Of Montreal's 13th record, dealing with the fallout from Kevin Barnes' separation from his wife, is his most straightforward and least inscrutable release in some time.

Aureate Gloom

The two records couldn’t sound more different, but in some ways Of Montreal’s 13th album Aureate Gloom resembles the band’s peak, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Both showcase Kevin Barnes’ singular talent for unspooling his emotions and wrapping them around narcotic musical fantasias, and both feature a woman named Nina. Eight years ago on Hissing Fauna, Nina Aimee Grøttland, aka Nina Twin, was Barnes’ newly reconciled wife as he struggled with an imbalance of brain chemicals, drugs, and love. Eight years later, Barnes and Grøttland have separated, and now he wonders if perhaps the natural order of the world is imbalance.
Hearing Barnes sing about Grøttland—somehow a part of every Of Montreal album, lyrically or otherwise, since *Satanic Panic in the Attic**—*anchors Aureate Gloom in reality. On Fauna, Barnes strangled his heart inside of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", an opus about his strained relationship with Grøttland. Now Barnes tempers his feelings with melancholy, and instead of some catastrophic metaphor, we get, simply: "You never did me wrong, we just been together too long, babe."
Which is to say, while there's still plenty of Barnesian lyrical rhapsodies here, there's also a refreshing ease, helped in part by the backing group he's been using since 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar. No longer a dusty, paisley San Francisco band, they’ve become '70s New York art punks. This is thoroughly an electric guitar album, and references to Talking Heads and Television abound (the guitar riff on the verse of "Last Rites at the Jane Motel" is a direct homage to "Marquee Moon"). Set against this wiry, mid-gain pastiche, Barnes' voice adopts a glittery, damaged glam rock tone that falls right in with the musical palette.
This consonance, coupled with Barnes' starkly personal lyrics, make this album one of the least inscrutable in their catalog. Aureate Gloom feels like it belongs in our universe, not some spartan funk galaxy borne out of the recesses of Barnes' mind. "I’m grieving for you, my love" he sings, so innocently, on "Virgilian Lots" before adding, "And I don't understand what's going on." It is straight up shocking to hear Barnes at a loss for words. Of course, just after his bemusement, he falls back on psycho-Marc Bolan patter on "Monolithic Egress". In a series of admissions and realizations (including what sounds like a specific reference to the dissolution of pet names, "I’m not a different man ‘cause you now call me some fucked up name") Barnes beats his chest around an ever-shifting garage rock template. It jumps from a fried take on Zeppelin’s "Immigrant Song" to a kaleidoscopic, proggy psych dream, and inside-out and back around again.
This bounding, perforated punk sound is enjoyable on its own terms, though you wonder what could’ve been if this band didn’t work so modularly in fits and starts. A highlight, "Empyrean Abattoir", starts with Barnes' hushed singing, slowly building with his signature three-part harmonies, carrying the song fluidly until we get to the skittering 5/4 section and Barnes' emotions get the best of him. He sings, now with more distortion on his mic, "Now it’s just a system of subtraction." Which, yes, breaking up is just a system of subtraction, but it’s not exactly a graceful turn of phrase. For every disarmingly honest moment, in other words, there is an equal and opposite moment where Barnes obfuscates, to unclear ends. These sudden shifts make it fun to follow Kevin Barnes, but difficult to get close to Kevin Barnes.
Of Montreal's concept has migrated as erratically as the tempo shifts and time changes on Aureate Gloom, so much that it’s hard to find their natural center now. So, our attention spans drift away. By the time the chaos of the bitter closer "Like Ashoka’s Inferno of Memory" comes on like an overcooked Bowie tribute, it’s hard to feel connected to the soul of this group. Even though Barnes is trying so desperately to figure out what’s happening in front of him, it’s a barbed mess behind him. Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium. That’s the paradox with Of Montreal: the more they create, the less you know them.


Swerving away from party-pop irreverence, Kesha collaborates with Rick Rubin on a spare and eccentric album about coming to terms with ambivalence.

Gag Order

Kesha was embattled from the beginning. On her 2009 debut, she played a hard-partying dirtbag and became a glittery avatar of harmless depravity; critics, missing or ignoring her quasi-feminist lampoon of male behavior, wrote her off as an untalented attention-seeker. More recently, Kesha’s biggest fights have played out in courts of law rather than of public opinion, and her foes have been more fearsome. Still, her affect—at least the one she put into music—remained largely unyielding. “I’ve decided all the haters everywhere can suck my dick,” she declared on 2017’s “Let ’Em Talk,” a cut from the first album she released after unsuccessfully suing Dr. Luke, her former producer and mentor, over allegations of sexual and emotional abuse in 2014.
That album, Rainbow, was notably vague in its references to Kesha’s legal predicament; its core message is one of self-love and self-determination, haters (and unsympathetic judges) be damned. But in opting to “just let ’em talk,” Kesha invited the question of what she herself was withholding—a question that is bolded and underlined by the title of her fifth album, Gag Order. Kesha’s claims against Dr. Luke have been dropped or dismissed, and his countersuit for defamation is set to go to trial in July. “There’s so many things I said that I wish I left unsaid,” she sings on one new song. Speaking out has never seemed so perilous.
And so the Kesha of Gag Order is changed—still working in bold, chaotic gestures, but with the color drained from her palette. The survivor’s vim of Rainbow and youthful bacchanalia of its successor, 2020’s High Road, are gone; this Kesha is feeling her age, processing her trauma, relinquishing hope and then digging deeper in search of some more. “Only Love Can Save Us Now,” an anomaly, starts off with a glimmer of bygone times, with Kesha brat-rapping over a gimmicky cash register beat. But the first verse ends with a coffin-nailing declaration that reverberates across the record: “The bitch I was, she dead, her grave desecrated.” Tonally and spiritually, Gag Order recalls another album made by a pop star in the wake of a high-profile conflict with a powerful industry antagonist. The old Kesha can’t come to the phone right now, etc.
The production of this record—which Kesha made with Rick Rubin and various returning collaborators including her mom, songwriter Pebe Sebert—trends dark and stormy, powered by rumbling synths that sound like tornado sirens, or like a sandworm is lurking somewhere nearby. Played through the right set of speakers, the bleak and faithless opener “Something to Believe In” hits the chest harder than it hits the ears. This music shudders and roils; the way it lingers in the body feels potent on an album loaded with allusions to foundational trauma (though, per its title, much remains between the lines). “You don’t wanna be changed like it changed me,” is Kesha’s refrain on “Eat the Acid,” a song held together by an ominous drone. The lyric echoes a warning, once offered to Kesha by Pebe, about the risk of taking LSD: The mind can be expanded to the point of rupture. But innocence can be lost in more ways than one, and Kesha is certainly missing hers: “I remember when I was little/Before I knew that anyone could be evil,” she sings wistfully on “Happy.”
It feels like part of what Kesha is giving up is an idea she’s always championed: that pop music is galvanizing, collectively validating, full of the promise of the night and the dancefloor. On Gag Order, “we” dissolves into “I.” The beats, when present at all, tend to sink and trudge like stilettos in mud; nothing begs to be played on the radio or at a party (the bouncy “Peace & Quiet” comes closest). But the overall maturation of the work brings welcome changes. Kesha’s lyrics, as subtle as a hammer, feel more startlingly raw than lazily underwritten. Her voice, which she has often wielded like a blunt instrument, is used more delicately, smudged through filters and applied in rich, textural layers, in the mold of singers like Feist or Fiona Apple.
Even passing familiarity with Kesha’s previous work is enough context to make all these shifts jarring, and she leans hard into that sense of disruption, pushing it to the limit with her more eccentric choices. “The Drama” takes a haunted carnival ride through a demented key change before arriving at an outro, co-written with Kurt Vile, that sounds like a vintage pet food jingle spliced with a Ramones interpolation—which is to say, like psychosis. Kesha incorporates a number of spoken interludes: The mystic and cult leader Osho, the neo-pagan priest Oberon Zell, and the New Age philosopher Ram Dass are among the voices heard across the record, holding forth on cycles of grief and healing and the triumph of love. In Rubin—as much a guru as he is a producer—Kesha’s found a collaborator willing to indulge her spiritualist tangents. But neither the ideas nor the audio clips feel fully integrated into a broader theme of the album.
Her ambivalence is more potent. On “Hate Me Harder,” the record’s inevitable power ballad, Kesha is once again sticking it to the haters, but now her message is flecked with masochism. With its gradual crescendo and insistent pulse, the song sounds like it’s heading towards a rousing final chorus, but instead ends a cappella, a calculated retreat rather than a full-throated triumph. “Fine Line” scrutinizes the high-wire act of celebrity and all its treacherous binaries. “Don’t fucking call me a fighter,” Kesha snarls, flinching at the empowerment language she herself has used. It’s not that the label’s inaccurate; it’s that it reinforces an unfair expectation of strength.
“Fine Line” ends with something like a thesis statement: “There’s a fine line between what’s entertaining and what’s just exploiting the pain/But hey, look at all the money we made off me.” It’s a line that collects all the demoralizing losses and pyrrhic victories of the past decade of her life and centers not the story but its protagonist, who—despite this record’s sonic mutations and the declaration of her own death—remains recognizably herself. Kesha, as ever, dares us to call her too loud, too messy, or too much.


Producer Prince Paul and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca contribute to this fusion of NYC-style hip-hop and Brazilian music.

Throwback to the Future

Even if it never became prominent and frequent enough to occupy the same trend-space as dancehall or Bollywood did, the intersection of hip-hop and Brazilian music has provided some indelible moments over the years. Dilla stirring up Stan Getz and Luis Bonfa’s early ’60s bossa nova for the Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” Mos Def building “Casa Bey” around a cut from Brazilian funk powerhouse Banda Black Rio, Wanderlea’s tropical quiet storm “Lindo” finding its way into a grip of ’10s beats peaking with Isaiah Rashad’s “Smile”—even Black Eyed Peas in their prototypical Cali backpacker days knew the strength of a good Jorge Ben loop. So the surface notion of BROOKZILL! (all-caps/exclamation point theirs) as a melding of Brazilian musical influence with American hip-hop isn’t the most unprecedented idea, even if it benefits from the more direct engagement with a Brazilian artist.
Rodrigo Brandão, who raps under the name Gorila Urbano, was introduced to the creatively restless producer Prince Paul in São Paulo about a decade back. And over time their collaborative interests drew in longtime Paul cohort/producer/3 Feet High and Rising host Don Newkirk and Digable Planets’ Ladybug Mecca, the Portuguese-speaking daughter of two Brazilian expat jazz musicians. Given three Brooklyn-based artists with an unbreakable connection to ’90s rap bohemia and another, Brandão, whose previous trans-American collabs last year included indie favorites Del the Funky Homosapien (3rd World Vision) and Anti-Pop Consortium’s Beans (Takara & Brandão), you’d be right to expect Throwback to the Future to feel like an artifact of a time—and a style—that seems more defiantly earnest, if only in retrospect.
That owes a lot to the flows both MCs use, which are breezier and simpler than modern fans might be used to and older heads might admit an ambivalence towards. That in itself isn’t a problem, but it does make the record feel a bit more fleeting than it means to be. Ladybug was the velvet scalpel of Digable Planets, cool and precise and right to the point even in abstraction, and she keeps up that smooth demeanor here—sometimes to the point where her laid-back energy level gets drowned out by the production’s bottom-heavy analog funk touches. That can be a strain for an MC who’s more listenable than quotable here; as someone who can catch the mood of childhood nostalgia (the Del-featuring “Maralém”) or remembrances of those lost (“Saudade Songbook”) with a straightforward energy less reliant on lyrical flash, the musical qualities of her voice don’t always get their due. That goes double for Brandão, who raps with a sleepy purr and would rather murmur than shout, even on uptempo cuts like the banger closer “Let’s Go (É Noiz)!”.
Which is a shame, since the production transcends sun-drenched post-Tropicalia funk—it’s a deeper invocation of the titular throwback, the saudade of something absent that will never come back no matter how much it’s pulled apart and rebuilt. Paul and Newkirk’s music walks the line between old samples and new constructions: beats from albums that coincided with the mid-’60s to mid ’80s reign of Brazil’s military dictatorship, reconfigured to try and envision a brighter future that wound up collapsing under this summer’s fiasco of the Olympics and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. It’s a party vibe that doesn’t entirely know the party’s about to end in the worst way. But while it lasts—through the Afrobeat fusion of “Mad Dog in Yoruba” and the upfront yet faraway-sounding horn blasts in “Macumba 3000” and the baile/bossa simmer of “Todos Os Terreiros”—it’s enough to make you wish the background music was up front.


Fatima Al Qadiri, who has recorded under her own name and as Ayshay, returns with a strangely beautiful album that is hard to classify. The music references her childhood in Kuwait and the first Gulf War, but through a synthetic lens inspired in part by video games.

Desert Strike EP

Fatima Al Qadiri's greatest strength as an artist is her ability to conceptualize a world-- typically a sci-fi fantasy that blends the physical, the spiritual, and the technological-- and beautifully render it with beats. On the 2011 EP Genre-Specific Xperience, she envisioned an atmosphere of dark luxury and conjured a kind of underground new age embodied by the gothic Tropicália of songs like "Hip Hop Spa". This follow-up EP, befitting its title, moves into exquisitely violent terrain. "It's named after a Sega Megadrive game from 1992, based on Operation Desert Storm from the first Gulf War in 1991," Al Qadiri told Ruth Saxelby. "The record is dedicated to this sci-fi period of my childhood-- surviving the invasion of Kuwait, the war, and then playing a video game based on those events a year later." It's her best and most affecting work yet.
With Desert Strike, Al Qadiri creates a new mood and aesthetic while maintaing the essential character of her music. The basic construction is similar to that found on Genre-Specific Xperience and WARN-U, the EP she released under the name Ayshay: Tracks are built using pointedly synthetic versions of steel drums, spectral chanting, organs, and horns, but despite the almost cartoonish texture, the result feels more like sacred music. Topical elements reinforce the militaristic cast-- song titles like "War Games" or "Oil Well" and sounds of weapons cocked or shells clinking on the floor are not exactly subtle-- but they shade the tone of the project instead of defining it. Each arrangement is a carefully constructed exercise in urgency and tension, from a bloodthirsty kickdrum right out of the gates on the title track to the faux horns on "Ghost Raid" ballooning in and out in a way that could menace a band of spirit-possessed army tanks. But in spite of the music's inherent ties to aggressive themes-- war, violence, international strife-- it is not abrasive. Al Qadiri can make this stuff sound uncannily feminine and soothing.
Highly conceptual music always comes with limitations, and it's is difficult to imagine hearing Desert Strike EP outside of a private listening setting. But Al Qadiri makes the specificity work. It's one thing to mine the internet for scattershot cool sounds and throw them all at a wall in the hopes that some will stick; it's another thing to imagine an insular parallel universe and build it from scratch. On the evidence of Desert Strike, Al Qadiri has got a few more worlds in mind, just waiting to come to life.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the radical underbelly of Nirvana’s 1992 compilation Incesticide.

Incesticide

In the living room of his tiny, late-’80s home in Aberdeen, Washington—the small town where it has been said there is nothing to do but “smoke pot and worship Satan”—Kurt Cobain filled a bathtub with half a dozen turtles. They are model beings for shy, hardened people: wise, solitary, with wearied eyes, and the envious ability to escape inside of themselves completely. “Turtles basically have this ‘fuck you’ attitude,” Cobain explained in Michael Azerrad’s 1993 biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Giving voice to his aquatic comrades, he went on, “I’m stuck in the tank, I’m miserable, I hate you, and I’m not going to perform for you.” Being a classic water sign—sun in Pisces, moon in Cancer—Cobain naturally related: Those tough exteriors were facades for an overwhelming sensitivity to the merciless world, a feeling Cobain voiced with every note.
Nirvana spent seven tortuous years and three hard-candied albums bottling the feeling of first seeing that this world is bullshit. Siphoning colossal power out of classic rock and delivering it back to the disempowered, Nirvana voiced the precise moment at which innocence is revealed to be merely a myth. No band before or since has made contempt so catchy, disenchantment so explosive, or disaffection so affecting. Negativity became a genre, a frisson of excitement, and an odd comfort. Nirvana’s beautiful melodies made ugliness a virtue. Sex Pistols said “no future” but for Nirvana things were worse. “No recess,” Cobain convulsed on “School,” from 1989 Sub Pop debut Bleach. “You’re in high school again.” Hell on Earth is not to come. It is right fucking now.
We call that teen angst, but it is not only for teenagers. It hums in the background of life, flavored by the sour taste of knowing that things are mostly unfair. At any time, any age, it is possible to feel utterly disconnected, misunderstood, maladjusted, an alien dropped to Earth, suspicious, sullen, hands in pocket, headphones on: Nirvana. A Nirvana song is a coming-of-age line in the sand endlessly redrawn. It is an excavation of all the frustration below a quietly jaded heart. A Nirvana song is a reality in which you never fell off your skateboard. It is a Walkman that is a portal to some semi-universal misfit energy across time and space, an invitation to smoke weed as far away from the human race as you can manage on a Wednesday, the combustion that occurs when sequestered pain is finally unleashed. It has no gods and no masters. Cobain’s voice became a friend in the heads of lonely people on difficult terms with society everywhere, screaming but also subliminally whispering you are not alone.
Incesticide was released on December 15, 1992, a year and three months after Nirvana—Cobain, fellow Aberdeen weirdo Krist Novoselic, and ex-hardcore kid Dave Grohl—became one of the biggest bands on Earth ever. It’s an unlikely appendage to the globe-smashing Nevermind: Instead of rushing out another LP to further propel Nirvana to the extreme edges of perilous fame, they slid their fans a mixtape. Incesticide is raw sparks to Nevermind’s pop explosion, collecting Peel Sessions, covers, demos, four different drummers, vocal sounds like dying feral animals, unabashed feminism, and yeah, a devil-horn-saluting cock-rocker called “Aero Zeppelin.”
The band’s label, DGC, didn’t intend to promote Incesticide much, clearly considering it a low-stakes time-buying placeholder. Nirvana took advantage of that. Allegedly the band only put it out because Cobain got to make the devastating cover painting and pen the thousand-word essay for its legendary liner notes, which were an indictment of toxic masculinity, a corrective of the exploitative media, and an ode to the underground. Incesticide embodies the free space of punk more than any Nirvana album: part outsider visual art, part punk fanzine, thrillingly raw.
It arrived at the end of a batshit year for Cobain and Courtney Love, who were married that February, just over a month after Nevermind hit its zenith, knocking Michael Jackson out of the No.1 spot on the Billboard charts. Their 1992 devolved from there. The press tortured the Cobains in the months leading up to the birth of their daughter; then followed a custody battle with Child Protective Services. It was the year Cobain wore a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone and a hand-drawn Flipper tee on “SNL.” By the end of 1992, he wanted to call the next Nirvana LP I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, which had become his standard response when asked, “How you doing?”
Incesticide tells a different story: It forms a snapshot of Nirvana pre-Nevermind, the same band you see goofing around in a cha-cha line with Sonic Youth and dramatically eating grapes in David Markey’s classic tour doc 1991: The Year Punk Broke. In a hypothetical biopic of early Nirvana, these are the early songs that would soundtrack the deadpan humor of their ascent—ranging from ecstatic punk-pop to a maniacal, grinding noise, all united in crudity. Cobain felt Bleach was compromised because he had to avoid overtly poppy material in order to appeal to Sub Pop; he thought Nevermind’s slickness was “closer to Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk record,” embarrassing; and the confusion over the Steve Albini-helmed In Utero production is well documented. Incesticide has less baggage. No matter how gnarled the music gets, it inevitably feels lighter because when these songs were recorded, things were not yet so complicated. It’s humbling—as if Nirvana wished to shuttle back down to Earth and deliver the message, “We are not superhuman. We are passionately covering Devo.”
The opening “Dive” and “Sliver” are Nirvana pantheon. The songs comprised the B- and A-sides of a classic pre-Nevermind single on Sub Pop, intended as a preview of their new poppier direction. (At the time of Incesticide, Sub Pop was planning its own Nirvana B-sides comp, allegedly to be called Cash Cow, but Geffen bought them out on that.) Cobain wanted “Sliver” to be “the most ridiculous pop song that [he] had ever written.” With its manic sideways hop and rudimentary harmonies, it is a hilarious caricature of one, containing the exaggerated naivete and cool simplicity of Olympia bands that Cobain loved, like Beat Happening and the Go Team. Our ’90s punk prophet revs through the words “ice cream” and “mashed potatoes,” giving voice to a boy who is left with his grandparents for a night, watching TV and feeling abandoned. Cobain said he got a K Records tattoo as a reminder “to stay a child,” and Nirvana never reached for that more than on “Sliver.” It was recorded in July ’90 when their Seattle peers Tad were on a dinner break from the studio; Mudhoney’s Dan Peters drummed. It took one hour and delightfully sounds like it.
A complementary meditation on childhood, “Dive” finds Cobain begging “pick me pick me” and swiftly deducing that “everyone is hollow”—as if transforming, within seconds, into the demonic child he painted on Incesticide’s cover, a spirit already ravaged in youth. In the crests and punches and crashes of “Dive,” Cobain shows all the contours and shapes he could carve with his voice. “Dive in me,” he sings with the self-awareness that he will be analyzed. Like the best of Nirvana, “Dive” validates pain while tacitly pulling you out from beneath it, depressive and buoyant in each breath, making the sunken feeling soar. The unassuming “Stain,” similarly, is like a one-song Nirvana blueprint: When Cobain 180s from the lilting “staiiiin” into a metallic roar (“STAIN”), you can hear him working through all the seemingly disjointed sounds in his head—the brain that, in one early Nirvana bio, listed the nearly a capella indie band Young Marble Giants as an influence directly alongside Slayer.
Not everything on Incesticide is of such life-affirming caliber, to be clear, but it’s all a blast to play. A blistering handful of its deep cuts are among Nirvana’s earliest songs: “Beeswax,” “Mexican Seafood,” “Hairspray Queen,” “Downer,” “Big Long Now,” and “Aero Zeppelin” were from their first demo, recorded January 23, 1988, with Seattle scene fixture Jack Endino. The demo was cut and mixed in one afternoon; Dale Crover of Melvins drummed, and Cobain paid the $152.44 studio bill with money from his janitor job. There’s a flash of spiraling, raging post-hardcore in “Downer” (a Bleach bonus track), but it is maybe generous to say there are a few duds among all this testosterone-fueled ennui. The lyrics to “Mexican Seafood” are plain nasty (index: “yeast infection,” “vomit,” “fleas”), the riffs prefab. As Cobain wrote in a press release about the amusingly irreverent “Aero Zeppelin”: “Christ! Let’s just throw together some heavy metal riffs in no particular order and give it a quirky name in homage to a couple of our favorite masturbatory ’70s rock acts.” It’s like the pop antagonists in Nirvana were trying to reveal themselves as unspectacular, to debunk the myth of male genius.
Like any thoughtful punk, Cobain pondered anarchy. The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video starred cheerleaders with anarchy-A jackets. The 1979 teen revenge fantasy film Over the Edge—which concludes with delinquent kids setting their school ablaze amid a PTA meeting—all but defined his personality. He considered selling Nevermind with radical-political essays. But the greatest manifestation of Cobain’s anarchic sensibility was undoubtedly in his commitment to dispersing his own power. He took any opportunity to diffuse the spotlight onto his lesser-known inspirations, shouting out dozens of bands in the Incesticide liner notes, on T-shirts, with opening slots, and especially via covers.
Incesticide features three, all recorded on John Peel’s BBC show. Nirvana’s full-sprint take on Devo’s “Turn Around”—the B-side to “Whip It”—gave Cobain the chance to invoke Bob Dylan (“Who said don’t look back? Don’t believe em!”), and feels like a symbol of proud nerdiness. There are also two covers from Glasgow twee pop band the Vaselines, “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of a Gun.” The Vaselines are a band you’d worship if you were interested in deliberately unpopular culture, things that sweetly validate the wrongness in your life. Cobain loved the askew, droll, befuddlingly cheery Vaselines so much he named his daughter Frances after the band’s Frances McKee. That glee circulates through these sunny, arresting bits of high-wire noise-pop. To Cobain, punk was a synonym for freedom—bands that said life is cheap, eat the rich, fuck the police; bands on the margins, deliberate anti-virtuosos, like square pegs never to fit into a circular world. In the Incesticide liners, he wrote, “We just wanted to pay tribute to something [punk rock] that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity. To pay tribute like an Elvis or Jimi Hendrix impersonator in the tradition of a bar band.” Nirvana’s covers distilled that admirable ambition.
In Cobain’s journals from this time, in between lyric drafts and notes to “call thurston,” there is one page that pops out, full of revolutionary zeal. In a letter to Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail, Cobain details his music-industry plot to infiltrate and subvert, to “sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game.” The piece reflects the influence of riot grrrl on his thinking. He writes, for example, about the hypocrisy of a school that teaches girls how to deal with rape culture instead of teaching boys about consent. He writes about how sexism had to be “blown wide open” in order to begin to “expand on all other –isms,” because no matter how you break it down, at the top still sits the white, corporate, irredeemable man. “It’s almost impossible to de-program the incestually-established, male oppressor, especially the ones who’ve been weaned on it thru their families...like die-hard NRA freaks and inherited corporate-power mongrels,” Cobain wrote. “But there are thousands of green minds, young gullible 15-year-old boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what they’ve been told of what a man is supposed to be, and there are plenty of tools to use. The most effective tool is entertainment.”
These are the seeds of how Kurt Cobain became the most famous punk feminist in music history: how he went on to play for millions of “MTV Unplugged” viewers while wearing a T-shirt for San Francisco band Frightwig (their 1984 debut included the pugnacious “My Crotch Does Not Say Go”), how a Nirvana benefit show raised $50,000 for Bosnian rape victims, how Cobain named their hit single after a phrase coined by Kathleen Hanna, how Nirvana posed for press photos in front of a public installation by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer broadcasting the insurrectionary message “MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.” For years, I was put-off by how male Nirvana could sound. But when I consider their aero-zep leanings as bait for the boys that Cobain mentioned in his journals—when I hear his mission to “suck em in with quality entertainment and hit em with reality”—its weight registers clear as day.
Incesticide collects some crucial, germinal entries of Nirvana’s feminism. The wound-up, savage, but emasculated lurch of “Beeswax” was originally released on the groundbreaking 1991 compilation Kill Rock Stars. How’s this for a mangled hook: “I got my dingaling spayed!” Kill Rock Stars was the first full-length music release on the foundational Olympia feminist punk label of the same name. It opened with Bratmobile’s sing-song “Girl Germs” (“You’re too cozy in your all-boy clubhouse!”) and placed Nirvana square in between a brooding Bikini Kill manifesto called “Feels Blind” (“Your world has taught me nothing”) and the fiery minimalism of Mecca Normal. Nirvana is tethered to the riot grrrl context, and the label certainly benefited from their contribution. Kill Rock Stars sold 25,000 copies; the label’s founder Slim Moon was able to release music by Bikini Kill and Unwound with the money.
A feminist ethos also infused Cobain’s songwriting. The breezy pop-punk of Incesticide’s “Been a Son” tells the story of a girl whose parents wish she were born a boy—a comment on how patriarchy sees women as second-class citizens, on how it dictates what it thinks women should be. Nirvana placed the startling folk song “Polly” at the center of Nevermind, which appears on Incesticide as the plugged-in ripper “New Wave (Polly).” “Polly” was inspired by the horrific story of a 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way home from a punk show at Tacoma’s Community World Theater (where Nirvana played early shows) in June of 1987, and brutally raped and tortured. As a slow, acoustic ballad, “Polly” insisted you hear its gruesome words. This lesser, compacted, neutrally-sung version was recorded on the BBC. “Polly” was originally titled “Hitchhiker” and, if not directly inspired by the 1978 song “Hitch Hike” by Swiss punks Kleenex (another Cobain favorite), then it is at least in a lineage with that earlier song, which is similarly about the price women can pay for adventures in public.
On Incesticide, “Polly” includes a disturbing footnote: In 1991, a girl was raped by two men while they sang its lyrics, as the liner notes report. This sickened Cobain. “At this point I have a request for our fans,” he wrote to close the liners. “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” Punk is an open door; when Nirvana arrived at it, the entire world was on the other side. With the world hanging on their every word, Nirvana told the world to wake up or fuck off.
The liner notes are the single most incisive document we have of the total intervention Nirvana staged on popular culture. Five hundred thousand people bought Incesticide within two months of its release, and in order to get to the life updates from Cobain, they had to first read 500 adoring words about the humble feminist punk band the Raincoats. Based in London, the Raincoats were only beginning to play their instruments upon forming in 1977; a quietly eccentric band who charged the air and hallowed ground in 1980s Olympia; who, like Nirvana, interpreted punk as a possibility, not one sound. Cobain bore a striking resemblance to Raincoats bassist Gina Birch—two punks with blonde mops of hair, drowning in shaggy mohair sweaters—bizarre, really.
He wrote of his quest to find the Raincoats’ long out-of-print 1979 debut at the Rough Trade shop in London. A Rough Trade employee advised him to visit guitarist and singer Ana da Silva at her cousin’s antique shop, where she worked, and though Ana was busy, she offered to mail an LP over if she could find one lying around. In a few weeks, it came: “that wonderfully classic scripture,” as Cobain called The Raincoats. “It made me happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the million dollars I made last year,” he wrote. “It was one of the few really important things that I’ve been blessed with since becoming an untouchable boy genius.” Books say Cobain was painfully shy; The Raincoats was introversion as punk.
I hear traces of The Raincoats play out on Incesticide. “Polly” has a clear precedent in the UK band’s ominous “Off Duty Trip,” which similarly chronicled the rape of a woman by a soldier in a Northern Ireland park. Cobain evoked the seismic anguish of “The Void” every time he sang. And rarely have I heard a song capture the feeling of lovesickness with such nauseating truth as the Raincoats’ “In Love”—but the guttural churn of Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” comes close.
The final track of Incesticide, “Aneurysm” is the apex of this compilation and Nirvana’s career. It is a shrill romantic exorcism, and like The Raincoats, it builds episodically: a tense, elongated, thrashing lead-in—each note like a glance over some deviant edge—giving way to the relief of just simmering drums, before an eruption of slashing noise and vulnerability. “Love you so much it makes me sick”—Cobain seems to curl his body around each syllable, the song’s guiding principle. What better word than aneurysm could describe the unpredictable, corporeal shock of infatuation that just dies? What makes the feeling dissolve? When Cobain beckons “Come on over and do the twist,” he evokes original teenage kicks, however cloaked in metaphor that may be. Nirvana’s dance craze is pogoing, which he incites.
“Aneurysm” never fails to put the stupidest grin on my face, and I cannot hear it without flailing every inch of my body to its squirming emotional upheaval, without jerking my shoulders to its torrential feedback of the heart, as if succumbing to every knot and crevice of this punk song could save my life. At all the peaks of Incesticide, a Nirvana song is the same: music for outsiders among outsiders, a thread of connection among the disconnected, a friend screaming loud enough to reach inside your shell, empathic enough to ensure it doesn’t break.


The duo’s third album is a nostalgic indie-pop rumination on suburban teenhood that thrums with hopeful energy. The best songs are like dispatches from a cracking cocoon.

Heavy Lifter

Heavy Lifter, the third album by Austin “pillow core” project Hovvdy, is a frothy Y.A. bildungsroman of a record, suspended in the moment between first discovery of love and first brush with heartbreak. Will Taylor and Charlie Martin dig through the detritus of youth with frank empathy for the people they used to be. They sing of leaving a small town and “moving to the coast” as though it’s the solution to their problems, and not another problem waiting to happen. They sing to a “friend” they’d clearly like to be more than a friend. They sound, in short, as though they don’t know what they’re in for.
The best songs on Heavy Lifter are like dispatches from a cracking cocoon. “Cathedral,” the record’s lead single and best song, finds emancipating joy in the realization that it is “brighter than before, outside” of a repressive church. The song begins in a pew, bent into a posture of prayer; it ends with the cathedral’s doors flung open. Vowing on the chorus to “never come back here” and instead “stay with our friends,” Taylor and Martin repeat the words in a kind of ecstatic chant. “Feel Tall” makes literal the personal growth that first love can inspire: “Any little thing you want, any little thing at all/Want to make you feel tall.” On “Watergun,” expressions of devotion tilt from the naive proclamations of a little kid toward a newfound, grown-up understanding of love as an act of service. A promise to “gladly dry the dishes” lands with exceptional poignancy.
What distinguishes this record from any number of other nostalgic indie-pop ruminations on suburban teenhood is the sparkling optimism Hovvdy carry with them. They don’t long to escape, but to accept the good with the bad. Hopeful energy thrums through cuts like “Keep It Up” and “Mr. Lee,” which mine mundanity for joy. The album is not without grey moments of post-adolescent malaise—particularly the devastating “Pixie”—but Hovvdy veer away from self-destruction, instead homing in on connection and intimacy.
These songs are grand, inviting backdrops against which the listener can set any number of paper dolls. This is the record’s greatest strength, and also where it stumbles. Hovvdy remind me of many artists I’ve loved, especially the underappreciated folk-pop savants Page France. But with the exception of a few skittering, programmed drums, they don’t innovate on the sound of last decade’s indie pop as much as imitate it. The lack of specificity in their songwriting means that they never quite eclipse their influences. The world they depict is always a bit blurry, like someone’s smeared Vaseline on the lens; any two people in small-town North America could occupy the vague starring roles.
This shyness makes a certain amount of sense, given the youth and inexperience at the heart of the album’s story. But the real gut punch arrives at the record’s end, in the final verse of “Sudbury.” As the singer dreams of graduating from “front yard catch” to the Texas Rangers, he recites the street address of a childhood home. That house, and the patch of yellow-green grass that made sports stardom feel possible, couldn’t belong to anyone else. Taylor and Martin are at their finest here, trading the ubiquitous for the unique, declaring who they were and who they wished to be.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Nirvana's scrappy Sub Pop debut is reissued with a 1990 live show as a bonus, and their legendary 1992 set at Reading is finally given a DVD/CD release.

Nirvana: Bleach [Deluxe Edition] / Live at Reading

The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)
And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.
But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks-- "Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of 1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.
But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place, of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark, exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.
Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a drunk club crowd on a Saturday night.
Two years and one Dave Grohl later, the circumstances couldn't have been more different for Nirvana. Amid rumors of Kurt'n'Courtney drug problems and inter-band acrimony, the trio took to the stage for their headlining Sunday-night appearance at the Reading Festival, effectively cementing their status as the biggest-- and most gossiped about-- rock band in the world. If Bleach contains just trace evidence of the band that would, almost overnight, force radio stations to flip formats and record stores to open up "alternative" sections, the Live at Reading CD/DVD provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll band to transform the monoculture in its own image. And yet, despite Cobain's cheeky show-biz entrance-- rolled onto stage in a wheelchair by music journalist Everett True, singing a line from Bette Midler's "The Rose", and then mock-collapsing-- the Reading set shows a band that hadn't changed all that much fundamentally from that Pine Street Theater gig two years previous.
Cobain's newly acquired, generational spokesmen duties didn't make him any more fond of engaging the audience with stage banter, ceding emcee duties to the jovial Novoselic during guitar changes. And even when playing to the biggest audience of their career, Nirvana blast through the 25-song setlist with a barrel-down, no-bullshit intensity that suggests it didn't matter if they were playing to 100 people or 100,000. And most pertinently, both concerts capture the band at crucial, between-album turning points: where the Pine Street Theater set shows a band burnishing its pop appeal, Live at Reading betrays Cobain's eagerness to tear it down, dispensing with the obvious Nevermind hits by the mid-set point, while reserving the encores for seething covers of 80s California punks Fang's suitably sardonic "The Money Will Roll Right In" and the Wipers' "D-7". In retrospect, the concert crystallizes the moment when Cobain stopped serving his servants and started serving himself, pointing the way to 1993's notoriously caustic In Utero.
Given its long-standing popularity as a bootleg, you can't help but wonder why Live at Reading wasn't officially released back in the mid-90s instead of the live compilation From the Muddy Banks of Wishkah; certainly, Reading makes for a more appropriate, electrified complement to the band's other career-defining performance, 1994's Unplugged in New York release. And for the sake of squeezing the entire set (save for "Love Buzz") on a single disc, the Reading CD excises pretty much all of the DVD's between-song interactions (most notably, the goof on Boston's "More Than a Feeling" that precedes the similarly riffed "Smells Like Teen Spirit") and key contextual interludes that reveal the tumult leading up to this triumphant performance (e.g., a heartfelt plea from Cobain to have the crowd shout a conciliatory "We love you Courtney" in the wake of her receiving the Yoko treatment from the British tabloids). But the CD's career-spanning tracklist-- touching on the best of Bleach, most of Nevermind, choice singles and B-sides ("Sliver", "Aneurysm"), three In Utero previews ("Tourette's", "Dumb", "All Apologies"), and the aforementioned covers-- actually makes it a far superior, more comprehensive introduction for Nirvana newbies than the band's 2002 greatest-hits compilation. Like the Who's Live at Leeds or Cheap Trick's At Budokan, it's an indispensible document of a legendary band at their most invincible.
And even if you're the sort of Nirvana die-hard who's been sitting on an audio bootleg of this gig for the past 17 years,you really need the DVD-- for a band whose visual legacy mostly amounts to a handful of stylized videos and the lowkey Unplugged special, Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling prime, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez. Like the Bleach reissue, the Live at Reading packaging is heavy on photos and other scrapbook visuals, but entirely bereft of liner-note reminiscences and analysis-- because lord knows we don't need another essay-length rumination about Nirvana's cultural import and Cobain's conflicted relationship with stardom. The most lasting images on the Live at Reading DVD-- from the 60,000-strong pogo pit, to the blood sprayed on Cobain's pick guard at set's end, to the awkward but poignant post-show meeting with a young, leukemia-stricken fan-- tell you everything you need to know.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2000 debut of Jill Scott, a neo-soul chronicle that brought love and sex to the everywoman.

Jill Scott: Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1

In the late ’90s and early aughts, before Tumblr and other social media sites became havens for all visions of gender and expressions of bodies, it would have been easy to think that sex was purely the purview of conventionally attractive, thin, young straight men and women. For the MTV generation, love was the reward for being hot and hetero.
Film and television reinforced this message (“The Bachelor” and “Extreme Makeover” took it to the extreme), but so did music. From boy bands, who socialized young girls to puritanically fixate on love and relationships, to hip-hop, which was the domain of hedonists. This was the era that gave us Akinyele’s “Put It in Your Mouth” and Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” released about six years apart, with the Nas and Bravehearts’ “Oochie Wally” surfacing in between.
To be regular, average, normal was in defiance of that era’s celebrity maximalism. It was a healthy body image and enthusiastic consent; it was the freedom to be wholesome instead of pitching moralistically between abstinence and nastiness. Regular was the quiet that filled the room after turning off a blaring celebrity entertainment show. It had ties to people and places and ideas, instead of decamping for New York or L.A. It was fat people loving skinny people, and vice versa. It was queerness beyond sex. Normal was variety and divergence; it was something other than the bleached blondes, video vixens, six-packs, brooding faces that filled our screens. But in this environment, who could be sure how average people did it? When Jill Scott released her debut album, Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1 in 2000, there were still too few chronicles of what love and sex were like for the “average” woman.
It began with the lead single “Love Rain.” The first verse documents the courtship rituals of two regular young people from Scott’s hometown of Philadelphia: long walks, long talks, and a lot of sex, all of which accompanies the rapid demise of summer love. Verse two opens the dams: “Love slipped from my lips, dripped down my chin and landed in his lap,” she sings, briefly tucking her airy soprano away in favor of breathing out the words in syncopated puffs of hot breath. The graphic lyric delivered a jolt. This was the same year that Dead Prez released the #sapiosexual anthem “Mind Sex,” and here was Scott lolling in allusive pleasure. The jiggy era was also at full speed, dousing pop culture with images of masculine, capitalist virility. But this wasn’t a cumshot; this was, as Scott wrote it, love.
What Scott offered was the perspective of a “regular” woman standing in her sexuality. Of course, Scott is beautiful. Her body language is open. She is ample and walks with meaning. Her smize confirms it. But she presented as an alternative to a world swayed by thinness, by straight hair, by whiteness. Not to make it about her body, but Scott made it about her body. “There are some really fine women with heart and mind and soul and body, who want a man with the same qualities,” she said in a Washington Post interview near the end of her debut year. “Not all of us are 5-foot-9 and perfectly slim, with big boobs that sit up in the air. In fact, none of us are like that.”
On Who Is Jill Scott?, the singer channeled the feisty funk of Betty Davis’ Nasty Gal and the soft-lensed romance of Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel. She found ways of putting bass in her soprano voice, and sighing at the opposite end. Love was to be found in others, but also in oneself: “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)” documented her real-life partnership with the relatable passion and intensity of many heady beginnings, and “One Is The Magic #” presented solitude as liberation. “The Way” is a peek at the way women schedule their lives around sex. She tells a girlfriend she’s passing on the club for a visit from her man; “As much as I like to shake my thang on the dance floor/I got another nasty, freaky, just right way in mind/Tonight I’m gonna beat the high score.” Scott’s stories of love and mutually pleasurable sex countered the inequitable hedonism of Puffy’s shiny suit rap, big-dick rock bands, and the weaponized testosterone of boy bands.
And Scott also populated her music with images of regular people. The ever-present chorus of friends offering loving, ribbing commentary on each other’s lives, children scampering across playgrounds and playing clapping games, old folks sitting on porches or playing dominoes, dudes hanging out on the corner, the smell of cooking wafting into a neighbor’s window. Who Is Jill Scott? situated the musician’s inner world within a neighborhood, brimming with people living their lives, and celebrated the social fabric of her community. It was a head-nod in passing, a shout across the street, and the mixing of generations.
Videos for songs like “A Long Walk” and “Gettin’ In The Way” brought those images to life, and situated Scott as the girl-next-door for a different side of America. The latter video opens on a shot of a man in the shower—hair braided, muscular, deep brown, dripping wet—and cuts to Scott, who’s casual in a red headwrap and button-up denim shirt.
Women in pop culture have always been coded, but for 20 years the parameters for black women were even more banal: beloved artists like Trina, Foxy Brown, and Lil’ Kim were tagged as raunchy, singers like Mariah Carey or Destiny’s Child were prim and unattainable divas, and those that covered up—like Da Brat and Missy Elliott—were subject to speculation regarding their sexuality. Even Erykah Badu’s introspection was seen as somehow other. Today, beautiful and talented women like SZA, Jorja Smith, Nao, Noname, Cardi B, and especially Rihanna, are beloved for their relatability—for the ways in which they speak directly to other black women. But in the context of the compartmentalized ’90s, where you were either a diva or vixen, conscious or pop, a feminist or wholesome, Scott’s ability to be simultaneously femme, sexual, black, soulful, messy, and experimental—or simply just the kind of woman you might see at the market squeezing lemons—stood out.
In her 2000 book that gave voice to Gen X’s hip-hop feminists titled When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost, Joan Morgan wrote, “Trying to capture the voice of all that is young black female was impossible... This book by its lonesome won’t give you the truth. Truth is what happens when your cumulative voices fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus.” Who Is Jill Scott? is a submission in service of these truths. A song like “Gettin’ In The Way” reveals the damage of the patriarchy on relationships between women, but the track that precedes it affords Scott more nuance. “Exclusively” is the giddy internal monologue of a person basking in morning sex over a Fender Rhodes and lazy drums, on her way to get orange juice. The cute new girl flares up Scott’s “women’s intuition, some kind of insecurity” and sniffs at her—investigating the scent of Scott’s morning romp—and asks, “Raheem, right?” Scott responds as the music falls away: “Right.”
At the turn of the century, Philly was vibrating. Musicians such as the Roots and Musiq Soulchild were pioneering alternative ideas in hip-hop and R&B. Beanie Sigel was rolling with the Roc. The Million Woman March, a grassroots event in support of black women, families, and community, drew hundreds of thousands of people to the city in 1997. Allen Iverson was with the Sixers and his playing and unmitigated swagger had sports media frothing.
Scott didn’t just benefit from this energy, she absorbed and helped sustain it through her music. Keen-eyed fans know Jill Scott’s name from the liner notes of the Root’s fourth album, 1999’s Things Fall Apart. Alongside a pre-fame Scott Storch, she co-wrote the Philly band’s breakout single, “You Got Me.” When Storch met Scott, she was working at an Urban Outfitters in Philly. Two years later, their finished song for the Roots, featuring Scott on the hook, was derailed by the band’s label. Scott would be swapped for Badu, then the high priestess of neo soul, who already commanded a large fanbase. (There was no bad blood between the two). It became a Grammy Award-winning song, and the Roots took Scott on the road so fans knew that ‘Jilly from Philly’—who announced herself at shows by spelling out her full name as a jazzy riff—was here to stay.
And Scott’s attention to conversations and consciousness in her particular community and black America at large solidified her music as being of the people. She wrote about hip-hop, jazz, reparations, Abrahamic religious texts, soul food (and what collards do to your bowels), the noted and imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, diasporic ideation, going to the market, and late nights on the phone. Her music does center heterosexual relationships and a pointed reverence of black men, which some might argue veers toward internalized misogynoir, a term the queer feminist writer Moya Bailey developed to describe the specific nexus of racism and misogyny affecting black women. But that doesn’t mean that the images and affirmations of under-represented communities and ways of life weren’t important, or that the candor of lyrics like “Alone to the bone/Although the night before/You were in my home my body/My dome,” and “So many times I define my pride through somebody else’s eyes/Then I looked inside and found my own stride” weren’t affecting for a generation of young women.
In late 2001, Scott released Experience: Jill Scott 826+, a live double album that contains recordings from her “Words and Sounds” tour. The relatively tidy compositions of her debut become big, sprawling, deconstructed suites, where she explores the full range and power of her voice. She plays with her phrasing, extending syllables, scatting, improvising, or just letting the rapt audience shout the lyrics for her. On Experience, Scott recreates neighborhood chatter and babble by letting the audience serve as her inner voice, the locals hanging over the gate wishing you well on your day. She talks to them, and they talk back. Regarding the stand-off in the music video for “Gettin’ In The Way,” she makes this point: “We have this thinking that as soon as we see somebody with a natural, they’re automatically positive.” The crowd hoots and laughs appreciatively for Jilly from Philly, who stays keeping it real.


Channeling acid electronica, Kabbalah, and motherhood, Madonna’s 1998 reinvention stripped away the controversy of her past and became one of her most unexpectedly successful albums.

Ray of Light

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
There was no reason Ray of Light should’ve been such a hit. After the collapse of grunge in the mid-90s, the music industry had begun to lean into the perky pubescence of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. 1998 was the year that “TRL” launched on MTV, and soon after, Britney Spears would release her teasing teen debut, ...Baby One More Time, catalyzing a string of young women—like fellow teens Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore—to overrun the charts with coy love songs. But in the eye of this gathering storm of adolescence, Madonna, then 39 years old, released Ray of Light—and it became the best selling studio album of her career since Nielsen began tracking retail, a record it still holds. How did a monastic and austere album about emotional and spiritual maturity by a woman and new mother strike such a chord?
Madonna was still in full control of the serpentine pop instincts that had helped her masterfully navigate more than 15 years in the business. Her last studio album had been 1994’s Bedtime Stories, an alluring and accessible collection of mostly R&B, produced, in part, by Dallas Austin and Babyface. Bedtime Stories had been its own soft reinvention after the fetishistic and controversial era of Erotica, and it was a big deal: the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts, her longest-ever run at No. 1. Presumably hoping to recreate that magic, Madonna turned to Babyface again at the outset of the Ray of Light sessions. But past success never presumes future performance for Madonna, and she abandoned Babyface after, as he put it diplomatically to Q, she “changed her idea about the album’s direction.”
It was another song on Bedtime Stories that offered the biggest clue into the Ray of Light to come: the Bjӧrk-assisted title track, “Bedtime Story,” a new age song on which she sings of relaxing “in the arms of unconsciousness,” and her deepest yet exploration of avant-garde electronica. After ditching Babyface, Madonna sought out William Orbit, an English producer best known for a smattering of understated ambient albums. Madonna liked Orbit, as she said in an unfortunately clumsy way, for “fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that.” He would end up co-producing every song on Ray of Light but one.
Orbit’s work throughout gives Ray of Light a unified tonal consistency, a kind of cohesion that masterworks are made of. He has a light touch with techno textures, both relaxed (flashes of acoustic guitar ground some of the most digitized moments) and danceable—after all, it can’t be a Madonna album if it can’t work in the club. “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” opens the album with bleary sound effects that pulse like the sound of sonar. This submerged quality of sound will become the bleary canvas for the album’s philosophical manifesto, as clear a declaration as can be imagined of the new Madonna that we will meet on the album. Here, she not just embodies her reinvention, as she had done with previous creative shifts, but goes ahead and describes it in full detail. There is no missing the point.
In the hangover from the hedonism that was her early ’90s era, Madonna gave birth to her first child, Lourdes and had begun to embrace yoga and the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Gone is the wry kinkiness and, at least according to her, the addiction to the spotlight, replaced with wisdom and patience and a powerful maternal instinct. “I traveled ’round the world, looking for a home/I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone,” she sings on “Drowned World.” “Now I find I’ve changed my mind/This is my religion.” It is a moving song, arguably the album’s best. In the music video, as she says these last words, she is seen smiling and hugging a toddler who has her back to the camera, a girl we assume to be Lourdes. Maybe those pulsating beats that open the album evoke not so much a world under the sea, but a child’s heartbeat heard through amniotic fluid, or even the sound of this new version of Madonna being gestated. Whatever they mean to you, Madonna, once more likely to embrace a near-naked man in one of her clips, manifests as a publically doting mother right before our eyes.
Reinvention, thanks to the template that Madonna set, is almost a cliché ritual in pop, like a motion that must be gone through for every star who needs a hook upon which to hang their new album. So too is self-discovery: How many times have you heard an artist claim that this album, the newest one, is her or his “most personal one yet”? But on Ray of Light, Madonna is so all-in committed to her metamorphosis that it’s hard not to believe her. “Nothing Really Matters” is a Buddhist-lite song about living in the moment and discarding the selfish motives of stardom. Even the notable love songs on the album, like the transcendent “The Power of Good-Bye,” are about turning away from the chaotic romantic entanglements that once characterized her public life and lyrics. “You were my lesson I had to learn,” she sings, as if all the turmoil she sang of on past albums had just melted away.
With what’s happened to the culture since, it’s easy to bemoan Madonna opening up the floodgates of this airy, sacred lifestyle: Ray of Light has to be in some ways to blame for Goop and the countless other millionaire celebrities—everyone from Jessica Alba to Dr. Oz—who preach the gospel of wholeness and wellness, sanctimonious and Instagram spirituality. And yet, on Ray of Light, Madonna sounds so confident and alluringly in control of her powers, you might be able to overlook the more dubious moments, like “Shanti/Ashtangi,” in which she recites a hymn in Sanskrit over a techno-pop beat.
Madonna had recently taken voice lessons for her role in the musical Evita and, as she put it about her work prior to improving her technique, “There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. And I was going to make the most of it.” Her newly trained voice explodes out of the speakers on the title track, the character of her upper register suddenly like crystal. Though “Ray of Light” is “a mystical look at the universe and how small we are,” it’s also just one of the strangest songs in history to ever become a radio smash, a sugar-high piece of acid-club psychedelia. She also exposes a certain vulnerability that had not been on display in the heady days of Erotica. “Mer Girl,” which closes the album, is a tender psalm about the death of her mom. It ends the album on a remarkably reflective and unresolved note, while also pointing to the reason Madonna has needed to be so many different people across her life to begin with: “I ran and I ran,” she sings. “I’m still running away.”
Madonna played a large role in reopening mainstream American music to the club sounds of Europe in ways that have reverberated since. You can hear Ray of Light in artists as disparate as Britney, who worked with Orbit years after Madonna on “Alien,” to the adventurous producer and vocalist Grimes, who called Ray of Light a “masterpiece.” It is important, in 2017, to reveal something serious about yourself and the world through your work if you are a pop artist, and much of this can be traced back to Ray of Light, not to mention Janet Jackson and George Michael, who in the years before also made ambitious and weighty records.
If I have one major gripe with Ray of Light, it’s a certain dissonance that this born-again Madonna causes in me that other reinventions did not. As a young gay man, I had been ennobled by Madonna’s earlier hedonistic pride, excited by her exaggerated glamour (though also aware of its problematic aspects: her provocative image, particularly in the song and video “Vogue,” heavily cribs from black and latino gay culture) and defiant sexuality. There are times I feel a bit confused listening to Ray of Light as she all but dismisses her prior escapades, referring to them as a “silly game” on “Drowned World.” Perhaps it’s unfair to lay this responsibility at her feet, but I had always felt that Madonna’s liberated vision of life, in part, reflected my own, a life that, because of any number of circumstances or choices, might not involve kids and a family and red brick home, or any of the traditional domestic and spiritual touchstones venerated on Ray of Light. This is not a knock at her, really—life is complicated and filled with phases, something that Madonna’s career has come to symbolize.Maybe, too, it’s nice to have a fantasy of peace after the tumult that is our twenties and thirties, even if it’s mostly just that: a fantasy. I’m certainly not there yet, but it’s perhaps reassuring to hear Madonna—content on the other side of chaos—let us know that all the breakups and late nights and insecurities will someday culminate in stability.
Of course, we know how it ultimately ended. Just one album later, the disco-tinged Music, Madonna would admit to feeling trapped by the quieter life. “I feel like an animal that's, like, ready to be sprung from a cage,” she’d tell The Face at the time of the release of Music, which, with its winking attitude, helped her keep up with the vampy Britney, by then fully ascendant and coming for her crown. “I’ve been living a pretty low-key domestic existence and I miss things.” So much for all that. For a brief shining moment with Ray of Light, Madonna became Her Holiness, the sage of synth pop. And the world heeded the call.


Kelela’s rapturous second album is a masterful display of tension and release, centering queer Black womanhood through blasts of heated dance music and ambient comedowns.

Raven

In the six years since the groundbreaking Take Me Apart, Kelela’s vaporous body music has become a singular force. The insatiable allure of new romance, power dynamics that shift like quicksand, celestially minimalist club and R&B: This is the strong gravitational pull of Kelela’s world. Her preternaturally relaxed aura has become such a quietly commanding force that when she went relatively silent on social media after Take Me Apart, fans clung to her occasional, errant likes on social media as crucial signs of life.
But while her music was gaining a life of its own, Kelela herself spent time battling writer’s block, reclaiming her privacy, and re-establishing boundaries. The global pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 sharpened her intention as she worked: Sick of dealing with the lip service paid to Black women and widespread misogynoir, she studied and reflected on films, essays, and works by academics and artists such as bell hooks, Kandis Williams, and Shaadi Devereaux. She sent a document to colleagues and friends asking what they’re doing to advance Black women and other marginalized people she shares community with; it led to a personal and professional restructuring that Kelela called “an act of self-care.” “Ultimately I’m working to be in alignment with myself. What that has looked like for me is speaking up to make sure I’m in partnership with Black people.”
The period of introspection casts Raven, Kelela’s second full-length, in a newly energized, restorative light. After anatomizing fractured relationships on Take Me Apart, Kelela centers queer Black womanhood through blasts of heated dance music and ambient comedowns. A new calm surrounds her intricate sound, forming an oasis from the problems of everyday life while simultaneously breaking down those problems with clarity. Listening to Raven leaves one breathless at the scope of Kelela’s enveloping music, offering several vantage points from which to witness new, head-spinning takes on R&B.
A roster of electronic producers and kindred spirits bring Raven’s innovative sound to life: Asmara of Nguzunguzu, LSDXOXO, Bambii, Kaytranada, Junglepussy, and more co-conspirators pepper the album with winding rhythms that draw from drum’n’bass, garage, Baltimore club, and further strains of Black electronic music. Built as a continuous mix, the record plays like a night out at a hazy, secluded club whose corners are primed for a heady blend of seduction and epiphanies on the dancefloor. The midpoint highlight “Contact” places Kelela’s delicate melodies over a scuffed jungle beat and warped synths that give way to a Dionysian rush of lust. Raven thrives in those straightforward dance moments: “On the Run” is driven by a dewy dancehall groove, a natural element for Kelela’s self-possessed, sexy come-ons. The breakbeats and brisk guitar that drive “Missed Call,” in line with a spate of artists working with the ’90s club hallmarks recently, give an added charge to the album’s front half.
To establish a more tranquil, soul-bearing afterglow, Kelela recruited OCA, the ambient group comprising Yo van Lenz and Florian T M Zeisig. (She previously included their sparse, abstract music on her 2019 Aquaphoria mixtape, a precursor to Raven’s drifting, pensive moods.) Yo van Lenz and Zeisig limn the album with pockets of reverb and minimalist sound design: On “Divorce,” co-written with Shygirl and the figurative painter Janiva Ellis, glassy synths and a buzzing bassline give Kelela an empty space to fill, delivering one of the most peaceful vocal performances on the album for an expression of brittle self-reflection. The slow-building, dreamlike “Holier,” meanwhile, is submerged in muted, rattling bass, with spare synth notes that weave in and out around Kelela’s clear-eyed resolve: “Though it troubles my heart/Don’t want to cover the scar,” she sings as though floating at zero gravity, “So I go where they hold me down.” It’s one of several instances on the album that speaks to nurturing self-care by standing in and with the community that grounds you when you need it most.
Raven’s lyrics circle images of water, from mist and pouring rain to stormy clouds and dripping sweat. The album’s connective tissue is found in the sound of rushing waves, or a sharp inhalation breath after coming up from the water (“Divorce” even ends with what sounds like the steady beep of a diver’s sonar radar fading out of earshot). For Kelela, water becomes cathartic, almost baptismal. The title track is the album’s panoramic zenith, building on keys and an oscillating synth line: “Through all the labor/A raven is reborn,” she sings, shifting the prophetic symbol of death into one of reinvention. Kelela’s graceful interrogations of her emotions have always been one of her music’s greatest pleasures, but here it leaves a long-lasting impression. The song accelerates into an ecstatic breakdown with fragmented, strident synths and pressurized beats that break through with the rush of a barreling subway car. It’s freeing and exhilarating, a rattling shock to the system that channels a deep well of irresistible power.
Kelela’s command over her voice is more dexterous on Raven, leaning into serpentine, delectable melodies. She metastasizes emotions with subtly complex vocal phrasing and aching background ad-libs, outfitting Raven with a velvety, laidback effortlessness. On the standout two-hander “Closure,” she sings about still holding on to a needling infatuation after being ghosted in an ethereal falsetto over plucked tones and a warped undertow before a guest verse from Newark rapper Rahrah Gabor, who injects the song with a slick, instantly memorable jolt of energy (“You like ’em brown,” Gabor spits, “You ain’t another Clayton Bigsby”). Kelela is a master of tension and release, giving a swift dose of propulsive euphoria before gently ebbing back. The luminous “Sorbet” is the best example of the latter, all slow-motion lust with airy backing vocals and a hypnotic, swirling beat. “Nowhere to go now/Let it melt away,” she pleads as the song reaches its transcendent, reverb-soaked climax.
Raven begins and ends with a sigh. “Washed Away” and “Far Away” are Raven’s axis points, lifted by Kelela’s improvisatory vocals and a resounding synth line that form a beatific prayer. They exemplify the album’s delicately sublime appeal—Kelela’s music is hydration for the soul, seductive and relatable even as she continues to refine and evolve her sound. You can be drawn in by Raven’s all-encompassing atmosphere, but it’s even better to lose your whole self in it.
Listen to our episode on Kelela’s Raven on The Pitchfork Review podcast


On his fifth record since returning from hiatus in 2010, Oval's Markus Popp shows a side of, well, pop to his music that has often dwelled below the surface but never so overtly above it.

Popp

With over twenty years of record-making behind him, Oval’s Markus Popp had long established his bona fides as a legend of the strain of electronic music that used to be called IDM. But once he returned in 2010 after a near-ten year absence from recording, he seemed liberated, as if the distance had granted him freedom from the monolithic formula of his first decade of work. With the self-referentially titled Popp, his fifth record since his return, he has delivered his most consistent and well-rounded collection since 2001’s Ovalcommers, showing a side of, well, pop to his music that has often dwelled below the surface but never so overtly above it.
Though it’s only been six years since releasing the double-disc O and Oh EP, Popp represents a third new iteration of the Oval sound since his return from retirement. On those two releases Popp applied new techniques to generating music that lead to tracks that ultimately sounded like brighter, more austere versions of his older records like ‘98’s Szenariodisk. Oval 2.0 came in 2013 in the form of the two self-released, collaborative records Calidostópia! and Voa, which saw Popp break new ground in pairings with a number of South American musicians. Though the uneven results alternated from the “eh” to the sublime (such as on Voa’s incredible “Drift” with Agustín Albrieu, which sounded like Oval plus Thom Yorke-meets-David Sylvain), they represented a big shift in sound and ideas and were his most song-based work since contributing to Gastr del Sol’s final record Camofleur in 1998.
On Popp, he takes things in yet another entirely new direction, one that manages to play with the past in a way that feels entirely interested in the future. Warm, sunny and frenetic, Popp represents his closest play toward actual pop music that Oval (or any of Popp’s other monikers) has ever made, even more so than Calidostópia! and Voa.
Two big factors contributing to the shift in feel of Popp are the use of drums and vocals, albeit sampled. Beginning immediately with album opener “Ai,” Popp lays down a choppy 4/4 rhythm that combines samples and actual drumming into a tower of beat that feels like standing beneath a rainbow-hued waterfall. Around the edges are the clipped coos that lend to an unexpectedly club-like feel. Popp is no longer playing with these sounds to provide texture, but to create a woozily busy form of futuristic dance music.
The rest of the album continues in this way, working hard to create an almost uninterrupted wall of sound. But the best of Popp begins midway through, as he shifts his gaze slowly from house and rave music to classic-era Warp Records IDM. “Ku” has a playful steel drum synth line that would sound at home on any of Plaid’s records, but laid over a storm of beats far busier than they would ever program. Better still is the halycon “Sa,” which channels Tri Repetae and LP5-era Autechre in its use of nagging, industrial machine-like melodies that churn while the song lurches slowly backward and forward to conclusion. Unlike much of Popp, “Sa” builds gently from quiet solemnity to cacophonous, triumphant joy in a way that is both reflective and redemptive.
Popp wraps with the rapturous and sunkissed “Ve,” which somehow stretches out gloriously and seems to end too soon. It’s worth noting that each of Popp's eleven cuts fall between 3:20 to 4:30 minutes long; gone are the 1-2 minute “ringtone” sketches of O or the lengthy drone extensions of past works like 94diskont's classic “Do While.” The focus he displays across the record over its 44 minutes, which never drag, is impressive, and the inspired post-pop composition of Popp easily provides the best argument yet for its creator’s continued relevance, not just as a legend but a creative force in electronic music for the next decade.


Body/Head is the minimalist duo of ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and experimental guitarist Bill Nace. On their intoxicating first full length, where both play guitar and Gordon sings, the duo treat a limited palette as a challenge, like the straitjacket a magician dons to prove he can break free.

Coming Apart

The musical approach Kim Gordon and Bill Nace chose for their duo Body/Head seems intentionally restrictive. Both play only guitar. Their songs are slow and sometimes static, an effect enhanced by the near-total absence of beats (and, in concert, by the slowed-down films projected behind them). Gordon sings mostly in monotone, spreading her words out in a glacial rap or moaning them in a breathy whisper. The mood is similarly confined, sticking to a strident heaviness through serious lyrics and dirge-like guitar.
This limited palette could feel claustrophobic, or just boring. But on Body/Head’s first full-length album Coming Apart, the duo treat it as a challenge, like the straitjacket a magician dons to prove he can break free. (Not coincidentally, the album is named after a 1969 movie set in a single apartment and shot from a single camera angle). In nearly 70 minutes of music over two LPs, Gordon and Nace burrow deep into their narrow sound, mining it for more variety and emotion than it should rightfully hold. The effect is subtle-- at first the music feels aimless, in search of something vague and elusive. But give Coming Apart a few listens, and distinctive shapes emerge. Eventually, the duo’s dedication to a specific point of view becomes intoxicating.
That dedication shows up most strongly in the conversational guitar work of Gordon and Nace (himself a veteran of many excellent collaborations). Oddly, the duo chose to pan their individual sounds to opposite sides of the stereo space. But rather than making them feel disconnected, that tactic gives their interplay a call-and-response synchronicity. When one of them hits repetitive chords or plucks two-note patterns, the other weaves long tones or dense distortion; at other times, one’s left turn into dissonance inspires the other to find melody in the noise. (The chiming quality of that noise sometimes recalls *Evol-*era Sonic Youth, but there are many other evocations in the pair’s timbres.) The timing of these actions and reactions makes Coming Apart surprisingly engaging-- though all 10 pieces were mostly improvised, many have an arc that’s thoughtfully song-like.
Even more engaging is Gordon’s singing, which is as expressive as anything she did in Sonic Youth, and often more so. She stretches out syllables, expands phrases, and melts her voice into the rising guitar lava. At times it seems she’s simply exploring the way words sound, treating them like physical objects sliding up her throat and pouring off her tongue. At other points, the concrete meaning of her lyrics is all that matters. So when her simple yell of the title in “Actress” turns urgent, it suddenly sounds like the most important word in the world.
Gordon’s voice also provides an entry point into tunes, which can otherwise be a bit forbidding. But it’s also easy to get lost in them, much the way the most intense work by Jandek or Scott Walker can take on the quality of a dream. As in dreams, time on Coming Apart becomes a moving target, and sometimes seems to disappear altogether. As a result, these songs often feel longer than they actually are-- but this is the rare case where that’s a strength rather than a weakness.
Still, given the music’s endless feel, closing Coming Apart with its two longest tracks is risky. But Gordon and Nace manage to find new ideas in these elongated settings. 17-minute closer “Frontal” is like an album unto itself, gradually moving from distant echoes to the duo’s most aggressive tones. Its predecessor, “Black”, is even more mesmerizing. It’s ostensibly a cover of the traditional folk song “Black Is the Colour (Of My True Love's Hair)”, but Gordon was likely inspired by one version in particular: the radical take recorded by singer Patty Waters and her free-jazz group in the late 60s.
Gordon doesn’t get as frantic or desperate sounding as Waters; in keeping with the album’s tone, her interpretation is darker and heavier. But it’s just as radical. Waiting almost seven minutes before singing, Gordon reworks simple stanzas into zombie mantras, eventually duetting with herself in a chorus of abstract hums. The re-imagining is typical of her career, which has featured more detours than she’s perhaps been given credit for. Count Coming Apart as another fascinating step in that journey, and Body/Head’s musical path as one that she and Nace will hopefully follow for a long time.


The 1975’s second album has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent polish of early ’80s Hot 100 pop.

The 1975: I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it

Last November, the 1975 frontman Matt Healy took shots at Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?” “‘When you nod your head yes but you wanna say no’—can we stop talking about girls who don’t know what they want?” he despaired. “Can we stop talking about nothingness? No one’s asking you to inspire a revolution, but inspire something.” Like some of his provocative Manchester forebears, Healy has a giant mouth on him, but unlike them, he doesn’t seem interested in tearing others down, just demanding more. This neurotic want drives his music, which in turn inspires wildly conflicting feelings: fervent adoration on one end, intense rage at the other.
The ire directed at the 1975’s very existence seems odd, considering their self-titled 2013 debut was basically inoffensive pop-rock pitched somewhere between Phoenix, the Strokes, and Jimmy Eat World. But there is something deeper at work in the objections, and Healy’s rebuke of Bieber provides a hint: Although the group approaches their work with a level of ambition and self-seriousness usually reserved for rock bands like, say, Radiohead—The 1975 is 16 songs long, with three ambient interludes, including a glacial choral opener called “The 1975”—they have the look, feel, and requisite huge teen girl fanbase of a boy band.
Pure pop has been a cool palette for left-field artists to play around with for a few years now, but the boy band model has remained terminally uncool. Hurts are maybe as close as it’s come; if PC Music really want to be transgressive, perhaps they should give it a shot. Even One Direction tried to escape the genre’s sanitized connotations toward the end of their existence, when they were allowed to manifest a little authorship along with their stadium rock dreams. The 1975 don’t wear matching suits or sell branded trinkets to the under-10s, yet after years of playing to nobody, they became a boy band by virtue of a voracious social media fanbase—not that they seemed happy about it at first. Once they realized the extent of their audience’s adulation—and indignation when they reshot the monochrome video for “Sex” in full color after signing to a major—they played around with them, pulling disappearing acts and refashioning their iconography.
Everything about I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it indicates that the 1975 have embraced girl love, color, and their boy band potential. Healy likes to talk about his band as a post-modern project that creates as people consume, but this ultimately isn't that radical when it comes to pop music, always the magpie. When you sleep… has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent, percolating polish of early ’80s Hot 100 pop that they flirted with on “Heart Out.” Single “Love Me,” for instance, flagrantly splices Bowie’s “Fame” and “Fashion.” The resemblance to acts like Scritti Politti, INXS, the Police, and Hall and Oates also makes it feel like the X-rated cousin of Taylor Swift’s 1989 and Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•mo•tion—despite Healy’s brash exterior, his primary mode is lovelorn and yearning.
That doesn’t mean that When you sleep… is consistent by any stretch. It’s 75 minutes long, which could mostly be solved by trimming the four (!) lengthy ambient tracks on the record. It opens with a darker reworking of “The 1975” (!!) that evokes Sigur Rós; “Lostmyhead” sounds like M83; the title track Bon Iver and Everything Ecstatic–era Four Tet. Their stab at emulating Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” is pretty good, except that it is called “Please Be Naked” (!!!). But, man: when compared to the UK’s current crop of milquetoast electro-balladeers, the 1975’s unabashed pomp and seeming imperviousness to ridicule make you want to kiss them.
It helps, too, that When you sleep… can be enormous fun. “She’s American” is all slap-bass fizz and clenched-fist vocal delivery; “The Sound” is pumping, uber-camp piano house. Although their sound is clean-cut, Healy’s lyrics are anything but: On the debut, Healy was coke-addled and fucked up, but When you sleep… finds him trying to reform, a process hobbled by the circumstances of his new superstar life. Like a lot of When you sleep…, his lyrics dip perilously from inspiring to embarrassing. For every neatly zeitgeist-capturing couplet like, “I’m just with my friends online and there’s things we’d like to change,” from “Love Me,” there's something like, “Caught up in fashion—Karcrashian panache and a bag of bash for passion” from the same song, which only makes Healy sound like the trustafarian street poet that he already slightly resembles.
“Love Me” is nothing, though, compared to its counterpart, “Loving Someone,” which will vindicate anyone who decided to hate the 1975 on principle. Musically it’s an outlier—it has the sweet, compressed insectlike burble of Baths or Bibio, and is the most synthetic thing here. Healy switches from singing to sort-of rapping, Lily Allen–style, in forensic, anguished detail about the superficial example that the world shows to young people. Steady yourself: “Charlatan telepathy exploiting insecurity and praying on the purity of grief and its simplicity/But I know that maybe I’m too skeptical/Even Guy Debord needed spectacles/You see, I’m the Greek economy of cashing intellectual cheques and I’m trying to progress/But instead of selling sex, I think I should be loving someone.” It’s like something Neil Tennant might have written if he had embraced the ludicrousness of mid-’80s pop instead of subverting it, and thank God he did.
Dropping Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a massive “look at me!” clanger, but Healy substantiates the song’s agonies with unvarnished accounts of how he’s fallen prey to these pressures. He often sings about his mental health: “Ugh!” is West Coast funk R&B lite about addiction, while “The Ballad of Me and My Brain” is pure stadium Sting in which he searches for his mind; he figures he might have left it in a supermarket, where it’s “flirting with the girls.” He searches for a higher power on “If I Believe You,” a Biblical, Michael Jackson–indebted slow jam gilded with a gospel choir. The closing lines are silly on paper—“If I’m lost, then how can I find myself?”—but buried in Autre Ne Veut–style ecclesiastical synth washes, his earnestness becomes surprisingly affecting.
In “Loving Someone,” Healy asked who would “show the kids that they matter.” It’s a trite line, but unlike so much “be yrself” Hot 100 pop, the 1975 never coddles the listener; instead, they respect their audience by believing them to be capable of handling everything they sing about, from coke psychosis to dead grandmothers (“Nana”) and post-natal depression (“She Lays Down”). They give them the credit to find the Easter Eggs hidden in their music, from melodies that echo old material (“The Sound” calls back to “She Way Out”) to sequels of first album situations (“A Change of Heart” follows on from “Robbers”). Perhaps their greatest tribute is that the 1975, despite being in their mid-twenties, are just like them: messy, earnest, vulnerable, unedited, gaudy. For Britain’s biggest young guitar band to ditch laddy machismo, embrace the boy band ideal, and run on feeling rather than posturing—that feels kind of radical. When you sleep… can be far too much, but it’s not cynical.


The upstart English pop-punk star’s second album buries his charm in clumsy genre experimentation, clichéd lyrics, and unearned bluster.

Weird!

At first glance, Doncaster, England native Yungblud has all the makings of a rock star. Twenty-three-year-old Dominic Harrison looks like an approachable yet high-fashion weirdo, using the magnetic appeal of pop-punk to speak to the troubles of an anxious generation. His first album, 2018’s 21st Century Liability (which followed a brief stint on the Disney Channel), employed the Twenty One Pilots model of using hip-hop elements to discuss mental health in varying shades of cynicism. But it was an energetic debut delivered with exhilarating recalcitrance, and Yungblud began amassing a loyal following that calls itself the Black Hearts Club (or BHC for short). His second album, Weird!, feels like an ode to his audience of self-identified misfits, but it isn’t as boundary-pushing as his look—and too often, it’s a shallow imitation of more popular songs you’re already tired of. Pop-punk isn’t dead, but Yungblud’s charm gets buried.
It’s a problem unique to his music: In interviews and on social media, Yungblud is forthcoming about his own struggles; he addresses fans intimately, with a palpable, infectious excitement that mirrors his increasing popularity. What’s missing is the connection between Yungblud’s amiability and his actual songs. Instead of thoughtfulness, Weird! delivers the type of third-eye-opening phrases that your middle-school boyfriend might have texted you after his very first beer: “Not gonna waste my life, ’cause I’ve been fucked up/’Cause it doesn’t matter.” It’s almost impressive how Yungblud manages to reduce serious topics to Hallmark Channel clichés, like on the acoustic ballad “mars,” which attempts to sensitively convey the story of a transgender fan with a rehash of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” and original lines like, “Yeah, this story told too many times, it makes me sad.”
Musically, Yungblud is swallowed by his own penchant for maximalism, screeching unintelligible phrases over crashing drums with unearned punk bluster. He co-opts distinctive sounds from all over the map, but he doesn’t really know what to do with them: “acting like that” is a less catchy version of Metro Station’s “Shake It,” “superdeadfriends” combines a poor impression of the Beastie Boys with a reference to Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids,” and “cotton candy” is just Post Malone’s “Circles” with higher sugar content. The shoddy genre experimentation quickly grows frustrating, replacing Yungblud’s unique bombast and earnestness with intrusive questions about where you’ve heard that song before. It’s harder to care about Weird! when the album is busy reminding you how great Channel Orange is.
A really good pop-punk lyric creates a liberating rush of kinship, puts angry, honest words to that gross feeling you’ve been hiding: Think of Tom DeLonge crying out, “Where are you?/And I’m so sorry,” or Joyce Manor’s Barry Johnson floundering through life until he finally spews out, “One perfect night’s not enough/It’s just a constant headache.” The uncreative homages that clog up Weird! also blunt Yungblud’s star power, but he is capable of this type of vulnerable lyricism when he puts his mind to it on “it’s quiet in beverly hills.” By comparison to the rest of the album, the emotional effect is jarring: Yungblud’s voice shifts to the sort of tenderness you reserve for intimate conversations with close friends, and an acoustic guitar twangs lovingly underneath. Sounding a bit rueful, he sings, “I don’t want them to believe that I am different.”
It’s the album’s most honest moment: Yungblud without the bravado, just a regular, insecure 23-year-old in search of acceptance. This is the embarrassing universal truth smothered by the rest of his loud attempts to convince his listeners that he’s strange and proud. Yungblud has all the tools in hand—a loyal following, a fan’s clear love of music, and a beguiling ease in the public eye. If he knew how to use them, he wouldn’t have to work so hard.

Buy: Rough Trade
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