
Yet one of the album’s brightest, breeziest tunes led to Brazil’s federal censors originally blocking the recording of the song, an instance of a disconnect between the music and words. “Paisagem Da Janela” [Landscape From the Window] is clopping, country-tinged soft rock with a chiming guitar line, but Lô Borges’s refrain belies such lightness: “When I would speak of those morbid things/When I would speak of those sordid men/When I would speak of this storm/You didn’t listen/You don’t want to believe/But that’s so normal.” It speaks of a past that could also be a commentary on that moment under the rule of the junta. It’s also one of the album’s catchiest choruses, a natural for a sing-along.
A military dictatorship trying to suppress such a song reveals that beyond the perfect pop songcraft and immaculate arrangements, Clube Da Esquina also signified the subtlest and most profound of revolutionary acts. “The military dictatorship imposed an element of urgency,” journalist Paulo Thiago de Mello wrote about the repressive political climate that surrounded Esquina. “And this is something that those who did not live those days may have difficulty understanding. The suffocation provoked by the dictatorship made life urgent.” Under such tyranny, the idyllic possibilities of youth are crushed. Be it Stalinist Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or under the brutal military dictatorships that sprang up throughout the Southern Hemisphere in the ’60s and ’70s, social bonds are not just strained and severed, but also called into question. It’s no coincidence then that Nascimento references the Mexican Revolution hero Emiliano Zapata in the first minute of the album.
“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life…by isolating men,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. “But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation…It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” In hanging and playing together, Milton Nascimento and his friends provided a beacon in the midst of their country’s “vazio cultural” (or cultural void).
Clube Da Esquina, the album itself and the subsequent movement, emphasized casual social encounters and the importance of getting together and playing, and as a result, it elevated not just Nascimento, but the entire collective. That spirit of collaboration continued for Nascimento well after, be it with saxophonist Wayne Shorter on the 1974 album Native Dancer that reintroduced him to a North American audience or his subsequent collaborations with everyone from Duran Duran to Pat Metheny to Quincy Jones.
Such a sense of camaraderie and community can be heard in the brief, joyous minute and a half of “Saídas E Bandeiras Nº 2,” with Nascimento’s falsetto and the guitars arcing to their uppermost registers and towards a not yet possible but still imaginable future: “To walk down avenues facing up to what’s over our heads/To join all forces, to overcome that tide/What was stone becomes a man/And man is more solid than the tide.” In playing on the corner together, Nascimento and his friends—and even Tonho and Cacau sitting on a patch of dirt—all of them became the face of Brazil.


The lo-fi, art rock project from Yung Lean is every bit as dazed as his rap music, while otherwise sounding almost nothing like it.

Nectar

Jonatan Leandoer127 is a side project for Swedish musician Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad, though it could also double as an escape plan. Håstad is better known as the zeitgeist-chasing rapper Yung Lean, but it’s easy to imagine why a young white artist might not want to commit to decades of making music under a debatably insensitive stage moniker that celebrates the very substance to which he was once addicted. And while Håstad has cultivated a surprisingly devoted audience with his depressive cloud rap, to judge from his most recent Yung Lean release, November’s pulseless Poison Ivy, it sure doesn’t sound like his heart is in it anymore.
It’s always dangerous to read too much into publicity material, but it’s no accident that the press release for Jonatan Leandoer127’s Nectar doesn’t mention Yung Lean once (instead it just conspicuously refers to Håstad as a “Stockholm-based multi-disciplinary artist.”) Pitched somewhere between King Krule’s gothic art rock and the narcoleptic folk of Beck’s early lo-fi projects, the album plays to an indie audience that’d likely never give the time of day to an artist named Yung Lean. The distance is impressive: Nectar is every bit as dazed as his rap music, while otherwise sounding almost nothing like it. Håstad’s groggy monotone and alienated wordplay are the only binding threads.
Removed from the rack-stacking rap clichés he was always too quick to default to as Yung Lean, it’s easier to appreciate how compelling some of his more original prose can be. On “My Guardian” he paints a horrible vision: “Who’s the man with the sapphire eyes/Who used to watch me in my room late at night?/With spider arms, black teeth and lice/He made me wanna kill ’em all somehow.” Delivered with the nonchalance of a beat poet, his free-form prose scrambles figments of memories, dreams, and traumas.
The more refined musical backdrop hasn’t made Håstad’s delivery any more ingratiating, however. His singing is a lot like his rapping: hollow and half-committal. Opener “Razor Love” sets him against flattering splashes of New Romantic saxophone, but his flat voice undercuts any emotion. He may be trying to conjure an air of Lou Reed’s detached cool, but in execution, he sounds more like G. Love singing his shopping list into a voice memo.
Despite its icy posture, Nectar stacks two crowdpleaders back-to-back. With its rousing, Art Brut-caliber riff, the rocker “Off With Their Heads” is such fun that even the normally poker-faced Håstad can’t suppress a smirk, while “Wooden Girl” has the majestic twirl of the Cure’ss brightest pop singles. And “Tangerine Warrior (Freestyle),” while not a freestyle in the traditional sense, beautifully frames Håstad spit-balled poetry with an impulsive accompaniment of Neutral Milk Hotel trumpets and somber piano: “I walk around and I shine with no rhinestones/There’s no life in my eyes there’s just ice stones/When I remember my grandma in a nightgown.”
Even when he seems to be sleepwalking his way through these performances, his sentiments stick and his melodies linger in the head the way his Yung Lean material rarely does. Is Jonatan Leondoer127 a lark or a reinvention? There’s enough inspiration on display to suggest that, should he ever be so inclined, Håstad really could go ahead and quit his day job.


The preposterously talented English band’s third record is pitched between clinical precision and crazed abandon.

Hellfire

black midi thrive in the half-light between serious and silly. It’s just fun, man, Geordie Greep and his mates have repeatedly said in response to earnest questions about their mission, their message, their “responsibility” to carry forward the torch of prog rock. Words like “ridiculous” and “crazy” come up a lot in their interviews. “We’re just doing this stupid thing and somehow making the semblance of a living,” Greep said on Radio Primavera recently, when promoting the band’s third album, Hellfire.
When compared with their inky-black music, which throbs with a terrible intensity, Greep's insistence on “fun” seems like special pleading. Of course you are meant to take this shit seriously. There are nine or ten tabs open in any ten seconds of black midi music—themes, sub-themes, recurring characters, historical references. Their compositions don’t feel arranged so much as welded together at impossible angles according to the precise calculations of aeronautical engineers. The lyrics are dense and specific enough to wonder if the soldier character named Tristan Bongo (from “Welcome to Hell”) might have served under the homophobic, screaming captain from “Eat Men Eat,” or if the diamond miner who died and became a diamond himself (from Cavalcade’s “Diamond Stuff”) might have been buried in the dirt beneath the feet of the post-apocalyptic preacher and cult leader of “John L.” You can find multiple Reddit threads devoted to why Greep keeps mentioning anteaters. Music that vibrates at this frequency simply does not get made without lunatic commitment.
But there is a knowing wink buried within the music’s hairpin turns and dissonances. The members have been playing together since their teens, and their technical command, by now, borders on preposterous. The absurdity of high-level performance, the cosmic humor in any mortal human growing this proficient at basically anything, radiates from their music. In the right light, black midi sounds less like the work of zealots and more like kids who have beaten every level and are now trying again with the controller upside down.
The curtain opens on Hellfire with a creaky, arthritic march rhythm straight out of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Along with Cavalcade’s ode to Marlene Dietrich, the moment underscores the hint of Weimar cabaret in their music, with its exaggerated gestures and cheery bad faith. As a vocalist, Greep’s motor-mouthed yammer channels old black-and-white newsreels and wartime propaganda films. It’s the voice of the classic Hollywood flim-flammer, the confidence man, the “trouble right here in River City” type. Greep’s lyrics often cast a jaundiced eye on fraudulent performers and their fickle audiences: On Cavalcade’s final track, a composer named Markus attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing 65 ascending fourths in a row because “everyone loves” them, only to be dragged out in chains. On Hellfire’s finale “27 Questions,” Greep portrays a preening actor named Freddie Frost, who prances about the stage and trills pseudo-profundities to a credulous audience. Once you look for them, you find rib jabs everywhere in black midi’s music, indicating that all this just might be, at least in part, a put-on.
As they’ve progressed, black midi have become increasingly interested in play-acting and costume as songwriting prompts. A lot of their material, to hear them tell it, begins with some version of the thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we tried to write a ___?” “When you want to do something original...use something as a model or inspiration that you know you definitely can’t do," Greep has said. “Your failure will be interesting.” You can hear this impulse at work throughout Hellfire, as they offer mad-scientist takes on country songs (the pedal-steel and Hammond organ washes in “Still”) and even tropicália: The first two minutes of “Eat Men Eat” sounds for all the world like Caetano Veloso—wry, knowing, weightless. No pose lasts for more than a minute or two. The rhythm section on “Still” convulses repeatedly, and Cameron Picton’s vocal melody takes some intriguing, nearly Sondheim left turns, while “Eat Men Eat” careens from its quiet opening into a climax of screaming horns, like a large land mammal dying painfully.
Three albums in, it’s only growing more thrilling to watch the group navigate these hard swerves, each one arriving at a higher velocity, executed with even more breath-sucking precision. The songs don’t segue so much as upend each other like a procession of spiky blue Mario Kart shells. But as exhilarating as the highs are on Hellfire—the rampaging 32nd-note riff on “Sugar/Tzu” triggers gasp-laughs, for example—the world that Greep details and populates with his bustling characters can grow wearying, over time, in its emotional aridity. “Posterity will show me to be/The greatest the world has ever seen, a genius among nonentities,” blares Greep on “Sugar/Tzu”—a great line, but also a sneering pose he repeats one too many times throughout Hellfire: “Idiots are infinite, thinking men numbered,” he mutters on “The Race Is About to Begin.” This is the kind of insight you arrive at when you are 22 and most of the thoughts you have are concerned with making sure the world sees how smart you are.
There’s a deep suspicion—common to the sort of young, intense intellectuals who find themselves drawn to listening to or making complicated music—that surges of uncontrollable emotion are suspect, dangerous, in need of further, possibly forensic, inspection. That process of forensic inspection often feels like the same bloodshot-eyed force powering black midi’s music. Greep has a vibrato velvety enough to make the words “prostrate, supine” (from “The Defence”) sing like a Tom Jones ballad. But his crooning sounds the way a boy dancing awkwardly at a middle school dance looks; the movements are there, but hiding behind uneasy scare quotes that betray a distrust of strong feelings, of pleasure mechanisms.
There is also some wild-eyed Scott Walker energy at work in black midi somewhere—lyrics about military nightmare scenarios, the sort of acrid theater of being a crooner, the exaggerated Kabuki nature of all the pulled faces—the grimace, the scream. Greep will utter out-of-nowhere, completely non-idiomatic put-downs like “some people are as useless as lids on a fish’s eyes”—that’s a Scott Walker line if ever I’ve heard one. Like some of Walker’s more experimental later work, black midi’s music can feel curiously stunted and two-dimensional, despite its metatextual layers and fiendish complexity. If the intellect on Hellfire is feverish, the emotional temperature often dips to morgue levels; their music is better equipped to comment on emotion than to feel it, or express it. They continue to get over, as they always do, on pure conviction, riding the knife’s edge between clinical precision and crazed abandon.


Newly released on streaming services, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other.

Lil Peep / Lil Tracy: castles / CASTLES II

castles / CASTLES II

Five minutes after Lil Peep and Lil Tracy met, they hatched plans to make music together. Peep told Tracy he had a verse open for him, and the song they recorded that day is a frenetic collision, excavating a tender beat from a Postal Service song and frothing over it with half-sung raps about switchblades and taking a girl home to “connect like WiFi.” It’s close to perfect. Tracy said later he had never connected like that with anyone. The two collaborated for a too-brief period, culminating in a bitter, public fall-out over Peep’s management and the way the media—and sometimes Peep himself—erased Tracy from the narrative around Gothboiclique and the rise of so-called “emo-rap.” They were barely speaking in 2017 when Peep died on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona.
The posthumous Peep projects that have trickled out since then have been gifts to fans, shrapnels of his legacy. castles and CASTLES II, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago, are time capsules for their collaboration. Newly released on streaming for the first time, these songs capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. These are bleary tracks, with a ragged mesh of rock and rap and blaring, ticking drums. It’s scratchy and sludgy and woozy; it sounds like it’s seeping into you.
Peep and Tracy sang about rot and mess and entropy, destroying everything around you to mirror the chaos in your head. “I know that’s your favorite dress,” they drone, “Set fire to it.” The best songs here find a cinematic shimmer. Their voices echo and layer on “Your Favorite Dress,” trading verses while dark synths pool under them. “Lord why, lord why do I gotta wake up,” Peep moans in “White Wine,” as Tracy howls harmonies over a sputtering beat. The intensity is the point, and they braid cartoon imagery—castle walls and demons, full moons and bloody teeth—into songs about coke and comedowns and ache. “Two weeks with the same old jeans on,” Tracy coos on “Dying Out West,” “I know you want to die, baby, this is your theme song.”
But this is also the sound of friends having fun, riffing off each other’s ridiculousness. “I can’t fuck with you if we weren’t friends on MySpace,” Tracy slurs on “White Wine.” They ad-lib word associations, which veers into bland asides about fake friends and good girls, or a line that falls somewhere between serious and self-satire—“If I die today, you would try to fuck my bitch!” Tracy hisses on “Never Eat, Never Sleep.” You can hear them self-mythologizing, egging each other on; they keep calling themselves vampires, crafting something mystical out of sleepless, strung-out nights. The core of any Gothboiclique song is a plea, for peace or corrosion or a way to hollow out. Here, Peep and Tracy revel in their disarray.
When they first released these tapes, it was stunning to hear them wail about wanting to die, with an intimacy that bordered on boredom. They turned death into the mundane. It’s hard to disentangle any posthumous album from nostalgia and grief; it’s also tough to separate listening to Peep’s music now from the reason people turn to it, for the glint of recognition that comes when you hear him scream the worst thought you’ve ever had, crashing over drums. Peep could be transcendent in how he wrote about life and death and meaninglessness. “Look at the sky tonight, all of the stars have a reason,” he sang on 2015’s “Star Shopping,” so earnest you had to believe him. On these mixtapes, he and Tracy sing about pain and waiting to not wake up, but more than anything, they look for refuge, brick walls and barricades. It is an act of hope to build a space where you can be alone, to carve yourself a hiding place, and call it a castle.

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An extended dance music composition from the Japan-based analog-synth trio audaciously tries to recreate a long-lost live session with contemporary global grooves.

"Fantasy Live 1999"

The quotes in the title are striking. Intimating a description as well as a headline, the punctuation marks are an essential part of the title of Tokyo Black Star’s second album, *“Fantasy Live 1999.” *They serve as an aspirational signpost for the artists, and a note of caution to those diving into their illusionary composition. Beyond the meta gates of those quotation marks, “Fantasy Live 1999” both reaffirms and moves beyond its deceptive title, playing around with what the piece is and what it isn’t.
The album is, in fact, a fantasia that exists amid extended-length masterworks such as Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 or Lindstrøm’s Where You Go I Go Too; the analog-gear live sets currently practiced by the likes of Magic Mountain High, Reagenz, and Blondes; and the dub-wise synthesizer music of global sprites such as Francis Bebey and the Yellow Magic Orchestra. In actual terms, it is a single, multi-part, instrumental “piece” constructed in the studio by Tokyo Black Star—long-time production partners Alex Prat (better known by his DJ name, Alex From Tokyo) and Isao Kumano (a Tokyo-based sound engineer, who is one of Japan dance music's most sought-after mastering pros), and a relatively new arrival, the modular synth wiz and bassist Kenichi Takagi. It runs a cool 40 minutes at a stately disco tempo, and as the title suggests, is a modern attempt to recreate a long-lost live session that Alex and Isao performed at a Shimokitazawa club back when they were starting and raving. It succeeds in spirit and in content, and thus spends as much time gazing back longingly as it does reaching forward.
TBS’s push and pull with the aesthetics of futurism—real, faux, beat-wise, ambient, contemporary, nostalgic—have been near their core from the get-go. Alex and Isao’s debut release was also the first record put out by Innervisions, the Âme- and Dixon-founded German label and crew whose house, techno and related materials have balanced underground quality and commercial popularity since inception. That 2005 EP, Psyche Dance, included a “beatless” version of a track, and set an important example for both artist and label: the pulsing qualities of synth chords and the oscillations of an analog synth’s sample-and-hold circuits made for a more Zen, less hedonistic approach to the art of the dance track. This laidback approach to the beat was hardly a new idea (it’s been a major ingredient of much great techno coming out of Japan for years), but in TBS’s music, it is especially intuitive, an unforced part of the group’s creative personality.
You can hear this relaxed comfort throughout the new recording, a large reason why “Fantasy Live 1999” feels so joyous. Beyond the clever title and the running time, nothing here carries much pretense; instead, like the intrinsically Japanese, post-Murakami cut-up sleeve art by Tomokazu Matsuyama, there’s a constant playfulness. At its heart, this is music for popping the balloon of life’s seriousness, for effortlessly dancing from one knowing smile to another.
The precedent is set at the top, where sci-fi sound effects and a synth run performed with classically trained dexterity create a B-movie atmosphere, while a rudimentary snare-and-kick boom-thwack completes the Kraftwerk-ian moment. Five minutes in—as the spacey synth chords reminiscent of the John Carpenter soundtracks drift by—the modus operandi of “Fantasy Live” as a journey to the past becomes abundantly clear. As soon as the chords mix down into an ambient string accompaniment for a minimal drum-machine-and-bass-synth foundation, the path is beyond doubt. Big-screen elegance slides in beside art-house kitsch—including a stretch (around the 25th minute) that can only be described as the suite’s Far East Dub moment, where koto and gamelan spirits invade the kick-drum world—co-existing naturally and maturely, and not as quirky juxtapositions.
The piece builds to a grand finale whose main elements come from “Mitokomon,” the standout from Edo Express, TBS’s 2015 EP. On its own, the track—a magnificent synth skank with some lightly sprinkled African percussion—seemed a glorious accident. Yet as the closing section of a wide-ranging “fantasy,” whose elements had been forecast throughout the piece, it is a groovy overture; the sonic references now full of inferred meaning about global movement, technology and rhythm. It’s a broadly satisfying ending, the kind of exclamation point that a great set of quotes richly deserves.


American Tunes is a posthumous album from the legendary musician, songwriter, and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, whose smartly funky touch enlivens a selection of standards.

American Tunes

*American Tunes *is a posthumous album from Allen Toussaint, who, though he had a six decade-long musical career, began his work as a regular touring live performer began in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina claimed most of his possessions and his recording studio in its destructive wake. Toussaint’s responsible for infusing the syncopated pianos of ragtime jazz and boom-bap style swing into New Orleans funk and rock,  but his just-released collection  does not necessarily reflect that level of innovation. However  it highlights the iconic musical pioneer’s ability to lightly repurpose some of his favorite and most well-worn influences into his distinctive style.  Whether re-imagining the work of piano boogie-loving New Orleans zydeco kingpin Professor Longhair, examining the melodies of jazz great Duke Ellington, or digging into his own canon via an instrumental redux of country star Glen Campbell’s Toussaint-written 1977 hit “Southern Nights,” *American Tunes *highlights Toussaint’s skill more as a pure musician, regardless of genre.
His live performances tended to veer discursively through his recording and production career, stopping to add re-interpretations of songs made popular by artists who served as his creative inspirations. However, it’s in Toussaint’s ability to weave his smartly appointed piano funk through the entire album that creates the tie that binds this disparate collection together. In less capable hands, Glen Campbell’s aforementioned country classic placed next to Rhiannon Giddens’ take on Ella Fitzgerald’s wistful “Rocks In My Bed” and a solo piano version of Professor Longhair’s swinging N’Awlins romp “Big Chief” would be three individual moments. However, there’s a virtuoso here weaving this all together, and it unfolds with the smooth inevitability of cocktail-party conversation.
Professor Longhair was often noted as one of Toussaint’s personal heroes, and the true highlight of American Tunes is his version of Longhair’s “Big Chief,” which builds as expected and then pivots from major-key euphoria into minor key-driven malaise. “Southern Nights” transforms here from a thumping soul-country groove into an orchestral-style pop number bearing a similarity to Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”
The most discordant moment on the album is it’s closing and titular single. In 1975, Paul Simon sang “American Tune,” offering a folk-meets-soul take on a style similar to 1971’s “You’ve Got A Friend.” 2016’s “American Tune” is almost an afterthought, as guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Jay Bellerose’s work is more showcased than that of the album’s lead artist. While the song is spare and hopeful in vibe, it’s at minimum “just” excellent.
Somewhere in the poly-stylistic Venn diagram that birthed Allen Toussaint’s vibrant and diverse musical catalog lie the spirits of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Glen Campbell, Professor Longhair and more. When combining those influences alongside modern era virtuosos like Bill Frisell, Rhiannon Giddens, Van Dyke Parks and others, something pleasantly expected emerges. A step left of center yet still striking familiar chords right on time, Allen Toussaint show us his understated brilliance one final time.


In 1986, Metallica released inarguably one of the best metal records of all time. Newly remastered with live takes and demos, the album’s riffs, power, and mania remain as potent as ever.

Master of Puppets

Before drummer Lars Ulrich even thought about acquiring Basquiats to auction off in the future, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was most stoked on obtaining the first issue of the Fantastic Four comic, which established Marvel as a big name and is now estimated to be worth around $135,000. The unmitigated success of Master of Puppets, inarguably one of the greatest metal albums of all time, let him do that, and set him on a path from obtaining valuable pieces of pop culture to becoming an icon in the culture itself. When asked about why he wanted the rare comic, Hammett replied, “To obtain the unobtainable is a real rush in itself.”
The lasting characteristics that took metal from its from heavier rock offshoot to its own distinct form were already taking shape by the time Metallica released their third album Master of Puppets in 1986. The Bay Area thrash scene where they originated—and quickly divested themselves from—was born from one of the most successful mergers in music: metal riffs and punk energy. Melody was increasingly prominent, bringing with it a wounded and raw beauty. Thrash also brought about an element of social consciousness, adding flourishes to British crust pioneers Discharge’s brute simplicity. Metal was both assimilated into pop culture and a bastion of musical expansion, a reimagination of progressive rock with more direct propulsion. It was music not content with its own alienation, ready to lash back as a big-tent alternative that demanded a deeper understanding.
Will this reissue of Master of Puppets—a remastered and expanded box set, featuring studio outtakes and live performances from around the world and one of bassist Jason Newstead’s first shows at a club in Reseda, Cali.—convince you it’s the greatest metal record of all time, if you’re not convinced already? The numerous early takes and rough demos have a diehard appeal (there’s a reason Metallica has a dedicated archivist on their payroll), though the live recordings present a band going through its most monumental transition punctuated by monumental tragedy. Recording a masterpiece was the easy part. Genius does not appear out of thin air and Puppets was a culmination of Metallica’s influences and forward direction, so yes, it will give you a more rounded sense of how a masterwork came to be. That the early roughness stands starkly shows how relentless they were in making a defining metal record.
Its predecessor, 1984’s Ride The Lightning, began with “Fight Fire With Fire,” a song fueled by nuclear paranoia, which was not at all uncommon in the ’80s. Puppets opens with “Battery,” a celebration of destruction as a liberating force, trading in commentary for a purely aspirational message, albeit one the heshers could revere. It’s basically “Fire” widened in philosophical scope and tightened in performance. In this way, Puppets wasn’t a radical break from Lightning. Both mostly follow a similar structure—acoustic intro, second song as title track, a “ballad” on the fourth song, a long instrumental—and yet Metallica were not copying themselves or refining their approach. They were crazy enough to think they could top Lightning, and they did. It’s what separated them from the rest of the thrash scene, and from most metal in general; they were the furthest thing from Def Leppard, but they wanted to push their own boundaries of metal as high art as much as Def Leppard was trying out-slick and out-pop their Los Angeles rivals. In hindsight, game recognize game. Metallica abandoned Los Angeles because they couldn’t hang with the pop bands there—all of those Decline of Civilization Part II Aqua Net rejects couldn’t fathom wanting to ascend to Metallica’s heights anyway.
Puppets deals with the very nature of control, presenting the hangover of its allure. Metal is fight music for underdogs and while that is empowering and worthwhile, Puppets shows the consequences of control in the wrong hands. The title track was Hetfield warning himself about addiction, something he would become intimate with, and he wouldn’t listen until their 2004 tell-all documentary Some Kind of Monster made a tragic comedy out of Metallica’s near collapse while recording St. Anger. Through its raging rhythm and heart-wrenching valleys, where bassist Cliff Burton brought a distorted symphony of the mind, Hetfield’s pleas for sanity sure don’t sound like someone coming to grips with how fucked up he is.
This isn’t unusual for cautionary drug songs, yet “Puppets” doesn’t sound like a morality play—“Master! Master!” is servitude delivered as arena unity, where you grow stronger, not indentured, by yelling it louder and louder. “Disposable Heroes” and “Leper Messiah” explore the illusion of control through more conventional topics—“Heroes” takes on war and “Messiah” skewers televangelists as any decent ’80s metal band would—and still manage to be more powerful than most bands at their best. Metallica embraced more complex structures without diluting themselves, a rare instance where a band gets more accessible by getting more complicated.
Puppets’ fusion of beauty and savagery is best defined in its last two songs, “Orion,” an instrumental, and “Damage Inc.” Both tracks were co-written by Burton, effectively sealing his legacy that still looms over Metallica three decades later. His presence is strongest on “Orion,” making thrash move like ballet, a swelling motion that’s not just about crashing into things. The bridge takes the control motif and creates worlds with it, creating tenderness and majesty, showing what a man’s hand masquerading as divine can summon. “Orion” is celestial through meaning, not explicit text, Hawkwind’s high-mindedness combined with Lemmy’s more direct glance.
“Damage Inc.” closes how “Battery” opened the album: reckless carnage as a cleansing, necessary fire. While it’s more of a contrast than fusion, they still coexist with a purpose to elevate metal. It’s even more apocalyptic than “Fight Fire With Fire”—there’s no mention of nuclear war, just a focus on getting mowed down for someone else’s survival. “Fuck it all, fucking no regrets” proved to be such an impactful line, Hetfield reused it again in 2003, on St. Anger’s title track with a teenager’s enthusiastic clumsiness.
Nevertheless, Hetfield is, bar none, metal’s standout rhythm guitarist, handling blazing speed with a precision and heft. Metallica are so ubiquitous that this perhaps has gone under-recognized; hummable as his riffs are, and the legions of hummers massive, Hetfield’s role as frontman obscures his contributions as a guitarist. The rough mixes included in this deluxe reissue are mostly devoid of solos and vocals, and they become pantheons to Hetfield’s rhythm stature. It’s jarring to hear gaps where Hammett’s solos or Burton’s fills should be, and yet through him (and our collective memories) the songs still flow as they should. Hetfield-Hammett-Burton-Ulrich is one of the few metal lineups where every member was equally integral, where if you removed one, the band would be radically altered. Hetfield was the bond between everyone else, a ground to Burton’s ambitions and Hammett’s squalling lead work, a reason that Ulrich didn’t need to be flashy because he certainly couldn’t be.
Puppets brought Metallica to their artistic climax, but its touring cycle proved a severe challenge to such loftiness. The live recordings here are closer to the tapes that Metallica made their reputation off of than the polished productions on the 1993 box set Live Shit: Binge & Purge, the cash-out from touring all corners of the globe. As demanding of perfection they were making Puppets, live they were still more concerned with tearing through, out-of-place leads be damned. Except for a 1987 VHS Cliff ‘Em All!, there weren’t a lot of official live recordings from this era, odd given how Metallica made their name as a live band. The live tracks here are rough, unpolished, but you can basically smell the beer and sweat from the band and the crowd throughout.
Before Burton’s death from a bus accident in 1986 on tour in Sweden, Hetfield considered kicking out Ulrich, an alternate timeline that scores of metal fans might still wish into existence. Loving Metallica and hating Ulrich are not mutually exclusive; Metallica could make more money charging fans and ex-fans to spit on him than they ever did making music. Even as the fantasy lingers, it’s impossible to imagine Metallica without Ulrich. Puppets is the product of brashness with an eye towards heaven, and that’s Hetfield and Ulrich to a fault. And Hetfield was going to make that relationship work: he described early Metallica as the family that replaced his own, his mother died from treating cancer with Christian Science and his father abandoned him when he was young. Burton’s death reopened that feeling of abandonment, making him grip to control even more. Trying to obtain the unobtainable is not for the foolhardy, and it will drain you into a husk if you’re lucky. That’s what Hetfield tried to warn you about on Puppets by yelling at you about chopped breakfasts on mirrors: control is a deathwish that keeps you alive.


As the phonk sound that he helped develop has evolved, the Parisian producer has switched up his own style. His latest album feels like a grab bag of genre experiments that lack a distinct identity.

Short Term Agreement

Parisian producer NxxxxxS was among the first wave of artists who shaped the aesthetic of SoundCloud’s phonk scene in the early 2010s, finding equal inspiration in the dreamlike stillness of filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Jarmusch and the atmospheric mixtape curation of DJ Paul and DJ Screw. Like his online peers DJ Smokey and Mr. Sisco, NxxxxxS sought to meld the nascent underground microgenres of that moment—cloud rap, vaporwave, and Memphis hip-hop fetishism—into hour-long soundtracks for late-night drives and smoke sessions. His work, however, aims beyond the movement’s traditional palette of library music and lo-fi vocal chops, exploring sci-fi bass music, chillwave production, and the synth arrangements of horror soundtracks over the course of fully realized concept records.
Though NxxxxxS and co. have managed to maintain a devoted cult following over the past decade, the rise of “drift phonk”—an unusual fusion of distorted house beats, Memphis a cappellas, and the repetitive 808 cowbell samples popularized by Russian TikTok edits of street-racing footage—has eclipsed the popularity of its SoundCloud forebears. You can detect traces of drift phonk’s influence in NxxxxxS’ recent streak of high-profile co-signs, from a noticeably drift-y collaboration with Beyoncé’s Ivy Park brand to the release of his latest album, Short Term Agreement, on Diplo’s Mad Decent Label. The latter represents a significant departure from NxxxxxS’ established sound. In contrast to the cinematic direction of previous full-length efforts, it feels like channel-surfing through a series of one-off genre experiments that lack a distinct identity.
There are some solid offerings front-loaded into Short Term Agreement’s first half. “Slump” and “No Witness,” collaborations with horrorcore revivalists Freddie Dredd and Apoc Krysis, respectively, embody NxxxxxS’ best traits. The former transforms a comfy lounge-music loop into a sinister tableau, mashed kick drums warping both the sample and Dredd’s double-time rapping beyond recognition, while the latter is more overtly evil, weaving cowbell riffs through a mist of synthesized strings. Neither reinvents the wheel, but each foregrounds the ambient, hypnotic effects of ’90s Southern rap production. It’s downtempo, but still rattles the trunk.
NxxxxxS’ ability to conjure immersive atmospheres makes the fickle sequencing of Short Term Agreement feel all the more jarring. “Grub,” built around brooding verses by London emcee Jeshi, would make for a good one-off drop on SoundCloud, but its pristine mix and drill-adjacent drum programming sound incongruous wedged between the two aforementioned tracks. The remainder of the record’s first half veers into largely instrumental ambient trap, bookended by fizzy synth sketches that sound like the opening bars of a classic Bones cut. While these brief interludes toy with evocative analog textures, the space in between them feels somewhat empty. “The Room” and “External Memories” are nondescript, flooded with goopy synth pads and buckets of reverb. Once the 808 drops, there’s not much more beyond a few snare rolls and sound bites of evil laughter to keep you engaged—it’s Muzak for the background of a vlog.
On the album’s second half, NxxxxxS abandons cohesion for a kitchen-sink approach that doesn’t play to his strengths. Co-produced by Iceland’s Lord Pusswhip and composed of crisp percussion and atonal industrial synths, the quirky West Coast bounce of “Find the Bag” is unrecognizable as NxxxxxS’ own. Guest rapper Baby.com’s performance is creative and charismatic, but without an infusion of NxxxxxS’ vaporous sound design, it’s not enough to feel like more than a gimmicky foray into club rap. Aside from the eerie harpsichord buried deep within the mix, “Mosh O’Clock” feels similarly removed from his wheelhouse, plugging sounds into the same skronky template used by EDM/rap fusions like Duckwrth’s “Start a Riot” and label boss Diplo’s “Welcome to the Party,” both written for blockbuster superhero flicks and far cries from NxxxxxS’ Tarkovskian subtlety.
Aside from a flaccid attempt at emo-pop with Pollari, whose cyborg delivery would be better served by more dynamic production, and a pair of amorphous cloud-rap cuts, this final stretch includes a couple of cracks at new-wave phonk that pan out surprisingly well. Drift phonk is formulaic by nature, but “Head! Shot!” finds plenty of room to tinker within the subgenre’s structure, deploying enough filters, ominous chants, and pitch-shifts to keep you guessing throughout its two-minute runtime. “Panic!” uses a wafer-thin Memphis cassette rip as a springboard for NxxxxxS to test out complex drum patterns. Each loop is peppered with a unique blend of squelching bass and cartoon sound effects: It’s sensory overload, but it feels as inventive and playful as the Tennessee source material he’s appropriating.
Though the many iterations of phonk that have arisen over the past decade can vary drastically in terms of tempo and intensity, the style’s ethos remains roughly the same. It’s about meticulous scene-setting and creating a coherent aesthetic—like furnishing a haunted house with 808 hits and a hard-drive full of Lil Noid mixtapes. There are pockets of phantasmal intrigue interspersed throughout Short Term Agreement, but listening to the record in its entirety feels more akin to sitting in on a focus group than exploring an immersive space. When you’re on board for a cinematic experience, being used as a test subject really snuffs out the vibe.


The Chicago band’s third album brings wiry new energy to their fuzzed-out rock songs. The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger.

Shadow Talk

With their radiant warmth and cracked, spidery riffs, Chicago jangle-rock band Cafe Racer sound a bit like a sidewalk on a summer day. For a while, they seemed perfectly content to stroll: On their second album, 2018’s Famous Dust, they shuffled along at a leisurely pace, guided by singer Michael Santana’s staticky whisper-sneer. It was a vibe, but the songs didn’t always move with confidence—some had one chord change too many, one true change too few.
Their third album, Shadow Talk, doesn’t just leave those critiques in the dust—it’s also the rare case of a band that sounds entirely aware of how much better it’s gotten. Cafe Racer are now bigger, sharper, and far more flexible. While Santana still sings as though from behind Jim Reid’s and Jason Pierce’s sunglasses, he also doesn’t hesitate to tear them off for the occasional towering ripper and bark some heavy-sounding words, pushing his full weight into “boulder” and “vulture” on “Seminal Art.” Behind him, bassist Rob McWilliams and new drummer Elise Poirier hum in the shadows. They do heavy lifting without breaking a sweat; when the rest of the band violently crashes down around them in the middle third of “Exile,” they keep the whole thing up while hardly raising their voices.
Still, the best part of Shadow Talk is its gestalt: The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger. Credit not only Cafe Racer’s conviction to rewire their love of fuzz with new energy, but also the album’s phenomenal sequencing. Subtle but firm, Shadow Talk’s motion mirrors time and weather: the first three tracks sound like a lucid morning becoming a focused afternoon, then gliding into a depressurized evening. Midway through the 10-minute closing track, a sustaining organ slips in unannounced, the whistling breeze that gently informs you that you have about four minutes before it turns into a droning downpour.
Shadow Talk is soluble yet rock-solid; it evaporates and re-materializes with ease. For a five-piece like Cafe Racer, grasping this slippery balance doesn’t happen by accident. It can take years of trial and error, the kind of long-term conditioning made possible by the independent venues where the band came up—venues that suddenly find themselves endangered. Shadow Talk is a victory made possible in part by artistic incubators like the Hideout, the Empty Bottle, and Beat Kitchen; it’s heavy but fitting that the album now takes on additional meaning advocating for their survival.