With the power of an orchestra behind her, Mica Levi provides a melancholy pulse for Jackie's portrait of a seemingly unknowable historical figure.

Jackie OST

In director Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, unlike almost any movie made about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there are no hints of shadowy puppet masters or boogeymen: there is simply the spotlight on one person’s grieving, complicated by the grief of an entire nation. Accompanying the film is a score written by Mica Levi, whose work in film in the last three years is slowly surpassing any of her output as an experimental producer or art-pop rocker (with Micachu and the Shapes). Her score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin proved Levi’s ability to create sound that is not only atmospheric, but definitive to the film itself. With the power of an orchestra behind her, Levi provides Jackie a palpitating pulse for the film’s portrait of a seemingly unknowable historical figure.
The score introduces itself in the film immediately as Natalie Portman walks through autumnal grounds of the Kennedy compound. She is walking towards her home, to meet a reporter (Theodore H. White, who wrote a LIFE magazine article that largely began the Camelot myth surrounding the Kennedy administration) to discuss life after November 22. The camera zooms in on Portman’s grimace, as she makes her way home, and Levi’s “Intro,” swoops into the scene with ghostly strings, immediately setting a tone of melancholy. Throughout the film, Levi’s score is used sparingly, but with sensitive accuracy. Here in these first few minutes of the film, it gives weight to all the dead foliage.
The camera often lingers on Portman’s face, especially when she is looking in the mirror. In moments like these, Levi’s score emerges unexpectedly, giving a strange stability to these often frayed and vulnerable visual experiences. One moment in particular haunted me. Shortly after the assassination, Portman finds herself in the bathroom of Air Force One, right before LBJ is sworn in as president. She looks in the mirror, wiping away blood from her face and blouse. When Portman cleans the viscera off the mirror, smudging its surface and blurring away her image, the piece “Tears,” which was barely perceptible as a nervous string arrangement at the beginning of the scene asserts itself. A simple chord progression of keys gives a momentary balm, and frames the scene perfectly. Jackie is replete with visual moments like this one, that are painful to look at. What Levi’s music can do is provide a brief respite, smoothing the razor edges of a picture. And unlike her work in Under the Skin, Levi’s score in Jackie is unobtrusive, it exists when you need and want it to, providing either a relief from or a multiplication of the grief the film is relating.
Listening to the whole score removed from the film, it’s easy to spot the same sounds used over and over again. At times, these leitmotifs can seem uninteresting when stretched out into compositions. But when you revisit them, there is a puncturing sensation to these repetitions. One theme in particular: a swell of descending strings that mimic the action of exhaling a very deep breath, is quite affecting. It appears in the introductory song, as well as in “Lee Harvey Oswald” (a piece used during the assassination scene) and “Walk to the Capitol” (which that soundtracks the funeral procession). In these parts of the film, the regular reaction might be to hold your breath, while processing the overwhelming sadness. But, what Levi’s score can do, is give the film and the viewer a way to stabilize a reaction; the strings allow you to feel oxygen in the room.
As a piece of music alone, it is hard to separate Levi’s compositions from their pragmatic function as a score. When revisiting the score weeks after watching the movie, the effect of certain sounds and movements was apparitional, the film’s power lingering essentially because Levi’s sonic cues were so well-wrought. Without her work the film might be less complete. Like an solid frame to a complex painting, Levi’s score concretizes and helps control the artistic experience of the film. In effect, the score may not supersede its filmic anchor, but is sure does make the entire endeavor more beautiful.


This comeback album, assisted by Scott Avett, feels both charmingly at ease and refreshingly ambitious, grappling with life’s big questions over understated, easygoing production.

Forever Just Beyond

Eef Barzelay has spent his career in a lonely spot. The Israeli-born singer-songwriter who records under the name Clem Snide has stumbled through all the trappings of alternative fame: a short-lived major-label deal, a tight-knit community of fans, a self-sustained schedule of crowd-sourced tours and new releases. But his timing has never quite worked. He was a buzz band before buzz bands existed, an early adopter who never cashed in. Put it this way—there are cult favorites and then there are the musicians who find themselves, two decades into their careers, performing at their fans’ family gatherings. “Thanks for coming? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say in this situation,” Barzelay said, guitar strapped around his neck, greeting attendees of Kim and Carla and Jim and Mary’s joint anniversary party in 2014.
This tragic, comic perseverance has long informed his music. When Clem Snide began in the mid ’90s, Barzelay’s work was lumped in with a wave of alt-country bands, mostly due to the distinctive sound of his voice: a hoarse, twangy grumble, pitched somewhere between Jeff Tweedy and Jeff Mangum. But from the beginning, Barzelay’s visions were more playful and absurd than his contemporaries’: “The Dairy Queen has melted/Having laid all her eggs,” went a typical opening couplet. As he soldiered on, his songwriting grew both more adventurous and more direct; as of late, he’s been offering to write specially commissioned biographical songs for his listeners. Our world is small and our time here is brief, he seems to say. Why not get to know each other?
He opens up a bit on Forever Just Beyond, the first Clem Snide album in five years. After seeing a video of the Avett Brothers covering one of his songs, Barzelay reached out to Scott Avett to collaborate on new material and, possibly, help revitalize his career. Together they crafted a comeback album that feels both charmingly at ease and refreshingly ambitious. Like kindred spirits bonding over a packed bowl, they immediately turn to the big questions. Within the first three songs, they discuss the supposed final words of film critic Roger Ebert (“It’s all an elaborate hoax”), the nature of humanity itself (“We are a wave endlessly breaking”), and at least one man’s definition of the word “God” (deep breath: “God is simply that which lies forever just beyond the limit/Of what we already seem to know”).
It’s heady stuff, and Avett is smart to pair Barzelay with the most natural, elegant production of his career. In the past, his best work has been artfully orchestrated (2001’s The Ghost of Fashion, 2005’s End of Love) or purposefully unadorned (2006’s solo album Bitter Honey). These songs split the difference with a healthy dose of reverb, layered acoustic guitar, campfire percussion, and background vocals that linger and dissipate like clouds of smoke. While the lyrics turn constantly toward the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, the music is content to simply float along, understated and picturesque. Or as Barzelay puts it in “Easy,” “We only see through keyholes/But maybe that’s all that our eyes can take.”
Around the announcement of the record, Barzelay, who turns 50 this year, made a confession: “That this record even exists, as far as I’m concerned, is a genuine miracle.” He described his forties as being full of both “deep despair and amazing opportunities,” and the record draws on both types of experience with the same sense of wonder. In “Easy,” he explores the meaningless of the term “selling out” in a world where the personal stakes for making art seem unbearably high. Even more intense is “The Ballad of Eef Barzelay,” a dreamlike narrative that cycles through suicidal thoughts, self-help, and a memory of cooking lamb kebab for his weed guy. It’s as personal as any song he’s written, but it’s also, amid the album’s grand theorizing of the universe, just as profound—a story of survival that Barzelay sounds grateful just to be here singing.


On its latest album, the New York band works hard to sound effortless, hindered by inert performances and unconvincing lyrics.

Headful of Sugar

Sunflower Bean are the rare band that identifies as misfits for being too cool: too glam, too rock to fit in with New York’s indie scene. Before the trio ever released an album, Vogue described frontwoman, bassist, and Hedi Slimane muse Julia Cumming as a “living, breathing ad for Saint Laurent,” and rather than playing it down, they’ve used “fashion band” to their advantage. As sleek synth-pop started ceding ground to grungy chic in the middle of the decade, Sunflower Bean were prepared with their brash debut Human Ceremony. 2018’s Twentytwo in Blue matured into resistance-pop politics, while King of the Dudes foresaw a larger embrace of Liz Phair, Shirley Manson, and Courtney Love in their most commercial forms. While their adaptability has helped far more than it hurt, there’s always been a nagging sense that Sunflower Bean had yet to embody an identity all their own. With Headful of Sugar, Sunflower Bean prove the fashionistas right yet again: They’ve always had an identity, and it’s to serve as a billboard for mainstream “indie rock,” the embodiment of what’s hot and what’s not.
Before hearing a second of Headful of Sugar, try to imagine what that actually means in 2022—specifically, in this ostensible post-Peak Pandemic normalization where B-market festival posters need to get filled and coffee shops comfort maskless patrons with All New Indie and the New Alt playlists. Opener “Who Put You Up to This?” accurately predicts Headful of Sugar’s greater lean toward the invisibly popular pop-rock that might variously (and wrongly) get described as “psych” or “surfy.” Co-producer Jake Portrait knows this territory as a member of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and the fuzzed bass and blown-out, telltale drum ticking trace back to a single Tame Impala song.
The gauzy romance of Tango in the Night is swapped out for its Y2K analog of polished countrypolitan breakup songs; the lyrics and sun-soaked production of “Stand By Me” draw from two separate eras of Sheryl Crow, and the brazen rip of “Strong Enough” in its chorus—“Are you man enough to stand by my side?”—is undermined completely by its tossed-off rhyme: “Are you strong enough to ride this ride?” Otherwise, Headful of Sugar accessorizes wisely, drawing on years spent opening for Beck, Cage the Elephant, Interpol, Courtney Barnett, Wolf Alice, and Bernie Sanders: a little bit of disco, a little bit of sync-friendly blog rock, some wry character studies, a healthy amount of post-electoral disillusionment.
At no point do Sunflower Bean sound out of their depth; if they adjusted their coordinates to include a Dan Nigro cowrite or talky post-punk, they’d probably pull that off too. The hooks, the flashy guitar solos, the profanity that will serve as the pull quote in any blurb: Headful of Sugar worked very hard to sound effortless. But coolness is a zero-sum game on a record that, like Twentytwo in Blue, aspires to have Something to Say about The Way We Live. Headful of Sugar launders Cumming and guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen’s experiences as “outsiders disillusioned in the modern world,” through “the lived experience of late capitalism”—things that are much tougher to discern in the music if you haven’t read the press materials first.
I can say that “Roll the Dice” successfully pulls off its attempt to wring a pop song from the GameStop stock-manipulation fiasco because its nagging hook (“I just wanna win, win, win, win, win!”) will almost certainly appear in the trailer when Hulu or Netflix buys the rights to the docudrama. But much like the recent wave of scammer-core limited series, Sunflower Bean recuse themselves of rendering any kind of judgment or opinion beyond “I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.” The breakup songs know exactly what responses they hope to trigger—“empowerment bop!” “epic clapback!”—though the performances render them emotionally inert. Instead, “Who Put You Up to This?” and “Stand By Me” resemble the interstitial music of Selling Sunset, its lyrics ruthlessly engineered to embellish someone else’s blow-up or glow-up rather than set a scene itself.
At no point does Headful of Sugar come off as cynical, though the central premise falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny: This is a largely beloved, well-connected, and unabashedly accessible rock band trying to be convincing as the voice of outcasts obeying their most reckless impulses. Studio perfectionism and social debauchery have long proven to be compatible, but the dissonance between the drunkalog of “I Don’t Have Control Sometimes” and its rigorously market-tested KROQ-core bounce is too obvious to be unintentional. Besides, alienation is in the eye of the beholder, and Sunflower Bean write about their specific experience candidly on “In Flight.” Reflecting on a rare instance of downtime from touring and disconnection with his Long Island roots, Kivlen sings, “Nothing changes in this town/The people die or they move out,” adding a despairing punchline: “Everyone but me.” It’s the peak of Headful of Sugar, not because it’s the strongest hook or tightest harmony. It’s the most convincing instance of Sunflower Bean writing from the heart. They wear it well.


The latest record from emo outfit You Blew It! is their most subdued yet, trading pop-punk yelps for the smoothly layered guitars of Mineral and American Football.

Abendrot

You Blew It! frontman Tanner Jones once sang, “I’m tired of all these toss ups and all this feigned motivation/But I’ve always felt fine singing in your basement,” but that was two years ago—before they played much bigger rooms opening for pop-punk institutions Taking Back Sunday, Motion City Soundtrack, and the Wonder Years. In interviews for their third LP Abendrot, Jones commented that “at some point you start to become less pleased with songs you wrote for basements and living rooms.” For a young band on an upward career arc, this might indicate an embrace of the loud, obvious gestures necessary to level up: a preemptive non-apology to the hardcore, protective fanbase as a much larger one awaits. But as with the most recent work of Modern Baseball, Sorority Noise, and Turnover, you get the sense from the inquisitive and insular Abendrot that You Blew It! simply saw a bigger version of “the basement” on those tours, a mental and spiritual holding cell where bands always have to be pop-punk, both sonically and lyrically.
And so Abendrot is borne of You Blew It!’s desire to engage with the outside world, not to dominate it. As some of modern emo’s proudest traditionalists, You Blew It! know how to signify “mature third LP”: beginning with a solo, homesick introduction is a good start, as is calling it “Epaulette.” In fact, most of the song titles likewise abide by the time-honored emo-band practice of exchanging quirk and in-jokes for thesaurus-thumbing (“Autotheology,” “Kerning”), geographical signifiers (“Greenwood,” “Arrowhead”) and neologism (“Minorwye”).
This continues the trajectory of their 2015 EP Pioneer of Nothing, which did away with the spittle-flecked spite of their best-known songs, “Award of the Year Award” and “The Fifties.” But while Abendrot is a natural progression, it’s rarely effortless: particularly during its first half, You Blew It! audibly have to restrain themselves from their old habits. “Like Myself” and “Sundial Song” are littered with lyrics that wouldn’t be out of place on Grow Up, Dude (“I don’t feel like myself or anyone else,” “I can’t control my insides!”), but rather than careening into the choruses, the band pulls back on the distortion and shifts rhythms, doing whatever it takes to avoid the cutting one-liners and slashing power chords that Jones once felt were necessary.
Even at their most aggressive, the guitars on a You Blew It! song were unabashedly pretty, and while Into It. Over It.’s Evan Weiss returns to produce, Abendrot discards the lush, saturated sound of Keep Doing What You’re Doing for something more subdued. This isn’t slick by any means, but it reframes the leaves-bare placidity and exploratory interplay of Mineral’s EndSerenading, American Football, and Sunny Day Real Estate’s second LP into pop-punk song structure.
More notably, Jones’ lyrical concerns are no longer directed at you and the countless ways in which you’ve disappointed him. Jones is mostly confused about his own place in the world, of how to live in the moment with an overactive brain and how to move forward despite a crippling fear of failure. Though less vindictive and more reflective, the underlying emotions aren’t all that different than they were on previous You Blew It! records, and Jones can capture their essence on a memorably worded chorus without shouting it: “when God dies, I’ll skip the funeral,” he moans during the Manchester Orchestra-ted grunge lurch of “Autotheology.”
But when Jones seems compelled to transmogrify his thoughts into art, he ends up twisting himself into knots: “When the skin and vessels underneath/Choose this space for bruising/I’m somewhere in between/Clumsily pulling on the strings”; “If I could lay down, I’d let my cells accept the grounds.” It’s easy to figure out what Jones is trying to get at, but Abendrot’s lyrics often feel like writing for the sake of writing, labored rather than layered.
Like anyone else who recently graduated from college and is trying to create a clear boundary between their earlier life and adulthood, Jones recognizes his desire for growth but searches for something palpable to push for. It’s common and relatable stuff, and Abendrot never feels dishonest, just occasionally overwrought in its desire to achieve the stakes and transcendence of similarly inspired records like Holy Ghost or Goodness. Fortunately, You Blew It! just as often let their guitars speak for their behalf and Abendrot can be heard as the completion of a directive started by their last two albums: grow up, dude and keep doing what you’re doing.


The Chicago rapper Lil Bibby got his introduction to the world with the drill scene gold rush of 2012, with every rapper with a 773 or 312 area code getting a look and/or a deal. His latest tape, Free Crack 3, feels like a game attempt to escape the box that being labeled a "drill" artist puts you in.

Free Crack 3

There's an area in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago known as Terror Town. It’s a 2-block-by-4-block area that has seen no less than three large-scale shootings in the last 3 years. This is where the rapper Lil Bibby lives, he of the boyish looks and the grown-ass man voice. He debuted nationally in August of 2012 alongside lifelong friend Lil Herb via "Kill Shit," a song that stands out as the absolute hardest song recorded by children I’ve ever heard. Bibby's work is a live play-by-play of chaos, with numerous references to paranoia that comes with simple trips to the store—"This real life, real facts, this ain't rap/ Walk into that corner store, we had to stay strapped/ Yeah, most of these niggas can't relate to that," he raps on "EBT to BET."
The moment that gave Bibby his introduction to the world—the initial gold rush of the drill sound, with every rapper with a 773 or 312 area code getting a look and/or a deal—has passed now. His latest tape, Free Crack 3, feels like a game attempt to escape the box that being labeled a "drill" artist puts you in. The tape comes with via a mix of big-name grabs (Future and Metro Boomin on obvious radio ploy "Aww Man") and local legends (Jeremih, R. Kelly, and Common, who drops one of his better verses in awhile on "Speak to ‘Em," all appear). The C-Sick produced "If He Find Out" features a stellar collaboration between Tink and Bibby. As expected, Lil Herb stops by for "Ain't Heard Nuthin Bout You," and the song is such a great example of the chemistry between the two that they’ve been promoting the single as "Kill Shit pt. 2."
As he expands his range of guests, his lyrical ability leveled up significantly. By and large, Bibby’s been out of town doing shows and recording, and in a recent interview on Chicago’s WGCI radio station, he acknowledged the change has been daunting for his creative process: When I be in Atlanta too long I can’t write too many songs. I have to always come back to Chicago. There's nothing like the Chicago feeling." The travel may have ultimately been good for him, though, broadening his worldview and leading him to delve into newer ideas and to sharpen his focus. On Free Crack 3, he switches perspectives ably, from a survivor determined to better the lives of himself and the people around him (the Five Stairsteps-sampling "Things Will Get Brighter") and a 21-year-old with a little money in his pocket and some time to kill, like "Aww Man." Through all of it, he remains self-aware of the choices he’s made and how they’ve made him into who he is. On "Word Around Town," he chuckles, "Probably could've been a mathematician/ But a nigga made bad decisions/ Momma told me but I didn't listen/ Judge sent my bad ass to prison."
In lieu of struggling to keep up and stay relevant, Bibby has found success mostly by sticking to the program that got him here: consistent quality. While this tape marks the conclusion of the Free Crack series, he recently announced a debut, FC3: The Epilogue, coming next month. A few months back, Bibby posted to social media that he received his G.E.D and was now thinking of attending UCLA. For various reasons, it’s hard not to listen and root for him.


Despite the strong production and features including Missy Elliott, Ty Dolla $ign, and Rick Ross, Ferg's latest is mainly about his wise observations on family, fame, and what comes next.

Always Strive and Prosper

When they first came on the scene, A$AP Ferg and A$AP Rocky offered two very different perspectives on rap’s new Harlem. In Rocky’s case, he brought a strong sense of fashion, with musical branches extending to Houston and Atlanta. Ferg stayed with the conventions of trap music, though his cadence and lyricism diverted from the genre’s formulaic sound. And just like that, the Trap Lord was born. His debut was aptly titled, full of chest-beating cuts that suggested Ferg was artsier than Rocky and slightly more overbearing—the Kanye to his Jay. But what happens when you’ve run out of superlatives for yourself and self-reflection kicks in? Well, you work in reverse, which is exactly where Ferg resides on his follow-up project Always Strive and Prosper. If Ferg secured a strong group of followers off Trap Lord, then his new album will surely lock them down as a cult.
An argument could be made that ASAP is the prequel to Trap Lord, where we’re finally understanding the Bruce Wayne before the Batman. But the underlying self-awareness suggests that Ferg has tasted fame and rejected the poisonous parts. The opener “Rebirth” makes that declaration in no uncertain terms. Over a joint production effort of DJ Khalil and Clams Casino, a chopped-and-screwed Ferg talks to himself: “Now that you’re no longer a lord that’s trapped/ You have graduated to the Hood Pope/ You have made it to represent your people/ Show them another way/ Be the voice of the people who couldn’t make it out the hood.”
This is no longer about A$AP Ferg, but Darold Ferguson, Jr. (Ferg’s given name), who came back home after being out in the world to report on what he’s seen. Production-value is high, with Ferg enlisting top-tier beatmakers like the aforementioned DJ Khalil but also No I.D., DJ Mustard, and even Skrillex. But the beats take a backseat to the lyrics. The overall sound remains intact, but he’s even more invested in what he’s saying.
The track “Strive” brings a deep house vibe—compliments of Mustard and Stelios Phili—as Ferg shares the cautionary tale of sitting at a basic job with bigger dreams but refusing to trap like the rest of them. Missy Elliott is the icing on the cake, bringing an evenly ambitious verse, turning what could have been a simple dance track into something so much more. Missy isn’t the only notable collaborator on the project. ASAP boasts an all-star lineup ranging from Chris Brown and Ty Dolla $ign on the breezy “I Love You” to Rick Ross on the violently spacey “Swipe Life” and even Chuck D on “Beautiful People,” also featuring his Mama Ferg. The family theme runs throughout Always Strive and Prosper. The idea of affording luxuries for his mother remains at the forefront (buying his mama a house on “Swipe Life”), but so does his family in general. His Uncle “Psycho” gets his own song, as does his “Grandma,” and there’s a strong desire on Ferg’s part to be a family man.
Stargate makes a smart appearance, producing “Let You Go,” which has the capacity to own the summer on beat alone, as does “Let It Bang” with ScHoolboy Q, only in an entirely different part of town. The deluxe version caps off Always Strive and Prosper with one vital cut—the quintessential New York joint “Don’t Mine” with French Montana and Fabolous—and one recklessly unnecessary one, the aggressively average “Back Hurt” with Migos. While Ferg is aware of his new station in music, there a few slip-ups where he falls back on style over substance. But not nearly enough to disqualify his epiphany.
There’s an important allegory woven through the fabric of A$AP Ferg’s Always Strive and Prosper: A$AP Ferg likes his fame, but doesn’t need it. He’s making this transition from Trap Lord to Hood Pope, attempting to address his congregation of all the perils that come with celebrity. It’s a vulnerable position in which to be in, following a self-proclaimed lord status. But strip away the features, strip the beats, strip the quirky nicknames, and you’re left with Darold’s wise words, coming through loud and clear.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


The English band returns with an adventurous, heavily orchestrated album filled with enigmatic songs of love, longing, and doubt.

The Car

To make a point, or at least the sort of point that Alex Turner might try to make, it’s good to get a little lost. The 36-year-old singer is in the midst of transforming Arctic Monkeys, one of the biggest rock bands of the new millennium, into a lovesick, debonair lounge act. At their recent live shows, throngs of fans go mad at the hint of a familiar drum beat or guitar riff, scenes that might lead you to suspect England had won the Euros, not that a wry group of Northerners had taken the stage in flared pants to sing about space hotels, espionage, and, sure, looking good on the dancefloor. After the heights of 2013’s AM, a swaggering album that rejuvenated Arctic Monkeys’ career, Turner turned inward and upward on 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, exposing his fears and desires obliquely, through the concept of an elaborate resort in the cosmos, watched over by Big Brother and populated by desperate ghouls dancing to the sultry notes of piano and synthesizers. It’s the most intimate Turner had ever been, opening up with the safety of fiction and metaphor.
The Car, their seventh studio album, is filled with detours, non sequiturs, and lost trains of thought, held together by Turner’s undulating vocal lines and an orchestra always at the ready like a wind-up toy waiting to be stirred to life. But, as with its predecessor, the more time you spend in its maze, the clearer its themes become: The Car is an album of love, longing, and doubt, and the obfuscation serves to bolster its core belief that the simplest truths are the hardest ones to discover.
The objects of Turner’s fascination on The Car are hazy, making his writing all the more rich. He is not strictly heartbroken or smitten, but there are often distant lovers in the periphery. He is not wary of the techno-future, as was the case on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, but modernity is not fully spared, like when he sings, “The simulation cartridge for City Life ’09 is pretty tricky to come by,” burying a sentimental message about the carefree past in something more foreboding. And he works in plenty of autobiographical lines that could easily apply to a man who’s been in the public eye for the better part of two decades. But just as soon as he reveals something personal, Turner quickly pivots away from the thought. Nothing is concrete, and that’s a key point of The Car. Things are not what they seem; blink and you’re gone.
One thing that is consistent across the album is that Turner is spooked, channeling paranoia through lyrics about spies and, even seedier, show business. On “Mr Schwartz,” the titular character is a commanding presence, if a bit of a mystery. The world around him bursts to life, and when Turner elegantly sings a line like, “Wardrobe’s lint-rolling your velveteen suit and smudging dubbin on your dancing shoes,” it’s clear that this man is of great import, catered to by his devotees as if he’s Jay Gatsby, but nothing untoward ever happens. The feeling of being in the wrong place or that something is amiss continues on “Sculptures of Anything Goes,” a song whose arrangement conveys the sensation of being trapped in a dark room, alone with anxieties and echoes, as Turner sings about foreign television performances and stark hallways. Everything is mixed-up, not wrong or bad, but peculiar, itching for a stasis it can’t reach.
The music of The Car matches the uncertainty of the lyrics. After the opening “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” which could soundtrack a French noir film from just about any era, the band bursts into technicolor on the funk-inspired “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am.” On first listen, it’s like going from a café in the rain to a carnival. The transition works, however, because of the passionate performances from the band—drummer Matt Helders hums along on the former track like a jazz percussionist, while Turner leans into the ludicrousness of the latter with wah-wah riffs to match. Other adventures include “Jet Skis on the Moat,” which could pass for an Isaac Hayes cover, and “Body Paint,” a blast of baroque pop that has all the swagger and bravado of an AM cut without any of the lurid desperation. By its climax, you can hear some of the scrappy band that rocked out in the mid-aughts, mixed with traces of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’s sumptuous glamor.
With regularity on The Car, Turner will begin an idea that he does not finish, or he’ll introduce something totally different just when you start following along. He has become a master of turns of phrases that don’t necessarily cohere but still feel right: “There’d better be a mirrorball for me”; “Village coffee mornings with not long since retired spies”; “Lego Napoleon movie written in noble gas–filled glass tubes underlined in sparks.” These lines serve as dramatic punctuation to the times when Turner is more open: “And if you’re thinking of me I’m probably thinking of you,” he sings in “Body Paint,” bringing the song to a halt. It’s as if it’s the one line Turner truly wants to deliver and he’s crafted an entire song around it just to muster up the courage to sing it.
Turner sings much of The Car in falsetto. He began his career close to his speaking voice, matching his unbridled, true-to-life observations of days and nights in Sheffield. Over the years, he would expand his range, but when he’d switch to a higher register, it was almost like a send-up, embodying the hip-swinging showman who can poke fun at rockstar machismo while still behaving a bit laddishly. Now that falsetto is nearly the standard on The Car, Turner has collapsed the irony and remove, and he is singing that way for some of his most sincere moments. It’s as if what had previously been an escape is now a reality. A way of being vulnerable with more than words. Earnest misdirection.


Sir Paul presents a resequenced, alternate-universe version of last year’s trilogy-completing release, as performed by Beck, Phoebe Bridgers, St. Vincent, Dev Hynes, Damon Albarn, and more.

McCartney III Imagined

Last December, Paul McCartney gave fans an early Christmas present in the form of McCartney III, an event that—short of a holographic Beatles reunion tour or an official release of Carnival of Light—fulfilled the ultimate fantasy of many long-time Maccaphiles. But the excitement was as much about him embracing old ways as making new music: The album revisited the mad-scientist methodology of die-hard fan favorites McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980), DIY efforts that deconstructed his perfectionist streak through off-kilter folk-funk and bizarro synth-pop. The enduring cult appeal of the latter record, in particular, has done much to transform McCartney’s image from a sentimental, set-in-his-ways rock dinosaur into an eccentric godfather figure for a new generation of home-recording misfits and pop omnivores.
But while McCartney III featured no lack of inspired, off-the-cuff moments, unlike its predecessors, it didn’t really showcase any new musical obsessions or curiosities that allowed us to see its creator in a new light. So in this case, a remix album isn’t simply a matter of extending the record’s shelf life—it’s more about tending to unfinished business. On McCartney III Imagined, Sir Paul presents a resequenced, alternate-universe version of the record as overseen by an eclectic cast of alt-rock icons, current indie darlings, and modern pop phenoms that would make for a pretty solid Coachella bill. This isn’t random stunt casting for clout—with few exceptions, the artists entrusted with remixing or covering these tracks are noted auteurs themselves, turning McCartney III Imagined into a talent summit.
In other words, even if you don’t look at the album credits, you’ll probably know exactly who’s behind the boards. Beck turns “Find My Way” into a song that originally sounded like a Mellow Gold demo into a bongo-slapping Midnite Vultures workout; St. Vincent amps up the film-noir melodrama of “Women and Wives” by multi-tracking herself into a girl-group chorus line; and Khruangbin’s “Pretty Boys” pulverizes its dainty source material into dubby vapor trails. The most successful remixers here work in service to the song rather than themselves. Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes rehabilitates the once-tedious synth-soul strut of “Deep Down” with his own velvety harmonies and an urgent piano arrangement recalling the Wings classic “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five.” Best of all is Anderson .Paak, who elevates “When Winter Comes” from a farmhouse ditty into a breezy, space-age bachelor-pad reverie that would fit comfortably into his new Silk Sonic project.
Alas, even seasoned pros like Damon Albarn and Massive Attack’s 3D RDN can’t totally salvage McCartney III’s more half-baked ideas: The former turns the folk-blues warm-up exercise “Long Tailed Winter Bird” into pawn-shop trip-hop, while the latter valiantly tries to organize the free-floating murk of “Deep Deep Feeling” around an acid-house pulse before eventually losing the plot. Compared to these overwrought reconstructions, the simplistic tack that Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and producer Paul Epworth take with “Slidin’” counts as an admirable act of trolling—they basically just speed up the tape and dial up the distortion until the song becomes a disco-metal jam.
But if the remixers embrace McCartney III’s lawless ethos, the cover renditions here are faithful to Macca’s fundamental tunefulness. Almost too faithful: You’d hope Josh Homme would add some QOTSA-sized muscle to a bluesy chugger like “Lavatory Lil,” but his take is actually more restrained than the original. Still, there’s a great deal of fun to be had in hearing Phoebe Bridgers make “Seize the Day” her own—certainly, a line like, “I don’t care to be bad/I prefer to think twice/All I know is it’s quite a show, but it’s still alright to be nice” acquires a delicious irony when delivered by someone who clearly gives zero fucks about ingratiating herself to the rock establishment. And if the ultimate goal of McCartney III Imagined is to sell Macca to the “who is Paul McCartney?” generation, the album finds its most effective Trojan horse in Dominic Fike’s “The Kiss of Venus,” where the Florida SoundCloud sensation transforms the creaky acoustic serenade into a slice of quirky indie R&B that, if not a surefire chart-topper, could score a premium position on a Spotify Bedroom Pop playlist. Of course, the path to pop-cultural currency looks much different now than it did 60 years ago, when McCartney was logging his 10,000 hours in Hamburg. But as this whole two-part McCartney III experiment proves, what hasn’t changed is Macca’s commitment to putting in the work to stay relevant—even if he has to occasionally delegate some of the tasks.

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The latest from Alex Zhang Hungtai's reference-heavy experimental music project is a double album. One half offers some electronics-heavy twists on the desert noir songs of his last album, Badlands, while the other veers into abstraction. Taken together, they offer a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights.

Dirty Beaches: Drifters / Love Is the Devil

Drifters / Love Is the Devil

Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches isn't shy about his influences. A year after 2011's breakthrough Badlands elicited comparisons to retro-damaged ancestors Suicide, he released a recording of an improv-heavy performance in Norway that featured a "loose adaptation" of Suicide's "Ghost Rider". Earlier this year, Hungtai shared the title track to the second disc of his new double-album, Drifters/Love Is the Devil, accompanied with a quote attributed to wastrel poet and professed inspiration Charles Bukowski: "Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality." And the YouTube account used to host the song was an abused portmanteau of Chinese director Wong Kar-wai's name.
Hungtai told Pitchfork around the time of Badlands' release that his media-saturated theatricality spoke to his own experience as a perpetually displaced stranger in strange lands-- he was born in Taiwan, but raised in Montreal: "Nostalgia can be a sickness or melancholia, like how immigrants that came to North America feel homesick. I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised. Home is a collage of all these different, fractured landscapes that I try to piece together."
Badlands was an impressive work, but it was also sonically limited, switching almost exclusively between howling open-road antagonism and evocative, soft-focus balladry. On Drifters/Love Is the Devil, all previous limitations are off the table. The double album, recorded in Montreal and Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe's Berlin studio over a period of six months, is both sprawling and detailed, a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights. Though few have heard his earlier material, Dirty Beaches' catalog is more diverse than the two-headed focus of Badlands suggested. But Drifters/Love Is the Devil is more robust and eccentric than anything he's ever released before.
This pair of albums also represents some of Hungtai's most experimental work yet, a hard left-turn from Badlands' song-oriented approach. There are a few excellent echoes of that previous record's sound on Drifters-- the junkyard roll of "Night Walk", "I Dream in Neon"'s bad-vibes glow, the raw blast of "Casino Lisboa"-- but song structure is less of a concern here. This music isn't impenetrable, but for those who listen more for song structure, it might take a few listens to lock into what Hungtai's doing. Much of the material collected on both discs-- each is about 37 minutes long and has its own title, though they are sold together-- comprises vignettes of varying length that exist in their own space. But a front-to-back listen starting with Drifters is the best way to take in the rich, haunting soundscapes on display.
Drifters, focusing more on songs, is the more accessible record, but it's also a confrontational work. The sole instrumental, "Belgrade", featuring synthetic oscillations matched with a perpetually doubled-over bass line, is chilling. Its electronic textures are submerged in pools of echo, bringing to mind vast, empty spaces that create an uneasy atmosphere; "ELLI" is a gothic, coldwave-leaning song about aspirational love ("In my dreams I'm always with you"), while "Aurevoir Mon Visage" finds Hungtai shouting in French over tumbling drums and a low jet-engine roar: "Goodbye my face/ It is nothing".
And then there's "Mirage Hall", which towers over Drifters and proves its most satisfying surprise. Hungtai has flirted with electronic music before, on 2010's Night People-released cassette Night City, but he's never operated with this kind of scope. Over nine harrowing minutes, he and collaborators Shub Roy and Bernardino Femminielli build a thick monolith of clattering techno, broken up by ethereal moans that eventually dissolve into high-pitched howling noise. Five minutes in, Hungtai enters screaming in Spanish, his vocal performance turning from muscular to absolutely blood-curdling.
The weatherbeaten horns and underwater ambience of Drifters' closing track, "Landscapes in the Mist", act as something of a portal to Love Is the Devil's drastic shift in sound. Hungtai has hinted that Love is a breakup album, but you don't need any context to hear this music as impossibly sad and lonely.
By design, Love Is the Devil is much more abstract than its counterpart; "Woman" is four minutes of synth and distant, irregularly plinked piano, while the second section of "Like the Ocean We Part" is a minute-and-a-half of what sounds like railroad field recordings. Give it time, though, and the album reveals itself as the more impressive of the two, a dense and cinematic exploration of grief and loss that is as pretty (the title track's swelling strings) as it is desolate ("Like the Ocean We Part (I)"'s dolorous vocals and radiant, solitary guitar). The highlight of the record-- and, possibly, the collection as a whole-- is the centerpiece "Alone at the Danube River", a seven-minute that features a guitar solo eventully overcome by waves of shimmering synths. In sound and spirit, it brings to mind Neil Young's masterful soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's gloriously empty 1995 Western Dead Man.
For me, "Alone at the Danube River" has an uncanny ability to lodge itself in my mind. After months of listening to Drifters/Love Is the Devil, its central guitar figure loops endlessly in my head, something I want to hum or whistle. And I think fits with Hungtai's overall artistic intention and shows why he's such an interesting artist. These records, steeped in reference and atmosphere, draw on memory but, being so textured and tactile, they bring the focus back to the present moment.


Schoolboy Q is the most promising foot soldier in Kendrick Lamar's Black Hippy crew, a small circle of talented rappers currently reinventing West Coast hip-hop. His dark and moody second LP is a sumptuously produced and deeply enjoyable hour-plus slab of weed-clouded rap, but it's more than that.

Habits & Contradictions

Schoolboy Q is the most promising foot soldier in Kendrick Lamar's Black Hippy crew, a small circle of talented rappers currently reinventing West Coast hip-hop, but he's more than that. His second full-length statement, Habits & Contradictions, is a sumptuously produced and deeply enjoyable hour-plus slab of weed-clouded rap, but it's more than that. I've spent the past four days immersed in it, trying to resolve its conflicting impulses and ferret out all of its weird corners, and the only thing I can say for certain is that, while listening to it, I feel pulled completely into someone else's center of gravity, which is maybe the most gratifying listener's sensation there is.
The record's first layer is sheer sound: Habits & Contradictions is full of plush, inviting, high-thread-count production, the kind that pulls you toward fat headphones and a chair. Like Kendrick Lamar's Section.80, there is a woozy drag to the drums and a thick, clotted feel to the sounds surrounding them. It shares a metabolic rate with Houston screw music, but the album's chilly mood is closer to the heron'-gray-skies gloom of RZA and Mobb Deep. In fact, when Mobb Deep affiliate the Alchemist shows up halfway through Habits on "My Homie", he feels right at home.
Habits & Contradictions is, accordingly, a dark and moody listen, but it never bogs down in momentum or succumbs to despair. "There He Go" flips a sample of Portland trio Menomena's brittle "Wet and Rusting" into a hard-hitting anthem. "Druggys Wit Hoes Again", with its gabbling bursts of vocal samples and bone-jarring snare kicks, is a prime slab of Bay Area gangsta music. Even when everything slows to a crawl, there are small sounds tucked in everywhere, enlivening the darkness: the spaghetti-western guitar twangs on "Sacrilegious", or the heavy-breathing Portishead drum break of "Raymond 1969".
It helps that Schoolboy is an odd, genuinely unpredictable presence who sometimes seems to be rapping entirely for his own amusement. There's audible dryness in his voice as he drunkenly croons the off-key hook, "House fulla money/ Tub fulla bitches," on "How We Feeling", and you can hear he's holding the words in air quotes, as if he's just trying the words on, since they're the Sorts of Things One Says in Rap Songs. On "Nightmare on Fig St.", he teases the opening "Ball so hard" bars of "Niggas in Paris" for no obvious reason, and then launches into sharply worded threats ("The landlord, turn your lieutenant into a tenant"), head-turning non sequiturs ("We drive to pussy more than we do to church/ No AC but the heater WOOOORK!") and a riot of demented ad-libs.
This lily-pad hopping means that it takes a while for the buried emotion in Habits to surface. Schoolboy raps in a wearily flat voice that evokes Prodigy's, and his lyrics deal with all the dark stuff of gangsta rap: poverty, violence, drugs, hopelessness. But his music has none of gangsta rap's implacable, survival-at-all-costs forward motion. Schoolboy's music is dank with the lousy weather of disappointment, with human-sized failures. When he tells us about selling oxycontin with a lifelong friend who sold him out, he doesn't sound like murderous Vengeance Incarnate; he just sounds hurt. His tangled past as a set leader of the Hoover Crips, meanwhile, leaks out in small bits. "Contradictions in my thoughts, and I just execute my feelings," he mutters on "2 Raw", and it hints effectively at an unspoken well of remorse.
Schoolboy Q has little of Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar's gloomy-paladin aura, or his rap-Hamlet charisma. But it's worth noting that, at least right now, Schoolboy is making stronger music than Kendrick. Habits & Contradictions sounds comfortable in its skin, at home its own quiet strangeness, in a way that Section.80 never manages. It's better-paced. He's probably not going to be a break-out star, but it's hard to imagine that there will be many more original or satisfying rap long-players this year.


When news first surfaced of this collaboration between forum-favorite emcee MF Doom and copyright-infringing producer Danger Mouse, keyboards were atwitter ...

The Mouse and the Mask

When news first surfaced of this collaboration between forum-favorite emcee MF Doom and copyright-infringing producer Danger Mouse, keyboards were atwitter with conjecture of what the duo would produce. Cartoon themes were a given-- maybe even too obvious-- but no one thought MF and DM would bring in Meatwad, the mucus-throated glob of raw beef who spits more heat than a thousand Biggie Smallses. If you think I'm describing a fat rapper and not an actual wad of meat, I feel for you, but don't leave yet. If you listen to Doom, you expect the ludicrous, and The Mouse and the Mask is his most ludicrous to date. Possibly in reaction to the rampant comedy skits on rap records in the last decade, Doom and Danger go all out, calling in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force to help craft the best funhouse hip-hop since De La Soul Is Dead. It may not move the critical masses like Madvillainy, but if nothing else, Danger Doom will get Comic-Con going nuts.
By now, most fans know what to expect from the parties involved. MF Doom still wears his villainous mask and rhymes stuff with "goonie-goo-goo" and "poop," along with brilliantly enigmatic self-deprecations and disses so cryptic their targets are oblivious. Danger Mouse, as he's done with cartoon hooligans and mashing up G.O.A.T.s, displays a deft hand on the sequencer and a taste for whimsical soundtrack samples. Here he takes that penchant and amplifies it, conducting neck-snapping scores for long-lost Looney Tunes. And then there's Adult Swim, the four-hour block of absurdimation aired late-nightly on the Cartoon Network, which slants toward bizarro and has a tendency for extreme sarcasm. Forcing all this farce onto one record could be disastrous, but instead it comes off like one big calamitous Saturday-morning public access show.
Doom loves themes, as he's shown on Mmm... Food and his King Geedorah project, but never has the concept of an album had him sounding quite this chipper. The Adult Swim crew controls the vibe with ridiculous interludes (most notably, Master Shake contributes a series of escalatingly angry phone messages), but also inspires Doom to avoid the dourness that shades most of his other records. The labyrinthine self-analyses of Madvillainy are mostly absent, but Doom remains sharp, focused on slaying a cavalcade of smartass cartoons. Elsewhere, Cee-Lo stops by to croon over the fuzz and slap of "Bizzy Box"; Talib Kweli lightens up and raps simply about breakfast cereal; and Ghostface recollects his own days behind the disguise on "The Mask", which certainly builds anticipation for a rumored GhostDoom project.
Danger Doom won't change your life. It's not as revealing as Doom's other work, and Danger Mouse's big, Technicolor productions here are a little too trivial to be immortal. But for what it attempts-- which is basically a comedy record with no-joke skills-- it exceeds expectations. The intelligence of everyone involved keeps it from being Jeff Foxworthy-worthy, with the interludes and adlibs as rewindable as Doom's lyrics. Yes, I've heard Three 6 Mafia and Young Jeezy and Lil' Wayne, and the underground is keeping it so real. But on Saturday morning, when temples throb and lungs wheeze, I'm trying to sprinkle sugar on my corn flakes-- not cocaine.


Anna Calvi's new EP, which features five new covers, sounds like an extension of her debut single, 2010’s “Jezebel”. Calvi takes on songs by FKA twigs, Connan Mockasin, Suicide, and others; David Byrne guests.

Strange Weather EP

Strange Weather, an EP featuring five new covers, sounds like an extension of Anna Calvi’s debut single, 2010’s “Jezebel”, which remains arguably her best song and certainly a deft means of introduction to her commanding voice. Originally a hit for Frankie Laine in 1951, it’s been covered often in various languages and genres, although most versions gently reinforce the song’s matter-of-fact pop sexism. Borrowing from Edith Piaf’s cover (“c’était toi!”), Calvi turns the song into a flamenco rock aria, her voice soaring accusatorily and her guitar providing sinister commentary. With its emotions blown up to operatic scale, “Jezebel” plays less like a woman-baiting lament and more like a powerful fanfare. Calvi may sing in second person, but she embraces the role of Jezebel as one of immense power.
That single introduced Calvi as a song interpreter with unique vocal power and timbre as well as versatile guitar chops, but her first two albums—2011’s Anna Calvi and last year’s weirdly under-the-radar One Breath—settled into a more workaday singer-songwriter mode. For that reason, a covers EP sounds like a natural and promising endeavor, one that lets her concentrate exclusively on crafting nuanced performances. She could easily level a small city with her voice, but instead chooses to emphasize subtlety and incremental shades of mood on these five songs. “Papi Pacify” becomes a slow blues seduction, not too far from FKA twigs’ original in tone and setting, but Calvi draws out the "ooh"’s leading up to the chorus and settles into the languorous guitar chords afterwards. The song takes on a pattern of tension and release that sounds slyly sexual.
Subtlety and restraint are, refreshingly, crucial to Strange Weather. She dials her vocals back considerably for Keren Ann’s “Strange Weather”, a duet with David Byrne, which sounds like a quiet moment after some great cataclysm. Even the climax of “I’m the Man, That Will Find You” plays things close to the chest, as Calvi relegates the dramatic wailing to the background in order to make her measured lead more prominent. Connan Mockasin’s original still sounds like a put-on—a half-joke built on aspic-wobbly vocals and a winking slink of a groove—yet Calvi takes the lyrics at face value and rescues the song from such fatal irony. Even so, its power lays not so much in her vocals but in her guitar playing, as she draws out that central riff like it’s an old delta blues lick.
None of these covers is quite as transformed as “Jezebel”, so nothing on Strange Weather delivers the same subversive charge. Partly that’s due to her choice in material, which for the most part is recent and more indie-oriented. So it’s odd that the two oldest tunes on here fare the worst. Her version of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” may play a bit with gender roles, but it’s so beholden to the original that it comes across as post-apocalyptic karaoke, more tedious than thrilling. And closer “Lady Grinning Soul” foregoes the cosmic pomp and self-regard of Bowie’s early ‘70s original for an easy elegiac tone that allows Strange Weather to simply dissipate into the ether. Her restraint is commendable, but on these two songs it curdles into something like hesitation.


This recent Acéphale signee steps out with a debut EP of electro-pop that touches on several strands of 1990s dance music. Nods to drum'n'bass and the blissed-out Lite-Brite melodicism of trance music can be heard, but here they're removed from their big-room origins and retrofitted for a more intimate setting.

Doss EP

As often happens with new electronic artists, the first two songs from Doss were remixes. At the end of 2012, she released a reworking of How to Dress Well's "& It Was U" that darkened the original's empty-warehouse swing, smearing it with a claustrophobia that paired well with the remix's jungle-soaked vibes. A few months later, her remix of Wildarms' "Full Hearts" operated in the same nocturnal space as its predecessor but was less portentous—it crossed the finish line with something that resembled catharsis if not straight-up joy.
And then last month "The Way I Feel" arrived, the first completely original track from the recent Acéphale signee. What it shares with her earlier remixes is a foundation that leans toward the jungle/drum'n'bass end of the spectrum as well as a reverence for the sounds of early-to-mid 1990s dance music. But "The Way I Feel", along with the rest of Doss' self-titled debut EP, is a lot dreamier than either of the remixes that preceded it. The EP maintains a similar sense of propulsion but with a markedly lighter touch, its four tracks gliding effortlessly through the air rather than driving their way through viscous material. The blissed-out Lite-Brite melodicism of trance music can also be heard, except here it's removed from its big-tent origins and retrofitted for a more intimate setting.
"I don't care about anyone" Doss sings in a hushed whisper on "Softpretty", which swirls with a jubilance seemingly at odds with this sentiment until you realize that it's not lament but rather a timestamp—there might not be a special someone in her life at this very moment, but the yearning in her voice belies a hope that at some point that don't becomes a didn't. "Here Tonight" slows things down to a trip-hoppier tempo before unleashing its percussive downpour just past the track's midpoint. It's the heaviest track on the EP, but even here its throbbing low-end is tempered by pastel-colored melodic lines that curl up and into the sky.
"Extended Mix", which closes out the EP, stands out for its breathless precision, matching anthemic house chords to a stomp that evokes the sensation that things could careen out of control at any time. It's an evocative end to an EP that mines older sounds not for nostalgia's sake but for thematic material, embracing the fact that euphoria and melancholy are usually jumbled together and probably impossible to separate into pure strains. Her music has been described as "the true sound of tomorrow", and based on the evidence here, I'm almost certain that the irony of tomorrow sounding an awful lot like yesterday is not lost on Doss.


Trying to harness the overwhelming rush of big feelings, the 23-year-old singer channels a heady mix of styles—jazz, Indian raga, Gregorian chant—but sometimes falls back on bland lyrical aphorisms.

empathogen

Sitting in the backless hot seat of NPR’s Tiny Desk earlier this month, Willow seemed more uninhibited and confident than ever. That’s a change of pace for an artist who’s existed under the harsh microscope of celebrity her entire life. But here, backed by bass, guitar, piano, and drums, she swayed and beamed like no one was watching. She “just wants to feel it and be in the vibe,” Willow said on a call beforehand, a predictably heady desire that nonetheless suited the band’s sleek renditions of old and new songs. They gave the peppy twang of her 2015 megahit “Wait a Minute!” a sloping, jazzy remix falling somewhere between Alanis Morissette and Esperanza Spalding, and they sanded down the light pop-punk edges of her cathartic 2022 ballad “Split,” putting more emphasis on her breathy falsetto. But a version of “symptom of life,” a single from her new album empathogen, best illuminated the next phase in Willow’s evolution. Over crawling bass riffs, drums, and siren-like guitar, Willow articulated ideas about pain and anxiety she’s been picking at her whole career: “It’s like a turtle in the sand/Making way to the ocean/Almost meeting the end/Because the birds are in motion.” On empathogen, she follows suit, keeping things poetic without getting too sappy, staring mortality in the face while she begins the musical healing process in earnest.
Willow’s musical and philosophical wanderlust over the last nine years has been exhausting—Annunaki-referencing neo-soul, Travis Barker-indebted pop-punk, empowerment-core odes to feeling feelings and rocking out. She’s never been short on ideas, but even the best of her earlier work lands like freehand graffiti writing; colorful and expressive, sure, but often lacking the focus and precision of stenciled graf. empathogen is the closest she’s come to not just channeling but harnessing the rawness of self-acceptance in young adulthood. It’s her most mature and well-rounded offering yet, though her writing can sometimes be as surface-level as an abandoned tweet draft.
The punk and metal influences of her last two albums have been pushed to the margins by a more ambitious fusion: “jazz, funk, and a little bit of pop,” as she recently told Vogue Australia, along with Indian raga, what she calls the “indigenous, ceremonial vibes” of Native American throat singing, and Gregorian chant. This hybrid gives shapes to the sprawling “false self,” which combines funky bass, deep drum blasts, and stacked vocals that swell and contract like the vague panic attack Willow describes in its hook. “I wanna crash, feel so attacked/On a mad dash in my own brain… Am I insane? Feel the answer change each day,” she sings, the music doing much of the heavy lifting. Thankfully, there are no treatises on phone addiction and only a few pie-in-the-sky paeans to spirituality on empathogen. But Willow’s lyrics often lean on bland aphorisms that gesture at emotional reconciliation instead of actually going there. “Don’t ask questions/When life’s expressing/Itself through you and speaking the truth,” she reads from your aunt’s latest Facebook post on “between i and she.” Album closer “b i g f e e l i n g s” has a chorus that begins, “I have such big feelings”; it sounds ripped from a rejected High School Musical: The Musical: The Series script. These had me longing for more moments like “‘i know that face.’,” where the pep talk she gives herself for running from her darkest thoughts is as urgent as its staccato delivery and syncopated jazz ensemble production.
Much of empathogen’s music, all of which is self-produced, is gorgeous and well arranged, jumping between proggy pop fusion and potent bursts of free jazz. Even when the words feel disposable, the textures of the backing tracks are rich and inviting. “no words 1 & 2,” a co-production with Eddie Benjamin, runs its bass and drums at the same pace as Willow’s scatting, giving Bobby McFerrin vibes with the brevity of a Destroy Lonely leak. Amalgams like this are leagues more interesting than the handful of occasions where homage slips into pantomime. “pain for fun,” a collaboration with St. Vincent—one of Willow’s favorite artists—is too keen to emulate Actor and Masseduction-era Vincent instead of bringing Annie Clark into Willow’s world. The gauzy bass and slinky vocals on “down” sound more than a little like demos from Lianne La Havas’ 2020 self-titled album. For an album centered on self-acceptance, some rely too heavily on their influences, obscuring Willow’s voice in the process.
In a recent interview with Billboard, Willow called empathogen her “first grown-up album,” citing recent experiences with psychoactive drugs and a desire to escape nepo-baby classification as the impetus to make her first Serious Musician album. It’s certainly her most expansive and musically refined project to date, bringing a deeper appreciation for songwriting, arranging, and producing to the airy atmosphere of 2017’s The 1st and 2019’s Willow. Her lyrics haven’t gotten much stronger, but her boundless enthusiasm holds things together more than usual. The refrain, “Acceptance is the key/Acceptance gives me wings,” which powers “b i g f e e l i n g s,” might look generic on paper, but delivered in lilting falsetto within a psychedelic jazz maelstrom, Willow feels like she’s singing to her most important audience: herself.


On the first proper album under his solo alias, Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos balances self-reflection with a sly, idiosyncratic approach to DIY pop songcraft.

This Is Lorelei: Box for Buddy, Box for Star

Box for Buddy, Box for Star

To behold Stonehenge is to bear witness to the human capacity for ingenuity. For songwriter Nate Amos, who records as This Is Lorelei, an encounter with the megalithic structure was life-changing: It convinced him to stop smoking weed. The prospect of giving up a habit he’d indulged nearly every day for 15 years was daunting, but Amos decided to channel his subsequent restless energy into songwriting. Maybe it was the lack of weed; maybe Amos was building off the recent success of his various other projects; maybe those Neolithic rocks transmitted something magic to him—regardless, the resulting album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is a keenly crafted and wonderfully adventurous set of songs, both earnest and appealingly funny.
Amos had his Stonehenge revelation while on tour with Water From Your Eyes, with whom he makes razor-sharp art-pop; he’s also one-half of the whimsical duo My Idea with Palberta’s Lily Konisberg. But Amos has been releasing solo music as This Is Lorelei for years, treating the alias as a catchall for experiments and unfiltered songwriting, and uploading to Bandcamp dozens of releases dating back a decade. In that way, he shares something of a musical kinship with Alex G, another prolific songwriter who got his start releasing batches of bedroom recordings on Bandcamp, and who—like Amos—combines a love for noise with Americana-ish songwriting. (As for Amos’ literal musical kinship: his father is a veteran bluegrass musician whose influence can be heard in the album’s moments of wistful twang.)
Box for Buddy, Box for Star represents the first time Amos set out to write a proper This Is Lorelei album. Focusing on classic, sturdy songcraft, Amos played, sang, or sampled everything on the record himself, and his appetite is vast; there’s singer-songwriter fare, Auto-Tuned pop, sampled strings, a meditative piano interlude. Whereas Amos’ ear for detail turns Water From Your Eyes’ songs into chunks of delightful chaos, here his flourishes are more approachable, if no less deft: the big classic-rock chords that cut in after the first verse of “A Song That Sings About You,” the twinkly keys on “My Boy Limbo,” the dreamy vocal melody of “Two Legs.”
His plaintive lyrics about romance and heartache have a surprisingly straightforward emotional quality. “Love, if you said you needed two legs/I’d give you mine,” he promises on “Two Legs”; on “A Song That Sings About You,” he mourns, “All these cities look the same without you.” But even in their most sincere moments, his songs are still the identifiable work of a goofball. “Dancing in the Club” features a reference to Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters” and a guitar riff that channels “What’s My Age Again.” (Amos claims Blink-182 “saved” him and taught him to value songs that are “fast, catchy and simple.”) The album’s opening moments sound like a curtain rising over a honky-tonk, a steel-guitar-and-strummed-chords soundtrack to a moving duet between two parting lovers—except that’s Amos singing both parts, and it’s actually a song about a cowboy who gets abducted by an angel.
Amos has called Box for Buddy, Box for Star a “delayed recovery album”—by the time he stopped smoking weed, he had already gone through the challenges of quitting alcohol and amphetamines, and was in a tough period of self-reflection about what would come next. Many of these songs confront those difficulties head-on: “When you left me to drink/I thought I’d die in my sleep,” he sings on “Where’s Your Love Now”; “But I’m healthier now/And I’m happier now.” The propulsive and compulsively listenable “I’m All Fucked Up” wobbles through scenes with the non-linearity of dream logic—getting high and passing out, having a nosebleed in Spain and finding God—but when you realize Amos wrote it as a loving admonishment of his younger self, it recasts each repetition of “You little sick thing/You had your fun” as the kind of scolding you only earn once you’ve made it to the other side. As an experiment in sincerity, the album works precisely because it knows how to see things from these dual perspectives—because it laces candor with irony, because its pop songcraft can’t help incorporating off-kilter impulses. Even amid our most self-destructive habits, it’s an optimistic act to believe we can change. For all the record’s humor, curveballs, and cowboy abductions, its perspective is genuinely one of hope: “I don’t mind the present and I like the past,” Amos muses on “Perfect Hand.” “I think that the future’s worth it.”


Written partly over text messages with his co-writer Buddy Cannon, Willie Nelson’s latest album finds the cosmic joker contemplating mortality with endearing humor and touching honesty.

God’s Problem Child

In the face of their own imminent mortality, our greatest singer-songwriters have pivoted towards that darkness to deliver some of their most profound lines. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” Leonard Cohen sang on last year’s swansong You Want It Darker. David Bowie portended: “Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter then stepped aside” on his final album, released two days before his own passing. Now in his early 80s, Willie Nelson too has his mind turn to the dwindling of days. “Well I woke up still not dead again today/The internet said I had passed away/But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay/And I woke up still not dead again today,” he deadpans on the boot-shuffling “Still Not Dead,” a sentiment to file alongside his 2012 collaboration with Kris Kristofferson and Snoop Dogg, “Roll Me Up.”
For all of the cosmic wisdom that Willie infused into the country music paradigm in the early ’70s, he now favors playing the cosmic joker in his twilight years. For God’s Problem Child, he took to swapping lines with co-writer and producer Buddy Cannon via text message, giving the seven songs they wrote via thumbs a casualness and looseness they otherwise wouldn’t have. “I’m writing it all down in this stupid ol’ song/I made a mistake Lord, I thought I was wrong,” he quips on “I Made a Mistake,” his feigned mea culpa finding him equate himself to Jesus, Elvis, and Robert Ripley. Approach the Tao of Willie for spiritual succor and you might get a puff of smoke instead.
At times, Nelson’s nonchalance makes some of the more topical concerns on God’s Problem Child feel a tad hackneyed. “Delete and Fast Forward” tackles the post-election malaise, but there’s little solace to be taken in “don’t worry too much/It’ll just drive you crazy again.” Coming from a man born in 1933, perhaps it is just one big circle to be fast-forwarded through, but it reduces the real world stakes for those affected by the election’s outcome. Though at song’s end, Nelson hints that there’s always a falling short: “We had a chance to be brilliant/And we blew it again.”
That leaves plenty of space for the other veteran songwriters to slip Nelson their own meditations on aging. Veteran Gary Nicholson pens “He Won’t Ever Be Gone,” an ode to fellow outlaw Merle Haggard, who departed last year, his most famous titles embedded in the lines. Longtime Kristofferson sideman and “Breakfast in Bed” writer Donnie Fritts has his “Old Timer” given a tender reading by Nelson. A song about late-stage heartbreak and the reality of watching the people you’ve known in your life slowly bowing out, it explores the divide between a failing body and still acute mind. “You think that you’re still a young bull rider/But you look in the mirror and see an old timer,” he sings, subtly drawing out the “ooo” for heart-rending effect. It’s a sound echoed by the elongated tones of Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, a solemn prairie wail that’s accompanied Nelson since Redheaded Stranger.
The title track is penned by Jamey Johnson and Tony Joe White, the former keeping the outlaw country banner high, the latter best known for the swamp-rock standard, “Polk Salad Annie.” White’s worn-leather baritone joins Nelson and Johnson, as does the late Leon Russell, making his last vocal appearance. For all of the convened voices, its Nelson and stirring guitar solo—eloquent in still-spry bursts—that speaks loudest.
And Nelson and Cannon’s ballad “It Gets Easier” details one of the real tragedies of growing old, the ease in which one can withdraw from loved ones and social living. “It gets easier as we get older to say go away,” he sings, save for the last line, where he sings of withdrawing wholly from the outside world yet still missing his love. It’s the sort of soft-spoken phrase that cuts through all of the smoke and finds Nelson detailing these twilight years in his own peculiar way.


The Toronto death metal quartet pushes outward into new territory on its darkest, strangest album yet.

Planetary Clairvoyance

Last fall, Tomb Mold previewed their third album, the sci-fi opus Planetary Clairvoyance, with a limited edition cassette tape. Featuring early versions of two songs from the upcoming record, the demo felt like an artifact from death metal’s late-’80s heyday: murky, xeroxed, with little context for the uninitiated. Both songs hovered around the six-minute mark, blasting like wind tunnels. The accompanying liner notes, which attributed duties like “Void Expansion” and “Nebula Observation” to cryptically initialed band members, featured a statement of cosmic gratitude in the place where other bands might list their ‘thank you’s’ or paste their Bandcamp link: “The azure of the heavens is perfect, beautiful.”
“Perfect” and “beautiful” are not the adjectives you might think to associate with a death metal band called Tomb Mold. But since forming in 2015, the Toronto quartet have evolved from typically morbid fascinations (song titles include “Bereavement of Flesh,” “Valley of Defilement”) into grander, more ambitious compositions. Last year’s Manor of Infinite Forms felt like a breakthrough, with guitarists Derrick Vella and Payson Power cycling through their infinite arsenal of riffs over a churning rhythm section. Death metal tends to thrive on history, and Tomb Mold never shied away from hero worship, particularly forebears like Incantation and Finnish weirdos Demilich. It was their energy that made them stand out, their ability to find new extremes in their old-school sound.
Darker, stranger, and more atmospheric than its predecessor, Planetary Clairvoyance extends their gifts beyond death metal, sounding untied to any particular lineage. It’s their tightest record to date, suite-like in its momentum and thematic coherence. Almost immediately, they gesture toward quiet, eerier textures. The opening track, “Beg for Life,” is interrupted by a passage of classical guitar that echoes over ominous fills from drummer Max Klebanoff. An ambient interlude, “Phosphorene Ultimate,” arrives early in the tracklist as a kind of warning sign. Less than 15 minutes into the record, it’s a purposefully arresting choice, meant to remind you that this is not background music: at every moment, Tomb Mold demand you take stock of the world they create, where passages of silence are as integral as the grinding melodies and chaos.
The lyric sheet is where the band’s alien obsession becomes clearest; lines about a burning universe and a planet that devours its children could even be read as topical. And while Klebanoff’s vocals are still completely indecipherable—a dull, smoldering mass losing shape as the music sets it on fire—Planetary Clairvoyance demands to be understood as a whole. Power’s leads are winding and luminescent, often arriving near the end of a song as a psychedelic light show. Vella’s riffs, meanwhile, have never sounded more versatile, mournful and dissonant throughout “Infinite Resurrection” and stuttering like helicopter propellers in the title track. For a group that started out as a studio-only project, Tomb Mold sound proudly alive, aware of how each component of their sound can be unleashed and withheld to maximize your attention.
The album closes with “Heat Death,” a climactic explosion that sputters out as its tempo slows into a decaying howl of feedback and noise. It’s the part of the album where the sky goes fully black—devoid of any life or movement. Its slow fade into pure atmosphere is a sign of the artistic leap that Tomb Mold have taken; as their work has grown more technically involved, it has also become increasingly human, emotionally invested and complete. Vella, who co-writes the lyrics, has claimed that he sequenced the record using the template of Hats—the 1989 masterpiece by ambient pop group the Blue Nile. Of course, there’s nothing about these songs that even remotely resembles their starlit, synthy heartbreak, but its influence is a good indicator of the band’s unlikely journey. No longer content to exist within the borders of their genre, their sound can now be admired by all fans of dark, inventive music, aiming wildly toward the cosmos and settling into orbit.


After years of merrily keeping the Paramore lights on, Hayley Williams considers her life and lets go of her grin on her latest album, a fizzy yet despondent piece of ’80s pop-rock.

After Laughter

Hayley Williams knows how to play the part of the jolly conqueror. Even while singing of anger, betrayal, and disappointment on ever-bigger stages and in technicolor videos throughout the last 13 years, the Paramore leader has projected a pro’s poise along with a child star’s desire to please. Since she was a young teen, Williams has led angsty pop-punk singalongs with the friendly authority of a summer camp counselor. She has bounced around. She has smiled. She has been in complete control. But in the recent video for “Hard Times,” the first single from her band’s fifth album, things are a bit off.
The clip begins with Williams climbing out of a car that’s crashed onto a stage set decorated with cotton-ball clouds, wearing an unsure look: How did I get here? Soon enough, a microphone is put in front of her, and she starts to sing and dance to a bright new-wave bop. But all is not quite right. When she flashes her teeth here, it looks more like a rictus of madness than a sign of genuine pleasure, a wary smile from the rock’n’roll ride Williams has gone through.
Paramore have had enough tabloid-baiting personnel switches to warrant one of those color-coded timelines on the band’s Wikipedia page—because the truth is as long as they have existed, there have been whispers about Williams breaking away as a solo star. Though past members of the Nashville group have quit, whining about their second-fiddle status, you could argue that, by sticking to the idea of being in a rock band with her best friends—not exactly the most au courant concept in an era of ProTools pop—it’s Williams who has made the biggest sacrifice. So, after years of merrily keeping the Paramore lights on, the 28-year-old singer and lyricist considers her life and lets go of her grin on After Laughter.
Which all seems like an immense bummer. But just as this album highlights Williams’ most existentially despondent musings to date, it is also the most fizzy record Paramore have ever recorded. This extreme yin-yang quality is somewhat new for them. When former guitarist Josh Farro was leading the musical charge for their first three albums, his ominous, distorted anthems propelled Williams’ angst as she screamed into the void like a heavy-metal hellion, albeit one informed by a pious Christian faith; on 2009’s Brand New Eyes, which chronicled Farro and Williams’ real-life breakup, the instrumentation and the vocals each fought to tell their side, making for a glorious explosion. After Farro’s departure, guitarist Taylor York took over the musical heavy lifting on 2013’s Paramore, on which the group searched  for a new identity, touching on post-rock bombast, string-laden balladry, and the funk-pop of their biggest hit yet, “Ain’t It Fun.” Since then, longtime bassist Jeremy Davis left amid a dispute over songwriting credits (he and the group recently settled a lawsuit) while former drummer Zac Farro, Josh’s brother, returns after six years. All these comings and goings might seem trivial in relation to Williams’ supernova star power, but the drama has always fueled her songwriting, as well as the band’s sound, to an outsized degree.
On After Laughter, York focuses his inspirations the styles of 1980s rock and pop, conjuring a slicked-back take on fixtures like Talking Heads, Paul Simon, and the Bangles. The current members of Paramore barely lived through the ’80s, and for them the decade represents something of an idyll—a time of neon colors and easy rhythms and feel-good fables like The Goonies. Instead of going to war with Williams’ words, the music acts as a gleaming counterpoint, a nostalgic lifeline from one friend to another. On “Forgiveness,” Williams doesn’t offer any, but the song’s lilting Graceland guitars hint at the possibility of a reprieve in the future; “Pool” finds Williams drowning under a wave while the track’s jangling sparkle pulls her above the surface. Music meets message more directly on album highlight “Grudges,” where Williams details her reunion with drummer Zac. “Are you recounting all my faults and are you racking your brain just to find them all,” she sings, peeling apart the fissures of friendship. “Could it be that I’ve changed—or did you?” At this, someone yells “woo!”—or maybe “whew!”—and the whole band tumbles into the chorus.
When the zipped-up hooks falter, though, Williams can seem gauche, especially for someone approaching 30. “Fake Happy” and “Caught in the Middle” come off like the basic complaints of a high schooler, and the maudlin “26” feels indulgent, a teary twinkle that wouldn’t feel out-of-place in a Disney cartoon. Much more intriguing are the album’s final three songs, where Paramore deal with their past and their role as modern idols in surprising ways.
Though After Laughter generally sees Williams exploring the softer nuances of her voice, “Idle Worship” has her seething and spitting as she rejects the heroism that’s so often projected onto her: “You’re wasting all your faith on me.” The song turns Biblical notions of false idolatry, along with radical fear and vulnerability, into a hook built to be sung by thousands of wide-eyed, hair-dyed followers. Meanwhile, “No Friend” is the weirdest thing to ever show up on a Paramore album. Sung by quavering emo intellectual Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou over a queasy, cyclical riff, it essentially tells the story of Paramore in language that’s dense, referential, and almost shockingly honest, culminating in lines that seem to suggest the band’s craven core: “So let’s make one point crystal clear,” Weiss explains, “You see a flood-lit form, I see a T-shirt design/I’m no savior of yours and you’re no friend of mine.” Once again, this is Paramore dressing themselves down, calling their own motivations into question and exposing their darkest sides. The fact that Weiss’ voice is mixed low enough to be largely unintelligible tempers the song’s startling truth, and feels like something of a cop-out. Then again, this strange song’s inclusion doubles as its own bold statement.
The album ends with “Tell Me How,” which doesn’t sound like anything else here, or in the band’s catalog. With its cascading piano chords, vaguely tropical pulse, and warily confessional words, it could be a standout from one of Drake’s recent releases. It’s sleek, modern, and grown-up. Williams’ hurt here is well-worn, it’s the hurt of regret, of mistakes, of the unending task of moving on. There are no easy answers, no scapegoats. Instead of railing against someone who’s let her down, she responds with shrugging grace: “Tell me how to feel about you now/Oh, let me know.” Williams is not all-powerful, and she’s no longer trying to be.


On their new album, the New York band collides hardcore, dance punk, and hip-hop like a little kid smashing together action figures. It’s an exhilarating, refreshing, and inventive listen.

Hex Dealer

In their music video for “In the Wawa (Convinced I Am God),” New York four-piece Lip Critic play avaricious record label execs, who realize the band (also portrayed by themselves) has stolen their masters. With the execs on their tails, Lip Critic incinerates the CDs with blowtorches, rendering them nothing more than melted plastic. The video exemplifies how the band approaches creation: like a hydra, cutting off one line of influence only to sprout new strands to experiment with. On their debut record, Lip Critic throws everything at you—dance punk, digital hardcore, heavy noise—and see if it’ll stick. At just over 30 minutes, this is an album of endurance and pure adrenaline; the mayhem makes Hex Dealer an exhilarating listen.
The band officially came together while studying at SUNY Purchase in 2018. The Westchester school boasts alumni like Mitski, so Lip Critic’s harsher sound immediately clashed with their more indie rock-oriented cohorts, sometimes literally; frontman Bret Kaser recalls an online post complaining about noise from their band practices traveling across campus. Lip Critic’s ethos resembles Death Grips in their raw, uninhibited performances, but their thematic interests also approximate a more raucous iteration of fellow Brooklynites Model/Actriz. On opener “It’s the Magic,” where Death Grips’ influence is most evident, blown-out percussion pounds against Kaser’s vocals, echoing DG multi-instrumentalist Zach Hill’s uncompromising, primal drumming on “No Love,” one of their most recognizable tracks.
Hex Dealer is a loose concept album about predatory preacher-types who resort to snake oil tactics to fulfill their craving for control. In this world, everything is a means to gain power, a façade to mask these characters’ true depravity. They numb their emptiness with overconsumption; whether that’s brand new jeans on “It’s the Magic,” trips to the butcher’s shop on “Bork Pelly,” or creating the ultimate gas station hoagie on “In the Wawa.”
The album is a master class in genre-hopping, running the gamut of drum’n’bass, hip-hop, and ska. It feels as though Hex Dealer is a litmus test; take Lip Critic as they are or not at all. When “Love Will Redeem You” breaks out of the gate with pitched-up vocals and anxious percussion, it seems things can’t get any more abrasive—and yet there are still 10 songs to come. “The Heart” immediately follows, the tempo accelerates, the drums get harder, and the noise gets thicker and more suffocating. The con man at the center of the song grapples with his vices, and punctuated by Kaser’s rapid yelps, he convinces himself that he hasn’t succumbed to corruption.
Hex Dealer is as frenzied as it is hilarious. On “Bork Pelly,” the band hands over duties to the now-dissolved Philly grime duo Ghösh for a verse that sounds like something Baby Billy Freeman of The Righteous Gemstones would market to you: “Take this flesh and take this wine/It will all be yours/And you’ll all be mine/For three easy payments of $19.99.”
The record starts cautious and distrustful, but ends with a smug shrug. “I never seem to win/I’m losing every day,” Kaser sings on “Toxin Dodger.” “So I’ll become the problem/That I refuse to change.” Like Frankenstein’s monster, Hex Dealer’s encyclopedic curation and roots might sound like a disaster. But that’s half the fun of it, and even when everything has gone to shit, Lip Critic still makes it sound like a party.


With help from Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, the California songwriter tells conversational, painfully precise stories of sad sacks, lost souls, hopeless drunks, and ex-boyfriends.

Quitters

Singer-songwriter Christian Lee Hutson is good-looking in a vague way that encourages strangers to mistake him for famous people—he’s posed with multiple fans insisting, despite his protests, that he is the English actor Dan Stevens. Born and raised in Santa Monica, he counts Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers as friends, both of whom receive production credits on his new album, Quitters. He’s also spent time as a touring guitarist for Jenny Lewis, even though he didn’t own an electric guitar when she invited him. With his blond locks and blue eyes, he resembles the foil in an Alexander Payne movie, the attractive guy to whom good things just keep happening.
The reality is more interesting. Before breaking through with 2020’s Beginners, Hutson spent years playing in wine bars to audiences of “two people who would be polite.” He spent years prior to that as a failed Americana singer, complete with fake accent and hardscrabble backstory, to escape what he calls his “shitty California voice.” In other words, Hutson is blessed with the kind of true self-loathing that can only mint the greatest singer-songwriters, and he’s spent years painstakingly stone-cutting his way through an internal wilderness to find his voice. He recorded the songs on his Beginners up to five or six times, in all different styles and arrangements, until he knew he’d found their essence.
Hutson’s current hero is Elliott Smith, and it only takes about two seconds of any given song to realize it. On both Beginners and Quitters, he sings in the exact double-tracked whisper, and he mics the strings of his acoustic guitar with the same intensity, like a nature documentarian filming a single grass blade. Hutson seems drawn to the bright, pretty sounds Smith made when he migrated to DreamWorks to record XO and Figure 8 and availed himself of all the added guitar parts and string sections he could suddenly afford. Like Smith did, Hutson also seems to be squirming underneath the beauty of his arrangements, squinting in their glare like a native New Yorker wilting in the L.A. sunlight.
The songs on Quitters suggest an abiding interest in the lonely sorts of communities we join in life without realizing we’re members. Unlike, say, Ray Davies, who narrates his characters’ inner lives like he’s observing an ant farm, Hutson mingles with his subjects, rubbing shoulders and scribbling down dialogue. His lyrics are full of second-person pronouns, snatches of conversations—half the time when he’s singing, he’s relaying someone else’s words to you.
He spends the first verse of “Age Difference” inhabiting the mind of an unhappy, possibly unsavory guy in his 30s, malingering with a much younger woman while sighing, “I think I was suicidal before you were even born.” It’s an x-ray characterization of a precise sort of creep, but Hutson quickly complicates the sketch, turning him into a sympathetic observer: “You watch your family drink the Kool-Aid/Powerless to stop them/First time as an adult that you wish you had been adopted.” The song trails off on a mournful image of the creep trying to cheer her up: “Do my impression of John Malkovich critiquing food in prison/At first it isn’t funny, then it is, and then it isn’t.” Few lyricists can paint such clear portraits in such a small space; even fewer can set them so naturally to such long-breathed melodies. Hutson has covered Taylor Swift’s “Betty,” suggesting that game recognizes game when it comes to lyrics that sound like conversation, slot together like crosswords, and sing like whistled tunes.
What’s more, Hutson does it repeatedly. Pick any song, and you’ll be rewarded with something painfully precise. On “Sitting Up With a Sick Friend,” he once again establishes the scene—the narrator is lying awake on the couch at a friend’s place, marveling at their inexplicable fondness for a terrible wall painting. “I have to figure out how to get rid of this stuff,” he sings, and suddenly we’re unsure if the sick friend is still alive, or if the narrator is mentally fast-forwarding to the moment he will be put in charge of this terrible painting, left to decide its fate.
Like anyone who uses first-person pronouns to tell compelling stories, Hutson invites the suspicion that these sad sacks, lost souls, hopeless drunks, and ex-boyfriends are all versions of himself. His laconic voice makes him inscrutable: You can’t quite tell if he’s denouncing you, pledging his undying love, or apologizing. What registers most clearly in his songs is weariness—every character on here confesses some version of it, whether it’s the friend who sometimes wished he’d just “randomly die” on “Sitting Up With a Sick Friend” to the character who stops a no-holds-barred fight with a partner to observe, “There’s an eyelash on your left cheek/I wanna tell you, but you’re yelling” on “State Bird.” All great writers are magpies and thieves, and all great writers are left alone at the end of the day. Hutson slips in and out of these people’s skins like a cat burglar, stealing away from each one with something irreplaceable.


With strings, xylophone, and homemade wooden percussion in addition to his usual synths and bells, the German musician ponders the secret life of trees.

Conference of Trees

Did you know there’s a map of all the street trees in New York? The one outside my apartment that’s been looking a bit sheepish lately is a Norway maple, I discovered. It’s not its seasonal nudity that’s lending it an awkward edge, but a crop of fresh, blond scars—round-shaped reminders of branches that once were. Along with many other trees in the area, the Norway maple recently received the chainsaw treatment because some of its limbs had become entangled with the electrical wires strung along the street, causing power outages. While my neighbors and I celebrated the end of our brief disconnection to the grid by logging back into our internet of choice, the trees along our street were probably engaged in their own kind of networking, deep beneath the concrete. Scientific research has shown that, thanks to a symbiotic relationship with fungi, a tree’s root system allows for the exchange of nutrients and distress signals (for example, during an insect attack) with other trees nearby, effectively rendering them a community.
All this is to say that thinking about the secret lives of trees seems bound to land a curious mind in fertile ground. German producer and composer Hendrik Weber, who is approaching two decades of releasing music as Pantha du Prince, would no doubt agree. His new album, Conference of Trees, is driven by a related, and self-directed, question: What does it sound like when trees communicate?
Weber answers his own question in a folkloric, rather than a scientific, way. Humans have looked to the tree as a source of music for millennia, mining culture from fallen trunks. Our ancestors carved resonant bodies from its lumber to create string instruments, and sliced into planks of wood to shake out all manner of sonic possibilities. In that tradition, Weber created his own set of wooden percussion instruments; I can almost smell the sweet and earthy sawdust in the stop-frame ambience of the album’s first few tracks. Throughout Conference of Trees, the forest’s dappled light is conjured by wood blocks and xylophones, while cello—played by French jazz musician Friedrich Paravicini—and monochord call to mind the rich, vibrating soil through which the roots must wind their way.
When Weber’s composition is led by a sense of density—multiple musical voices all intertwining to create a sense of vibrant dialogue—it is at its most engrossing. There is solace to be found in the gentle world-building of “Pius in Tacet,” and the pensive pace of “Lichtung,” which swells and evaporates like early morning mist. Even the echoey energy of “Roots Making Family” feels like a salve; in lesser hands, it could’ve come off chaotic, but instead it pulls focus, inviting the listener along on its search.
Where Conference of Trees falls down is when its electronic elements talk over its organic ones. The perky lead melody of “The Crown Territory” strays into twee territory, and in the context of countless ambient techno albums that have turned to nature for inspiration, “Supernova Space Time Drift” feels overly familiar and overdone. It might be sacrilege to die-hard Pantha du Prince fans, but I can’t help but wonder what the album would have sounded like if Weber hadn’t relied so heavily on his trademark bells.
That’s not to say there’s no place for bells under the canopy of Conference of Trees. When used subtly, as a shadow to the xylophone tones on “When We Talk,” they lift the whole mood. It’s compelling, too, to hear Weber take on a rambling Robert Wyatt-ish vocal here; a foreshadowing, perhaps, of his nearing elder statesman role. Where Conference of Trees ultimately takes me is back to the woods I walked through as a child, twigs snapping underfoot and sunlight filtering through a thousand shades of green. In turn, that makes me think of the Norway maple, planted in a sea of concrete to suck up the carbon dioxide we spit out, and leaves me wondering about the kin it’s making in the deep, damp soil.


Blending modern techniques with deep reverence for history, producer Meitei sets out to recapture a “lost Japanese mood.”

Komachi

In storytelling, to build a world is to set the boundaries of a shapeless void. Writers set out to fill that vast emptiness with natural laws, intricate systems that interact with one another and organize the stories of their inhabitants. Some worlds are rooted in fantasy, while others are more grounded in the annals of history. Komachi, the new album from Hiroshima-based producer Meitei, draws heavily from both of these notions, resulting in sonic landscapes that are as indebted to J. Dilla and Steve Reich as they are to East Asian instrumentation and noted Japanese producers like Susumu Yokota.
Crafted with the stated mission of recapturing what he describes as a “lost Japanese mood,” the tracks on Meitei’s latest release were inspired by the recent loss of his 99-year-old grandmother. The album derives its title from Ono no Komachi, the eighth century waka poet whose mythical beauty and profoundly wistful writing earned her countless suitors and elevated her to the stuff of legend. (In Japanese, komachi is often used as shorthand for a great feminine beauty.)
Beauty manifests in many forms throughout Komachi. Gone are the ghost stories of Meitei’s 2018 release Kwaidan, which were conveyed via raspy spoken-word fragments and gloaming ambience. In their stead are brighter peals, intricately woven with traditional Japanese percussion. Field recordings and the familiar warmth of tape hiss are still present but rarely oppressive, providing a naturalistic undercurrent throughout. Some songs, such as “Chouchin,” sound as if Meitei lifted fragments from an ancient dream and laid them out across the 16 pads of a modern-day MPC beat machine. On other tracks, like “Ike” and “Sento [Pt.I],” babbling brooks peek out from underneath layers of plucks and noise.
The two-part “Kawanabe Kyosai” is named for the “demon of painting” himself, the prodigious visual artist who many scholars consider to be the father of modern-day manga. “Kyosai [Pt.I],” the longest track at almost nine minutes, revolves around cascading melodic interplay that eventually gives way to pitch-shifted oblivion. Meanwhile, “Shinkai” (“deep sea”) is perhaps the album’s most contemporary-sounding track: Echo tails of lonely piano notes are anchored by an unwavering low-frequency heartbeat, evoking the perspective of a diver plunged into the Pacific.
Fortuitous YouTube algorithms, “lo-fi beats,” and long-awaited reissues have recently reignited interest in 20th century Japanese ambient, but it’s through the work of modern practitioners like Meitei that one can best observe the evolution of this distinctive lineage of music. His production style is one of constant flux; motifs fade in and out of focus via subtle filtering, and the low bit depth of sampler technology colors even the most pastoral elements of his compositions. It’s this representational style that allows Meitei to conjure a unique interpretation of mono no aware, the Japanese concept of melancholia invoked by the inevitability of impermanence. The new school reinterprets the old, and along the way discovers the same lessons in embracing transience that the ancestors sought to realize in their own art.