In 1970, just four months before his death, the avant-jazz saxophonist played two concerts to a rapturous crowd in France. A new 5xLP set collects the complete recordings for the first time.

Albert Ayler: Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondations Maeght Recordings

As the summer of 1970 approached, things weren’t going great for Albert Ayler. His brother and musical partner Donald suffered from mental health issues, and family members were pressuring Albert to help him more. Musically, encouraged in part by his label Impulse!, Ayler had moved from groundbreaking avant-jazz to a more conventional R&B sound. The resulting albums (1968’s New Grass and 1969’s Music is the Healing Force of the Universe) featured lyrics and vocals by Ayler’s wife and manager Mary Parks (aka Mary Maria), a guiding force in his later years, but they were not well received. Reflecting the tone of the criticism, jazz critic John Litweiler later wrote that Ayler “forsook his musical vision” and “mock(ed) his magnificence.” Impulse! ended up dropping him.
But Ayler had at least one reason for optimism. In July, he was invited to France to perform at the fine-art museum Fondation Maeght. Situated on a hilltop near Nice, it featured a newly built geodesic dome in which Ayler’s group could play. His previous concerts in that country had gone well, and he felt better understood in Europe than America. Ayler quickly put together a group including musicians he’d never played with before, providing them no sheet music or rehearsal time. Pianist Call Cobbs missed his plane from New York, meaning the first night would be a quartet concert with Ayler, Maria, bassist Steve Tintweiss, and drummer Alan Blairman, followed by a performance by the full quintet two days later.
Evidence that these shows were a success came later that year, via two volumes of LPs called Nuits de la Fondation Maeght. They were released by the French label Shandar, run by the man who had invited Ayler to play there, Daniel Caux. The performances—including versions of Ayler classics such as “Spirits” and “The Truth Is Marching In”—sounded triumphant, especially when followed by boisterous applause. But according to notes from a subsequent CD version, Caux had intentionally chosen the “wildest” material from the two nights, specifically avoiding pieces that included Maria’s vocals. Though a few more songs showed up on a 2005 ESP-Disk’ album Live on the Riviera, a full picture of these concerts remained hidden.
Over 50 years later, Revelations presents both nights in their entirety, with two hours of material never released before. While it turns out that Caux’s initial selections were indeed highlights, every moment on this four-hour box set (released in 5xLP and 4xCD versions) is worth hearing. Alongside fresh takes of pieces from across Ayler’s catalog, there are looser versions of songs that sounded stiff in the studio, spirited tunes that never made it onto albums, and a wealth of high-energy improvisations. Most compellingly, each night offers the twists and turns of a narrative, with lots of sonic variety and shifts in momentum—especially during the second evening, in which the wildly enthusiastic crowd became practically another member of Ayler’s group.
The first night opens with Ayler alone, playing “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” to set a fiery, inspired tone for the evening. Maria’s spoken poetry soon follows, and while her verse verges on platitude, what matters most throughout Revelations is the way she delivers it, with a dramatic authority more stirring than her contributions to Ayler’s studio albums. It helps that Tintweiss and Blairman add electricity to her exhortations, making them nearly a match for Ayler’s earlier rhythm sections. (That feat is all the more impressive given that, as Tintweiss writes in the liner notes, Ayler’s only directions were, “You start off with the bass and I’ll come in and we’ll take it from there.”)
Soon after that opening tune, one of Revelations’ biggest revelations emerges: Maria could play soprano saxophone, and quite well at that. She injects it briefly into a version of “Masonic Inborn” (a sweeter take on Healing Force’s bagpipe-heavy original), but it’s on the first improvisation that her playing really takes off, circling in and out of Ayler’s like a snake. From there, the group deftly steers through many curves, including Ayler’s fluttery lead vocal on “Oh! Love of Life,” Maria’s catchy singing on “Heart Love,” a reverent version of the Ayler classic “Ghosts,” and three improvised pieces that showcase Ayler’s dizzying runs, inhuman noises, and frequent references to traditional melodies. As the audience literally stomps for more, Ayler and Maria end with a stretch of wordless vocalizing that’s as captivating as their horn duets.
Ayler’s first night at Fondation Maeght got mentioned on local TV news, which Tintweiss claims resulted in a much larger crowd for the second show. “The place was packed,” he writes. “The audience was ecstatic, just built up.” Revelations bears him out, as escalating cheers give this second set a stair-climbing arc. This is despite the fact that the music is a bit tamer than two days before, owing mostly to the arrival of Cobbs, whose more conventional piano playing centers on melody and chord changes. Still, Ayler remains forceful and adventurous, cresting during a kaleidoscopic 20-minute improvisation.
The straighter parts of night two work pretty well, too. Cobbs’ bop stylings on “Holy Family,” from 1965’s Spirits Rejoice, partner perfectly with Ayler’s fluid horn, while Maria’s spoken-word piece “Again Comes the Rising of the Sun” is a moving melange of folklore-inspired verse. Most surprising is “Thank God for Women,” a hooky tune that Ayler had hoped would someday be a pop hit, but was never able to include on a studio album. Hearing him chant the song’s title while the band vamps behind him is thrilling. After over two hours of ever-heightening music and applause, Maria effusively thanks the audience while Ayler adds, “I would say something, but I can’t talk—I’ve been blowing so hard!”
That’s the last known recording of Albert Ayler’s voice. He was found floating in New York’s East River four months after these concerts, though the circumstances of his death were never determined. An LP of studio recordings called The Last Album, which included many songs played during this concert, came out posthumously in 1971. The energy and breadth of these French shows make Ayler’s tragic death even more poignant. As Litweiler observed, “There’s a renewed sense of purpose in this final concert… Possibly some major changes in his art were on the verge of occurring.” Revelations helps us imagine what might have come next.


Based upon early 1900s German poetry about sick patients and maimed soldiers, these two side-long tracks of experimental vocalizations highlight the singer’s conceptual, confrontational heft.

Broken Gargoyles

Diamanda Galás composes violently compassionate music about suffering. Her late-1980s Masque of the Red Death Trilogy focuses on AIDS, which killed her brother, Philip-Dimitri, in 1986, while other projects delve into the oppressive Greek Junta and the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Genocides. The 67-year-old goth icon performs less harrowing stuff, too—a hard-grooving 1994 collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a bevy of brilliant takes on blues standards. Yet at her best, Galás sharpens her cutting sense of empathy, slices open difficult subject matter, and approaches it from inside: Her 1991 dirge for HIV’s most deadly era, Plague Mass, might be the heaviest live record ever made. Ultimately, Galás’ haunted ritual, like all of her releases, is a ceremony of tenderness.
A master of the early 19th century style of bel canto singing, Galás uses her operatic genius to explore tropes uncommon in experimental composition—especially the breakdown of tortured, diseased bodies. Shaped from spectral piano and electronics, her soundscapes batter, unsettle, rouse us. Her virtuosic voice, inspired by avant-garde saxophonists Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, spans an untold number of octaves. She screeches, wails, bleats, and slips between characters, usually vengeful, demonic figures skulking around like a bad conscience. Both performance artist and diva, Galás has a potent theatrical sense and a persona at once progressive and full of fire and brimstone. Echoing obsolete medical drawings that illustrate sickness as floating miasma or bodily humors to be drained, she rebukes ignorant societies while harnessing their wild imaginations.
Her latest record, Broken Gargoyles, highlights the chronic nature of our callousness toward the ill and injured. Inspired by the mistreatment of wounded World War I infantrymen, Galás unearths devastating source texts from a slightly earlier era: the verse of Georg Heym (1887-1912), son of an assistant in a yellow-fever clinic and an enfant terrible of German expressionist poetry. Before his death at 24, Heym wrote unflinchingly about sick patients, maimed soldiers, and other doomed souls he might have been exposed to through his father’s work. Setting four of Heym’s poems to pulsing, droning accompaniment, Galás traces a throughline of ostracized invalids across the past century-plus of public health catastrophes. Appropriately, she premiered some of this material at a medieval German leper sanctuary and began cobbling the album together during COVID lockdown. Broken Gargoyles targets governments’ botched coronavirus responses—implicitly, it sets sights on their homophobic sluggishness to protect gay men from monkeypox, too.
The album may not shock the singer’s die-hard fans, but Broken Gargoyles is a moving, painful listen and an ideal access point for the uninitiated. Split into two tracks, each of which hovers around 20 minutes, the record occupies recognizable terrain Galás charted out on her recently reissued early career peaks, 1982’s The Litanies of Satan and 1984’s Diamanda Galás. We’ve even heard facets of this material before: In 2020, Galás released De-formation: Piano Variations, an instrumental setting for one of Heym’s poems and a collaboration with sound designer Daniel Neumann, who returns on Broken Gargoyles.
The duo’s overhaul from solo piano to full arrangement, though, is thorough. Over the skeleton of De-Formation’s chords, the opening “Mutilatus” hangs ominous synths, eerie, wordless arias, and renditions of two poems. The composition is lush and undulating, full of voices that bedevil the edges of the audio field. There’s a palpable tension between sustained keys and Galás’ precisely articulated, staccato recitations. And while her piano is largely dissonant, when she allows herself a few snatches of somber, left-handed melody, the mood turns immediately from agonized to elegiac.
Throughout, Galás draws a singular timbre from Heym’s guttural German, approaching the language itself as an instrument. Still acrobatic and versatile, her voice sounds occasionally treated, bubbling from beneath a pool’s surface. Galás’ varied intonations circle each other, crying out from mutual isolation like ailing bodies on a long, crowded ward. Thin whimpers emanate from somewhere far off; a gurgle of filtered noise fills out the low end; repetitive chimes mock us with memories of human comforts, like a food cart wheeling down a hospital hallway. On the second song, “Abiectio,” Galás’ voice warbles between consonance and caterwaul, as strings swell from melancholic tunefulness into abject anxiety. Over muffled moans, Galás’ readings grow increasingly desperate: Somehow, the track manages to be even more mortifying than its predecessor, a coda from beyond the grave.
While she’ll always be admired for her remarkable singing ability, Broken Gargoyles draws our attention to Galás’ conceptual, confrontational heft—a quality we haven’t heard from her on record since 2003’s double-disc Defixiones: Will and Testament. Her mixture of literary intelligence and three-dimensional sound design feels particularly relevant today, a direct predecessor to the talky strain of noise music that links Lucy Liyou, Lingua Ignota, even claire rousay and more eaze. Yet Broken Gargoyles pushes this side of Galás’ practice to such an extreme that she still seems a world apart from other musicians, while leaving us unable to ignore the urgency of her themes. There’s a good reason that the voices on Broken Gargoyles feel so maddeningly real: Their hurt might be bygone, but sinews of experience tie it to the present. Galás shows us humankind as both culprit and victim, a self-destructive pawn that each year grows guiltier, sadder, and more overwhelmed by the weight of bottomless trauma.


Once rumored to be a full-on Roxy Music album, Bryan Ferry's latest does feature original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno.

Olympia

There was a point at which Olympia was intended to be a new Roxy Music album. It would have been the band's first since 1982's Avalon, and there even seems to be a sly nod to that two-decade gap on album opener "You Can Dance", which opens with a brief musical passage that is pretty much a note-for-note reference to Avalon's "True to Life". Somewhere in the process, though, this became another Bryan Ferry solo album, featuring original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno, and Ferry brought in a raft of collaborators, some old, some new, to round out the record, his first to feature original songs since 2002's Frantic.
The funny thing is, if Roxy Music had released this exact album in 1983 as a follow-up to Avalon, I don't think anyone would have batted an eye. It spills over with the aesthetics and sounds of Ferry's 80s work, which has the strange effect of also making it sound very current. The synths, fluid beats, wiry guitar parts with just a bit of chorus, and electric pianos are all things you can hear on any number of indie rock records today. Ferry puts them together in a very classic rock way, residing at the center as the charismatic front man. The FM-rock approach to the emphasis on vocals is mirrored in the lead guitar contributed by Manzanera and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour-- that kind of playing is one of the few elements of 80s album rock that hasn't made a significant comeback, which may partly be down to the proficiency it requires.
The first half of the album is as solid as anything Ferry has done under his own name. "You Can Dance" and "Alphaville" have their roots in a late-90s session that ultimately produced about half of Frantic, and they're both very centered on grooves. "You Can Dance" grinds along on a creeping bass line and heavy drumming, guitars hovering in the wings as Ferry underplays his signature vocal quaver. "Alphaville" is more slippery, cut through with nicely phrased lead guitar by Gilmour, and it's good pivot to one of the album's standouts, "Heartache By Numbers". The song features the Scissor Sisters as backing band, and their studied grasp of disco and New Wave suits Ferry well-- the echoing piano intro is almost cheeky in its easy anthemic fluency, but it's very much of a piece with the singer's classic songs.
Elsewhere, Ferry indulges in a couple of covers; one is a completely disposable take on Traffic's "No Face, No Name and No Number", but the other is a pretty stunning transformation of Tim Buckley's epochal "Song to the Siren" into a sweeping, synth-soaked pop ballad. Ferry has always been fond of interpreting others' songs on his albums, and like his very best covers in the past, this one reveals a real connection to the song. The album does falter a bit in its second half--"BF Bass" just has a sort of generic fashion-rock sheen, aiming for something high-class and hitting something more like the oddly sterile cover image of Kate Moss, which basically looks like a perfume ad. Still, it's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.


Friend of Mine is the debut LP from Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy's DJ Dodger Stadium project. The record is built on ecstatic forms of house and techno, but its influences go both broader and deeper than simple genre revivalism.

Friend of Mine

“Lately I’ve been singing love songs by myself.” Those eight words, an unashamed proclamation of loneliness and heartache, form the mantra around which DJ Dodger Stadium's delirious new album Friend of Mine is built.  The album is the first full-length release from the Los Angeles dance imprint Body High, and DJ Dodger Stadium is the name that founders Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy have chosen for themselves as a duo. The moniker is fitting in its audacity and camp, as well as a celebration of Los Angeles as both city and symbol.
Friend of Mine is built on ecstatic forms of house and techno, but its influences go both broader and deeper than simple genre revivalism. At its core, the album draws energy from the intense emotionality trumpeted in the music of artists like Body High associate Shlohmo. Jerome LOL, both with the defunct LOL Boys and in his own solo work, has long shown the ability to mine authentic emotion from what might otherwise seem a particularly cerebral form of dance music. Samo has similarly tempered his technical finesse with wounded samples that elevate his projects beyond your casual beat-happy wonkery. Together, the two wed their technical expertise to produce an album that’s far more trickier to pull off than it sounds: through the majority of the churning, frantic Friend of Mine, they maintain a sense of near-constant climax.
The need to reach that peak and stay there, and the previously mentioned words that form the album’s mantra, originate on the thumping “Love Songs”, which repeats those eight words endlessly without losing momentum. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, and the duo accomplish it by adjusting almost every other element in the song—pulling a gun-patter drumbeat in and out of the mix, shifting the volume and clarity of the sample, and playing with countless other minor beat variations that keep things fresh for the entirety of the track’s running time.
“Love Songs” is the best song on the record and a blueprint for the rest of it, as its perennial high and repetitive vocal loop are echoed on the majority of Friend of Mine’s ten tracks. This maximalism is maintained by clever sequencing; though the repetitive vocal sample on “One Who Lost” could prove numbing in the wake of "Love Songs", it’s quick and effective in its delivery. But even the seemingly lighter songs here reach an eventual fever pitch. The album's exception to that rule is the organ-powered “Sit Down Satan”, which reaches for a more explicit type of ecstasy and is perfectly positioned to stoke momentum for the album’s final flourishes.
DJ Dodger Stadium’s sound counters assertions of superficiality in current-day dance music by doubling down on the human element within their music. Some of that humanity is owed to the record’s firm sense of place. Los Angeles is inescapable here: on the carnival sounds and Salvadoran sermon incorporated into “The Dust”, the Hollywood-style intro “The Bottom is As Low as You Can Go”, and in the video for “Love Songs,” which used an aerial drone to capture a one-shot take of the duo’s Westlake neighborhood*.* With its happy contradictions—theatricality and genuine emotion, self-consciousness and self-awareness—Friend of Mine functions as a symbol of the neurotic, nocturnal Angeleno, happily alone upon the highways or anonymous on the city’s dance floors, free to lament and to celebrate existence.


On their first official mix album, the Lawrence brothers broaden their horizons, focusing on a selection of classic-sounding house. It’s a far more intimate vibe than their festival-stage fare.

DJ-Kicks

Throughout an 11-year career, English production duo Disclosure have never exactly tested dance music’s boundaries. Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence are classicists: torchbearers for the vintage influences they pull from Chicago house, Detroit techno, and UK garage. But within that crowded market they’ve made a niche for themselves by emphasizing the immediacy and familiarity of pop music. Call them the Starbucks of EDM: They’re not here to deliver a sublime gourmet experience, but a reliably sweet and satisfying pick-me-up.
And so it continued with 2020’s ENERGY, the third Disclosure album and a half-successful attempt at tapping into what made their 2013 debut LP so electric. Some of its best moments came from the duo’s reimagining of UK garage, but their dabblings with African house, French filter house, and North American hip-hop freshened up the standard fare. So if the Lawrence brothers don’t push at the edges of dance music itself, they do at least broaden their own horizons. In its own way, Disclosure’s DJ-Kicks mix album furthers the trend of eclecticism. This lively and effortless 58-minute DJ set feels like the id to the ego of their studio albums: Stripped of guest vocalists, radio-friendly song structures, and big-budget production, it’s like listening to what makes Disclosure tick.
Little surprise that what makes them tick is house music of all stripes. The 12 selections here pull liberally from acid, disco, garage, Afrobeat, breakbeat, and deep house, with hardly a lull in the flow. After a densely textured ambient intro from Spanish producer Pépe, London’s Harry Wolfman sets things in motion with mix exclusive “LOTF,” a warm and easygoing roller that brims with understated funk. It feels like the perfect opening tune for Disclosure, setting a solid 120 BPM baseline while reminding listeners this is more intimate than the festival stage. But the energy only climbs from there with some wiggly filter-house from the Netherlands’ Cleanfield and one of two original Disclosure tracks featured here. The bright, bubbly “Deep Sea” is a bit of an outlier in the duo’s catalog, with all the carefree samples and pillowy bass notes of a Pampa Records B-side. If this is the Lawrence brothers letting loose, they should do it more often.
Kicking off the final third of DJ Kicks is “Observer Effect,” another Disclosure original that further strips things down. Produced solely by Guy without his brother Howard, the track sounds like a DJ tool with just enough Trax Records influence to keep it interesting. Sandwiched between two of the mix’s most flavorful selections, however, “Observer Effect” is bland in comparison. “Mezmerized,” a 2005 cut by English trio Slum Science, is all slinky breaks and hip-hop samples set to a skipping rhythm, whereas “bRave,” by Londoner East End Dubs, livens things up with little more than an elastic, sub-rattling bassline and a swinging groove. Both tracks utilize techniques similar to Disclosure’s, but they land much more effectively.
Other tracklist highlights include &on&on’s gentle, synthy “Don’t Say a Word,” M-High’s soulful and stratospheric “Harmony in the Distance,” and exclusive mix closer “Recognise,” a jazzy jungle hybrid by Arfa x Joe. All three are recent releases that confidently point back to the heyday of their respective genres, mimicking those ideas while slyly folding in an update or two. Disclosure seems enamored both with that concept and the many ways it can play out, which makes their DJ-Kicks a consistent and entertaining—if not at all surprising—listen. As the mix shows, the further the Lawrence brothers expand their reference points, the greater an impact their tried-and-true formula can make.

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As the shadows deepen on Sophie Allison’s third album, she sees into the lie on the other side of success: You can win, but you still have to live with yourself.

Sometimes, Forever

Sophie Allison sings from the exhaustion at the end of a big feeling. Across her work as Soccer Mommy, she has excavated that point after despair or elation where your nerves reel back from overdrive, when the intensity wanes and you’re left with the blankness of yourself. Since releasing her debut studio album, Clean, in 2018, she’s worked to heighten the contrasts of her guitar-based songs. The 2020 LP color theory drew vintage synthesizers and layered sampling into the mix, expanding the space in which her wry, acerbic, and poignant lyrics could play. On her latest album, Sometimes, Forever, Allison teams with Daniel Lopatin of the retrofuturist electronic project Oneohtrix Point Never, whose production deepens the shadows in her songwriting. Soccer Mommy’s music has often folded in the bitter and the melancholy, but this is the first time Allison has faced down danger so squarely.
At the heart of Sometimes, Forever lurks the axiom that nothing lasts. The most vivid triumphs and hollowing depressions each evaporate in turn. Though repeated to the point of cliché, “this too shall pass” butts up against another persistent cultural narrative: That it’s possible to make it, that if your output or your essence is good enough, you’ll ascend, be rewarded, never work a day in your life. By now, Allison has shored away enough cultural capital that she can see into the lie on the other side of success. You can win, but you still have to live with yourself.
“I lost myself to a dream I had/And I’d never give it all away/But I miss feeling like a person,” Allison sings on the album’s swirling closer, “Still.” Throughout Sometimes, Forever, she and Lopatin expand on the ’90s palette that has characterized previous Soccer Mommy releases. Bolstering the lingering imprints of Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow, and Sleater-Kinney is a healthy dose of Loveless worship: glide guitars and tendrils of haze. “Darkness Forever,” with its abundant negative space and snaking bassline, calls back to the menacing creases of Portishead’s Dummy: Allison’s half-whispered vocals rise from the pit of her stomach as they orbit the kind of self-destruction ideation that feels permanent in its intensity. The minimally melodic pummel of “Unholy Affliction” echoes PJ Harvey’s work with Steve Albini on her second album Rid of Me. A choked-out bassline thrums underneath the heaviest percussion yet to appear on a Soccer Mommy song, an agitated pattern whose busyness counterbalances Allison’s lank vocal delivery. “I’m barely a person/Mechanically working,” she sings, hinting at the churn demanded of an artist once the system decides their work is valuable and wants more of the same, forever.
Between these bleaker points, Allison’s characteristic humor and wit still glimmer. The advance single “Shotgun” boasts a pitch-perfect Soccer Mommy line at its chorus, set there like a crown jewel: “Whenever you want me, I’ll be around/I’m a bullet in a shotgun waiting to sound.” One second we’re on the receiving end of a sunny, weightless show of devotion; the next we’re staring down the barrel of a deadly weapon. Allison’s invitation to pull the trigger holds both poles: boundless love and fathomless threat. They’re indivisible. The sun gilds the summer evening and it’s also a nuclear inferno.
“I don’t know how to feel things small/It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all,” Allison sings on “Still.” The couplet recalls a similar totalizing switch in Dinosaur Jr.’s deadpan alt-rock hit “Feel the Pain”: “I feel the pain of everyone/Then I feel nothing.” It’s a duality common enough to culture workers, people whose art is tasked with carrying the feelings of so many others they’ll never meet. For a little while, you’re everything to everyone. Then the show wraps, or the needle loops, and the vacuum of individuality sets in: you’re only yourself to yourself. Sometimes, Forever reckons with that whiplash, surfing its highs and puddling in its lows—wondering, maybe, if there’s a humanizing middle ground somewhere between being an image aloft on a billboard and a body alone in a room.


The drill rapper sets juvenile joy against the harshest realities that some of the UK’s young people face, encapsulating the stiff push and pull of street violence.

Noughty By Nature

Digga D scored his first UK Number One last week with his third mixtape, Noughty By Nature. Among those listening and poring over the snappy West London drill rapper’s lyrics were the Metropolitan Police officers responsible for enforcing the conditions of his extraordinary Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO). Under the terms of his CBO, Digga, born Rhys Herbert, has to notify the police of any new music within 24 hours of it being released and provide lyric sheets. Breaching his CBO can mean more prison time (Digga, now 21, has already discovered this the hard way). But for Digga, these conditions aren’t a legal oddity. Since 2017, he’s been forced to adapt, which means verses thick with misdirection and a lyrical dexterity and comic wink that outstrips most of his drill rap peers.
The first thing Digga says on Noughty By Nature, pattered over a plaintive harp, is “Anything you hear man rapping about is facts. Nothing’s fabricated.” He proceeds to slide on fat kicks and skittish snares into a potted autobiography—but the names of people and places have all been skidded through by the censor’s pen. The tussle between facts and Digga’s own freedom is at the heart of his output, both as a conceit and a tool to unpick the depths that his braggadocio conceals.
The way Digga raps about violence is particularly complex. Over drunken trumpets on highlight “Stuck in the Mud,” playground games are the setting for street duels, where sickly sweet Jammie Dodgers biscuits become slang for faulty firearms, and being found in a game of hide-and-seek has deadly consequences. On “Addicted” (a half-successful piano ballad), he draws parallels between physical and mental addictions and how violence has become embedded within his peer group. Even while he raps about having “Blood on my cutlass” (on “Rambo”), he’s alive to the futility of these conflicts: The brutality on show here isn’t always to be gawped at. As Digga recalls a victim’s “horrendous” scream on “Let It Go,” the song’s knotty double entendre—with its refrain of “I told bro don’t let it go”—encapsulates the stiff push and pull of street violence.
Digga hasn’t forgotten how to have fun. He likes flashing his cash. He likes traveling: to influencer petting zoo Dubai, where he shot a glitzy video for “Pump 101” (one of three boisterous 50 Cent homages on the tape); and to the U.S., where he links up with Hotboii, B Lovee, and Moneybagg Yo for a string of convincing collabs. And he still gets giddy over blowjobs in a way that only teenage boys do. His quick delivery and class-clown ad libs—of “glee” and “whee” and “woi,” and other variations that no doubt haunt the sleep of parents and school teachers—are TikTok catnip. The have-a-go approach inevitably spits out the occasional dud: “Why,” a collaboration with fellow West-Londoner AJ Tracey, raises only the question of why—with its droning chorus and ham-fisted Robert Miles sample—it was included on the album at all.
But the ease with which Digga sets juvenile joy against the harshest realities that some of the UK’s young people face, and the way he smartly pulls it off, is part of what makes his voice so compelling. At the end of “Statement”—a moody, mostly beatless contemplation—he compares himself to Stormzy and Dave before offering a blunt “Fuck you” to anyone doubting him on account of his record. Digga’s self-belief and willingness to raise a middle finger were never in doubt. As he continues to test and flex his talents, his path forward will only become clearer—no matter who’s looking over his shoulder.


On his 41st album, Van Morrison splits the difference between nostalgia, impassioned gripes, and spiritual yearning.

Van Morrison: Three Chords and the Truth

Three Chords and the Truth

Forty-one albums into his storied career, Van Morrison remains one of rock’s most enduring studies in contrast, never changing and forever restless. Three Chords and The Truth is his sixth record in the last four years, the latest dispatch of a particularly productive period, and the first to feature all-new original songs since 2012’s Born to Sing: No Plan B (minus one co-write with lyricist Don Black). Though he sticks closely to the conservative R&B, blues, and jazz modes that have defined his ’00s discography, the LP’s 14 songs showcase his determination to wring profundity out of even the most common language. Songwriter Harlan Howard coined the phrase “Three chords and the truth” to describe the necessary ingredients for country and western music, but this isn’t a country record. Van’s talking about his desire to take simple rhymes and traditional song structures and imbue them with Caledonia soul heaviness.
As it has since his raging beginnings with Them, it’s Morrison’s voice that affords him such latitude. At 74, he sounds incredible, his voice deepened and richer with age, growling, cooing, and occasionally barking about familiar but resonant concerns. As always, he’s grouchy— sick of the powerful getting away with it all (the Brexit commentary “Nobody in Charge”), annoyed by notoriety and the complications of stardom (“Fame Will Eat the Soul,” which features a rousing call and response assist by Righteous Brother Bill Medley), and uncertain if goodness makes any difference in a compromised world (“Does Love Conquer All”).
But he’s equally nostalgic, riffing on the joy of sound on the title track and earnestly recalling the freedom and purity of youth (“Early Days,” “In Search of Grace”). There’s a warmth here that recalls his ’90s highwater marks, Hymns to the Silence and The Healing Game, and connects even farther back in time to 1971’s Tupelo Honey, which balanced the charms of domesticity with R&B raves. Credit the superb backing band for the record’s subtle but palpable drive. With Astral Weeks guitarist Jay Berliner in the mix, they support Morrison sympathetically. “It’s called ‘the flow,’” Morrison said in a recent interview, detailing his optimal conditions for making music. “I don’t know the mechanics of how that works. I just know when I’m in it.”
“The flow” makes Three Chords and The Truth a deeply pleasurable listen, but it’s the moments where Morrison sounds less settled that carry the most weight. The album’s third song, “Dark Night of the Soul,” never wanders as far out as epics like “Madame George” and “Listen to the Lion,” nor does it match spaced-out gloss of his ’80s albums with trumpeter Mark Isham, but it’s gripped by the same existential fervor. Its mellow heat has a lot in common with 1997’s “Rough God Goes Riding,” a gentle midtempo cut with apocalyptic visions hiding in plain sight. Revisiting the 16th-century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’ poem about the unknowability of God, one he’s sung about a number of times before, Morrison showcases the way his twilight years haven’t dimmed his yearning for growth, his desire for a deeper understanding. Morrison concludes the song with passionate vocal riffing, treating his voice like a saxophone pushed nearly to its breaking point.
That tension, between the sublime and the terrifying, has always fueled Morrison’s best work. He’s always been split between the desire for complete freedom and a love of tight structure; He’s a guy who once shouted out L. Ron Hubbard in the liner notes to Inarticulate Speech of the Heart but also “wouldn’t touch [religion] with a 10-foot pole.” He’s been a prophet of metaphysical openness and also the chronicler, as author Steven Hyden has noted, of “an infinite number of grievances, both real and imagined.” There aren’t a lot of songwriters who can fit the word “skullduggery” into the lyric book, as Morrison does here with “You Don’t Understand.” Even fewer make the word sound so natural—in Morrison’s songs, griping and testifying are never separated by much.
Like his peer Bob Dylan, Morrison has found resonance in singing standards of a sort. This time around they’re all of his own design, and his fitful, relentless desire for cosmic fulfillment animates them. Comfortably appointed in his twilight years, he’s still chasing enlightenment, haunted by “the things I might not yet know,” as he puts it on “Dark Night of the Soul.” For Morrison, there are always mysteries left to articulate.

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The follow-up to last year’s Konoyo—recorded, like its predecessor, with a Japanese gagaku ensemble—functions as a counterbalance to that album: a kind of photo negative, more subdued but no less overwhelming.

Anoyo

Ambient music is having a moment, or so the algorithm would have you believe. Streaming apps are intent on offering the stressed-out masses the promise of the perfect mood-management tool, optimized to increase focus and settle nerves whether you’re coding, falling asleep, or writing music reviews. As I type these words I’m listening to a Spotify mix called Productive Morning that has 435,363 followers, many of whom, I assume, play the Album Leaf and Jon Brion as they down salt juice and stack nootropics. Amanda Petrusich, in a recent piece for the New Yorker, wrote about the wildly popular Chillhop YouTube channel, whose anodyne beats offer just enough oomph to push you from one Keynote slide to the next. There’s even a service called Focus@Will, which, for a subscription fee, “has been scientifically proven to increase attention span and increase your productivity by 400%.” Who can argue with science?
Tim Hecker, for one. Over nearly two decades the Canadian electronic composer has made a career of enmeshing the algorithmic and the analog, capturing cosmic infinity with buzzsaw synths. While playlists use science to refine our routines, Hecker’s machines dismantle them. “I feel that my role in the conversation of music is to, say, lapse and leave people to connect the dots in their own ways and meanings,” he said. At their best, Hecker’s compositions come alive as corporeal objects, sound made tangible as if shaped with clay. With his 2011 breakout record, Ravedeath, 1972, Hecker joined the ranks of Christian Fennesz, William Basinski, and the handful of avant-garde composers whose unapologetically out-there compositions are appreciated by a weirdly large audience. On 2016’s Love Streams he employed thrumming synths and mutated Icelandic choir to stunning effect, further blurring electronic and human elements to “interrogate the voice.”
Anoyo, Hecker’s exquisite new record, is the second of a pair of LPs, including 2018’s Konoyo, that Hecker created in collaboration with Japanese gagaku musicians. Gagaku (which means “elegant music” in modern Japanese) is the traditional ensemble of the imperial court; Hecker recorded these albums with Tokyo Gakuso, a collective assembled by the musician Motonori Miura. Together, along with other collaborators, they worked through a series of improvisational sessions at Jiunzan Mandala-Temple Kanzouin, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Though Hecker is often labeled an ambient producer, Anoyo fits this description only in a literal sense; Anoyo becomes your environment as it envelops your senses. In order to fully appreciate the album, one must actively probe its crevices, exploring the space between anguished reeds and thundering taiko. Brian Eno’s famous definition, that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” simply does not apply.
Because they were created from the same sessions, Anoyo is best viewed as a counterweight to Konoyo. Together, they are two parts of a singular whole. Konoyo translates to “this world” or “the world over here”—our world—while Anoyo represents “the world over there,” where the spirits reside. Though the two could have sensibly been released as a double album, the space between them is welcome. They represent distinct experiences: light and dark, yin and yang. Following this logic, Anoyo acts as a sort of photo negative of Konoyo, more subdued but no less overwhelming. Wind instruments—the hichiriki, shō, and ryūteki—and percussion punctuate the silence. “Into the void,” a particularly plaintive track, might evoke the doleful cries of whales separated by leagues of sea, siren calls from the abyss. Or perhaps you may be reminded of NASA’s recent image of a black hole, with its halo of doomed light. Strange, how sound can evoke emptiness better than actual silence.
Like Hecker’s other records, Anoyo lives in opposition to the sort of soundscape-as-wallpaper that has become a staple of the streaming economy. Rather than a soothing balm, Anoyo’s ambience is a carefully modulated anxiety attack. Inspired by a series of conversations with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hecker’s friend and collaborator, Hecker became fascinated by the Japanese concept of ma, which translates roughly as “void” or “the space between two structural parts.” Anoyo is seemingly permeated by this notion, expressed as an uneasy thrum beneath ancient Japanese instruments (see the controlled clatter of “Not alone,” which uses spare percussion to excellent effect). This nothingness serves as connective tissue with notes emerging occasionally from the dusk. Anoyo could be described as a meditative album, but it’s not one you’d want to meditate to. What Hecker offers is a gateway to another world rather than a new filter for this one.
With Anoyo and Konoyo, Hecker has further swapped studio plugins for human musicians. On Love Streams he built an album from an Icelandic chorus that was later processed to oblivion. But Anoyo mostly leaves its human players unadulterated. “I don’t want to set up a digital-analog divide because I find the most interesting things confuse the two, like hybridity or in-between,” he told FACT in 2016. With Anoyo and Konoyo Hecker takes another step toward erasing any distinction between the two approaches.
Hecker’s music is not easy, but it is worthwhile. As music becomes another palliative tool for sanding the edges from our daily grind, embracing art that makes us uncomfortable, that asks significant questions, becomes all the more important. On the six tracks and 35 minutes that make up Anoyo there is no purpose but to explore the shadows in which Hecker and his collaborators have blanketed themselves. Because they know what those life hackers do not: If you’re going to reach for the sublime, it’s going to take some work.


The singer and former G.O.O.D. Music signee returns with a palette of adult contemporary synth-pop and early-’10s R&B. It’s bright and open, built with sounds that move and breathe with the artist.

Kacy Hill: Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again

Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again

Kacy Hill, the 26-year-old singer and erstwhile model from Phoenix, Arizona, explores acceptance across her second album, Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again, a collection that she’s self-released after five years with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music. It was an affiliation that cast an austere, serious pallor over her 2017 debut, Like a Woman, and also placed her against Travis Scott on one of his earliest hits, “90210,” juxtaposing her real and fragile soprano with his lurid Auto-Tune raps. In a way, that song summarized her time with the label: unfairly cast as a complement or texture and not given space to focus on herself or her sound.
The acceptance Hill seeks on Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again is primarily of herself. The album acts as a therapy session, filled with bits of advice that suggest countering times of pain or heightened worry with patience and trust. On the effervescent single “Porsche,” Hill sings, “No one’s gonna tell you/It isn’t all about you,” a guiding principle for an album whose core conflicts originate in loneliness, insecurity, and heartbreak. The issues are not trivial but common, and Hill acknowledges their universality and rejects the urge to dwell, instead focusing on the ways she can better herself. It’s comforting to hear a pop record embrace life’s in-betweens.
As she admits her troubles, Hill embraces joy. Is It Selfish is bright and open, built with sounds that move and breathe with the artist, instead of existing beside her—as was often the case on her debut, when she and the beat seemed to take turns at the microphone. Hill co-produced all but one song on Is It Selfish, working primarily with Francis and the Lights, BJ Burton, and Jim-E Stack for a palette of adult contemporary synth-pop and early-’10s R&B. The atmosphere suits Hill, whose voice requires similarly delicate tones and supplemental melodies to add some heft to her careful singing. Previously, on her G.O.O.D. songs, which were often criminally minimal, it could sound like she was suffocating in total emptiness. There is now real momentum to her work, a feeling that you’re self-discovering alongside her.
Still, Is It Selfish gains strength from Hill’s ever-present doubt. The album’s title, the opening line of “Much Higher,” is an admission that, no matter how much she hurts, Hill feels reluctant to open her own wounds at the risk of taking up others’ space and energy. It’s unclear what sort of answer she’d accept from the titular question (which pointedly lacks a question mark), but what is evident is that she wants to channel her diffidence into supporting and loving others. Later on “Much Higher,” Hill sings, “Do I tell you enough to thank you right?/’Cause nothing matters as much.” In Hill’s world, goodness can still emerge from darkness and you must confront your own faults in order to show love to others.
Across the album, Hill details little moments—car rides, rainstorms, late nights lying awake—that give life to her emotional and psychological breakthroughs and setbacks. The album’s best and final song, “Dinner,” is a story of unrequited love that Hill colors with two small stories that capture the sweetness and plainness of everyday life: a night getting too high with this other person and needing their warmth, followed by the smell of California, bringing to mind the scent of “Arizona after warm thunderstorms,” the prettiest four words on the record. The song captures the album’s themes and moods succinctly: Hill is longing but resolute. When she encounters disappointment, she doesn’t aim to change the circumstances but hopes to share tenderness, singing, “You could love me the same.” She’s content.

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Parquet Courts are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility tendency you can think of. Their music ably mixes skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos.

Light Up Gold

Parquet Courts are high as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Stoned, starving, and maybe just a little bit irritable, they're approached by a clipboard-carrying do-gooder seeking donations. "'A minute of YOUR time?'," they ask co-frontman Austin Brown, who quickly sends Mr. Greenpeace off with a snide-beyond-belief "for-GET about it" and a (questionably apropos) reminder that Socrates died in the fucking gutter. Munchie money secure, there are far more important details to attend to: roasted peanuts or Swedish fish?
Parquet cohorts Brown and Andrew Savage-- also of Fergus & Geronimo-- are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility, sativa-hoovering tendency you can think of. Their tangent-prone music flits, not always smoothly, between skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos. It's wound tight but fraying at the edges. They're smart but they don't always act it. They could probably play these songs a little better if they wanted to. They're very funny, but not the kind of funny that makes you laugh much. They contradict themselves constantly. They probably wait until the afternoon to shower.
The tension between the sharp rhythms (courtesy of Savage's brother Max) and the ace fretwork is Gold's most reliable thrill; were it not for all this forward motion from the younger Savage, there's just no telling how far afield these songs would drift. Still fresh off Fergus & Geronimo's genre-hopping, indie-skewering Funky Was the State of Affairs, Savage seems considerably looser here: though F&G sometimes hew too closely to constraints of their source material, here he drops the retro studiousness and gets a little weird. Of the pair, though, Brown's the real eccentric; his outburst-riddled material slot in beautifully against Savage's anthems-in-miniature. After a while, you start to see the logic in all all their rambling deflections.
It's not much of a stretch to hear many of of indie rock's recent go-tos-- blurry edged-production, meaning-averse lyrics-- as a form of disaffection. Times are strange, the future's rarely seemed less certain, so it's pretty easy to see the haze surrounding indie rock as a sonic counterpoint to the unfixed nature of, well, everything. Parquet Courts may be potheads but they're not head-in-the-clouds escapists. And, while there's a we're-all-fucked undercurrent running through Light Up Gold's lyric sheet, Parquet Courts aren't about to take it sitting down. Mumbly highlight "Careers in Combat" speaks to a fairly uncomfortable reality: there are no more lifeguard jobs or decent gigs left, but hey, the military's always looking for warm bodies. Savage, on "Yonder is Closer to the Heart", sees the wadded receipts and spare change piled on his desk as a reminder of the mundane passage of time; later, up to his neck in "motivation neglect," he unhappily admits "these days I'm captive in this borrowed time." Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll.


Fucking Hell

No Home has been aware of precarity for a long time. The solo project of London-based musician Charlie Valentine, No Home gained well-deserved attention in recent years opening for Big Joanie, Priests, and Moor Mother, playing the city’s Decolonise Fest, and releasing a series of EPs that seethe with critiques of capitalism and exploitation. If industrial music was meant to echo the alienation of mechanical factory labor, No Home’s unhurried progressions, minimalist percussion, and bursts of distortion mimic the disorientation of being locked out of labor-time to begin with. Fucking Hell is punk the way reclaiming your time is punk. On their full-length debut, Valentine’s powerful voice and experimental song structures dilate and expand time, pushing against the boundaries of genre and resisting enclosure. Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way.
Valentine’s voice is the clear centerpiece of the album. It stretches expansively, shapeshifting from a mesmerizing full-bodied blues vocal on “Burning the Body” to Liz Phair deconstructed alt-rock on “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” (where “I think I’m paranoid” seems to cite Shirley Manson); from Thom Yorke in outer space on “Secondary Actor” to a waxing swell on the meditative “Exile.” Valentine does with their voice what many noise musicians hope to do with their soundscapes: It is both the shifting emotional core and the steady unspooling that holds the song together. Its breadth creates a space of undoing.
The record’s narrative rests on classic transitional moments—graduating, looking for a job, trying to find steady footing. But these songs are not stumbling pauses along a well-lit upward path, as in some sort of Boomer imaginary; they’re elegies for the swamp of exploitation and humiliation, where the cost of entry is your self-worth and any rewards are fleeting and illusory. Valentine’s depiction of this headspace is brutally funny and also devastating, as in a memorable line from “The Perfect Candidate”: “Sorry we’ve considered other applicants/Good luck/Have a nice job search/Have you ever considered/Fucking off forever?” In “4x4,” which zeroes in on the music industry’s particular indignities (playing for free, emailing gatekeepers), Valentine returns to a line that escalates to a near-howl: “Say you wanna do this for life/Are you being realistic, baby?” It’s simultaneously one of the record’s most chilling moments and one of its best hooks. A quiet moment in “Candidate” hits just as hard: “I wish I could be worth more than this.”
Valentine turns that same incisiveness inward, digging into themselves and their creative process. “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” is ostensibly about music-making as an alternative to therapy because therapy itself is too expensive, but also about the double-bind of performing your pain for an audience. The song’s dissonance stretches in opposite directions, opening with ominous keyboard noise but veering into pop melodies, as if trying to stay one step ahead of itself. “You masturbate to my misery,” Valentine sings, “I learn how to cry in public.” Their narrator twists in the gaze, fighting to trust themself while remaining keenly aware of the pressure to be consumable. “Only white people dream of utopias,” Valentine sings, resisting any neat resolution. Economic and personal insecurities (and all the ways they intertwine) exert their ruthless gravity even as the record fights to pull out of their grasp.
Although the songs on Fucking Hell take different forms, all are stripped down to such sharp immediacy it feels like you’re hearing them at a house show. The sparse instrumentation creates a folk intimacy, foregrounding Valentine’s vocals and furthering the sense of temporal dislocation. The plaintive “A B- in This Economy” and “The Perfect Candidate” have the conversational tone of Sneaks or Frankie Cosmos, while the foreboding bursts of noise and eerie vocal samples in “Couldn’t Cry” and “Catholic School Never Taught Me How to Talk to Men” are as haunted and avenging as Moor Mother or early EMA tracks. But though No Home traverses indie rock cosmology, the project is singularly itself. Eschewing traditional pop structures, songs meander and change direction: There is no neat narrative to pain, no efficient linearity outside of the ruthless logic of capitalist production.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of release. Despite themes of debt and social anxiety, “Drink! You’re One of Us” is a fun, uptempo rocker with clear melodic hooks. Album closer “YY” is surprisingly pop, with the melancholy warmth of a Tracy Chapman song and a more traditional chorus that includes both a line about “doing good by your neighbor” and the skeptical refrain, “Don’t quite like the fruits of your labor.” There is no escape, but there are moments of reprieve: mutual aid, community support, collective and individual resistance. “YY” breaks the fever of despondency, allowing some cathartic sweetness to sneak in. “I made a good thing out of a bad situation,” Valentine sings, “Maybe I’m okay with my fall from grace.”

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Famous for his widescreen imagination, the legendary R&B producer and arranger helped define Chicago soul. This anthology of home recordings uncovered by his daughters reveals his more intimate side.

Step on Step

A legendary R&B producer and arranger that sample-flipping rap producers turned into a hip-hop touchstone, Charles Stepney also made prismatic one-man-band demos in his Chicago South Side basement, working up songs for Earth, Wind & Fire, Rotary Connection, and other collaborators during a dazzlingly fruitful decade before a heart attack killed him in 1976 at age 45. “Charles was such a gorgeous musician,” Richard Rudolph, lyricist for Rotary Connection, told Wax Poetics in 2007. “He’d play all these beautiful things, and give me the tapes with the melodies on them, and I’d ride around and—God, it was fantastic—try to write to them.”
It’s sweet to imagine that scenario while listening to Step on Step, a compilation of previously unreleased Stepney demos uncovered by his daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté. The album is part of a multimedia project to commemorate the work of their dad, a crate-diggers’ hero whose widescreen imagination helped define Chicago soul, in turn birthing a generation of Windy City rap innovators—Common, Kanye, Lupe, Chance, Noname, Jamila Woods—many of whom would sample his work, re-enacting Rudolph’s experience. (It wasn’t just a local phenomena; when his daughter, comedian Maya Rudolph, first met Q-Tip—who famously incorporated Rotary Connection’s “Memory Band” in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum”—she told him, “Your band put me through college.”)
Step on Step, though, shows an unfamiliar side of Stepney, whose signature maximalism incorporated call-and-response choral arrangements, jazzy brass pageantry, and swirling storm clouds of strings, often drawing on the talent of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Witness the majesty of “Les Fleurs,” a solo signature of Rotary Connection’s Minnie Riperton, Maya’s mom and Rudolph’s wife—an oft-sampled gem that underscored the credits of Jordan Peele’s Us and, more recently, capped the controversial “Big Payback” episode of Atlanta. Stepney came up as a jazz pianist and vibraphonist, recording with Chicago saxophonist Eddie Harris in the early ’60s, and those instruments dominate these demos alongside a new acquisition: an early Moog synthesizer, which by all indications Stepney quickly mastered. “Gimme Some Sugar,” “Daddy’s Diddies,” and “Gotta Dig It to Dig It” are effervescent synth-funk workouts in the vein of Stevie Wonder’s contemporaneous Talking Book and Innervisions; “Daddy’s Diddies” also features Stepney’s delightful, multi-tracked scat-singing, the set’s only vocal performance: a South Side echo of the joyous vocal play of Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’ “Cravo E Canela” from Clube Da Esquina, another early-’70s touchstone.
The draw here for many listeners will be the blueprints of classic recordings. “Black Gold” is a piano sketch for Rotary Connection’s psych-soul revival meeting “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun,” a Stepney masterpiece that triggered one of his periodic revivals when house-music heroes Masters at Work remade it in 1997 for their Nuyorican Soul project. Stepney’s “That’s the Way of the World” is a fully imagined realization of the 1975 Earth, Wind & Fire hit, a watercolor of Moog melodies, while “Imagination,” played on what sound like electric piano and organ against a skeletal drum-machine beat, distills the brassy falsetto gospel-soul highlight from Spirit, the 1976 album the group was creating with Stepney when he passed. (In one of the narrated footnotes sprinkled through the compilation, one of his daughters mentions her plans to use the recording to walk her down the aisle at her wedding in her late father’s absence.)
The downscaled intimacy of Step on Step may or may not be an accurate picture of the solo album Stepney had planned one day to record. Its 23 tracks—fully developed songs plus fragments and ephemera—do capture his rich sense of melody and counterpoint, flair for embellishment, and modular approach to composing; its mosaic format recalls the “segues” that Stepney and soul-folk singer Terry Callier used on the latter’s sublime Occasional Rain while laying out a banquet of stems for future beatmakers to repurpose. But as a portrait of an artist whose defining achievements were ultimately collaborative and monumental, the miniaturism showcased here is sometimes frustrating, especially as no one has yet ventured a survey like what Ace Records has done for Motown psych-soul swami Norman Whitfield and Sound of Philadelphia orchestral-soul architect Thom Bell, producer peers that Stepney is every inch the equal of and then some. It’s overdue. It’d be wonderful to hear his work with EW&F, Callier, and Rotary Connection alongside the Afro-Brazilian jazz-funk of Ramsey Lewis’ Salongo, the psych-blues freakouts of The Howlin’ Wolf Album and Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud (fueled by future Miles Davis hire Pete Cosey), and Stepney’s other Chess/Cadet/GRT Records productions: Riperton’s lush solo debut Come to My Garden, the Dells’ mighty Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach tribute, etc. Hopefully this set—together with a forthcoming documentary and the formation of Rotary Connection 222, a new repertory outfit of Stepney offsprings both spiritual (Junius Paul, Makaya McCraven) and literal (granddaughter Brandice Manuel)—will spur a lasting reappraisal of a man whose expansive cosmic soul feels as inspiring and necessary now as when it was first made.


Inspired by a childhood dreamworld and the pop radio hits of the 2000s, Bea Kristi’s second album is simultaneously heavy and light, dense and playful, melodic and dissonant.

Beatopia

Beabadoobee’s 2020 debut Fake It Flowers captured Bea Kristi as an angsty, impulsive adolescent, with the disaffected college rock hooks and box hair color to match: “Let me cut my hair and dye it red if I want to,” she bellowed over thick and dissonant guitars, on a song that began with “Kiss my ass.” But Kristi—who recently turned 22—is a different person now than the teenage singer who screamed about throwing it all away. When she finally toured the album, “I almost felt like I had to force myself back into the Fake It Flowers world,” she said. On Beatopia, Kristi moves forward by retreating backwards, finding a brighter sound in the sanctum of her inner child.
The title of her new record comes from the name of an imaginary world Kristi dreamed up when she was about seven. As a child, Kristi immigrated with her parents from Iloilo City to London, where she felt like an “alien” in a majority-white school. She found a much-needed escape in the invented alphabet, people, and places of Beatopia, but she blotted out her fantasy land after her teacher and classmates found—and roundly mocked—her grand escapist vision. It wasn’t until recently that Kristi rediscovered her lost world. Maybe it was the psychedelics she started taking in her early 20s, or maybe time had healed some deeper traumas, but as Kristi began drafting her follow-up album, her forgotten kingdom started to come back.
To an outsider Beatopia might sound disjointed, but any fellow child of early ’00s pop radio will feel intimately at home with Kristi’s mix of adult contemporary and guitar-driven bubblegum pop. If her first album was an homage to the decade before her birth, all slanted guitars and screams and Sub Pop cosplay, this one is a send-up of the soft rock of her actual childhood: “Sunny Day” is relaxed and radiant, a bubbly echo of Norah Jones, Ingrid Michaelson, and Natasha Bedingfield. Paired with Kristi’s sly, lythe vocals, the shimmying bossa nova of “The Perfect Pair” is a vision of an internet-age Corinne Bailey Rae. “Talk,” with its compact percussion and smudged vocals, takes the canned one-hit-wonder pop-punk princesses of the 2000s and cranks up their levels. It’s an inspired and nuanced take on an era flattened by nostalgia: Kristi’s riffs are more explosive and her lyrics are stranger (“See You Soon” is supposed to make the listener “feel like you’re tripping on shrooms,” and her sighs of “I’m deteriorating” are an apt approximation). Where her source material is often facile or vindictive, these songs are restorative; “Fairy Song” sounds like a self-care checklist, with gentle reminders to drink water, eat food, and call your brother just to check he’s okay.
If Beatopia the universe was a solitary creation, Beatopia the album is a far richer text, buoyed by a bevy of collaborators that help flesh out Kristi’s world with demonic-sounding backing vocals (“10:36”), baroque orchestral flourishes (“Ripples”), and towering guitar solos (“Talk”). The personnel list reads like a freshman class of burgeoning British pop stars—Georgia Ellery of Jockstrap contributed string arrangements, while TikTok drum’n’bass revivalist PinkPantheress adds elven harmonies to “Tinkerbell Is Overrated.” As on last year’s Our Extended Play EP, Kristi partners with labelmates Matty Healy and George Daniel of the 1975, but here their fingerprints are more visible: “Beatopia Cultsong,” the spacious overture that opens the album, echoes the 1975’s signature self-titled opening motif. On Beatopia, their contributions broaden her sound while at the same time making it less specifically Bea: The Healy cut “Pictures of Us,” with its Midwest emo-tinged guitar noodling, is a striking stylistic departure that feels a bit out of step, as if Kristi is doing her best 1975 impersonation. But the sentimental and sleepy closer “You’re Here That’s the Thing” is a perfect fit for her lithe voice, even if the smarmy sensuality of a line like “When the lights go down don’t say I didn’t warn ya/I don’t think that’s legal in the state of California” feels quintessentially Healy.
Kristi’s most prolific partnership is with her guitarist, Jacob Bugden, who co-wrote almost every song on Beatopia. You can hear their dynamic grow in real time on “Don’t Get the Deal,” with Bugden’s lower register serving as a perfect foil to Kristi’s featherlight vocals. As their voices meld into a harmonic duet and a “Maps”-inspired guitar solo crashes in, the Beatopia universe comes into focus: heavy and light, dense and playful, melodic and dissonant, all at the same time.
Beabadoobee is well-suited to imaginary worlds: Her lyrics are often more form than function, her words merely vessels for sounds. “I find words that don’t really make sense but fit perfectly with the melody or just feel nice to say,” she has said of her writing process. Untethered from the typical constraints of grammar and diction, Beatopia finds its own dreamlike logic. “Is it me/Or recently/Time is moving slowly?” she and a chorus of friends and musicians repeat, entranced, on her titular “Cultsong.” Try to decipher the verbiage—shouldn’t it be “time has been moving slowly”?—and you’ll miss the point entirely, just as her classmates and teacher did 15 years ago. But let the sentences flow as just another instrument, as something nice to say and nice to hear, and you might get a glimpse at Beatopia.


Ten of the eighteen tracks on the soundtrack for the Miles Teller-starring boxing film Bleed for This come courtesy of composer Julia Holter, in her first-ever film work.

Bleed for This OST

Every year, the film industry reliably churns out a new biographical boxing film with aspirations towards artistry and, hopefully, awards. This year’s entrant is Ben Younger’s Bleed for This, starring the famously boorish Miles Teller (Whiplash, Fantastic Four) as Vinny Paz, a world championship boxer on the road to recovery from a devastating car accident. It was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, in itself setting up an unfortunate parallel to the  already-existing Raging Bull. The soundtrack, meanwhile, pairs selections from artists like Willis Earl Beal with some period-specific ’80s glam, and, intriguingly, several selections from the composer and performer Julia Holter.
Holter provides ten of the eighteen songs on this soundtrack, each a piece of new music from her. It is definitely an odd fit, and the soundtrack doesn’t make any efforts to make sense of it: In its first few tracks we are treated to selections from Billy Squier and Bad Company, selections that serve a scene-setting purpose in the film that they do not serve here. Songs from Willis Earl Beal’s 2013 album Nobody Knows are peppered throughout to add a dash of emotional depth, but Beal’s probing and leftfield soul is mismatched with the film’s rote aggression. This disjunction is even more apparent when Holter’s music appears in the film.
For the most part, her contributions are short, almost weightless, instrumental pieces that lean towards ambient. Almost none of the pieces are over a minute long, making them closer to sketches. In the film, they are deployed where easy emotion needs to be summoned.  No matter how beautiful some these tracks can be, they are forced to serve utilitarian ends: “Fighting Dele,” one of the most well-executed pieces, only exists to heighten the tension of Vinny Paz’s title fight against Gilbert Dele. Instead of the old tricks of heavy breathing, audible heartbeats, shaky camera angles, or even silence, Holter’s song is used to make a difficult moment in the fight (right before the telegraphed victory) seem ethereal, almost divine. The strategy ends up making her music feel silly when tied to the film.
Worse, Holter’s songs are given the hoary old agenda of making the aggressive and masculine edges of the film seem more sensitive, softer, and intimate. Bleed for This does not break any stereotypes about boxing films. It follows a narrative arc, a cast of characters, and explores a set of emotions (failure, redemption, victory) that are well trodden. The score’s best songs, “Fighting Duran,” (a grandly wrought three-minute ambient song), “Home Movies,” (a short minimalist epic of luxuriant and melancholic strings) and “Vinny’s Trumph” (the score’s triumphantly horn-filled closer) make clear just how mismatched Holter’s sensibilities are to this ultimately lazy and formulaic film, filled with scenes of sweaty gyms, casino floors, and other places of contest. Holter admirably writes music that attempts to complicate these spaces, but in the end she is mismatched with this film. And that’s a bummer, because any film would be lucky to have her contributions.
Holter’s work for Bleed for This is her first film score. Without a doubt her music will continue to appear in film because it is subtle, spectral, and densely packed with energy without being plodding or gaudy. Bleed for This like any run-of-the-mill white-elephant film vying for critical success is going to do away with those kinds of qualities, in order to activate base pleasures in a movie viewer. This film’s palette of emotions and events is only made of primary colors, while Holter’s music often exists in a spectrum that is murkier and less defined. The kind of film that Holter’s work may be suited for will more fluidly incorporate the hypnotic pace of her compositions. It will be a film that chooses not to retell the same story over and over again.


Wolfgang Voigt’s investigations of German heritage turn ominous on an imposing, hour-long ambient album whose title translates as “frenzy”; it feels closely keyed to the current political state.

Rausch

“They dreamed of a fusion of worlds,” wrote the historian Modris Eksteins in his landmark Rites of Spring, describing Germany on the eve of the first World War: “The technical became spiritual.” Following a rapid economic expansion from a loose network of rustic provinces to a united industrial superpower, the nation embraced a fresh mythology. “Efficiency became an end, not a means. And Germany herself became the expression of an elemental ‘life force.’”
In many ways, this description applies just as readily to the music of Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS alias. By using computers to meticulously process samples of Wagner, Volksmusik, and Schlager into pulsating atmospheres, Voigt refracts German identity through a haunting digital prism. Albums like 1998’s Königsforst and 2000’s Pop are collections of moments drawn out for five, 10, or 15 minutes. The tracks barely evolve; the music feels like a slowly unfolding natural phenomenon, born from a collision of the acoustic and digital. Evoking his youthful LSD trips in the Black Forest, the tingling high frequencies call to mind buzzing insects or rippling water, while slow-motion chords envelop like the womb.
The GAS alias went silent following the release of Nah Und Fern, a retrospective 2008 box set cementing the project’s legacy. But last year, Voigt reappeared with Narkopop, which was a bumpy landing for fans: Listeners expecting a second helping of the project’s iconic, mesmerizing tones were instead met with fidgety disruptions. Returning now with Rausch, GAS remains in an unsettled headspace. In 1999, Voigt described the project warmly: “The aim is always to give love and to be loved for your work.” It’s hard to draw that conclusion today. Rausch heaves with a potent cocktail of seasick unease, grand visions, and snarling intensity. As far-right nationalist political views lurch back into Germany’s mainstream, the project’s motherland obsessions seem suddenly less comfortable in their own skin, exuding a dissonant terror alongside the requisite transcendence.
Rausch is meant to be taken in as a single, hour-long piece made up of seven parts. It’s an imposing listen. More than anything, this album looms over you, swaying back and forth between awesomeness and menace. The title translates to an ecstatic state of drunkenness, or “frenzy,” and the most joyful passages teeter on the edge of chaos and oblivion.
The opening contains some of the most beautiful music on the record: nearly eight minutes of stretched-out symphonic tones, rain-like static, and depth-charge bass. The arrangement is stacked to emphasize the sense of scale: The low end invites vertigo, while cymbals guide your gaze upwards, letting you breathe in pure, brisk air. In the middle, dense harmonies cascade with the muted majesty of cloud banks. Voigt has left the Black Forest for an alpine summit.
If Voigt were to fade it out here, “Rausch 1” would stand as another gorgeous addition to the GAS catalogue. Instead, it’s a prelude to a descent accompanied by a chugging beer-hall beat. A bleary unease sets in, the threat of violence looming in the otherwise ethereal mist. Dissonance ripples across the surface, at times deep in the background, elsewhere rudely elbowing its way to the front. By the time we get to “Rausch 4,” the mix is half consumed by a wind-tunnel roar.
Over three cycles, this rhythm rises up to the surface amid alternating waves of confusion and splendor, only to recede again. It’s another take on the timelessness that distinguished the GAS albums of the early 1990s. If those records suggested a kind of meditative eternity, Rausch feels like the mess of history playing out in an intoxicated melee. GAS’ rebirth could have easily coasted on almost two decades of accumulated goodwill, ignoring the knotty and uncomfortable problems of the day in favor of a detached, expertly crafted rehash. No one would complain, or perhaps even notice. Instead, Voigt continues to absorb and explore. Rausch, though hardly topical, feels current, as jarring and revealing as last night’s nightmare.


On an album meant to strike “a balance between rural and city living,” the Canadian producer evokes rural idyll in dozy deep house, but the mood too often verges on soporific.

Project Pablo: Come to Canada You Will Like It

Come to Canada You Will Like It

While house and techno emerged from the staunchly urban settings of New York, Chicago, and Detroit, the countryside played a pivotal role in the second phase of electronic music, as Summer of Love ravers turned England’s farmland and fields into unlikely hotbeds of kick drums and bass.
Project Pablo—aka Vancouver-born, Montreal-based producer Patrick Holland—is almost certainly too young and Canadian to have experienced this. Yet his new album, Come to Canada You Will Like It, speaks to the same mystic pastoralism you can see in footage of those early raves, where dazzled partygoers and early house came together in a rustic techno paradise. Holland has said that the album is “about slowing down while finding a balance between rural and city living”; the record’s cover features a childlike painting of a country cabin under a benevolent yellow blue sky. It might be the least typically techno record sleeve in the past few years of dance music.
This pastoral creep is reflected in Come to Canada’s 10 sprawling tracks, which seem to suggest house music if it had been raised on a diet of fresh fruit and outdoor exercise rather than gay clubs and city basements. While British raves mixed the thrilling rush of illegality with their bucolic charm, Come to Canada suggests the well-worn idea of the rural idyll, all yawning pace and dappled green. The familiar elements that have made Project Pablo’s music so inviting are present and correct—the wandering bass lines, jazzy chords, and subtly swinging drums—but they feel laid back to the point of sloth, with all the energy of a cat catching 40 winks in a suntrap.
“Tunstall,” for example, is recognizably house music, thanks to its 4/4 beat and bongo lilt. But it sounds utterly unconcerned whether you dance or not, its noodling touches quite happy to wander along with little in the way of build or friction. The same format is repeated throughout the album: Drums skip by contentedly, synth chords lend a suggestion of melody, a bass line ambles, and jazzy keyboards solo away, all without a care in the world.
There’s something to be said for such stylistic consistency—it holds the album together well—but it feels limiting over the course of 10 tracks. What is initially lush and golden rapidly pales to a gilded froth. Electronic music can often get away with extreme tonal minimalism, thanks to its percussive thrust. But Come to Canada has none of the energy of earlier Project Pablo songs like “Movin’ Out” or “Is It Dry?” and the album’s palette isn’t particularly rewarding, either. “Fine Match,” for all its melodic charm, resembles an Air demo before the French duo have applied their studio magic. You frequently find yourself longing for some level of detail that might lift the songs above their basic level of affable stodge.
There are some lovely moments on Come to Canada. Holland is a gifted melodicist, and you can hear it on “Intro,” which resembles Boards of Canada with all the menace surgically removed, or the warmly wistful “Nanana,” while “To Sealeigh and Back” has a brilliantly fluttering hi-hat sequence. But there is no urgency, no feeling that this music simply had to exist. Holland has described Come to Canada as “a collection of songs that I’ve been sitting on for a while,” and it feel exactly like that: a selection of perfectly inoffensive tracks that could have stayed locked on his hard drive without too much disappointment.
Canada has a reputation—generally ill-informed, and often lampooned by Canadians themselves—for politeness. And, as promised by Holland’s surely tongue-in-cheek title, Come to Canada is perfectly likable and nice. But for base thrills, edge, and energy, you might want to look elsewhere.


House and Land is the new collaboration of Asheville guitarist Sarah Louise with fiddle player Sally Anne Morgan. The tension between new and old, between folk and avant-garde, is its driving force.

House and Land

When 12-string guitarist Sarah Louise Henson (aka Sarah Louise) first recorded the mournful ballad “The Day Is Past and Gone,” it was a very different piece of music. As the Asheville native plucked and bent the strings of her guitar, you could feel the sorrow in the song all within her playing. But on the debut release of House and Land, Louise’s new duo with multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers), it approaches the form of a folk epic. Louise has become one of the most exciting figures in solo guitar music, with a style of fingerpicking that aligns her more with banjo players and pianists, notes cascading in constant patterns like rain. In House and Land, she often takes on the role of lead vocalist, echoing the hum of Morgan’s fiddle with a sad, steady sigh.
House and Land’s self-titled debut feels expansive and immersive while using the simplest resources. Its source materials stem from centuries-old folk songs, so traditional they share lines with Old Testament verses. But Louise and Morgan attack them with urgency and excitement. The record’s best moments, like “The Day Is Past and Gone” and “Rich Old Jade,” are warmly psychedelic, proceeding patiently with minimal percussion and unfolding into new shapes at every turn. Other songs take up smaller spaces. “Listen to the Roll” is nearly a capella, with Louise singing sternly over a low drone. “I had to answer for myself,” she repeats, adding an ominous edge to the melody by raising her voice just a half-step between the syllables of “answer.” It’s a haunting sound, showing just how much these musicians can communicate with such sparse arrangements.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to draw a hard line about what is folk music and what is avant-garde,” Louise has said, “Because so many ‘folk’ musicians are incredibly inventive and plenty of ‘avant-garde’ artists are just doing the same stuff over and over again.” This tension—between new and old, between folk and avant-garde—is the driving force of House and Land. The sounds throughout the album are alluringly simple: the primitive buzz of a shruti box, the percussive trill of a banjo, the fluttering sound of the pair’s tight, ghostly harmonies. In the opening track “Wandering Boy,” House and Land illustrate their potential as a more accessible folk duo, with a straightforward arrangement that places an emphasis on melody and harmony. But the pair are not just content to retell stories from the past; they also take pleasure in bending them at their will.
For their rendition of Shirley Collins’ “The False True Lover,” Morgan maintains the song’s persistent flow while slightly restructuring the melody, adding a new emotional undercurrent similar to Sam Amidon’s reinterpretations on I See the Sign. In “Johnny”—a song the duo discovered on a late ’90s private press folk album—they shift the song’s subject from “father” to “mother” and replace the word “sterling” with “garland,” because, according to the liner notes, “[It was] more to our liking.” These subtle, personal changes are indicative of the album’s success. House and Land don’t just make these songs their own: they effectively reclaim them, illustrating that they’ve always been theirs.


The New England rapper celebrates the joys of gaming on a bright and bubbly collaborative album.

Pink Navel / Kenny Segal: How To Capture Playful

How To Capture Playful

Devin Bailey, the rapper, producer, and singer who records as Pink Navel, has an effervescent and nasal voice, an extensive knowledge of animated television, and an immense, somewhat intimidating pool of references and SAT words. Thankfully, the term “nerd” no longer stings like an insult—these days, it’s more like a term of endearment. On the charming How to Capture Playful, Pink Navel teams up with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal to celebrate nerdom with joyous raps that revolve around their enduring love of video games.
In games, Bailey finds a way to process the intricacies of existence and as well as a place to disappear when life gets too overwhelming. “I’m thinking that a game can make the pain stop,” they rap on “Cracked,” sounding almost surprised to admit it out loud. Little moments here and there indicate how deeply the subject is woven into Bailey’s life. They play anytime they have to wait in line (“Memory Card”); they sit all day with the controller in their lap, poised to respawn at a moment’s notice (“Reset”); they estimate that their hours of screen time stretch well into the triple digits (“Synergy'').
Gamer life can be isolating, but Bailey doesn’t wallow in darkness or escapism. While they occasionally question the space their hobby takes up, they also relish the wonder and meaning it provides. In “Maps & Navigation,” which is ostensibly about in-game cartography, Bailey ruminates on what it is to be present, how following a set path may not take you where you need to be. In “Present Vendor,” they rap glowingly about Beedle, the merchant who appears throughout The Legend of Zelda series, transforming him from a bit character to a working-class hero. Beedle could be the friendly bodega clerk who remembers your usual order or the postal worker who keeps the line moving efficiently.
Kenny Segal responds to Bailey’s whimsy with an equally spirited palette. The beats are a far cry from the ramshackle doom jazz he provided to billy woods on Maps, instead feeling more akin to the pastoral instrumentals on his 2018 solo album happy little trees. He supplies Bailey with shivering psych-folk flutes (“Speedrun”), distorted 8-bit jazz (“Hours Played”), and lush loops (“Poet Gang Playing Cards”). Each track feels bright and slightly over-caffeinated, goofily stumbling over itself to create space for Bailey’s infinitely unspooling rhyme schemes.
Pink Navel’s complex writing and dexterous command of rhythm reflect their immersion in the music. Listen to the way Pink mimics the bassline on “New Tech” before pivoting to a syncopated staccato that mirrors Segal’s sporadic needle-drop sampling. Their triple-time cadence on the washed-out drill of “Solving Combat” tumbles over the insistent hi-hats, finding nooks and crannies between the kick drums. They make a Cones of Dunshire reference, rap about scrolling TikTok while hiking, and say “IRL” unironically—but they make it sound cool. Bailey’s passion is the joyful heart at the center of this record. Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s easy to get swept into its bright, pixelated world.


The Brooklyn punks remain focused on the ceaseless challenges of living in the big city, but their overdriven guitars no longer sound quite as bitter or fed up—particularly when they shift to love songs.

Broken Equipment

Brooklyn punk band Bodega’s debut album, Endless Scroll, was largely a lament that modern life is lived through screens, but there were also songs about low-wage workers selling gluten-free sugar water in Union Square and the ridiculousness of center-liberal New Yorkers thinking Trumpism was unprecedented. Songwriters and vocalists Ben Hozie and Nikki Belfiglio made incisive points, but the approach they took on some of Endless Scroll’s political songs wasn’t always the sharpest line of attack. They sometimes mocked the very people who might stand a chance of coming around after some open-minded conversation—say, the identically dressed but potentially well-intentioned showgoers of “Name Escape.” On follow-up Broken Equipment, which Hozie co-produced with Bodega’s live sound mixer Bobby Lewis, Hozie and Belfiglio still stumble a bit when they attempt sociopolitical commentary. They remain focused on the ceaseless challenges of living in New York—and, by proxy, any major U.S. city—but now, their overdriven guitars don’t quite sound as bitter or fed up. Broken Equipment often sounds like a band weary of having to make the same points they’ve always made but then doing it anyway.
They shine best when they write about love, when their vocals go beyond sing-speaking, and when they blast the overdrive on their midtempo punk riffs. On “Doers,” Hozie’s cadence approaches rapping, an exciting new style for him. When the band adds crunchy guitars and Tai Lee’s percussive thwacking during the chorus, Bodega briefly transcend their lopsided lampooning. Ham-fisted references to a “soylent toilet seat” and innovation being impossible without dongles sandwich the razor-sharp line “I take all my meals to go/It’s fast down the tube/Delivery, and back to my workflow,” a gastronomical take on the productive forces of capitalism.
His rhetoric holds up slightly better on “NYC (disambiguation),” where relatively pared-back verses swell into an overdriven singalong chant of “New York was founded by a corporation”—a history lesson that in 1626, the Dutch West India Company bought New York from the indigenous Lenape tribe. Elsewhere, when he and Belfiglio aim their accusations upward, they fall back to the ground before they reach their target. On “Thrown,” he spits, “I’m surrounded by bureaucrats/And I was cold-called by two Democrats/Who said ‘senators thrown’/Still failing the class,” over click-clacking guitars; his voice has a scornful sneer but not quite the rage that lambasting a whole political party begs for.
Hozie is at his most engaging when exploring romance. On “All Past Lovers,” right after he sings, “All past lovers live inside of you,” guitars rattle like little fireworks going off, as though he finds power, not dread, in reflecting on past relationships that didn’t pan out. “I’m gonna show I love you,” he slowly intones atop phaser-heavy chords on “Pillar on the Bridge of You,” a love song he wrote for Belfiglio, before transitioning to something more like a speak-shout: “When my back lifts you up that street!” His excitement is audible, and there’s something sweet about someone so prone to derision being so genuinely enamored that he’ll use his whole body to show it.
When Belfiglio takes the mic, Bodega sound even better. On “Territorial Call of the Female,” her voice swings from a mild mid-register vibrato to a Karen O-like wail in a fraction of a second, and dovetails thrillingly with walloping power chords and Adam See’s punchy bassline. While Hozie can sound less like a singer than someone simply complaining loudly, Belfiglio sounds inviting and sharp. Her luminosity fades as the song closes, her wails of “call me out” gradually sounding ever more breathless and exhausted. It's unclear who she's addressing: herself? Some unnamed other? Society itself? But in that ambiguity lies one of the perplexing things about Bodega: She and Hozie have always known how to identify problems, but they’re still figuring out how to get people on their side.


The debut album from the celebrity production duo is a somber departure from their EDM days—a lifeless, anodyne pop record that wallows in basic feelings of regret and narcissism.

The Chainsmokers: Memories...Do Not Open

Memories...Do Not Open

Commercial EDM thrives on triumph, each one greater than the last, and the Chainsmokers have a bootstrap story as big as any in the game. When Drew Taggart and Alex Pall released “#SELFIE” in December 2013, they were relative nobodies trying to make a dent on the EDM scene. A month later, Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak label picked up the single—a novelty song about social media that suggested women are somehow more vain and annoying than men—and things started happening for the duo. But, like the viral spread of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the success of “#SELFIE” and its attendant backlash threatened to eclipse their fledgling career.
“We made a novelty record that was, in my opinion, one of the most clever records ever made... Obviously not everyone got the joke,” Taggart told Idolator in late 2015, gravely underestimating everyone's ability to get jokes. “But we’re working our way out of that and proving that we’re pretty well-rounded musicians.” So they abandoned their EDM to emphasize slower tempos, slinky melodies, and songs about bruised feelings. Whether they helped initiate the move away from super-sized dance music or merely sniffed the shifting winds, it was a canny move. In the past year, they have become one of the biggest names in pop music. On YouTube, a pair of videos for their single “Closer”—a moody, surprisingly convincing song about sex, regret, and the passage of time—has been viewed 1.6 billion times. Their 10 most popular songs on YouTube and Spotify alone account for a combined seven billion plays.
This stylistic and emotional maturation is a big part of the narrative the Chainsmokers tell about themselves as party bros made good. The first lines we hear on the album are an apology: “You know I’m sorry,” sings a wounded, suspicious Taggart, sounding more like an emo singer than a superstar DJ, and it sets the brooding tone for an album preoccupied with breakups and betrayals. Musically, Memories… Do Not Open is of a piece with all of their output post-“Roses,” the single that marked their big shift. There are no big-room bangers, no concussive drops, no coked-up-mosquito-with-a-vuvuzela synth riffs. Diplo and Skrillex’s big hit for Justin Bieber, “Where Are Ü Now,” serves as the template for their pneumatic pads and processed vocals. With few exceptions—like “Break Up Every Night,” a peppy pop-rock number that could be a more caffeinated MAGIC!, or “Last Day Alive,” which features the country duo Florida Georgia Line in the musical equivalent of a poster of fighter jets—the duo and their 32 credited co-writers keep the tempos slow and the moods muted. It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality. None of it sounds anything like “#SELFIE,” but its worldview is barely any bigger than that song's narrow perspective; toggling between cheap thrills and bitter recriminations with all the emotional stakes of a drunken beach fight caught on Snapchat.
Taggart first sang on one of the duo’s songs with “Closer,” and its success seems to have encouraged him to take more of the spotlight here. His voice is capable, deep and boomy, and he has a way with reaching down for the low notes that faintly resembles the Crash Test Dummies. His chief quality, though, in song as in interviews, is a kind of everydude relatability, mapped out in conversational lines like, “Fuck it, yeah, I said it.” It is indicative of the Chainsmokers’ irony: a #nofilter vernacular sung through countless vocal filters.
Only “Paris” comes close to what they achieved with “Closer.” It’s enlivened by a similar ear for detail that flickers between the specific and the universal, and its us-against-the-world chorus has a way of reaching even the inner teen of even the most hardened listener. But too many of their songs writhe around in pettiness. “She wants to break up every night/Then tries to fuck me back to life” takes the art of the couplet to a new low—though whether that’s lower than the same song’s “She’s got seven different personalities/Every one’s a tragedy” may depend upon your views on assonance, make-up sex, and mental-health shaming. “Wake Up Alone” wastes Jhené Aiko on a song about worrying that once you’re rich and famous, people will only want to have sex with you for being rich and famous. And “It Won’t Kill Ya” pulls out all the stops—swaggering trap beats, horn fanfare, dolorous piano—for a song about hooking up before last call.
For two guys who sell reckless abandon as a lifestyle, they're just not very fun to be around. The smirk they wore on “#SELFIE” is dwarfed by the massive chip on their shoulder—both as Artists Who Demand to Be Taken Seriously and more exhaustingly as Dudes Who Can’t Seem to Catch a Break. The narcissism comes to a head on “Honest,” in which the song’s protagonist is tugged between his faithful girlfriend and the temptations of life on the road. “Bloodstream” might best encapsulate the album’s spiritual void. You don’t need to read the duo’s exegesis (“We are often criticized for being ‘party boys’ in what seems to be an attempt to discredit our artistry, when in fact, our partying has led to some of our most sobering songwriting moments”) to grok that it’s another song about the perils of fame. “Those things that I said/They were so overrated/But I, yeah, I meant it/Oh yeah, I really fucking meant it.” I’m not sure “overrated” means what he thinks it means here if he’s complaining that people have blown the duo's poorly thought-through public statements out of proportion.
But none of this stuff has happened in a vacuum. Despite the preponderance of sad piano across the album, the Chainsmokers remain preening arena hams who make videos that look like Maxim spreads. And that, as much as anything, is why they are so popular. The regret that’s baked into their tired-of-winning debut has as much to do with the ennui gnawing at the heart of modern culture as it does any of the time-worn traditions of teenage kicks, star-crossed lovers, and spring break blackout episodes. Beneath its shiny veneer, Memories… Do Not Open is a Pandora's box of self-loathing that, to use their vernacular, also wants to be really fucking meaningful. It would be daring to say that there’s levels to their music because maybe, like “#SELFIE,” this is all pop-art commentary and we’re still not getting the joke. But their billions of plays don’t lie: They've just got their fingers pressed to the basic, regressive pulse of America.