Restraint prevails on the debut solo record from Tortoise’s Jeff Parker—a collection of quiet, atmospheric mood studies that seems to hang in mid-air.

Slight Freedom

What does the concept “slight freedom” mean when you’re a musician like Jeff Parker? Is the qualifier tongue-in-cheek? It’s not like he must hear the word “no” very much. Since the 1990s, as a linchpin of Chicago’s music scene, Parker has developed his singular voice across a variety of contexts. He’s a core member of Tortoise, where his playing often feels like the glue that holds the band together; as a co-founder of the Tortoise spin-off Isotope 217, he tackles looser, spongier strains of jazz-funk. Then there are his sideman gigs—for Toumani Diabaté, Matana Roberts, Meshell Ndegeocello, among many others—and his activities in a number of more traditional jazz ensembles, including his long-running trio with bassist Chris Lopes and drummer Chad Taylor.
Even as a frontman, though, Parker is a stealthy player, not a limelight-hugger; he’s known for his restraint and his carefully controlled tone. His uncluttered playing seems to hew to the tenets of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: “Discard anything that doesn’t spark joy.”
This past year has seen Parker moving outward, in multiple directions—filigreeing the edges of Tortoise’s sly, energetic comeback, The Catastrophist; exploring tangled textures and timbres alongside cornetist Rob Mazurek on the album Some Jellyfish Live Forever; and rolling up a decade’s worth of beat sketches on The New Breed, a laid-back set of soul-jazz experiments colored by his recent move to Los Angeles.
With Slight Freedom, he tries something new yet again. Unlike The New Breed, where a handful of collaborators helped execute his ideas, Slight Freedom, his first totally solo album, is all Parker. He recorded everything live in the studio with no overdubs, using a Boomerang Phrase Sampler to layer loops and drones in real time. But where some users of looping pedals are prone to building up towering stacks of tone, Parker’s restraint still prevails. He constructs the title track like a spider spinning its web: Using a dubby, percussive pattern as the main support, he lays down fine, almost invisible fibers—seemingly wispy yet deceptively sturdy—that are more structural than ornamental. There are no wasted motions. Yet the whole, which seems to hang in mid-air, glistening, remains deeply expressive, despite its extreme economy.
“Slight Freedom” sets the tone for the whole album. All four songs, including a drowsy instrumental cover of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” and a loosely woven instrumental version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” are quiet, atmospheric mood studies that tend to conceal more than they reveal. Sometimes it seems as if Parker is intent upon hiding behind his own shadow: In “Super Rich Kids,” his muted, almost bossa nova-like plucks are nearly obscured by sounds pouring in through an open window: braking buses, car horns, the occasional burst of police siren, terse and menacing. A similar kind of veiling happens on “Lush Life,” in which a dull electrical hum stretches from beginning to end, masking the contours of Parker’s tremolo-soaked guitar with faint dissonance. Parker’s take on the standard is bittersweet, almost resigned; from time to time, the melody reluctantly pokes its head out from beneath the chords, but mostly the song dwells in an all-consuming fog—a perfect evocation of Strayhorn’s hungover and heartbroken narrator, slumped against the bar in some seedy dive.
“Mainz,” on the other hand, gives Parker his chance to shine—at least, within the spare framework he has set up for himself. It’s hardly acrobatic, but the song’s unusual time signature, which switchbacks between 13/8 and 12/8, is as tricky as it is lithe. In his trio’s 2012 recording of the Chad Taylor composition, the band closes out the song by locking into a slow, driving groove, but here he takes a considerably different tack: The song’s final five minutes are just pure, shimmering held tones and softly droning feedback.
It turns out that some of the album’s most striking moments are those, like this one, where the least is happening. In the opening “Slight Freedom,” the principal theme is eventually swallowed up into a luminous bath of tone, and for six more minutes he proceeds to gently stir it, eking quiet mini-melodies out of the swirl. It’s not jazz, it’s not ambient, it’s not noise; it’s something more idiosyncratic and more personal, something only Parker could have come up with. Perhaps this is what “slight freedom” is supposed to mean: Not an anarchic exploding of rules, not the total liberation proposed by free jazz, but a steadier, stealthier path—dissolving boundaries, softening constraints, and wearing away at the edges of things until the ideas run as freely as water.


On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash. 13 years later on Payola, they find their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. It is by far Conor Oberst's most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record.

Payola

It's been 13 years since Desaparecidos' previous album and in the time since, Conor Oberst's political conscience has seemed to age in reverse. Payola simplifies colossal, complex systemic issues into an "us vs. them" cage match and the Royal We are up against mostly strawmen and supervillains. This would be an issue if Oberst was using lines like, "Now we're taking it back for the greater good/ Goddamn Robin Hoods" and "Freedom is not free/ Neither is apathy" as a means of convincing listeners to vote in a primary election, draft a persuasive letter to their local representative, or go to law school. But Payola advocates chaining yourself to an ATM, taking a baseball bat to a limousine, and shouting every word at the nearest authority figure. And this makes Conor Oberst a writer of awesome punk rock lyrics.
It would appear that Payola is where Oberst's been storing the splenetic rage that fueled his most compelling work and has mostly gone missing since I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. But while Payola is his most urgent and angry work in a decade, it's by far his most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record. This is the result of an important shift in a classic punk rock binary. On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash—a fair accusation as Oberst was months away from dropping his Omaha Calling magnum opus Lifted and Desaparecidos would later cover "Spanish Bombs". Their songs were topical, idealistic and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Often singing in the same whole-body quaver as he did in Bright Eyes, Oberst led you to believe these songs saw themselves as the actual solution to the suffocating, transactional nature of marriage, a spiritually broken American military, and the overabundance of Starbucks in Omaha.
Payola is a discovery of their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. Up against institutions too big to fail but also too big to defend themselves, Desaparecidos provide heavy ammo for cathartic finger-pointing and maximum collateral damage.
Though Oberst is largely responsible for Desaparecidos' profile, this is not his side project—this is a full-on band and one that has grown increasingly tight and versatile despite only intermittently existing in the 21st century. Infamously recorded in a week of chaotic sessions, Read Music/Speak Spanish played out like a demolition derby, riffs, corroded shouts, and clamorous drums careening into each other. Payola is fast and furious, but carefully engineered for maximum, straight-ahead velocity. Despite the professed influence of the Cro-Mags and T.S.O.L., Desaparecidos are not a convincing hardcore act. Most of their arsenal draws from pop music, New Wave or even metal—Oberst's major-key, happily resolving melodies would've fit into his folk songs while Denver Dalley gilds the edges with tapping solos and ingratiating call-and-response riffs with keyboardist Ian McElroy.
Regardless of its throwback sonic inspiration, Payola sounds far more contemporary than Read Music. So So Glos appear on "Slacktivist" and provide context for the harmonized guitars and beer-muscled pop-punk. Meanwhile, Against Me! has always balanced their most affecting, crucial work with potent sloganeering, so Laura Jane Grace is a perfect accomplice to piss on the Wall Street frat houses during "Golden Parachutes". It's hard to say whether Desaparecidos have truly influenced similarly minded, popular punk acts who have emerged in their absence or vice versa, but it lends Payola a current vibrancy that Read Music avoided—Patrick Stickles has been saddled with Bright Eyes comparisons from the get-go, and now that he's making compact rages against the machine like "Dimed Out", he's a real-time competitor with Conor Oberst's band. Meanwhile, "Te Amo Camila Vallejo" imagines if Joe Strummer had the foresight to write a Japandroids song, a pound-the-steering wheel anthem about going to the ends of the Earth for a charismatic, beautiful woman. In this case, it just so happens to be the "World's Most Glamorous Revolutionary", a Communist leader of Chile's 2011 student uprisings and now an elected member of congress.
But as with Strummer or any political writer who tries to give voice to people outside of his own demographic, Oberst could be accused of being out of his depth (not to mention the question of whether their name brings light to a terrible situation overseas or is being utilized for its cachet). It would take a very willful misreading to accuse Desaparecidos of misappropriation—"Radicalized" split screens a potential Islamic extremist and an American mourning his fallen brother in a double wide trailer, and it's not attempting the depth of Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues"or even the bite of Desaparecidos' own "The Happiest Place on Earth". This juxtaposition is built upon by the thematically linked "10 Steps Behind", presumably inspired by a religious tradition of requiring wives to trail their husbands. The imagery in "10 Steps Behind" remains intentionally vague—is the subject from the Middle East or Middle America? Do both cultures see women as property in their own way?
As with "Radicalized", the seething anger underlying "10 Steps Behind" is better conveyed through the blistering music and Oberst knows when to get out of the way. And mostly, chucking any pretense of nuance works in Payola's favor. When discussing the policies of celebrity racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the beneficiaries of the Wall Street bailout, or a cancer patient whose life is going to be determined by paperwork, these songs seem to ask, do you really need to hear both sides?
Whether or not Payola was "worth the wait" is a moot point—not much about Read Music/Speak Spanish suggested a follow-up was ever going to happen at all, so who was waiting really? But Payola's weaker points are entirely due to its latency period: by the time "City on the Hill" had debuted, exactly half of this record had been publicly available. Every song here is effective and memorable, just some less so than others, and most of them are packed towards the end, repeating earlier ideas ("Von Maur Massacre", "Anonymous").
And a topical record that's been cobbled together over the span of five years is going to sound dated in a 24-hour news cycle. It's not just the references to Occupy or the NSA's Fairview surveillance system or flashmobs, though those tend to jut out like 2012 RT's on your timeline. There's an Auto-Tune joke buried in "Backsell", but also a warning from former big league washout Britt Daniel, whose A&R-ripping "The Agony of Laffitte" single made him and Oberst short-lived labelmates on Saddle Creek. Since the release of "Backsell" in 2012, however, Spoon has signed to a major label started by a former Warner Bros. executive.
Then again, Read Music/Speak Spanish was written and recorded shortly after 9/11 and while it captured the spirit of its time, it actually proved to be prophetic—though criticized for its maladroit lyrics at the time, it (however clumsily) pledged feminist allegiance, fretted over the overinflated housing bubble and a war with no end in sight. The outlier was "Mañana", a desperate rallying cry where Oberst hoped against hope that humanity could create a new future rather than an increasingly shittier version of the past. They played it at their first reunion show in 2010, a benefit to oppose a Fremont, Neb. renter's ordinance that blatantly targeted the influx of Latinos into the town by requiring an oath of legal citizenry. The U.S Supreme Court declined intervention and a headline detailing its current status perfectly sums up Payola's reason for existence: "furor persists."


Promising and fast-rising group brings a sense of drama and lust and elliptical, unexpected arrangements to indie rock.

Native Speaker

There are dreams, there are nightmares, and then there are those night visions that don't quite qualify as either, the unnerving images and dialogues that rattle about your head in your waking life for the rest of the day and reveal strange, forgotten details every time you pick at them. That's the kind of stuff we need to be talking about if we're going to call Braids "dream-pop" as so many others have. The quartet's bracing debut Native Speaker is almost Inception-like in its warping of reality, equally tactile and dissolute, cerebral and surreal and ultimately haunting for its refusal to answer questions the same way twice.
The Montreal group is constructed like your typical indie rock outfit-- keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, all parties contributing vocals-- but each element is employed in a way that embodies the best ideals of post-rock, where each member coaxes sound like they're trying to learn something new about their instruments at each turn. The same exploratory nature applies to structure-- Native Speaker's seven roomy compositions (ranging from four to over eight minutes) rely heavily on loops and drones, pinwheels of guitar, and clusters of bell tones. There's constant motion, each layer pushing and prodding until they prop each other into something like stasis, its minimalist bent never drawing too much attention to how it's working really hard.
The loop that drives "Lemonade" reads like an EKG, dipping and rising steadfastly as the rhythm section builds a limber, athletic pace and introduces Raphaelle Standell-Preston's intriguing and idiosyncratic vocals. She's not without precedent: tonally there's some Régine Chassage in her higher register, and her knack for knocking the listener off course with well-placed vulgarity recalls prime-era Jenny Lewis. But the loopy, playful interaction of her and the strange, gripping placidity of Native Speaker feels like something all its own. She's demure as "Lemonade" begins but gets more and more unhinged as Braids hurtle forward. Despite the bizarre imagery she sets forth, the song is ultimately an impressionistic commentary on suburban romantic prospects-- "what I've found is that we're all just sleeping around."
As Native Speaker truly starts to take shape toward its midsection, you can hear them disassembling "Lemonade" only to rebuild each aspect of it into longer forms. It's no discredit to the band that it eases into the record's biggest sounding moments, while amidst the catharsis the vocals do the heavy lifting. "Glass Deers" plays it as straight as it gets on Native Speaker: the closest they come to typical strumming and clean guitar lines, while Standell-Preston recalls fellow deconstructionist Sue Tompkins (Life Without Buildings), repeating "I'm fucked up" for as much of a percussive effect as an emotional one. Coasting on volume swells and whirring sound effects, the title track finds a point where Braids capture a woozy warmth not far removed from a more tactile take on Animal Collective circa Feels. But within what could scan like post-coital calm, the lyrics drop their often coy logic puzzles for about as straightforward of a cry for sexual need and desire as you'll hear in indie rock.
Immediately thereafter, "Lammicken" deeply upsets the mood and throws Native Speaker into a stark relief. "I can't stop it," Standell-Preston repeats as she navigates a hall of funhouse mirrors with only that line to comfort her, her vocals warping and rising. Native Speaker tails off slightly thereafter almost out of necessity, yet it reaches a fitting conclusion with the distant drones of instrumental "Little Hand". Native Speaker is by nature elliptical, never seeking out a final word even as it converses with itself, almost as if it's meant to be played as a loop, something that can begin as soon as it ends.


At the edge of crossover success, the hardcore stalwarts sputter out with an overstuffed album of weak modern-rock imitations.

Underneath

Code Orange have been on the brink of a breakthrough since they were teenagers. A dozen years ago, the Pittsburgh kids rose from the local ranks to the taste-making Deathwish imprint before making their major-label debut with 2017’s Forever. Abrasive and volatile yet accessible, Forever became a consensus critical favorite, topping year-end lists at Rolling Stone and Revolver and prompting praise from The New York Times when it was nominated for a Grammy. They were a hit away, it seemed, from crossing over into whatever’s left of mainstream rock.
But Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting. Recorded with Nick Raskulinecz, who has spent 25 years helming consistently middling efforts from the likes of Ghost and Korn, Underneath aims to justify Code Orange’s major-label existence, from its rigorously high concept about the psychological damage of our digital reality to the warmed-over rock radio moves of its would-be hits. During “You and You Alone,” Jami Morgan seethes, “It’s killing me, every line you scribble on the page/In trying to be an amalgamation of everything you see.” It’s an unintentional encapsulation of Underneath, an album that wants to be so much it’s barely anything at all.
The central idea is obvious enough: Our online lives cause dangerously wide divisions within our personalities. Code Orange call nomophobia—a neologism for the fear of being without your phone—by name and criticize the din of modern life as “crowded Technovision.” They take this theme to its violent extreme, painting technology as a parasite feeding off our energy and a tool that will drive us—“the guinea pigs of a generation”—to madness or death. They quote Ricardo López, the Björk stalker who committed suicide after mailing her a bomb, and assail the way we have become “brains in chains.” Underneath reads like the Twitter account of a paranoid friend you muted long ago, or the slapdash musings of someone who shouldn’t smoke sativa after morning coffee.
The music itself prompts the same sort of shrug and chuckle. An overzealous pastiche full of inspirations but near-devoid of new ideas, Underneath is as goofy and garish as the worst of nu metal. Code Orange sprint between touchstones and subgenres as if they were running a Tough Mudder, trying to prove their versatility and grit. “Cold Metal Core” gilds grindcore with harsh noise, like Pig Destroyer with an unnecessarily big budget, while “Last Ones Left” founders in its attempt to find solid ground between Slipknot and Wolf Eyes. The metal riffs are more aluminum than iron, the industrial beats hilariously dated, and the power electronics too weak to stand on their own. Code Orange’s longtime enthusiasm for stop-time pauses—moments in which everything goes quiet, so they can redirect a song’s momentum—was once unpredictable and exhilarating. Now, it feels like a crutch.
The radio-ready anthems here are hackneyed and awkward, like ’90s leftovers reheated with post-millennial white adolescent rage. With its sustained guitar squeals and whisper-to-roar dynamics, “Who I Am” sounds like a teenager experimenting with basic electronics while listening to the Deftones. “The Easy Way” springboards from cheesy industrial signifiers to a pandering hook that recalls Filter. “Underneath”—the closing track and first single—is the ugly crust that got stuck between Sirius XM’s Lithium and Octane. It’s so repetitive, at least, that you can turn it off after the first half and save yourself the last two minutes.
Code Orange are proud practitioners of scene beef and self-aggrandizement. They seem to thrive on bombast and controversy, even telling Kerrang that “[Underneath] … is more relevant than anything that’s coming out in rock and metal this year. Period.” Underneath may indeed set them apart from the fray and push them to larger audiences, shouting back the chorus of “Who I Am” or grunting out some approximation of “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole.” But it will be at the expense of the very recent feeling that Code Orange could reshape the vanguard of popular metal.


Five years after it helped define microhouse and kick the clicks + cuts aesthetic to the curb, Luomo is reissuing his groundshifting house LP Vocalcity on his own Huume imprint.

Vocalcity

New Year's Day, 2003. At a semi-luxury hotel a few kilometers from the coast, a sprawling complex of balconied buildings and a swimming pool nestled next to a stand of trees, a few hundred ravers in summer duds-- some in dirty Diesels, some in bikinis, and all eyes hidden behind enormous, smoke-colored shades-- pivot and sway while the last molecules of MDMA sweat their way out of their systems. On a stage facing the pool, a skinny young man with a blond mane swigs champagne from the bottle while he nudges absently at a computer mouse; his own massive eyeshield tosses off disco glints that mirror the flashes of light that go tearing up the firelines between bass and space in his music.
It's every Balearic cliché at once, except that this isn't Ibiza, it's Reñaca, Chile; and the laptop jockey isn't Sasha van Oakenweed but a skinny Finn named Luomo, née Sasu Ripatti, best known until not long before as Vladislav Delay-- a former free-jazz drummer who made the leap to Chain Reaction-styled "heroin house" before being crowned prince of clicks + cuts. The event is notable for several reasons, among them the globalization of European leisure culture; but the real significance here concerns the ongoing conversion of tight-lipped minimalism into something self-consciously sexy and sophisticated and Ecstasy-friendly. It's the preface to an ongoing evolution that is only coming to fruition in 2005, when the Sasha van Oakenweeds of the world pepper their mixes with tracks from Kompakt and Traum, and Creamfields' beachside raves feature the likes of Ellen Allien and Blackstrobe alongside Deep Dish and Carl Cox. In many ways, all this began with Luomo's 2000 debut, Vocalcity, reissued this month on Ripatti's own Huume label.
Vocalcity was unexpected, and not a little audacious: "Luomo-- The Next Episode in House-- prod. by Vladislav Delay," proclaimed a sticker on the sleeve. The album was published by Force Tracks, one of an avalanche of sublabels from Frankfurt's Force Inc., an erstwhile "proper" techno imprint that had gone all theoretical as it aged, christening sublabels after Deleuze and Guattari tomes and fashioning grand philosophies around concepts like "clicks + cuts." (Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for Clicks + Cuts 2.) "The Next Episode in House" sounded like the kind of sweeping, appropriationist, Zeitgeist-stroking statement that Force would make-- but damned if it weren't true. If anything, it sounds even truer today. It's not that Luomo advanced the cause of house music in some way that his forebears (Chez Damier, Derrick May, and Maurizio, to pick three) didn't manage to. But there was nothing else that sounded like Vocalcity at the time, and there's been precious little that sounds like it since, including Luomo's slightly disappointing, ill-fated 2003 followup The Present Lover.
Writing in The Wire back in 2001, I pegged Vocalcity as the tipping point (the clipping point?) in what I called microhouse-- a genre that seemed to take the essential template of house music and shrink its constituent parts (that shoomping beat, a cavernous sense of space, and an echo of soul music as processed through disco) down to byte-sized pieces, leaving a schematic of dotted lines swimming through oceans of dubwise absence. But listening now, it's clear that I got it exactly backwards, at least in Luomo's case. What stands out now, a half-decade later, isn't the smallness of Vocalcity's sounds but its fullness. Sure, Luomo has the requisite clicks and clanks; as "Market", the absolutely epic lead track, opens up, half the action is in the chattering of truncated hi-hats and a distant rattle that sounds like an army of mechanics spinning their ratchets. But house music has always had these kind of details; for comparison, just listen to E-Dancer (Kevin Saunderson)'s 1997 cut "World of Deep", the track I've come to believe most closely heralds what Luomo would later attempt. Beneath those enormous, cascading pads, the hi-hats and bells have been whittled down to needlepoint proportions. Luomo emphasized his details by framing them in white space, but what you hear now, after the demise of clicks + cuts, aren't the pinpricks but the enormous, inflated sounds of everything else-- bass, pads, and of course those vocals.
True to its name, Vocalcity put breathy, yearning male and female vocals at the center of its pneumatic mix. Tracks like "Market", "Class", "Synkro", and "Tessio"-- a full two-thirds of the six-track, triple LP-- expand like inner tubes as those voices come rushing in. Indeed, my favorite element of the album has always been the way that "Market" begins by teasing in the vocalist's breaths and sighs, one tiny gasp at a time, along with fragments of sung melody buried deep, deep, deep in the mix. Only at 4:48, nearly halfway through the 12-minute track, does she finally introduce the full vocal hook. And when the sad reprimand drops-- "There's nothing in the world that you can do," repeated a full five times, then a quick breath, and finally the explosive charge buried in the slug, "For me"-- Well, we could talk about formalism all day, but people, that right there is one of the most perfect moments in the world of pop music, albeit a full minute and 18 seconds after most pop songs have punched out the clock and gone home to sleep.
That's the triumph of Vocalcity. Not reduction, but expansion. Vladislav Delay has always aimed for the long view. (If you think Luomo's tracks are long-- "She-Center", at 10 minutes, is the shortest thing on Vocalcity, and the rest average around 12 minutes apiece-- check out Vladislav Delay's 2000 album Entain, where the cuts run from 15 to 22 minutes long. 2001's Anima went even further, comprising a single, hourlong track that swirls in place like a dead tide.) If there's anything "micro" in Vocalcity, it's the way tiny little holes open up within the frizzing chords, as though you could see the pixels framing each fraying waveform. But that's all academic. Five years later, "minimal" techno has fattened itself up again. Most of today's rave hits don't sound anything like Luomo, but I don't think anything today would sound the way it does if Luomo hadn't seduced the tinkerers away from their mouse pads and back to the land of goosebumps and sex. What you hear most in Luomo today are the stomach-punching bass lines, the pistoning chords inherited straight from Chicago's finest, and those maddeningly ambiguous vocals, always hovering just out of reach. Perhaps the long exception is the male refrain in "Synkro", which could stand as the tautological epigraph to the album's simple brilliance: "Because you move/ The way you move."


Future's current run of dark and compelling music is reminiscent of Lil Wayne at his druggy peak. Purple Reign, his latest mixtape, is a slightly minor release, but the best songs on it still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

Purple Reign

Unhealthy, sick, desperate, hopeless: You’ve done something either very wrong or very right if these are the words hardcore fans use to discuss your music. But this is the rubric Future listeners now consult when he drops a mixtape: Just how lost and broken does Nayvadius Cash sound this time around? Is his life still a grim parade of the saddest, most transactional sex you can imagine two humans having? (Last year’s LP Dirty Sprite 2 had a minor-key song called "Groupies" that sounds like a funeral march.) Just how many mournful references to perkys, Zans, and promethazine does he make?
If you’re new to the Supervillain Stage of Future’s career, a quick primer on how we got here: Mix one part noxiously awful publicity (Future cheated on universally beloved R&B singer Ciara, breaking the public’s perception of the pair as an idealized super couple); one part savvy embrace of resulting notoriety (the phase was kicked off with 2014’s aptly titled mixtape Monster); and one part obsessive focus on a single aesthetic—mostly one or two producers per mixtape, short track runs, and a single uniform vibe. Out of this mushroom cloud sprung the obsessive online community known as #FutureHive, and it can be a weird place to spend time: I’ve seen fans expressing ambivalence or even disappointment upon learning that Future may not in fact be the codeine-crazy drug addict he plays in his songs.
This sort of dance-of-death vicariousness is nothing new in rap (see: "I Feel Like Dying"-era Lil Wayne, which could also be a Monster-era Future song title), nor is this childish magical thinking about artists by fans. But Future’s taken this poisoned chalice and run further with it than anyone in rap since Wayne at his druggy peak. To listen to Future’s output right now is to feel concerned for him, repelled by him, and slightly coated in slime from association. His best and most potent songs should make you feel a little nauseated, a little sad, and exultant all at the same time.
This is the place to note that Purple Reign, his latest mixtape, is a relatively weak dose of Dirty Sprite. Heard in the context laid out above, the den-of-sin air has cleared a bit. The lights have started to come up (or maybe your eyes are adjusting), the feeling that something unspeakable is about to happen has receded. It’s a fine tape, but considered in the run of the most vital rapper working, relatively minor.
The beats on Future’s best work give off an eerie, muted light, like alien eggs glowing beneath a blanket, but the music on Purple Reign is some of the least distinctive work his star producers (Metro Boomin’, Southside, Zaytoven, Nard & B, and others) have ever given him. A few of the beats here, like "Hater Shit" and "Wicked," are so minimal they almost resemble presets. Future's delivery also hits a few rough patches: The chorus to "Drippin (How U Love That)" is a dishearteningly direct Fetty Wap imitation, and his groaning, stomach-pains cadence on the "Never Forget" chorus is a Gucci Mane rip. Meanwhile, one of the best songs ("Inside the Mattress") feels like a stealth rewrite of last year’s classic "March Madness."
The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy. "Perkys Calling" is downcast and beautiful, a piano ballad full of Future’s heat-lightning one-line observations: "Everything around me turn to fast food," he mumbles, an abstract line that manages to be feel more heartbreakingly specific the more attention you devote to it. "I had to take a loss so I could cherish that shit," he declares on "Never Forget," maybe the world’s best philosophy. On that same song, he defies his characterization as a destructive force, someone who uses people up and throws them away, by acknowledging the family members he has hurt by selling them drugs. He might be a monster, but he has a conscience.
But then there's the closing title track, where he briskly snuffs out this ember of humanity, declaring syrup his "girlfriend," compares himself to a heroin trafficker and a terrorist, and tells a rival "until you gunned down, we ain’t gon' never have closure." Playing the heel is tiring work, and Future sounds convincingly exhausted. Sounding convincingly exhausted, in fact, is one of his biggest gifts. The way he records his vocals, and the sensitivity he uses to explore its smallest inflections, shows a producer’s mind as well as a rapper’s. Listen to the slight catch in his voice while repeating "purple reign"; these are the moments that draw in #FutureHive, the moments that bottle and sell a helpless wail of pain.


The debut from this instrumental trio has the air of a purifying ritual, blending psychedelia with a loose-limbed minimalism.

voyage au soleil

Numün’s first album, voyage au soleil, works in a stealthy, unobtrusive way. The band’s use of lowercase letters in their name and titles isn’t mere affectation; it’s a reflection of their introverted, sly methodology. Bassist Bob Holmes of the cosmic country band SUSS and guitarist Joel Mellin and percussionist Chris Romero of Gamelan Dharma Swara have arrived at a rarefied strain of instrumental music that has the air of a purifying ritual, blending the opiated psychedelia of Brightblack Morning Light with a loose-limbed minimalism that privileges subtle effects and incremental chord progressions. They achieve these results through instruments traditionally alien to rock, such as dholak, Theremin, gongs, and gender wayang.
Album-opener “tranceport” epitomizes this approach; it fades in with a feather-light drone, taking Brian Eno’s Apollo to church and to an even deeper quadrant of space. (The LP’s title translates as “trip to the sun.”) With its reverberant, two-chord bass plucks criss-crossed with the squawks of a cümbüş (a fretless Turkish banjo), Mellotron whorls, and tambourine-enhanced beats, “tranceport” morphs into a beatific psych-rock procession redolent of Chocolate Watch Band’s “Voyage of the Trieste.”
By the time the second track, “first steps”—a radiant slice of East-West psychedelia devoid of the tired tropes typically associated with this gambit—you realize that numün’s innate peacefulness guides their every move. Augmented by a snippet of astronauts conversing with President Nixon during the first moon landing (it’s jarring to hear the latter’s voice in such a blissful setting), “tranquility base” achieves liftoff through shimmering tones created by a synth version of a celeste and methodical bass riffs that add a riveting contrast and ballast to the track’s delicately beautiful atmospheres.
On their debut album, numün have created a suite of becalming songs that move at a tempo slower than a resting pulse while seemingly striving for a sacred quality. Much music in this vein has a tendency to lull you to sleep or to cloy, but voyage au soleil reveals numün as savvy navigators of paths less traveled.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The witch-house pioneer and a Berlin-based producer join forces on a purposefully “difficult-to-digest” album whose sprawling array of references and styles mimics life online.

oOoOO /  Islamiq Grrrls: Faminine Mystique

Faminine Mystique

There’s a disorienting quality to Faminine Mystique, the purposely “difficult-to-digest” collaboration between bedroom producer-songwriters oOoOO and Islamiq Grrrls, that will be familiar to anyone coping with the modern affliction known as “extremely online.” You know the one: shallow breathing, legs turning red under a hot laptop, two dozen tabs open—yet time seems to stand still, somehow, as long as you keep scrolling. Now that the internet is less a novelty and more a banality, as one “post-internet” thinker described it, we’re all pretty used to tackling endless streams of seemingly unrelated thoughts as we navigate our newsfeeds every day.
For oOoOO and Islamiq Grrrls, all that complexity and incongruity comes built in. Faminine Mystique, which was written and recorded at home in Berlin, is built from a sprawling array of discrete sounds and styles: whispery shoegaze, trap hi-hats, soaring guitar solos, detuned pianos, wobbly Auto-Tune, and even what appears to be a lo-fi tribute to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games.” Adding to the density of references, the album’s title—a play on Betty Friedan’s influential text The Feminine Mystique—is meant to refer to “a powerful set of social forces” that allows us access to vast amounts of music while favoring “easy consumption” over experimentation. Fortunately, the results are much more accessible than all of that sounds—nothing a seasoned tab-flipper can’t handle.
The album is the first full-length release in five years from Chris Dexter Greenspan, the New Jersey-raised producer whose early releases on the nascent Tri Angle Records, with their hazy atmospheres and trap-influenced electronic drums, were filed under “witch house.” Returning from a self-imposed break from the industry, Greenspan found an eerily compatible collaborator in Islamiq Grrrls, a singer and musician who grew up in a strict Bosnian Muslim household in small-town Germany (she gives her name only as Asia). They originally linked up to share feedback on their solo albums, but after some back and forth, they realised their separate projects had merged into one. Many of the songs on Faminine Mystique in fact remain solo productions, but it’s remarkable how smoothly they fit together. Side by side at the center of the album, “You Don’t Love Me” and “Y’re Gonna Love Me” share the same trap-inspired flourishes, with purring hi-hats and booming bass laying steady ground for moody synths and, on the latter, a pitch-shifting piano melody that sounds like a 1990s mixtape melting in the heat.
Ideas are stacked precariously, referencing multiple genres and eras at once. On “When Y’re All Alone,” processed vocals are buried under a pastoral synth melody, bursts of breakbeats, and the polite ding of an elevator. On “Feeling Feelings,” Greenspan’s voice wobbles with Auto-Tune over squealing post-punk guitars, perhaps channeling the “retrolicious” and homespun quality of Ariel Pink. Tunings are frequently out of whack, lending the entire record a certain queasiness; in atmosphere, it shares the unsettling nature of Angelo Badalamenti’s synth-and-jazz-heavy “Twin Peaks” themes. Strange samples abound, popping up unexpectedly and disappearing just as soon; they even have the nerve to sample a famously litigious classic-rock band in the breakdown of “Be on Through.”
Lyrically, it’s far less daring. Her words are direct and heartsick—“baby” and “love” appear repeatedly—while his are more opaque, but their poppy simplicity at least stands in relief from the weirdness elsewhere. The songs don’t stick out so much individually, but the overall effect is engrossing; soon enough you’re sucked into their disorienting, time-flattened grooves. Hallucinatory and inward-gazing, Faminine Mystique offers a distinctly post-internet strain of eclecticism.


Indiana "stoner emo" outfit Cloakroom's debut album, Further Out, packs a wealth of hooks, even if it’s an album for the gearheads who’d rather spend time and money assessing amplifier nuance than effects pedals.

Further Out

The most frequently quoted fact from Cloakroom’s bio is that they’re a trio of factory workers from Indiana. It is a backstory that makes sense in hindsight upon hearing their minimally arranged, moderately morose, and maximally loud debut LP Further Out. Cloakroom know from heavy machinery; the operative terms for Further Out are "bulldoze," "steamroll." Here’s a picture of the band—Brian Busch is on the left and the drums on Further Out sure sound like they’re being hit by a guy who has 100-litre barrels for arms. Meanwhile, Doyle Martin valiantly keeps up with all the might his lanky, mortal frame can bear, as Further Out comes off like the only indie rock album released in 2015 actively gunning for its own tablature book. Opener "Paperweight" sums up Martin’s sedentary, sarcastic point of view ("You exist in material states/ One part paper, one part weight/ You could not decide what force is holding you down today") and empties his arsenal of bullying power chords, fluid, clean arpeggios, melodic fills and narcotized acoustic strums.
All of the aforementioned provide for a wealth of hooks throughout Further Out, even if it’s an album for the gearheads who’d rather spend time and money assessing amplifier nuance than effects pedals. Proudly analog from the recording to the vinyl pressing, Further Out utilizes a mere handful of tones because Martin took like two years to get these settings just right: his favorite is a super-saturated buzz that somehow sounds both impenetrable and like it could dissolve on contact. It’s a shame someone else beat Cloakroom to Let’s Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time as an album title, as Further Out is equal parts thick muscle and lactic acid.
The result is a record heavy enough to justify a 2xLP pressing even with a relatively brief 45 minute runtime. It’s probably best for the vinyl considering the contents: "Paperweight" inherits the Secret Machines’ ambitions to recreate Texas-sized arena boogie that’s part Slacker, part Dazed and Confused, "Lossed Over" and "Moon Funeral" are the basis for the pop record to which Jesu refused to commit, while "Outta Spite" and "Starchild Skull" hulk boxes upon boxes of CDs from the time when indie rock went alt and cast a lot of truly great bands as one-hit wonders stashed in the Buzz Bin. Most specifically, Hum—Further Ou**t was recorded in Matt Talbott’s studio and his former band would be a reference point even if had no direct involvement. Hum have become a kind of shorthand for contemporaries like Cloakroom who draw from but are not limited to shoegaze, slowcore, alt-rock, emo, basically all forms of music that favor distorted guitars and never really have their "moment" in indie rock post-1995.
But for that reason, they also never really go out of style. Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience. Though Cloakroom might be selling themselves short in the interest of cohesion—"Mesmer" and "Sylph" are meant as instrumental interludes, but their skittering rhythms and timbral beauty are such intriguing divergences from the consistent piledriving that they feel like unkept promises; one wishes they could’ve been extended into vocal tracks. But in light of the effort and exertion required of Further Out’s eight other songs, perhaps that was too much of an undertaking for the time being.
All of the deliberate aggression in Cloakroom's music is a none-too-subtle defense mechanism for the implacable depression at its core. Martin’s yawning moan is a dead ringer for that of Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, somehow managing to emerge clean and clear from the murk despite him never raising his voice. But unlike Bazan, Martin’s pen is caked with bong resin rather than poison. Cashed bowls and empty cans litter Further Out, having served as coping mechanisms rather than means of escape. All of these low-level narcotics have a way of muddling situations as Martin attempts to explain his disappointment in people who continue to fail him. At any given point, it’s unclear whether he’s addressing a girlfriend, a friend, a coworker, a parent, the mailman, whoever.
Most likely, it’s himself, but his lethargic delivery becomes a part of the hook: on "Asymmetrical", Martin describes suburban, drunken intransigence as a night out where he, "Took a long drive/ Got a few dents/ Told a couple jokes at your expense"; the major-key melody appears to be mocking the target, as Martin’s words drip with both dejection and derision, a perfect match of content and delivery.
Cloakroom once described themselves as "stoner emo" as a joke and they’ll probably spend the rest of their career getting shit for it. It’s clearly meant as a joke, the punchline being the obvious incompatibility of its two parts. The latter is defined by anxious rhythms, a tenuous connection to straight edge, brazen, high-register melodies and a desperate desire for human connection amidst a litany of misunderstanding and communication failures. Meanwhile, a band named Sleep made one of stoner rock’s formative documents, which just so happens to be called Dopesmoker and sounds exactly like what you think it does. To the extent that their turbid, somewhat timid debut EP Infinity couldn’t achieve, Further Out presents those genres existing as a continuum rather than in conflict: Cloakroom are driven by a distinct Midwestern despair and disillusion, they just don’t make music that reflects it. Instead, they hit a very specific catharsis wrung from exhaustion; at a certain point, you’ve earned your place on the couch after a hard day at the factory, the office, or just enduring a line at the grocery store, and you figure you may as well just spark up and crank up the amps.
[Editors note: an earlier version of this review contained an aside in the first paragraph whose meaning was unclear; it should have been removed in editing initially and we have done so in hindsight.]


Numero Group's compilation collects guitar instrumentals first issued between 1966 and 1981, showing a solo steel-string world apart from John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke.

Various Artists: Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli

Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli

Guitar Soli, the Numero Group's collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar instrumentals, professes to explore the "private side of the solo guitar movement from 1966-1981". The public side needs no introduction here, having been documented by Martin Scorsese in his revealing 1983 documentary The Last Raga about the decadent concert blowout for solo guitar's leading lights. Davey Graham did a load of blow off of a Martin D-28 and Bert Jansch nearly choked Sandy Bull with a nickel-wound 46-gauge string. Wait, no, that never happened. The scene's leading lights used 1966-1981 to move into some combination of obscurity, poverty, and cult worship. Solo acoustic guitar is not by definition a private affair but its conventions-- and the personalities that are drawn to those conventions-- are not typically the public type.
But I'm being a shit: surely Numero means only to show a side of acoustic composition and performance outside the genre-defining names like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, none of whom were really public figures but all of whom enjoyed (or enjoy) critical acclaim and understanding audiences. Guitar Soli collects fourteen such pieces, focusing neither on technical achievement nor on any coherent historical narrative. Freed of even minor stylistic excesses-- like Fahey's collage or Basho's chant-- Guitar Soli defies categorization as anything but six-string plainsong.
So silly miniatures help focus Guitar Soli. Ted Lucas, who turns in the comp's most furiously picked track, "Raga in 'D'", was Motown's Indian-music session man, playing sitar for the Temptations and the Supremes. Richard Crandell has found work after learning the mbira while driving Thomas Mapfumo's bus. Daniel Hecht knew Moondog and now writes mystery novels. Best of all, Mark Lang's "Strawberry Man" is sunny and weightless in its contemplation of a beachside fruit vendor but it never would've hit the tape if Lang hadn't grown jealous of his brother Peter, who cut an album with Fahey and Kottke. Other tracks require no backstory at all: Stephen Cohen's "No More School" is exactly as red-faced and dimpled as its title suggests, while Jim Ohlschmidt's "The Delta Freeze" is Guitar Soli's most singular sonic statement, a mess of strangulated slides that grow denser and angrier until the tape saturates.
The music only gets so peculiar, though: these are acoustic guitar tracks mostly in the folk mold with occasional Eastern influences. Guitar Soli doesn't even contain a proper blues; its most far-off cut is its last, Dwayne Cannan's "One Forty Eight", which features an electric guitar part best described as...Carlos Santana-y? Strange, but it fits: these artists, along with Fahey, Basho etc., were important bridges between the American Primitive style birthed by the 1960s folk movement and the New Age 80s. Guitar Soli is no missing link but its placidity, a product of carefully minded source music and the subtlest of desires to innovate, suggests that the artists of Guitar Soli belong in the discussion, however private and odd their endeavors.


On the first album released under his Caribou moniker, Dan Snaith mostly eschews the spiraling psychedelica of Up in Flames; instead he creates clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober.

The Milk of Human Kindness

When Dan Snaith's Manitoba released Up in Flames in early 2003 it felt like a debut. Bearing little resemblance to the cuddly IDM of 2001's Start Breaking My Heart, Up in Flames felt like the work of another mind, and logic dictated that the project should have a different name. The Gods of Music apparently agreed but were a little slow on the uptake; finally sensing the marked shifts in tone and focus they sent Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators to smite the project. Papers were served, a trade infringement lawsuit was threatened, and Caribou was born.
Bummer that the record racks of the world are going to get more confusing, but in purely musical terms the name change isn't such a bad thing. The Milk of Human Kindness sounds once again like an album from a band without a past, a band ready to take risks and go where the music needs to go. The contrast between The Milk of Human Kindness and Up in Flames is certainly less pronounced than the jump from the debut, but the feel here-- clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober-- is new to Snaith.
I should explain that when I say that Caribou sounds like a band without a past, I mean a past of their own. Certain historical strands from the last 35 years or so of rock are easy to discern. Where Up in Flames referenced spiraling psychedelia, this record is more controlled, carefully choosing its moments and arranging peaks for maximum impact. The most obvious addition to the sound is a strong dose of Krautrock, particularly the classic propulsion of Neu!
The opening riff of "Bees", for example, takes a handful of Booker T & the MGs' "Green Onions" and spreads them like flares along the Autobahn of "Hallo Gallo". That's only the bedrock rhythm, and as the song progresses Snaith indulges his fondness for dynamic builds and folds in a chorus of horns that lead to a booming drum crescendo. "A Final Warning" is another strong motorik beat and this time Snaith rides the efficient engine through the kandy-kolored dreamland of the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun, exploding from dark tunnels into a vast, yawning mother sky with a wailing "Ahhh!!!!"
The noisier tracks here are a lot of fun-- the spazzy "Brahminy Kite" is all cymbal crash and tom roll, its martial pulse and tinny organ contrasting with a repeating vocal refrain. The flipside of these drum-heavy tunes (which you know the band is aching to play live) is "Hello Hammerheads", an upfront and folksy vocal where Snaith aims for Simon and Garfunkel territory and winds up in the same area code, which is saying something considering how "just another instrument" his crooning can be. Tying the various strands together are a well-crafted series of minute-or-two interludes, which move from Lynchian melodrama ("Subotnick") to manipulated bits of warped baroque ("Drumheller").
Some of the "big" tracks remind me of the gothic reconfigurations of DJ Shadow, particularly the dramatic build-of-steam "Pelican Narrows", with its melancholy "Theme From the Incredible Hulk" piano theme and loose, splashy drumbeat, but also the gangly interlude "Lord Leopard". The Shadow feel is doubly interesting because, though Snaith is currently leading a full band when out on tour, complete with two drummers, he brings a record fan's approach to his music. He's digging into the past to find the best bits and combining the new ways, reinforcing the idea, suggested at on earlier Manitoba material, that his particular genius is curatorial rather than strictly inventive. However he does it, he's created another thrilling, excellent record.


With Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye achieved pop stardom without compromising his vision. On its uninspired follow-up, Starboy, he seems to lose sight of that vision almost entirely.

Starboy

Who is the Weeknd? That’s the question a lot of us asked when the act first materialized, fully-formed, with 2011’s House of Balloons. Thanks to the group’s savvy anti-publicity campaign, the question had a literal bent: who are the people who made these songs? Fast-forward five years and there’s little mystery remaining when it comes to the provenance of the Weeknd’s music—like so many modern pop songs, his are now designed in consultation with a committee of experts. And yet, even as we watch Abel Tesfaye walk the red carpet in the light of day, the question remains: Who is the Weeknd? Is he a drugged-out lothario? A beloved pop star? A nihilist foil to Drake? The second coming of Michael Jackson? The runaway success of last years’ Beauty Behind the Madness—two No. 1 singles and over two million units sold in the U.S.—seemed like it might finally force an answer to this question. And yet, Starboy, the Weeknd’s sixth overall album and third for a major label, only further muddies the waters.
Initially, there were signs that Starboy would represent a much-needed pivot, a rethinking of a sound and image that seemed to have run its course, from DIY mixtapes to the top of the charts. The album’s lead video features Tesfaye murdering a past version of himself before taking a cross-shaped bat to a condo full of awards and sales plaques. Starboy, however, is hardly a dramatic reinvention—if anything, it feels like a watered-down retread of the same old tropes. Beauty Behind the Madness managed to smuggle sleaze into the mainstream by refining Tesfaye’s pop songcraft, even as it doubled down on the darkness. Starboy eases up on both fronts, recycling melodies, ideas, and even whole songs while presenting a sanitized version of the Weeknd that often lacks any real sense of perspective. It’s a curious move for a guy who so decisively managed to succeed on his own terms.
As if to guarantee that it feels like a slog, Starboy is also overstuffed: over an hour of music stretching out over 18 songs, many of them bland. “Rockin’” sounds like a label executive’s idea of what the Weeknd could be: inoffensive club pop tailor-made for office karaoke parties (“I just want your body next to me/’Cause it brings me so much ecstasy/We can just be rockin’, yeah”). “False Alarm” snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, its sublime opening harmonies devolving into a screamed chorus that’s as contrived as Michael Jackson’s bellow at the beginning of “Scream.” “Six Feet Under,” a collaboration with Future, is essentially just a rewrite of the pair's much sharper “Low Life” (“Reminder” also recycles the vocal melody from “Low Life”); both here and on “All I Know,” the melodically-gifted rapper feels sorely underutilized. Kendrick Lamar’s verse on the autotune-heavy “Sidewalks” is characteristically dexterous but even he sounds a bit unenthused to be here. It’s hard to blame him.
There are a few bright spots on Starboy, moments that feel guided by a stronger vision. Both of the Daft Punk collaborations are satisfying, if hardly groundbreaking; “Starboy” glides like a sleek, high-performance car, while “I Feel It Coming” sounds like a slowed-down version of “Get Lucky.” “Secrets” pushes the Weeknd’s nocturnal sound into new wave territory, borrowing washes of clean guitar from Tears for Fears’ “Pale Shelter” and lifting the chorus from the Romantics’ “Talking in Your Sleep” wholesale. “True Colors” sounds like a ’90s R&B slow burner produced by Noah “40” Shebib (who was once apocryphally rumored to have ghost produced for the Weeknd). And “Ordinary Life” proves that Tesfaye is still more than capable of raising eyebrows, opening with a vivid description of fellatio behind the wheel before taking a hard left into petite mort fatalism (“David Carradine, I’ma die when I come”).
Starboy’s most interesting song is barely even a song. The two-minute-long “Stargirl Interlude,” finds Lana Del Rey reprising her role as Tesfaye’s foil, relating a pornographic “vision” over a minimal backing track, before Tesfaye closes out the song by cooing, “I just want to see you shine, ’cause I know you are a Stargirl.” The brief snippet is filled with the sort of tension that’s so lacking from most of Starboy, playing up the theatrics for which both artists are known. “I feel like we’ve always been talking to each other through our music,” Tesfaye said of Del Rey in an interview last year. “She is the girl in my music, and I am the guy in her music.” Here, the pair embrace that meta-narrative, responding to their perceived lack of authenticity by retreating fully into the pop fantasy where their characters connect. It’s a boldly self-aware move, one that smartly manages to wring art from artifice.
Starboy could use a lot more of this kind of audacity or really, any kind of coherent storytelling that challenges, complicates or further illuminates our understanding of the unfeeling villain that Tesfaye has been playing since day one. Instead, we get a grab bag of difficult to reconcile contradictions: a “Party Monster,” on one track, a doe-eyed balladeer on another (“Die for You”). Tesfaye used to be near-obsessive about packaging projects that felt narratively whole—after all, this is the guy who released an entire trilogy of interconnected albums in his first year. Starboy, by way of contrast, feels more like an opportunistic compilation of B-sides than an album. Who is the Weeknd? At this point, even the man behind the curtain might not know.


The indie-rock icon fires up his laptop and lays down a set of quasi-electronic jams that owe more to late-1970s post-punk than to the Berlin nightlife that supposedly inspired the record.

Groove Denied

When promo copies of Stephen Malkmus’ eponymous 2001 solo album began to circulate, they bore the record’s working title: Swedish Reggae. It was an obvious joke that worked on two levels. There was the implicit contradiction in terms, which seemed more preposterous in a dial-up world where the internet had yet to dissolve geographic and musical boundaries; the gag was also rooted in the equally absurd notion that Stephen Malkmus would deign to make music that sounded like anyone other than himself. As the primary singer and guitarist in Pavement, Malkmus had not only been one of the defining figures of 1990s indie rock; his signature mix of skewed, fuzz-coated songcraft and cryptic lyricism had practically become a subgenre unto itself. And with his post-Pavement outfit the Jicks, the song has more or less remained the same, even as the guitar solos have gotten longer.
Now in his 30th year as a recording artist, Stephen Malkmus is so good at being Stephen Malkmus that the mere prospect of him futzing around and making electronic music with Ableton Live might raise eyebrows, even after plenty of indie-rock titans of his vintage have dabbled in digitalism. Malkmus started writing Groove Denied while he was living in Berlin in the early 2010s, after a DJ friend chaperoned him into the city’s infamous club scene—but Ravement this is not. Rather than thrust him into foreign musical territory, the album returns Malkmus to the murky soup of lo-fi, DIY post-punk that once served as Pavement’s petri dish. But now he’s taking his cues from the primitive, proto-industrial synthwave of the Normal and “Being Boiled”-era Human League instead of the gnarled guitars of Swell Maps and the Fall. As far as records inspired by Berlin nightclub benders go, the vibe here is less “Dance like no one’s watching” than “Mess around like no one’s listening.”
Groove Denied channels circa-1979 post-punk not just in austere sound but in mindset, harking back to an era when machines represented the sound of the future but no one was quite sure of what do with them yet. There’s a palpable sense of “What does this button do?” curiosity to the opening “Belziger Faceplant,” where jabbing synth notes arrhythmically spar with a sputtering drum-machine beat while Malkmus intrudes with an atonal croon like someone hamming it up in a karaoke booth. Even as he fortifies the rhythm with tambourine effects and a circular police-siren refrain, he pokes and prods it with distorted synth bleats, as if checking to see if his steak is done.
Groove Denied is technically Malkmus’ second proper solo album after his 2001 debut, but that record was really a trial run for the then-unbilled Jicks. In stark contrast to the Jicks’ West Coast open-road splendor, Groove Denied is a true solitary effort, the sound of after-hours home-studio tinkering, gear bursting with tangled wires, and cabin-fever claustrophobia. This is especially true of “Forget Your Place,” a slow-motion swirl of ambient techno where Malkmus modulates his voice down into a drowsy drone, imagining a future where the robots have come for his job. Even his overtures toward straightforward synth pop eventually start to short-circuit. For a recent Noisey feature, Malkmus sat down and listened to LCD Soundsystem’s first album for the first time; fittingly, “Viktor Borgia”—with its neon-lit Kraftwerkian tone clusters, minimalist disco groove, and archly delivered meta-lyrics about making a beat connection (“We walk into the club/Thank the heavens above”)—sounds like Malkmus trying to make a James Murphy song having only read about the dance-punk icon. But he stops short of building the track up into a LCD-level thumper, because he’s having too much fun switching up the drum-machine settings.
Compared to the triumph of 2018’s Jicks effort Sparkle Hard—an album that featured some of the most endearing and incisive writing of Malkmus’ career—Groove Denied can’t help but feel like a minor effort. It’s essentially his answer to McCartney II—the sound of a veteran artist with two beloved bands under his belt reveling in the freedom to indulge a latent fascination with the latest gadgets. Like that record, Groove Denied’s tech fetishism ultimately has its limits. A handful of these tracks (like the toga-party Velvets rumble of “Rushing the Acid Frat”) are guitar-based one-man-band rockers that could’ve easily been retooled into Jicks jams. But Groove Denied’s slapdash kitchen-sink experimentation rarely overwhelms Malkmus’ singular charms. With the lonesome, sitar-speckled lament “Come Get Me” and the Southern Gothic prog-pop opus “Ocean of Revenge” (whose earworm chorus melody was teased in the string arrangement of Sparkle Hard’s “Brethren”), the album yields a pair of aces that can stand alongside his finest songs. Since the ’90s, Malkmus and Pavement have become lazy shorthand for “ironic slackers,” a reputation that’s always undersold the emotional distress and subtle social commentary at the heart of his best writing. But even on a willfully irreverent record that puts a premium on groove, those qualities can’t be denied.


Like Chromatics and Junior Boys, Nite Jewel makes dance music more suitable for the ride home from the club than the actual disco.

Good Evening

How far from an actual disco can dance music get? Chromatics and Junior Boys make a sort of dance music suitable for transit-- steeped in typical club-friendly sonics, their records are the soundtrack to the drive home from the club rather than the night out itself. Taken to its logical extreme, is it possible to make a sort of dance music as a completely disembodied observer? Los Angeles' Ramona Gonzalez, under the name Nite Jewel, seems set on finding the answer.
Like the phrase "Nite Jewel" itself, Good Evening is minuscule and precious, both of which are charming descriptors, but its fragility is taken to an almost palpable extent. Once the record gets past a certain volume in headphones (it doesn't take much), you can faintly hear recording buzz splitting it apart at the seams. Take "Suburbia": Underneath Gonzalez's incorporeal wail, nothing feels concrete, despite the insistent and simple repetition. The leading synth blurt falls in and out of tune while the four-on-the-floor kick drum threatens to go into slack triplets. Any quantizing feature could "solve" this problem, but is seeing the stitching part of the appeal? The whole appeal? On "What Did He Say", the most immediately striking track on Good Evening, there's a nifty bassline but the moment it modulates up a couple of steps, the mix turns to mush. If you've ever played a preset song on a Casio and switched up between incompatible major scales, you might get the idea.
There are positives, but even they raise questions: Bubbling single "Artificial Intelligence", which is probably the first track on Good Evening with a discernible lyric (even if it's just the title), has a clear-eyed purpose. Meanwhile, "Let's Go (The Two of Us Together)" and "Chimera" follow in the path of "Weak For Me", an earlier highlight that cops its sound from the Jets' "Crush on You". It's debatable whether this DIY take on lite and funky Reagan-era R&B is refreshing or akin to munching on a piece of bubblegum that's been stuck in a pack of Donruss since the mid-80s-- why dull the hooks when the sort of fidelity that could bring them to a focus is more readily available than ever, even to artists at their most entry-level?
But then again, maybe it's not a remix Good Evening needs so much as a fair yardstick to measure it by. Though it's arguable that each has different goals, the same sort of disembodied vocals and languorous textures you hear in acts like Grouper, Beach House, and A Sunny Day In Glasgow are proof there's more to this sort of thing than sounding like a Cocteau Twins record playing two parties over. Alas, Nite Jewel isn't at the level of the aforementioned; with her devotion to a sound at the relative cost of songs, she's more like a shuttle-mate of Salem in the blog-hype space race to find an act that can merge tapes-out-of-the-trunk hip-hop recording methods with 4AD gossamer. Now let's see if they're willing to outsource the engineering.


Accompanied by strings, sax, and piano, the Toronto musician sorts through his past on an intimate collection of orchestral pop, bursting with hooks.

Ballad of a Tryhard

After a period of intense searching, Scott Hardware finally took a vacation. While writing his third album, the Toronto songwriter travelled to the quiet city of Elche, Spain for an idyllic escape with his romantic partner. Naturally, this lush setting on the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea inspired him to adorn his music with ornate arrangements of strings, sax, and piano, resulting in a pristine atmosphere drifting dangerously close to adult contemporary. In comparison to the spiky disco grooves and decaying electronic passages of his previous album, 2020’s Engel, these 10 songs are disarmingly earnest and boldly uncool—and all the more beautiful because of it.
As a collaborator, Hardware has bounced around the Toronto scene for years, playing with drone-rockers Ostrich Tuning and bristling post-punks WHIMM. His earliest synth-pop solo offerings arrived under the name Ken Park, before a move to Berlin influenced the techno-flirting sound of 2016’s Mutate Repeat Infinity, the first album credited to Scott Hardware. “I imagine dance music as hallowed ground,” he explained at that time, paying tribute to a generation lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis while writing evocatively about his own queerness.
Four years later, Hardware was still yearning. The transitional nature of 2020’s Engel stripped his desires down to a raw and vulnerable mess of meaty stumps as he attempted to overcome emotional blocks. That album crescendoed with the skyrocketing hi-hats of “Joy,” yet Hardware revealed that he only experienced the passion described in his lyrics second-hand: “I was seeing somebody and thinking ‘I’m supposed to feel something,’” he confessed. Ballad of a Tryhard brings those buried emotions up to the surface and into the sky, like a plane pulling a banner to profess his romance to the world.
Hardware’s soft, nimble voice has earned comparisons to Thom Yorke, but the Radiohead frontman wouldn’t dare sing lyrics this direct. (“Here with a love I’m not worthy of,” he sings. “And full with a strength I can’t take away.”) Tugged by glammy guitar riffs, “Love Through the Trees” makes the shift in perspective clear. While he seemed inconsolable in the past, Hardware admits that finding a connection has softened his edges: “We both know that don’t come around that often,” he adds. “Metaterranean” plunges into his European getaway in medias res, as he leafs through a book of common phrases and sips cola in the salty sea air. Yet despite the peaceful atmosphere, Hardware can’t escape his anxieties: “I go somewhere else and I sing the same song.”
The intimate “Is Something Wrong Tonight” uses a lovers’ quarrel as a springboard to reflect on the fights that fade like shooting stars, “burning out and gone without a sound.” Hardware has always excelled at conjuring tactile imagery, as on “Joy,” when he tasted someone who reminded him of cinnamon, and dug his hands through the dirt in search of deeper sensations. On this album’s catchiest song, “Watersnake,” he flashes back to a childhood memory of reptiles slithering across the lake near his mom’s home. Bolstered by swooning strings, there is an understated intensity to Hardware’s voice as he vividly describes a person from his past returning to interrupt his tranquillity and “make a meal of a swimmer’s peace.”
With the deft touch of co-producer Matt Smith, who releases electronic music as Prince Nifty, Hardware lets his guard down. Frequent collaborators such as drummer Jonathan Pappo dance around these agile arrangements, and some of the most stunning moments are when Hardware is accompanied by guest vocalist Caitlin Woelfle-O’Brien of the Toronto band Jaunt. On previous releases, striking melodies were hidden between haunting experiments, but Ballad of a Tryhard is a relatively straightforward collection of orchestral pop, bursting with hooks. Like the heartfelt folk songs of Amen Dunes’ Love, it is a grand step towards traditional songcraft.
The lyrics on Ballad of a Tryhard sort through Hardware’s past, using wistful sense memories to examine how he’s arrived in the present moment. In “Bootleg,” he is a teenager basking in the glow of the television, late at night, alone; in “Another Day Ending,” he zooms to the present day, reaching out for solace and resting his head in his boyfriend’s lap. Songs this sincere, presented with such sophisticated arrangements, have a risk of becoming overly sentimental, but in Hardware’s hands they feel singular and personal. No matter which point in time or which place on the map his music brings us, he feels close enough for us to reach out and touch him.


The St. Louis rapper’s new mixtape channels Gucci Mane and Trina, delivering filthy, laugh-out-loud punchlines and setting the tone for the freakiest summer since the advent of the smartphone.

Hood Hottest Princess

Only a few rap songs from the past few years have lyrics that offer a welcome shock every single time I hear them. On the shortlist is Rio Da Yung OG’s punchline-driven madness “Legendary”; RXK Nephew’s “American tterroistt,” a 10-minute saga that is the sonic equivalent of a Reddit thread; and lastly, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s raunchy megahit “WAP.” Sexyy Red’s breakout single “Pound Town” is in that league, earning the title of the wildest rap hit of the year. Over a Tay Keith beat that would have the strip clubs on lock in 2008, Sexyy Red is getting her toes sucked, recruiting dudes who are savages in bed but can also be decent stepfathers to her son, and theatrically moaning like she’s in a Paul Verhoeven-directed sex scene. Then, of course, there’s the line: “My coochie pink, my bootyhole brown,” a declaration she breezes through like it’s just another bar. It’s funny, out-of-pocket, and makes pearl clutchers squirm—but it never feels like she’s trying too hard to be provocative.
Elaborating on the spirit of “Pound Town” is Red’s new mixtape Hood Hottest Princess, which sets the tone for what she hopes is the nastiest, sweatiest, and freakiest summer since the smartphone came along. Fittingly, the booming sound of the project feels of a time when beats by Shawty Redd and Zaytoven were the blueprint (honestly, if you were to tell me that Sexyy Red has been in a cryo chamber since the summer of 2012, I wouldn’t be surprised). But the throwback spirit of Hood Hottest Princess actually comes from Red’s St. Louis roots, a city that is, according to her, stuck in the 2000s: “We don’t listen to the new rap; we still listen to the old shit,” she said in a recent interview. You can hear that sensibility in the way she raps with a slurred delivery, as if she’s been stranded on an island with banging 2008-2009 Gucci Mane tapes, like EA Sportscenter and The BurrPrint: The Movie 3D. And most importantly, she doesn’t simply refashion existing Gucci hits. In an era where so many artists are looking to capitalize on “ready-made nostalgia,” that would be the easier route. But for Red, that source of inspiration is a foundation—not necessarily the point.
You could let practically all of Hood Hottest Princess ride at a party or club without killing the vibe; it’s 30 minutes of straight-up standing-on-the-table raps. There are a handful of songs on here that are bound to be summertime anthems (if they aren’t, then we’ll get what we deserve, which is three months of rappers riding the wave of club-rap and J. Cole and Lil Durk doing their version of Schoolhouse Rock). “Hellcat SRTs,” a song about getting turned on by a man who’s willing to do everything behind the wheel that traffic laws would advise against (speeding, fucking, smoking dope), will turn dancefloors into shouting matches. The beat is so thunderous that it sounds like you should be listening to it in an IMAX theater. Meanwhile, “Sexyy Walk,” produced by Juicy J and DJ Paul, is all brute force, with Sexyy Red starting the song off blazing hot and never letting up: “Coke-bottle shape and I got some soft skin/Chanel No. 9, exotic weed, that’s my scent.”
Hood Hottest Princess is also full of moments that are hilariously off the rails. The shrill hook on “SkeeYee” is so hypnotic and nutty, you’ll probably be asking Why? until you just decide to give in. When Red’s voice is in this high register, the spirit of Gucci that possesses her starts to sound a lot more like Trina. That’s where she’s at on “Mad at Me,” laying down raps that talk about guys the same way male rappers have women forever: They’re all just there to “lick-lick between my ass, suck on my clit” (except her baby’s daddy, whom she seems to have a soft spot for). On “Female Gucci Mane,” she leans into the Guwop comparisons; her delivery is almost drunken, but it never slips into full cosplay. That approach is less successful on the Three 6 Mafia-indebted “Strictly for the Strippers,” which interpolates “Sippin’ on Some Sizzurp.” It’s the one time she lets nostalgia do all of the work.
Underwhelmingly, the original “Pound Town” is not on the mixtape; in its place is “Pound Town 2,” which is pretty much the same song, this time featuring a Nicki Minaj verse that isn’t steamy enough to match Red’s energy. These chart-chasing remixes are inevitable at this point, but if it had to be done, Cardi B would have been a better fit; her updates of Latto’s “Put It on Da Floor” and Glorilla’s “Tomorrow” are worthwhile, not just industry formalities. Luckily, it would take a whole lot more than a mailed-in Nicki verse to bring down a mixtape as fun as Hood Hottest Princess. For a minute there, the mainstream options for soundtracks to warm-weather debauchery were looking slim. That’s where Hood Hottest Princess comes in. Lighten up and take your pick.


The latest from the one-time member of shadowy experimental outfit Hype Williams veers in the direction of proper song and sounds heartbroken, boasting sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and harp flurries, along with ominous clock chimes and distraught voicemail messages.

The Redeemer

Dean Blunt is heartbroken, possibly. The Redeemer is his break-up album, a relatively straightforward affair after numerous releases that seemed to reveal as little about him as possible-- or maybe they revealed everything. His prior work, both on his own and with sometime partner Inga Copeland, varied wildly in quality, finally reaching a dead end with last year's The Narcissist II, a half-assed tribute to half-assedness. Where do you go from there? For Blunt, the answer is to lose the dopey feel of his prior records, strip away the layers of fuzz, and etch out a set of short ballads that form something resembling a relationship crisis album. There are occasional diversions-- distraught voicemail messages, clocks chiming ominously-- but much of The Redeemer assimilates the feel of someone slumped over a bar, reading the last rites on a romance.
The most interesting thing this album does is pose a few questions about substance and how it's ascribed. Does Dean Blunt now come with added "weight" due to sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and the sound of hands running up and down harp strings? No, not really. Often it sounds like someone keenly aware of the trappings of music that reads as "heartbroken," and how to manipulate them. At least it occasionally seems like there's genuine hurt there, sometimes from a twist in Blunt's voice, or a passage of particularly weepy piano playing. But most of the songs are half-formed and barely able to gain any momentum, strangled by track lengths that clock in around the one- or two-minute mark. There's a strong sense of something as transient as the Narcissist material, just dressed up in different clothing.
Fortunately, The Redeemer isn't just an elongated comment on how heavily certain devices have been leaned on throughout music history. On a song like "Demon", tellingly one of the longest here, Blunt ties together vocal manipulations, sound collage, pounding drums, and even a softly tooting trumpet solo. It finds room to bridge between Blunt's prior inclinations for haze and the roomier ones he works in here. His work as an arranger is often skilled, even if the end result either can't or won't get beyond feeling like a simple exercise. "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is his attempt at a Histoire de Melody Nelson cut; "Make It Official" briefly dips into woozy David Sylvian territory. Even Inga Copeland, possibly the person cast as Blunt's subject matter, surfaces on the title track, although her appearance lacks any dramatic élan. The Redeemer is too cynical an enterprise for that, always stopping short of actually feeling very much.
There is some worth in giving common musical tropes a kicking, although Blunt's approach-- essentially swilling the dregs of balladry around in his mouth and spewing them out-- too often ends up more flaccid than the style he's referencing. The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to. The fragmented nature of the tracks, where ideas are set in motion and just trail off into insubstantial thought, can't get to the genesis of what makes material like this work. Pop that comments on pop needs to have a thorough understanding of the form in order to function. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter whether this is Blunt making a genuine attempt at recording a break-up album or using it as a framework to illustrate how vacuous such a gesture can be. Whatever he was looking for, he hasn't found it here.


Can a band build an entire career, a legacy even, on a handful of EPs and a boundless torrent of ...

Fever to Tell

Can a band build an entire career, a legacy even, on a handful of EPs and a boundless torrent of press? How many party dresses need to take a beer bath before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drop the rock icon pastiche and just play some music? Over and over again, they've been accused of empty posturing, wallowing in scrofulous, self-conscious "irony," disguising themselves Predator-style as the public conception of who they were supposed to be rather than who they actually are. And yet (dramatic pause), until the stylists and spin-mongers start writing the music, why does this still have to matter? The band plays the blistering, bassless hand they're dealt, plus or minus the cards up their designer sleeves, and make the "right moves." More power to them; hype, famously, is a bitch, a shrew, and in the end, it's still theirs to try and tame. No one wants to be the ill-fated morning-after tat on the ass-end of the garage-rock revival, after all.
The really stupid part of all this, though, is that the shitstorm of publicity that's been hanging overhead the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is based on all of, what, eight songs? Two EP/singles? Robert Pollard throws away eight songs before breakfast and you sure as hell don't see him on the cover of NME. Well, hold yr breath, kids. The YYY's have finally released the plot element that their garage-to-riches Cinderella II story has most sorely lacked: The Full-Length Album. This is gonna make 'em rockstars, everybody! The final story arc-- and how's this for irony-- will conclude with them shedding their personas here, showing everyone that they've got what it takes to endure, and living happily ever after as the saviors of rock 'n' rollllll...
Except, they don't do any of that. Or maybe (and this is only an hypothesis) they were never all that guilty of the heinous crimes of Fashion they've been charged with in the first place? Either way, here it is, Fever to Tell, and they just play the same guitar/drums rock they have since the beginning-- what'd you expect? Sure, you can practically feel Karen O looking over her shoulder for approval with every faux-erotic squeal or disdainful shout, and a number of these tracks fall flat entirely because of the knowing, brutal swagger they try so damn hard to affect. And when it's all over, the slow-burning, gently chaotic dissolve of "No No No" (even the title is self-conscious) or the bluesy strut of "Black Tongue" will wither under anything more than passing scrutiny, but more will remain.
Reason is, first and foremost, the near-faultless musical support at the core of the YYY's: Nick Zinner and Brian Chase. If you can hear (or even care to try to hear, which you shouldn't) an ounce of "posture" in Zinner's thunderous guitar licks or Chase's relentless percussive assault, then you're a more cynical man (or woman) than I. The rhythms are never very complicated, but when it counts, Chase pounds away with enough precise desperation to project an unfailing sense of urgency; it carries through even the more emotional tracks, lending the rare vulnerability a tragic sort of transience.
Between the vicious buzz and slender trill of Zinner's strings is a breathtaking range-- the robotically looped harmonics of "Rich" coupled with the layered crunch of the wall-of-sound that collapses on top of them; the stop/start emergency-room shriek of "Date With a Night". Even Karen O seems stunned by the anthemic scope of the blazing, surf-like guitar and Chase's deafening percussion on "Y Control"; she turns in one of her most subdued vocals, as if it's all she can do just to keep up. Not coincidentally, it's also one of her most impressive turns.
That's not O's only compelling performance, though-- there are a couple moments when she drops her lacquered sneers and teases, and when this happens, it suddenly becomes very difficult to avoid seeing the music in a different light. Of course, her success varies. At times, she's the linchpin of the band-- and not just because her gratuitous sexual tension has become their trademark-- while at others she's the weakest link. The problem here is that, while the guys are definitely on here, they're still nowhere near groundbreaking, and as a result, they rise and fall depending largely on Karen's delivery. Her play-acting is what got the Yeah Yeah Yeahs slapped with the charges of shallow insincerity in the first place. It shouldn't matter if it's a façade, but it does; knowing beforehand what you're dealing with or not, it becomes very trying to accept every sleazy squeak as part of her routine. If the band ever wants to really dump these lingering doubts for good, they'll need to overcome this obstacle.
Still, for proof that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, at their core, make a better band than they do runway trendsetters, one need look no further than Fever to Tell's singular true moment of clarity-- a tune of such moving grace I can scarcely believe they're responsible for it-- "Maps". Though the song is sadly in a class by itself on this record (it would take about two seconds to call roll for the tunes that even come close), absolutely everything falls into place here. The drums are gentle enough to simply caress the tune, but still pressing enough to make it clear that this second of happiness is fleeting, and Zinner's guitar work is easily his best to date, equal parts joy and discord. But it's Karen's vocals that steal the show; for once, they fairly drip genuine, regretful emotion: When she sings, "Lay off/ Don't stray/ My kind is your kind/ I'll stay the same.../ They don't love you like I love you," almost on the verge of defeated tears, the emotive response it produces is very real, and that means a lot.


After her darker sophomore effort 2012's Master of My Make-Believe, Santigold returns with a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy.

99¢

In retrospect, Santigold's debut album was something of a miracle. Freshly split from her massively underrated Philly ska-punk/new wave band Stiffed, she found her way to a fresher, grimier rock-pop sound. Eight years later, Santogold pretty much stands as filler-free document of its time, and it maintains its integrity no matter how many Bud Light Limes it sold. In the meantime, Santi White has released a darker sophomore effort (2012's Master of My Make-Believe), had a baby, took on acting jobs, and is now attempting to shed her more jaded side for a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy.
The moment on 99¢ where it all comes together is on "Banshee," an absolute firestorm of a track co-written with Cathy Dennis, the bonafide genius hit-maker behind chart-toppers from "Can't Get You Out of My Head" to "Toxic." A bubbling cauldron of handclaps and perky synths, "Banshee" sounds like the soundtrack to a military invasion by a chorus of anime schoolgirls. The joy is so pure that it casts a pall over actual lead single "Chasing Shadows," co-written and produced by Rostam Batmanglij, which basically plods along inoffensively until it ends. The faltering momentum grinds to a complete halt during "Walking in a Circle," which resembles a trap version of the Siamese twin cats' song from The Lady and the Tramp.
*99¢'*s other major winning moment is "Who Be Lovin’ Me," which reinforces the theory that there are few things iLoveMakonnen's soft and sleepy flow can't improve. Santi matches his rhymes beat for beat, meanwhile, revealing surprising prowess as a rapper. "Rendezvous Girl" is a tasty nugget of '80s synthpop (down to the lyrics about a powerful businesswoman "sashaying through town"), driving the second half of the album into more stable territory. "Outside the War" begins to dip again, but luckily the end is salvaged by the "Run the Races," an effectively plaintive ballad co-produced with Batmanglij that profits from wailing guitars from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and "Who I Thought You Were," the album's upbeat rock-pop closer.
The album veers awkwardly like this, sometimes giving the impression that Santigold is getting in her own way. At her best, she elevates the party song to an artform; "Walking in a Circle" and its soundalikes lack the enthusiasm and focus that we know she is capable of, as if these lulls are the result of trying to balance out 99¢’s serotonin rush. Self-consciousness is usually the enemy of a good party, and the downtempo moments feel like she’s pumping the brakes on her own talent. The album is presented as a consumerist critique, intentionally blurring the line between artist and product, but the quality of the songs varies too widely to pull off an actual concept album.
Even as a tongue-in-cheek statement, Santigold is worth more than her self-affixed 99¢ price tag, and the peaks of this record just about outweigh its valleys. But for all its colorful packaging and flirtations with bubblegum pop, 99¢ feels constrained, like she took the cover image literally and vacuum-sealed all of her best traits—reggae-tinted riffs, candy-colored fashion, Casio synths—into one too-neat package. On 99¢, sealed away they remain, poking through the plastic just enough to tantalize.


Japanese post-rock-cum-hardcore band leaves the thrash behind and wanders through a moody cinematic landscape reminiscent of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky.

Insomniac Doze

What to expect from a record titled Insomniac Doze? Those prone to sleep at the prospect of 15-minute songs titled impressionistically after the abstract (say, "The Unknown Glow"), and after further discovering those songs are performed by a band, Envy, from a country, Japan, known as the spiritual home for musicians who pick up guitars and play them for not minutes but months at a time, will likely drift off at the very thought. And disciples of Envy's early years, when they formed an unofficial international alliance with like-minded post-hardcore bands Yaphet Kotto, in America, and Yage, in Germany, might do more than nod off at the news-- they'll likely chuck the disc.
Envy's days as a forward-thinking hardcore band are well behind them, and Insomniac Doze makes the case that they were never one at all. Their songs were always longer, their aesthetic, gauzier: With their stretched-out, openly cinematic take on hardcore's slasher-vérité came longer album titles, longer sets, even longer hair. Rather than drafting their countrymen Mono's slipstream, Envy probably helped pave the way for that quartet's nakedly orchestral snooze fests, just as Corrupted's infinite doom and Acid Mothers Temple's extended space-time explorations had paved the way for Envy.
On their newest record, Envy sound mild enough for the dentist's office. Reminiscent of the film scoring Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky have been doing in the last few years, Insomniac Doze accepts the same contours: chiming builds and ringing climaxes, drawn-out clean guitar lines, and EBowed sustains leading towards mournful bridges. But Tetsuya Fukagawa's tortured howl-- as if the band hadn't told him that they're no longer constantly aiming for red-- sits on top like an oil slick.
The fascination with cinema common to lesser Japanese post-rockers evidences a lack of imagination: They reenact scenes of rain falling, the camera circling up and away from a kneeling, drenched protagonist. It's the kind of effect that draws snickers when beheld firsthand and, post-Godspeed, on record as well; Envy, in retaining the gut-punch of their hardcore roots, manage the same general arc with less shtick and more gravity.
"Crystallize" is aggressive but otherwise near-symphonic pop that starts out galvanized and soaring before stretching out the confines of the song, carrying the melody on echoed, playful note-slivers. When the vocal comes in, it's not ethereal Bowie but more like City of Caterpillar, another U.S. band who successfully blended abstract-rock with hardcore immediacy. Envy's "Shield of Selflessness" successfully takes City of Caterpillar's mid-tempo blast and adds even more bombast, replacing naked panic with a kind of existential sadness, conjuring vast empty landscapes and cold vacant rooms. "Night in Winter" drops the storm entirely, suggesting only its drained aftermath.
So too with Insomniac Doze-- gone is the furious band that once expanded rock palettes with tricky arpeggios and lots of air. Instead, Envy have given themselves completely to their once dormant spacey impulses and time-lapse songwriting. Your interest may well depend on your attention span.


Tucker Pillsbury’s second album turns to folksy sincerity, recounting a celebrity breakup in songs that feel competent, cutesy, and almost believable.

Kansas Anymore

Tucker Pillsbury sure looks like a pop star. He’s got the movie-star good looks, a collection of trendy tattoos, and an eccentric Fashion Week wardrobe. The 27-year-old Maine native nearly landed a role in HBO’s Euphoria but was passed up for Dominic Fike, another suave, tattooed singer. Like Fike, Pillsbury has struggled to channel his on-camera charisma into compelling music. Since 2017, he’s released room-temperature pop as Role Model, portraying himself as a sweet-natured yet mentally tortured heartbreaker. He’s clearly inspired by alt-pop heroes Frank Ocean and BROCKHAMPTON, but his music mostly resembles Shawn Mendes if Mendes were a mediocre singer. “I want something on the radio,” Pillsbury told GQ in 2022. Shuffle through his catalog and you’ll hear an artist desperately searching for a star-making moment.
Pillsbury’s second album, Kansas Anymore, is a step in the right direction. It’s a compact, confident, and well-produced pop-rock record about breaking up with one of Gen Z’s most influential stars, Emma Chamberlain, who has served as Pillsbury’s muse two records in a row. Rx, his 2022 full-length debut, was a frictionless and frequently excruciating collection of lyrically bland, Imagine Dragons-indebted love songs. While Kansas Anymore has shortcomings—cutesy choruses, unadventurous melodies, middling vocal performances—its personality and songcraft are more mature and palatable than any of Pillsbury’s past work.
Though it makes a few bids for radio singles, Kansas Anymore seems less concerned with landing a hit than it does building a sturdy home to hang out in. Pillsbury and executive producer Noah Conrad draw from a folk-pop playbook of Fleetwood Mac and Kacey Musgraves to pen a selection of sunny, sentimental songs. “Look at That Woman” is pleasantly arranged with bright acoustics, slide guitar, and grand piano, and Pillsbury maneuvers well within his vocal range, cruising through plainspoken verses before stretching into a faint falsetto hook. In slower moments, like on the beautifully raw “Slut Era Interlude” or the silky Lizzy McAlpine duet “So Far Gone,” he winds his way into genuinely moving melodies; when he croons “I don’t want you but I want you to spend the night,” it sounds like he really feels what he’s singing. It’s a first for Pillsbury: He elicits a sincere emotional reaction, and he’s not playacting.
There is definitely some playacting on this record, though. Pillsbury’s stomp-clap pivot feels slightly forced considering the recent success of artists like Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan. (“The Dinner” is a full-on Kahan rip—or Mumford & Sons, blame whoever you want.) Still, the role of cowboy-hatted songwriter suits Pillsbury better than the swaggering bad boy character he sought to cultivate on Rx, where he sang “I’d die for my bitch” with the conviction of a boy-band backup. In this softer, more contemplative mode, he’s an occasionally deft writer: “If I was younger, I’d take a downer/Lay on the carpet, pills on the counter/If I was lonely, I’d call up Rachel/Be there in twenty, jeans at her ankles,” he sings on “Slipfast.” He’s still prone to a weak chorus—the punchline on “Superglue” is a wincer—but Kansas Anymore proves Pillsbury to be a sensitive and competent songwriter, even when the G-C-D-major chords and verse-chorus archetypes wear thin.
Despite some biting moments, the album-wide breakup narrative also loses intrigue. Pillsbury admits to masochistically reveling in disillusion, embracing “the feeling of letting it all burn down.” But voyeurs looking to get a documentarian view into his and Chamberlain’s private lives—and the album’s marketing certainly alludes to this possibility—will be disappointed. For all Pillsbury’s claims that he’s a “scumbag,” he’s quick to a cliché, and even quicker to a cheery silver lining. He wants what’s right for her; he tried his best; maybe they’re still meant to be? Without show-stopping talent or anything that truly differentiates him from the gaggle of guys who hope to blow up like Zach Bryan, he remains stuck in pop star limbo. He looks the part, but the role may already be filled.