Clementine Creevy sifts through the muck on her new album, picking up everything from radio-friendly electro-pop to fuzzed-out garage rock.

Cherry Glazerr: I Don’t Want You Anymore

I Don’t Want You Anymore

On Cherry Glazerr’s first new album in four years, I Don’t Want You Anymore, Clementine Creevy pushes herself to extremes. As a lyricist, she explores devotion and surrender, apathy and dependency. As a musician, and self-producing alongside Yves Rothman, she swerves from radio-friendly electro-pop to fuzzed-out garage rock, her vocals delivered in conspiratorial speak-sing or guttural howls. If it scans as an artist throwing everything at the wall, the triumph is that Creevy sounds like she’s in the process of sorting through it.
Cherry Glazerr’s previous albums, 2014’s Haxel Princess and 2017’s Apocalipstick, were rooted in garage rock and noise-pop, but 2019’s Stuffed & Ready went off like a cynical, adrenalized bomb. In place of those explosive moments, I Don’t Want You Anymore paws at ambiguity. The feelings are raw, and Creevy resists major-chord resolutions. Alongside sparse basslines played by Rothman and Sami Perez, Creevy captures the emotional murkiness of a series of devastating but life-affirming relationships through her chilled minor-key guitar and a playful snarl that recalls PJ Harvey. She has cited Evanescence as an influence—a clear reference point for the album’s moments of unbridled drama. But this isn’t a mall-goth reinvention; in sound and subject matter, Cherry Glazerr resists being pinned to any one aesthetic or sound.
Two songs early in the album show just how much Creevy is willing to expand. “Touched You With My Chaos” is a melancholy anthem with harsh, overdriven guitars, shrieking trumpet, and a maudlin string section in the final minute. Creevy wrote it after watching Gregg Araki’s harrowing 2004 film Mysterious Skin, seeking to mimic its themes of desperation, which she does in a screamy, bratty chorus: “I said that I loved you,” she howls. “I never wanted love.” In the relentless “Soft Like a Flower,” Creevy bares it all over garage rock deep-fried in emo. The song ends in a maniacal laugh that could easily be mistaken for a cry: an actorly gesture that suggests Creevy is fiercely devoted to her role.
The maniacal laugh-cry is also a sign Creevy’s having fun again. It recalls the offbeat ridiculousness of early Cherry Glazerr gems like “Grilled Cheese,” a surprisingly sultry ode to comfort food. I Don’t Want You Anymore falls flat when Creevy opts for bubbly, optimistic indie pop like “Wild Times,” which doesn’t display the distinct artistic personality she has developed over the past decade. But the rest of the album’s back half soars, particularly “Sugar,” a slow-build rocker in which Creevy’s vocals take on an ominous lullaby lilt: “You make me wanna push my luck/Break my heart/I don’t care,” she sings. By the end, Creevy once again erupts in delirious laughter, but this time, there’s no mistaking it for tears—the only logical response is to start laughing along with her.


At once immersive and disorienting, Seth Horvitz’s second album as Rrose is dance music that erases the dancefloor.

Please Touch

In the beginning, Rrose made techno. Unusual techno, perhaps—heady, psychedelic, convoluted—but techno nonetheless. It maintained the genre’s recognizable form, based on four-on-the-floor beats and boom-tick cadences. It drew its minimalist aesthetic from the early-’90s sounds of artists like Robert Hood and Richie Hawtin, and it was in conversation with fellow travelers along the genre’s grayscale fringes—contemporaries like Sandwell District, Donato Dozzy, and Kangding Ray.
Rrose—American-born, London-based artist Seth Horvitz, who borrowed the alias from Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter ego—has simultaneously moonlighted in more avant-garde sounds. They collaborated with modular-synth pioneer and free improviser Bob Ostertag and recorded a 1971 composition by percussionist James Tenney. Rrose’s debut solo album, 2019’s Hymn to Moisture, struck a balance between their opposing influences, alternating between chugging rhythmic workouts and buzzing expanses of pure drone.
On their new album Please Touch, Rrose continues to move between sounds that flicker and sounds that throb, wreathing shuddering electronic pulses in opalescent waveshaping. But the proportions have shifted. Where Hymn to Moisture was neatly split between club tracks and ambient pieces, on Please Touch, the elements have fused, and it’s more difficult to discern one mode from the other. It’s all one glistening, churning morass, a cascading chain of vibrations that transcends electronic music’s conventional templates.
Rhythm and drone are inextricable in the opening “Joy of the Worm,” in which a nervous gamelan thrum taps away over low-end swells. There’s something almost rotor-like about the chopping percussion, suggesting a helicopter hovering motionless over a fetid swamp: The drums are in constant motion, yet the whole thing stays almost still, but for the rolling waves of bass. Other tracks attempt similar blends of motion and stasis. “Pleasure Vessels” is dub techno in the tradition of Basic Channel or the Chain Reaction label, just with all the beats blotted out; bursts of synth pile up over almost inaudibly burbling bass, suggesting overlapping layers of translucent materials, like onion skin or tulle.
There are a few purely beatless tracks, like “Disappeared” and the closing “Turning Blue,” in which microtonal harmonies and extraordinarily patient mixing yield immersive psychoacoustic effects in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros or Éliane Radigue. And on a few cuts, the balance tips back toward proper beats. Yet Rrose’s work is so rhythmically and timbrally complex that it bears little in common with standard contemporary dance music. “Rib Cage” begins with a machine-like hum and gradually spreads a flowing array of pulses and pings across the spectrum, from the deepest sub-bass to the prickliest high end. Superimposing insect chatter on turbine groan, it’s part engine room, part rainforest.
Rrose has described their approach as a process of feeding “seed” sounds through “elaborate webs of interrelated audio processing,” which might help explain why these tracks tend to develop in the way that they do, as if expanding outward from a single point, like an organic fractal. They often feel like attempts to map out chaos theory’s “butterfly effect”—the metaphorical postulation that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet might cause a tsunami on the other—in sound. “The Illuminating Glass” begins as the album’s most stripped-down track, just a half-speed kick drum and answering hi-hat swathed in noxious clouds of synth. But as it unfolds, individual drum hits ripple out in waves, and after a few minutes, every single element of the track is quivering violently. It’s a profoundly disorienting effect; you may find yourself snapping to attention and wondering exactly how you’ve gotten where you are. And in the track’s closing minutes of seesawing whirr, as the beats melt away, you may wonder if you had imagined them entirely.
There are few mile markers in Rrose’s music, few opportunities to get your bearings. Weirder and more mystifying than the majority of what passes for techno these days, Please Touch plays tricks on the mind and body. Like those carnival rides where the ground drops away, leaving you pinned to the wall of the rotating chamber, it’s dance music that erases the dancefloor, even as it makes you acutely aware of the physics of sound—the way the tiniest vibrations propagate into your ear canals and across your skin.


With production assistance from John McEntire, the Canadian indie rock kingpins return, tighter and more polished than ever.

Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record

Forgiveness Rock Record

Forgiveness is not a sentiment often associated with rock music. Anger, despair, infatuation, sure. But forgiveness is more complicated, and tougher to fit into a four-minute song. Broken Social Scene know all about heartbreak-- they've spent most of the last decade crafting songs about it with almost unparalleled zeal. Their story is filled with scurrilous encounters, backstabbings, and break-ups on par with most 70s arena-rockers, and they've crashed and rebuilt so many times that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who was where at any given moment. But they've also used that flexibility to their advantage: Their epochal 2002 breakout You Forgot It In People was the joyous sound of friends banding together to boost each other up, while 2005's Broken Social Scene was the dizzying sound of friends fizzing out into solo endeavors and outside pursuits.
Now they're back, and they're forgiving. Who, exactly? Each other, loves, bad decisions, humanity at large, worse decisions, the past, the future, culture, corporations, art, you, me, maybe even George W. Bush. (Well, maybe not him.) And while a 59-minute absolution session sounds excessive for even the most devout fans, Broken Social Scene aren't just throwing out hail marys here. Because forgiveness is hard, especially for a group this grand and this intertwined for this long. The album lets bygones go while acknowledging the pain and discipline involved, and does so while keeping with the band's indie-mixtape rep. There's a song that sounds like Pavement, one that sounds like the Sea and Cake (featuring Sea and Cake singer Sam Prekop), another like a Broadway adaptation of Children of Men, a weightless ballad that may double as an ode to masturbation, and a song that's basically five minutes of atmospheric pop perfection. Their ambition is intact.
Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too. Working with band hero, Tortoise/Sea and Cake drummer, and post-rock mastermind John McEntire for the first time, Broken Social Scene made sure to have their shit together. Considering the co-producer's experimental bona fides, it's surprising that this is the most song-based album the band has ever made-- every track but one contains vocals, and a couple seem to be filled with more words than the entirety of You Forgot It In People. Unlike their last album's sometimes indulgent cut-and-paste sonic collages, Forgiveness has distinct targets and leaves little room for wayward meanders.
The band's newfound tightness results in a few of the most chart-friendly songs in BSS history, although as usual, each seems to come with a built-in caveat to prevent the potential of radio play: the sweat-soaked "World Sick", with its massive crescendos building to one visceral, heart-pounding release after another, is nearly seven minutes long with extended instrumental intros and outros. "Texico Bitches", despite its misleading breezy accompaniment, is an increasingly topical indictment of big oil that repeats the word "bitches" 12 times. And the vocals on the beautiful, synth-laden "All to All" are serviceably performed by relative newcomer Lisa Lobsinger, where Leslie Feist's stronger, more possessed delivery may have pushed it into another weight class entirely. (Feist does show up on Forgiveness, but only for background vocals.)
As an alt-hippie with obsessions for Dinosaur Jr., Jeff Buckley, and Ennio Morricone, BSS main face Kevin Drew led the burgeoning band to somewhere completely fresh with You Forgot It In People, an album that read like a non-ironic, indie-rock Odelay for the early 2000s. For the most part, Drew and company are referencing the same beloved bands on Forgiveness, with one key addition: Broken Social Scene themselves. There are now marks that listeners expect them to hit, and they're nailed with focus and precision: the peppy, horn-laden track from Apostle of Hustle's Andrew Whiteman ("Art House Director"), the back-of-the-bus acoustic session ("Highway Slipper Jam"), the immense instrumental to end all immense instrumentals ("Meet Me in the Basement"). All of those tracks excellently fill their respective niches, but the fact that there are niches at all adds a bittersweet tinge to a band that once sounded like everything else and nothing else.
Which leads us to the indiscretion summary "Sentimental X's". It checks off another BSS box-- the subtly devastating Emily Haines-sung heart-tugger. "Off and on is what we want," sings Haines, narrating the band's gift-and-curse plight, "A friend of a friend you used to call/ Or a friend of a friend you used/ You used to call." Which is what Broken Social Scene is: a mess of friends using friends, loving friends, calling friends, wanting to call friends, and then not calling friends anymore. The connections are transitory but also indestructible. Ultimately, "Sentimental X's" is a love song; there's lots of forgiveness, but nobody feels sorry.


Lately I feel a little shaky. It rains too much and the coffee's too strong and the sirens are ...

Berlinette

Lately I feel a little shaky. It rains too much and the coffee's too strong and the sirens are too loud, too often. People aren't as pretty as they used to seem, and on top of that they're gradually electing the entire cast of the movie Predator to significant governorships. Minnesota, California: I think I saw Carl Weathers in Central Park yesterday with a stack of leaflets. When late November rolls around and someone asks what I'm thankful for, I might just give up and say Ellen Allien's Berlinette, which has made the past six or seven months a lot nicer.
That's the kind of love she inspires. Another Pitchforker came back from Berlin a few months ago, having seen her DJ at a party for her label, Bpitch Control, and said faux-hawked German boys had been lined up around the deck to bring her drinks. Thom Yorke's been going around talking about how great the label is, the cheat: yes, yet another cadre of ultra-fine German electronics. And earlier this year she released Berlinette, which is "serious," and "pop," and beautiful, and which I've had more success recommending to people than anything in years. It's a record that German techno enthusiasts and Björk fans can agree on; it tweaks and thumps and then pulls gorgeous ghostly pop out of it; it's big and solid and lovely.
How so? The truth is that it's just enchanting, in a way that has to do with something much more than the sonic inventiveness and precision engineering that I'll have to settle for discussing here. It's rare for artists to manage what Allien does-- to take the tweaky cutting edges of techno and IDM and electro and draw from them pop music evocative enough to entrance even people who are usually turned off by electronics and "repetitive beats." It's even rarer for an artist to manage that with anything like Berlinette's sense of mood and personality, which mostly transcends the mechanics of the sound. But Allien manages all of this, in about eleven different ways.
Just try one track: "Trashscapes". Her beats are like tiny hypercomplicated machines, with lots of pistons and articulated limbs; "Trashscapes" kicks in with a stiff, daunting one, one that pounds and then hangs in the air for a second before flipping over and starting again. Then come bursts of gnarled guitar, processed into a grim, extra-terrestrial chug-- the same way Allien's vocals are always processed into what feel like departure announcements from a spaceport on Mercury. At first we can't hear her: just micro-second clips and stutters popping over the mech-beat. Then she's singing and it feels heavy but it hasn't quite gelled into sense: "Wo is where/ What is when/ Why we are here." But when the guitars speed into an evil blur she comes out all steely-eyed with the record's mantra: "The past is a lighttrain to unknown trashscapes."
That's what she does, on the face of it: She blurs the line between "real" sounds and "fake" ones, weaving processed patches of voice and guitar directly into the laptopped complexity of her rhythms; on "Abstract Pictures" it's the clang of a sequencer that rings out clear and natural. On "Push" she indulges in the half-crazy tweakery of some of her labelmates, toying with stompy synth blurts and calling, "Push/ Push/ Kick your ass." When she goes pop it's not by watering down the beats and crooning seductively or anything like that; it's just by gathering her steady tech throb up into gorgeous sweeps of melody. "Sehnsucht", one of the record's other standouts, has a compositional swell that's like the best days of Orbital, another act that always had the same ghostly, personal sheen Allien conjures: the beat here is her second-best machine (see "Wish"), and the vocal is just another micro-processed blip, a half-syllable "Ah." It stutters in and takes its shape, and by the time the song draws up, roaring, there's no lyric that could be more right than the electronically pitched melody of those half-syllables.
But all that's only technical. If it were just that, Berlinette would be an outstanding record, but not so outstanding as this. No, Berlinette has something extra-- the sort of mood and magic that makes you want to bring Allien as many drinks as she'll let you buy her. It's in the hyper-pretty, otherworldly electro-funk of "Secret", in the almost Cure-like cerebral throb of "Open", and even in the embarrassingly bald, maybe even naïve lyric of "Wish", which, like any good moment of vulnerability, makes you like Allien that much more. "Need a planet without cars and wars/ I wish it could be true," she sings-- an almost strange thing to hear on a record full of alien machines.
So that's the thrill: realizing all over again just how evocative and gorgeous the stiff clatter of technology can be. You sit calmly listening, drifting off to somewhere else, and then you notice that the little people dancing inside your head could almost be jacking their limbs off to certain points, or that the sounds of power tools are peeking out between the sounds of androids singing arias. Oh, maybe it's not that amazing: It's just a record, after all, and one of plenty of great ones released this year. But I've spent half the year with it, and it only gets better, and I can't wait to hear how it sounds in a few months, when the Predator itself announces a dark-horse independent bid for the presidency.


Eleanor Friedberger's second solo album, which she co-wrote with alt-folk singer/novelist John Wesley Harding, feels like a travelogue of the mind. Personal Record is jam-packed with clever wordplay and fleeting emotions, but the tight, buoyant pop arrangements keep it from getting bogged down.

Personal Record

As one half of proggy brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces, the songs Eleanor Friedberger used to sing sounded like pop music as imagined by Thomas Pynchon, or maybe Carmen Sandiego: tirelessly globe-trotting, breathlessly complex, and just a little cartoony. In a voice that sounds like a perfect cross between Patti Smith, Stephen Malkmus, and a 19th century diction coach, Friedberger spun elaborate, wildly fictional travelogues (usually written by her brother, Matthew); in one Fiery Furnaces song she was a Michigan boat captain defending her cargo of blueberries against South Asian pirates; in another she sang in Innuit, and a few songs later she was also a high school queen bee caught in a labyrinthine plot involving credit card theft. Then something unexpected happened with the release of her first solo album, 2011's terrific Last Summer. She suddenly began to apply that same keen eye for meticulous detail, propulsive narrative, and ironic humor to the one character it seemed she'd never written about before: herself.
Last Summer was a sharply observed account of Friedberger's first decade or so in New York, where she moved in the early 2000s. At times, its confessional, meticulously detailed lyrics read like ripped-out diary pages, and its brilliance was so sneaky that it was the very definition of a grower. It demonstrated an exciting shift in her songwriting that she continues to explore on her excellent new album, Personal Record. Spinning unexpectedly compelling narratives out of party-hopping New York nights ("When I Knew") and solitary shut-in afternoons ("My Own World") alike, the songs on Personal Record feel like travelogues of the mind, entertaining accounts of adventures closer to home. “The last record I did was so specific and detailed,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s nice to have a record where you can catch a glimpse of the artist and their world, but this time I wanted something where people could insert themselves into it.” She co-wrote Personal Record with a new collaborator, alt-folk singer and novelist John Wesley Harding, and adding another skilled writer to the mix seems to have gotten her out of her own head a bit.
Occasionally, she nails the one-size-fits-all timeless pop lyric: the opening track’s vivid admission, “I’d rather be two inches from your face,” the elegantly sighed, “Love is an exquisite kind of pain/ And oh, since I saw you, I’ll never be happy again.” But memory’s a funny thing; it latches onto the sensory details, even when they’re somebody else’s. “When I Knew” so perfectly captures the excitement of a blossoming friendship between music nerds that the line “We both liked weird music, so you played me Soft Machine,” practically invites you to swap out the specifics for your own favorite band; ditto the scene of the infatuated new lovers reading an e-book in the back of a cab, or the girl curiously dressed as a Dexy’s Midnight Runner for Halloween. Contrary to what she might believe, the more detailed and specific Friedberger’s songs are, the easier it is to insert yourself into them.
Personal Record is so jam-packed with clever wordplay and fleeting, sometimes contradictory emotions (“I’ll Never Be Happy Again” is followed by the calisthenic skip of “Stare at the Sun”, a song about being dizzyingly happy) that it occasionally feels as much like a short story collection as it does an album. But the tight, buoyant pop arrangements keep it from getting bogged down. Despite Friedberger’s singular phrasing and voice, there’s something inviting and comfortingly familiar about Personal Record’s approach to pop melody. The great “She’s a Mirror” sounds at once like Hall & Oates covering “Lust for Life” and the Peanuts shuffling to a Harry Nilsson tune-- but its amiable melody and boingy bassline give an easy entry point to a song that's lyrically devious.
Like the title Personal Record itself, Friedberger’s songs use double meaning to great (and sometimes genuinely funny) effect, but they become suddenly poignant in the moments when those defenses fall away. “Other Boys” is one of the most candid, quietly devastating songs she’s ever written: It’s about the kind of casual, open relationship that, secretly, only one of the parties wants to be casual and open. In her ever-confident voice she pantomimes a shrug, but someone who didn’t care about the competition wouldn’t make a list of her guy’s side chicks as poetic and mythologized as the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships: “The long-tail pony with the thick, dark mane/ 14 hands, four thousand names,” “the spider you kissed in the stairwell,” and the subtly cutting, “that sometime star of stage and screen who had a bit part in a film back in her teens.” “There are other boys, too,” she insists, her about-face betrayed by the slightest tinge of melancholy. With each repetition, the line becomes a little harder to believe, and a little more heartbreaking.
Ultimately, though, Friedberger’s self-aware enough to be amused by the irony of confessional songwriting. This becomes explicit on “Singing Time”, Personal Record’s bittersweet finale. Over a muted, aqueous guitar, Friedberger finally lets go of a doomed relationship: “You could turn up late and miss the show, or sit in the middle of the very front row/ He would not know, he would not know.” It’s appropriately downcast until-- in a swell of synth and percussion-- the song suddenly takes flight. “Let’s go, my songs,” she sings, a meta-address that's somehow both playful and self-deprecating. “One day we will know more.” Up until then, the song’s been a tear-jerker, but in this moment it becomes oddly triumphant. It’s hard to think of many other songwriters in indie rock right now who’d be able to pull off that kind of tonal shift-- probably because very few are writing with half the precision, wit, and cool poise that Friedberger displays here.


With a slightly subtler approach, the post-metal band relies on familiar tricks, gesturing at widescreen emotions in an endless sea of sine wave swells.

Dimensional Bleed

Over the past decade of heavy shoegaze music, Holy Fawn have enjoyed a uniquely organic success story. The Arizona four-piece broke out with their 2018 debut, Death Spells, which they self-released online before it garnered re-releases from British punk/metal label Holy Roar and New York indie/emo mainstay Triple Crown. They’ve since found fans in post-hardcore-turned-prog mainstays Thrice, Swedish metal giants Cult of Luna, and perhaps most crucially, blackgaze icons Deafheaven, all of whom have invited Holy Fawn on tour. For modern fans of shoegaze, blackgaze, or post-metal, Holy Fawn have become the ultimate “recommended if you like” band. They’re the people’s champs.
It's easy to see why. Holy Fawn draw on some of the most beloved “epic” music of the past 30 years: the drawn-out crescendos of Explosions in the Sky, the mainstage (not dance tent) electronics of early M83, the textural lushness of Slowdive, the intimate grandeur of Sigur Rós, and of course, the Norway-via-California black metal screeches of Deafheaven. These are all bands that are dead serious in their sweeping melodrama, bands that seem tailor-made for soundtracking (or even creating) profound moments in listeners’ lives, and that’s what Holy Fawn aim for, too. Even before you press play, their new album, Dimensional Bleed, is full of song titles (“Death Is a Relief,” “True Loss,” “Lift Your Head”) that aim to evoke widescreen emotions.
Here’s the thing about those types of emotions, though: In real life, they’re completely unpredictable. You never know how you’re going to feel in the aftermath of a life-changing event, whether it be a breakup, a cross-country move, an unexpected death, or even just a random revelation about mortality while stargazing. Lyrically, Holy Fawn’s three vocalists are too opaque in their nature-infused mortality metaphors (“I am an ugly root/Knotting itself out of life”) to discern what, exactly, is eating away at them. But musically, the emotional cues are more baldly manipulative than the soundtrack of a daytime soap.
Picture this: a swell of warm, glitchy electronics, keening guitars, and intimate, close-mic’d singing. A gradual crescendo, louder guitars, heavy methodical drumming. Several minutes in, the tone shifts from hopeful to mournful, and all of the sudden: screaming. The tempo rarely rises above a dirge, the songs (including interludes) average out to five minutes apiece, and the screaming never, ever starts more than three minutes before the song ends—that would ruin the climax. Being formulaic isn’t always a bad thing—in some cases, it’s part of an artist’s charm—but when nearly all of Holy Fawn’s songs expect you to feel things without much deviation from the form, their albums resemble an endless sea of sine wave swells.
Dimensional Bleed introduces a bit more subtlety than Death Spells, with bookend tracks “Hexsewn” and “Blood Memory” in particular making use of minimalistic sound design that goes far beyond “rock band adds synths” stereotypes. These quieter moments are Holy Fawn’s most unpredictable—check out all of the tasteful tricks and effects deployed on the vocals and drums on gentle mid-album highlight “Amaranthine”—much as they were when the band first started prominently featuring more electronic textures on the back half of 2020’s The Black Moon EP. This sparkling, glitchy side is best married to their more bombastic tendencies on lead single “Death Is a Relief.” Through sudden beat switches, constantly churning Stranger Things synths, and satisfying exclamation marks (that spliced-in, breathy four-beat drum hit is very cool), it actually achieves that pit-of-the-stomach, missing-a-step-on-the-staircase feeling that is so often missing from Holy Fawn’s bold, underlined attempt at emotional resonance.
The black metal goblin rasp that inevitably shows up at the climax of “Death Is a Relief” is effective there and in a few other moments—particularly “Void of Light,” where it’s finally paired with drums that ever so slightly pick up the pace. In general though, Holy Fawn’s use of that very specific type of screaming feels like a patch-emblazoned battle vest thrown on to impress a friend’s older brother. There’s nothing else in their sound that’s metal in the slightest. Black metal in particular, defined by rapid-fire assaults of blastbeats and tremolo guitar picking, relies on an intensity that Holy Fawn’s heavy-lidded reveries, which fall squarely into the category of post-rock, never so much as hint at. In a crowded blackgaze landscape that’s quickly becoming just as stylistically restrictive as the genres it initially sought to leave behind, these hallmarks are still treated with blind reverence, despite the nontraditional settings.
In the press materials for Dimensional Bleed, Holy Fawn hammer home that they are covering “uncharted territory,” “blazing new trails,” and “inhabiting multiple states of sonic existence all at once.” But in 2022, is their combination of styles really all that revolutionary? A decade-plus ago, heavy, metal-inflected shoegaze was a tough sell (and a lot tougher to produce). Despite being critical successes, Deafheaven and Alcest were clowned relentlessly by metal purists, and Nothing spent years being either the only loud band or the only slow band on live bills, depending on whether they played with indie or hardcore acts. Holy Fawn have been welcomed by an existing scene with open arms. Perhaps what’s holding them back is a lack of the hunger and iconoclasm that pushed their forebears into uncomfortable, groundbreaking spaces.


On the 18-year-old New York rapper’s debut album, a pocketful of catchy melodies and bubbly rhythms don’t make up for a lack of anything interesting to say.

Virgo World

On his 2013 song “Lonely,” South Carolina rapper Speaker Knockerz sounds like C-3PO with a splash of AutoTune, backed by pianos soft enough for a lullaby. “I had to make a couple bands by my lonely,” he sings, and his expressionless voice suggests he’s trying to hold back tears over a stack of money, like Jada Pinkett Smith in the final scene of Set It Off. It was a regional hit, and became something bigger than that after his tragic death at 19 the following year. The song trickled its way up the East Coast to New York, and Speaker Knockerz’s handful of mixtapes became a lodestar for a new scene of singing rappers 700 miles from his hometown: artists like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Lil Tjay, Jay Gwuapo, and most obviously, Lil Tecca.
Coming from the Five Towns, a section of Long Island that abuts Queens, the 18-year-old Lil Tecca has made Speaker Knockerz’s impact on his music openly known. But even if he never admitted it, you’d be able to tell. “Ransom,” Tecca’s 2019 breakout moment, feels particularly indebted, as he glides over a bright and bubbly beat with a monotone flow, sounding like the kid who got called on by the teacher after sleeping at the back of the classroom. Tecca channels the style well, but there’s an element of Speaker Knockerz that mere imitation can’t capture: he was a writer, filling songs like his “Rico Story” trilogy with the narrative detail of a Carl Franklin neo-noir. On Lil Tecca's debut album Virgo World, he compensates for his lack of a pen with a pocketful of catchy rhythms and melodies, but they don’t have enough spark to elevate the filler.
This isn’t an attempt to nitpick about rappers who lack substance, but they do have to say some memorable or cool shit eventually. The lifestyle Lil Tecca documents in his songs is mundane, which isn’t necessarily a strike against him; plenty of other rappers have found ways to make the uneventful pop. Babyface Ray packs his songs with colorful specifics that make it feel as if you’re there, and Curren$y can make the most monotonous days sound glamorous. Virgo World’s boasts and observations are too generic to resonate in the same way. “For all that I been through and all that I’m goin through next/I’ma always be myself and we gon’ count up these checks,” he raps twice on “No Answers.”
Tecca’s storytelling faults are most clear on “When You Down.” Next to Lil Durk and Polo G, who are both pouring their hearts out, Tecca sing-raps about faceless haters and friends who have turned their backs on him, a writing crutch he leans on repeatedly. On “Insecurities,” he sings, “Real nigga shit, niggas not how they seem like/Real nigga shit, I’m goin’ up and niggas seem tight.” These impersonal and unspecific lines are made even more lifeless by a Taz Taylor and Nick Mira beat that’s like a watered down version of an instrumental from Popcaan’s Fixtape.
Since Lil Tecca emerged on SoundCloud in 2018, his best songs have been the ones where the melodies, production, and good vibes outweigh the blandness of whatever he’s saying. In keeping with that trend, Virgo World’s strongest cut is “Selection,” a Skrillex and DJ Scheme pop record that captures the fun of that “Sorry,” “Where Are Ü Now,” and “What Do You Mean?” summer of 2015. Tecca also has an affinity for light Afro-Fusion records; “Level Up” and “Closest to Heaven” are a pair of moody, slow-wining dance cuts that I selfishly wish were released in June. But these glimpses of vibrancy don’t come often enough.
Nobody is asking Lil Tecca to be profound, or even to make sense. But at least give us the full picture of what you’re talking about. Who turned their back on you? Who is fake? What are you wearing? What are you drinking? What city are you in? Who or what is making you feel this way? These sorts of details helped Speaker Knockerz mixtapes travel from South Carolina and into Tecca’s Long Island home. So far, it’s hard to imagine Lil Tecca’s music making the same sort of journey.

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The seventh album from Ice-T’s heavy metal band sounds like a TED Talk set to a bracing thrashcore/groove metal soundtrack.

Bloodlust

It takes a special balance to straddle the line between piousness and self-parody, but Tracy Marrow, aka Ice-T, has long pulled it off with gusto. Since the beginning of his 1987 hip-hop debut Rhyme Pays, Marrow has relished his self-appointed role as something like Crenshaw, Los Angeles’ unofficial ambassador to the world. As Marrow once explained to Arsenio Hall in 1989, his m.o. has been to intentionally paint exaggerated scenarios in order to show the world what street hustling life is like while also discouraging black youth from pursuing a life of crime. In 1990, Marrow carried the same approach over into metal group Body Count, which he founded with southpaw guitarist Ernie Cunnigan aka Ernie C.
In an interlude on Body Count’s seventh album, Bloodlust, Marrow explains that he started the band to provide the metal-loving Cunnigan with a musical vehicle while also expressing his own love for three key influences: Black Sabbath, Suicidal Tendencies, and Slayer. If you don't mind Marrow’s didactic style, the impromptu Q&A comes off with some charm, as if Marrow were standing at a lectern expounding on the band’s history. (Hell, if Steve Albini can take questions halfway through Shellac’s shows, why shouldn’t Marrow do the same on his own records?) In fact, much of this album plays like the 2015 TED Talk Marrow gave at the Sing Sing maximum-security prison, only set to a bracing thrashcore/groove metal soundtrack.
On his own, Ice-T has maintained household-name status for his 17-year role as Detective Tutuola on the “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” TV series. But the last time Body Count caused any real ripples in the zeitgeist came in the summers of ’91 and ’92, first as a surprise addition to Ice-T’s rap set on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour, and then as the source of a heated controversy over their song “Cop Killer.” Marrow ultimately agreed to pull “Cop Killer” from later pressings of the band’s 1992 debut. Since then, the band has basically repeated itself, almost becoming a heritage act before its time. These days, Body Count can operate in a comfortable space satisfying the public’s niche appetites for vintage metal and hardcore.
But now, owing to the recent occurrences of police brutality captured on video, Body Count stand poised to hit a nerve once again. Marrow attempts to do so most blatantly on “No Lives Matter.” No surprise, he explains the song’s motives in a monologue before it even begins. It’s not, as the ironic title might suggest, a renunciation of the Black Lives Matter movement, but a reminder that although racism is very much alive, power elites view all poor people with the same inhumane disregard. Similarly, Marrow waxes professorial at the beginning of the title track, where he says: “Since the beginning of time, humans have killed each other because they disagreed... The ability to kill is as innate as our ability to love.”
Needless to say, Marrow likes to spell things out. On Bloodlust, he sounds like he’s narrating a profanity-laced “Sesame Street” segment: Imagine an Ice-T muppet popping out of garbage cans shouting, “They’re shootin’ at cops/They’re pushing the line/Racism is high/The country’s divided, you know the fuck why.../The public is dumb.../Our leaders are evil!” Bloodlust is like that; it doesn’t take long to feel like you’re being patronized. That said, Marrow—who doesn’t rhyme on Body Count albums—is simply following in the footsteps of his most pointedly direct hardcore influences. For proof, just look at the Exploited medley he recorded with Slayer in 1993. But his style hasn’t changed one iota since then. Neither, really, has the rest of the band’s. They keep the music raw enough that it sounds almost-but-not-quite amateurish—again, following in the hardcore/early-thrash tradition—while Marrow’s willingness to indulge in comic absurdity with the lyrics makes Body Count’s preachiness more palatable.
Bloodlust opens with a mock emergency broadcast announcement, in which Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine announces that martial law has been declared by the Department of Homeland Security, that gatherings of two or more people are now illegal, that “all traitors will be shot,” and that “America is now engaged in civil war.” It’s hokey as hell. But what makes Ice-T still valuable in a world where we now have Killer Mike, Dälek, the Coup, and Immortal Technique is his unique ability to deliver a message of upheaval that also feels celebratory. Later in the opening track, there’s a giddy sense of anticipation when Ice yells “I’m feelin’ the tension/Don’t tell me you don’t.../Rich or poor, urban war/This shit just might jump off tonight” over squealing leads. At moments like that, Ice-T and Ernie C capture the energy of a party record while urging us to give serious consideration to some of the most naggingly persistent issues of our time—an accomplishment regardless of how spotty Bloodlust gets.


Though just as charged and confrontational as any of his other projects, the rapper’s latest album is uninhibited and proud of it.

LP!

The chip on JPEGMAFIA’s shoulder has only grown bigger with time. His music—a blend of rap, noise, and punk filtered through the cultural vacuum of the internet—has always existed in the space between brash and sly, hollowing out the center of that Venn diagram with a jagged shovel. Every project, from 2015’s Communist Slow Jams onward, sways from hazy synths to bludgeoning boom-bap to earnest covers of pre-Y2K ballads on a dime, mixing and matching the styles as fresh perspectives on a well-established formula. His two breakout records—2018’s independent Veteran and his 2019 major-label debut All My Heroes Are Cornballs—mine from different ends of the noise-rap spectrum, but JPEG’s humor and world-weary thoughts on racism and music industry bullshit are the adapters through which he’s able to process any musical energy. His rage is palpable while being offset by a deep passion for craft and left-field pop culture reference.
JPEG’s notoriety has increased exponentially since the late 2010s, netting him guest spots on tours with Vince Staples and his first entry on the Billboard 200 with Cornballs. This rise has also eroded what little patience he had for the rap industry machine, and on his latest project, LP!, his final under EQT and Republic, he’s practically bursting a vein at the idea of freedom: “My time in the music industry is over because I refuse to be disrespected by people who aren’t [behaving] respectably in the first place,” he said in a note on the album’s Bandcamp page. LP! supercharges the ire and catharsis of this moment in his career, playing up the contrast between JPEG’s abrasive cheekiness and his warmest batch of beats to date.
For starters, LP! has been released in two forms: the “Online” version—uploaded to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.—and the “Offline” version available on YouTube and Bandcamp, which boasts a handful of extra songs, extended versions of existing ones, and a slightly tweaked tracklist. Even the project’s title—the most basic descriptor imaginable with an exclamation point at the end—feels like a middle finger or at least a metatextual rib poke.
JPEG’s sense of humor is clearly intact, and his myriad influences continue to pull his work in strange directions. A three-song run near the middle of the album typifies these strengths: The ghostly wails and funky bass behind JPEG’s thundering voice on “REBOUND!” are immediately followed by “💯,” a sea of synths flowing around a warped vocal sample. And then there’s “OG!,” which takes a sampled beatbox and rapping session and adds drums that blast like mortar shots. One moment he’s shouting out Bad Bunny and the late MF DOOM, and the next he’s interpolating Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time.” This fusion of past and present is playful without feeling contrived, the beats’ minimal nature never diluting the raw mashups on display.
LP! has enough laughs and smirks to scan as an overall fun time, but the lyrics further plumb the depths of JPEG’s contempt for people who’ve crossed him. His aggro tendencies have always been at the forefront of his art, but there’s more venom this time, more kiss-offs, threats, and vague stories to fuel his glitchy fire. “Why would I pray for your health?/Baby, I pray for myself,” he screams on “REBOUND!” “TIRED, NERVOUS, & BROKE!” in particular, spews at various targets, including someone “buying a ticket to get beat up at my show.” For all the energy behind his vocals, there’s a dead-eyed focus to the sneak disses peppered throughout LP!. His raps land firmly within the established pockets of beats, but each song is so distinct and JPEG’s writing is so fluid and witty that no two moments within the album’s humid atmosphere sound the same. “DIKEMBE!” and single “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” rank among the best pure performances of his career, and they’re not the only highlights.
As artistically assured as JPEG sounds across LP!, the sequencing between versions of the album occasionally snags the momentum. In the Online version, the fourth song “END CREDITS!” segues seamlessly into “WHAT KIND OF RAPPIN’ IS THIS?” while the Offline version smash cuts from “CREDITS” to the bonus tracks “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” and “GOD DON’T LIKE UGLY.” “HAZARD” and “UGLY!” are good songs on their own, but they would have benefitted from a later placement. JPEG claims the Offline version is the one he stands behind the most, his way to circumvent sample clearance issues and an attempt to pull a Frank Ocean on his former label and keep his true artistic intentions in-house. If that’s the case, the sequence and the few unnecessary tracks derail an otherwise tight experience.
That sense of chaos has always come with the JPEGMAFIA brand. He isn’t just a collage of his influences and experiences—they all flow through him simultaneously. It’s the laughter, anger, and passion of a rap fanatic unafraid to declare his love for Terror Squad, AEW wrestling, and twinkling synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Hatsune Miku song. None of these things are foreign to rap, but none of them play out quite like they do on a JPEGMAFIA song. Though just as charged and confrontational as any of his other albums, LP! is uninhibited and proud of it, shit-talk from the eye of an ever-evolving storm.

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Lil Pump’s wingman goes through the motions on an aimless, half-baked new 10-song mixtape with “Nice for What” producer Murda Beatz.

Bless Yo Trap

Miami rapper Smokepurpp is best known as Lil Pump’s wingman and understudy, the tag-team partner brawling at his side at shows—a strung-out-seeming, assault rifle-wielding wildman in body armor. He’s the 20-year-old madcap with a baby bottle full of lean tattooed on his stomach, a catchphrase-roaring reject fit for casting in a “Jackass” reboot. There isn’t much else that defines him, and his unruliness doesn’t really enhance his impersonal music. When people talk about SoundCloud rap, a term that’s quickly becoming a catch-all for an entire generation of young rap refugees, they’re speaking specifically about rappers like Purpp. If he’s not posing as G.G. Allin or proudly declaring his music “ignorant,” he’s staring dead-eyed into the void and rapping in circles about nothing in particular. On the heels of his 2017 debut, DEADSTAR, he’s released Bless Yo Trap, a 10-song mixtape made in collaboration with buzzing Canadian producer Murda Beatz. The main thing he accomplishes in its 23-minute running time is exposing himself as a wash-out simply going through the motions.
Bless Yo Trap takes its name from a DEADSTAR cut that felt like a ritual for the Trap Gods, an unholy offering to Young Thug and Chief Keef. The tape lacks that energy. Murda and Purpp made almost the entire project in a night, and it sounds just like that—in the spirit of SoundCloud, the reason this exists is simply because it can. Half the songs on Bless Yo Trap feel halfway finished, rapped without purpose and released into the world with a shrug. Four of them clock in under two minutes, continuing rap’s ongoing obsession with ridiculously short songs.
Like his friend Pump, Smokepurpp needs his songs to be over as quickly as possible. He isn’t quite as committed to unrelenting motion, but his verses are just as empty and unproductive. Where Pump can occasionally thrill, Purpp is mostly stupefying. His punchlines don’t have set-ups, and sometimes he bails out on his own ideas midway through stating them. On most songs, he doesn’t seem to even be following a specific train of thought—he’s pretty much just rambling into the mic, as if he’s been asked to present a project on the spot by a teacher who caught him sleeping in class.
Every once in a while he stumbles upon something mildly droll (“Your bitch tryna find the circumference/And I got hoes in abundance,” or “I don’t wanna fuck I tell her suck my watch”) or wanders in a somewhat interesting direction, as on “Pray”: “My Fiji and diamonds the same thing/Scope on that bitch it got good aim/Choppa make a nigga do the rain dance.” But the songs are all circuitous, often taking roundabout ways to say the exact same things about the color of his diamonds, the nature of his shootouts, or which drugs he’s doing in which designer outfits. His verses are the rap equivalent of Mad Libs. In certain situations, Purpp’s aggro raps seem to channel bluntness, chasing an “idgaf” punk aesthetic. But on Bless Yo Trap, his rapping is simply artless and unimaginative.
The X factor on this project should be Murda, who, having produced hits for Drake (“Portland”), 2 Chainz (“It’s a Vibe,” “4 AM”), Migos (“MotorSport”), and Travis Scott (“Butterfly Effect”), broke through even further earlier this week with Drake’s “Nice for What,” the current No. 1 song in the country. Murda is a versatile beat maker with undeniable instincts; without him, this effort would be a lost cause. His talents can be felt in the spooky synth throb on “123” and the metallic strobe of “Do Not Disturb.” But his beats don’t suit Purpp the way Jersey pioneer (and SoundCloud rap architect) Ronny J’s distorted bass abstractions do. The life expectancy of these songs isn’t much longer than the time it’d take to face a blunt.
There’s little on Bless Yo Trap to suggest that Smokepurpp has much room for growth, and there’s even less to suggest he cares about that. He’s unbothered and myopic, as many are at his age, stoked to be handling more money than he knows what to do with, simply for turning stunts into songs. “Everywhere I go I keep that thang on me/In the club I flex on niggas that are older than me,” he raps on “For the Gang,” which seems to be the general idea: He’s young and he’s already richer than the adults around him, and he got that way doing what he’s doing, so why stop? Which, fair. Purpp isn’t completely incompetent—he’s finding his way around melodies and he is capable at mimicry—but the time is coming when he runs out of tricks, when being able to ape the sounds of the moment won’t be enough, when “SoundCloud rap” itself is another long-forgotten tag on blog posts. Bless Yo Trap suggests that time is rapidly approaching.


Blondie's third and best full-length-- a whipsmart album from the days when there was chart pop made by and for adults-- is an oddly undiscovered gem with charms that extend far beyond its iconic, oft-compiled singles.

Parallel Lines: Deluxe Edition

"Blondie is a band," read the group's initial press releases. The intent of this tagline was clear, as was the need for it: "This is an accomplished bunch of musicians, a tight, compact group versed in everything from surf to punk to girl group music to erstwhile new wave," it seemed to say, "but, oh-- I'm sure you couldn't help but focus on blonde frontwoman Debbie Harry." In America, however, people didn't notice the group quite so quickly. Their first two records-- a switchblade of a self-titled debut and its relatively weak follow-up Plastic Letters-- birthed a pair of top 10 hits in the UK but had been, at best, minor successes in the U.S.; the debut didn't chart, while Plastic scraped the top 75. Despite savvy marketing-- the group filmed videos for each of its singles, that now-iconic duochromatic cover photo-- the group's third and easily best album, Parallel Lines, didn't take off until they group released "Heart of Glass", a single that abandoned their CBGB roots for a turn in the Studio 54 spotlight. Though its subtle charms included a bubbling rhythm, lush motorik synths, and Harry's remarkably controlled and assured vocal, "Heart of Glass" started as a goof, a take-off on the upscale nightlife favored outside of Blondie's LES home turf.
The swift move from the fringes to the top of the charts tagged Blondie as a singles group-- no shame, and they did have one of the best runs of singles in pop history-- but it's helped Parallel Lines weirdly qualify as an undiscovered gem, a sparkling record half-full of recognized classics that, nevertheless, is hiding in plain sight. Landing a few years before MTV and the second British Invasion codified and popularized the look and sound of 1980s new wave, Parallel Lines' ringing guitar pop has entered our collective consciousness through compilations (built around "Heart" plus later #1s "Call Me", "Rapture", and "The Tide Is High"), ads, film trailers, and TV shows rather than the album's ubiquity. Time has been kind, however, to the record's top tier-- along with "Heart of Glass", Parallel boasts "Sunday Girl" and the incredible opening four-track run of "Picture This", "Hanging on the Telephone", "One Way or Another", and "Fade Away and Radiate". The songs that fill out the record ("11:59", "Will Anything Happen?", "I'm Gonna Love You Too", "Just Go Away", "Pretty Baby") are weak only by comparison, and could have been singles for many of Blondie's contemporaries, making this one of the most accomplished pop albums of its time.
In a sense, that time has long passed: Blondie-- like contemporaries such as the Cars and the UK's earliest New Pop artists-- specialized in whipsmart chart music created by and for adults, a trick that has all but vanished from the pop landscape. Parallel Lines, however, is practically a blueprint for the stuff: "Picture This" and "One Way or Another" are exuberant new wave, far looser than the stiff, herky-jerky tracks that would go on to characterize that sound in the 80s; "Will Anything Happen?" and the band's cover of the Nerves' "Hanging on the Telephone" are headstrong rock; "11:59" does run-for-the-horizon drama, while "Sunday Girl" conveys a sense of elegance. The record's closest thing to a ballad, the noirish "Fade Away and Radiate", owes a heavy debt to the art-pop of Roxy Music.
Harry herself was a mannered and complex frontwoman, possessed of a range of vocal tricks and affectations. She was as at home roaming around in the open spaces of "Radiate" or "Heart of Glass" as she was pouting and winking through "Picture This" and "Sunday Girl" or working out front of the group's more hard-charging tracks. That versatility and charm extended to her sexuality as well-- she had the sort of gamine, sophisticated look of a French new wave actress but always seemed supremely grounded and approachable, almost tomboyish. (That approachability was wisely played up in the band's choice of key covers throughout its career-- "Hanging on the Telephone", "Denis", and "The Tide Is High" each position Harry as a romantic pursuer with a depth and range of emotions rather than simply as an unattainable fantasy.)
Already into her thirties-- ancient by pop music standards-- when Blondie released its debut album, Harry (and many of her bandmates) had years of industry experience and music fandom; at the turn of the next decade, they would combine pop and art impulses like few bands before or since. The lush, shiny sound of Blondie still greatly informs European pop-- which pulls less from hip-hop and R&B than its American counterpart-- as evidenced by the Continent's best recent pop architects and artists (producers Richard X and Xenomania, plus Robyn, Girls Aloud, and Annie); in America, however, the group is oddly seems tied to the past, a product of its era. Even the release of this record is built on the tentative need to celebrate its 30th anniversary. (An opportunity not fully explored: This latest reissue of the record includes a new album cover, as well as a DVD with four videos of television performances and a quartet of mostly unneeded extras-- the 7" edit of "Heart of Glass", a French version of "Sunday Girl", and a pair of remixes.) In that sense, this isn't a record that needs to be re-purchased-- if you own it already, skip this. Sadly, I get the feeling not many people under a certain age do own the record, however, which justifies the reason for trying to re-introduce it to a new audience-- it's still as sparkling and three-dimensional as ever.


The noise of Bill Orcutt’s acoustic guitar days is dialed back on his latest album. It features shimmering solo electric guitar that charts new sounds for one of music’s premiere abstractionists.

Bill Orcutt

Bill Orcutt’s guitar playing has an apocalyptic energy. Harry Pussy’s blown-apart blues records and the torrent of solo acoustic records he’s made since 2009 are rather far apart compositionally, but they’re united in the frantic way he chews up and spits out his instrument. Low parts rumble like mushroom clouds on the horizon. Piercing trebly plucks buzz like swarming locusts. Erratic rhythms and the off-key ramblings punctuate all the more melodic parts. Orcutt plays with the spirit of a doomsday preacher, spewing surreal, dark imagery from a guitar with only four strings running down the neck of his acoustic.
These moments have always been starkest and most harrowing when he takes on recognizable songs from the continuum of American pop history—a tradition he's tackled at various points over his solo career, most prominently on 2013's A History of Every One. There’s something so twisted and unsettling about hearing only the ghosts of familiar melodies, surrounded by instrumental rubble. It’s like coming back to a familiar cityscape, long after it's been ravaged by disaster.
Orcutt’s new self-titled record is largely a departure from the desolation. It’s his first solo electric guitar album, after nearly a decade-playing his four-stringed contraption. He leans mostly on a clean guitar sound, with just the buzz of the amp as accompaniment. But the amplification does allow him a few new tricks, each of which makes the record seem a little brighter.
Most of these pieces start slow, plucked lightly, but at high volume. Every creaky finger slide is teeth-chattering, like you’re listening from inside of one of his pickup’s magnetic coils. A version of “Ol Man River,” from the 1927 musical Show Boat and to which he’s nodded on another of his cover-heavy records, allows Orcutt to demonstrate a dynamic range that he was only able to wring from his guitar by brute force. Volume and texture become new dimensions to explore. He swings from bluesy ambience to dense thickets of barely-consonant notes, diving back and forth between the two with a slippery energy because of the unpredictable shimmer of his new instrument. He’s always been a great improviser, but you can hear him excitedly charting new sounds and melodic runs. There’s a sense of life to it, if only because of the variation he allows himself.
Consequently, his playing takes on a softer, spacier character. You can see it developing in videos of recent live performances, where the slaps and mutilations of his acoustic guitar days are largely replaced by slow, thoughtful musings. He’s relishing in the sounds themselves rather than charting new constellations with his sputtered notes. He still mostly shirks the melodies of the songs he's covering in favor of spiritual approximations—a combustible version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” is even more tattered and droopy than Jimi Hendrix’s famed rendition. But there's something more deliberately approachable about the melodies he uses here. He meditates in the spaces in between phrasings, allowing the more volatile segments to linger like light trails in your vision.
Even when he spools together dense sections—like on “O Platitudes!”—these are pieces of tensile strength and glimmering beauty, more like arachnoid webbing than the clouds of toxic soot he spit up before. Versions of “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “White Christmas” in particular showcase his fascination with dissonance and deconstruction, pushing familiar songs into abstraction. But by and large, his playing bubbles calmly, which is a good, if unfamiliar look for him. It’s a reminder that after destruction, there can be rebirth—greenery poking through the soot and ash.


It's hard to imagine a voice more equipped to puff new life into "MTV Unplugged" than Florence Welch's, but the series' stripped-back approach doesn't do her any favors.

MTV Unplugged

To answer your first question: Yes, they still do these. "MTV Unplugged" was once a showcase for pop culture writ impossibly large-- a place where the entire world could gasp at Gene Simmons' bare face or where Kurt Cobain could introduce over five million record buyers to the Vaselines. But in recent years, the show's institutional power has fizzled, and its most recent installments have featured tepid, obligatorily low-lit performances from are-they-really-that-famous? acts like 30 Seconds to Mars and Young the Giant. Which is why Florence and the Machine's Unplugged instalment feels so promising. One of the more compelling pop acts to spring up in recent years, it's hard to imagine a voice more equipped to puff new life into the series than that of celestially soulful frontwoman Florence Welch. As on mega-hits like "Dog Days Are Over" and "Shake It Out", Welch has displayed a talent for sprawling her demons and heartbreak across canvases bigger than the sky: Every song she's ever sung has been writ large.
And occasionally, that's the problem. While her promising 2009 debut, Lungs, had the skittish, genre-hopping restlessness of an artist still settling into her sound, the 12 tracks on its followup, Ceremonials, came in only one size: gigantic. Even the ballads beat with earth-shaking percussion were gilded with epic, Greek choral background vocals and all other varieties of sonic baubles. Though Welch's voice is undeniably powerful, the songs beneath it all seemed well-composed and deeply felt, but their emotional impact was often blunted by producer Paul Epworth's unrelenting maximalism, ramped up from his work on Welch's debut. Which makes them perfect candidates for the classic scaled-back, stripped-down approach, right? You'd think so.
In quite a few cases, the Unplugged treatment does work wonders. The opening number, "Only if for a Night", is more arresting here than it is kicking off Ceremonials, where its haunting power (the song is about being visited in a dream by the ghost of a loved one: typical Florence stuff) was interrupted by a superfluous, glitchy beat. The Unplugged version gives the song much-needed room to breathe, and with fewer distractions the searing imagery of Welch's lyrics have a chance to float to the surface. "And the grass was so green against my new clothes," she trills, losing herself in the song's second verse, "And I did cartwheels in your honor dancing on tip-toes/ My own secret ceremonials before the service began/ In the graveyard, doing handstands." It's an oddly joyous funeral rite, but it's Welch articulating the feeling she plumbs best-- deriving light from the deepest darkness and feeling more at home in the world of spirits than the corporeal one. Same goes for "Breaking Down". On Ceremonials, that song's edges are padded with stately chamber-pop echoes, as though to protect Welch from bruises as she wrestles her demons to the ground. The sparse arrangement of the Unplugged version allows Welch to find deeper and even more unsettling emotion in the song, transforming the chorus from a pop hook to something like a moaning, seasick dirge.
Some of the greatest "MTV Unplugged" moments have been somewhat unlikely covers (Maxwell doing Kate Bush! Nirvana doing Lead Belly!), and here we get Welch adding to this enduring trope with her take on "Try a Little Tenderness". It's a lovely vocal performance (she hits a note early on that will probably prompt someone to book her for an upcoming Whitney tribute), but it also brings into focus the problem with her Unplugged as a whole: Its emotional range is decidedly limited. Welch's "Try a Little Tenderness" is mournful and utterly devoid of playfulness, and-- though no one's going to fault her for her putting her own signature spin on a classic-- so is every other moment of this performance. Which means that "Tenderness" bleeds right into the song after it, an acoustic arrangement of the power-ballad "No Light, No Light". Her twangy duet with Josh Homme, a cover of the Johnny Cash and June Carter song "Jackson", provides a little deviation, but not much.
Many of these songs might sound good on their own, but listening to them one after the other exposes their repetitions. There's only a certain number of times you can listen to Welch feeling lost in the verse and then found, transcendently, in the bombast of the chorus before it all starts to feel like a package of "Amazing Grace"-themed magnetic poetry, with each new track shuffling the elements around just so. Unlike one of Welch's songs, though, Unplugged is a decrescendo, and the performance runs out of steam by the time she gets to two of her best songs, "Dog Days are Over" and "Shake it Out". The latter, a torch song that has enough oomph not just to move mountains but to pick them up and punt them, peters out into a disappointingly tepid finale.
No one who listens to Unplugged will accuse Welch of being an untalented singer, but they might be left wanting more from the material she lends her voice to. Fans will enjoy hearing Welch's songs opened up in this format, but her Unplugged definitely doesn't rank among the classics of the series. The artists who have been responsible for the best and most enduring Unplugged albums-- Nirvana, Lauryn Hill, and Jay-Z's collaboration with the Roots-- all used the candle-lit stage to explore new directions in their respective sounds. For Welch, it serves the opposite end: It displays the boundlessness of her vocal talent but finds her tethered to a frustratingly limited aesthetic.


Named in honor of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Minneapolis-based musician’s shadowy EP is an imaginative investigation of religious and sexual tensions.

ROSETTA EP

Dua Saleh is terrified of being tokenized. The 25-year-old Minneapolis-based artist holds identities that people tend to poke, prod, and fixate on: immigrant, refugee, Black, Muslim, activist, non-binary. They boldly engage with these facets of themself in their music anyway. They’ve sung in Arabic. They’ve released an ode to Black victims of murderous cops, promising the song’s proceeds to a radical hometown organization. Their new EP, Rosetta, is named for Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the oft-forgotten architect of rock’n’roll who straddled Christian and secular spaces, though Saleh finished recording before choosing the name. Only in hindsight did Saleh consider Tharpe’s style and story, particularly her failed romantic relationship with collaborator Marie Knight. But the artist reserves their sharpest criticism for the religious zealots who demonize queer people.
Rosetta doesn’t relay queer life with the sort of warm, danceable tracks that bookended Saleh’s first release, Nūr, whose breakout single “Sugar Mama” described a romantic prospect who seemed to fetishize Saleh, too. Instead, Nūr’s harrowing “Survival” may be Rosetta’s clearest predecessor. On that eerie track, Saleh wrestled with the devil and tried to clear their name. On Rosetta, Saleh embraces sin, addressing it directly. “I know you,” they tell it on “windhymn.”
Hoping to satirize the belief that queer people are destined for fire and brimstone in the afterlife, Rosetta features archetypally nefarious queer characters over haunting soundscapes by the EP’s executive producer, Psymun. Saleh is the victim of a lusty enchantress on “umbrellar,” a sexual aggressor on “smut,” and, most memorably, a Hadean slick-talker named Lucifer LaBelle on “hellbound.” The song twists Rosetta’s hip-hop cadences, pop elements, and rock thrashes into a whirlwind of chaos. It is the project’s thesis, combining musical elements that appear throughout: a creeping, skeletal melody that builds into nightmarish distortion, accompanied by Saleh’s steady flow and the light, long sound of their singing, like they’re casting a spell. As Lucifer LaBelle, a brash queer and trans figure who takes pleasure in seduction, Saleh conjures the underworld without actually condemning anyone to it. “Why you fucking hellbound?” they ask instead.
In interviews, Saleh has not been coy about Rosetta’s aims and subtext, which is important, because their writing is often so abstract it could feel meaningless without explanation. They got their start in poetry, writing dark pieces that worried their teachers. Like challenging, personal poetry, Rosetta’s lyrics are heavy on imagery, but the images are disparate and rapid. On intro “cat scratch,” Saleh summons a bloody cheek, dank air, flowering plants, and a toothless raptor within 30 seconds. Sometimes, Saleh’s accessibility is strategic. “smut” ends in soft Arabic warbling that they’re reluctant to translate to English, preferring to reserve an element of their music for a fanbase that can recognize it.
What Saleh and Psymun do best is communicate by mood. “cat scratch” feels unorganized, but there’s a sharpness to its text. Throughout Rosetta, the team creates intrigue and darkness without camp—but without Saleh saying so, the satirical embodiment of religious spite is often unclear, even on “hellbound.” Saleh’s coded lyrics present their vantage point without compromise or commodification, but listeners may still find their ideas difficult to parse. The hexed feeling of the music strikes a nerve, but the tape’s true villain—institutional hate—remains obscured. Luckily, Dua Saleh is an astute and generous guide.


The confrontational Brooklyn-based goth-metal outfit get a decadent box set that celebrates their sensuality and pathos as well as their uglier side.

None More Negative

Type O Negative sounded how clove cigarettes smell, how crushed red velvet feels, how black hair dye looks when it stains your bathroom sink. Led by singer and bassist Peter Steele—a towering figure with bone structure to die for, best described as either Evil Thor or Dracula with a gym membership—these Brooklyn-based purveyors of goth metal spent their career exploring the genre’s inherent tension between seriousness and schtick. Originally released on Record Store Day in a limited run and now reissued (on gorgeous green vinyl), None More Negative packages nearly that entire career, featuring all six albums from their years on Roadrunner Records. (Their final effort, Dead Again, was released on another label and isn’t included here.) It’s a suitably massive set for a band best known for its eerie epics.
The best-known of these kick off 1993’s Bloody Kisses: “Christian Woman” explores its subject’s sublimation of sexuality into the crucified body of Christ with all the subtlety of “Ken Russell’s The Devils: The Musical.” It continues with “Black No. 1,” an affectionate send-up of a goth girl’s beauty regimen that launched the band into the public consciousness, via a striking black-and-white video that received heavy Beavis and Butthead rotation. Both songs showcase Steele’s distinctive, vampiric baritone, complete with theatrically rolled R’s and overemphasized consonants (“on her milk-white neck-kkh, the devil’s mark-k”). The man eroticized diction.
Steele shared vocal duties with his gifted guitarist Kenny Hickey, who handled the shouty bits; over time, this allowed Steele to hone his voice into something not just creepy or sexy but actually romantic, even abject. He closes October Rust’s anthemic “Love You to Death” by plaintively asking the object of his affection “Am I good enough for you?”, clearly already believing the answer to be “no.”
World Coming Down goes even further down this guilt-ridden road. It’s effectively a concept album about the death of people close to Steele, who by then was dealing with life-threatening addictions of his own. (He died of an unrelated aortic aneurysm in 2010.) Two songs—the savage, hook-laden “Everyone I Love Is Dead” and the harrowing and bittersweet “Everything Dies”—tackle that pain by wondering if it’s worth going on without those he’s lost. The song’s ferocity emerges from the band’s hulking exterior and Steele’s lyrical vulnerability, which sounds trapped inside it.
The music itself displayed a similar duality, alternating between doom-laden dirges and swirling psychedelia. The latter element manifested not just in the Type O’s choice of covers (Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” Seals & Croft’s “Summer Breeze,” an honest-to-god Beatles medley) or in its nickname (“The Drab Four”), but in lush original compositions. My current favorite: Life Is Killing Me’s “(We Were) Electrocute,” an ode to turning neighborhood heads side-by-side with an old flame. These songs showcase keyboardist and producer Josh Silver’s ability to create colorful soundscapes that belie the band’s strict black, white, and green color palette.
But this is a box set, not a greatest-hits comp or even an a-la-carte reissue of the catalog, and that means putting up with the bad and the ugly along with the good. In particular, it means shelling out for vinyl versions of the band’s first two thrash and hardcore-influenced records, which predate the full flower of Steele’s voice. These feel more like an elaborate prank played on the listener than a new group finding its sea legs: Album two, The Origin of the Feces, is essentially album one, Slow, Deep and Hard, re-recorded with new titles for the same songs and, for some reason, fake crowd noise edited in for a faux-live effect—complete with hecklers. (That Type O chose to exchange insults with an imaginary audience on its “live” album tells you a lot about Type O.)
There’s little of musical value on either album, which are also the main, but by no means the only, outlet for the band’s most dunderheaded Noo Yawk shock-jock-style material about class, race, gender, and sexuality. Even the album covers—a blurry closeup of sexual penetration and a crystal-clear photo of Steele’s anus respectively—all but invite you not to listen. This regrettable strain of their work continues on and off through 2003’s Life Is Killing Me and its infantile heterosexist anthem “I Like Goils,” in which Steele roars “I’m proud not to be P.C.!” like he’s auditioning for a Netflix standup special.  New liner notes that emphasize this aspect of the band in 2019 do them no favors either.
But just a few songs after “Goils,” this same band absolutely tears through a straight-faced, straightforward cover of “Angry Inch,” as in Hedwig and…. No joke, no irony: Steele simply adored this story of a glam-rock star who underwent botched gender-reassignment surgery and wanted to spread its gospel to his fans. That’s the Type O I hear in their best love songs and death songs: a band torn between the pleasure of an open heart and the pain of having it ripped out, determined to lend its sensual voice to both sensations.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his new album, Manchester producer Andy Stott is still dabbling in dark, abrasive textures while also moving towards something airier.

Too Many Voices

When Manchester's Andy Stott dropped the Passed Me By EP in 2011, its sound was such a paradigm shift for the producer that it effectively obliterated all that had come before. A previous full-length and more than a dozen singles were rendered obsolete; this rang out as Stott's "true" sound and self. The bruising and bleak dirges were diametrically opposed to the dub techno of his earlier work, its depth of bass aligned more with Sunn O))) and Demdike Stare. Through albums like Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers, the silty sound palette evoked dour industrial spaces even as Stott let in more and more light, primarily by folding in the voice of his onetime piano teacher Alison Skidmore. Much like one of David Lynch's blondes, she was the one beacon of light in human darkness.
For most of Too Many Voices, it sounds like the end of that cycle, suggesting that the grimy sonic template that defined Stott and earned him fans in noise and experimental circles the past five years ultimately might just be a phase itself rather than a final iteration. If anything, Stott sounds like Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, pulled between those two worlds, still dabbling in dark, abrasive textures while also moving towards something airier. "Butterflies" best exemplifies that split. On the hand it keeps the sluggish rhythm that underpinned his previous tracks. But rather than sounding weighted by granite it feels untethered, the beat landing like ping pong balls instead of boulders. A melody shrieks through, but the mood is no longer foreboding and the effect more enervating than haunting. And where Skidmore’s vocals once gave tracks such as this a thrilling contrast, against these thinner backdrops, now they are turned into mere wisps.
Elsewhere, the tracks feel unfinished, such as "Selfish," wherein Stott takes a preset that sounds like a monkey wrench on cheap plastic. It’s the album’s trickiest beat, bringing to mind early dancehall, early '00s grime and even a bit of Radiohead’s "Idioteque," but Stott does very little with the beat or with Skidmore's voice, just speeding up and slowing down both elements. " The distorted beat of "On My Mind" and gaseous synths might be the start of something, but Stott seems reluctant to add layers in-between. The inverse applies to the title track, with Skidmore’s voice existing in multiples but with little around them. There’s plenty of low and high end, but none of the gray in-between. It makes for an album that sounds more like backing tracks missing the singer and the song to complete them. If anything, Too Many Voices sounds like it has too few.


Strip away the cringe threats and drip talk and what’s left is a glorified beat tape that indicates that, artistically, Matt Ox has a ways to go to discover his sound.

OX

Matt Ox looks like a kid on the cusp of a growth spurt who stars in modern Nickelodeon sitcoms. His well-documented journey to stardom proves that he’s lived a cozy life, so the fact that his music portrays the exact opposite captivates a certain sect of rap fandom. His dark trap music is at odds with his appearance and age, so it’s risque in a way that hipsters refraining from drinking Starbucks is. His new album, OX, relies on the listener being familiar with who he is and what he represents to find the novelty within it. Strip away the cringe threats and drip talk and what’s left is a glorified beat tape that indicates that, artistically, Matt Ox has a ways to go to discover his sound, and, more importantly, what he really has to say.
OX is a luxury car with no engine. The kid’s only 13 years old and sounds like Playboi Carti doing an impression of Seth MacFarlane who’s doing an impression of Playboi Carti. His raps are delivered with a sneering gusto that makes them sound comical at times—a complete change from his viral hit “Overwhelming” and “Michael Myers” before it. While he’s a bit better at crafting stellar hook that mixes his older, traditional rap style with the new sneering one, a majority of the album sounds like he binged Die Lit overnight and tried to recreate it immediately.
For what it’s worth, OX makes a stellar first impression with its glossy collection of atmospheric beats. The core of producers here give Ox trap beats that sound gaudily congested, even if they wouldn’t sound as unique if someone older tackled them instead. But the idea of a clean-cut, non-cursing, pre-pubescent teen rapping through his nose while thunderous bass rumbles in the background make these beats hit harder than they ordinarily would. As the album simmers in a way that takes a few listens to really sink in, once unique beats begin to blend together. Album opener “Trident” sneaks with its tip-toeing bassline. “Ride Around,” a few tracks later, feels largely the same. “Ya Dig” is a tad murkier yet still in the same realm.
TrapMoneyBenny, the producer responsible for the meat and bones of Drake’s “In My Feelings,” brings a frosty chill to the album with “Pull Up.” The album’s magnetic centerpiece was co-produced by Oogie Mane, Ox’s in-house Working on Dying collective producer who was also responsible for Drake’s “I’m Upset.” It’s politely nostalgic with those wind chimes that make early ’90s R&B so elegant. When the smothering 808s come in, the track becomes a soothing synthesis of the two producer’s greatest qualities—Benny’s ear for unique melodies and Oogie’s ability to submerge the listener beneath a wave of bass without drowning them—and Matt Ox carries it with relative ease. The kid’s got style.
The album at-large remains paper thin, though. Matt Ox the idea is entertaining, but the actual quality of the rap being presented is mediocre. It’s Slim Jesus all over again. A luxe palette of gorgeous instrumentals and a rather striking imitation of Playboi Carti undoubtedly sound good, but we don't learn anything about Matt Ox over the course of the album. There’s a certain kind of novelty in what’s being packaged here: a suburban, good-natured kid as a criminal kingpin. Without biting into the absurdity of this idea, the album just isn’t odd enough, or weird enough, to be anything more than a suburban kid putting his own dark spin on contemporary trap.


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 debut album by the positive-thinking Swedish pop group whose fusion of synth-pop and reggae became a preposterous international success.

The Sign

In the early 1990s, four unassuming Swedes created a snappy, newly digitized sound that took hold of the world. Ace of Base locked into a style that radio programmers, record execs, and fans latched onto with equal fervor, devising an unheard-of blend of upbeat synthpop cranked with a reggae-influenced bottom end that ushered in a renaissance of Swedish pop imports that continues to dominate charts to this day. But for siblings Jonas, Jenny, and Malin “Linn” Berggren and friend Ulf Ekberg, all in their early 20s at the time, the quick ascent was a surreal head trip. “I never thought I’d come anywhere in the world,” Jenny, one of Ace of Base’s singers, admitted in 1994, at the height of the band’s multimillion-selling peak. “I figured maybe I would see all of Europe, and that would be it.” Yet with the group’s unstoppable debut album, The Sign—which, at over 26 million units, remains one of the best-selling albums of all time—the band quickly went much farther.
The Berggrens grew up in Gothenburg, an industrial port city on the western coast of Sweden. The siblings studied classical music in school, and as they grew older each found a musical outlet: While sisters Jenny and Linn sang in a church choir, older brother Jonas became an Italo disco obsessive who sported a rattail and bleached hair and performed in local bands that traded in New Romantic synth-pop. By the late ’80s, he entered a Swedish government program for aspiring musicians, which afforded him a rehearsal space and some cheap equipment to experiment with. There he worked on music that combined melodies inspired by ’80s synth-pop legends Depeche Mode and A Flock of Seagulls with thrumming percussion that shared the nervy pulse of Kraftwerk. A poster bearing the latter band’s name hung in his studio like a talisman.
At 20, Ekberg was coming out of a phase as a member of a skinhead gang—he’d performed in a neo-Nazi group called Commit Suiside, a fact that haunted Ace of Base when they first got famous and European reporters picked up on it. He blamed banal reasoning for his past: “I used to indulge in drugs and violence, which culminated in my association with the worst form of rebellion: the skinheads,” he said in a statement released the same year as The Sign in a minimal effort at damage control. “I now regret all of this, but I can hardly change the past.”
Despite his history, Jonas and Ekberg struck up a friendship as they worked on separate music in the same rehearsal space. Jonas, eager to start a band of his own, enlisted his sisters Jenny and Linn to supply cheery vocals, forming the first iteration of a group called Tech Noir after the night club in The Terminator. When the original bassist missed a performance to catch a Rolling Stones show the same night, Ekberg filled in and formally replaced him. As they created new demos together, reggae groups often rehearsed down the hall—the genre was gaining popularity in the country by the early ’90s, as local acts like Dr. Alban reworked the sound with a Eurodance pulse. The coincidental proximity of working reggae musicians exerted an osmotic influence on Jonas and Ekberg, setting off a lightbulb that transformed their music for good. They grafted reggae’s spacious groove and off-beat percussion onto their own chirping synth-pop, creating a sweet spot in the middle.
The new quartet clicked, and as their songs gained traction with Swedish club DJs, they quickly wanted to secure a record deal. “Jonas and Ulf were pushy to get what they want,” Linn, who, like her sister, had no formal experience as a leading vocalist, said in 1997. “But the toll was, we’ll just see what happens.” The newly rechristened Ace of Base released their debut single, “Wheel of Fortune,” in 1992, essentially nailing their formula on the first go: enthusiastic synth melodies, weaving percussive rhythms, and the Berggren sisters’ swooping voices. Yet it also contains a melancholic undercurrent that pulls at the corners of their best songs. That bittersweetness is their irresistible, maudlin draw, one that would become key to Ace of Base’s massive appeal.
“Wheel of Fortune” got some regional radio play, specifically in Denmark. Ace of Base recorded a few more tracks and sent a demo tape to Danish imprint Mega Records, rather than to Swedish labels, which they’d found were only interested in the group’s slower ballads. The gamble paid off once the demos reached Scandi-pop impresario Dag Krister Volle, known as Denniz Pop. Pop was responsible for the sleek choruses and R&B inflections that turned Sweden’s young singers and songwriters like Dr. Alban and Kayo into a hit factory in the early ’90s, a sound that would eventually filter through acts like Robyn and *NSYNC in the decade to come. As fate would have it, Ace of Base’s tape got jammed in the cassette player of Pop’s car, forcing him to listen to it nonstop. One of the demo tracks, the loping “Mr. Ace,” got stuck in his head badly enough that he decided to produce a single.
“Mr. Ace,” which evolved into the near-perfect “All That She Wants,” depicts a woman cycling through lovers, tilting the mood toward heartbreak despite the bright chords. Originally centered on a peppy major-chord horn section, the song changed because Linn, a forceful vocalist who was now tasked with singing lead on the bulk of the band’s tracks, insisted that the melody should shift to a minor chord. Even in its spare original form, it’s a pivotal difference: the song moves with a tugging, introspective swing, anchored by Linn’s aching performance. She ramps up the drama behind the refrain “she lives a lonely life,” each repetition echoing like an afterimage. The song landed at radio in summer 1992 and rocketed to No. 1 in Denmark before quickly expanding across the rest of Europe.
When “All That She Wants” hit No. 1 in the UK, a significant feat for any European artist at the time, Mega’s priority became crafting an album to package it alongside “Wheel of Fortune,” which had similarly reached gold in Denmark. To record The Sign, Ace of Base decamped to their own studio—in a rundown house on the outskirts of Gothenburg shared with an automotive shop—and moved at lightning speed to complete writing and recording in just three weeks. “It was too fast, definitely,” Ekberg admitted in 1998. “Some of the songs we didn’t have time to mix or record again. We had to take the demo versions and just finalize them a little bit.” Many of the resulting songs on The Sign, released first as Happy Nation in November 1992, sound as rushed as its genesis, with repetitive arrangements and awkward lyrics throughout. It came out of an urge for “singalong music on the dance floor,” as Jenny put it. “What I enjoy singing about most is that a lot of bad things are happening, so you have to focus on the good parts,” she said.
Even a total lack of attention to detail can’t suppress The Sign’s exuberant attitude. Optimism floods the entire album, whose lyrics flit between romantic troubles and positive sloganeering with wispy attempts at finding meaning in the contradiction. For every “All That She Wants,” there’s a house-inspired misfire (“Voulez-vous danser”) or plasticky ’80s nostalgia (“Dancer in a Daydream”). In “Münchhausen (Just Chaos),” a mystifying selection that only appeared on the Happy Nation version of the album, they transplant the infamous liar’s tall tales onto a techno-fried, convulsive backdrop. You get the sense someone pointed to a bookcase at random as a source of dire, last-minute inspiration.
Yet the group constantly surprises you, even in their programmatic moments. They thrive during the vocoder-heavy “Waiting for Magic,” one of the album’s most underrated moments, an ode to dancefloor hookups that pinwheels out into a rapid-fire staccato chorus. Like several songs on the album, it borrows from the inscrutability of Italo disco to create a template for future Swedish pop, in which lyrics need not make complete sense so long as they fit a lilting melody (“I am Snow White in a coffin waiting for you/Waiting for magic” is about as deep as their metaphors go). The writing doesn’t hamper the album so much as amplify its uncanny digital luster. The same goes for the original title track, “Happy Nation,” written as an “antifascist song and a hymn to life” following the unearthing of Ekberg’s skinhead past, a choice that colors the entire album in a reactive light. Pivoting to lurching drums and echoing liturgical backing vocals in Latin, the song breaks away into chanted lyrics about brotherhood and uniting mankind; it’s oddly effective and deeply unserious at once.
Happy Nation spread quickly, selling over a million copies across Europe within the year. Ace of Base’s success piqued the interest of American music executive Clive Davis at Arista, who signed the group for a U.S. re-release. He required that they replace some of the original album’s 13 tracks with fresh singles to give the re-release more American appeal and an edge over the flood of imports. At his insistence, they covered Albert Hammond and Diane Warren’s “Don’t Turn Around,” originally a Tina Turner B-side and another of The Sign’s pleading highlights, and filled it out with another song, “Living in Danger,” a lesser retread of “All That She Wants.” Then, in another twist of fate, the album found its new title in a song that almost didn’t end up on the re-release at all. “The Sign,” another Denniz Pop co-production and undeniable pop bauble that combines all the group’s best impulses—bobbing rhythm, eccentric production tics, lovably inane lyrics—was intended for a follow-up album, but on Davis’ order it became their next single. The choice unmistakably ensured the song’s seismic impact after the album was released in the U.S. in winter 1993, rounding out the trio of singles that would take them to No. 1. The charming, greenscreen-heavy video for “The Sign” secured constant rotation on MTV, a vital source of exposure that inspired impostor groups bearing names like Bass of Spades and Box of Laces.
By March 1994, “The Sign” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for an impressive six non-consecutive weeks. Ace of Base’s chokehold over radio was unprecedented—all three of their singles also reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Top 40 airplay chart, making them the first band in history to rack up that achievement with a debut album. With “The Sign” in particular, it’s easy to see why: that funky beat, the strangely processed whistle, and Jenny and Linn’s ascending, occasionally growling dual performances are irresistibly sunny. Even as critics took every opportunity to call the band ABBA clones, often straight to their faces (“If you ask us an ABBA question, it’ll cost you five bucks,” Linn once joked to a reporter), and dinged them for their repetitive sound, Ace of Base’s persistence and distinct blend of genres made them stars outside of their counterparts’ shadow. Much like white artists throughout history who have rewired Black music into a diluted, more commercially palatable form, from Elvis to the Beach Boys, their whitewashing of reggae worked wonders in the mainstream. It helped that their featherlight sound, entirely synthetic and draped in a blanket message of optimism, doubled as counter-programming to the grimmer themes of the grunge and rap music then climbing the charts. It was a contrast they often amplified themselves: “I don’t think the lyrics are the best in the world,” Jonas admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “but they’re not about ‘I shot them down,’ or ‘I’ll kill that or that or that.’”
The instant rush of fame left a lasting mark on the group, especially its women. “I liked the success in Europe, but after that, all my interest was lost there,” Linn said of The Sign’s sudden ubiquity. They traveled on press tours for the better part of two years, leading to swift burnout. Linn, the primary singer and the face of the band, was subject to an intense spotlight. Most terrifying of all, in 1994 a would-be fan broke into the Berggrens’ family home and held Jenny at knifepoint. After three follow-up albums featuring the original lineup—The Bridge, Flowers (released in the U.S. as Cruel Summer), and Da Capo—both Linn and Jenny left the group. The Sign remains Ace of Base’s most essential album, a crystallization of pop music as it transitioned toward synthesizer-based production and pronounced Sweden as a veritable hub of pop songwriting. In the decade to come, aspiring American stars like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would jet to Scandinavia in search of radio-conquering hits.
Though Ace of Base never reached the same level again, their music has had a longer, more curious afterlife than one could have anticipated. You can hear its influence within titanic turn-of-the-2010s pop albums like Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream; both singers have also worked with Swedish producer Max Martin, who was running coffee for Denniz Pop around the same time that his mentor was producing Ace of Base. By design, it’s hard to resist their upbeat, stylized reggae-pop. Today, turn on any pop radio station and one of their hits from The Sign will turn up eventually, bopping along like a waving palm tree, as absurdly catchy an example of pop music’s simplest pleasures now as it was then.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


This Scandinavian folk singer embodies the (seemingly) breezy effortlessness of early Bob Dylan, infusing his songs with a detachment that, miraculously, is neither cold nor alienating.

Shallow Grave

Over the last half-century, the tag "Dylanesque" has been slapped on so many mediocre folksingers clutching battered Moleskines that it's become a meaningless joke, a critical hiccup, a silly, lazy way of invoking an age-old raspy voice/acoustic guitar combo. It's gotten so bad that, in 2008, yammering on about the cliché of dubbing someone "the next Dylan" has become a cliché in itself. Still: It's exceptionally hard to talk about Scandinavian folksinger the Tallest Man on Earth (also known as Kristian Matsson) without mentioning Bob Dylan's early years, mostly because Matsson manages to embody Dylan's effortlessness so well (Dylan was trying really, really hard, sure-- but he sang like he didn't give a shit), infusing his songs with a detachment that, miraculously, is neither cold nor alienating. Like Dylan, Matsson is so natural a songwriter that these tracks feel predetermined, tumbling out of his mouth with an ease and grace that's increasingly uncommon.
Matsson released a self-titled five-song EP in 2007; Shallow Grave is his full-length debut. The production is appropriately scrappy, and it seems relatively safe to assume that the album was recorded live with one microphone-- accordingly, we hear the scratch of fingernails on string (and, on occasion, the chirping of birds in the background), made privy to each tiny exhalation and sigh. Matsson is an adept fingerpicker, and his guitar is easily as central as his voice, which is high, crackling, and rich. Much like Dylan himself, Matsson has mined the American south for inspiration, and his frantic strumming and front-porch poetry recall everyone from the Carter Family to Lead Belly to, most noticeably, country bluesman Mississippi John Hurt.
"The Blizzard's Never Seen the Desert Sands" sees Matsson caw little poems ("And the bells up in the tower they will ring/ And the frightened little choirs they will sing/ They will tremble, all their voices") over plucked banjo; "The Gardener" features a robustly strummed guitar melody and more half-cogent ideas ("I know the runner's gonna tell you/ There ain't no cowboy in my hair/ So now he's buried by the daisies/ So I can stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe"). Matsson's lyrics don't stand up as well on paper as they do in song (some have all the logic of fairy tales), but each of these cuts has a distinct, if muddled, narrative-- sparrows, tranquilizer guns, curtains, unicorns. Road stories, love stories, prayers.
Matsson's melodies are remarkably pliant, and while it's understandable to be skeptical of another skinny dude with a mustache, a guitar, and a worn-out copy of The Anthology of American Folk Music, the more time you invest in Shallow Grave, the more you'll realize how unusually memorable it is. Ultimately, Shallow Grave transcends comparison-- which is saying an awful lot, given the popularity of its prototype-- and Matsson is a natural-born folksinger, earnest, clever, and comforting.