The Toronto lo-fi rockers deliver indelible hooks with slacker nonchalance.

Melt the Honey

Like many frustrated twentysomethings, Madeline Link fled the city and moved back in with her parents in early 2020. Enduring lockdown in the Ottawa suburbs where she grew up, she spent that torturous April writing and recording songs nonstop to ward off the anxiety. A year later, the arrival of PACKS’ full-length debut, the terse, 24-minute Take the Cake, solidified her talent.
A few years later, Link’s solo project, PACKS, has grown into a four-piece band, and she still seems to be riding that prolific wave. Inspired by the warped popcraft of Micachu and the Shapes and the voluminous output of Guided by Voices, Link squeezes out lazily hooky, lo-fi bangers as likely to draw lyrical inspiration from 19th-century literary arcana as from her personal life. She works fast and favors crude, brittle guitar tones that repel virtuosity; “I’m not a perfectionist,” Link told NME. Melt the Honey, an unshowily eclectic record warmed by the glow of new love, is the group’s third and strongest album since signing to Fire Talk in 2021.
Self-recorded with minimal equipment in an eccentric communal house near Xalapa, Mexico, the album buzzes with the spirit of a weirdo songwriter carving out a creative oasis. Songs vibrate with ideas, opening with snatches of band chatter (“HFCS”) and wildlife clamor (“Missy,” a bilingual ode to a stray cat hanging around the premises). Yet Link, who fell in love shortly before making this album, injects these scuzzy creations with a certain sweetness. With its sprightly organ and pleasantly dazed melody, “Honey” milks the confusing euphoria of a new relationship that feels like “seriously what I wanted all this time.” The titular refrain—“Come on, baby/Melt the honey,” Link croons suggestively—refers to the actual honey Link ate while living with her partner in a Chilean beach town. “HFCS,” inspired by high-fructose corn syrup, is a garage-pop sugar rush, while the languid, delicately layered “Take Care” seems to be about treating a partner with more tenderness than you can extend to yourself.
PACKS’ best songs deliver indelible hooks with the nonchalance of a slacker who couldn’t care less. It’s there in the downtuned psychedelia of “Trippin,” which evokes the lethargic haze of Mellow Gold-era Beck, and in the way Link exaggerates the coarse, sloppy qualities of her voice in that charmingly ’90s way on “Pearly Whites.” It’s also there in the way Link likes to repeat vocal refrains until they sound like nonsense syllables: “Fucked up, now you gotta restart/Gotta restart/Gotta restart,” she taunts on “Paige Machine.” The song refers to the fascinating saga of the Paige Compositor, a failed 1800s printing device whose creator, James W. Paige, received financial backing from Mark Twain but doomed his invention with an overcomplicated design and obsessive perfectionism. For PACKS, this seems to be a cautionary tale and guiding philosophy: overthink things and you risk winding up creatively obsolete.


On her fifth album, the Welsh musician is at her best. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself.

Reward

What does solitude sound like? Reward, the fifth album by Cate Le Bon, offers a strange and beautiful approximation. Le Bon grew up on a farm in rural Wales, and her earliest music—with its humble, organic whimsy—exuded the buoyant charm of someone trying to make a connection. Since then, her work has grown more alien, reflective but devilishly playful: a turn away from the world and into the landscape of her own mind. Increasingly adept at expressing this topography through wobbly, romantic post-punk, she has delved deeper into its recesses and invited more people along with her. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself.
If Crab Day, Le Bon’s 2016 breakthrough, felt like a collage made from cut-out pieces of construction paper, then Reward is like a series of tissue paper flowers, featherlight and diaphanous. She wrote the songs while living alone in England’s mountainous Lake District, in a rented cottage where she played piano late into the night. And while her treatment of these songs is fuller than anything on her previous records, she still turns to refrains you might find yourself singing once the idea of actual company becomes a distant fantasy. “Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you/But you’re not here,” goes one chorus. “You must die a little/You must exercise,” goes another, like an existential to-do list scrawled between dreams.
While Reward is defined by such pillars of aloneness, it is far from lonely. The arrangements are lush and warm and ornate, drawing on breezy synths and keyboards to maintain a patient, crystalline momentum. Like Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, Le Bon takes pleasure in blending horror and fairytale, elegance and absurdity, and her music can soothe and disorient in the same measure. The deceptively complex arrangement of mid-album breather “Here It Comes Again” makes it difficult to distinguish between each instrument; they blend into a carousel of bobbing melodies with Le Bon’s plaintive voice conducting from afar. “Man alive,” she sings. “This solitude is wrinkles in the dirt.” You can get lost in it.
With the jagged edges of her recent work smoothed out, her surroundings turn luxurious. When she does roughen things up—the art-punk slink of “Mother’s Mother’s Magazines,” the motorik pulse of “Magnificent Gestures”—the feeling is less pent-up anxiety than unleashed nerves, a colorful parade of fire ants rushing toward you. These songs also serve as runways for the album’s longest moments of uninterrupted musical chaos: descending patterns that derail and don’t stop until the woods becomes too thick to pass through. This is Le Bon’s idea of jamming; her role is the crazed traffic conductor.
Still, her music speaks loudest in its calmest moments, and Reward is an album most remarkable for how it fills its space. The trademarks of her sound—blasts of saxophone, music box percussion, silvery, oblong guitar licks—are still here, but the presentation is more distanced and refined. Note the contented sigh two minutes into “Home to You,” or the brief, elated yip after each chorus in “The Light.” After producing music for Deerhunter and Tim Presley, her bandmate in the duo Drinks, it’s easy to imagine any number of artists turning to her for this kind of open planning in their own work.
While writing Reward, Le Bon attended architecture school to study the art of chairmaking. She described the craft as being both “unbelievably nourishing and really physically hard,” and she seems to have applied a similar discipline to her own songwriting. “The more you feel, the more you have to lose,” she sings in a mournful ballad called “Sad Nudes,” just before the music parts ways and threatens to collapse. This clarity is new from her—a stab at usefulness beyond her tightly-crafted universe. Reality comes crashing in again at the end, during the elegiac closer “Meet the Man.” Accompanied by woozy keys, Le Bon introduces the harshest words imaginable in her music: “Back to life.” You can hear the tug in her voice, the precise moment when a fantasy starts fading to the everyday. Learning to be alone is one thing; next comes finding that solitude in the sad, screaming world around you.


Lee Ranaldo’s latest album is his finest post-Sonic Youth solo effort, featuring collaborations with Sharon Van Etten, Nels Cline, Kid Millions, and lyrics co-written with novelist Jonathan Lethem.

In the early goings of Jonathan Lethem’s book Chronic City, an ex-child star called Chase Insteadman and his aging, eccentric pothead-critic pal Perkus Tooth listen—at Tooth’s insistence—to American primitive guitar/banjo legend Sandy Bull. Though Bull’s dronings soothe Tooth’s headaches, they grate mightily on the younger Insteadman; that is, until he and Tooth get nicely toasted on a strain of weed called Ice whilst scouring eBay late into the night for rare vases. Something about the night and the drugs and the cheap thrills finally sparks Insteadman’s interest in Bull’s buzzing, proto-psychedelic thrum.
What’s all this got to do with Lee Ranaldo? For starters, the bulk of the lyrics on Electric Trim, Ranaldo’s third LP under his own name since the dissolution Sonic Youth, were written in collaboration with Lethem, the celebrated novelist/critic. Really, though, it’s that plenty of listeners have been waiting for their Sandy Bull-on-Ice moment with Ranaldo’s solo works. While Kim Gordon’s gloriously gnarly duo Body/Head keeps digging its heels into our skulls, and Thurston Moore continues to play in the sandbox with his own sprawling post-SY material, Ranaldo—with 2012’s Between the Tides and the Times and 2015’s Last Night on Earth—hasn’t enjoyed the same successes.
With and without his band The Dust—including Sonic Youth stickman Steve Shelley, experimental guitarist and critic Alan Licht, and bassist Tim Luntzel—Ranaldo’s solo works are a meandering, somewhat toothless lot, littered with better-on-the-page lyrics and musicianship, perched in a not-unpleasant but hardly inspiring zone between proficient and predictable. This is the same Lee Ranaldo who wrote “Hey Joni” and “Eric’s Trip” and “Karen Revisited.” Was he really going to keep turning out these noncommittal solo LPs?
First, the good news: Electric Trim is easily Ranaldo’s finest post-SY solo effort, a sumptuous, shape-shifting headphone record that proves there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank. Guiding a massive ensemble cast—The Dust plus Sharon Van Etten, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Oneida drummer Kid Millions, Ranaldo’s son Cody, and others—through nine expansive, deeply pliable tunes, Ranaldo, Lethem, and Spanish producer Raul Refree have created a dexterous, rambling record, pieced together from scraps of poetry and tiny little flickers of sound. From snaky power-pop to piquant autumnal balladry to the gospel-y back-and-forth of the title track, Electric Trim is a rangy but fluid record, constantly in rearrangement, rarely the same from one moment to the next.
In many ways, it’s classic Ranaldo at a somewhat lower ebb: the offhand, rainwater-grey tenor, the sinuous pace at which these tunes—all but one clocking in over five minutes—unfurl. Lyrically, Ranaldo and Lethem prove fairly sympatico, slinging conversational, Beat-derived abstractions and thumbnail-sketch narratives that leave plenty of room for interpretation. Lethem doesn’t fully curb Ranaldo’s tendency towards semi-guileless lyrics (the less said of the boneheaded body/head splits of “Uncle Skeleton,” the better). Pynchon notwithstanding, there are few if any other working novelists who get rock music quite like Lethem does—his 33 1/3 on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music is one of his three or four best books, full-stop—and he comports himself admirably here.
Ranaldo and company seem to have left plenty of tape running throughout the yearlong, continent-spanning Trim sessions. Songs shift, swell, retract: a steady Shelley pulse will quickly give way to a rattletrap Kid Millions thwomp; late-Beatles orchestral ballasts come sneaking in from the sides; Nels Cline’s writhing leads streak across the sky before dissolving into the backdrop. It’s a rich, multivalent sound, and Ranaldo and producer Refree’s ability to direct all this traffic without causing too many pileups is no small feat.
The gangly lyrics and garish pulse of “Uncle Skeleton” are the set’s one true misstep, but there are certainly some rough patches elsewhere. Opener “Moroccan Mountains” kicks off with a murmuring drone and slides quickly into spoken word. It finds its way into a few overlong verses, tosses out a couple Avey Tare-style yips, then completely flips itself on its head into what passes, on a Ranaldo record, for a pop song. This lends the album a semi-disjointed feel it never fully shakes; as much attention as they’ve paid to arrangement here, there’s a kind of collagist, put-that-anywhere logic to the way the songs themselves progress that can feel haphazard and choppy. It’s no wonder the more straightforward stuff—like the rousing call-and-response of “Electric Trim,” the sweet nothings of “New Thing,” and the delicate sunrises of the Sharon Van Etten-assisted “Last Looks”—fares best.
I caught Ranaldo playing in Chicago just a few days before the inauguration. He introduced the circuitous Lethem collaboration “Thrown Over the Wall” as a kind of accidental protest song, a potential anthem for the gathering resistance. The tune’s a touch too indirect (“We use the sea to hide our submarines/Disguise our faces with dreams”) to fit that particular bill. But it does manage to capture a certain feeling many of us have had since late January, that restless “What now?” malaise that greets the endless tide of ever-worsening news. It’s hard to say if I would have gathered as much if Ranaldo hadn’t spelled it out, but Electric Trim draws you in just close enough to give up a few more of its secrets.


Split between hedonism and hardened street anthems, the Mob Figaz rapper’s first album in more than a decade feels like a time capsule of Bay Area hip-hop as it used to be.

H

If the Mob Figaz rapper Husalah had a superpower it would be his self-confidence. It oozes from an open wound that also bleeds depression and survivor’s remorse; the whole point of his music would seem to be to unbandage and give it air. But it’s been so long since he released new music that Husalah followers—mostly hip-hop fans throughout the Bay Area, along with a faithful few elsewhere—have gotten used to feeling nostalgic. It’s not the kind of complicated reckoning with the past that has become common in a culture of comebacks and reissues, but something more basic—more like, Hey, remember Husalah?
Husalah’s last album was 2007’s Huslin’ Since Da ’80s, a sophomore record that cleaned up the meandering roughness of his mixtapes and found him peering back at a life in the streets. Now, after a pair of 2017 comeback singles comes a new album called H. It’s the first Husalah has released since spending five years in federal prison on a drug charge, and the first since his good friend and spiritual counterpart the Jacka was murdered on an Oakland street in 2015. In that time, hip-hop’s poles have reversed several times over, and H is tinged with the creeping feeling that music has become a lonely place of refuge for Hus. Perched atop his own little mountain of Bay Area rap, he sounds like a man preaching out one side of his mouth and shrieking party raps out the other. He hasn’t changed a bit.
The major upshot of Husalah’s radical self-confidence is that he has always sounded unafraid to do fun, weird things with street rap. It helps that he has always been a hell of a rapper: smart and dexterous enough to be a capital-L lyricist, goofy and experimental enough to never seem out of pocket doing something gonzo. But on record Husalah’s most endearing quality might be that he sounds like a guy in love with music. On H he swaggers over a swinging banda sample (“Mi Encanta”), raps at length in blustering but capable Spanish (“Mi Encanta,” “Bad Young Thang”), channels dancehall and reggae, delivers an interlude-like R&B floater (“Million Miles”), and churns out the type of gaudy, emotional hooks that can come only from equal parts pain and a total lack of self-consciousness.
With “M.O.B.,” the 2017 comeback and return-to-form single that presaged this new album, Husalah has crafted one of the best songs in his catalog, a rattling dose of hyphy adrenaline that transforms him into a shit-talking Hulk. “They say, ‘Husalah, would you please stop beastin’?’/I couldn’t give a shit I keep goin’ for no reason,” he gasps in his hilarious, breathy shriek. (Try this record at the gym, on a run, or in the middle of a dead-end task, and you might find yourself suddenly at the finish line.) “Humpin’” is smoother but equally fun and just as bitterly barked. (The title applies mostly to a panel of subwoofers, but also the party and the women that surround Husalah.) In the slick creeper “Bad Young Thang,” our star channels the smooth-toned crassness of Mac Dre. It’s not the only moment that feels like calculated Bay Area torch-carrying: The sole features on H are a pair of appearances from rappers that were also a part of Mob Figaz, the hyperlocal Bay Area rap crew intertwining aggressive street rap and pensive spirituality that graduated Husalah and the Jacka as its biggest stars. Fittingly, “Keep Mobbin’,” featuring a posthumous Jacka verse, sounds like it could have been pulled from a group mixtape recorded more than a decade ago.
If those are the raucous good times, H is just as full of reflective depression and PTSD repackaged as wise, rethink-the-system self-help. “Protect Your Soul” interpolates the chorus to Sade’s “Bulletproof Soul” word for word, flipping the cynical breakup prediction—“I know the end before the story’s been told”—into a hardened street anthem about death. “Second Time Around” packages a set of life stories—a baby born to an addict, a regretful street soldier, a struggling sex worker—into a song so patently emotional that it’s almost maudlin.
Album closer “Pray 4 You” is a clunky banger released many years ago—quintessential Husalah, but not so essential to the album. It’s not the only track that feels rough, if charming, next to the more polished standouts. H’s comeback doubles as a kind of time capsule, and after so many years away, you can hardly blame him for wanting to pack in as much as possible.


Channeling a wary mixture of dread and hope, the Polish indie rockers tighten the slackness of previous records into a potent fusion of post-hardcore and shoegaze.

Of the Sun

Like any politically aware artist making music today, Polish indie rockers Trupa Trupa are particularly attuned to the tenor of our times. They understand that to be alive in 2019 is to perpetually grapple with two strongly oppositional states of being: paralyzing misery over looming ecological and social collapse, and whatever emotion it is—some might call it hope—that motivates us to get out of bed every morning, text birthday greetings to friends, sort our recyclables from our compostibles, and publicly shame fascists on the internet. The band’s fourth album, Of the Sun, doesn’t so much directly address the state of the world as vividly conjure the day-to-day sensation of existing within it, forever teetering on the tightrope walk between luminous ugliness and awful bliss.
Of the Sun’s roiling energy is actually the product of fine-tuning and focus. On prior releases, Trupa Trupa were eager to embark on extended flights of psychedelic fancy or let their slack-rock jams messily unspool. But like juvenile delinquents shipped off to boot camp, they emerge on Of the Sun flexing a more militaristic muscle, their wandering experimentalism harnessed into a potent fusion of lurching post-hardcore and shimmering shoegaze.
Trupa Trupa hail from Gdańsk, the Baltic seaside city that was the site of dramatic changes in the 20th century—namely, the first battle of World War II and the rise of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity labor-union movement in 1980. Earlier this year, the city was in the headlines again, when its progressive mayor, Paweł Adamowicz, was stabbed to death at a public event. This cycle reverberates through Of the Sun, as the band attempts to chart a steady course through the turbulence of history, its newly fortified sound serving as protective armor.
Singer/guitarist (and poet) Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has stripped all the fat off his lyrics, reducing his words to staccato sloganeering that’s as brutally minimal as Wojciech Juchniewicz’s basslines. He’s especially fond of riffing on variations of a word in a kind of verbal improv (e.g., “Anyhow/Anywhere/Nowhere man/Nowhere land/No one/Nowhere”), but his surrealist soundbites can be as evocative as they are enigmatic. On the Goo-slathered standout “Remainder,” he turns a simple repeated refrain—“Well it did not take place! It did not take place!”—into a taunting critique of Holocaust deniers; the dub-punk wobble “Long Time Ago” centers on a line—“Long time ago! No one! No way!”—that obliquely echoes the old saw about what happens to those who cannot remember the past.
Trupa Trupa’s trudging, Slintian drum beats, bass-battered grooves, and agitated lyrics mirror the gruelling rhythms of the modern world, and at times, this slow burn of a record begs for more moments of unbridled catharsis like the Wire-y blitz “Turn.” But Kwiatkowski frequently couches his communiques inside alluring, psychedelic melodies that lift you out of the morass. On “Satellite,” images of technological collapse are delivered with a Syd Barrett smirk, while the psych-pop stomp of “Longing” mainlines the hazy-headed rush of the first Stone Roses album.
More than just revel in the tension between medium and message, Trupa Trupa are the rare dystopian post-punk band to embrace optimism and levity as necessary survival mechanisms. Amid the ominous predatory prowl of “Dream About,” Kwiatkowski’s exultant chorus cuts through the grey skies like a sunbeam. “I dream about!/I dream about! I dream about!” he repeats with trembling glee, before the song is overtaken by stormy distortion. We never find out what exactly he’s dreaming about, but that’s not the point: Trupa Trupa may not have the perfect prescription for a better world, but they welcome you to imagine one together.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After six years, Derwin Dicker returns to his primary project for a lush, sun-drenched set with a genuine emotional charge.

The Work

After his last album as Gold Panda, Derwin Dicker thought he might be done with the alias. The UK musician had made three full-lengths under that name, sampling thrift-store vinyl into wistful electronica that caught the light like a field of wheat at the golden hour. But after wrapping the third LP, 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Best, he considered putting his signature palette out to pasture, along with some shopworn formats. “You know, 11-track albums with an arc, that’s over,” he declared.
For the next six years, Gold Panda mostly went dark as Dicker tried out new ideas. Some of his subsequent output didn’t fall too far from the tree: He and Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw teamed up as Selling for a 2018 album that, despite the absence of samples, shared Gold Panda’s genial gleam. But as DJ Jenifa, he opted instead for club-ready house bangers. He wandered even further afield as the semi-anonymous Softman, trading his trusty MPC for arcane software tools like Max and Pure Data, and ditching the secondhand wax in favor of bronze temple bells and coolly restrained minimal techno as frictionless and utilitarian as brushed stainless steel.
With The Work, Dicker returns to his principal project—and along with it, some old habits that he said he’d sworn off. Full of luminous harps, winsome vocal snippets, and the kind of gently swung rhythms that Saint Dilla set in stone, The Work is every bit as lush and sun-drenched as its predecessors. It also happens to be 11 songs long, with a neat, naturalistic, dawn-to-dusk arc. (Oops.) But whatever hopes of reinvention he might once have harbored, his return to his wheelhouse is hardly a bad thing; Dicker is, in fact, very good at being Gold Panda.
This sparkling strain of electronica, a lineage that descends through Boards of Canada and Four Tet, is an increasingly crowded lane, and in the hands of a less talented artist, it could easily turn to pastel mush. But despite the laid-back loops and unassuming air, Gold Panda’s music couldn’t easily be confused for mood-based playlist fodder. The grooves are too tangled, the tones too bruised. There’s a genuine emotional charge here, one that goes beyond the obvious nostalgia signaled by the crackle of scratchy vinyl. Clinging to his hangdog chord progressions and weeping-willow keyboards is a bittersweet air that suggests a guy not just idly jabbing at his drum pads but actively grappling with some heavy shit.
That subtle pathos reflects an important phase in Dicker’s life. After years of self-medicating his anxiety with alcohol, he is sober, in therapy, and father to two daughters. The album’s title is shorthand for “putting in the work”—the effort that goes into getting better. You wouldn’t necessarily know any of these biographical details from listening to the album, however; The Work doesn’t wear its mental-health themes on its sleeve. Instead, Dicker pours his energy into sound. Take “I’ve Felt Better (Than I Do Now)”: Despite the title, it’s the most upbeat piece on the album, whipping creamy Beach Boys harmonies into a giddy, house-adjacent anthem that sounds like DJ Koze on pep pills. A sugar rush of smeared chords and unnatural hiccups, it’s a celebration of the simple pleasure of stretching recorded sounds into improbable new shapes.
The first half of the album is particularly inspired. Following the slightly pro forma chimes of the opening “Swimmer,” The Work cracks wide open with “The Dream,” whose jabbing chords and staggered kicks are as jagged as the insides of a geode. “The Corner” pairs a splintered string section—imagine This Mortal Coil’s chamber ensemble chopped into kindling—with a yelpy, lovelorn vocal loop rescued from dollar-bin purgatory. And “Plastic Future” is a model of harmonic and textural economy, its harp melody, sandpapered drums, and ruminative synth arpeggio cycling each other like the elements of a Calder mobile. On the album’s back half, the balance between playfulness and moodiness occasionally tips too far toward the latter; the unguarded garishness of tracks like “The Corner” and “I’ve Felt Better” is missing, and I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world.


On his new album, the Nicolás Jaar collaborator undergoes a vivid technicolor upgrade but his songwriting doesn’t always leave an impression.

Wendy

Around the release of his debut EP, The Beautiful Moon, New York songwriter Will Epstein (then known as High Water) described his changing relationship with Bob Dylan’s music. A lifelong fan, Epstein didn’t really pay attention to what Dylan was singing until adulthood. “The lyrics act like a spell, to summon the spirit,” he said in 2013. “He uses these words to summon this emotion, and I as a listener can experience the spirit without knowing the spell.” The composer, multi-instrumentalist, and longtime collaborator of Nicolás Jaar, has since referred to his own songs as incantations, their circular structures mutating with each rotation. On his new album, Wendy, Epstein leads a cast of contributors through an imaginative blend of cosmic jazz, psych, and 1970s soft rock, but his songwriting doesn’t always stand up to the detailed arrangements.
This is Epstein’s sharpest solo work, following a pair of more hemmed-in releases. His 2016 full-length Crush and last year’s Whims sounded somewhat compressed and coated in a lo-fi haze, the grainy production obscuring Epstein’s arrangements like VHS static. The songs were expanding toward something unique, but they never quite got there. On Wendy, Epstein and co-producer Michael Coleman render every instrument in high-definition, sculpting and sanding each sound as if trying to coax it into a three-dimensional form. The result feels like Eptein crossing over from the fuzzy black-and-white of his past work to full blown technicolor.
In “Will the Morning Come,”  a distant clatter scratches at the surface, stirring an otherwise soft and simple piano ballad. The small disturbance—like a wind-rattled porch door—places you in the room with Epstein. It swells into a dry ripple, contrasting his clean falsetto and enriching the song with texture. On “Golden,” multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily spins bright, brittle webs from his guitar, tangling with Epstein’s saxophone at the song’s climax.
These unexpected details and scene-stealing guest appearances embolden Epstein’s melodies, which can be repetitive and a bit unadventurous. Across most of Wendy’s songs, you’ll hear inventive instrumental flourishes, rarely played the same way twice. Yet Epstein’s vocals loop the same course, without traveling anywhere unexpected. “Oyster Bay” is one of the sleepier examples; Epstein crafts a sparkling plane of prepared piano, body percussion, keyboards, and soprano sax. But his gauzy voice, recalling “powdered glass from cities past,” wears thin. On an album bursting with dynamic instrumental performances, the vocals feel structurally basic.
Epstein’s writing is fairly simple, but compact and vivid phrases cut through here and there. On “Passenger” he sings about a rigid heart, “dancing like a needle in the groove.” The lyrics, which he co-wrote with musician Gryphon Rue, convey the worn path of old habits—the illusion that we’re moving freely when we’re confined to the same cyclical track. Epstein’s voice is pinched tightly into an almost painful key, but the discomfort adds a sense of eeriness, as does the veil of electronics, chirping like microrobotic crickets.
The five-minute opener “Suddenly Rain” is by far Wendy’s best song. Its dense arrangement culminates in a carnival of clanging textures, which pile on with each pass of the chorus. Epstein performs nearly every instrument, save for drums (Coleman) and the blazing guitar solo courtesy of Darkside’s Dave Harrington. It is Epstein’s most Beatles-indebted song, underpinned by layers of wordless harmonies, but their sweetness works well against the off-kilter lyrics, written with poet Maggie Milner. “Salt water kiss/Under the fly strips,” he sings. “Amber strings/Dangling/Little wings.” Epstein contrasts his sun-drenched melody with rough, tactile percussion and creeping piano. It is a rich and kaleidoscopic piece, and it kickstarts the record with the promise of something truly intoxicating. If only all of Epstein’s spells were so effective.


The composer and singer/songwriter Olga Bell joined Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan and released a profoudly strange and complex album in 2014 called Krai examining her childhood in Russia. Her new EP, Incitation, is more straightforward, evoking FKA twigs and Björk.

Incitation EP

Few albums of the last five years provided as profound a feeling of escape as Olga Bell’s breakthrough album Krai. For the Brooklyn-based composer and electronic musician, the effect of its process was the opposite: The piece, meant as a "concert" work and funded by a grant from the American Composers Forum, was her way of re-accessing her earliest memories as a young child in Moscow (she moved from there to Alaska when she was seven), as well as exploring the remotest corners of her ancestral land through extensive research. The fruits of her labor are near-uncharacterizable: Bell melds Russian folk melodies with pop, traditional Eastern European forms with jagged, prog-rock onslaughts, and integrates non-Western vocal styles—from Altai-style throat singing to throaty, piquant harmonies recalling the 4AD tapes of the Bulgarian State & Television Female Vocal Choir.
By embracing a musical world that feels more in line with her present—and self-consciously down to earth—her new five-song EP, Incitation, provides something more immediately parsable than Krai. Like her 2011 full-length Diamonite, Incitation consists of electro-pop music ready-made for one-person performance. Unlike Krai, Bell is not wrestling with demented mirror reflections of herself; the busy and tangled vocal counterpoint is gone. The digital instruments act as extensions of her strong solo voice in the center of the mix—the pointillistic MIDI synth figurations (think Glasser) on the periphery, the booming electroacoustic percussion and subdued bass. Incitation has an economy of purpose and more serious bent than her previous electronic work, in which Bell made a strong break from her years training as a concert classical pianist and paid tribute—in ecstatic, self-aware or outright jokey tones—to her new life as a composer and performer in New York City.
Instead of rushing to keep in time with skittery, double-time drum machines, Bell aims for the austere on this EP, embracing the melismatic melodies and damaged electronic architecture favored by Björk and so many after her. The richly textured drum sampling is the most modern element, indebted to artists like FKA twigs who have drawn threads from R&B toward IDM and other realms of the avant-garde.
The lyrics are epigrammatic, and often solemn: They seem to address either her narrator’s self-doubt, or moments of impasse with a lover. In any case, some other soul or specter is always at play as an antagonist, even if it seems like it’s just Bell moving outside herself. In "Rubbernecker", the simple repeating piano riff forms an eccentric rhythmic relationship with the drum loop, perfectly underscoring Bell’s fraught diary entry of impressions from a recent national fly-over (the refrain: "My soul, how hard you're driving/ Get along/ Watch your own road"). Likewise, on "Goalie", a synth evoking woodblocks hammers nervously away, as gutted, uneven drum beats pull in and out at random. Bell’s melodies come through with pealing clarity, but her emotions seem harder to pin down: "For all the tiny muscles in your hand, you don’t shake like I thought you would."
If Krai was on the verge of being irreducibly complex, Incitation risks cutting to the chase too hastily. The songs make an impression only after several run-throughs, and the appeal of some (the title track and "Pounder I", especially) waxes and wanes across their duration, sometimes feeling too risk-averse. It feels good to be drawn closer by Bell—to be trusted—but one can’t help but wish for some more complications to the narrative. The music is comfortable, hinting in plenty of promising directions but hesitating from going all the way toward them.


Looking back on 2003, among the sounds that Pitchfork may have undervalued are crunk and the ragga-jungle revival. Granted, they ...

Sound Murderer

Looking back on 2003, among the sounds that Pitchfork may have undervalued are crunk and the ragga-jungle revival. Granted, they weren't ignored-- each of them scored a few reviews and a handful of well-deserved praise. But by the time David Banner got screwed and chopped, the "Meringue Remix" of "Get Low" slipped onto the radio, the Soundmurderer + SK1 12-inches received proper release, and Tigerbeat6 released a handful of records that didn't treat jungle and drill sounds like aural raspberries, it became more clear that these were a couple of the most under-told stories of 2K3.
When it comes to the ragga-jungle revival, the place to start is still where the present meets the past: Soundmurderer's Wired for Sound features a trio of breakneck mixes of some of most ruff, masculine and steely-eyed moments in first-wave ragga-jungle. A tall tale of ragga-jungle's history, Wired for Sound re-cast its rhythmic innovation as all peaks and no valleys, a frenetic series of whipsmart neck-snapping drumbeats which, in the right hands, isn't actually that much of a fib. Fittingly, one of the producers who most heavily features on Wired for Sound is Remarc, who in 1995-97 released ten singles of uncanny power and elasticity on labels such as the legendary Suburban Base, Dollar, Kemet, Labello, and White House. Sound Murderer collects most of those tracks-- many of them on CD for the first time-- on a well-deserved Remarc full-length. (A second compilation of Remarc's work, Unreleased Dubs 94-96, will be released on Planet Mu on CD and 4xLP in late spring.)
Despite the variety and a near-chaotic intensity of Remarc's re-wiring of the empty promise of rave to the sinisterism and dread of darkcore, the origin of each of these tracks lies on the flipside to the Winstons' 1969 top 10 soul hit "Color Him Father". Like many junglists, Remarc built his tracks over the "Amen" break, which is derived from "Amen Brother", a break that is sort of to jungle what "Apache" is to hip-hop: perhaps the integral strand in each sound's genetic code.
Far from the IDM-leaning of jungle's over-ground, more white-washed head music, these are tracks of urgency and dread that appealed to/soothed the paranoia of too many years of drug use as much as it did to embody the thrill of communicative dance music. And yet, it's more sonically stuffed and sophisticated than both its spliff-cloud brethren and the drill-n-bass snobs who later delighted in rubbing sludge over melody rather than marrying them to any great effect. Among the few Remarc classics missing from this comp is perhaps the most extreme, the cold sweat of "Ricky", a track so overcome by drug-induced paranoia that it sounds like an anxiety attack on acetate.
What is here includes some of the most deft manipulations of rhythm of the jungle era, from the drums, sub-bass and congas in your face of "Unity" to the self-explanatory yet still funky title track to already exalted classics such as "R.I.P." and "Thunderclap". The snaps and skitters of Remarc's robust breaks color his tracks without pulverizing them, whether laid alongside the bravado of Jamaican patois or gunshots or more unexpected and docile treats such as or Spaghetti Western whistling or delicate string lines. After years of jungle being associated with too much of the latter and not enough of the former, this is a welcome resurrection.


The Bay Area rap crew’s collaboration with Hit-Boy catches them in a moment of furious flux.

Family Not a Group

SOBxRBE dropped into the rap world like a cartoon fight cloud. Last year alone, they released two full-length albums: the careening Gangin’ and its meaner-sounding sequel. This is not counting any of the solo work by the group’s four members (Yhung T.O., Slimmy B, DaBoii, and Lul G); nor does it include “Paramedic!,” their standout song from TDE’s Black Panther soundtrack. Family Not a Group, a collaboration with the Fontana, California-bred producer Hit-Boy, casts SOB as an act with a durable style that can be transposed into new formats, sometimes workmanlike but usually thrilling, too.
The secret to SOB’s continued success lies in the group’s mechanics: Slimmy, Lul G, and DaBoii rap in different variations on the same urgent bark, while the smooth-voiced T.O. offers the kind of half-R&B hooks that might reasonably wind up on rap radio. It’s a time-tested recipe—dense, uncompromising street rap, glazed with semi-sweet hooks—that evokes everyone from G-Unit to the Hot Boys. It also allows them to take big pop swings without muddying their core identity.
On Family Not A Group, they manage to get away with some moves that that would be trite in other hands. The opener, “Chosen 1,” sounds like the climax of a movie where everybody learns a little something in the end; the song works because from the moment Slimmy opens his mouth, SOB seems both in tune with the beat’s triumphant spine and at odds with its glossy finish. (It also helps that T.O., tasked as always with giving the track its silky hook, is reeling off sparklers like “You can’t talk about no body til you get one.”)
Hit-Boy’s beats mostly adhere to SOB’s established format: propulsive, sparse arrangements juiced with bone-crack percussion. In that sense, Family Not A Group sounds more like Hit-Boy stepping in to do an SOB x RBE album than the other way around. Hit-Boy has always been a more of a collaborator than a signature-stamp producer: He went from producing singular hits like “Niggas in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle” to helping major artists realize visions of their own. He fumbles here and there, though, like on“WYO,” which is anonymous lounge music.
Despite the album’s title, Lul G appears only once, with an excellent verse on “Both Sides,” suggesting a rift similar to the one that cropped up before the release of Gangin’ II. It’s unfortunate because the best songs here—the woozy, minimal “Stuck In the Streets” and the growling “Young Wild Niggas”—suggest a group still on the upswing.


The Stooges reunite for just their fourth album and first in 34 years. Mike Watt takes over for the late Dave Alexander on bass and Steve Albini serves as engineer.

The Weirdness

The Stooges' first three albums were a perfect triptych. Each record had its own peculiar atmosphere of dread, but when played back-to-back-to-back they form a complementary arc: black-cloud threat (1969's The Stooges) gives way to fiery holocaust (1970's Funhouse) and a post-apocalyptic zombie dance party (1973's Raw Power). Collectively, these records helped spawn every guitar-based subgenre you'll find in a reputable record store: glam, metal, punk, goth, hardcore, indie rock, shoegazer, stoner-rock and noise, and-- through sideman Steve Mackay's fearsome Funhouse sax work-- they even served as many rock fans' gateway to free jazz. There's really nothing more a rock band can or need do in its lifetime. Given that track record, the concept of a fourth Stooges album at this juncture is pretty much doomed from the start.
Sequestered in their home base of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the original Stooges operated in geographical isolation, equally reviled by the pop establishment and the prevailing hippie counterculture, and-- in sharp contrast to their MC5 soul brothers-- almost determinedly oblivious to the turbulent political climate of the time. What made the Stooges such an intimidating prospect was not their aggression so much as their willful indifference to the world around them.
When Iggy changed his surname from Stooge to Pop for Raw Power, there was no small amount of cheek involved in suggesting this self-mutilating drug sponge had aspirations to be a pop idol. But by this point, Iggy is pop: You've seen him in iMac and Motorola ads, on "Deep Space Nine" and in Snow Day, and singing with Sum 41. So by default, the strategy is now to subvert from within; if the old Stooges didn't give a shit about Vietnam, the reformed Stooges-- Iggy plus Ron and Scott Asheton, with Mike Watt replacing the late Dave Alexander on bass-- are at least paying attention to Iraq. But it's this very attempt to infuse the Stooges with some ripped-from-the-headlines currency that ultimately downgrades The Weirdness from being a passable aging-rocker reunion album into an atrocious one.
A big reason why the Stooges' discography has aged so much better than, say, Jefferson Airplane's, is that they avoided topicality and period detail, instead favoring a simple, provocative language-- little dolls with cigarettes and pretty faces going to hell-- that still simmers with deviant suggestion. The Weirdness, on the other hand, is practically begging to be dated, with Iggy dropping sore-thumb references to Dr. Phil, intifada ('cause it rhymes with "Madonna"), the Christian right, "a war with no reason," and The New York Times' Sunday Styles section, while celebrating his return ("rock critics won't like this at all"; "you can't tell me this is not a suave thing to do"; "the leaders of rock don't rock/ This bothers me quite a lot").
No one expects Iggy to act like the chest-slashing miscreant of old, but from a vocal-performance standpoint, there's little difference between this and, say, Naughty Little Doggie. Songs like "The End of Christianity", "She Took My Money", and "Trollin'" revert to the old "I Wanna Be Your Dog" trick of repeating the title until it becomes a chorus, but there's no underlying tension or menace to make them stick. He's never been the most subtle songwriter, but even Raw Power's "Penetration" sounds poetic next to "my dick is turning into a tree" (from "Trollin'"). And when Iggy sings "My idea of fun/ Is killing everyone," he sounds not like a 60-year old punk, but something way less flattering: a 16-year-old one.
As he recently explained to The New York Times, Iggy instructed Mike Watt to simplify his playing and find his "inner stupidity," so any hope that punk's most dexterous bassist would inspire a further exploration into Funhouse's funk/jazz extremities goes unfulfilled. Instead, the songs hew more closely to the straight-ahead slash 'n' bash of Raw Power (ironic, since Ron didn't even play guitar on that one) but with the restraint of older, wiser gentlemen who don't quite hate the world and themselves like they used to.
Though still capable of producing some sinister riffs ("My Idea of Fun", "Mexican Guy"), Ron's wah-wah workouts have lost some of their raygun charge, his fills sounding more typically blues-rocky. Even the return of Mackay fails to provide a corrupting influence, as he dutifully follows the band's lead (see: the Stonesy bar-band jam on "She Took My Money") where he once disrupted it. The only one who sounds like he's been waiting 34 years for this opportunity is drummer Scott-- thanks to Steve Albini's off-the-floor recording, his playing sounds more muscular and limber than the claustrophobic production and caveman beats on the early Stooges records would suggest.
But really, he's just trying his damnedest to kick some life into an album that hideously disgraces the band's original work. When the Stooges opened their South by Southwest set last weekend with a military-strike-precise string of five classics from The Stooges and Funhouse, the ensuing torrent of stage dives and flying beer cans offered convincing evidence they could still give us danger. But that the Stooges can ably relive past glories onstage only reinforces the sobering realization that one of rock'n'roll's most infallible discographies has now been saddled with an unwanted stepchild.


With drumming by Zach Hill (Hella, Marnie Stern), the Sacramento punk-rap outfit offers a bludgeoning slab of hostility on its free mixtape.

Exmilitary

Energy without insight is monotonous. Insight without humor is preachy. Humor without frustration is toothless. Frustration without humanity is destructive. And humanity without energy is defeatist. If an album operates with the purpose of being a big noisy fuck-shit-up machine, missing just one of those elements can leave you with an overbearing mess, where every speaker-rattling burst of noise or cathartically screamed hook turns you back instead of getting you all riled up. Sacramento punk-rap outfit Death Grips are known for starting frothing mosh pits with a style that seems in keeping with the hardcore-meets-hip-hop confluence that first ran through skate culture a few decades back. Exmilitary, their free mixtape, is a bludgeoning slab of hostility that plays like both sides of a circa-1987 Cro-Mags b/w Just-Ice home tape bleeding through each other.
Exmilitary avoids any of the flaws outlined above, but it's still a potentially alienating album: unnerving when you're not on its aggro wavelength, inviting when you are, and transfixing either way, thanks to the aggregate work of Death Grips' core. The raspy, deliberate MC Ride doesn't so much flow as bellow. Producer/videographer Flatlander and co-producer Info Warrior hit both sides of the audio-visual equation with overloaded noise (check the "Guillotine" video for starters). Additional vocalist Mexican Girl skulks in the background and spits venom for occasional effective emphasis. And Zach Hill, the Hella drummer-- recently heard on Marnie Stern's self-titled album-- provides some of the live percussion elements. But isolating each member's specific contributions seems like a good way to make an overwhelming sound seem flimsier than it really is.
That said, MC Ride might be the most upfront element. His tendency to go hard in the rawest way possible with doomsayer verses has slotted him in a strange no-man's land between Southern and avant-rap. His tangled, diabolical lyrics are wrapped up in lust, drug panic, metaphysical power-tripping, and political agitation, and he delivers them as if every syllable were an exclamation point. And while there's not a ton of nuance, there's a surprising versatility, as Ride's rhymes range from malevolent to anxious to smart-assed. Monolithic and harsh, his voice sounds powerful doubling up the beats to the point where it doesn't even seem like a problem when it's halfway buried in the mix.
The production does its damnedest to capture punk aggression for a hip-hop context without pushing things too far in either direction. Fuck-the-cops anthem "Klink" invokes Black Flag's "Rise Above", the opening scream from Bad Brains' "Supertouch/Shitfit" punctuates "Takyon (Death Yon)", and the beat to "Spread Eagle Cross the Block" is built sturdily around Link Wray's "Rumble". On sex-maniac anthem "I Want It I Need It (Death Heated)", a devastating hijack of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" perfectly conjures up this music's intersection of choppy, riff-heavy beat assault and psychedelic sprawl. Juke-inflected bangers like "Thru the Walls" and "Blood Creepin" blur Exmilitary's stylistic lines, and that's good-- it means not having to worry about scene purity or crossover potential, and focusing instead on just how much ferocity you can take.


The noisy Baltimore post-punk duo team up with Dan Deacon for an album of ’80s pop melodies and newfound lyrical maturity.

Riddles

For years, the quickest way to understand why avant-garde post-punk duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat is a Baltimore institution was watching them perform live. It began as a solo act in which Schrader lugged a floor tom into the room, removed his shirt, and began thwacking the drum while screaming lyrics with an underlit, sinister grin. Come 2010, bassist Devlin Rice joined Schrader and the Music Beat took shape, but their reckless noise still couldn’t be accurately captured on record. Over the past two years, they’ve been working to change that. Schrader and Rice approached electro-pop visionary Dan Deacon to co-write and produce their third album, Riddles, where they enter a world of racing synths, ’80s pop melodies, and sporadic violins. It’s the most unpredictable sound to come from Ed Schrader’s Music Beat so far, and yet somehow, the most unexpected part of it all is how well it suits them.
As a friend and colleague in Baltimore’s music scene, Deacon was a natural choice to help transfer the duo’s notorious energy into expansive recorded arrangements. They retreated to Deacon’s personal studio to collaborate over two years, giving and taking from each other’s expertise. You can hear Deacon’s style, especially that of 2012’s America, all over this album: the gleeful piano fluttering in “Riddles,” the manic percussion buried in fuzz on “Dizzy Devil,” the thick wall of synth on “Kid Radium.” In the past, Deacon’s grandiose ideas occasionally lost themselves in ambition, swirling beautifully toward nowhere specific. Ed Schrader’s Music Beat gives him new parameters to stay within, and he rises to the occasion on Riddles. Even songs he didn’t co-write, like Rice’s mellow instrumental number “Humbucker Blues,” benefit from his role as the album’s producer and mixer, giving Rice’s bass a gentler tone than any Deacon tracked in the past.
But while the album’s surface gloss traces back to Deacon, the deeper change reflected on Riddles has to do with Schrader and Rice’s maturation as songwriters and musicians. They push themselves to try new techniques, from the puckish finger-snapping in “Seagull” to the salsa undertones of closer “Culebra.” On “Dunce,” Rice ditches his garage-style bass playing from their 2014 album Party Jail for a guttural tone akin to Suicide. Meanwhile, Schrader explores deep-bellied vocals every chance he gets. Even the biggest Perfume Genius fan could mistake his liberating hollers on synth ballad “Wave to the Water” for Mike Hadreas.
The cathartic feeling cloaking the album comes from a distinct need. As the three collaborators were making Riddles, each of them suffered a loss, as noted in the album’s press materials: Schrader’s stepfather passed away; Rice’s brother chose to die peacefully after a long terminal illness; and Deacon went through a long-term romantic breakup. They came together at a time of hurting, and used their collaboration to grow in new directions. When Schrader alludes to his complicated relationship with his stepfather on “Tom”—“Wipe the black under eyes just like his face…I’d call my shots but I can’t stand under my feet”—Rice plays a cascading key melody while Deacon adds a celestial element with orchestral arrangements, the two offering support through cushioned instrumentation.
After nearly a decade of unhinged basement-show experimentation, the new musical direction Ed Schrader’s Music Beat take on Riddles is a defining point in their career. By lacing arms with Dan Deacon, the duo throw themselves into an auspicious zone, creating an album that remains introspective even at its wildest moments. The two acts aren’t just collaborating with one another; they’re supporting one another. That difference is what helps them develop as artists in such a rewarding way. And while Ed Schrader’s Music Beat haven’t cut out their past entirely—“Rust” continues their old frenzied energy to a T—figuring out how to work with others to deepen their sound, from Deacon to alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to Ponytail drummer Jeremy Hyman, is the most important riddle they’ve solved.


Amid a pandemic, and while recovering from a gunshot wound, the superstar rapper made an album that purposefully celebrates life. Her beats are playful, and her rapping is as sharp as ever.

Good News

Bullets ravage bodies, and often, the work to mend the injuries they cause are as destructive. Rib cages are cracked open. Victims are sometimes intubated without anesthesia. Limbs are amputated. The instruments surgeons use in the operating room look like they’re made for installing a hardwood floor, not fixing a body. If you’re fortunate enough to survive being shot, your body could be changed forever. You could be paralyzed. You could have to poop into a bag through a hole in your stomach for the rest of your life. One Philadelphia man had to live with a wide-open abdominal cavity, rendering his intestines visible for 11 months.
This says nothing of the emotional trauma of being shot, particularly as a 25-year-old Black woman with no parents but millions of people watching her, some of whom believe she lied about or instigated her attack. Considering the range of disabilities survivors can face, it’s a little miraculous that rapper Megan Thee Stallion could twerk through song after song at a live-streamed virtual concert 48 days after being shot in the foot, allegedly by rapper Tory Lanez.
So on her latest release Good News, after some scathing record-straightening on “Shots Fired” over the same sample Biggie used in his alleged Tupac taunt “Who Shot Ya?” and more nebulous grievance-airing (fake friends and pesky men) over the New Orleans bounce of “Circles,” Megan turns her attention to more pressing matters. She goes from reducing her assailant’s bullets to mere pellets to ribbing someone who she’s fucked so good he’ll want to wear her hoodie. Once she moves on from this summer’s shooting, she rarely looks back. Her beats are more playful and poppier than ever, but anchored in rap and R&B staples. Her rapping is still razor sharp, littered with punchlines and barbs that make your ears perk and jaw drop. Her disposition is unexpectedly chipper. In a year in which a virus, a man, and a cadre of misogynistic spectators could have killed her, Good News is a celebration of life.
When the album ends with the massively successful “Savage Remix,” plus singles “Girls in the Hood,” and “Don’t Stop,” it feels exultant, like confetti falling from the ceiling for an encore at Madison Square Garden. The 14 tracks that precede them are varied—slinky and sexy, dance-routine ready, or throbbing with 808s—which makes sense, given there are more than 14 producers helming Good News, compared to Megan’s usual two, Lil Ju and Juicy J. Here, the pair is joined by high profile beat-makers like Tay Keith and Mustard, as well as Dutch upstart Avedon, who comes out swinging on standout “What’s New.” The producers’ diverse approaches are unified by their optimism, a novel tone for Megan.
The pulse of the album is steadily upbeat, which might appeal to the casual hip-hop fans she’s collected through the viral “Savage Remix” more than those from Make It Hot, Tina Snow, and Fever. Smartly smuggled towards the end of the new releases (almost as if not to distract) is “Don’t Rock Me to Sleep,” a bold sing-along experiment with the same Day-Glo airy synths that Dua Lipa and The Weeknd use to evoke ’80s nostalgia. It’s the kind of song that any of today’s pop stars could make, and it’s ill-fitting on Megan. The similarly poppy follow-up “Outside” works better, maybe because it’s tougher, which feels like a more natural pose for her. “I ain’t for the streets, ’cause bitch, I am the street,” she huffs.
Even as Megan experiments with sounds that appeal to a wider audience, her hip-hop traditionalism remains undeniable. Webbie, Trina, Adina Howard, Juvenile, Naughty By Nature and Eazy-E are sampled throughout, and she does each one justice with her relentless rapping. Megan’s mythos as daughter of a Texas MC—conditioned for the game, and rising to prominence as a fierce freestyler—is now rap lore. She’s in her prime on Good News. “Freaky bitch, I do this/Suck it like I'm toothless,” she offers on one song. “Bitch, touch them toes/Bitch, get that dough/If you in love with your body, bitch, take off your clothes!” she spits in staccato on “Work That.” It’s not that Megan’s raps are profoundly intimate—on Fever, she reminded us that that’s not why she’s here. (“They wanna know ’bout me/They say, ‘Tell me your story’/Only thing you need to know is I’m in love with the money,” she says). It’s that after four years in the game, she can still make bars about good sex, hot girls, and unwaivering confidence sound new.
A handful of hooks scattered across Good News feel insidiously simple but strategic—they’ll stay in your head and roll off your tongue. “Body-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody,” goes one. Her verses though, are like top-shelf spirits, smooth and biting. Whether she’s referencing island-exclusive cognac on a dancehall song with Popcaan (“Intercourse”) or trading disses with City Girls (“Do It on the Tip”), her wit and delivery is nonpareil. This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.
Even with its smattering of stars, Megan Thee Stallion unequivocally decided her debut album would be hers. Two and a half months after the shooting, her alleged assailant dedicated a release bearing his name to slandering hers, his rage swallowing him whole. Good News, however, is about her own agency. “I still ain’t doing nothing I don’t wanna do!” she barks on “Sugar Baby.” “Don’t fuck me like that, fuck me like this!” she commands on “Cry Baby.” Like always, she locates her power in the bedroom, the mirror, and the recording booth. But unlike her previous works, with their dark and fiery undertones, what she has finally cemented as a studio album bears the victory of spars with death. Two years before Megan was born, Lucille Clifton penned a poem for this very triumph:

come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

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1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment


Working with Lil Peep collaborator Nedarb, the Riverside rapper makes 10 songs feel like a great house party right before someone calls the cops.

Crashed My Car

Hook sucker-punched her way into the world with last year’s Bully, which flipped the controversial Rockstar video game of the same name to introduce the Riverside, California rapper as a cut-throat queen bee with acrylic nails and clout goggles. She came across as the toughest kid in the schoolyard, the one who taunted the other kids into fighting but wasn’t afraid to throw down herself—her rap name evokes a punch to the face as much as a tightly written chorus.
Hook finds a natural partner in Nedarb, who executive-produced Bully and shares the billing with her on Crashed My Car. One of the contemporary rap underground’s most prolific producers, Nedarb is a relentless workhorse and hustler, as skilled at finding new talent as he is at crafting beats. Before he produced, Braden Morgan (his producer tag is his name backwards) played in hardcore bands, and his most influential collaborations have been with the members of the emo rap outfit Goth Boi Clique. Ned’s most famous beat is an emotional banger that flips a Microphones song, but his music resists being simplified as “SoundCloud rap”—he’s collaborated with artists as varied as Open Mike Eagle and Alice Glass. He pulls equally from alternative rock, experimental electronic music, and various strains of California rap, but the end result is more mutation than mash-up, synthesizing disparate sources into a distinct and singular sound.
Ned was born in Alberta, Canada, but he lives in Los Angeles, and his production for Hook is distinctly West Coast. These beats are heavy and hyphy, a hard-hitting mix of 808s and deep bass designed to make trunks resound and asses shake. The album’s title offers a sonic motif across 10 tracks—wailing sirens, shattered windshields, frenetic voicemail messages—that keeps the listener on a perpetual razor’s edge.
Hook’s Riverside homebase is located in California’s Inland Empire, an area she describes as “nothing.” As she puts it in an interview with The Fader, “the IE” revolves around house parties, not shows: “If you go to a party in the IE, you’re going to hear a lot of ratchet shit, a little bit a hyphy, a lot of L.A. shit. Basically a lot of shaking your ass music.” That Inland Empire influence spills out of Crashed My Car; the album feels like a house party at its peak, threatening to get shut down at any moment. Hook and Nedarb ride that dangerous line when you’re still having a great time but can sense the paranoia starting to creep in, as the clock counts down on one of your neighbors inevitably calling the cops.
Hook’s delivery is staccato and precise, with little distinction between verse and chorus—as her name implies, her bars are all hook, no filler. Her flow is flanked by overdubs and ad-libs, a cacophonous clone army of chattering voices that mimics the imitators she calls out on “Wanna Be”: “I’m who your sister wanna be/That’s not Hook, she a wannabe.” Up front, she’s confident and calculated, but her vocal parts on the edges sound exasperated, overrun with anxiety and gasping for breath. When she ends “Yes Man” just chanting the words “shit” and “fucking ow” over and over again, it sounds not like a Playboi Carti-esque affectation but like somebody going through a crisis.
The features on Bully felt like overhearing an after-school shit-talking session with the kids you weren’t cool enough to hang with; Hook’s guests on Crashed My Car mostly serve to make her look better. Professional shitposter Zack Fox shows up on the title track for a serviceable, punchline-heavy verse that’s overshadowed by Hook’s more distinctive delivery. When she makes jokes, by comparison, they’re more subdued and don’t sound like rough drafts of tweets—“She said she wanna meet up around noon/But I don’t fuck with 12, so I told her 2.” Minnesota’s Lerado lends a spaced-out drawl to “Awesome,” and LA’s Almighty Suspect appears on “Onion” with a flow as unbridled as Hook’s is bottled. “Onion” sounds like something Sada Baby would spit over, but Sada raps like he’s in a shouting match with the instrumental — Hook is equal parts honey and vinegar, and only needs a whisper to command a beat to do her bidding. Like a car crash or the biggest bully in school, Hook demands you give her your attention—if you don’t, she just might drag you on her next tape.


The singer-songwriter follows up her gloriously baroque debut with an album that uses deep grooves, politicized self-portraiture, and an eye for everyday cruelty to reckon with life in the Trump era.

The Future and the Past

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, as nauseating improbability hardened into a reality, Natalie Prass found herself sitting on an album’s worth of songs that felt entirely wrong. Some artists who shared her frustrations were quick to express them in the moment. Setting aside the compositions she had imagined would make up her sophomore album, Prass, too, was determined to respond to Trump. But it took her a bit longer to find the right words.
Arriving well after the collective post-election adrenal spike started tapering off, as exhausted members of the resistance burn out from the stress of fighting the president’s every move, The Future and the Past isn’t a set of protest songs so much as the compassionate self-portrait of a protester who’s in it for the long haul. Prass levels her demands, then gives herself permission to be tired and discouraged—and to indulge in passing moments of joy.
On day one of the Trump presidency, “Sisters” might have made the most sense as the album’s showpiece; with its call for female solidarity and reclamation of the “nasty woman” epithet, the track could easily serve as a pump-up jam for droves of banner-waving women in pink. Now, nested seven tracks deep, “Sisters” feels more like the album’s bedrock. It’s the song into which Prass’ feminism is most clearly etched; she calls out to underpaid women grinding to keep the lights on, women trapped in bad relationships, women praying to be judged by their work and not their bodies. That she performs much of this song with a crew of female backup singers reads as a nod to the power of the collective voice.
On the verses Prass sings solo, her voice floats and rustles the way it did on her self-titled 2015 debut. At first listen, that album, with its delicate but ornate orchestration, offers an aesthetic more suited to her modest vocal style. But on “Sisters”—and throughout The Future—the grooves cut deeper, threatening to overpower her melodies. That contrast has political implications of its own: The tenderness of Prass’ voice poses a challenge to the notion that brute force and bluster are the most effective ways to relay a message.
And while the sonic shake-ups that distinguish The Future from its predecessor are noticeable, they aren’t radical. Prass stands behind the more-is-more philosophy that guided her debut, adding layers of synth, bass, and percussion to fill in the spaces where she’s peeled back woodwinds and strings. Extended intros, outros, and reprises pattern the album like swaths of damask: The lush “Interlude Your Fire” sets a dramatic stage for the sparkling doomsday romance of “The Fire.” Pieces of “Hot for the Mountain,” an eerie (if ambiguous) call to arms, bleed into later tracks.
Prass doesn’t go in for understated lyrics, either—she’ll throw all her weight behind one point until she’s satisfied that she’s driven it home. On The Future’s reproductive rights anthem, “Ain’t Nobody,” she repeats the words, “Ain’t nobody can take this from our hands.” The song sounds upbeat, but the words have the ring of an affirmation strategy; she’s like a college student chanting “I’m not tired” to keep herself awake in the final hours of an all-nighter. Hoards of politicians are working to ensure that she and other women are not what she calls “the sources of [our] bodies’ choices.” Declaring her autonomy on a loop becomes a way of clinging to it.
As she demonstrated on her debut, Prass has a sharp sensitivity to everyday cruelty. Back then, it was the skill that equipped her to paint a riveting portrait of malignant romance. On The Future, it guides her as she zooms out to contend with larger societal strife. As she puts it on “Ship Go Down,” “I’ve always felt the rain/But now a hurricane is pouring on me.” That hurricane is an endless torrent of depressing headlines and empty rhetoric.
Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present—about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat.


Produced in collaboration with Blue Note, a new collection documents some of the artists and sounds emanating from the London cultural institution at the epicenter of contemporary jazz.

Total Refreshment Centre: Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre

A Parisian whose gateway to jazz and hip-hop was the Beastie Boys, Lex Blondin opened the Total Refreshment Centre in a London warehouse in 2012, creating a space that tripled as a recording studio, artist workshop, and concert venue. Within a few years, the community orbiting TRC became the epicenter of an adventurous jazz scene that couldn’t be confined to Britain. Soon, such acts as the Comet Is Coming and Moses Boyd established an international reputation, helping to seal Total Refreshment Centre’s position in the musical vanguard.
Just as the popularity of Total Refreshment Centre and its associated artists started to crest, neighborhood noise complaints led the Hackney Council to decline to renew its live music license in 2019. The concert stage shuttered but the recording studio and artistic community remained. Blondin and TRC are currently on a mission to popularize the Total Refreshment Centre brand, launching an eponymous imprint and collaborating with Blue Note on Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre, a seven-track collection featuring musicians associated with TRC. Some of this music was recorded at Total Refreshment Centre, some elsewhere in London or Europe, which means the compilation isn’t so much a chronicle of a scene as a definition of an aesthetic: stylish artifacts repurposed as a vehicle to the future.
In the liner notes, Emma Warren—author of a 2019 book on Total Refreshment Centre called Make Some Space—calls the featured artists “the widescreen young cousins of Guru’s landmark Jazzmatazz,” a reference to the groundbreaking album the rapper released in 1993 after leaving Gang Starr. Guru enlisted such jazz titans as Donald Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Roy Ayers to record live in the studio, an innovation that yielded livelier results than the British jazz-rap group Us3’s Hand on the Torch, a 1993 record created with free reign to sample from the vast Blue Note catalog. Featuring the U.S. Top 10 hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” Hand on the Torch was part of Blue Note’s modernization mission of the 1990s, a project that also produced the Blue Break Beats series, compilations that plucked highlights from funky soul-jazz LPs of the late ’60s and ’70s—and which stuffy jazz fans dismissed upon release.
Nearly 30 years later, sampled loops and the jazz-rap fusion forged on albums like Jazzmatazz are part of the lingua franca of jazz, something Transmissions from Total Refreshment Centre makes clear. None of its juxtapositions are startling; they feel like the natural evolution of a process set in motion years ago. Each track traces a connection to the crate-digging cross-pollination of the ’90s, ignoring perceived borders between dance, experimental, hip-hop, and pop. The proceedings take on a slight air of nostalgia, not for the initial sources but for their rediscovery, the moment when these disparate strands were first tied together. When Miryam Solomon sings sweetly over Matters Unknown’s refurbished bossa nova beat, it doesn’t bring to mind Latin music LPs from the ’60s—it sounds like peak Stereolab.
Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre is filled with quiet, fleeting moments that vaguely recall something else, particularly if an MC is involved. Soccer96, the duo of Max Hallett and Dan Leavers (who also play in Comet Is Coming), conjure the ghost of Jazzmatazz in a spontaneous collaboration with rapper Kieron Boothe, playing on seedy ’70s funk and hard hip-hop rhythms. Neue Grafik Ensemble—one of the few acts here signed to Total Refreshment Records—team with Brother Portrait on “Black,” a sinewy number that taps into the spookier elements of trip-hop. As trumpeter Byron Wallen intertwines with the sawing drone of Oli Langford’s strings on “Closed Circle,” there are hints of Miles Davis stretching the limits of hard bop just before he delved into fusion on In a Silent Way.
Fusion is at the center of Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre—not as a musical style but an aesthetic. What’s striking about each of the compilation’s featured artists is how thoroughly they integrate adventurous improvisation to the skittish rhythms. Groove and vibe are present but they’re not the key to the music; exploration is. Even the cheerfully insistent “Isa”—the most conventionally danceable cut—is based on a live improvisation, with Noah Slee overdubbing vocals at a later date. “Isa” is a bit of an outlier, though. Most of the transmissions on this compilation are appealingly monochromatic, such as Resavoir’s clustered, clattering reading of Charles Tolliver’s “Plight” and Jake Long’s “Crescent (City Swamp Dub),” where Tamar Osborn’s elongated baritone saxophone runs give shape to slow, churning funk. This is the experimentation fostered at the Total Refreshment Centre, a sensibility that spilled out into the larger jazz world: alternately smooth and restless, nostalgic yet forward-thinking, both natural and alluring.


The Sacramento rapper spends most of his second album conscience-stricken, trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted.

Preacher to the Streets

While OMB Peezy’s debut album, last year’s Loyalty Over Love, was a sort of personalized therapy, this is almost instructional, a running inner-monologue on the keys to making it out and subsequently dealing with withdrawal symptoms that come with not knowing anything else. Peezy has spent most of his life somewhere in the middle of two things—Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California, a burgeoning rapper and hustler—and on Preacher to the Streets, he is seeking a more balanced discourse between the angel and the devil on his shoulders.
His style is betwixt and between—a bonding of regional touchstones from Northern California to the deep South. He’s signed to E-40, a student of Juvie and Boosie. More recently, he’s found himself somewhere amid the spring of post-hyphy and the Auto-Tuned warbling of Atlanta trap. The pained howls of his nasally drawl lend themselves to the unnerving sense of doom in his lyrics, which can be subtly complex and are usually piercingly direct, to a point of near discomfort for the squeamish listener. On “Soul Bleed” he yowls passionately, “I’m from a city where the murder rate through the roof/I’ma put it on for the trenches where it’s either get shot or shoot.”
At his most reassuring, OMB Peezy is a cynic. At his more fatalistic, he’s unapologetically nefarious, resigned to his fate to suffer the hell of perpetual violence. He has often written from a place of paranoia and isolation, but personal ordeals, like getting shot after a show in his hometown, have driven him from the honor-bound street code of Loyalty Over Love toward the shoot-first mentality of “Treacherous.” This is not who he wants to be but it’s what the world has made him (“Goin’ down the wrong road and I forgot the way back”), and Peezy spends most of the album conscience-stricken trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted.
For instance, when partnered with Sada Baby, on his Detroit detour “On Me,” there is a clear delineation between someone shooting for fun and someone like Peezy shooting back to avoid an early death. Peezy grew up around extensions and that’s why he rides with them now; meanwhile, Sada is all the way in England still trapping off a flip phone with five choppers—“and I’ma shoot all them bitches, on my mama,” he raps, excitedly. The latter is a remorseless, thrill-seeking delinquent, the former is a reluctant sinner cornered in a life he wants no part of anymore. It’s a distinction Peezy makes early on, during “Soul Bleed”: “Robbin’ for some food to eat, you robbed ‘cause it was cool.” Though it is to somewhat diminishing returns here, this is the core of OMB Peezy’s appeal; he is a good rapper, to be sure, but he is a remarkable exponent of hood gospel.
The faceless characters that fade in and out of his stories are judged by their willingness to stand by those they have pledged their allegiances to, and his raps are commendations for the resilient few who never fold or broadsides aimed at turncoats. This philosophy suits his raps well; his writing sprawls out in fits and starts as if under the stresses of suspicion and anxiety. He is constantly looking over his shoulder and spelling out the nature of impending threats. The sense is that this death calculus has kept him alive this long but also threatens to alienate him in a way that is just as dangerous. “You can teach ‘em how to cook and they still gon’ watch your plate,” he grumbles on “I’m Straight,” flipping the old proverb about teaching a man to fish into a pessimistic street parable.
Perhaps a bit weighed down by that pessimism, Preacher to the Streets never reaches the intense, often gratifying epiphanies of OMB Peezy’s debut and finds him closer to square one, both emotionally and as a songmaker. Despite dubbing himself a street preacher he is decidedly even less of a storyteller on this installment, opting instead to rely entirely on his ability to convey a truly chaotic and solitary mental state. On “Struggle,” Peezy raps, “You in that struggle, I know it’s hard to make it out, nigga, but look/Keep on grinding, promise you gon’ make it out, nigga,” as if trying to usher others passed a finish line he has already crossed. But they feel a bit like empty words when you realize the doctrine OMB Peezy is preaching is one he himself has yet to apply.


In the Red garage-rock band sounds more like juvenile-delinquent Nuggets types than today's marketable hipster revivalists.

The Strange Boys: The Strange Boys and Girls Club

The Strange Boys and Girls Club

That the basic tenets of garage-rock have not changed in the four decades separating Black Monk Time and Black Lips is not a comment on the music's regressive nature as much as its enduring utility. Whether the war's happening in Vietnam or Iraq, garage-rock is essentially the musical equivalent of a superhero comic book-- it transforms shy, socially awkward young men into fuzzbox-stomping, skirt-chasing, government-overthrowing revolutionaries. The mostly failed attempts in the early part of this decade to reposition the music as a marketable hipster commodity overlooked this fundamental quality-- garage-rock is not a music for the masses; it's the private, fantastical domain of misfits.
And in that sense, Austin, Texas, quartet the Strange Boys come just as advertised, coming on like the kids who sit in the back of the class and would gladly sign up for another hour of detention because it at least gives them something to look forward to. The Nuggets-vintage rudiments are all in place on Girls Club: maximized R&B rhythms and bright Rickenbacker strums; trebly, AM-radio-quality production (making them a natural In the Red addition); and, in frontman Ryan Sambol, a suitably nasal mouthpiece who suggests a young Bob Dylan had he spent more of his formative years in juvie halls than coffeehouses. But the Strange Boys' debut is notable for what it doesn't do-- though their songs are rife with references to guns, death, and terrorism, the Strange Boys do not behave like angry young men railing against the indignities of our time. They're just a little worried and confused, maintaining a steady, roadhouse-blues beat indicative of a band just trying to keep their shit together as the world around them seems to come apart. This sense of uncertainty is perfectly embodied by Sambol, who doesn't know whether he should get fucked up or join a militia-- as he wails on "They're Building the Death Camps": "I'm scared because no one else around me seems scared/ I'd buy a gun and be prepared."
That the Strange Boys never actually blow their tops may prove a liability for garage-rock heads looking for more fierce, swift kicks, especially over the course of a 16-track album that would benefit from a few edits; straightforward bluesy shuffles like "Who Needs Who More" and "Probation Blues" sound like they would hit a lot harder in a live setting than the tempered, lo-fi presentation they're given here. But the Strange Boys are the kind of band that seem weirder and more threatening the nicer they play it, drawing us closer into Sambol's peculiar psyche: "Should Have Shot Paul" is a memo to Mark David Chapman delivered in a jaunty jangle and high-pitched harmonies, and within the graceful, Greenwich Village folk-rock of "Then", Sambol casually recounts the U.S. government's involvement in 9/11 as if it were received wisdom. Even his most graceful, open-hearted songs-- the swooning "No Way for a Slave to Behave" and the standout soul strut "A Man You've Never Known"-- carry a whiff of misanthropy. "Please understand," Sambol sings on the latter track, "it's my job to write songs/ Allow me to do whatever I want." And that is why generations of young men keep going back to the garage-- it's the only place in this world you can do just that.


Eddie Ruscha Jr.'s latest album is the first full-length release for Beats in Space, a new label established by WNYU DJ Tim Sweeney. It's a graceful and intricate record that flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to Ruscha Jr.'s Tropical Psychedelics compilation, tracing trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another.

Tactile Galactics

Study the erratic career arc of Eddie Ruscha Jr., the Los Angeles resident who records under the name Secret Circuit, and you'd be forgiven for thinking he doesn't care too much about how the outside world views his music. That impression mainly comes from the endless stream of self-released CDs and cassettes he's released under the Secret Circuit moniker, some of which were gathered on the excellent Tropical Psychedelics compilation in 2012. It wasn't always this way; Ruscha played in notable shoegazers Medicine for a time in the early 1990s, and in the Virgin-signed, John Cale-produced psychedelic rock act Maids of Gravity. Those failed glimpses of the limelight appeared to send him scurrying deep underground, only to surface for air again in recent times.
Tactile Galactics has the air of an album with something riding on it, not just for Ruscha, but also for Tim Sweeney, the WNYU DJ who is putting it out as the first full-length LP on his Beats in Space label. Both even admitted to feeling nervous about its release in a recent joint interview about the project. That fear doesn't translate to the music, which flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to the Tropical Psychedelics collection, gleefully pulling a wide range of influences into the mix. Sometimes the tools are different-- there's nothing here that infuses the Martin Denny lilt that lit up "Foggy Twilights" from Tropical-- but mostly it's airy, relaxed electronic work, rarely raising a sweat, often constructed from trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another.
It's a graceful and highly intricate record, sometimes taking a baffling amount of twists and turns. The arpeggiated swirl of "Exalter" shifts through so many changes it sometimes resembles a fully electronic take on an old Gong record. Ruscha can play it loose or tight whenever either mood takes him, ending the album with the endearingly sloppy keyboard work of "Milk" and dropping the tighter mood piece "Escargot" earlier in the tracklisting. Earnest vocal tracks occasionally surface-- a new addition to the Secret Circuit sound-- sometimes resembling the clash of earthy and synthetic impulses that Hot Chip like to play around with. That's the place where much of Tactile Galactics lands-- gentle electronic work touched by palpable human emotions, a mix that's often hard to get right, but which seems to come naturally to Ruscha (admittedly after many years of practice).
Those years spent toiling in the studio have also led to a natural cohesion that helps bridge Ruscha's fondness for moving from, say, wild cut-up synth lines that resemble Death in Vegas' "Dirt" ("Parascopic Rope") to the New Age stew of pan pipes and bongo fury that partly make up "Mountains". In lesser hands, Tactile Galactics would sound disjointed, maybe even rashly uneven. But Ruscha is clearly a big picture thinker with a careful ear for making connections. The deliberate choice to keep everything ticking over at 120 BPM throughout acts as the glue that holds it all together, giving this material a meditative feel that's as easy to lie back and get lost in as it is to dance to. It's understandable why Ruscha is so apprehensive about letting this work out in the open after getting burnt by the industry and then spending so long in the dark. Tactile Galactics shows why he's got no reason to hide anymore.


The BROCKHAMPTON star’s latest solo album is an often powerful document by a queer artist who has weathered life’s bruises.

ARIZONA BABY

In a move inspired by Shia LaBeouf’s bemusing catalog of durational work, Kevin Abstract recently endured 10 hours on a treadmill on a suburban street of his hometown, Corpus Christi, Tex. While running, the BROCKHAMPTON singer and rapper multi-tasked: He took selfies, signed sneakers, posed with a baby, and mumbled along to the chorus of his recent single, the yearning gay love song “Baby Boy.” Abstract vaguely told one fan that the performance was to teach empathy—indeed, you could interpret it as an allegory for the upstream battle to make it out of suburbia for so many kids—but that didn’t save it from feeling like a stunt.
Abstract’s sincere intentions are more effectively translated within his music. ARIZONA BABY, which he has said he made “out of survival,” is a loose document of an artist who has weathered life’s bruises and is ready to reckon with his religious past. Abstract ran away from home as a teen, and his Mormon family only found out that he is gay from his 2016 “Empty” video, in which he gets a blowjob from a jock. The cover image of ARIZONA BABY suggests an artist newly unmasked: Abstract is shirtless, baring rows of crowded teeth, his skin lacquered as if coated with sweat, amniotic gloop, or some other bodily fluid. On occasion, he delivers on the arresting artwork’s promise.
Gay men are defined by who we love—and who we want to hook up with—and expressing that is a subtle but necessary resistance to the insidious pressure to only show half of our full selves. Abstract’s references to sex have been frequent and gloriously lewd (and lovingly cataloged), but his songwriting has never been as explicit as ARIZONA BABY’s assaulting 90-second opener “Big Wheels.” “I’m a power bottom like a Freemason/Y’all stuck playin’, that’s complacent, I’m cum-chasin’,” he raps, a line that could more likely be found in a song by, say, queercore agitators Limp Wrist than an artist coming off a No. 1 Billboard album with BROCKHAMPTON. Abstract’s ribald humor extends to his religious past in the lurking, gospel choir-sampling “Use Me,” where he raps, “I’m still tryna fuck every Mormon.” Humor can be a powerful device for addressing trauma, and the line could feel victorious. But in the absence of Abstract detailing the complexities of his religious upbringing, the gag lands hollow. It would make for a good tweet.
ARIZONA BABY is a departure from the alt-rock textures of Abstract’s 2016 solo album American Boyfriend, which he once positively compared to an MOR-leaning Chili’s playlist. In a recent Beats1 interview with Zane Lowe, Abstract said that he sought out Jack Antonoff to co-produce ARIZONA BABY alongside BROCKHAMPTON’s Romil Hemnani after he heard Antonoff’s work on Lana Del Rey’s cosmic “Venice Bitch,” leading Abstract to imagine a similar sound for his own music. On guitar-led tracks like “Corpus Christi,” Antonoff’s expansive, trippy instrumentation can feel magic, like when your retinas flood with light after waking from a snooze in the sun. But ARIZONA BABY is often unbothered by memorable hooks, and Del Rey’s influence is a little too literal: At least six of the 11 tracks borrow “Venice Bitch”’s hypnagogic coda, with synths that quiver into the ether.
ARIZONA BABY’s strongest moments are when Abstract turns inwards, with reflective passages often sung in a pitch-shifted register. On the enchanting “Mississippi,” his vocals undergo childlike treatment amid a waterlogged piano line as he asks, as if with a blush, “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?/My Mississippi sunshine?” The lo-fi guitar ballad “Baby Boy” (featuring Ryan Beatty) is undoubtedly the prettiest song he has ever released, a queer, Gen-Z take on a complicated romance in which Abstract describes shaking off a depressive episode to wind up outside an ex’s hotel. He ends the song with a repeated plea for reconciliation, his voice enveloped by swelling strings, as if surrendering to an uncertain fate.
On “American Problem,” a highlight where he raps with the sprightly cadence of ’00s Kanye, Abstract contrasts being targeted by his high school principal for being a “flaming faggot” with finding safety at a Tyler, The Creator show. In contrast to LGBTQ artists who pander to straight audiences, it feels really good to see Abstract not give a fuck about who his proudly queer work is excluding, and allow that attitude to permeate ARIZONA BABY’s mesh of intense vulnerability and chest-puffing defiance. On the album, he raps “I wanna be Paramount.” Well, he’s more A24: at times uneven and, at others, no less than radical.


The California indie-pop band goes bigger and broader, leaving behind some of the more intricate songwriting of their past.

Sunlit Youth

Between their 2010 debut Gorilla Manor* *and 2013’s Hummingbird, Local Natives garnered a reputation in the indie landscape: dependable, gratifying, though not the most innovative. On Gorilla Manor, their cinematic emotions and soaring harmonies referenced the National’s slow-burning sweep and Fleet Foxes’ wide-eyed, bucolic tumble. With Hummingbird, Local Natives grew up with a more meditative album that dealt with the death of vocalist/keyboardist Kelcey Ayer’s mother. Though the rush of Gorilla Manor was missed, it was hard to knock the maturity and gravity that came with Hummingbird's more gradual revelations.
Sunlit Youth encounters aging, change, and where life has led you. It is, presumably, an album where they continue to employ new textures and approaches. The difference here is that there’s a discomfort to the shift, with some songs sounding like old-school Local Natives tracks with a weak neon facelift, and others sounding like imposters snuck into the studio and got a few tracks on the album somehow, mostly yielding negative results. It’s a growing pains album, but not exactly a rewarding one.
Far from the indie-folk of their earlier days, *Sunlit Youth *leans heavily on the synths and flirts with big-melody pop forms. “Past Lives,” a prime Local Natives composition emboldened by its synth leads, is a moving mission statement for the album. Despite the album’s title, Local Natives write more about the passing of youth, and “Past Lives” finds its way into a steadily intensifying gallop that captures the feeling of life starting to tumble forward as you age. Closer “Sea of Years” lands as if someone said, “We need the epic, swelling finale” and produced a checklist of necessary elements before actually writing it. Yet while the production and instrumentation render many songs on *Sunlit Youth *flat, “Sea of Years” is genuinely gorgeous, another moment where the themes of the album hit home. The instrumental melodies underpinning the chorus glimmer in the heat rather than charge headlong. It’s a convincing depiction of where these guys must be at, making anthems with more of life's baggage hanging around.
Then there’s opener “Villany,” a fluttering and pulsing track where Local Natives successfully inject themselves fully into the realm of synth-pop. There is mission-statement business on that song, too; the key lyric is the recurring refrain of “I want to start again.” Its spiritual partner, “Fountain of Youth” is the grating low of the album, with the answer to “I want to start again” coming in the chorus with, “We can do whatever we want!” Suddenly, the band starts peddling the brand of cloying, faceless indie-pop you’d hear as background annoyance at Anthropologie, or in trailers for a “Grey’s Anatomy” knockoff. Tracks like “Mother Emanuel,” “Psycho Lovers,” and “Everything All at Once” follow suit, conjuring a bastardized fan-fiction in which latter-day Coldplay made an album with the Lumineers. The big vocal refrains of Local Natives used to alternatingly evoke the glow of the West Coast and the real, transformative feeling that can still come from barreling down an endless American highway. Now they sound bloodless and unearned.
Across Sunlit Youth, there are flickers of what Local Natives do well, but the growth of their sound feels forced and awkward. You'll hear the funk excursion “Coins” touted and celebrated as one of the biggest stylistic leaps on the album. But it’s endemic of problems on about half of the album: One of the big draws of Local Natives were their melodies and their intertwined harmonies. Melodically speaking, they stumble on “Coins,” and they stumble on “Masters,” and they stumble on “Everything All at Once.” In the midst of rebuilding their sound, they’re less reliant on the subtle song-building of their past and lean more on big and broad emotions like they’re auditioning for a headlining spot at Sasquatch Music Festival. But in this half-formed state, they come off more like a mainstream rock band who can’t quite nail the big catharsis.
As a result, there’s something sadly anonymous about Sunlit Youth. It’s cloudy, distant, and inert when it should be effervescent. It clubs you over the head with choruses when Local Natives used to be capable of effortlessly lifting you up. As much as they try to sell that “We can do whatever we want!” chorus in “Fountain of Youth,” the song is jarring. They don’t sound like themselves, and it’s hard to believe those words, no matter how loud they sing them.


A percussionist by training, Moritz Von Oswald has been subverting techno’s omnipresent thump since the early 1990s. On the intriguingly ambiguous Sounding Lines he's joined by master drummer Tony Allen and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer, and the three have a strong and singular shared vision.

Sounding Lines

Moritz Von Oswald has an acute ear for rhythm and an oblique way of expressing it. A percussionist by training, he’s been subverting techno’s omnipresent thump since the early '90s, when he was one half of the Berlin duo Basic Channel and the four-on-the-floor beat’s primacy still remained largely unchallenged. Over the years his beats have grown even subtler as he’s figured out ways to maintain techno’s propulsive needs without falling back on its tropes, and connected it to styles like dub in an attempt to create some sort of abstract, weightlessly chill sonic space.
One of Von Oswald’s favorite tricks is to take the heavy workload that in techno tracks usually falls on the kick drum and redistribute it across the few other instruments in his typically high-minimalist compositions. An inspired sonic engineer, he often enlists keyboard licks or delay effects to carry more rhythmic weight than usual, and as a result his compositions are urgent and danceable but rarely revolve around a 4/4 kick.
Von Oswald’s found an ideal partner in master drummer Tony Allen, who’s been creating trance-inducing works that duck and dive around the beat since his days as Fela’s chief rhythmic architect. Allen’s recently joined Von Oswald and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer in Von Oswald’s namesake trio, taking over for Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) on drums, and their first album together shows that the group’s quickly cohered into something interesting.
The addition of a superstar collaborator, along with S**ounding Lines’ open-ended arrangements and tracks that are numbered instead of named, all suggest the kind of high-powered jam session that usually sounds better on paper than on record, but Allen, Von Oswald, and Loderbauer work well together. Their playing has a loose, improvisatory feel but a strong sense of purpose. Even when they stretch a groove out toward the 10-minute mark they maintain the cohesiveness of a good jazz combo.
Jazz has become one of the Trio’s touchstones, or at least it’s made itself more present on Sounding Lines than on earlier recordings. Clearly a lot of that influence comes from Allen, whose expressive style has its roots in Art Blakey and Max Roach’s frenetic but focused performances. The album opener "1" starts out centered around a happily burbling synth bass line, but Allen’s hi-hat takes the lead for a sizable chunk of the track’s 10 minutes, and his bop-inspired playing is so expressive and so casually virtuosic–and Loderbauer and Von Oswald’s backup is so judiciously minimal–that he easily pulls it off.
Elsewhere the group brings some of its other influences to the front, to varying effect. On "4" they fully indulge their dub sides, and the resulting track works better when you let yourself get caught up in its gently wafting mood than if you focus in on what it’s actually doing. "7", on the other hand, dives headfirst into '70s jazz funk with a cheeky clavinet riff and greasy hi-hats, and manages to strip away the decades of kitsch that those signifiers have accumulated, rediscovering an unexpected vibrancy lurking underneath.
At its best moments, Sounding Lines drifts in an intriguingly ambiguous space where each member invokes the genres they’re best known for playing while bending generously to accommodate their partners—Von Oswald bringing out his underutilized funky side, Allen using his inimitable Afrobeat style to sculpt a techno beat in negative space, and Loderbauer washing the whole thing in warm ambience. The three showcase a strong and singular shared vision, and in the moments where the music pulls you in deep enough to share it with them, it’s a beautiful thing.