The mysterious Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe has recently revived his shimmering ambient techno project. This striking new album focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotion.

Shinichi Atobe: From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art

It might not feel like it now, at a time when the internet has rendered so many mysteries of the era moot, but from the mid 1990s until not long after the turn of the millennium, Berlin’s Chain Reaction label was among the most cryptic operations in electronic music. Label heads Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, better known as Basic Channel, kept a defiantly low profile, and the label’s artists trafficked in a dizzying array of aliases; some, like the solo project known simply as Various Artists (Torsten Pröfrock, aka T++, Erosion, et al), continue to flummox databases decades later. The label’s sound didn’t exactly lend itself to transparency, either: grainy dub techno emphasizing collective ethos over individual ego, in which shadows and murk threatened to drown out techno’s steady footfall.
Chain Reaction’s most enduring mystery came with its penultimate release, in 2001: Ship-Scope, a near-perfect EP of shimmering ambient techno credited to one Shinichi Atobe, a total unknown. Unknown he remained: Chain Reaction gave up the ghost two years later, and Atobe dropped out of sight, seemingly for good. Many listeners assumed that he was really another Chain Reaction artist in disguise. Then, in 2014, Demdike Stare’s Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, allegedly following a tip from the Basic Channel office, claimed to have tracked down the artist at home in Saitama, Japan; they came away with an album’s worth of unreleased material, some new and some archival. The result, Butterfly Effect, built upon Ship-Scope’s dream-world architecture with a tantalizing assortment of styles, from glistening, minimalist house to dissonant musique concrete to lumpy rhythm studies poised somewhere between Dettinger and Burial.
Whoever Atobe may be—and the promise of an upcoming live debut in Japan suggests that maybe he really is just a reclusive dude—the past few years have found the project definitively revitalized. Since Butterfly Effect, he has released a Ship-Scope reissue, the mini-album World, and the short Rebuild Mix 1.2.3 EP, a remix project in which Atobe’s hand obliterated all traces of the original. From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art fleshes out his catalog with 40 more minutes of music, and it is uniformly striking stuff. While not as wide-ranging as Butterfly Effect, it is richer and fuller than World, and though it retains ambient music’s atmospheres, it focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotional content.
That’s particularly true of its two most substantial cuts. In “Regret,” bright chords reminiscent of DJ Sprinkles flare over a bare-bones boom-tick rhythm, with hi-hats chirping like crickets. In “Republic,” a flayed open hi-hat suggests peak-time techno at its most severe, yet watery synths and midsection-caressing sub-bass suggest almost shoegaze-like vibes. Both tracks are little more than static loops, all but unchanging over the course of their nearly 10-minute run, yet their hypnotic repetitions and naïve melodies wrap you up in a kind of cocoon.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that’s so enveloping, and so moving, about Atobe’s work. Some of it comes down to his tonal sensibility. Like “Rainstick” and “The Red Line,” from his debut EP, his best tracks here seem to emanate a rosy glow, and his chord progressions, simple as they are, are masterful exercises in tension and release. Not everything is such a wistful reverie, though. “The Test of Machine 2” sounds like an etude for melting wind chimes, while “The Test of Machine 1” hammers uneven kick drums over a backdrop of bell tones and mechanical clatter, like a fax machine eating an old Jeff Mills cassette.
For many, the most fascinating material here will be a trio of songs that builds upon the Shinichi Atobe mystery. Before Chain Reaction ever released Ship-Scope, claim Canty and Whittaker, Atobe recorded a three-track EP that was cut to acetate—a vinyl-like material, often used for dubplates, more susceptible to wear and tear than the wax used in commercially released records—in an edition of five. The original EP was never released, but three tracks on the new album have allegedly been remastered directly from those crumbling acetates. “First Plate 1” is a luminous dub techno sketch that certainly sounds like it could have been recorded in 2000, with a muted, compressed quality reminiscent of a seventh-generation cassette dub. The vinyl crackle is even thicker and creamier on “First Plate 2,” a deliciously dubby stepper that suggests a more narcotic take on Basic Channel’s Maurizio project. And on “First Plate 3,” surface noise settles over a resonant dub-techno roller like a low mist hugging the countryside.
The story raises more questions than it does answers: Why were only five acetates made, and then no records pressed? Why didn’t they utilize the original master disk for the reissue, or, better, the original DAT or digital file? And why, if they really did work off of such a damaged acetate, did they choose to emphasize all that surface noise, rather than minimizing it? It’s impossible to tell how much of the sound design is intentional, and how much is a result of the alleged remastering process. But as with William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops or Burial’s “Distant Lights,” the degraded sound quality becomes an integral part of the music’s emotional experience. Wherever and whenever the music has come to us from, it wears all the signs of a great journey. And as with bards of yore, it’s the storytelling, not the veracity of the tale, that keeps us rapt.


Featuring several of his acolytes, So Much Fun remains a triumphant showcase for the iconoclastic Young Thug and one of his best albums to date.

So Much Fun

Before he turned 25, Young Thug had already reshaped the way we looked at rappers and birthed an entire subgenre in his wake. Between 2014 and 2016, the Atlanta-born space alien released the premier collaborative album of the 2010s, the rare trilogy that wasn’t a disappointment, and his opus, Barter 6. So what would come after his first quarter-century? Young Thug didn’t know.
First, he tried to get weirder—a nearly impossible feat after he slipped into the mainstream with 2013’s deranged and innovative 1017 Thug—flipping himself into a country singer on 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls. Then, he successfully parlayed his talents into the pop world by laying down vocals for Camila Cabello and Post Malone. BTG set the acoustic-tinged blueprint for his apprentices Lil Baby and Gunna, and the pop songs broadened his visibility. But still, Thug never needed to throw on a cowboy hat or aim his music at the masses—his coos and ad-libs over the trap snare and 808-heavy sound of Atlanta were more than enough. Thug just needed to be himself, and that’s exactly what we got with his latest project, So Much Fun.
Young Thug rarely leaves his comfort zone, but he’s able to add a melody, a flashy ad-lib, or a new flow that keeps the sound fresh and pushing toward new ground. He develops a natural connection with Pi’erre Bourne throughout the project, as the super-producer gifts Thug four beats that sound like he locked himself away in a submarine specifically to lace Thug with something futuristic and beachy to talk his shit over. “Surf” immediately jumps out: We get Thug screeches, sass, and some of his best ad-libs in recent memory (“Totally dude”). “I’m Scared” is just as good, with Thug and 21 Savage bonding over their mutual love of terror. “Lethal weapon, let it rip from out the top of the drop to his scalp,” says Thug, in the same tone as he talks about his favorite pair of custom Nikes.
On the album, Thug takes some time to pat himself on the back, aware of his own widespread influence. With guests on most songs, each of his Atlanta rap sons get some swings in, but Thug makes sure to show them they’ve still got a ways to go. On “Hot,” he educates Gunna on how to expertly flex one’s jewelry over triumphant Wheezy-produced horns. His most accomplished pupil, Lil Baby, makes him proud on “Bad Bad Bad,” as his unrelatable boasts about real estate and foreign whips are on par with Thug. Lil Keed is still in the midst of being groomed, but the two share a connection in their vocal similarities, trading helium-pitched deliveries on “Big Tipper.” Even when Thug dips outside of his immediate circle of influence, he’s just as comfortable, clearing the runway for Nav to list off his favorite pairs of Gucci tube socks and getting caught in a battle with Lil Uzi Vert about who wears the tightest pair of jeans. (It ends in a draw.)
But despite all the collaborations on So Much Fun, the album is about Young Thug. He might not mystify as he did in the early stages of his career, when he was stumbling into new flows and deliveries at an inhuman pace, but now he’s able to wield the madness with ease, satisfying in many modes. He’s got the single aimed for the Billboard charts with the J. Cole and Travis Scott assisted “The London,” as well as the hard-nosed Southside-produced Atlanta street hit, “Pussy.” And then, there’s a song like “Light It Up” that has the bizarre ad-libs and sudden melodic outbursts. At the core, he’s rapping as good as anyone, like he always has. After years of rappers trying to be the next Young Thug, there’s still only one.


The impish artist’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success.

Oxy Music

Alex Cameron is just as much a musician as he is a performance artist. He takes on personas—usually that of a sleazebag everyman, the kind of guy who frequents strip clubs and casinos on weekday afternoons. His work is deliberately provocative, deliberately transgressive, and rarely serious. In an era of indie music that can sometimes feel so self-consciously woke that it suffocates, Cameron can feel like a breath of fresh air. He’s a latter-day Harmony Korine character: Alien in Spring Breakers playing Britney Spears on a piano with white-guy cornrows and grills, or the titular Beach Bum walking around the pool in a pink marabou bathrobe. On 2016’s lo-fi opus, Jumping the Shark, Cameron gave off the vibe of a down on his luck wedding singer performing Suicide b-sides. On 2017’s Forced Witness, he penned a propulsive, weirdly moving ’80s synth-pop ballad that involved rhyming “Down Syndrome Jew,” with “the real estate crew.” His music, at its best, is a slightly problematic—but needed—reprieve from the status quo, a good laugh.
Oxy Music is a different beast, but it doesn’t try to be. Cameron’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success. The sleazebag bit has grown old and the character-study work attempts to be transgressive but is actually just trite and, crucially, not particularly funny. The ’80s sound palette that gave so much life into his earlier records now has lapsed into pastiche. “Sara Jo,” has a catchy melody, blasts of saxophone, and chintzy synths. But it is catchy in the way that a song in the grocery store is, something tinny and distant. You’re singing along while figuring out the calorie content of S’Mores Pop-Tarts, even though you don’t know the lyrics. Which, by the way, involves Cameron singing the phrase, “Who told my brother that his kids are gonna die from this vaccine?” a bunch of times.
Maybe the one funny thing about the record is its name. It’s Roxy Music minus the “R”, an homage to the drug known as Oxycontin. It’s pretty edgy stuff, which is a grim caveat of his less than compelling social commentary to be found within. Cameron tries to show that he is a) totally not woke and not interested in being PC but also b) not like, a total nihilist, he’s totally a cool, self-aware, caring dude. Look no further than “Cancel Culture,” which is both a critique of cancel culture and a critique of people who think cancel culture is bad. “Lily-white/But I use ebonics when I’m online,” Cameron croons in a falsetto, “Because everything’s dope/And I can barely hide it, baby.” He’s calling out hypocrites and culture vultures with the kind of air of someone who thinks he’s enlightened, but the meta nature of the song makes it feel even more slimy than if it actually had something novel or interesting to say about cancel culture—which it doesn’t.
The thing is, Cameron wants you to think he’s totally in on the joke. You see, these songs are supposed to sound bad. But the self-awareness really only carries you so far in an album that sounds like Costco-brand Roxy Music on purpose. The spartan production is some of the weakest in Cameron’s career, mostly consisting of cheap-sounding software plugins and maybe a handful of vintage synthesizers. More than anything, it takes on the quality of a short story written by a young student trying to cram as many neon lights, bongs, uzis, blow jobs, g-strings, and jokes into 10 pages as possible. For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon. I guess that’s pretty funny.


From modern classical to disco classicism, Peter Zummo shadowed Arthur Russell's cello lines with his peerless trombone work. His first album of solo compositions, from 1985, has been reissued on vinyl by JD Twitch of record obsessive DJ duo Optimo.

Arthur Russell / Peter Zummo: Zummo With an X

Zummo With an X

It's safe to assume you've heard neglected New York City trombonist/composer Peter Zummo without realizing it. As the renaissance of the classically trained cellist/Buddha-pop enthusiast/leftfield disco auteur/cowboy-shirted indie-folk trailblazer Arthur Russell has swelled to include many lovingly rendered reissues, a big biography, and impressionistic documentary, so too does Zummo's nimble trombone work subliminally reach more ears. That's him delivering the booming Skatalite-like horn line on Russell's Paradise Garage staple "Go Bang #5", adding cumulous soundclouds to the heavenly "In the Light of the Miracle", and foghorning amid the cello fuzz of "The Platform on the Ocean".
From modern classical to disco classicism, Zummo shadowed the man's singular cello lines with his own peerless trombone work, and no matter Russell's genre or interval leaps, he remained the closest of collaborators. So it makes sense that Russell would repay the favor on Peter Zummo's first album of original compositions, 1985's Zummo With an X, with one side devoted to a seven-sectioned piece entitled "Instruments" from 1980 and another composition from 1985 entitled "Song IV" taking up the other. Out of print on vinyl since its release (though the CD reissue from 2006 tacks on "Lateral Pass", another 25 minutes of lovely music), JD Twitch of the record obsessive DJ duo Optimo has taken it upon himself to reissue the album on vinyl. No doubt, it's a piece of music that's close to his heart.
And let's be real here, it's certainly not because of "Instruments". Beyond the Glass-Reich Titans of Minimalism Industry that overshadowed most of the late-1970s/early-1980s modern classical scene of New York City, previously ignored works continue to surface to varying grades of astonishment and cosmic justice, be it the efforts of composers like Jon Gibson, Yoshi Wada, Charlemagne Palestine, Dickie Landry, or Peter Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra. "Instruments was my answer to a militaristic sort of minimalism that had become popular at the time," writes Zummo in the original liner notes. "I had a much freer-flowing notion."
Yet in listening, it's difficult to hear such openness. Rik Albani's trumpet duets with Zummo's trombone in repetitious two-note phrases while Bill Ruyle's marimba sometimes percolates in the back and Russell's cello is all but impossible to discern. The composition is dryly segmented by half-steps, sixths, sevenths, whole steps, and the like. They move in and out of phase, yet rather than explore the rich tonalities that can occur from such phasing and overtones, it simply never manifests. Perhaps not enjoying the nuances of such composition exludes my ears from the piece, but throughout it feels more like the rote practice of scales than some exploration of freedom.
Then again, on the original CD issue of Zummo With an X, "Song IV" is positioned first, and rarely has there been an instance in the past five years where I have ever needed to hear something else besides "Song IV"'s quiet majesty. In a temporal world where Don Draper's statement that the human condition is one where "happiness is a moment before you need more happiness," Zummo's "Song IV" is pure manna, the sound of sublimity that erases the need for more sound. Tangentially, it's a 20-minute trio recording from 1985, yet such numbers feel feeble against its sound. There is no gauge of duration or where it slots in the discographies of its participants. There's a softness, a fragility to "Song IV", much like magnetic filaments or crystal structures, things that would dissolve if touched or dissected. It would be the sound of a Rothko painting, were such canvases portals denoting nirvana rather than the void.
Its closest relation would be to Indian classical music, what with Bill Ruyle on tabla and Russell's cello tuned "like one of the low 'sympathetic' strings on a sitar," according to Zummo's liner notes on the CD reissue. Russell's bow taps out beats that dovetail with the tabla's patter in such a manner that sends shivers down the nervous system. But it's as Russell's cello scrapes (and their attendant bit of electronic processing) intermingles with Zummo's muted trombone, close-mic'd so that every breath and growl can be felt that makes my arm hairs stand on end.
"Song IV" feels without beginning or end, as if it's this state entered into rather than something structured and composed, and in its universe, so many tiny, amazing epiphanies happen. There's the way that Russell's wordless mumbles conjoin with what Zummo calls "lip multiphonics," or how a certain cello line will suddenly scale upward, or when Zummo sings through his horn an octave above Russell's own voice. And most beautiful of all, it's the sound of two dear friends in deep conversation, both in this world and beyond it.


Foregrounding her voice for the first time against airy, otherworldly beats, the Brooklyn producer’s new tape is her most lucid and surprising to date.

Truest

“I don’t want to tell you what I’m feeling,” Anysia Kym sings on “Test Your Patience,” and for a while, she might have been talking to us. The first few years of her career were spent playing drums for Blair, a Brooklyn band that braved cramped rehearsal spaces by day and threw shows with heavyweights like Wiki by night. Since departing the group in 2022, she’s lugged her percussive penchant into airy, otherworldly territory—less concerned with fringe rock’s fucked-up realities, and more infatuated with the hazy hypnagogia that strings shabby days together. On 2022’s Soliloquy and 2023’s Pressure Sensitive, she tossed artful alley-oops to the likes of MIKE, Niontay, and Jadasea, setting the table for some of her collaborators’ most psyched-out plays. After years of being a pass-first producer, Truest marks her first foray into pure scoring—solo tracks, only one feature—and shows flashes of a star in the making.
If Kym’s discography is a collection of dreamscapes, the songs on Truest are lucid: No longer watching other characters brave her worlds, she waltzes through the house she’s spent years constructing. Like much of her earlier work, these songs come from a place of wistful longing; unlike anything she’s released before, they spotlight Kym’s singing voice, which claims a well-deserved spot in her woozy world. Album opener “Hesitations (Intro)” recalls dreamy R&B contemporaries like Liv.e and keiyaA, modulating and multiplying Kym’s murmurs to match the “faded,” “sedated” state she sketches out. Her chops—literally, chops—as a producer by now are familiar, but she foregrounds them in sinuous new shapes. “Test Your Patience” begins as a head-bopping saunter, until, within two minutes, Kym is gliding over a breakcore beat-switch, the way psychedelics might make you glide over grimy earth. “I’m convinced that this could be appealing,” she sings. She isn’t wrong.
Truest is the first Kym release to feature multiple producers besides herself, which makes for compelling, if peculiar, extensions of her palette. The 454-produced “Pool of Life” is fast and futurist, a groove-heavy Goldilocks zone between FAST TRAX 3 and The Velvet Rope—picture Janet Jackson in the studio with Nintendo devs. Skater-slash-rapper Na-Kel Smith has long favored pitched-up vocals and brash bass; over his frenetic beat for “Owed2Me,” Kym’s voice is in tinnitus territory, not controlling chaos so much as contributing to it. But as tripped-out as it is, and disarming as it may be for longtime listeners, it’s promising to see her take new risks, exploring others’ creative worlds instead of shrinking back into her own. Between Blair and now, she’s lived a few different artistic lives: punk-adjacent drummer, prolific hip-hop producer, soulful R&B singer. Seeing her surprise isn’t necessarily surprising.
The only featured artist on Truest is MIKE, godfather of the Brooklyn DIY enclave Kym spent the past several years studying, then sprouting from. Two years ago, on her debut solo tape, she enlisted him for a brief track called “Real Love”—less a full-fledged collaboration than a temp check, with MIKE rapping for a minute or so, as if feeling out her approach, then letting the beat ride out. There’s a full-circle moment here as both artists—and, now, both vocalists—immerse themselves on “In Doubt.” Kym’s production is far heavier than it was then; while the bassline swoops beneath her, she’s way up high, serenading a lover who no longer has to peer behind a drum kit, or sleuth out track credits, to see her. When the beat switches and MIKE comes in, it’s revelatory: the protégé playing host to the mentor.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the influential debut from the SoCal band, a pop-punk spark that spread like wildfire in the Tumblr era.

Joyce Manor

Joyce Manor emerged from the beer-soaked ecosystem of basements and bowling alleys that has sustained SoCal pop-punk for nearly a half-century. But Barry Johnson knows who was truly responsible for the legend of Joyce Manor, ten entirely quotable, all-hook songs in 18 minutes, megaphoned by the new vanguard of punk tastemaking: “16-year-old and 17-year-old girls, with septum piercings and green hair,” sharing gifs, lyric quotes, and glitchy live videos. In other words, “Tumblr,” in case it’s unclear what exactly he’s getting at. And in being the first definitive punk album of the Tumblr era, Joyce Manor set the course for its foreseeable future, anticipating a decade of social media and streaming trends that rewarded immediacy and the perpetual bite-sizing of attention spans.
In 2011, they were simply a band that everyone could agree upon: The hardcore kids appreciated Joyce Manor blasting through at least three songs by the time they refilled their Solo cup, while the nerds latched onto the early forays into folk-punk, ska, and songs that wondered if fish have periods. The Defend Pop-Punk and emo revivalist wings were unified by a band who viewed Jawbreaker, blink-182, Green Day, and Weezer as equals in shaping the sound of California pop-rock.
All of these typically warring sub-factions would deem Joyce Manor “elder statesmen” at this point, a band dignified by their longevity. Yet they already sounded over it on Joyce Manor, resignation the subtext of every song—resignation at being post-teen, post-punk, or, if you prefer, just too old for this shit. Johnson was already in his 20s when Joyce Manor formed in the South Bay suburb of Torrance, shaped by its provincial adolescent Americana: He first met bassist Matt Ebert through a local bowling league, not far from Del Amo Fashion Center, once described as “America in mall form.” They later reconnected on an Orange County Ska message board. The initial bond with guitarist Chase Knobbe, then a 16-year-old employee at Gable House Bowl, was consecrated with ill-gotten Joose in a Disneyland parking lot.
Three years later, Joyce Manor begins like most SoCal punk albums, with another shitty day in high school. “Orange Julius” is a quintessential Joyce Manor song, just one long verse that modulates in intensity, allowing a brief glimpse of gang vocal catharsis before cutting it off. Johnson has explained it as a song about “falling in love with your bully/tormentor,” and falling in love with something you hate might be the most consistent throughline of Joyce Manor’s music. When Johnson writes about a crush, it results in “See How Tame I Can Be.” There are many, many Joyce Manor songs about the fear of being stuck in the South Bay and none that really consider what it might feel like to leave.
Johnson and Ebert saw firsthand the futility of using SoCal punk as a proxy for full-scale revolution or even a vision for an escape. To this day, Joyce Manor practice in the same converted garage in a quiet, residential patch of Torrance. The availability of this space could be seen as an act of kindness from the homeowner, the former guitarist of the Last, a Los Angeles power-pop act that released three albums on SST, the legendary label run by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. When Lost royalties weren’t paying the mortgage, the homeowner eventually took a corporate job at Hewlett-Packard and attended the sort of national conferences attended by Hustler Honeys. The garage walls are still plastered with dozens of centerfolds autographed for his teenage son.
In 2011, the thought of getting a corporate gig or, say, being three albums deep on a legendary Los Angeles punk label like Epitaph was equally unappealing to Johnson. Most of the band’s origin story leading up to Joyce Manor rests on Johnson slowly being prodded into action against his will. Three years prior, folk-punkers Andrew Jackson Jihad (now AJJ) asked Johnson if he was available to play a gig with his erstwhile hardcore band Fever Kids. They had just broken up, and Johnson bluffed when asked about his new project’s name (“Umm…Joyce Manor?”). He quickly cobbled together a couple of songs to play Joyce Manor’s first gig, as an acoustic duo. Johnson had a formidable work ethic as a songwriter but no interest whatsoever in the grunt stuff of DIY punk; it was Ebert making the flyers, inviting friends to shows, booking gigs, and ultimately convincing Johnson to take Joyce Manor as seriously as the rest of the band did. “That was a stupid fucking idea as far as I was concerned [back then],” Johnson reflected in 2018. “I’ve got rent and shit. We’re not gonna go on some Tom Sawyer adventure with my life, I’m 24.”
It’s kinda surprising that Joyce Manor even made punk music at all. They repeatedly cited Morrissey and Weezer as primary influences; artists that are invariably discovered by teenagers who think they’re too clever to be miserable but feel miserable because they’re too clever. But Joyce Manor were either uninterested or incapable of trying to be among the hundreds or even thousands of SoCal bands actively trying to sound like either of them; the jaunty shuffle of “Ashtray Petting Zoo” is vaguely reminiscent of “Is It Really So Strange?” and that’s really about it. The Weezer comparisons are almost entirely attributable to “Leather Jacket’ and “Beach Community” trudging at a midtempo 6/8 time, slumping along like a nerd saddled with an overstuffed backpack on one arm because that’s how the cool kids wear it.
They also exclusively wrote very short songs and spiked alt-rock melodies with day-drunk surrealism, like a SoCal Guided By Voices that exclusively drank alcopops. While searching for a lost Nokia cell phone in “Beach Community,” Johnson is taunted both by police and streets that “count backwards.” The non sequitur titles of “Ashtray Petting Zoo” and “21st Dead Rats” also function as their hooks, working equally well as images of corporeal decay or just phonetically cool words to shout. None of Joyce Manor’s previous songs scattered throughout demos and splits and Johnson’s notebooks were off-limits, so Joyce Manor ostensibly could’ve been their Bee Thousand, a clearinghouse of ideas for a prolific songwriter who just couldn’t bear to let any idea go to waste. But Johnson was skeptical about anything that passed for a “lifestyle,” whether dictated by indie’s self-deprecation or punk’s self-delusion. When asked about Guided By Voices’ tendency to stuff several dozen tracks on each album, Johnson scoffed, “Don’t you wish they wouldn’t?”
Joyce Manor fit the demands of slapdash shows that could get cut off at any time—every part had to be the good part. Any other band that wrote a chorus as sticky as the one on “Beach Community” would’ve repeated it at least a second time; as is, it’s the big chorus and the big coda all at once. “Leather Jacket” might as well be all chorus, but the real hook is the rare Ebert lead vocal on the bridge that drives home the tremulous anger borne of high school betrayal.
Even after a decade of consistently escalating acclaim, I can’t think of too many bands that sound like Joyce Manor because how would anyone go about doing that? Their songs are almost impossible to parody because no one element feels separable from the whole. Like every album that came after, Joyce Manor is a testament to their excellence in un-punk qualities of editing and restraint. This is most evident on the songs that Joyce Manor salvaged from the “maybe” pile. On their 2/15/09 demo, “Stir Crazy” was a frenzied folk-punk burner about a friend lapsing into cocaine addiction. Two years later, they slowed it down, put it to an assured shuffle, sanded off the grit on the vocals, and it became “Ashtray Petting Zoo.” “Constant Nothing” and “Leather Jacket” are culled from the previous years’ Constant Headache EP and given tidier production. The band’s signature song, “Constant Headache,” itself did not appear on that EP.
There’s a possible alternate history where Joyce Manor, like many punk LPs of its ilk, ends after nine songs and about 15 minutes—and I have little doubt that it would still be an album we talk about 10 years later. But Joyce Manor aren’t headlining 3000-capacity rooms without “Constant Headache,” which portended much bigger things despite being the least ambitious song on Joyce Manor. There’s a single melodic line that repeats throughout the entire thing and it sounds like someone trying to remember “Don’t You Want Me” and failing to get past the second bar. Most of it requires no more than two chords at a time, played in a strumming pattern and tempo suitable for a teen within their first three guitar lessons. It peaks with Johnson shouting “entirely fucked” as the band drops out. But “Constant Headache” is exactly the song it needs to be in order to fully convey the persistent, nagging resignation that high school memories of getting drunk or getting laid for the first time have set a standard you will never, ever live up to.
The early and still persistent comparisons to Jawbreaker make sense thanks to “Constant Headache”—a California band making gruff, quotable, and sticky songs about being in the scene, but not quite of the scene, hovering slightly above it. Yet, that analogy always felt like projecting a bygone era’s ethics onto a band that never had much use for scene politics or politics of any sort. “Yeah, your dad/He was a cop who punched you right in the head/You said, ‘Fuck you, Dad! I hate you!’ and that's just what you meant,” Johnson shouted on early single “House Warning Party,” which eventually got resurrected as a “lead single” of their rarities compilation Songs From Northern Torrance in 2020. In the current moment, “Your dad was a cop/I bet his dad was a cop/Yeah but you're no cop, you see” can be read as an astute observation about genetic pathology, or that cops are state-funded shitty dads equating violence and discipline. Judging from Joyce Manor’s earliest shows, it served as a cathartic prompt for wimps finally gaining the confidence to tell their dads to fuck off.
Joyce Manor’s lyrics weren’t intended as words to live by, but lifestyle accessories in their own way—readily available for high school yearbook quotes, inside jokes, or content for the emergent forms of microblogging that were instrumental in their success. Throughout the previous decade, emo and pop-punk had become synonymous with the logorrheic, proudly overdramatic and Blingee’d garishness of Friendster, LiveJournal, and MySpace. As the leading figures of that era were starting to recede from rock radio, grittier and more nimble scenes were emerging alongside social media platforms that favored short, pithy expressions of manageable anxiety. Or, as Johnson described the subject matter of Joyce Manor: “Boredom, repeating the same mistakes over and over, eating too much candy, sexual depression, regular depression, fifteen VHS tapes for five dollars, that sorta thing.”
But these trivialities served as a jumping-off point for Johnson’s gift of capturing the casual cruelty of social interaction. Or, he’s just very good at writing about jerks (Exhibit A: “The Jerk”). In books or movies, jerks are given space to slowly accumulate microaggressions, to let social facades chip off until their true colors are revealed. But Johnson can cut right to it, beginning “Call Out” with the unofficial motto of The Jerk: “I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry.” “The one you are ain’t the one that I’m after,” he sneers later on, and yet, he was able to spend years of his life playing the part: sitting by the ocean, riding on the handlebars of her bike. Joyce Manor spends most of its time in that precarious space between high school and confirmed adulthood, where people look at the relationships they’ve made, fostered mostly by proximity and superficial interests, and judging whether making new friends is even worth the hassle.
Nearly a year removed from their most recent gig, Joyce Manor took requests on Twitter to offer a one-sentence synopsis of each song—examples from Joyce Manor included “riding in a car going to a party feeling bad,” “unable to change,” and several of them were just: “not sure.” The 10 songs were built from this kind of exercise from the start, each concentrating itself into a tagline: “I walked in to find what’s worse than the worst of all time,” “I realize it’s true, everything reminds me of you,” “I rode a wave of emotion I can’t begin to place,” “I’d really like to know what it takes to say ‘I am strong,’” and the line that has prompted more Tumblr quotes than any other, “I just lay there in protest entirely fucked/It’s such a stubborn reminder one perfect night’s not enough.”
Less than a decade later, they got awfully close to that perfect night: Joyce Manor headlined the Hollywood Palladium as a career capstone in 2019, joined by Jeff Rosenstock and AJJ, the first guy who paid them for a gig and the guys responsible for their first gig, period. They were all preceded by emo upstarts awakebutstillinbed, hyped by Johnson as “a once-every-ten-years band.” Joyce Manor alone wasn’t a revolution when it arrived in 2011. It was simply one of the first central nodes amid the interrelated scenes of “feeling stuff” music that was still bubbling underground before they displaced finicky art-rock as the primary form of guitar-based indie rock—emo, pop-punk, confessional singer-songwriters, all of the things that teenagers are supposed to get out of their system. As thousands of emo teens and indie rock 40-somethings shouted along with Johnson about feeling totally washed on the encore-closing “Leather Jacket,” it’s abundantly clear why Joyce Manor will endure when TikTok and whatever replaces it goes the way of Tumblr: feeling too old for this shit never gets old.

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Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, Beth Orton's latest is anxious, playful, and sounds little like anything the singer/songwriter has done before.

Kidsticks

Beth Orton has been considered a singer-songwriter folkie for so long that it can be hard to remember that her career began quite differently. She got her start singing on William Orbit's chillout project Strange Cargo, and she lent her voice to two songs on the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust, placing her smack in the middle of British pop's volatile post-rave milieu. When her 1996 breakout album, Trailer Park, appeared, it balanced plaintive acoustic guitars and barroom piano with trip-hop beats and atmospheric electronic detailing. That unusual fusion had a lot to do with producer Andrew Weatherall, whom Orton hired after he wedded acid house to bluesy psych rock on Primal Scream's Screamadelica. But Trailer Park ended up being an outlier in Orton's catalog. On subsequent albums she progressively dialed back the electronics, and her last full-length, 2012's starkly acoustic Sugaring Season, wrapped itself snugly in the warm, homespun mantle of folksingers like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.
Kidsticks returns to her electronic roots, but not necessarily in ways that anyone might have expected. Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung, of the noisy, psychedelic synth-mashers Fuck Buttons, it often sounds little like anything Orton has done before. The record's sequencing plays up its strangeness, placing its most unexpected songs right up front. “Snow” leads off with caterwauling counterpoints and flanged electric guitars over a trashcan drum corps; “Moon” follows with dance beats and a warbling keyboard melody that's a dead ringer for a sound from David Bowie's “Ashes to Ashes.” Orton, meanwhile, sounds like she's channeling Johnny Cash, lending to the impression that part of the album's genesis may have simply been Orton and Hung swapping the aux cord, constructing a virtual mood board of favorite songs as they sketched out Kidsticks' idiosyncratic sound. That might how the dubstep-inspired bass throb of “Petals” snuck through, not to mention the peppy new wave pastiche of "1973." Fortunately, most of these songs are far more than the sum of their influences: “Petals” may start out sounding like Massive Attack, but by its guitar-and-drum-duel finale, it burns like a church on fire.
It helps that Orton and Hung have enlisted a crack group of musicians, including bassist Bram Inscore, jazz drummer Guillermo E. Brown, percussionist Lucky Paul, and George Lewis, Jr. of Twin Shadow on guitar; Grizzly Bear bassist Chris Taylor also turns up on a couple of songs, and the soundtrack composer Dustin O'Halloran contributes string arrangements to a few more. Their contributions are subtle but key. The rolling “Wave” crests atop a deceptively potent rhythm section and surging wah-wah guitar; “Flesh and Blood” gives her pastoral tendencies a loose, jammy makeover and adds lilting, one-finger synth lines. The scope of her collaborators' resumes—Inscore has played with Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Brown has a long history with David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp's groups, while Paul can be found sitting in with Chilly Gonzales and Mocky—says something about Orton and Hung's approach here: Kidsticks is less a roadmap to a given destination than a net for catching vibes.
As for Orton, loosening up suits her well. You can tell how much she's enjoying herself by all the ways she experiments with her voice. She takes on three or four different styles in “Snow,” alternately cooing and yelping, playing head voice off chest voice. On “Wave,” her delivery frays around the edges, inseparable from the throat that produced it; every crack, every quaver feels like a proud badge of her years on the planet. She's just as physical on “Flesh and Blood,” but here, in contrast, she sounds absolutely luxurious, with a texture like crushed velvet.
Lyrically, the big themes hold sway. She fixates on celestial bodies and planetary forces: suns, moons, stars, seas, smoke, snow, waves, weather. She swims through a liquid sky on "1973"; lilacs turn to teardrops in "Petals." But she also has an ear for small, lovely details, like "corduroy legs running up the stairs," the image that gives shape to “Corduroy Legs,” a delightful, boundless expression of parental love. And if her lyrics sometimes read like the work of someone who's coming off a lost weekend of tarot cards and John Donne, she also knows when to strip back: In “Falling,” she sings, with devastating simplicity, “Now my phone book / Is filling up with dead friends / And I wonder / Who would answer if I called them.”
Throughout it all, a picture emerges of Orton that's anxious, playful (“You got a certain way, I swear, of sticking it in,” she leers on “1973”), and even supremely relatable. There are love songs here, and falling-out-of-love songs, and sometimes it takes a while to tell which is which. The twist in a song called “Falling” is that she's “falling backwards from your arms”; in “Dawnstar,” she sings, “Our love is gaining speed,” but she also admits, “I am thankful that what I have is enough.” Escape velocity is for the young, I think she's saying; once you reach a certain stage in life, you're happy just to keep going. And if this all sounds like a case of lowered expectations, the strikingly beautiful “Flesh and Blood,” the album's peak, turns simple acceptance—of “whatever this is,” as she sings, over and over—into something approaching ecstasy.
Looking back on Trailer Park, Orton told The Quietus in 2009, “I thought, well, if I really am a singer… I must create my own thing and do it, only then will I prove it. But even today I'm still proving it to myself.” But on Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too.


On the strongest album of their unlikely second act, the Swedish melodic death metal band lets their weirder side take the reins.

The Nightmare of Being

At the Gates became one of the most influential bands of the Swedish melodic death metal boom by boiling their sound down to its essence. Their 1995 album Slaughter of the Soul funneled its gut-punch riffs, venomous vocals, and sugar-rush melodies into pop-adjacent song structures, unwittingly spurring the early ’00s metalcore explosion led by bands like Killswitch Engage and Darkest Hour. To make Slaughter, At the Gates had to subdue the experimental impulse that ran through their earlier work, and just as they were beginning to reap the rewards of that transformation, they broke up. Now, three LPs into a once unthinkable second act, we can finally hear the promise of the more exploratory band that could have been.
The Nightmare of Being is At the Gates’ second album with bassist Jonas Björler as their primary songwriter, following the departure of his twin brother, Anders, in 2017. It was Anders who first pushed the band to write more approachable material back in 1993, and in his absence, At the Gates have started to sound more like those exuberant teenagers who put an extended violin solo on the first song on their debut album. While 2014’s At War With Reality and 2018’s To Drink From the Night Itself tried to split the difference between these esoteric inclinations and their more streamlined sound, on The Nightmare of Being, their weirder side claims a decisive victory: It is their best, most diverse, and most provocative album since reuniting.
Nearly every At the Gates record has incorporated non-metal instrumentation to some degree, but on The Nightmare of Being, those parts feel just as integral as the churning guitars and pummeling drums. At a key moment in “The Paradox,” Björler underpins a particularly throat-ripping scream from frontman Tomas Lindberg with a plink of piano, where his brother once might have put a chugging riff. Anders Gabrielsson’s snaking saxophone emerges from the center of “Garden of Cyrus,” picking up the lead melody from the guitar and building in intensity as the band thrashes around him. “Touched by the White Hands of Death,” one of the more straightforward songs, complements its furious death metal assault with a string quartet, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and tuba. None of these parts sound like mere window dressing, nor do they undermine the essential death metal-ness of the album.
Björler’s impressive songwriting and arrangements wouldn’t have the same impact without Lindberg’s signature rasp at the front of the mix. As his work with punk-aligned acts like Disfear and Lock Up suggests, the veteran singer’s take on death metal is rooted in hardcore—more staccato bark than guttural growl. This style is hard on the vocal cords, and over the past decade, Lindberg has often sounded totally spent, both onstage and in the studio. Nightmare, however, is the strongest vocal performance he has given on an At the Gates album since he sang about his “22 years of pain” on Slaughter of the Soul. Of course, he doesn’t sound that young anymore, but he’s learned to weaponize his exasperation and exhaustion.
That effect is enhanced by Lindberg’s lyrics, which are fixated on the philosophy of pessimism extolled by fatalistic thinkers like Thomas Ligotti and Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism,” a bouncy, krautrock-inspired track, takes its lyrics directly from Thacker’s book of the same name, in a surprising act of interdisciplinary collaboration. The key tenets of philosophical pessimism are that humanity is doomed, the planet is inhospitable, and the universe is indifferent. That sounds bleak on its face, but for At the Gates, embracing the philosophy helped put their art into perspective. “Pessimism is, weirdly enough, comforting,” Lindberg told Revolver in a recent interview. He went on to explain that the pandemic helped him appreciate the small things and warned against setting goals that will only end in disappointment. From that view, making an album is a laughably low-stakes affair, and Lindberg would likely make fun of the idea that The Nightmare of Being is somehow life-affirming. Yet its power, both in spite and because of its core ethos, is undeniable.

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In the year before he died, Mark Linkous hit the studio with Steve Albini. Fourteen years later, those unreleased sessions reveal a bittersweet cocktail of beauty and torment.

Bird Machine

Mark Linkous was a devotee of the work in progress. Under the banner of Sparklehorse and until his death by suicide in March 2010, the Virginia songwriter crafted a series of exquisitely fractured indie-rock albums that suggested a distrust of anything too polished, guided by an inherent belief that the silence and static were as crucial as the words and music. In order to achieve this balance, Linkous developed a meticulous process in his home studio that involved finding just the right busted vintage equipment to layer against his tender vocals, close enough to the mic so you could hear the breath between each line. With each successive album, the process became so intensive that it seemed like a miracle anything ever got released.
That is, until Bird Machine. As the first decade of the 2000s drew to a close, Linkous reached a breaking point and decided to change directions. The plan was to hit the studio with noted punk naturalist Steve Albini and bash out some simple tunes that wouldn’t drive him, or any of his collaborators, crazy, all in an effort to rediscover his initial spark. He revisited his favorite records by the Kinks and wrote music that would translate easily to a live rock show. “The songs are not quite as clever,” he said at the time, “and I’m not laboring forever over every lyric.” For an artist so clouded by doubt and perfectionism, pain and self-deprecation, the new approach sounded a little like therapy.
Instead, Bird Machine was destined to become the greatest labor of love in his catalog: Only now is it finally getting released, miraculously, 14 years after he started making it. Completed by younger brother Matt Linkous and Matt’s bandmate and wife, Melissa Moore, the record is composed of recordings Matt discovered in 2017, rounded out with guest appearances from Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Matt and Moore’s 19-year-old son, Spencer. With the same collage-like, bittersweet atmosphere as the best Sparklehorse albums, Bird Machine conveys an uncanny thrill—like revisiting an exact replica of some safe haven you frequented as a child. But where those records carried the unflinching vision of a single auteur, this one plays through a foggier, more distant lens.
In a sense, there was always a posthumous quality to Sparklehorse records, even when the man behind them was still with us. He often sang about and from the perspective of ghosts, a word he pronounced in a sweet, Southern falsetto that made its central vowel sound as soft as a muted horn. Early on this record, we get a whole song about this type of haunting with “Kind Ghosts,” where he surveys his past for any comforting omnipotence: “Oh where were you, my kind ghosts, when I needed you?” As with Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill, many lyrics could be read like grim premonitions, but they are so consistent with the imagery throughout his catalog, it is mostly just a comfort. I am not sure, for example, what Linkous means when he sings about a “hummingbird and quasar,” but from him, it’s hard to imagine a more romantic phrase.
These familiar turns make Bird Machine a comfortable fit in Linkous’ catalog, and you can easily connect the dots to his past work. The essential tracks will largely come down to which side of his songwriting you connect with the most. The woozy psych pop of “Daddy’s Gone” also appeared on 2010’s Dark Night of the Soul, a record he was working on with Danger Mouse and David Lynch around the same time as this project. While I prefer that album’s version, a duet with the Cardigans’ Nina Persson, this rawer solo take has a more visceral quality, where imagery of a dog eating cake connects to the title track of 2001’s masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life. The crunchy alt-country of “Chaos of the Universe” draws a straight line to the burst of noise that interrupted one of his first great anthems on 1998’s “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man.”
When Linkous wrote that song, his major label suggested it could be the big single, which only made him more hell-bent on corrupting it with an MTV-proof wave of fuzz. Back then, the label might have been pushing Linkous to make something more like Bird Machine, where even burnt-out, droning lullabies like “The Scull of Lucia” feel equally aimed at solitary headphones and live, swaying audiences. This record, in fact, might boast Sparklehorse’s highest concentration of catchy melodies, from the seasick breeze of “Evening Star Supercharger” to the gospel balladry of “Falling Down” and “Hello Lord.” You can hear what he was drawing from those Kinks records, how their sunny choruses melt into his nightmarish kaleidoscope.
A constant through Linkous’ catalog was the pairing of his most optimistic lyrics with his saddest melodies, giving the sense of a constant battle to transcend the darkness. There’s a similar quality at play in these songs, where the heaviest, thrashiest performances are also the most beautiful. Maybe it’s because you can hear glimpses of a way out: the garage-band throwdowns Linkous had in mind, music he could play live and start shedding his reputation as some sad bastard holed up in a studio. These songs also happen to be the moments when Linkous gets most direct as a lyricist, trading his mystical, abstract universe for a more candid approach. One song is called “I Fucked It Up,” and it’s a blown-out, junkyard spiral of all the ways he’s sabotaged himself—personally, professionally, creatively. He knows it’s a cautionary tale, but through his distorted, gnarly delivery, Linkous makes it sound a little triumphant, owning his underdog story while it’s still his to tell. For the rest of us, it’s another stirring reminder that nobody could fuck it up like him.


Demi Lovato has long sung about rebirth. On Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade.

Holy Fvck

Demi Lovato could have drawn from her own comeback playbook. The singer, whose battles with addiction and mental illness have been widely documented and dissected since they first sought treatment in 2010, has historically returned from rehab with a solemn message about their struggle. In 2011, it was with “Skyscraper,” a raw power ballad about rebuilding a collapsed life. In 2020, following a near-fatal overdose, it was with “Anyone,” a plea for compassion debuted, through tears, at the Grammys. Both on that stage and in the video for “Skyscraper,” Lovato performed in a chaste white dress, signaling contrition and rebirth.
If you didn’t already know that Demi went back to rehab, she’ll be the first to tell you. “Demi leaves rehab again” is the opening line—delivered with a sardonic bite, like she’s trying to snatch the words away from haters and gossips—of “Skin of My Teeth,” the lead single from her eighth album, Holy Fvck. Sometime after releasing last year’s Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over, an ultra-exposed document of self-reinvention after self-immolation, Lovato quietly went through another round of treatment. Seemingly, question marks still hover around the matter of their own survival, a central preoccupation of their music: “I’m alive by the skin of my teeth,” goes the refrain. But rather than don the white dress, this time Lovato suits up in latex and leather, grabs a spiky guitar, and borrows from Hole. Go to hell enough times and eventually you come back hardened.
Holy Fvck fulfills its promise of sweaty, angsty excess with a tour through pop-punk and adjacent genres. Opener “Freak” sets the tone with sludgy metal guitars and fits of guttural screaming, plus an appearance by Yungblud—like Lovato, a Disney Channel alum with an alternative streak—whose gritty voice roughs up the track like sandpaper. Across the album, Lovato’s idea of transgression is working abrasive sounds into songs about pleasure and pleasurable hooks into songs about pain and death, plus some punctuating “fuck!”s, just because. Rather than tapping current pop-punk kingpin Travis Barker, Lovato stuck with returning producer Warren “Oak” Felder, whose work for Alessia Cara and Lizzo is noticeably light on headbangers. But this is no half-hearted rebrand: On Dancing with the Devil, Lovato sang about rebirth, and on Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade.
The sounds Lovato is gravitating to—hurtling, cymbal-heavy drums, rumbling electric guitars, bridge breakdowns—have regained their currency in recent years, as pop-punk has acquired new mainstream acolytes in Machine Gun Kelly, Olivia Rodrigo, and Willow. Lovato positioned this album not just as her pop-punk album but as her homecoming—a return “to my roots,” as she wrote on Instagram. It’s true that her musical interests have long been edgier than her public persona might suggest. As early as 2008, Lovato confessed her fascination with metal to Rolling Stone; during press for Holy Fvck, she recalled crowd-surfing at a performance by the Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir as a young teenager. The music she herself made around that time, with its lightly thrashing guitars and love-it-or-leave-it spunk, was about as raucous as she could get away with in the conservative Disney ecosystem.
It’s genuinely exciting to see Lovato enter chaos mode on Holy Fvck, opting to break shit rather than publicly mend herself. Frankly, there’s a lot for her to be mad about. They excoriate the much-older actor with whom they became involved at 17 (“Numbers told you not to/But that didn’t stop you”) and tear into the rigid standards of beauty and behavior to which women and femmes are held (especially oppressive for someone, like Lovato, whose gender identity is fluid). Friends lost to addiction wander through her mind, and the pressure of being a “real model” weighs her down.
Within the anger, there’s plenty of room for humor and irreverence. “Substance” pops off, bemoaning the artifice of contemporary life with cheeky wordplay (“Am I the only one looking for substance?”) that helps save the song from its hand-wringing generalizations. It also helps that Lovato sounds so good. Their voice has always been something of a blunt instrument, undeniably mighty but imprecise. Here, that looseness is an asset—just try to imagine someone like Ariana Grande, Lovato’s more technically rigorous peer, wailing her way through a chorus about her own decaying corpse with all the messy grandeur of a Mentos-and-Diet-Coke geyser. Lovato is an approachable powerhouse, the kind you can sing along with, and Holy Fvck’s megahooks offer plenty of opportunities.
At times Lovato pushes the irreverence to the extreme. You already knew that from the cover, which has her posing in bondage on a mattress shaped like a cross. Lovato loves mixing the sacred and the profane—on the title track, which likens their body to communion, as in the literal body of Christ; on “Heaven,” a barely veiled masturbation hymn with a skipping kick drum and a celestial choir; and definitely on “City of Angels,” a ribald “christening” of Los Angeles that climaxes with an outrageous pun on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain. It’s not just laughs: Lovato was of the generation of faith-oriented Disney stars who wore promise rings, and has pointed to the role of Christian purity culture in her reluctance to speak up about a sexual assault she survived as a teenager. The middle finger she extends here is warranted, but even with those biographical footnotes in mind, when she’s called herself a sinner, a heathen, a serpent, a sexorcist, and “ungodly but heaven sent” all by the album’s midpoint, you start to wish for just a little more subtlety.
But somewhere between the Holy and the Fvck of it all is something sweeter. In the extended metaphor of “Wasted,” Lovato tries to bottle the intoxicating feeling of infatuation with a new crush. The love-as-drug trope is certainly loaded for them, but choosing to couch love in terms of their destructive former vices scans as a gesture of self-acceptance—a recognition that who we once were is just context for who we’ve become. “Smitten and hopelessly lost in this feeling,” Lovato arrives at the closer with her demeanor softened, and her palette, too. “4 Ever 4 Me,” more Goo Goo Dolls than Blink-182, wraps Lovato in acoustic chords and bittersweet strings as they sing to a new partner about wanting to meet his mother. In some ways, this feels like a segue, a hint that adult contemporary is the center to which Lovato will ultimately return. But it doesn’t undermine the album’s essential spirit. Planning for forever when every day is a fight—that’s defiance.


Torrance, California, pop-punk outfit Joyce Manor have gained a reputation as one of the most popular and interesting bands in their realm, and their third record is their most ambitious and diverse album, as weird as it is instantly enjoyable.

Never Hungover Again

Pop-punk has certain stylistic rules about song structure and topicality that detractors often refer to as cliches, and it’s much easier to break these rules than to do something notable within them. The latter explains how Joyce Manor have grown to be one of the most popular and interesting bands in their realm: Yes, they’re from Torrance, California, and write 90-second, hook-filled songs called “Orange Julius” and “Leather Jacket.” They also take prog-like liberties with format and assume their subject matter is as fascinating as science fiction. They take pride in their given aesthetic, and the quartet’s third LP, Never Hungover Again, is a pop-punk cliché itself: the one where an ascendant, dearly beloved band signs to a big label, hires a hotshot producer and, oh shit, are those keyboards? The successes of Never Hungover Again are numerous, and the foremost is how Joyce Manor’s most ambitious and diverse album is just like their other ones—10 songs, 19 minutes, every second as weird as it is instantly enjoyable.
Assuming you’re approaching this record as a self-identifying “indie-rock” fan, there isn’t a single “legitimate” precedent that will walk you through this—maybe “west coast Lifetime” comes close, considering Barry Johnson’s perpetual slur, self-deprecation, and goofy earnestness. Joyce Manor are a stylistically comprehensive band and this record is a consolidation of their talents, accomplishing the difficult task of welding the straightforward charms of their increasingly canonical self-titled debut and the ambition of Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, a record praised at the time for its relatively experimental leanings and in retrospect for having the fortune of being produced by “the Sunbather guy” (even though numerous Deafheaven songs are longer than the complete running time of Of All Things).
Of All Things’ “Bride of Usher” was typical of that record’s dilettantism, Joyce Manor playing a Smiths song by cribbing Johnny Marr’s leads and their rhythm section’s bounce; it felt as much of a cover as their actual take on the Buggles. The remarkable “Falling in Love Again” reverses and imagines if the Smiths wrote a Joyce Manor song—Tony Hoffer (Beck, M83, Air) adds a glycerine sheen to the slashing guitar chords and maxes Johnson’s vocals to a state of high school high drama; you can believe the title is being played straight or you can hear lines of Moz-like ambivalence (“Hope you don’t think that I care/’Cause I do I just don’t know if I should feel this bad about you”) as being par for Joyce Manor: Falling in love again is just the first step to the preferred resting state of falling out.
This is how Joyce Manor operates: In the past, beach communities, toothaches and model train sets were merely symbols and mirrors for Johnson’s infinite sadness.  So while “End of the Summer,” “Heated Swimming Pool,” and “Heart Tattoo” are indicative of Joyce Manor’s suburban purview and are about the exact things they promise, Johnson’s subtle and powerful insight allows him to expose new angles and multitudes in the mundane. “The Jerk” is, yes, about being a jerk and also watching the titular movie and learning “that stuff don’t work." In both “Christmas Card” and “Heart Tattoo,” love can only be legitimized by pain—“I want it to hurt really bad/That’s how I’ll know it’s real.” Johnson’s lyrics are conversational, keg-side and half-pipe ruminations taking on a heft and layered meaning that likely escapes everyone involved until they’ve had a chance to mull them over alone: “Never really had a drug phase/So you think you’re fucking miserable now?,” “I always knew you'd join the army,” “I wish you would’ve died in high school/So you could be somebody’s idol.”
But if you want to hear Never Hungover Again as a summer record, Joyce Manor mask their depressive streak with chiming, fake 12-string riffs, mid-tempo jangle, group harmonies, and basically everything that can be crammed into pop-punk without turning it into plain ol’ “indie-rock.” Most bands working on a two-minute time limit tend to strip things down to the most rudimentary aspects and Joyce Manor can do that—the strict tense verse/explosive chorus template of “Victoria” is proof enough, though it’s an outlier that reflects how unconventional the band’s songwriting is throughout. The velocity of Never Hungover Again has an illusory effect where you can hear these songs as having been isolated from lengthier ones—the strange riff that bisects “Schley” sounds like it was excised from a long-winded solo, “Catalina Fight Song” is a 64-second perpetual crescendo that’s missing the expected, vestigial four-minute run-up, and “Falling in Love Again” churns tempestuously through near shoegaze synth ambience without ever hitting a predictable peak.
Upon first listen, the brevity of Never Hungover Again can sound less effective than, say, trying to hammer to home a chorus for the third time. But once you stop trying to label what should be a hook and focus on what is, the ingenuity of each song’s design and the ear-turning nature of every maneuver speaks to Never Hungover Again’s inexhaustible quality, the kind of album you can play three times in a row without any part wearing out its welcome.
Yet, the broad appeal of this record somehow makes it a more precarious sell than something that can be easily pegged; pop-punk literalists may reflexively hear the slick production as a betrayal and compliments such as “smart” or “crafty” as backhanded against its visceral, pleasure-seeking genre, similar to “conscious rap” or “intelligent dance music”. Meanwhile, it may be seen by indie fans as less substantial than Perfect Pussy, United Nations, White Lung, Cloud Nothings, and the Hotelier, who have revitalized their modes of punk in 2014 with heavy albums that nobody would call “fun.” Joyce Manor make punk music for the other 99% of waking life when you’re not functioning at peak intensity—for getting drunk, being bored, falling in love, feeling like shit, and wondering if your best days are behind you before heading out to a pool party you’re pretty stoked about. The optimal balance of maturity and immaturity is right there in the title, so throw on Never Hungover Again when you’re still looking to get into dumb shit, but you just want to be smarter about it.


The 1975 emerged in 2011 as the third-wave emo band the Slowdown, then quickly disappeared. A couple years later, the rebooted Manchester group’s spit-polished self-titled full-length aims for the gleaming synth rock of Phoenix and M83.

The 1975

The saga of the 1975 is odd and protracted: Once upon a time, in 2011, there was a perfect Jimmy Eat World mall-emo anthem called “Sex” by a Manchester band called the Slowdown. The black-and-white video showed four telegenic people with perfect haircuts performing near a carefully placed Johnny Cash poster, clearly a month or two away from fulfilling their destiny on the cover of several American magazines.
Except that never happened, and, in fact, it seemed that someone had made a number of mistakes—the band may have actually once been called Drive Like I Do, or maybe the Big Sleep, and in fact already might not be called the Slowdown anymore. Anyway, they disappeared immediately—their SoundCloud, their Bandcamp, and even that video came down unceremoniously, all before they had even begun to assume their rightful one-hit wonder status.
A couple years later, we find ourselves facing a complete reboot. Hi, we’re the 1975, and this is our brand-new song “Sex,” this same group of people are now telling us. To which we can only shrug, and say: OK, guys. Emerging from this long, bewildering gestation, they now have the overcompensating brio of a band that is making its first impression for the second time—their band name, album name, and first song are all “The 1975.” “Sex” has even been completely re-recorded and given a new, fumbling-teenagers-in-lust video treatment.
They’ve also retooled their sound. In this incarnation, they have stepped away from third-wave emo and aim for the gleaming, modular synth rock of Wolfgang-era Phoenix and M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which ironically makes them less distinctive now than it would have in 2010. Produced by Mike Crossey, who has worked with Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club, their spit-polished full-length is a throwback to the sort of CD-era pop rock album everyone remembers buying at least once: the one with the re-recorded single surrounded mostly by less-developed, vaguely similar stuff.
There are still a handful of serviceable pop-rock singles: “The City,” built on a big, blocky drum loop, has a bit of the forlorn romanticism of Bloc Party circa “I Still Remember.” “Heart Out” opens with a ringing synth figure, punctuated with “hey!”s, that feels like a built-to-scale replica of M83’s “Midnight City.” Matthew Healy’s pinched vocals hit that ice-cream-headache sweet spot between pretty-boy quaver and adenoidal yelp, and the version of “cool” he seems to be gesturing towards feels endearingly carbon-dated and translated from a few different languages into English. There is a lot of overt leering in their lyrics, but no sex or grease or danger anywhere in the music, even on “Sex,” which is here and is still their best song by miles.
The song, along with precious few others on The 1975, boasts a secret weapon sorely missing elsewhere: a middle eight. For such a pop-oriented band, the 1975’s songwriting has turned out remarkably stiff, cloistered, and unimaginative. The production, which is glistening and brilliant, usually points to what the band might have accomplished with more sophisticated chops: The skipping synths and handclaps that open “M.O.N.E.Y.,” or the itchy guitar figure fidgeting near a blocky drum beat in “Talk!,” work up a gently caffeinated fizz. But the songs zip along the tight lines established by their opening seconds and refuse to budge, not a bridge in sight for miles. The fizz fades quickly, and the effect, over the course of the album, is a little like a promising new band introducing and re-re-introducing itself to you. There is some value in figuring out what to say next.


The songs on J Dilla's signature production opus, released the week of his death, are miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites from the nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, complete with bonus material.

Donuts (45 Box Set)

If the six years since Donuts was released has taught us anything, it's that a great album can be a sort of open-ended puzzle that can be solved from multiple angles. It's become James Yancey's signature production opus, even though the path that led him to it was laid down by a lifetime of collaboration, workshopping, and constant production in the service of other people's voices. It's the last work he created in his lifetime, released the week of his death, and yet it still feels like his music hasn't run out of time yet, whether that's down to periodic dives back into his vaults, or via the artists that've picked up inspiration and run with it to new places. It's a widely praised favorite for so many people, and yet there's something about Donuts that feels like such an intensely personal statement. Even attempting to engage with it objectively, setting aside the direct experience of the man who made it, doesn't entirely break through its mystique.
But as music, the role Donuts occupies is something more than the weight of its rep or impact-- or even the circumstances in which it was created, as hard as it is to separate the idea of the album's sound from the motivation of a prolific creator knowingly constructing his final work. As an album, it just gets deeper the longer you live with it, front-to-back listens revealing emotions and moods that get pulled in every direction: mournful nostalgia, absurd comedy, raucous joy, sinister intensity. There's all kinds of neat little tics and idiosyncrasies, pushing Dilla's early 00s beat-tape experiments and exchanges into compositions that tinker with Thelonious Monk's off-kilter timing and Lee Perry's warped fidelity. The songs on Donuts are like miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites out of all those nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. There's little else in Dilla's catalog quite like it; at points, it sounds like he was busy quickly unlearning everything he'd taught himself just so he could have the experience of relearning it all again one last time.
While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, a format that initially comes across like a boutique novelty at the expense of practicality. If anybody owns a scuffed-up old jukebox and wants to stock it with records that recreate the feeling of recalling jumbled-up memories and mulling over them for a while, then sure, this would work great. And it's hard not to appreciate the symbolism of issuing this album on 7" records, considering that the hospital bedside setup Yancey used to create a significant portion of Donuts consisted of a SP-303 hooked up to a portable 45 turntable. But is there a reason to chop one of the last 10 years' purest can't-listen-to-just-one-track experiences into pieces, especially when the target audience for this reissue likely already has a version they don't have to keep flipping over?
Well, think of it this way: What's your favorite song on Donuts? Breaking an album like this into its component tracks puts a new viewpoint on a record that's always been easy to see as a whole, and the limitations of three minutes or so per side gives individual moments more weight on their own. The rhythms of the isolated tracks can feel truncated and abrupt in this new context-- without anything to segue into, side-enders like "Workinonit" and "One Eleven" flip off like a light switch-- but it still fits the suddenness and in medias res editing of the album's handmade, conversational feel. And it only serves to elucidate how much Dilla could do in such a limited amount of space. He could fit a lot of off-beat meter-shifting, loop-upending false starts and jump cuts, subtle slow-build dynamics, and double-back surprises into the little 50-to-80-second vignettes. That's plenty of time to set up expectations, only to twist them around a thousand degrees.
There's also some clever sequencing to the sides that lets new thematic possibilities appear. Of course "Airworks" and "Lightworks" share a side to themselves, and as consecutive tracks they felt like weird companion pieces in the middle of the original album. On record, that odd pairing-- a hiccupy series of tics drawn from L.V. Johnson's classic Chicago soul, transitioning into a cheerfully odd rework of Raymond Scott's late 50s musique concrete corporate jingles-- forces those two cuts into closer quarters and highlights their shared tendency to loop vocal phrases and backbeats into knots you can't untie. Same goes for "Two Can Win" and "Don't Cry", which consecutively showcase Yancey's knack for building classic hip-hop beats out of solitary 70s R&B nuggets. The choppy yet lush elegance of "Dilla Says Go"/"Walkinonit" and the heartbroken please-stay pleas of "Hi."/"Bye." stand out in isolation, too.
But even without that benefit of new juxtapositions, it's still eye-opening to take each little set of songs as it comes and not sweat getting to the next one, pinpointing the inimitable technique and sample-sourcing scope of Donuts through certain distinct moments. Just pull out "Geek Down" and note how Dilla took one of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, ESG's "UFO", and found something surprising and obscure to lay it over: a 2002 7" retro-funk b-side called "Charlie's Theme" released in limited numbers by an incognito Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley from Portishead. That's in keeping with the other moments where he's clearly working with some well-used building block that every sample-based producer should know their way around-- Mountain's "Long Red" ("Stepson of the Clapper"); Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" ("Workinonit" and "The Twister"); the Beastie Boys' "The New Style" ("The New")-- and still finds a way to fit that piece into something uniquely his by drawing from an encyclopedic catalog of under-utilized funk and soul deep cuts. Even the ubiquitous siren he lifted from Mantronix feels like Dilla's sole property now-- maybe because Kurtis never thought to lay it over a mobius-strip revamp of Kool and the Gang album track "Fruitman" ("The Diff'rence") or a tense, staggered piano loop cut from Martha Reeves' mid 70s post-Motown solo debut ("Thunder").
If you need any extra incentive, the box set packs in some bonus material. There's a medley of tracks that share sources with Donuts instrumentals "Anti-American Graffiti" and "Geek Down", which were originally slated for MF DOOM and Ghostface showcase "Sniper Elite & Murder Goons". The track shows both MCs still in post-Madvillainy/Pretty Toney form, DOOM twisting internal rhymes at a ridiculous clip, Ghost still verbally sprinting like he's coming off "Run". And "Signs", originally a Fan Club release, tacks on a stand-alone postscript that hints at some of Donuts' brilliance, but mostly just provides a pretty straightforward (if appealing) instrumental break based off a needly organ riff and that old Syl Johnson "Different Strokes" grunt. The rarities are enticing, the packaging is immaculate, and the format is intriguing. But above all else, this reissue provides a good excuse to revisit an old favorite in a new light, and in the end it's still a classic no matter how you hear it-- on 45, CD, MP3, or just running through your head.


Nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, Lil Wayne produces Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms.

Tha Carter III

"Where the fuck is my guitar?"
Lil Wayne is a terrible guitarist. Just incredibly bad. The fact was evident at this year's Summer Jam, when he spent two and a half interminable minutes noodling and crooning all by his lonesome while a stadium full of New York's most devout hip-hop fans looked on bewildered. "Is he really playing the guitar right now?" giggled a teenage girl. "That's not a chord or anything!" Still, she recorded Wayne in all his tatted-up Tracy Chapman glory for YouTube posterity just the same. While everyone else on the day's bill-- from Alicia Keys to Kanye West-- filled their shortened, festival-style sets with hits and finely-tailored theatrics, the audience's most anticipated act took the opportunity get his Guitar for Dummies on; Lil Wayne is, as he likes to say, "different." Always has been.
Earmarked as a gifted elementary school student in New Orleans, he became the token prodigy of his hometown's Cash Money clique at the age of 16, spitting pipsqueak gangsterisms over skittering Mannie Fresh beats. And, opposed to the typical rap flame-out trajectory, Wayne got better-- and stranger-- with each album. Now, nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, we get Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. Instead of hiding his bootleg-bred quirks in anticipation of the big-budget spotlight, he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package that's as weird as it wants to be; he eventually finds his guitar but keeps the strumming in check.
"I pay my dues, you keep the difference."
As the major music industry continues to wheeze and splinter, Lil Wayne's spitball marketing plan for C3 is an unprecedented masterstroke. Over the past couple of years, he's given away more worthwhile free music online than most artists of his stature ever release officially. Using the mixtape market as a free-for-all training ground, Wayne expanded his persona, voice, and talent while presumptively killing off thousands of wannabe MCs hoping to charge five bucks for some garbage CD-R. For that alone, he deserves thanks. Wayne set the definition for a Web 2.0 MC-- his output pours through computer speakers at broadband speeds. And while stellar tapes like Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3 offered-up plenty of hidden darts for sun-deprived message board nerds, his Just Say Yes policy toward any and all guest invitations (Enrique Iglesias? Why not!) provided maximum visibility and chiseled his radio-friendly chops. Piggybacking on hits by Chris Brown and Lloyd undoubtedly did wonders for his giggling teenage girl fan base, but a lesser-known assist appears to have had an even bigger effect on the new record.
"Gotta work everyday/ Gotta not be cliché/ Gotta stand out like Andre 3K."
One of the few satisfying tracks on OutKast's bungled Idlewild album was a woozy bitchfest called "Hollywood Divorce" featuring Lil Wayne. In hindsight, the invite feels like an act of sanctification. The song's a lesson in winning idiosyncrasies-- Andre, Big Boi, and Wayne are all salty, but they make sure to side-step pessimism (Big Boi deems rumor mongers "M&M's with no nuts"). Traces of the South's most genre-bursting, P-Funk-worshipping ATLiens can be heard all over C3, from Wayne's staccato phrasing on "Mr. Carter" to the extraterrestrial fetishism of "Phone Home" to the eclectic unpredictability of it all. The musical open-mindedness also lifts C3 above regional niches-- the #1 hit "Lollipop" sounds more like it was born on Jupiter than anywhere on earth. While Wayne isn't quite ready to produce something like "Hey Ya!", don't be shocked if you see him held up by a pair of leprechaun suspenders in the not-so-distant future.
"I've done it before, please don't make me do it no more."
C3 is Wayne's most absurd album to date but it's also his most personal. "Shoot Me Down", with its "Lose Yourself"-style guitar chug and ominous hook, has the rapper looking all the way back to age 12, when he accidentally shot himself with a .44 Magnum while toying with the gun in a mirror. "Two more inches I'd have been in that casket/ According to the doctor I could've died in traffic," he rhymes on "3 Peat", possibly referring to the day in 2001 when a disgruntled groupie shot at his tour bus, planting a bullet in his chest. Such details add even more gravitas to his grizzled, elastic timbre, which suggests an impossibly hoarse (and high) David Ruffin at times. "All I ask is don't take our love for granted," sings a perfectly sympathetic Babyface alongside Wayne on the lush ballad "Comfortable", the line coming off more like a saucer-eyed plea than a threat. And the LP's best track doubles as its most crazed and pained.
"Playing With Fire" is a full-on faux-metal stunner that hearkens back to Bad Boy's cinematic peak. On it, Wayne reaches Ghostface levels of paranoid distress: "I'm doin' the same shit Martin Luther King did/ Checkin' in the same hotel, in the same suite, bitch/ Same balcony like assassinate me, bitch!" His claims of MLK grandeur are far-fetched, but his impassioned delivery makes them seem more believable than one would think possible. Apparently, those Biggie and Pac references are getting to his codeine-addled brain-- after all, at 25, Wayne is now older than both legends were when they were gunned down. The implicit danger of carrying on such a legacy only adds to the rapper's dramatic reading, and his anguish burns as hot as his punchlines.
"I think everybody gonna like this one...I got one!"
Considering his running-faucet leak rate, there are bound to be fanboy quibbles about the intricacies of C3's tracklist (e.g., the buoyant web gem "La La La" should replace "La La" and its braindead Busta Rhymes verse, and what about the hazy "I Feel Like Dying" or the promising speed-soul track "3 a.m."?). But considering there are probably several hard drives stuffed with syrupy odes featuring Wayne's dubious auto-tuned howl, the final tally is exquisitely balanced and considered. After dozens of listens, the record's overflowing minutiae-- from Fabulous and Juelz Santana's overachieving cameos to Wayne's hilariously apropos kinship with "Macho Man" Randy Savage-- still feels limitless. Just as the record's cover playfully skews the Ready to Die/Illmatic baby-picture formula with Photoshopped tattoos, Wayne updates what it means to be the best rapper alive here. Gangster dandy. Fender-slinging sex god. Intergalactic prankster. It's all in him.


Vince Staples' first full-length for Def Jam is brilliant. The Long Beach rapper expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet. His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away.

Summertime '06

Summertime '06 crams 20 songs inside an hour and when it ends Vince Staples is somehow still mid-sentence. The heavy-lidded, preternaturally calm Long Beach rapper has always seemed to have a remarkable amount on his mind, with more to say than he has room for: The last line on "Taxi", the final track of his first full mixtape, 2011’s Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, ended in a similar fashion, with a freezing bucket of water—"Tried praying for forgiveness, but God told me to shut up"—before the music simply stopped.
In those days, Staples seemed studiously laconic, like his friend Earl Sweatshirt, whom he is still often mentioned alongside. What’s been remarkable to watch is the way Staples has leaned forward—bigger songs, bigger statements, greater urgency–as Earl bled into the cracks in the walls of his mind. Earl doesn’t know or care if you are in the room, which is part of his appeal; Vince Staples’ eyes are boring right into you.
Staples has become an increasingly powerful communicator, and on Summertime '06, his lines are sharp enough that every word digs into meat: "I hate when you lie; I hate the truth, too." ("Jump Off the Roof"), "In the Planned Parenthood playing God with your mom's check/ You ain’t even been to prom yet" ("Surf"). Like Chance the Rapper drained of hope, Staples expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet: "No matter what we grow into, we never gon' escape our past," he states simply on "Like It Is". His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away.
The album is split into two sides, making it technically a double album. But double albums are usually unwieldy, and Summertime '06 is breathtakingly focused, a marathon that feels like a sprint. The production bangs and clanks throughout with a septic, rusted, retooled-buggy persistence, which Staples matches. On "Lift Me Up", he chants the song’s title over and over again, but his voice is thin and tired, and the music heavy and slow. It’s the sound of someone working for uplift who knows in their bones just how much misery lays along the road.
Summertime '06 was overseen by Dion "No I.D." Wilson, one-time mentor to Kanye and the force behind all of Def Jam’s best projects for years now. No I.D. seems to grasp the essence of every track he works on; music that has borne his attention almost always emerges with its worldview clarified. On Summertime '06, he turns an album produced largely by himself, DJ Dahi, and Clams Casino into one tense, seething organism, making it difficult to isolate which songs these wildly different musicians worked on. The sound is cold and brittle, full of little blurts of percussion that resemble nervous fidgets. The basslines are often played by a groaning distorted electric guitar, and songs like "Dopeman" have the crackling alkaline energy of a Neptunes production. There are forlorn melodies, played on keys, that sometimes sneak in behind songs like "3230" or "Might Be Wrong", and they provide the undercurrent of what all this hard-nosed realism might cost you.
By now, it’s clear that Summertime is not "fun," and at no point do you suspect you’ve been invited to a party. But the sound submerges you in the itch of Staples' mind. He is a devotee of realism, in its simplest definition. Keeping it real, for him, means clearly documenting everything he sees, removed from the clouds of hope or pain or pity. He marvels at the loneliness of his job as a rapper, translating his life to those who don’t live it: "All these white folks chanting when I ask them ‘Where my niggas at?’/ Going crazy, got me going crazy, I can’t get with that/ Wonder if they know I know they won’t go where we kick it at?" he raps on "Lift Me Up".
The voices you hear on the album that don’t belong to Staples—the voicemail on "Might Be Wrong", hooks whispered by art-rapper Kilo Kish—feel like echoes or ghosts. He raps often about crimes he’s committed, but the songs don't have the cinema of street rap. His attention to detail purposefully drains the adrenaline out of the scenario and leaves a quotidian focus on the smallest facts of the situation—"Four deep, five seats, three guns," he observes on "Get Paid", and this is almost all you get. "The sheets and crosses turned to suits and ties/ In Black America, can you survive?… No hopes and dreams, just leave us be, we leaning on the Bible," he laments on "C.N.B.", an expression not so much of defiance as a simple plea for peace. Sometimes, nothing feels as real as simple weariness, or wariness.
There is one true moment of tenderness on the album. "Summertime" has some oddly voiced guitar chords, which Clams Casino surrounds with his trademark soothing hum of synths, like a buzzing air conditioner behind yellowed drapes. Staples half-sings in an exhausted monotone. "Look at the sun, all we need to see to know our freedom," he offers. "My teachers told us we were slaves/ My momma told me we was kings/ I don’t know who to listen to/ I guess we somewhere in between/ My feelings told me love is real/ But feelings here can get you killed." It’s a love song, or the closest thing to that Vince Staples allows himself to make—an allowance that love might exist. There’s nothing in the song’s deadpan knock, its arrangement, or in Staples' voice, that gives away the warmth. It is just there, like the sun the song’s characters stare at to know their freedom.


If the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them, the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. The band's never felt like a purely retro exercise, but Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date.

Brill Bruisers

The evolution of New Pornographers hasn’t been measured by changes in their core sound so much as in energy level, with a discography that can essentially be plotted alongside a DJ console’s BPM lever. And since their 2005 masterwork Twin Cinema—an album that perfectly balanced their formative power-pop freneticism with loftier, widescreened ambitions—that lever has been gradually sliding down, with Challengers from 2007 and Together from 2010 emphasizing more patiently paced set pieces that tiptoed the fine line between gracefully decompressing and killing the buzz altogether. But even if such gambles cost them a few ADD-addled admirers along the way, you get the sense the New Pornographers would soldier on at their own leisurely clip even if no one was listening. Because, for the principals involved, the New Pornographers are less a band than a holiday resort, “a vacation from rock'n'roll music, inside rock'n'roll music,” as resident siren Neko Case once put it. And boy, do they ever need it now.
Since the release of Together, the band’s principal songwriters have experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows: Dan Bejar produced his most immaculate, universally acclaimed Destroyer album to date with Kaputt; conversely, bandleader A.C. Newman and Case each released sobering, uncharacteristically introspective solo records written in the aftermath of deaths in their respective families. So if the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them (with each vocalist checking in to collect their three-song rations), the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. And that album title is brilliantly apropos for both the song-factory connotations and intimations of violence: here, the New Pornographers resemble not so much a supergroup as a gang, wielding hooks like shivs, guitar riffs like machine guns, and synths like laser beams. The opening title track isn’t just a blown-out bubblegum pop song made from a box full of Bazooka Joes—it’s a swarming, instantly thrusting you into a dizzying flurry of “bo-ba-ba-bo” harmonies coming at you from all sides. The steady beat of latter-day New Pornographers may remain, but it’s delivered with the force of a body check.
While greatly indebted to pop movements of the past—from ’60s psychedelia to ’70s glam to ’80s new wave—the New Pornographers have never felt like a purely retro exercise, their best songs too jacked-up and exuberant to lapse into studious classicism. But Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date, and a great deal of credit for that lies with the person who, historically, has been the one least likely to be mentioned in a New Pornographers review— Blaine Thurier—and fellow keyboardist Kathryn Calder. In contrast to Together’s cello-dramatic sound, Brill Bruisers foregrounds their playing, not to opportunistically recast the band as au courant synth-pop, but to restore the forward momentum that was in scarcer supply on recent records, from the starbursts that propel Case’s daydreamy turn on “Champions of Red Wine” to the zippy oscillations that power Bejar’s triumphant “War on the East Coast” to the meaty tones that lend the authoritative march of “Backstairs” (the band’s most imposing rocker to date) a little extra spring in its goosestep.
Thurier and Calder's elevated roles speak to the more integrated teamwork in effect on Brill Bruisers; while tracklists on past records could be easily segregated by singer, there’s a greater degree of vocal trade-offs and harmonic interplay that heightens the communal, celebratory sense of occasion. And with the Fleetwood Mac attack of “Fantasy Fools”, the delirious “Dancehall Domine”, and Tommy-sized closer “You Tell Me Where”, the New Pornographers deliver the sort of pure pop head rush they haven’t unleashed in years. (Bejar is an especially feisty mood, hurtling himself into his trio of heart-racing contributions like a drunk who’s just found out the wedding he’s at has an open bar—all the while, in true contrarian fashion, showing up to the New Pornographers’ most modernist album yet with a batch of songs that require harmonica solos.) As ever, the exact meaning of the songs are evasive, but their ascendant arcs readily cast them as underdog anthems for whatever great challenge you face.
Within such a maximalist context (not to mention a bulky 13-song tracklist), acoustic-tempered, middle-geared songs like "Marching Orders" and "Wide Eyes" can't help but pale next to the aforementioned showstoppers. But Brill Bruisers' most revelatory, parameter-expanding songs are actually the most stripped-down: Calder’s quick-hit “Another Drug Deal of the Heart” serves the same reprieving function here that Tobin Sprout’s minute-long melodic morsels did on Guided by Voices’ classic mid-’90s records, while Newman’s “Hi-Rise”—boasting a circular harmony assembled from clipped vocal tics—imagines what the posthumous, animatronic line-up of his band will sound like at a 22nd-century intergalactic tiki-bar residency. As legend has it, when recording the New Pornographers’ 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, Newman’s primary instruction to Case was to “sing like a robot”; with the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.