The busy German producer Nils Frahm returns with a film score. Though he uses additional instruments and sound effects, the album conjures a mood that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with Frahm's solo piano albums.

Victoria OST

Victoria is a German movie, filmed in one long shot. It observes the night of a young couple who meet, flirt, and stumble their way improbably into a violent heist. In the film's charged, uncertain atmosphere, the glow of anticipation from meeting someone new and the tingle of dread right before something awful happens both occur along one unbroken continuum: When life gets better, it is also one hair’s breadth away from getting worse.
The German producer Nils Frahm composed the film's score, and if you listened to it and tried to imagine the film he was working on, you'd probably arrive at a very different movie—something sweet-toned and modest, slightly grave, and above all, muted. Maybe a family drama where none of the members can quite muster the strength to say exactly what they're feeling. It is a mood that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with Frahm's solo piano albums, the most recent of which (Solo) he released for free just in April.
The Victoria OST marshals more instruments than his solo piano works, but not many more—each new sound, whether it's a husky-throated cello on "Our Own Roof" or the subcutaneous hum of organ keys on "The Bank", tiptoes in carefully and gingerly. Frahm’s score works along Brian Eno's fabled ignorable/interesting divide: You can soak in the long, receding tones like you would sit in the sun beneath a big window, or you can fixate on surgically tiny details, like the way you can nearly hear the felt of the piano hammers being brushed into individual fibers on "A Stolen Car", or the rustle of whatever foreign objects he’s placed on the strings to make them generate extra noises. Frahm strikes little "off" notes in the interstices of that piece's simple major chords, so that when they ring, they don’t ring "clean"—there is a tendril of sour air in them, seemingly acknowledging the turmoil that plays out on the screen.
Moments like this in Frahm’s score are furtive and quiet: There is a foreboding drone piece called "In the Parking Garage", full of room tone and tiny, human-sounding scrapes, that hits your ear the way a parking garage's sodium lighting assaults your eye. And the album opens with a DJ Koze edit called "Burn With Me", in which a dry techno thump meets a dull knock and some nauseated synths. Frahm’s aesthetic shares something in common with Koze, whose touch suggests someone who would prefer to cover all exposed hard edges with blankets so no one gets hurt. Frahm's awareness seems repeatedly drawn to glowing spaces where notes ring out after they've been struck. These spaces mimic the way a memorable event lingers in our minds, acquiring new shades of meaning and slowly receding into the morass of our lived experience. In echo-rich, contemplative music like this, the event itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as its aftereffects, the way it changes over time and the way it changes you.


Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. The MGM deal he inked after the success of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than even the hits he’d produced for others.

Lee Hazlewood: The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood / Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure / Something Special

Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. After moving to California in the early 1960s and making some interesting records with subpar musicians, Hazlewood scored big in 1966 with Nancy Sinatra’s feminist flip of a song he wrote called "These Boots are Made for Walkin'." In those days, hit-making songwriters and producers for other artists were rewarded for their hard work by getting to make albums themselves—see Carole King, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and Hazlewood’s own collaborator Jack Nitzsche. So though Hazlewood was still recording with Frank Sinatra’s fledgling label Reprise, MGM offered him a deal following the release of "Boots" to put out some "writer’s records" of his own, even though his previous solo outings had sold next to nothing. Prior to his stint at MGM in 1966 and 1967, his own recordings had been modestly arranged, acoustic-guitar-based recordings in the pop-country vein. The MGM deal gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than the hits he’d produced for others.
Though these albums were recorded in the space of less than two years, they sounded very different from each other. The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, one of the most straightforward albums in his career, serves as a primer on his style and showcases all of his contradictory impulses. It’s Hazlewood at his most maximalist, building a wall of sound to rival Phil Spector’s. Most of the tracks on The Very Special World feature full orchestras passing ideas back and forth in flowery counterpoint, choirs instead of backup singers, and contributions from the in-demand studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.
Of all the MGM recordings, the songwriting on The Very Special World is by far the most consistent, and features a handful of the most subtle and sensitive songs Hazlewood ever wrote. "I’m Not the Lovin' Kind" is a beautiful bossa nova with unusually sensitive singing, a triumphant string and horns call-and-response from arranger Billy Strange that manages to anchor just off the coast of faux-Jobim parody while retaining its humor. "I Move Around" is a travelogue Lee would re-record several times later in his career, most notably on his 1972 classic 13. Here, in a simple folk arrangement, it explodes into the kind of sweeping, cinematic climax Hazlewood seemed unable to talk himself down from during this time. His vocal performance is controlled and wistful instead of bitter and stoic—as his renditions of so many songs would become when left to his own devices. But the album’s most important contribution to the Hazlewood songbook is the lethargic, lounge ballad "My Autumn’s Done Come," which embodies his ethos as well as any standalone recording ever has. With its hypnotic pacing, odd chord changes, and dreamy but crystalline production, it’s easy to see how it would influence Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, who sang the song’s particular praises in a 2015 interview.
The kitschy experimentation at the sidelines of The Very Special World comes fully to the fore on its follow-up, 1967’s Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure, a record that finds Hazlewood backing away from traditional songwriting while still widening his musical palette. The first half of record, featuring a series of character sketches, is one of the weirder sides in a discography chock full of them. Two of its biggest production numbers are tragic narrative recitation songs that are very much products of another time, shaped by particularly elaborate and exotic charts from Strange. "José," the Flamenco-styled story of a poor Mexican boy who develops a life-enveloping passion for bullfighting ("He lived for one thing and nothing more/ He had to be the very best matador") and "The Nights," steeped in the percussion of Blaine and insistent interjections from a wraithlike studio choir, tells the picaresque story of a white woman who runs off with a Native American who lives a "hard" life hunting buffalo in the Dakotas. Despite the dated storytelling, these arrangements are indicative of the almost comically expansive vision Hazlewood and Strange had for these sessions. The ethos is borne out further in the bonus tracks: recordings billed to "Lee Hazlewood’s Woodchucks" that read like a bid on the part of Lee and Strange to get their foot in the door in the mood instrumentals market.
Hazlewood productions never got bigger than on the aggressively disparate Hazlewoodism; even the most half-assed of these songs—say "Suzi Jane Is Back in Town," a gag-filled novelty record that would have fit right in on the Dr. Demento show—has five to six Wrecking Crew guitars stacked on it. Though it frequently feels like Hazlewood sent ideas to Strange to be charted before he had more than a sketch, Hazlewoodism nonetheless adds a handful of excellent entries into the Hazlewood canon. The most essential track is its biggest outlier: "After Six," a stripped-down, two-chord showcase for the guitar playing of his frequent collaborator Al Casey that’s also an alcoholic’s rant to the bartender in the vein of the Sinatra (Frank) "One for My Baby." It’s Hazlewood’s dry, dark humor and conversational phrasing at its best ("I’ll give you my shoes for a glass of booze/ If you won’t tell that they don’t smell/ No better than I do after six").
The irreverent small-combo approach showcased on "After Six" would be the entire focus of Something Special, the one Hazlewood MGM album that sounds like a demo, and the most patently uncommercial of the lot. The songs on the miniature record were all done with the same septet: guitars, upright bass, drums, and Hollywood jazzer Don Randi’s invasive hard-bop piano and—yes—throaty scatting. The sessions were done in just two months in 1967 and they had a distinctly live, sloppy sound. Multiple songs have the air of partially-improvised lyrics, the most patent example being "Stone Cold Blues," a five-minute goof which ends up with the verse: "If Martoni’s is such a good place to eat and drink and be good/ Why do they call the steak Sinatra, and the hamburger Hazlewood?" The whiskey-soaked atmosphere was indicative of the looser, more sentimental direction Lee was to take on his later records, when he was answering to no one but himself. Songs like "Fort Worth" take in a more wistful, sad-sack quality: "Don’t know if I can forget you/ Don’t know I’m even gonna try/ But you’re gone and I let you/ Guess I’m not much of a guy." The reissue improves this head-scratcher of an album: Bonus tracks "Moochie Ladeux" and the hilarious "The Lone Ranger Ain’t My Friend" are among the most carefully wrought and unusual songs on the record.
This group of albums, along with his final Reprise album, 1968’s Love and Other Crimes, would prove to be Hazlewood’s long farewell to the major studio system. He was already making moves to broaden his eccentric empire with his own LHI label. In a way, everything after this was Hazlewood sliding slowly toward the full-on retirement he had been contemplating before "Boots," while making some of the greatest music of his career along the way (see Requiem for an Almost Lady and Cowboy in Sweden).
With music like this, the question always looms: To what extent do we become enamored of it based on its cultural novelty alone? Becoming a diehard Hazlewoodian requires romanticizing this hectic time, when major corporations were gladly funding unabashed insanity in music and film. But Hazlewood’s personality is too overbearing to make this the type of music one loves simply because it was allowed to exist. Whether he’s fulfilling a bar-room, surrealist-Johnny-Cash raconteur role, or embodying the consummate professional and pop craftsman, Lee Hazlewood never sounded like he was posturing or overreaching. The capriciousness of these albums feels like a direct reflection of a split, contradictory consciousness: He was resistant and sometimes openly defamatory toward hippie rock'n'roll, yet always at pains to not fall behind, clad in floral shirts and flamboyant suits. But his music never sounded like Hazlewood doing what he thought others wanted him to do.


The rappers deliver an album filled with serpentine, enigmatic stories and gloomy beats. It doesn’t have the gloss and pomp of their best work, but it highlights the pair’s complementary gifts.

Mach-Hommy / Tha God Fahim: Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2

Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2

Mach-Hommy isn’t just looking to control his narrative; he keeps it under lock and key. Very little about the Haitian-American rapper’s life is public knowledge, and whatever specifics he offers in songs and interviews usually produce more questions than answers. Still, there’s a meticulousness to his antics. He sells his own albums for $444; he uses lyrics about the importance of a Gore-Tex jacket to convey particular eras of time; he offers piecemeal details about his past in magazine cover stories. His grip has loosened slightly since he’s done more press and released a good chunk of his discography on streaming platforms, but he still relishes the distance afforded to him by his mask and microphone. “We doin’ donuts with somebody A6/Don’t none of this shit belong in Page Six,” he says with cheeky disdain on “Bad Hands,” the second track from his latest album, Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2. It doesn’t have the gloss or pomp of 2021’s Pray for Haiti or Balens Cho (Hot Candles), but Mach’s mystique and lyrical skill keep the music unpredictable.
Like the 2018 release that kicked off the Notorious Dump Legends series, the second volume is a team-up with Atlanta rapper-producer and frequent collaborator Tha God Fahim, who appears on all but one song. On a technical level, their forms complement each other well. Mach is a Swiss Army knife, capable of switching flows and languages on the fly while busting out lyrics both tuneful and blunt (“Two L’s make a dub in this cold milk” on “Cold Milk” or “Heard none of you niggas’ weed plates” on “Pissy Hästens”). Fahim is the grounding voice who arrives with straight punchlines and life advice, adhering strictly to the beat. On “Pissy Hästens,” an agitated Mach’s voice slowly turns into a growl, embodying the frustration he experiences when people mispronounce his name. Through it all, Fahim’s workmanlike rhymes anchor the Jersey rapper’s erratic thoughts. Occasionally, Fahim matches Mach’s energy and the two enter a sparring contest; “Olajuwan” and “Everybody (Source Codes)” contain two of Fahim’s most energetic verses ever, his voice briefly rising above his usual nasal monotone. When they rap together, Mach and Fahim adapt to each other’s changing tides like a constantly morphing yin-yang.
Despite the reciprocity, this is ultimately Mach’s show. He has the more exciting vocal turns, the more slippery flows, and his bars have the highest stakes. You can hear it in his croons about the “Sour Patch Kids writing pieces on me daily”; in his stories of seeing enemies relax on the same beach as him; or in the way he transitions from English to Patois and Kreyòl mid-song, as if he’s swiping between apps on a phone. It’s hard not to get caught up in the mythmaking at the end of “Olajuwan,” as Mach clears his throat in grand fashion: “His last shit became public domain as soon as he spit it/He a wizard, his name is Mach-Hommy, he the illest.” For all his cultured poeticism, Mach loves a good flex as much as any rapper. Volume 2 doesn’t stray far from that sensibility, another excuse for him to reflect on his life and good fortune—and for him and Fahim to burrow deeper into their own legends.
To continue the Dump Legends tradition of shadowy, creaky beats, the duo enlists a handful of usual suspects from the contemporary underground. Philadelphia’s SadhuGold expands his range with the wonky horn and drum loop that gives “From Vailsburg to Vaudeville” its warped aesthetic, as well as the hazy string plucks and somber drum march that rumble in the background of “Olajuwan.” New York’s Fortes and Detroit’s Denmark Vessey stand out with two of the fullest arrangements on “Niggas Sooooo Good” and “Nan Dezo,” respectively. Shimmering pianos and hand drums establish the foundation of the former, while the chimes, violin strings, and breathy tongue clicks of the latter convey an aura of Gothic horror. They’re nothing revolutionary, but they’re atmospheric enough to give Mach and Fahim a more chilling presence.
In the third of a series of recent cover stories for The FADER, Mach was asked what he would rap about if he were a billionaire. He responded in the most Mach-Hommy way possible, using the third person: “He wouldn’t.” He’s reached a point in his career where he’s selling mystery vinyl packages for a thousand dollars and impressing Jay Electronica and Beyoncé in the booth. For the time being, he seems content to rap circles around the competition, just because he can. Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2 captures enough of the verve and strategically enigmatic storytelling that make up Mach’s best work—adding another patch to the vast and layered collage of his music.


Written in the remote coastal town of Yachats, Oregon, the duo’s latest EP refashions its gloomy guitar pop as ecstatic shoegaze, complete with a cameo from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell.

An Object in Motion

Drab Majesty have always reached for other worlds. The title of their 2012 debut EP, Unarian Dances, was a reference to a cult of UFO obsessives who broadcast bizarre films on public access TV in Los Angeles. In interviews, the duo’s Deb DeMure (aka Andrew Clinco, formerly of Marriages) and Mona D (Alex Nicolau) have said that their pseudonymous personas and unsettling makeup are an effort to leave “no human trace” in their art. They’re straining for something beyond the everyday.
Their songs have largely lived up to this promise. Surreal and strange, yet nevertheless deliriously emotional, Drab Majesty’s records have often emulated guitar music’s most abstract emoters—Slowdive, Vini Reilly, and Felt among them—but their new EP An Object in Motion pushes further into the unknown. Written while DeMure was living in a restored A-frame in the small coastal town of Yachats, Oregon, the record is a document of isolation and introspection; it captures a time spent pulling at the seams of Drab Majesty’s gloomy guitar pop in an attempt to reveal its glowing core. What they emerged with is familiar in sound—delicately wavering guitar lines, wispy vocals that bear a debt to decades of goth’s great dramatists—but the songs stretch and twist into newly abstracted forms.
The 15-minute song “Yield to Force” is the clearest example of Drab Majesty’s newfound commitment to dreamlike structures and heavy-lidded ambience. Tensile guitar arpeggios knot into thick tangles and then slowly unfurl, like a ball of yarn floating in low gravity. Structurally, it’s a departure for their music: loose, impressionistic, and entirely wordless. Yet it’s still propelled by the sense of drama that has been the project’s signature for over a decade. Centrifuged down to its parts and reassembled into dizzying new arrangements, the composition represents a bold new direction, more unearthly and unsettled than they’ve ever attempted before.
This predilection for weightlessness also holds on the more pop-oriented songs. “The Skin and the Glove” shows another left turn, drawing on the MDMA-mangled haze of Madchester for an ecstatic yet cryptic song about the passage of time. It’s the record’s most straightforward pop moment, but it still shows Drab Majesty trying out new sounds, wringing emotion out of dream pop’s outer realms.
In the EP’s other vocal-led track, “Vanity,” Drab Majesty are at their most expansive, cushioning a meditation on misery in pillowy guitar lines and feather-light vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. It’s an especially spacious and labyrinthine take on the duo’s shoegaze-esque style. As a latticework of guitar lines and reverb-smeared vocals builds toward a blurry cacophony, the border between DeMure and Goswell’s vocals and the noise around them smudges and swirls. Chaotic and unsettling but strangely beautiful, it’s the record’s most affecting moment, and a reminder that An Object in Motion is like little else that Drab Majesty have released, a version of gothic guitar music divined from the static of deep space radiation.


It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles,\n\ combining and rearranging until ...

Enjoy Your Rabbit

It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles, combining and rearranging until something new in born. But there's a fine line between that and cashing in on a trend and letting market research be your guide. Unless your name is Serge Gainsbourg (who jumped in headfirst wherever his muse happened to lead him, bending whole genres to his will and overpowering them with his personality), it's best to not force it, and let things happen naturally.
Given his first album was a collection of folky, singer-songwriterly musings and Sebadoh-inspired, bedroom-recorded alternative rockers, I was a little dubious at first of this second effort from Michigan-gone-New York composer/multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens (who sometimes sits in with the Danielson Famile during their live shows). Enjoy Your Rabbit is a collection of electronic compositions, so my first impression was that it was the work of someone who just happened to have access to high-end software, some extra time on his hands, and a desire to see if he could stir up some TV commercial work-- all of which might be correct, but all questions of authenticity and motivations faded from memory about two minutes into the album. Such concerns are rendered trivial when confronted with such a fully realized piece of work.
An IDM song-cycle based on Chinese astrological symbols-- or as the liner notes put it, "programmatic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac"-- Enjoy Your Rabbit explores a wide palette of electronic textures using few external samples.
After a brief introductory track, we're hit with "Year of the Monkey," which uses what sounds like a hyper-modified Atari battling a supped-up Colecovision in a chess match/battle royal. Microchips fly everywhere as a thunderous, crashing piledriver of a beat smashes them both to bits. Like its namesake, it's playfully mischievous, with a hint of violence always lurking nearby.
"Year of the Rat" follows, starting like a classic Eno piece before squalling feedback undercuts the theme while the song turns into background music for the next Toy Story movie and returns to its introductory theme. "Year of the Boar" is frantic with its pin-sharp wind-chime notes scattering across an organic bongo beat, and ending in an ascending faux-guitar solo coda. With "Year of the Tiger," a human voice pops up for the first time atop the sound of circuitry covering the earth like kudzu, ending in an aggressive death rattle. By contrast, "Year of the Snake" is almost hymnal with its organ drone, but for the recoiling flashes of short-circuitry and sing-songy bells near the end.
The standout track comes with "Year of the Dragon." At 9\xBD minutes, Stevens gives himself some room to stretch out. If the other songs have a fault, it's that they cram to much into such small containers. Here, Stevens allows a marching beat to hang around long enough for him to weave in a subtle, yet soaring soundscape. "Enjoy Your Rabbit" (replacing the expected title of "Year of the Rabbit") is the most conventionally song-oriented track, with a distorted guitar melody line leading much of the way, and even what could be called a recurrent riff. Elsewhere, the rubbery and fluid "Year of the Dog" sounds inspired by 70s Stevie Wonder and other bouncy funk; "Year of the Horse" rounds out the zodiac with a long piano-driven romp through futuristic gothic architecture; and the album final track, "Year of Our Lord," closes the record with ambient meditation.
Taken in one lump dose, Enjoy Your Rabbit can be a bit intimidating as it's almost 80 minutes long, and at times it does sound like electronica-for-entry-level-listeners due to its sheer breadth of styles. But Sufjan Stevens proves himself adept of both long and short forms; downtempo and high BPM; glitches, scratches and ambient drones; blips, bleeps and bloops. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.


Moving away from the abstracted electronica of earlier releases, the Scottish producer embraces streamlined rhythms and a newfound sense of clarity.

Refresher EP

Just as some master chefs have turned their backs on exotic ingredients for the reliable joys of locally sourced product, there has been a recent tendency in the more outré genres of electronic music for producers to direct their skills toward the simpler delights of house and techno. The Scottish producer and graphic designer Konx-om-Pax (aka Tom Scholefield), best known for abstract electronica and refracted rave memories, is the latest producer to follow Joy Orbison, Pangaea, et al into the welcoming embrace of the four-to-the-floor kick. This pivot toward clarity has helped to surface previously submerged melodic skills: His four-song Refresher EP features two of the most immediately rewarding tracks he has committed to computer memory in “Cascada” and “Species With Amnesia.”
“Cascada,” in particular, is a joyful banger, the kind of half-dreamy, half-strident tune that has become a hallmark of the misty-eyed rave revival. It’s a pretty simple set up: a scratchy melodic riff that clambers up the rhythmic framework like a Shakespearean lover ascending his betrothed’s balcony, whispered vocal hooks, and a hands-in-the-air second act that brings to mind Orbital at Glastonbury 1994. This nod to ‘90s dance culture is not without precedent. Caramel, Konx-om-Pax’s most recent album, was also based on rave throwbacks, but whereas those tracks were faded, woozy, and indistinct—Scholefield called them “photocopies of photocopies of rave tracks, where the drums have dissolved”—here the memory is pulled into sharp rhythmic and melodic focus, revealing a gift for a nagging hook that was not immediately obvious before. The central riff on “Cascada” may sound simplistic among Konx-om-Pax’s more nuanced recordings but, like “Wild Thing” amidst a world of Sgt. Pepper’s, it just works.
“Species With Amnesia” is similarly forthright, riding a raucous kick and an Italo bass riff that wouldn’t sound out of place in a mainstream techno club. Above this, the song’s musical surface is warped and dangerous, like a record left out in the sun that you can’t bring yourself to throw out. The effect is malevolent yet energetic, suggesting the dark satanic mills of Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi gone inappropriately disco. The third track on the EP, a subtle yet effective re-rub of Caramel’s title track from µ-Ziq (aka Planet Mu label boss Mike Paradinas), makes a similar point about the rewards of pulling Scholefield’s music into focus. Paradinas’ “Caramello Mix” stabilizes and sweetens up the wobbliness of the original track, and the added polish helps the song’s lo-fi melody to shine without betraying its crumbling romanticism.
The EP closes with Huerco S.’s take on another Caramel track, “Beatrice's Visit,” which stretches and spaces the original out into 11 gloriously airy minutes. The remixer’s customary sprawl means that focus, admittedly, is slightly lacking, but he leaves the consciously rough sound of the original track immaculate and sparkling. As “Beatrice's Visit” drifts to its elegant end it becomes apparent that the Refresher EP is well named. This seemingly rather odds-and-ends release doesn’t just highlight Scholefield’s production skills; it also cleanses the listener’s palate, resetting our expectations of the Konx-om-Pax sound. Ultimately, Refresher may prove an outlier in Scholefield’s catalogue. But let’s hope not: scraping away the grot and fuzz to expose the melodies underneath can be an unsettlingly naked moment for an experimental producer, yet Refresher proves that it can pay harmonious dividend.


The latest project from the Bronx rapper enlists musicians from across the globe for an attempted cross-cultural exchange of Afrobeat, dancehall, and reggaeton to mixed effect.

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: International Artist

International Artist

Bronx rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie has become an under-the-radar star. His debut album, last year’s The Bigger Artist, was sold and streamed more in its first week than Playboi Carti’s or Lil Yachty’s and it was certified gold in March. The album produced the biggest of his four platinum singles, “Drowning,” a minor-key celebration of being flooded with ice. His success, the product of a sing-songy style that’s closer to what’s coming out of the South than what’s happening in his borough, has ironically added him to the short (and constantly changing) list of rappers out to restore New York City to its former glory as a rap mecca. But A Boogie’s sophomore album, International Artist, expands his ambitions beyond being king of his backyard. Here, in his role as Bronx ambassador, A Boogie organizes an intercultural bloc, striving to integrate his tuned hip-hop moans with sounds from across the African and Latin diasporas.
A Boogie, born Artist Dubose, grew up in the same Highbridge neighborhood that produced Cardi B, but while she’s placed herself in the genealogy of epic NYC punchers, he has remained reliant on his whined melodies indebted to out-of-towners. His writing isn’t as vivid as those that have come before him (or his contemporaries, for that matter), but he is distinctive and honest, both to his city and his story. Though his music doesn’t embody the New York of rap’s past, he has brought a much-needed fresh take as a prominent figure on the city’s vanguard. (It’s telling that he was tapped to open for Drake at three sold out Madison Square Garden shows in 2016, since he is a noted acolyte of the post-Drake rap-sung half-ballad.) This has made him more amenable to ideas of what New York can, or should, sound like—“[New York’s] like a vibe, it’s a hit song, it’s a song that you could listen to in five years and still like,” he told Interview magazine—and should, in theory, make him an ideal candidate to explore world music through a rap lens. But through much of International Artist he loses the perspective that made his songs interesting.
Where The Bigger Artist felt like a homegrown personal statement, International Artist enlists musicians from across the globe for an attempted cross-cultural exchange: Afrobeat torchbearer Davido from Nigeria, dancehall deejay Alkaline from Jamaica, reggaeton revivalist J Alvarez from Puerto Rico, Afro-swing hybrid Kojo Funds from London, and Torontonians Tory Lanez, Nav, and Jessie Reyez. The objective is fairly obvious: bridge the gaps between them with A Boogie serving as the link. His crooned raps are usually malleable enough to suit any and all of his personal rap needs. But the Bronx rapper doesn’t have the finesse necessary to negotiate these multinational transactions.
As a performer with an unmistakable sound and an underrated knack for songcraft and execution, A Boogie is a talented soloist, but he goes as his guests do on International Artist. Since the idea is to bring the sounds of black and Latin music together under one umbrella, he often plays on their turf or their terms, letting them dictate. This is occasionally for the best, but A Boogie loses himself trying to accommodate them; his writing is blander here than it has ever been, and even his sandpapered vocals, which can polish down the edges on all manner of synths, get worn down. Some attempts to meet guests halfway, as on the Alkaline-featuring “Nonchalant” and the Jessie Reyez duet “Pretending,” misfire because of a chemical imbalance. When paired with sham heartthrobs Tory Lanez and Nav, he becomes just as vapid as they are.
That doesn’t mean A Boogie lacks congeniality; International Artist is most gratifying when it throws itself full-on into its concept with purpose, when he extends his reach beyond his borders and finds the harmony he was searching for. Davido takes charge on “Way Too Fly,” guiding A Boogie through the hip-swaying Afrobeat rhythms. On the bilingual “Deja Vu,” A Boogie and J Alvarez find common ground in Auto-Tune, the latter’s slick, silvery delivery countering the former’s rawer one nicely. The best song comes at the album’s close: The remix of “Check” with Kojo Funds and RAYE reworks Craig David’s “7 Days” into an Afro-swinging rap jam; A Boogie’s raps stagger into the pockets created by GA the Producer’s elastic chop. In these moments, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s vision of a unified world through sound are momentarily realized. But for the most part, on International Artist, he never becomes the envoy he sought to be.


Akira Sakata, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese noise-electronics eminence Merzbow form the core of this experimental jazz group. But instead of upping the cacophony, the addition of Merzbow results in a surprisingly spare and considered work.

Merzbow / Jim O’Rourke / Akira Sakata / Chikamorachi: Flying Basket

Flying Basket

Akira Sakata is a longtime student of multiple avant-jazz traditions. The piercing intensity of his alto saxophone and clarinet playing occasionally harkens back to the mid- and late-'60s work of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Albert Ayler. But the Japanese musician's simultaneous attention to psych rock and some of the more meditative aspects of global free improv has helped him build a catalog of improvised music that sounds beholden to no school. (He even funked it up with Miles Davis' great fusion-era guitarist, Pete Cosey, on the unmissable 2001 album Fisherman's.com.) His skill as a synthesist is so great that it can sometimes feel self-effacing, with Sakata often appearing more concerned with a given group's success than individual heroics.
Given this, it's only fitting that Sakata wound up collaborating with Jim O'Rourke, the unassuming experimental magus responsible for this year's Simple Songs (as well as, in large part, Sonic Youth's late-period renaissance). Their first recorded collaboration—a generally frenetic, double-live 2011 set titled and that's the story of Jazz…—placed O'Rourke's guitar and Sakata's reeds alongside the free-time pulse of drummer Chris Corsano and bassist Darin Gray (the duo known as Chikamorachi). This time, they've added Japanese noise-electronics eminence Merzbow to the mix, but instead of upping the cacophony, the addition results in a frequently spare and considered work.
Presented as a 71-minute jam cut in Tokyo, Flying Basket begins quietly, with Sakata lingering over a few notes and phrases. O'Rourke also avoids heading straight for the shredding post-punk that dominated his playing on this ensemble's last recording. Merzbow, too, starts softly; nearly a tenth of the album has passed before his prickly shards pervade the album. This slow, muted intro helps lend weight to the explosions that pop up throughout.
The piece tenses and slackens, passing through fits of raw soloing and quiet drones and extended technique texture. The overall feel is graceful; during one passage that finds Sakata on clarinet, he manages the trick of grouping some pinched notes into phrases that sound like charming exclamations. The interplay here, just before the record's midpoint, is so nuanced and powerful that the "everyone go fully nuts" ending seems somewhat less impressive than it otherwise might. Still, Flying Basket is another valuable document of a vital, contemporary avant-team-up. Anyone who has been following O'Rourke's varied activity since moving to Japan should want to hear this—along with more of Sakata's own discography.


On his Sub Pop debut, deranged psych-pop bedroom auteur Morgan Delt cleans up his sound considerably.

Phase Zero

Morgan Delt’s 2014 self-titled record was an unexpected melange of power pop and druggy, psychedelic experimentation—a rougher, more unhinged successor to the beloved, defunct ’60s loving Elephant 6 outfits Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System. It wasn’t a perfect record and had a number of rough stretches, but it delivered a powerful and pleasant weirdness. Phase Zero, Delt’s second album, seems like an appropriate title, because while he’s not exactly starting over, he appears to be doing a bit of an identity reset. Having jumped from Trouble in Mind to the larger and better-serviced Sub Pop, he’s jettisoned that strangeness, and in its place is a more well-realized psych-pop album, with perhaps better songwriting but less charm.
In terms of resetting expectations, Phase Zero begins with its most extreme case. Opener “I Don’t Wanna See What’s Happening Outside” is so clean and pokey that it's almost jarring. Gone are the fuzzy sound channels bleeding into one another, as well as the strange samples, jumpstart pacing, and in place is a tight and hygenic pop song with clearly audible vocals. Delt still sings in a hushed, enigmatic tone, but in comparison to his debut it’s remarkably tame.
Thankfully, the record loosens up a bit from there. “Another Person” offers a better example of “clean” Morgan Delt, spiffed-up but not sanitized. “Sun Powers” and “Mssr. Monster” maintain the wild tempo and volume shifts of his earlier work, as well as some of the sound burbles Delt would use to line the edges. Album closer “Some Sunsick Day” is an excellent '60s pop song, one that showcases Delt’s attention to craft without erasing his personality. Sometimes what seems like a forward move turns out to be a lateral one, and right now it's an open question whether Delt’s more professional environs were preferable to his messy charm.


On their long-awaited debut, the Swedish duo flits between the sound of Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and trashy Europop, while delighting in emotional precipices and tremendous, history-making passions.

Instinct

It's a universal pop truth that songs about the thrill of the club rarely live up to the urgent abandon induced by a night's hard dancing. Two years ago, Swedish duo Niki and the Dove-- aka Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf-- struck a rare and peculiar seam with the release of their debut single, "DJ, Ease My Mind", on British indie label Moshi Moshi. Over militaristic clattering drums and swathes of pristine synthesizers (think the Knife's precision blown up to Eurovision Song Contest size), Dahlström pleads, "I want to forget, I want lights to blind me... I want to disappear," imploring the DJ to let calm flood her soul by playing a jam that takes her back to a time laced with romantic triumphs. "DJ…" is spectacular because it doesn't just feel like a song made for your own euphoric moments in the wee hours; rather, it's a force that bolts your heart to Malin's and forces it to pulse along with hers. Two years in the making, Niki and the Dove's debut album, Instinct, has a borderline greedy hit-rate where all 12 of its songs (not counting the two bonus numbers on the U.S. release) manage to be equally arresting, flitting between the sound of Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and trashy Europop, while delighting in tiny but pivotal moments, sites of emotional precipices and tremendous, history-making passions.
Quality aside, there's a reason why all these songs feel so immediate: Two years is a long time to wait to release a debut album (particularly when Dahlström and Karlöf have been working together in various guises for over a decade), and 11 of these 12 songs have already been given away for free online, or released in EP form. Only the dramatic oriental strut of "Love to the Test" is truly new (though new versions of previously heard songs are present), a full-bodied seduction where Dahlström catches a guy's eye across the room, sasses him into giving her his number along with the time, then calls "Touchdown!" asking, "Are you ready for this woman?" hand undoubtedly on hip. The lack of new material does make Instinct feel like a consolidation effort, perhaps aimed at grasping for the continued attentions of newer fans, but that's certainly not a complaint. If anything, it's a justification of sorts for the sea of Björk comparisons that's followed the duo since the beginning. Although invoking the Icelandic innovator is usually ham-fisted shorthand for "kooky woman pop," there are plenty of experimental leanings here-- and in Niki and the Dove's live show-- that suggest a weirder future for the pair, in similar fashion to how Björk began her solo career in the mid 1990s.
There's not quite an "It's Oh So Quiet" on Instinct, but there are plenty of enormous, joyous moments that come close enough to that sensation, with plenty more going on than in your common or garden banger. The victorious "Tomorrow" opens the LP, followed by "The Drummer", where a high-pitched sonar blip needles through thundering synthesizer sashays, Dahlström's drum-like heart powering her assault across a topography of nerves and difficult decisions. "The Fox" jabs like a razor-sharp ballet, bloody cello chopping beneath gloaming synthesizers as Dahlström asks a four-legged beast to bury to bury her fears so that she might sleep. The dark grind of "Under the Bridges" transports her back to a dark and dangerous zone on a city's edge where a friend confesses a secret that remains untold. It doesn't matter what it is-- there's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.
They pull you into the back of the cab on "Last Night", too, where you're a gooseberry gamely drawing hearts in the window condensation as the protagonists get "married in a taxi," Dahlström steeling her heart against getting too attached by invoking the scorn of Stevie Nicks circa Bella Donna. It's not difficult to spot the fact that the situations described in most of Niki and the Dove's songs take place at night, which is rarely a zone of abject fear for the characters within, but a canvas against which to conquer anxieties and triumph romantically. On the soft, Prince-like stroke of "In Our Eyes", Dahlström sings, "I'm the night now, but I will shelter you," as if she's a wise sage offering protection. If the night is an embrace in which to seek succor and work out complex thoughts, then the nightclub of Niki and the Dove's breakout hit seems by default a kind of transcendental, heavenly zone where the most intense and vital decisions get their hearing. It's fitting, then, that they've made an album against which it's easy to imagine having similar experiences.


For an electronic music culture increasingly bloated, glitzy, and insufferable, the British duo Paranoid London is a refreshing punch to the nuts. They emulate the shoddy, shady days of early Chicago house: The mad whinnying squeals, the 303s, the deadpan vocals—all of it is here, and it hits with visceral force.

Paranoid London

Since its inception, acid house was received far more enthusiastically in the UK than in the U.S. Writing about his favorite tracks for Fact, Ed DMX said: "Even though nearly all the best records were made in Chicago, the music took off in a big way over here, [where] it was massively popular, much imitated." The UK top 100 for 1989 boasts the likes of Inner City's "Good Life", Lil Louis's "French Kiss", and British early adopter A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray" while the U.S. charts bear out that we all but ignored our homegrown sound (though we charted Marshall Jefferson's “Move Your Body” as blanched by the Belgian act Technotronic as "Pump up the Jam"). No historian or music critic would ever categorize 1989 as Chicago's "second summer of love".
Beginning in 2007, singles began emanating from a British label and act known as Paranoid London. The duo of Gerardo Delgado and Quinn Whalley, flashed an unfettered enthusiasm for—and emulation of—the mad whinnying frequencies of the 303, but coupled it to an ethos that in the 21st century might more closely align with punk. They didn't do any press, didn't promo their music, didn't upload mixes to Soundcloud to build buzz, and when they released their debut album at the end of December 2014, there was no digital version. While the group were much discussed in Europe and the UK, there was nary a ripple nor mention made stateside.
A year on, the ten track album is now readily available digitally and on CD. For an electronic music culture increasingly bloated, glitzy, and insufferable, Paranoid London is a refreshing punch to the nuts. The tracks that Delgado and Whalley craft are simple as a prison shiv, not adding layers of gloss or paint to its acid-house, but stripping it back to its basics. Almost every track is erected from the same blocks: handclaps bright as tin foil, dry snares, sharp hi-hats, concussive kicks, all of it buoyed by queasy undulations of bass. They emulate Trax and those shoddy, shady days of Chicago pressings to the point that you expect a chunk of rubber to be embedded in the records themselves.
There are spot-on acid house bangers like "Headtrack" and "Paris Dub 3" that evoke peak Junior Boy's Own releases as well as late-'80s Chicago. On the latter, the duo collaborate with Paris Brightledge, a vocalist on early tracks by Sterling Void and Joe Smooth. The coup de grace is the deadpan intonation of Mutato Pintado; on the wet cardboard thud of "Transmission 5", he switches out words that range from the inane to the lurid: "skin on my shoes...feeling good...lipstick...hair in my hand...late night..." and at one point, he croons about "playing by the rules" then suppresses a small chuckle.
Playing by the rules of making classic acid house while also laughing at them, setting up expectations and then undercutting them: It's what Paranoid London does best. “Lovin U (Ahh Shit)” is a love song but the title sends mixed signals, approximating the cross purposes of hook-up culture. "You've got the green light/ right past the stop sign" DJ Genesis sings in her monotone, juxtaposing "forever loving you/ just a little bit." Its sentimental in a way that works with the group’s decidedly cheeky unsentimental manner.
Earlier this summer I got to see Paranoid London play live as part of Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival. They were sandwiched between two legends: DJ Harvey and Derrick May. But after a weekend of DJs coolly manipulating laptops, turntables and drum machines, there was something visceral about PL's live set, less clinical, more chaotic. The crowd churned like a mosh pit rather than a dance floor and rather than throw cake into the crowd, Mutato Pintado brandished a bottle of vodka lifted from backstage and began to pour full cups of it, passing it out to the crowd.


The Atlanta rapper still has an ear and charisma on his latest album, but the songs are more like templates than novel creations. For the first time, he sounds predictable.

Dope Don’t Sell Itself

Ten years ago, a 34-year-old rapper formerly known as Tity Boi released his long-awaited debut album. All of it felt improbable. After resuscitating a flagging career through an omnipresent campaign of high-profile, show-stealing features, 2 Chainz completed his reinvention with Based on a T.R.U. Story, which established him as a certified, bankable star. Yet beyond the ridiculous one-liners and big-name collaborations, he revealed himself to be a rapper with a savvy artistic vision that extended far beyond 15 seconds of fame. Over the next five years, 2 Chainz morphed into an album artist, releasing concept projects anchored by unconventional production and careful art direction, a process that peaked with 2017’s Pretty Girls Love Trap Music. For the past decade, he’s kept us on our toes.
Fast forward to 2022, and 2 Chainz is now playing catch up. Dope Don’t Sell Itself, his seventh studio album, is the first one that feels predictable. A brisk 12 songs, it plays more like a mixtape of throwaways, a collection of forgettable, though occasionally great, bangers with of-the-moment features and total disregard for cohesion or risk. Now in his 40s, posting more on Instagram about his family than the club, 2 Chainz is at a creative and commercial crossroads. His last hit came in 2017 (“It’s a Vibe”), and 2020’s So Help Me God!, despite features with everyone from Kanye West to Lil Uzi Vert, produced the lowest sales of his career. Dope Don’t Sell Itself feels like a half-hearted attempt to return to basics—but, as 2 Chainz should know, shifting the culture is a Herculean task, and it sounds like he doesn’t have the strength or hunger to do it anymore.
The songs here are serviceable, thanks to 2 Chainz’s ear and charisma. But they’re more like templates than novel creations, far from his days of sampling Hall & Oates or trading verses with Kendrick Lamar over a Pharrell beat seemingly constructed from cutlery and trash cans. “Pop Music,” featuring Moneybagg Yo, is boilerplate strip club fodder, while the buoyant but just passable Roddy Ricch feature “Outstanding” could appear on anyone’s album. There’s a rote stop-the-violence track (complete with a chorus from Lil Durk, who probably shouldn’t be the one singing about the senselessness of rappers dying), and a run-of-the-mill sex song featuring Jacquees that’s inexplicably the album’s closer. Missing in all of this is anything memorable from 2 Chainz himself, just recycled lines on dope dealing and big cars, with little of the astounding zaniness or trenchant political awareness and introspection that make his verses feel essential.
There are a few bright spots: lead single “Million Dollars Worth of Game,” a perfect team-up with 42 Dugg, and featuring a beat that sounds like a tea kettle about to explode, is pure 2 Chainz gold: “I sold green, sold white, sold lyrics/Courtside, watching the Hawks play the Pistons!” His horn-filled collaboration with the embattled YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “10 Bracelets,” is triumphant and anthemic. And “Neighbors Know My Name” contains a flip of D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” that’s so brilliant, it’s inconceivable that no one had done it before. Longstanding Atlanta stalwart FKi 1st turns the first two, saccharine bounces into a thundering brew of 808s and distorted synths; 2 Chainz’s chorus is a nursery rhyme-like earworm, and yet it’s baffling that the song stops at a minute and a half. Like much of Dope Don’t Sell Itself, it feels like an unfinished sketch.
The most relevant guests on the album—Moneybagg Yo, Lil Baby, YoungBoy, Lil Durk—became stars on the prolific features-and-mixtapes formula that 2 Chainz perfected over a decade ago. Their urgency is palpable when they perform alongside him here; they each possess, in their own way, the snarling, underdog motivation that initially took 2 Chainz to the top. But on Dope Don’t Sell Itself, he seems like his heart isn’t as in it anymore, or, at the least, his priorities have shifted. “Except for the ones I love, I ain’t never pick the phone up,” he huffs on “10 Bracelets.” For a 44-year-old father of three, that’s exactly how he should feel.


I'd pretty much written the Smashing Pumpkins off after their severely disappointing fifth (and assumed to be final) album ...

The Smashing Pumpkins: MACHINA II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music

I'd pretty much written the Smashing Pumpkins off after their severely disappointing fifth (and assumed to be final) album, MACHINA/The Machines of God. The laughable attempt at storyline, the terrible songs, and the ungodly production flourishes glued the final sequin on Billy Corgan's velvet-lined coffin.
Though I'd been a fan for many years, even through 1998's unfairly maligned Adore, I didn't bat an eye when Corgan announced the band's imminent breakup. Then comes this new, hastily issued "final album." Rejected by their label, the band printed 25 copies (consisting of three ten-inch EPs and a 2xLP set) on their own imprint, gave them to 25 people, and instructed those people to distribute it digitally. This was their best option to get the material out, since Virgin would have blocked any attempt to release it on another label.
It would be extremely easy to dismiss this album as Billy simply taking out the accumulated garbage of the past couple years. It would be easy, that is, if it didn't almost redeem the Pumpkins. You certainly can't accuse them of trying to make a buck, as they've probably lost at least a couple hundred printing up the source copies of this Internet-distributed release. And it's all the more frustrating that this album features an abundance of tracks that throw the deficiencies of their previous record into even sharper relief.
Within the first three songs, I'm immediately reminded of everything I ever loved about the Smashing Pumpkins: perfect examples of the dream-pop/arena-rock hybrid they forged back in 1993. The performances are, for the most part, raw and mostly live sounding, with some tracks actually recalling the glory days they spent in Butch Vig's basement. Basically, you get the one thing missing on MACHINA I: the sound of a band playing.
But there's plenty of filler in this set, too, and it's not really sequenced to be played as a continuous album. Several songs are unnecessarily repeated. And did we really need a "demo" version of the still-awful "Heavy Metal Machine"? Probably not. But all these faults aside, within this collection resides an album that would have been infinitely superior to The Machines of God. The high points are high enough to erase any bad taste left by that album.
Songs like "Dross" and "Glass' Theme" could have provided the "return to rock" that MACHINA I failed to deliver. The long-standing live favorite "Let Me Give the World to You" could have been the hit single the group never managed to score. "Here's to the Atom Bomb" sounds like an answer to "1979". "Vanity" and "Home" are simply gorgeous, songs only the old Pumpkins could have made.
There isn't really any new ground broken here, but the band revisits nearly every style they've adopted over the years. Throughout, they sound energized and at a creative peak. Jimmy Chamberlin's muscular, fluid drumming provides the backbeat missing from the Pumpkins' music for the last couple years. James Iha has developed from a merely competent rhythm guitarist into a creative lead player, providing a spacy ambience to Corgan's power-riffing. And as easy as it's been to dismiss Corgan as a fame-hungry self-aggrandizing egomaniac over the years, this set proves that he's also a songwriter of considerable talent.
So take this as a proper farewell to the Smashing Pumpkins-- it's a nice album to remember them by. Believe me, it's the last album I expected to enjoy this year. And the icing: it's free.


On his latest album, a luminary of the Los Angeles beat scene remembers how to come back down from the astral plane and hits the dance floor running.

Time Flying Beats

During the late-2000s heyday of the Los Angeles beat scene, artists pushed sound in ways that frequently suggested hyperbolic visions of distance: We were somehow traveling into space and exploring new dimensions when we listened to Flying Lotus or Nosaj Thing. Yet despite his origins in that circle, Matthew David McQueen, who makes music as Matthewdavid, has always preferred to operate on a more intimate, subconscious level, bathing his audience in hallucinatory collages instead of presenting defined set pieces.
His discography zigzags between experimental instrumentals (his 2011 debut, Outmind), semi-traditional R&B throwbacks (2014’s middling In My World), and weightless new age, all generally tied together by a coating of ambient gloss. Matthewdavid fully dove into that aesthetic with 2016’s Trust the Guide and Glide, a 90-minute Om of an album. Time Flying Beats is yet another left turn, stripping away the clouds that surrounded much of his past work in favor of lucid, brisk production. For an artist whose best ideas too often feel like they’ve been diluted, it’s a welcome switch-up.
There’s a twisted familiarity to much of this album, like finding your family covered in ectoplasm. The first full track “Time Flying” stretches Roland Orzabal’s lovelorn croon from “Head Over Heels” into a drowned howl, meshing it with footwork drum twitches. “Flow With the Go” is a star-stepping fete that sounds like it’s emerged from Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma asterism, while the clean, summery guitars on “Yearns Out” gesture toward a reality where Matthewdavid is a reliable pop producer. For all his headiness, Matthewdavid reminds us throughout the album that he’s adroit at composing missives for the body.
His most beat-driven work can make it feel like he’s moving too fast to bother smoothly threading his influences together. Instead, they bleed into each other, at times colliding in ways that blur the difference between a progressive experiment and a rough draft. A majority of the tracks on Time Flying Beats end within two minutes, with stop-and-reset transitions that make the tracklist all but interchangeable. The anthemic “Ode to Low End,” which takes its name from the Wednesday club night in L.A. where Matthewdavid and his beat scene contemporaries flourished, is followed suddenly by the bleary “Millennial Midnight.” The tracks are lean enough to give his ideas an accessible clarity, and they keep the album’s pacing off-balance enough to maintain Matthewdavid’s psychedelic edge.
This fragmented approach can make for exciting listening, even if Time Flying Beats doesn’t commit to it all the way through. The album’s momentum downshifts abruptly with “Into the Night,” which submerges the sampled cries of the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmit, from an obscure solo cut of the same name, within a malfunctioning key riff. “Desert Moon” is a disorienting mix of percussive stomps and bells that never bothers to develop into a listenable song, and the nearly seven-minute “Secret Rooms of Tokyo” settles into a melody that runs about five minutes too long, even when an accelerated drum-and-bass rhythm intrudes. Even so, these relatively minor missteps don’t undo the preceding thrills yielded by Matthewdavid’s move to de-emphasize the third eye. Out-of-body trips are fun, but sometimes, the tangible hits just as hard.


On Restarter, their Relapse debut, Torche are as harsh, heavy and mean as they have been in nearly a decade. The result is their most compelling record since 2008's Meanderthal.

Restarter

Torche leave very little room for misinterpretation as Restarter, their fourth album, begins. On vicious opener "Annihilation Affair", the quartet wallops a short, simple theme, in unison, at mid-tempo and very high volume. Frontman Steve Brooks barks his words, delivering them like marching orders as an enemy approaches: "Know it, build it, grow it, blow it," he shouts, the band surging behind him. The action eventually grinds to a dissonant halt, the guitars feeding back and screaming against the beat like a long train trying to brake before slipping into hell. After seeming so eager to capitalize on their pop underpinnings in recent years, Torche arrive on Restarter, their Relapse debut, as harsh, heavy and mean as they have been in nearly a decade.
Since the release of the head-turning 2008 shout-along Meanderthal, and the subsequent dismissal of guitarist Juan Montoya, Torche have not been shy about their melodic enthusiasm. Recorded as a trio, the eight-track Songs for Singles aimed to cram captivating hooks into rock tunes that ran anywhere from 52 seconds to more than six minutes. After adding guitarist Andrew Elstner, they cut Harmonicraft, a record whose cover of furry beasts holding chocolate-chip cookies and puking rainbows portended their most brisk and ebullient batch of songs yet. Torche were still plenty demanding, but the harmonies were brighter and the guitars both quicker and slicker. The metal at their core had started to melt; the big refrains and the bigger sound began to collapse into one another, producing diminishing tension. Harmonicraft felt transitional, putting Torche perhaps one album away from a package tour with retro-rock hawkers like Free Energy or Wolfmother.
But Restarter push Torche back toward the more punishing pole of its sound. The brief "Undone", for instance, counts as one of the heaviest pieces in Torche's catalog. Brooks leads multiple marching sections, but when he pauses, they slip into the sort of down-tuned, instrumental slogs that consumed multi-minute chunks of their early records. This allows Torche to be brutal while still moving, a trick they've rarely mastered. This doesn't mean they've suddenly slid into doom or sludge metal. These 10 songs are actually no less memorable than those on Harmonicraft; "Minions", "Blasted", and "Undone" rank as new shoo-ins for any hypothetical best-of-Torche collection.
This time, though, Torche achieve magnetism as a band that lumbers and roars in unison, instead of manic, flashy guitars or songs that seem in a hurry to reach an end. Bassist Jonathan Nuñez and drummer Rick Smith are essential like never before. They trace Brooks and Elstner closely, fortifying every melody and movement with powerful, unselfish playing. Brooks' seesaw singing during "Annihilation Affair", for instance, sticks because of how the bass and drums reinforce every note. Like the best songs from Meanderthal, "Loose Men" is agile but strong, lovable but aggressive. Its rhythm section is a juggernaut, but it moves gracefully around a guitar solo, like an elephant tap-dancing in a small room. During "Minions", incisive guitar lines and Brooks' monotone singing crisscross like a game of cat's cradle; Nuñez and Smith pulse behind the action, offering the equivalent of a house beat, pushing you along with the song. "Blasted" is one of Restarter's quickest songs, its racing tempo and vocals recalling Harmonicraft. But the rhythm section remains the bulwark beneath it, not making room for the band's pop-rock maneuvers so much as forcing them to fight for space and attention. Brooks sings of lascivious men and scenes that seem stolen from The Fast and the Furious. The band pushes you along for the ride.
Restarter is Torche's first album since Brooks reunited Floor, the band's predecessor in terms of style and personnel. It seems as if, in rebooting that old act, he remembered the root of the formula for both: Write catchy songs and play them at undeniable volumes, no gimmicks or flourishes necessary. On Restarter, that precept again takes the lead, and Torche have made their most compelling record since Meanderthal.


The former Youth Lagoon songwriter’s second album under his own name is almost wordless, a quest for ego death that explores the beauty of the natural world with a lingering disquiet.

Capricorn

In 2016, after six years performing under the name Youth Lagoon, Trevor Powers said goodbye. He sought greater artistic freedom: After finding success making intimate bedroom pop about anxiety and isolation, Powers felt his vision had become constricted. “It’s odd to realize that something you’ve created can have the power of wrapping a leash around your neck & holding you hostage,” he wrote in a note to fans at the time.
But freedom is an illusion we all learn to concede to in one way or another. After a severe panic attack, Powers decamped to a cabin with a piano located at the foot of Idaho’s Sawtooth mountain range to reset. Accompanied by his instruments, a computer, and recording gear, Powers encapsulated this time in an album he titled Capricorn. While 2018’s Mulberry Violence—Powers’ first foray into making music under his own name—leaned into discord as a means of self-obliteration, Capricorn is a measured, expressive experiment in erasure.
Minus a few distorted samples, Capricorn removes Powers’ voice from the equation and allows his skills as a sculptor of sound to shine. While Powers’ early work is sometimes lumped in with the tail end of chillwave, his sense of depth and texture was always more ambitious, characteristics on full display here. Like a heavily tattooed modern-day Thoreau, he sprinkles the record with recordings of raindrops, streams, and thunderstorms, reminders of the symphony that the natural world offers us for free. But for the most part Powers distorts these details until they lose their organic quality, the way a cricket chirping in slow motion sounds more like a computer than an insect.
Capricorn unfolds slowly, creating a surface calm. Nothing here feels rushed, nor overly polished. “Earth to Earth” emits a haze of textured synths and bird calls, while “The Riverine” contains tinges of pedal steel, evoking rolling hills misted with dew. The spectral beginnings of “A New Name” slowly give way to a warped sample of a voice seemingly repeating the word “body.” The mind is encouraged to wander.
But there’s an undercurrent of eeriness to Capricorn, as if at any moment the tranquility could slip to reveal a nightmare. Sometimes these lines are obvious, as on “The Riverine” and “Blue Savior,” each briefly punctured by mournful, bluesy horns. The serene opener “First Rain” is suddenly interrupted by a garbled voice and a chiming bell that sounds like a train barreling through the night; the song picks up again like nothing happened, but the sensation lingers.
A pair of ominous closing tracks do little to inspire a sense of resolve. “Pest” begins with a symphonic array of woodwinds that suddenly burst into sharp, menacing squawks. The song builds on the sense of unease, ratcheting up tension until it could soundtrack some poor soul’s untimely demise. “2166” is unsettling in a different way, pairing a fuzzy, melancholic piano melody with a noirish sax drone. Musically, Powers appears to be on a quest towards ego death, willing to tear everything apart in order to rebuild. Capricorn invites us to disappear with him.

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An endurance of idealism threads together these 13 reimagined protest songs, collected from four decades of albums. But their tempered presentation reveals a profound generational disconnect.

“People of America, when will we learn?” Yoko Ono asked over a briskly strummed acoustic guitar on her 1973 album, Approximately Infinite Universe. “It’s now or never: There’s no time to lose.” She sings those same words on Warzone, a collection of 13 songs from her back catalog that she re-recorded with their original lyrics and somber new synthesizer underpinnings. It’s been 45 years since she first urged her adoptive home to dream of a reality unblighted by violence. The words ring sadder now; the people of the United States ostensibly chose “never.”
A ferocious optimism animates Ono’s half-century career. Her early performance pieces and her 1964 book of creative prompts, Grapefruit, worked from the assumption that art was play, an inborn human faculty. She carried that humanism into the music she made, on her own and with husband John Lennon, throughout the 1970s. Impassioned, erratic vocals tore at long-held conventions of what women behind microphones should sound like. Her liberating irreverence reverberated throughout New Wave in bands like the B-52s and the Talking Heads, as well as underground experimentalists like Meredith Monk. That her legacy as a creative force was so deeply subsumed by the myth of the Beatles speaks to a slowly lifting rockist misogyny, not the quality of her work.
Warzone collects a handful of songs from Ono’s seminal ’70s records alongside tracks from 1985’s Starpeace and 1995’s Rising, plus an interlude from 2009’s Between My Head and the Sky. Most songs tell the same story: Humanity will one day achieve enlightenment and relinquish war in favor of love and unity. The unity of the message speaks to the endurance of the Ono’s idealism. While the original recordings offer a glimpse at the sheer variety of Ono’s discography—her work houses dub beats and thrash metal riffs and acid freakouts—the re-recorded versions drain each track of historical and musical specificity. Most have been slowed to a funereal tempo, which makes lyrics that once brimmed with hope sound like a concession to the ubiquitous cruelty of the present. Ono sings a 20th-century dream for a 21st-century utopia that never came to pass.
When Ono strangled the word “why” during the 1970 song of the same name, she pronounced the question like it had an answer that she could find if she screamed hard enough. She was spurring herself into action. But the 2018 “Why” loses the original’s rock instrumentation and shelves Ono’s feral vibrato. Instead, over wolf howls, trumpeting elephants, and ambient synthesizers, she wails the word as if in mourning. One “Why” looks out onto a course that has yet to be set; the other looks back onto irreversible wreckage.
“Woman Power,” from 1973’s Feeling the Space, loses its sense of spontaneous play. Roaring electric guitars and a commanding drumbeat once gave the track urgency, as if Ono really were singing on the cusp of gender liberation, as if she could sing it into being. The re-recorded take might be the track here closest to its source material, as the guitar riff and drum pattern survive for the song’s first half. But the instruments hide under Ono’s voice; rather than raw and vital, they sound spectral and faded. They soon fall away entirely, replaced by strings arranged by New York composer Nico Muhly. When the band crashes back in and guitarist Marc Ribot tears through a rote solo, it feels as though two visions of the future are competing: one in which women have already seized the power afforded to men, and one in which Ono mourns that power’s lack.
Warzone’s liner notes include a 1972 essay by Ono originally published in The New York Times. “The Feminization of Society” articulates an enduring tenet of feminism: that masculinist ideals have failed the world, and only by means of feminine survival strategies can the world be saved. She argues that women cannot compromise their liberation or achieve it within existing masculine frameworks. Women must rewrite reality by force. Some of Ono’s writing has aged well. On the other hand, she flippantly claims that black people have already achieved liberation and women must do the same, at once seemingly forgetting the existence of black women and glossing over the United States’ enduring racism. A year later, she’d release an album with Lennon that printed a racist slur on its cover. On “I Love All of Me,” originally released on Starpeace, she again uses black people as a rhetorical peg, claiming, “I’m a black man who’s come to terms with his anger.” A line no doubt meant as a bid for compassion undermines her vision of universal love, conflating black masculinity with anger without interrogating that association’s roots in white supremacy.
These moments pin Ono’s radicalism to a vision of liberation that ignores the way racism and misogyny structure the world in tandem. They feel dated and draining in a political climate where a majority of white women voted for a candidate serially accused of sexual assault, opting to safeguard the benefits of whiteness by aligning themselves with a violently misogynist party. That Ono never thought to rewrite these lyrics or the included essay while rearranging the songs themselves highlights a disconnect between the hippie utopianism of the 20th century and the current bitter fight for survival of so many.
Because its overt politics now feel so inadequate, Warzone works best as a melancholy gesture, a long look back at a time when dreaming of a better world felt invigorating rather than exhausting. Its peak comes on its last track: a recording of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Nearly a decade after releasing the song, Lennon admitted that Ono deserved partial songwriting credit, because he had penned the lyrics around one of Grapefruit’s prompts. Here, Ono reclaims a song long offered as proof of her late husband’s towering genius.
Ono works against its engraved expectations. Her rendition is melancholy and moving; she sings tentatively against sparse electronic drone, as if reckoning with the weight of all that has been lost in the decades since Lennon sang the same words. She strains a little to hit the high notes before the chorus, the playful vocal flourish so idiosyncratic to the late Beatle. Her voice considers his absence as she pronounces some of his most famous lines: “You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one.” She’s right, of course, and the world she envisions here—no possessions, no nations, no want—still describes the world young radicals are fighting for against late capitalism’s heavy inertia. It’s a beautiful idea, this paradise of which she sings. It just takes more than dreams to get there.


Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm.

I AKA I

Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad offers up harsh, detailed compositions that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve using physical synthesizers and samplers. Kooshanejad in particular stands out amongst peers like Arca and Actress because he's not framing his work as a deconstruction of dance music, nor does his knowledge of Persian classical music figure heavily in his work. The digital world, and the software that engenders it—the way it allow users to re-scale, re-orient, and and re-produce sound—is the only apparent framework for Kooshanejad's work.
I AKA I is Kooshanejad's second album under his Ash Koosha alias, following last year's GUUD. He's a multimedia artist, dabbling in film as well as expressing an interest in virtual reality. "At some point in my life I thought it was good to specialize, but now I think it’s good to build a bigger product than just music," he told Philip Sherburne last year; he's diversified, in other words. But I AKA I is a complex sonic statement, one where sound qua sound is the order of the day. Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them.
This leads to a lot of exciting moments that occur outside of traditional structures. Rhythms slur and slow down; melodies coagulate and dissipate. It's exciting or directionless depending on your mood. For this reason I prefer I AKA I when vestiges of Kooshanejad's music studies show up, such as on the stately melody that underpins "Eluded," trading space with a halting, insidiously catchy melody. Or on "Make It Fast," a lumpen hip-hop beat that contains trace elements of non-Western melodic modes ("Shah" offers a similar experience). "Biutiful" owns its title, a nod to late-90s Warp acts that prized both grace and oddity.
Tracks like these offer windows with which to view Kooshanejad's work; how necessary the windows are will depend on your preferences. He's capable of being abstract ("Growl") and obtuse ("In Line") but while the album can be difficult it isn't exactly alien or otherworldly. From the jarring opening moments of "Ote" we know exactly what world this hails from: the digital, where it has been zoomed and cropped and clipped and reversed and shuffled. If anything, I AKA I is a reminder of how normal these concepts are becoming.


The Colombian producer’s galaxy-sized rave tracks are unsettling and exhilarating. This 21-minute EP is an essential record for the vanguard of dance music.

Breathe... Godspeed EP

Verraco and his peers in Medellín, Colombia once presented themselves as rave revolutionaries: guerillas rising up to topple a hegemonic club culture and wrest electronic music from the Global North’s death grip. They called their label Insurgentes; its inaugural release, Verraco’s debut EP, was titled Resistir. But over the past seven years, Verraco (aka JP López) and his crew have grown from upstarts into some of the most feted names in the underground, kingpins of a scene that onlookers have dubbed—somewhat problematically—“Latin club.”
Yet Verraco has never been one to be pigeonholed. True, he deployed cumbia rhythms on the 2020 song “Breaking Hegemonies” and sampled the iconic Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos on “Hasta morir si es preciso.” Releases on his label TraTraTrax, a successor to Insurgentes, are awash in Caribbean dembow, Venezuelan raptor house, Mexican tribal techno, and other sounds from across Latin America and the diaspora. But TraTraTrax refuses to be pinned to any identity but the one that the community has invented for itself: The label described 2022’s no pare, sigue sigue—the closest thing the scene has had to a manifesto—as a “popurrí,” a mixture of “everything and nothing, just sudaca bangers loaded with flavour and resentment, but above all, resentment, because we don’t want our wounds to heal.”
Verraco’s music is equally informed by the brain-bending sounds of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and other UK electronic pioneers, along with the psychedelia of artists like James Holden and the darkside electro of Rotterdam and The Hague. This is also a kind of resistance, a way of reminding worldwide audiences that López has as much claim to the Euro-American techno canon as any white kid in Ohio or Heidelberg. After the relative abstraction of his 2020 album Grial, Verraco dropped his heaviest, most triumphantly unbridled work yet with last year’s storming and altogether unorthodox Escándaloo, a double-barreled shot across club music’s bow; now, on Breathe… Godspeed, he breaks out even bigger guns. The four tracks bear some relationship to other contemporary Latin club anthems in their chugging rhythms and severe sonics, but in their sheer, intransigent weirdness, they sound little like anything else—from anywhere at all.
Rather than any given style, Verraco’s work is defined by its intensity—overdriven synths, distorted percussion, violently gyrating oscillators—and the epic scale of his arrangements, which often sound less like club tracks than galactic battle-march hymns. Both qualities are in ample supply on these four tracks, which feel like a single overarching suite. They share a palette of muscular drums, digitally abraded textures, and wildly disorienting sound design. Nothing is what it seems: Basslines growl like cyborg beasts, while processed voices—jabbering and chattering indecipherably—might be mischievous aliens. The mood is exhilarating but unsettling; both the intricate patterning and ambiguous air of malice remind me of the geometric landscapes and “machine elves” described by many DMT users. Verraco’s tracks report from an alternate dimension of club music, where even the most familiar trope is made thrillingly strange.
Breathe… Godspeed’s four tracks also share a resistance to doing anything you might expect them to do. On the opening “0∞,” Verraco withholds the bass for more than two minutes, stoking tension with a succession of high, squealy frequencies; then, halfway through, a plunging breakdown suggests shades of garish 2011 dubstep crossed with the harsh, fuck-off sonics of underground noise music. Only toward the end does a 4/4 beat claw the track back from the edge of chaos. “Godspeed >” turns the same elements into a relentless percussive assault; “Climaxing | Breathe” drops the tempo to a grueling 85 BPM, dials up the dissonance, and wraps around an ascending glissando that sounds like a Shepard-Risset tone from hell. Just when you expect the beat to drop, the whole track just fizzles out. It’s an audacious way to thwart an anticipated climax; you can practically hear Verraco cackling to himself in the studio.
Nowhere is Verraco more unpredictable than on the closing track, “Sí, idealízame.” It’s the EP’s emotional heart, fueled by a surprisingly melodic bass progression and festooned with gleaming accents. Like “Climaxing | Breathe,” it moves with a feeling of perpetual ascent; every time you expect the beat to kick in full-force, one or more elements pull back, withholding the satisfaction of the drop. The groove moves so swiftly and forcefully that it might take a while to realize that there are almost no drums, just an understated kick and hi-hats dissolved into a fine mist. But there are no snares, no congas, no cowbells—none of the stereotypical attributes of Latin club. The title translates as something like “yes, idealize me,” or “sure, fetishize me.” I read it as a provocation: Try to put Verraco in a box if you like—he’s got other plans.


On their first album in over 20 years, Tanya Donelly and her band conjure the same potent mix of grace and force that fueled their 1990s output.

DOVE

Like Stevie Nicks, Tanya Donelly has devoted decades of craft to describing what it feels like to be on the edge of 17. The difference between the two songwriters is that Donelly stays safe on terra firma. She’s passionate but grounded—an adult filtering the ardor of youth through art. As a singer and guitarist in Throwing Muses (and later the Breeders), she crafted feminine archetypes whose complicated internal lives felt inseparable from the band’s woven guitar threads, along with snarling rockers like “Not Too Soon.” In her debut as a bandleader, on Belly’s 1993 album Star, Donnelly became a master of lurching rhythms and vertiginous swoops. Her timbre coaxed the feral out of the winsome. “I’d like to see you naked, I’d like to see you take it,” she roared on the title track of 1995’s King.
The excellent Dove, Belly’s first album since the Clinton administration, picks up where their ‘90s output left off, yielding not a millimeter to notions of propriety. Donelly and her bandmates were adults in the ‘90s, too, not the delicate flowers many of the contemporaneous reviews suggested, and Dove’s 11 tunes reintroduce an act whose division of labor was always a model of gender parity: Donelly was flanked by male co-guitarist Tom Gorman, his brother Chris on drums, and Gail Greenwood on bass. In Donelly’s songs, men and women reckoned with each other, bemused by their cycles of interdependency: “And when you breathe/You breathe for two,” she sang on 1995’s “Seal My Fate.”
Now she returns to those familiar tropes, perhaps reinvigorated by how well Belly’s catalog has held up since they returned to gigging in 2016. Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses. “I see the truth break over your face like a bad egg,” she declares on “Army of Clay,” buoyed by bass and drums; when Tom does a pitch-bend on his guitar, it’s just like old times.
Donelly’s fusion of grace and force is Dove’s most compelling achievement. “Artifact” mines the same country-rock vein as Star’s title track, conjuring a sound that’s heavy and comforting at once. “Faceless” opens with an acoustic fake-out before shifting into a rocker. On “Stars Align,” Donelly proclaims, “You’re gonna give someone a heart attack,” and then the song becomes a pretty love anthem whose clichés only confirm Belly’s impressive self-confidence. What’s adulthood for if you can’t do a Corona-fueled dance to the bar band and not give a damn?
Look in vain, though, for another “Feed the Tree,” the spring ’93 modern rock hit that was propelled to radio playlists by the Nirvana Phenomenon. To their considerable credit, Belly show no interest in recapturing the cultural moment that made Star a gold record. Hell, that cultural moment was gone in 1995, after Rolling Stone put her band on the cover and the marvelous King stiffed anyway. Belly never stopped recording awesome songs—audiences just stopped caring. Here’s hoping Dove gets them listening again.


The Chicago four-piece’s debut oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety, finding new shades of delicacy within math rock.

Voyage Out

On their debut album, Voyage Out, Floatie locate untapped delicacy, tranquility, and serendipity inside math rock. The Chicago four-piece have spent the past few years honing their skills as a tight live band in the city’s DIY scene. Although their minimalist approach and jazz-indebted playing style is more akin to Real Estate than Tera Melos, Floatie are also well-versed in the tricks of math rock—uncommon time signatures, gratuitously technical guitar, maze-like song structures. The proof is in Voyage Out, an album like an M. C. Escher painting, revealing its gravity-bending tricks the longer you look at it.
Voyage Out oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety. That kind of intuition and control can only be built over time, with a deep sense of connection between players. Although Floatie formed in 2018, all four members—singer-guitarist Sam Bern, singer-bassist Joe Olson, guitarist-synth player Will Wisniewski, and drummer Luc Schutz—have been friends for nearly a decade. That bond lends Floatie an effortless precision, which allows tiny explosions of garage fuzz to jump out of the otherwise buttoned-up “Lookfar,” or the time-signature twists in “Water Recipe” to give the deceptively smooth song a delightful, hiccuping rhythm.
Like their labelmates Krill, who dissected individualism and teleology through nature metaphors and BDSM scenarios, Floatie boil down the complexities of similarly academic issues into conversational lyrics. On “Catch a Good Worm,” Bern sings about a “pretty worm” that’s confused by the sight of its own reflection. The song gradually becomes a metaphor for the false binary of gender identity: “You hear the words, but tell yourself/That you deserve what you’re dealt,” sings Bern. “But something’s in the way of feeling great.” Elsewhere on Voyage Out, Bern wades through self-determination, gender expression, and social acceptance. For a band that quietly wants to educate listeners about decolonization and libertarian socialism, Floatie hit their stride when using personal struggles to illuminate universalities in their songs.
Floatie fuse all of this together into an endless helix, looping back to verses in inconspicuous yet seemingly unending ways. Meanwhile, Bern sings so gently that their lyrics occasionally seem to dissolve into the arrangement. Floatie immediately submerge listeners in this experience with album opener “Shiny.” After a few beguiling riffs criss cross in the introduction, the song shifts gears into a world of impossibly soft hi-hat taps, dreamy guitar chord slides, and whammy bar sighs. It’s here that Bern matches their falsetto refrain (“Other ways to get to the other side”) to the song’s rise-and-fall melody, as if the very phrase is climbing over a fence to the aforementioned location. It’s the type of trick that lures you back to figure out how it’s done, and in moments like this, Voyage Out is as hypnotic to pick apart and puzzle over as it is to close your eyes and get lost in.

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The Los Angeles rapper’s debut charts his development as he settles into a style that’s funny, winkingly formal, and rich in commercial potential.

It’s Remble

When Remble started uploading music three years ago, he was exactly in tune with the scene that was codifying around him. Then a teenager, the San Pedro native rapped with a flat affect in cadences that careened past the ends of bars, his ghoulish threats and outré jokes ping-ponging across beats that sounded digitally processed and almost knowingly cheap. From his earliest efforts he was uniquely magnetic, though he was not alone: Los Angeles County was and is littered with disciples of the sound that rappers like Frostydasnowmann, Drakeo the Ruler, and Almighty Suspect began molding a few years prior. But over the past 10 months or so, Remble has tweaked the dials on this formula and settled on a new variant. He now raps with hyper-clear diction and a winking formality, as if he’s auditioning for the Broadway adaptation of his own life story.
This can have a chilling effect. The first verse on his debut record, It’s Remble, ends with him describing the aftermath of a shooting: “Bodies holding bodies/It was as if they were cuddling,” the as if giving the line an uncomfortably wistful air. But it also serves to make the new sound of L.A. rap more legible to a mass audience, both literally—unlike Drakeo’s, Remble’s vocals never dissolve into a growl or mumble—and by mostly excising the more inscrutable bits of slang and gang politics. (Neither are absent from Remble’s work, but they appear as asides rather than rabbit holes to fall down.) This March’s “Ted Talk,” for example, walks a fine tonal line, both lightly parodying and sincerely functioning as one of those post-Meek Mill intro, motivational thesis songs. It’s earnest and not; Remble is joking (“I might just sign a deal with a major—what’s independent?”) until he isn’t (“Remember when I wasn’t anything but a co-defendant”).
While It’s Remble, which is out on Warner, certainly argues for the rapper’s significant commercial potential, it also traces his vocal development. About half of its 13 songs are new, the others having been released in scattered drops dating back to January 2020. This makes it a telling document of an artist who’s burrowed into and now stands apart from a burgeoning scene, though it occasionally disserves the earlier records. See the way the oldest song included here, the deadpan “Watch How You Talk 2 Me,” is made to sound inchoate when placed next to “Audible,” where Remble’s sneer is fully realized as he cackles about someone getting booked and singing to the cops “like you were Jodeci.”
Remble is reliably funny—few rappers can go bar-for-bar with the BlueBucksClan guys, as he does here on “Book Bag”—and this sense of humor gives him the latitude to revisit the same jokes and threats over and over again, their effectiveness simply compounding. (This man really, really does not respect that you still wear True Religion.) So even as he bends this new style into potent near-pop, the most essential songs on It’s Remble are the two freestyles that radically expanded his audience in L.A.: last December’s “Ruth’s Chris Freestyle,” which pairs him with Drakeo, and this February’s “Gordon Ramsay Freestyle,” where he somehow makes the fact of his father’s life sentence tonally agree with the 2002 movie Juwanna Mann. And while “Ruth’s Chris” confirms Drakeo as the scene’s sharpest writer—“I beat life twice, I’m a two-timer/Shoe shiner/Flick of the wrist—Look! I bought new diamonds”—Remble’s calm, deliberate opening verse clearly identifies him as its most likely star.

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Refining her approach, the Japanese musician shifts from singer-songwriter confessionalism to open-ended abstraction on this textured, ambient record.

Hanazono

Satomi Magae recognizes that memory is as bound up in the body as it is in the surroundings. Since her 2012 debut, awa, the guitarist and vocalist has seen reflections of herself in the world around her, using empty streets, vacant apartments, and barbed-wire-wrapped watchtowers as conduits for somber meditations on the passage of time. With soft, acoustic arrangements that barely rise above a whisper, Magae’s work splits the difference between narrative songwriting and ambient composition, combining aspects of each style into a greater whole. Her fourth studio album and first with the American experimental imprint RVNG (in partnership with Amsterdam-based Japanese label Guruguru Brain), Hanazono, draws Magae’s sparse, textural approach into a mode of taut and refined composition that doesn’t abandon the inner brilliance of her earlier material.
Magae adopted the Satomimagae moniker—a combination of her first and last names—as a university student in Tokyo, where she studied molecular biology. The moniker, which to English speakers might appear to contain the word “image,” became a fitting title for the project as Magae shifted away from singer-songwriter confessionalism toward something more impressionistic, using her hushed, delicate voice as a singular texture within an intricate ambient landscape. Early standouts like “Koki” and “Mouf” placed her voice alongside dusty field recordings and skittering electronics, rising through the mix only to retreat beneath gentle layers of white noise. Others, like “Bokusou” and “Hono,” stayed closer to Magae’s folk music roots, using guitar, voice, and an occasional droning sample to showcase her versatility as a songwriter.
These delicate home recordings eventually caught the ear of Kranky-affiliated producer Chihei Hatakeyama, whose label White Paddy Mountain went on to release Magae’s second and third albums. On 2014’s Koko and 2017’s Kremi, she returned to narrative songwriting with newfound precision, enhancing the spare arrangements with the lush, natural reverb of the space around her. The albums share a certain affinity with Liz Harris’ early recordings as Grouper in their oblique approach to acoustic guitar, detaching the instrument from its associations with the singer-songwriter tradition only to reassert its utility in new ways.
Magae’s latest album, Hanazono, builds on contours long present in her work, refining the tone of her songwriting in ways that feel uniquely cohesive within her catalog. On “Hebisan,” the songwriter returns to a familiar headspace, layering sparse guitar and vocal lines over distant field recordings. Abandoning the Japanese lyrics of her earliest material in favor of English-language imagism, Magae describes a wide-eyed snake tightening its grip around the speaker’s body, inducing comfort and security where some might expect fear. Despite the inescapable presence of this narrative, Magae’s off-kilter arrangement favors her heartbreaking vocals over the lyrics, which function more as poetic scaffolding than traditional narrative.
Hanazono is the Japanese word for “flower garden,” and while Magae includes numerous natural images within the album’s lyrics, she is much more interested in language as an acoustic texture. On “Suiheisen,” a smoldering, low-end field recording gives way to a meditative singing bowl and finger-picked acoustic guitar as the songwriter constructs a dense wall of spectral, reverb-drenched harmonies. While the lyrics describe a scenic moment catching insects before sunset, Magae’s soft and staggered vocal phrasing renders them nearly indecipherable, punctuating the mix with occasional images that seem otherwise content to drift artfully in the background.
It’s tempting to view ambient music in terms of a general arc built on moments of tension and resolution, and as much as Hanazono might adhere to this tradition on the surface, it feels more committed to refining earlier iterations of the project in pursuit of a new polish. About 45 seconds into “Uzu,” a steady guitar riff gives way to one of the more singular moments on the album, as Magae’s voice recedes into a soothing hum accompanied by changing chords. It’s the kind of sentiment that could have easily gone unnoticed on any of the songwriter’s earlier releases, but here it arrives with the sobering weight of a breakthrough. The fact that Magae is still exploring new ideas nearly a decade into her career feels like an achievement in itself.
Buy: Rough Trade
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